by Van Quattro
She answers on the second ring.
“Yes, hello.” She sounds the same but kinda reinvented. Sturdy.
“Jill?”
“Who is this please?”
“Hi Jill, it’s me.”
“Well me who? Van?”
“Yes, how are you?”
“Well I am fine I suppose. Where are you?”
“I am here.”
“Here where? Speak up will you.”
“Here London. I’m in a hotel in Knightsbridge.”
“You are? What are you doing here? Working?”
“No, I just came with some friends.”
“Oh, some friends. Okay.”
“Are you seeing someone? Like a guy?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I am. He’s an awful bore though, why do you ask?”
“Oh I was just wondering. Yeah, I’m seeing someone too. I’m not sure how I feel about her either.”
“Well I didn’t say I’m not sure how I feel about him, I said he’s a fucking bore.”
“Oh yeah, really? He’s a bore? Why are you with him?”
“Oh I guess he’s fine for now. What about your partner? My God I feel as though I am in a dumbed down Noel Coward scene.”
“Ha, that’s funny. She’s okay, we sorta had a fight last night. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what Van?”
“Well you know how I don’t like material people?”
“All people are material, otherwise their spirits.”
“I mean people that are in to material things. You know the ones that have to have all kinds of stuff?”
“I remember conversations regarding that, yes.”
“Well she’s kinda like that. I mean it’s like too much I think.”
“Why are you with her?” Man I lose it here. Snot waterfall.
“Because I love her.” There is a long pause that is not uncomfortable for me because I’m crying so hard.
“Well…love her then and be on with it.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh gawd. Why can’t you?”
“Because I fucked it all up.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“I called her names last night for about twenty minutes straight.” She pauses again.
“Well young man, if she can’t take a few names maybe she’s not a woman of substance.”
“No she is. I was really mean.” Snot, snot. “Jill I don’t know what to do, I fucked it up so bad. What should I do?”
“Maybe you don’t really like her.”
“I love her though.”
“I don’t know what you should do.”
“God it hurts so bad, you know what that feels like right?”
“Uh yes, I have been uncomfortable in my life.”
“How did like, John make it up to you?”
“Are you serious? How the fuck did John make up to me? He promised me the fucking world.”
“I can do that, but I can’t, I don’t have anything to offer.”
“Then I suggest you work on that. I’m sorry, but I must go now.”
“Oh, okay then. Thanks for listening. I’ll be okay. You want to get some tea this week?”
“I am very busy for the fortnight, but thank you. I wish you all the best, Van. Goodbye now.”
I feel a little better but now something else is eating at me and it has to do with Jill but I’m not sure what it is. I feel like the world is grapes and I keep stomping on them with my dirty feet.
I beg Maria to stay in London with me for the rest of the week and she does. It's so uncomfortable between us. I’m nice to her. I feel like a groveling phony ass nothing on the verge of losing my mind.
I need to get her back then all will be okay. She never smiles. We have sex and it's like she can't wait for it to end and man that’s just not like her, she's the horniest woman I have ever met.
Debbie leaves midweek and the credit card for the room is in her name. Maria and I stay on. I don’t have any money but I'm thinking if we stay at the hotel Debbie won’t have to pay for us because she's closed out her part of the payment and we can stay for free. I convince Maria this is true (because I fucking think it is), so we stay at the hotel. It's free.
Everything feels fucking unreal right now. I am in a bubble of damage. And the stuff I breathe is black, blacker than my nightmares. I have to watch my drinking to prove to Maria how much I love her. Man, what if she tells Roy and everyone in the class what a freak I am? I'll just tell everyone how she likes to shop and shit. I constantly shake inside like a paint mixer.
We leave London on separate flights and so phase three of the spiral to hell begins. I drink on the plane, at home, in the streets, anywhere, and alone. I move out of my sister’s place into a flea ridden, rodent infested back house in Hollywood for next to no money. Every night I can hear the squirrels and the tree rats running through the walls like an ant farm.
Maria, despite my pleas goes to New York for a few weeks to be with the old boyfriend who's on the soap opera. My hope curdles every second she's gone. I’m obsessed, I scream inside, I cry to the fucking void. I can’t think of anything else but her and the rats and the fleas and my booze.
She returns and we are apart. I can’t get across to her how sorry I am and how much I love her, but she is long gone. I have to somehow stop me. I drive by her house and shit.
We never get together again.
Hurt that comes from hell is the thing that chases me. I can keep it away for a while but it’s always there and its power is based on how much I care about something. If I dare to open up my wants and needs it attacks me like a cobra. Its venom is uncertainty, jealousy, despair and nothingness. So I surround myself with potions to fix the poisons. I have always lived this way.
Jill and I talk through the years and our conversations are all similar ‘How are you? Are you acting? Stuff like that. We don’t go in to love stuff, maybe because nothing we could say would ever come close to what we are, now there is heartache in-between our words that we both acknowledge openly. We navigate through it because we are bigger than us somehow. It feels like England is on the moon and Jill is an unsure memory that I carefully guide to suit me. She talks of her disappointment with her life. It’s reassuring to have a relation that has lasted now over eight years but the conditions are so hard. I feel I betray everything we were because I only offer her distant and guarded encouragement. What the hell am I supposed to do? I know what it’s like to want to die, plus I’m miles away from her so, “Jill, don’t do anything crazy please,” is the best I can come up with. I can write out a full page of reasons to die but the best I can do to encourage life is, ‘Things will get better.” I don’t know how much I believe that but I’ve stayed alive far beyond my actions; many that should have killed me. I always walk out of the fire, on fire. There is never a joy or a sense of accomplishment regarding my survival, maybe just a pinch on my heart waking me up to some kind of purpose, or maybe just reminding me to keep living because I can’t die. I’ve tried.
In the paper and all there is news that Ava has died. I’m sad for her life. I wish I could have known her stronger. I dare to think we had some stuff in common though. I’m proud I spent time with her, but that’s now gone. That part of me is lost. Her being alive always meant I was in relationship with her and she is real to me somehow, but now it's like it never happened. I hope her heart was full, and that she is singing her pretty ass of in heaven.
I’m living with my younger brother in La Crescenta. The water under the bridge that got me here is rich with all the stuff I do and the stuff I don't do. They mix and run together so I can't tell one from the other. Same business.
I get a letter from England. I'm thinking it might be from Jill who I haven’t heard from in over a year, but the return address has the name of some barristers. The letter asks if I would please call them. I mean hearing from England is a shot in the arm after these years of being stuck here. I have no idea what this can be about
but I’m excited to jump back into a world other than mine.
I ring them and introduce myself. Ha, it's like talking to an old countryman. I am there again.
“Yes, Mr. Quattro, thank you so much for ringing us. I have some questions to ask you if you please regarding M. Jill Bennett.”
“Uh, Okay.”
“Are you aware of any will that she had made out?”
“Will? Uh, no why.”
“Well we have a document here that lists you as a beneficiary to items in her estate.”
“What do you mean? Where is she?”
“Oh, I’m so very sorry. I am going to assume you are unaware that she passed away in October.” This is like a hit in the chest with a baseball bat. I can’t breathe, my body seizes up and I howl like the monkeys in the Jungles of Guatemala. It all comes back to me like a tidal wave. Loving her, caring for her, letting her down again and again, laughing with her and pleading with her to live for some phony reasons that barely kept me alive.
“How’d it happen?”
“I am very sorry, Mr. Quattro, but I can’t release that information.” Now I know I have mentioned my tears many times in this account over time but I don’t think I’ve ever cried harder than the next six or so hours. “Mr. Quattro do you have any knowledge of a will?” The part of me that wants every fucking thing in the world wants to say yes, to lie, to take the pieces she may have wanted me to have and claim the rest as well.
“No sir, I don’t know anything about a will.” I feel a tiny moment of honor where I can raise my sad head to God and Jill in some kinda heaven. My heart aches wondering what things she wanted me to have, and how she may have really loved me. We hang up, and England joins the river of no return.
I'm pretty sure I know what happened, but I need to be sure. I’m hoping she died in her sleep and she was peaceful. Or even a car wreck where it was sudden.
I call her assistant, Linda every ten minutes, but get no answer. I ring Brian as well, no answer. Charles, no answer. I feel so goddamn helpless. I pull out all my artifacts from England and search for any kind of an answer. I find Lindsey Anderson’s phone number in an old handwritten note pad. I have no idea if it's still good but I call him up. There’s no answer, but a man's voice on a machine says to leave a message. I do in a shaky voice that is no longer concerned with status or the possibility of this not being him. As heavy as my heart is I feel warm with the idea that I have really loved someone. I cry for that as well. I don’t drink this night. Don’t want to.
Next day Lindsey calls me. He tells me Jill had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. I knew it. I start balling again. He comforts me explaining how sorry he is that I am just finding out. He confides how he mourned three months earlier when it happened. He says Jill always talked so highly of me and that he wished me all the best. He then thanks me for reaching out to him and for sharing my life with Jill. He bids me farewell. I feel like I just spoke to the pope.
Oh man, I wonder if he has any clue as to what a nutbag I was.
Spurts of inspiration surge through me and I promise Jill I will try to be a good person for the rest of my life. She never knew that I stopped drinking and drugging completely. I wonder what she would say about that.
I talk to her and imagine her laugh and the way she’d say, 'fuuuuucking,' Her walk, her strength, and the way she would get so small and soft then nestle in to some part of my shameful body and call me baby and I’d call her baby back because we were babies right then. We let each other be babies. I talked to her everyday for a long time. I’d thank her. I’d talk, trying to be the person she admired - fun, witty, smart, and loving. But I suppose she can still see the rest of me from where she is. She probably still thinks I’m a fuckup, but I try, and that she knows for sure. I eat my own tail. I'm kinda more of a mess sober than I was drunk. But I stay alive somehow. I still hate L.A. but that doesn't seem to matter. I’ll live.