by Darren Greer
“Not all of them,” she said. “You’re a good writer. I’ve really enjoyed the reports you’ve written so far.”
I waved her comment away. “How would you know? You’re not even a writer.”
Dagnia smiled sadly into her BIG BAD coffee. “I guess I deserved that,” she said.
“What were you doing looking for me?”
“I wanted you to spy on my brother.”
“Why?”
“I’ve already told you why. Because he’s sick and he won’t speak to me.”
“I mean why me?”
“It’s complicated.”
“We’re complicated people,” I said. “Blank is to Dagnia as Dean is to Dying. I think we can handle it.”
LXXXIX
Julie and Dean were born exactly four minutes apart in the Sisters Who Gave Good Mercy Hospital on August 12, 1969. Julie arrived at 6:52 A.M., Dean at 6:56 A.M. Their mother, a former actress who had gladly given up her modest share of the stage for a luxury condo and a trust fund, had named them both after movie stars: Julie Andrews and Dean Martin.
“You don’t know the hell of it,” Julie told me. “‘That’s Amore’ and ‘The Sound of Music’ played over and over again on our birthday, on super hi-fi with hidden wall speakers in every room. Me in a Mary Poppins costume and Dean in a miniature Italian-cut suit from the fifties. My mother was a Broadway-musical ditz.”
From the way that Julie told this story, almost entirely in the past tense, I knew that we were in for more dramatic tension.
They hardly saw their father. Julie was sketchy about what he did for a living, other than to say he was “loaded to the gills” with money and that he worked on the top floor of a very tall office building. Almost as soon as he married Julie’s mother he started fucking around on her with other show girls, and maybe a few debutantes here and there, to offset the taste of hamburgers with caviar. Julie’s mother divorced their father, or was it the other way around? Pre-nuptial agreements were a must when a John Dick Head III married Gina Lolabrigida. Julie, her brother, and their mother got enough money each month to live on, one maid, and an apartment to the south of the city. Both children went to a modest Catholic private school. Their mother, too old and stretch-marked for the stage, became fond of sloe gin fizzes in the morning. By the time the soaps hit the screen in the afternoon, she had given up on anything slow and fizzy.
“Having a former stage actress for a mother wouldn’t be so bad,” Julie said. “Having an alcoholic mother would be barely tolerable. But having an alcoholic mother who was a former stage actress and who played show tunes from five o’clock in the afternoon until the wee hours of the morning was enough to drive even the most well-adjusted person crazy. The worst thing about it is it isn’t even an original story. If someone read that story in group I’d be the first to yell, ‘Trite! Hackneyed!’ I’d be the first to tell them that if this really was their life story, they’d better start using their imagination, because it just isn’t working for me. You understand?”
I understood. I’d thought about it before. The bad things that happen to us are rarely unusual, though that doesn’t stop them from hurting. Only the luckiest among us have rotten childhoods original enough for us to grow up and make literary fortunes off the backs of them. I told Julie to continue.
“She died eventually; sclerosis of the liver. Dean and I used to say that Tom Collins killed her. We were sixteen. Our father was old enough and impotent enough at the time to want us back with him, but both Dean and I chose to live with my mother’s sister until we were old enough to move out on our own. This pissed my father off. He set up enough money for us to go to college and have a little bit left over for when we got out. That was it. No fortune. No bottomless trust fund. You probably won’t believe this, but neither Dean nor I gave a shit. We were young and idealistic. We both had the arts in our blood. We went to the city university. I studied English literature and Dean studied music. I was going to become an English professor and lecture on the threat of capitalism to the liberal arts. Dean was going to teach music and play bohemian rhapsodies at alternative piano concerts.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Julie shrugged. “We grew up. Graduate school was too much for me. I wasn’t sure if it was because I wasn’t smart enough, or if I didn’t have it in me to write a paper about the use of canine noises to reinforce metaphysical conscience dissipation in the collected works of Faulkner. And Dean drinks, did I tell you that? They say if an alcoholic parent has two children, one of them will likely turn out to be a teetotaller and the other a lush. Bingo. I don’t touch it. Dean drinks.”
For a minute I thought that Julie’s belief that her brother was dying was because he drank. That spiritual death the counsellors at the centre always talked about. But she was assured me this was not so. The threat to his life was very real, she said. Not spiritual.
“What is he dying of?”
“Cancer. Dean has brain cancer.”
The old bugaboo. The Consumeristic Period’s great invisible enemy of blood, organ, flesh, and bone. More money has been spent on cancer research in this century than on all other disease research in the history of mankind. Of course, more money is spent every year on liposuction and collagen transplants than cancer, or AIDS relief to certain Third World countries where one in every four adults is HIV positive. Not that I care. I’m not good at abstract outrage. I’m the kind of guy who gets really upset when the local Humane Society mistreats animals. I’ll picket, I really will, if even one cat goes without food, water, or clean kitty litter for one day.
“You still haven’t told me what I have to do with any of this.”
“A lot,” said Julie. “Time and circumstance rule over us all, as someone once said.”
“So do indigestion and chronic bowel movements. Get on with it.”
I wasn’t being gracious. This was, after all, only the Black Widow in disguise. She might not be a novelist, or an expert on premature menopause, but she was still someone with an agenda, and she had lied to me. You can change your personality for a time, especially if you need a favour. But eventually your humanity, your inherent God-given messiness, will shine through. Only children are exempt from this rule. And children, with the exception of Darrel’s sister and a few like her, almost always grow up.
Maturity — that old bugaboo.
XC
What Dagnia didn’t tell me, and Julie did, is that she and Dean together had chosen where he would live to get away from her.
“I know that sounds strange,” she said. “I mean, why would a brother who hates your guts want you to help him pick out a place to live so that he never has to see you again?”
“I’m sure you will fill me in eventually,” I said.
She ignored my nastiness. “I pay his rent. I pay both our rents. I pay so much fucking rent that I could own the Taj Mahal by now and still have enough left over for landscaping.”
When asked how a night-school teacher of English as a second language affords two downtown rents, Julie said, “First of all. I don’t live downtown. I live way uptown and take three buses to work. I wanted Dean to live uptown too. He said that even fifty blocks wasn’t enough of a gulf to separate us to his satisfaction, but perhaps we could let it try? ‘Besides,’ he told me, ‘nobody but losers and night-school attendees live that far uptown. True artists live downtown.’”
“And you let him get away with this?”
“He’s dying,” said Julie. “Someone who’s dying can get away with an awful lot.” True. So very true.
Julie still had some money from her father’s university education fund (she saved a bundle by not going to William Faulkner’s Dogs’ Graduate School) and she had been paying his rent out of that. Dean, of course, pissed away his money on booze and bimbos. Still, even with her job and the dwindling supply of dear old dad’s money, Julie found it hard going. I could imagine what it must have done to her bank account to pay me one hundred dollars a week to spy
on Dean. But Julie was like Juxtaposition and me. Loaded with suspicion and selfishness. She never imagined anyone would do her any favours. Also like me (Darrel’s retarded sister) and Juxtaposition (my bare buttocks) she had her soft spots (Dean).
Be careful of your soft spots. You can sink out of sight in them faster than you can say Co-dependents Anonymous.
She set her soft spot up in an apartment downtown, gave him all the furniture she wouldn’t miss (and some she would), a monthly allowance from what was left from her graduate school fund, and the precision-tuned, ebony Steinway that had belonged to their alcoholic actress mother. She insisted on picking out the apartment herself so he wouldn’t choose anything extravagant. The last time she saw him face-to-face was the day they signed the lease in Rose and Amy’s Filipino grocery. She also picked the apartment because she knew I lived there.
“You spied on me?” I asked her.
“No. I read your articles. That gave me an idea. I called up the editor of the magazine and threatened him until he told me your name and where you lived. Then I looked for an apartment close to yours. I figured if you could spy once you could spy twice. It was pure luck there happened to be a for rent sign in the window of the grocery.”
Julie moved Dean into the apartment upstairs, followed me to the writers’ group at BIG BAD BOOKS, changed her name, and started bitching. When she had bitched enough to make me afraid of her, she approached me with the hundred-bucks-aweek deal.
M is for blank as S is for sucker.
“Why didn’t you just spy on him yourself and save the money?”
“I did,” she said. “I do. In the evenings when you’re at work. But I couldn’t check up on him all the time. I needed someone who lived close by, maybe someone who knew him and could tell me what he was up to. I was hoping to convince you to become friends with him so that you wouldn’t have to go through his garbage anymore.”
“Why did you get me to go through his garbage in the first place? Surely not for used condoms?”
“No. Not for that. To find what you found. The empty orange pill container. He sometimes has a habit of not taking them.”
I didn’t ask what kind of pills a guy could take to combat brain cancer. There was some kind of pill for everything. Not to cure, but to prolong. I didn’t need to know its unpronounceable name.
“And why did you want him followed?”
“Doctors’ appointments. CAT scans. Brain biopsies. Chemotherapy. You didn’t notice the wig?”
I didn’t notice the wig, though I had noticed that his hair was unusually light, fine, and curly. I mentioned this.
“Always been that way. The wig is a prefect match for what used to be there. It’s made from real human hair. Even I can’t tell the difference and I’ve known him all my life. That stupid wig cost me a fortune.”
“I didn’t follow Dean to any hospitals,” I told her. “I didn’t see him go into any chemotherapy clinics.”
Julie shook her head slowly. “No. He’s stopped treatment. I knew he would. And that’s where I can use your continued service.”
I nodded. I knew what Julie wanted me to do, without being asked. It was why she told me the truth in the first place. She wanted me to continue the reports. Befriend him, get him to confide in me. Become a nag in her place. It was all becoming as clear as the harbour waters’ considerable effluent leakage. “No way,” I said. “A hundred bucks is one thing, but I don’t want to hound some guy I hardly know about his CAT scan!”
“Come on,” Julie pleaded. “I’ll keep paying you. Just keep doing what you’re doing. He won’t listen to me. Maybe you can help keep him alive. Dean is a brilliant pianist. It’s the only thing he’s ever cared about. Think of it as your contribution to art and music.”
“My contribution to art is my own work,” I said, somewhat huffily even for me. “I don’t need to help keep some self-destructive penis alive, even if he is kind of cute. I do that at work every day, for Christ’s sake!”
Whether she had it in her mind all along as a last resort, or my mentioning Dean’s looks made her think of it, I’ll never know. But one thing is for certain — whether it was Dagnia’s malice aforethought or Julie’s spur-of-the-moment deviousness, it worked.
“Dean is bisexual. And,” she added, “he never would have come down to your apartment in the first place if he didn’t think you were kind of cute. Believe me, I know him. I know how he works. He wants to have sex with you.”
If you ever want to convince a male Homo sapiens to do something for you and all else — compassion, appeals to humanity, downright on-your-knees begging — fails, all you have to do is lower your focal point and grab him by the cock.
Radical feminist lesbians beware. You’re more right than you know.
Dagnia — not Julie — but Dagnia said, “Have you ever been fucked by someone with brain cancer? I bet they go at it like every time is their last.” C is to Cameron as D is to Desperate. And how the Black Widow knew it.
XCI
I closed my Christmas files that March and never did get around to opening them again that year. Instead, I worked almost entirely from Darrel’s file, picking up little pieces of his life and running with them. Soon I had almost a dozen stories about this one man stored in my computer, each one about a different incident in his life. I have never had stories come so easily or so quickly. I would start with one detail from his file, that was all I needed. One detail would spark association after association. Made-up facts about this stranger’s life would begin to tumble over themselves to pass through the ends of my fingers and onto the page. I had never written so well in my entire life and somehow I knew I would never write so well again. That didn’t make a difference. Each morning I was excited to get up and get to the computer, and got depressed when I had to leave it for the day. I felt like Shakespeare must have felt when he wrote Hamlet. The way F. Scott Fitzgerald must have felt when he wrote that wicked last page in The Great Gatsby about the Dutch sailors and the green light at the end of the dock. There is no high like the creative high. The guys in the Sally Ann don’t have one war story, one incident of what their counsellors would call “euphoric recall,” that could convince me otherwise. Writing was my horse, and I rode it every day like a junkie who doesn’t ever wanna get better.
Giddy-up.
XCII
Of course, there were some problems. I just couldn’t seem to make up fictitious names. No name but Darrel seemed to fit when I was writing directly about him, no name but June when I was writing about her. I could go through after I was finished and change the names. But I knew I wouldn’t. No other names would do. It had to be the real names, or no names at all. So the question of what I wanted to do with this cycle of stories when they were finished had begun to bother me. (I didn’t call it a novel; I can’t write novels, remember?) I could try and publish them and hope that none of the Sally Ann staff ever picked up a book or a magazine. I could stick them on a floppy disk in a drawer somewhere and just be thankful that I had been given such a gift so late in my writing career. (No matter what any self-justifying unpublished writer tells you, pushing thirty-one is late to be an unsuccessful writer. Most writers who are going to be successful are successful by then.) Or I could just say fuck it, try to publish the stories, and if there was fall-out, there was fall-out.
I could always carry a lead-lined umbrella.
XCIII
I decided to change all the bylines on all the stories when they were ready. I decided to claim that every story written about Darrel and his miserable, brief, brutal, but emotionally rich life was written by his retarded sister, June Greene.
Giddy-up!
XCIV
Friday is movie night at the Cocaine Corral. During the day the counsellors draw up a list of acceptable movies and the list is given to the guys after dinner. They sit in the smoking room — or most of them do anyway — and go over the list of about ten titles, trying to come up with three movies that everyone wants to see. It’s
an impossible task. You should hear the screaming that comes from the smoking room around 7:00 P.M. on Friday nights. The RAs are told not to interfere unless it gets violent or there are unwarranted character attacks. The primary purpose of movie night is to provide the guys with entertainment so they don’t go bugshit thinking about drugs over the weekend (there are no group therapy or private counselling sessions on Saturday or Sunday), but the counsellors let no opportunity for self-improvement pass by. Having twenty-six guys who are used to shooting and stealing and lying to get their way settle on three acceptable movies is the centre’s method of teaching conflict resolution and decision-making. I think they should start with something everyone can master. I have been in video stores and have seen nicely-dressed, well-to-do, cosmopolitan couples come close to killing each other over whether it was going to be Steel Magnolias or Lethal Weapon 3.
When the guys finally make their decision — it can take hours — they bring their three choices to me for approval. I know what you’re thinking. If the counsellors set the list in the first place, why the hell would they have me approve the selection a second time? Because guys will sometimes add titles that were not on the original list of ten or so movies. I have to take their three choices, cross-check them with a copy of the list the counsellors gave me, then dig out seven or eight bucks from petty cash and pick a couple of guys to go to the video store. But first I have to call the store to see if those movies are in. If one or more is out, the guys have to go back to the smoking room again. Sometimes they bicker so long that lights out arrives before they get to watch any of the movies. As Pete says about Friday night movie mania at the Sally Ann: “I’ve killed guys over less.”
XCV
Here are the criteria that have been developed for renting movies at the Salvation Army Treatment Centre:
1. No drug use, mention of drug use, or drug paraphernalia allowed. Movies that fall into this category include: Drugstore Cowboy, Sid and Nancy, Pulp Fiction, and Blue Velvet.