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I had watched each of our episodes dozens of times, looking for answers. But I had never seen this one.
I made myself eject it and I threw it down the trash chute on my way out. I packed an overnight bag and I charged a one-way red-eye to Honolulu out of LAX. I called Kelsey and told her I was leaving and to look after my plants, not to try to contact me. I was going to my island.
I watched the cars on the road, sure everyone was following me. I parked on a residential street off Sepulveda. I left my phone unattended out front of Fuddrucker’s in the Galleria and someone palmed it before I had walked away. What a lovely town. I dropped my wallet on the escalator. No one called after me to return it. O brave new world, to have such people in it!
I paid cash for a ticket to something awful at the Arclight and shuffled from theater to theater until after midnight, waiting for low tide.
My plane would be leaving in an hour. They probably knew that I wouldn’t be on it. But if they knew me as well as I knew myself, they probably expected that I had completely caved and checked into the Encino Euthanasia Center under a fake ID, or snuffed it in some private storage space, my only trump card denying them the satisfaction of claiming my death.
I knew they knew me all too well. I contained nothing they did not put into me.
Maybe it was their idea, that I go hide on my island.
~*~
My own Wikipedia biography after Golden Class would read Drugs, Failure, Homosexual Panic, Drugs, Failure, Drugs, Failure, Rehab.
Mom had violently opposed my following Dad into acting, but after Golden Class wrapped, the bonus check went to her head. I auditioned full-time and landed a few commercials and bit parts in sitcoms and cop dramas until I was ten, and started cutting myself. When I flunked sixth grade and stole her sleeping pills, Mom blew my nest egg on therapy and increasingly abusive private schools.
As a nominal adult, I kept trying to find other work, but there was nothing else I knew how to do. I did theater and the mystery dinner circuit in North Hollywood in between nervous breakdowns, and I cashed the unnervingly decent residual checks that came every month to wherever I happened to be living, even when I didn’t file a change of address, even when I didn’t want to be found.
When things got really bad, Kelsey tried to lecture me about the cosmic ebb and flow. I was hitting bottom, and the negative flow was bound to reverse itself. Kelsey believed that when she lost a wad of cash, the city was redistributing the wealth to the nearest schizoid crackhead Brahmin in some kind of blind, karmic osmosis.
But Kelsey had only repeatedly touched the bottom, while I had a standing reservation there. I knew what this city was, and that it had acquired a taste for me. To the casual observer, it might appear that I was having another nervous breakdown after losing a job and getting evicted from my studio in Sherman Oaks. But LA was eating me a bit at a time before I got the tape. That I had suffered a nervous breakdown would have surprised no one, but only Kelsey would be there to help.
I would not die for them, but I was going to disappear in the most pathetic way possible.
I was careful. I had no illusions about my ability to get away with anything. When you’ve been pinched for pissing into a storm drain on your own street at three in the morning in the pouring rain, you learn to take nothing for granted. You live in a world of magical possibility no less incredible for its being entirely fucked and out to destroy you.
My island was the only place on Earth where I felt safe. Nobody would look for me there, nobody could trace me, and I could hide and freak out, and nobody would try to have me committed.
~*~
The last time I saw my father, he came to pick me up when Mom was still at work. Left a note telling her we were going camping, and the last eight months’ child support, plus the next six.
Dad was an actor who got thrown off porn sets for trying to direct. Mom never talked about what he did or who he was, and she genuinely didn’t want to know. He got into some kind of cult, or he was mixed up in a pyramid scheme. He never had money, and when he did, Mom handled it with salad tongs.
I wasn’t expecting to go camping. He didn’t have any gear. He’d clearly been wearing the same clothes for a week. We stopped at a park in the Valley, walked around a shallow ornamental pond and fed the ducks, and it was nice until he saw people throwing coins into the water.
“Why do morons think any body of water too small to drown in is a wishing well?”
I didn’t answer. Mom told me the only way to navigate one of Dad’s irrational rages was to be agreeable, but quiet. At six, I was already enabling at a high school level.
“You want to see a real wishing well?” It wasn’t a question, but a command.
We weren’t going camping.
He took me to the Galleria and we sat through the late movie––Mephisto Waltz––twice, then ducked out and climbed over the wall of the structure overlooking the intersection of the 405 and the 101. He boosted me over the wall and dragged me across the forking, curved onramp. The pavement was soft and hot like chewing gum, even at midnight. It felt like running down the barrel of a gun, but then we jumped the battered guardrail and he was pulling me into a forest thicker than anything in the mountains, wilder than Griffith Park.
The only sound was the rushing of cars, unseen through the thick undergrowth, bullets hurtling through curved cannon barrels. The freeway lights didn’t cut through the pines or the thick stands of pampas grass and bougainvillea. Only the silver-blue light of the full moon seeped down into the circular bowl-shaped glade, an enchanted forest of Christmas trees.
“Used to be a ranch right here, before there was a city. Indians here before that. The old californios said the well here was a deep one. Indians said it went to the center of the Earth, to the First Water. Wishes made here came true. The legend spread and people forgot everything except maybe any deep hole in the ground could make wishes come true, and all it cost was a penny. They moved the well to another park in Tarzana and put a trash can in, for people to throw away their money… but whatever used to make the wishes come true stayed down in the hole…”
Pushing me ahead of him now, through the crush of untrimmed trees and scrub brush, through the wreckage of a transient camp to a hollow surrounded on three sides by clover leaf offramps. Looking up, you couldn’t see the cars, the city, the lights, anything.
“I like to come here to think,” my father said, pushing me forward as if to encourage me to meet someone. “I like to come and ponder why none of my wishes came true.”
He could see I was scared. He ambled around the bowl of a forest in the middle of the freeway and lifted a filthy plywood plank up off the ground, revealing a perfectly circular hole like a pool of oil.
“It used to be here,” he said, out of breath, patting himself down for his precious Newports. “They filled it in with concrete, but we dug it out.” He finally noticed me backing out of the clearing, towards the guardrail and the hurtling cars. “It’s okay, I’m not going to throw you down the well.”
That hadn’t even occurred to me. Most of the places we’d lived in were infested with rats, roaches and worse. I imagined everything in the dark coming out and dragging us back down. I wanted to go across the freeway to play minigolf, but was afraid to ask.
He took out a silver dollar. Walking it across his knuckles, he flipped it into the hole.
He shouted down into it, “Make me the greatest actor in the whole wide world!”
“It won’t come true if you say it out loud,” I said. I think I wanted to make him angry, but he just laughed.
“It wasn’t for me,” he said. “It was for you. And wishes cost a hell of a lot more than a dollar, if you want them to come true.”
His voice had that low, brittle tone, like a knife on a whetstone, that he got when he was going to cry or break something. I didn’t know what to do. I was h
ungry and scared, and beginning to think maybe I was going to die on a traffic island on the busiest freeway intersection west of the Mississippi.
But then he came over and sat down beside me, and suddenly he was dragging a backpack, a big one with a bedroll. He set up a little primus stove and heated popcorn.
“You go to any auditions this month?” he asked after a while.
I didn’t answer. He kept pushing me until I said, “The agent said I have no charisma.”
“But you’ve got character! That stupid bitch––“ he started to fly into a rage again, but then looked around and saw nothing he could throw, but me.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he growled. “I would never hurt you. You’re a prince, and one day, my boy…” His arm trapped me, his other hand sweeping over the candy-colored panorama of the miniature golf course and the endless barrage of cars. “One day, all this will be yours…
“For one day.”
~*~
My island hadn’t changed as much as the rest of the Valley, but it felt different.
The little pocket forest tucked between the looping cloverleaf onramps of the 405 and the 101 had been overrun by invasive weeds and worse. Nasty parasitic wild cucumber vines and morning glory draped the eucalyptus and pine trees with such repulsive violence you could hear them growing and strangling their hosts. Spiky pods all over them burst as I shouldered past, spreading sticky seeds.
The iodine colored light from the arc sodium lights made everything look like the bruised afterglow of a flashbulb explosion, filling the darkness with squirming life while hiding none of the trash choking the ivy and ailanthus undergrowth. But there was no tramp camp, and the view was still lovely; across the 101 West-to-405 North onramp lay the pastel pasteboard kingdom of the Camelot minigolf course, and beyond that, the fireman’s training tower and a graveyard of antique fire engines sprawled out like the abandoned toys of a happier childhood than mine.
I had a silver dollar in my pocket, but I had forgot my crowbar. I always kept it in this bag, with a compact air mattress, a bunch of cereal and freeze dried backpacker food, a mess kit, a flashlight, binoculars, a can of pepper spray and an 8” survival knife. I dumped out the contents of my pack on the air mattress. I had also somehow managed to lose my pill caddy. And I was nearly out of cigarettes.
I could not go home, not until I knew. I could hit the Mobil station and be back here long before high tide. But they would be looking. My plane had left without me. And I didn’t need my binoculars to see my apartment on the top floor of my building, because the lights were on. I had turned them off when I left.
I had enough snacks and dehydrated backpacker food for three days. All the landscaping fixtures on the island were reclaimed waste water, but the adjoining island was an oasis with tanbark to kill the undergrowth, king palm trees and an old sprinkler head that I could tap for water. I was prepared to live out here forever, but I wouldn’t last twelve hours without my meds, or half an hour without a smoke.
I don’t know how long I sat there, paralyzed. I had forgotten to put on a watch.
A car shot down the onramp honking wildly, like trying to spoil somebody’s putt on the Eiffel Tower hole. Something smashed through the branches of the sickly pine trees like a cannonball. I threw myself to the ground until I began to feel foolish. I crawled over to the Betty Boop backpack that the passing car had thrown onto the island. Before I unzipped it, a phone inside started to ring.
My pill caddy, an extra sweater, a foil space blanket, two rolls of toilet paper, a stack of tabloids and a carton of Newport Menthols. At the bottom, the disposable prepaid phone trilled like a cicada, making my fillings vibrate.
I answered, “Bueno.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
I sat down in a clump of ailanthus, choking on rancid peanut butter stench as I burst into tears. “Kelsey… thank you. Thank you… but you shouldn’t have gone to my apartment.”
“Nobody’s looking for you. Nobody else, anyway…”
“Listen, thanks, but you don’t know…”
“Is this about the show? Are you having the flashbacks again?”
See how kind she was? She called them flashbacks, not delusions. “Yes… but it’s…”
“You’re not on your meds, are you?”
“I took them this morning, but… I saw something. They sent it. They want me to know…” My jumbled mind stopped tumbling long enough to connect a thought. “You went back there. Did you see it?”
“You left a mess. Nice job on the TV, by the way. I saw your pills on the counter.”
“You didn’t find the package on the table––“
“I didn’t see anything, but I could go back––“
“No! It’s not safe––“
“Are you hallucinating?”
“It’s bad. I can’t see faces.”
“Come again?”
“It’s not like LSD or psilocybin hallucinations, either, where everything weirds out in the corner of your eye, but when you really look, the veil rolls back. It’s more like ketamine, where looking only melts and burns it worse, and you start to think your perception is destroying reality. I can’t see anyone’s face, Kelsey…”
“You’re having a breakdown. It’s just paranoia. Nobody’s looking for you.”
“You figured it out pretty quick. They could have followed you––“
“I’m on my way to see The Reflecting Skin at the Coronet and eat alone at Dolores’, since you flaked out. Anyone following me or tapping the line is welcome to join me.”
“This is…” Screaming at her wasn’t going to convince her of anything. But I tried. “It’s real! I’m hallucinating because that’s what they make you do… That’s how they… They’ll kill you…”
A long pregnant pause, and then the squelched sound of sirens. “Jesus, the freeway is fucked up, they’re detouring all the traffic onto Sepulveda… Listen, the phone is good for another week, but as soon as you start feeling the least bit lucid, you need to cut short your camping trip and come back to LA.”
“OK…” I got up and walked around the bowl shaped island until my boots stubbed against a plug of concrete jutting a few inches out of the carpet of pine needles. “I’ll come back soon, I promise. But Kelsey…”
“What do you need?”
“There’s a True Value in Santa Monica that’s open all night––“
“For what?”
“Um… I swear I’ll come back and straighten out everything, but please just get me a crowbar and a sledgehammer.”
~*~
I had never seen her naked, but Kelsey was the great love of my life.
I met her when we were both on suicide watch at County. I attacked my therapy group because I had a narcissistic self-destructive complex, the doctors said, and not because the other patients had masks or slimy, membranous cauls covering their faces that flapped and fluttered when they talked. When things got really bad, she was the only one who still had a face.
It was how she carried herself, the way she occupied space, somehow silently asserting her right to exist in a world that offered her little or no reason to stay. What must they have done to raise a girl so utterly prepossessed, so sure of herself in spite of everything they did to her. I didn’t know until later her poise came from trying and failing to kill herself eight times.
Kelsey was a secret bastard. Her anonymous, unspeakably famous father had paid her quite handsomely to change her name and keep her mouth shut. He hadn’t paid her to become a 300-pound neurotic, and thus completely invisible in LA, but it would’ve been money well spent. Someone like Kelsey could sing until angels wept, and nobody around here would notice, unless she hid behind a supermodel when she did it.
She’d gotten a couple plus-size modeling jobs, but somebody at an agency always shitcanned it before the pics went out. It was almost like they kept her in a box and kept shaking it until she had no choice but to cremate his career with a pyrrhic tell-
all book. She worked at her one-bedroom in Studio City, doing web maintenance for something called reputation.com. She adopted me because her mother never let her bring home stray dogs.
~*~
The day was one of those brilliant early winter LA days when the sun is a bright pale gold special effect, but the blue shadows are like hoarfrost and suck the heat out of you through your feet. I woke up shivering in my space blanket, and couldn’t get up and around for an hour.
I’d had nightmares: the old recurring one, where Miss Iris ushers me into the closet. The dust and the cloying miasma of tea rose and sour sweat clamps over my nose like an ether soaked rag.
“I’m going to show you what you are,” she says, and I try not to look at her, but then she orders me to look and she opens her dress and everything spills out and crushes me against the wall.
I had this dream every night through puberty until I stopped talking to girls. I thought it was normal. I thought it meant I was gay. When that didn’t work out either, I was relieved I didn’t have to try to figure it out.
But nothing like that ever really happened to me. I was told I was using her to express my mother issues, my repulsion for the female archetype. I’d been through hypnotherapy and intensive psychic driving techniques to uncover repressed memories, anything to help me understand why some colors and smells nauseated or terrified me, why I couldn’t bear the thought of being touched, why I constantly entertained waking nightmares about what everyone hid under their clothes.
I made my toilette in a castor bean bush and read Wodehouse and enjoyed the sounds of rush hour, so like the waves on a tropic beach. To rest in sylvan tranquility in a glade encircled by an endless circuit of steel and road rage was more soothing, somehow, than any real wilderness setting. I gorged myself on cereal and cooked a Salisbury steak for lunch, then napped until the tide turned, and spent the magic hour spying on my apartment.
A Season In Carcosa Page 22