by Lynn Crosbie
The car stops at a gas station and will not start.
My car is a ’66 Arcadian Blue Mustang convertible, syphilitic with rust, its bat-black roof in tatters. I get out and work on it with a wire hanger and a selection of similar tools, then get back in and bang my head against the steering wheel, which squeals in unison with me.
I stare at myself in the rear-view mirror, motion over a custodian.
“I am the Creature from the Black Lagoon,” I say. “Hideous. Doomed.”
He is a wiry little Asian guy in a gray sweatshirt, with a shaved head and a tiny rat-tail.
“The fuck?” he says, scratching his RASCAL tattoo.
“Should I do this audition and debase myself further?” I ask, snatching up a ballpoint pen and writing “Rascal” on my own hand.
The guy stares at me, then laughs.
“Get the fuck outta here, bangobros,” he says.
I fire up the car, text Krishna that I have a sprawling, possibly precancerous mole on my face, and drive off, waving. I feel almost good as I cruise along, smoking and listening to “White Rabbit.” At a red light, I wink at a pretty blonde in a mohair sweater.
“Eat shit,” the blonde mouths, peeling off and leaving me stalled at the light.
I get out of the car, ignoring the honking, shouting, and worse. Kick my baby’s flanks, and she bursts into life.
I am flushed with triumph. When I am almost home, I buy a large bottle and a handful of scratchers.
Cigarettes too, and a lighter emblazoned with the words LIVE FREE RIDE FREE.
* * *
I lie in bed with my haul and, as I get more and more blissfully wasted, start remembering such beautiful things: a carpet of lotus blossoms, the soaring notes of Elgar’s Sea Pictures, underwater empires I —
There is a muffled crash and a small gasp.
I am, I see, stark naked. I quickly shrug on my robe and walk toward the living room holding an aluminum bat.
* * *
In a heap on the floor beside my nubby, oatmeal-coloured sofa: a young girl, hair stuffed into a watch cap, her long, skinny body hidden beneath layers of shapeless black garments.
Her face is plain, and free of makeup, her sloe eyes magnified by ugly red pebble glasses.
Her feet are bare; I see faint scars on one of her small ears, another below her maxillary sinus.
She is holding a notebook, which I pull from her and examine.
“FOUND HIM,” reads the last entry. And “SOON, I WILL — ”
Her dark, wolf-gold eyes flash as she snatches the book from my hands.
She smiles and I am swiftly repelled by a mouth full of metal.
“Why have you come here?” I ask, and lean against the wall.
She stands, scratching her scalp.
“I wanted to meet you,” she says. “I fell asleep on the couch and woke up picking bedbugs out of my hair.”
“You’re Parnell Wilde, aren’t you? I am such a big fan — ”
“Please,” I say, and I am filled with self-loathing. My intoxicated dreams have turned into terrors. “I don’t want you or anyone to see me like this.”
I start to nudge her to the door, nervously. What if she’s crazy; what if she is here to hurt me?
She crosses her arms, and does not budge.
“Damn,” she says. “You’re so old now.”
Christ. I was only twenty-seven when I made the film, what does she expect?
“I am going to have to ask you to leave,” I say, pallid with misery.
Who is she, really?
“I’m an admirer,” she says. “And I want to fix you.”
She takes my hand and, resisting weakly, I let her.
We sit together in the small club chair and through the caged window watch the sky grow darker.
“What’s in it for you?”
“Everything,” she says.
“How did you find me?”
“I was driving by and saw you leave,” she says. “I bribed the landlord by paying your rent, and — ”
The lights spring on. The refrigerator groans.
“ — paid your utilities as well.”
“Why look for me?”
I watch her face screw up: she could flatter me, but does not.
“I’m obsessed with Ultraviolence,” she says, but her voice is unsteady. “I make short films — well, videos for now. I want to make a sequel, in a short form or as a series, I’m not sure. I just finished a workshop with Tanya Hamilton. She thinks I should try.”
She flushes with pride. I nod, never having heard of Tanya Hamilton.
“I’d write and star in it with you. Well, not you the way you look now.”
She blushes.
“Sorry,” she says, staring at her feet.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, inflating with anger. “The way you look now would drive viewers to spike their beverages with cyanide and praise the Reverend Jim Jones.”
“So maybe you can fix me,” she says.
“Get me a pair of pliers and some scissors,” I say, and she laughs.
“I can still see you under all those ruins,” she says, peering closely.
Then the gangly, gazelle-elegant girl touches my face lightly, coaxing some of my youth and beauty back to the surface.
She is pleased: her long, burnished fingers meet and make a spire.
“There he is,” she says.
I get up and start emptying the bags of groceries she has left on the counter. Starving and bewildered, I push a pie crust into my mouth.
“Why don’t you leave me alone?” I say, as raw pastry flies from my mouth in queasy moonbeams.
I sink to the sofa, my shoulders heaving.
She opens her phone and plays something called “Everything Will Be Alright,” by the Killers. “A little old school,” she says, “but listen.”
I do. And, vacantly, I believe, even though I know there will be many more catastrophes, humiliations, and horrors to come.
She dances around the room and, as she sways, her cap falls off and a sea of champagne-coloured waves fall, breaking at her waist.
She hides her hair again, keeps moving, and I stand still, watching.
Watching the criminal who claims to care for me; whose story is ludicrous; who is so ugly she looks like she is in costume.
But she is more than a little bit cute.
She is a girl in my living room dancing barefoot.
It is enough.
Some time later, I buy the biggest can of Raid I can afford and spray its delectable perfume everywhere, taking deep, delighted breaths.
* * *
Annabel — her name is Annabel Wrath, she tells me — lives in Laurel Canyon. She is twenty-one and has a doctorate in film studies, she says, stuffing her mouth with Entenmann’s flower-shaped frosted donuts.
“I make micro-films,” she says. “Some work as cinepoems; others are video essays. I worked with Tony Zhou for a while.”
More blank staring from me.
“Video is too simple a term, however. Tony says every frame is a painting, or should be, and that is the effect I try to achieve.”
I am instantly bored and impatient.
“Every frame is in a frame,” I say, being wilfully obtuse. I hate cinema theory, beyond the fantastic Roman assessment system of thumbs up or down.
“Why don’t you just make your movie without me?” I say.
She stares at me, perplexed. “Because you are the movie. You’re a famous fucking movie star, what’s wrong with you?”
“In my last movie, an animated one, I played a piece of lost luggage named Gogo.”
She laughs, stops when she hears me sigh.
“I saw Gone Gogo,” she says. “There were moments — ”
I wave o
ff her faint praise, light a cigarette, and open the small bottle of Cutty Sark I find in one of the grocery bags.
“I’m done,” I say.
“No, you need confidence,” she says. “A way back to who you are. I was filming you before, as you walked toward me. But I stopped, it was too — ”
“Too risqué?” I say, hopefully.
“Too goddamned sad,” she says, showing me a fast clip of a lumpy old man wringing his hands like a prodigious fly: me.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “One day we’ll look back at this footage and laugh.”
She gets up and heads for the door.
“Wait,” I say, but I have no idea how to induce her to stay.
“We’re just getting started,” she says. “You’ll get better and better and I’ll make hot little movies of you that get everyone excited, and then — ”
“What about the way you look?” I say coldly, watching her throat work like an anaconda on an entire donut.
“Worry about yourself, you dirty old bastard,” she says, meeting my iciness with a goddamned avalanche.
She releases her hair again, spits her braces out, and smiles.
I get a massive erection, my first in I can’t say how long.
“My, my,” she says, taking it all in before slipping into the hall and stomping away in hideous army boots.
As I pocket her comical braces, I stare at my bulging robe and feel, deep within the repulsive dirt and trash that occupy my heart, a green seedling nose out.
O bold, dauntless thing!
* * *
After Annabel leaves, I venture to the corner and scrounge through my pockets, hoping to grab some beer, a racing form, and a cigar.
I find a hundred-dollar bill and a glassine bag of adhesive gold stars.
I rattle off my list, and Angel, the usually despicable man at the K-Town bodega, smiles at me, baring his grill.
“You got some pussy,” he says, and I am too shocked to answer.
He slides everything I want into a paper bag and hands it to me.
“For you, big star, free,” he says, and retrieves an old shot of me in a loincloth, hunting a werewolf.
I sign it “To Angel, my friend at ‘The Movies’” and walk home in a bouncy sort of way.
I need to call my bookie. A horse named Lady Annabel is running today.
Right after, I score a big bottle of Black Label, which rustles down my throat like fire honey as I listen to my Survivor tape, evangelizing “Eye of the Tiger” as if it were the Apostles’ Creed.
* * *
I am barely conscious, holding my phone and lightly kissing it.
“Who holds such mysteries?” I ask its porthole, then, somewhat hopefully, hold it to my ear.
Annabel has added herself as a contact. The photograph is a close-up of her smile. Heavenly wine and roses, it whispers to me. Her number spells out YOUR FUTURE like a punk-rock miracle.
And she lives on Wonderland.
“Lady of the canyon,” I sing, creakily, and fall back on my suddenly dear sofa.
The phone rings as I am writing, writing in my sleep: my fingers move rapidly across the sofa’s green wide-wale corduroy, iterating “the polemical nature of genius as observed not exp —”
Is it her?
I am hopeful but guarded: the bill collectors have become ruthless.
“Sit godless before the religious something of the telephone,” I recite, desperately searching for my glasses.
Ultimately, I adopt my standard defense, the voice of a sad and brainsick old woman.
“Who moved the lard and what is their name, Precious?” I begin, only to be stricken by Annabel’s voice, less a sound than a smell and shape, genies secreting cyprine that squeezes through the silver rectangle at the phone’s slender base bottom.
“Are you still up?” she asks, a laugh percolating beneath her sugared words.
I see that it is nine. I have slept through dinner. My Annabel sandwiches — crustless pinwheels of PB & J and buttered watercress rounds — and a bottle of cherry, plum, and pomegranate rosé are waiting in the stuffed fridge; the room is dark with sky. When sparklets of dust shoot past, I make a wish.
“Of course I’m still up,” I say, and shake away the clouds.
I light a cigarette and finger-comb my eyebrows, expecting some banter about hot dates and midnight assignations.
Instead, sleepy Annabel says such terrible things.
She went to see Ultraviolence when she was just thirteen and many of the boys in the theater she sneaked into were dressed like me and cheered during the infamous, singularly violent rape scene.
“I almost threw up,” she whispers.
I say nothing. There is nothing to say.
“And I did throw up after you — ”
I cover my head with the pillowcase. Wait.
“After he raped me.”
She hangs up.
Liberating my head, I sit up, look in the mirror, and my stomach turns.
* * *
“What?”
I answer the phone, which is wedged beneath the mattress, and feel my head clamp and start making molds of the words brutal headache
“It’s chicken day,” Krishna says. “ The Golden Hags passed, by the way. I’m on my way. Get dressed.”
I have a faint, persistent memory of Annabel calling the night before, but the details are hazy.
It was bad, though. I know that much.
I shuffle to the bathroom, piss like a stallion, and scratch my ass. Notice a decent pile of money, my winnings from the race, on the end table, and shimmering footprints everywhere.
I pull on the chicken costume: it is like being embraced by grim death.
Carelessly, I add the belt and scabbard, the Jolly Roger bib.
Krishna laughs when I answer the door, and I start to slam it shut.
“Come on,” he says. “It’s funny. People like to see villains —”
“Humiliated?”
“Let’s go,” he says. “These chicken fuckers don’t like to be kept waiting.”
* * *
We take my car.
“Nice ride,” Krishna says, hiding his face with his ball cap.
I frown, then imagine he is dead, which pleases me.
We drive to the office on Sunset, extruding feathers and blasting the only one of my cassette tapes Krishna can stomach: Orgasmatron.
When we get inside, we go right to the washroom-slash-changing room.
Krishna adjusts the head of the costume. I can see his tapered fingers through the grille in the neck that conceals my own smushed head.
We walk into the boardroom, which quickly fills with muted wool suits and bold, sassy scarves.
“Do the line,” Krishna says.
“These are the most chickeny chick chick breasts,” I begin to recite, sonorously, while gasping in short, tearful bursts.
“That’s not it!” someone says peevishly.
I try and try as the anonymous voices flip from irritated to enraged.
“Avast!” I say. “These fiery breasts are chicktastically cherrific.” At last there is a small round of applause.
Krishna slaps me hard on the back and says, “Chicktastic!”
A calamity of feathers rises through the bars of my cage.
“I told you I’d make you money, old man,” Krishna says. “My ride is here, I gotta bounce.”
On the ceiling-mounted camera, I am churning against a wall in the rear corner of the empty room.
I am having an episode of some kind: I clutch my heart.
The suits are gone and I am alone; there is no one to help me.
Fitfully, I gather my clothes and shoes, and make my way to the car. It takes forever to squeeze through the door. I am damp and anxious and passersby start t
o gather, pointing their phones and yelling, “Crazy chicken man!”
As they laugh and take pictures, I recite her name like an orison: Annabel, Annabel, and she appears.
She is less hideous today in a quilted one-piece orange jumpsuit, the same boots, and a balaclava. Her body, somewhat on display, intrigues me.
“I called that weasel agent of yours and he told me you’d be here,” she says, withdrawing a pearl-handled revolver and training it on the crowd.
“I told him I was Joan Collins,” she says, and laughs.
Crouching, she tells those gathered to drop their phones, walk away, and never speak of me again.
She stands and says, “Dance,” aiming at their feet until they bust a few moves, pissing themselves with fear as she laughs.
Firing into the sky, she tells them to run and they do.
Annabel steps on the discarded phones, twisting a comely ankle until each one bursts, then kicks them onto the road and gets into the car with me.
I turn on the radio. Suddenly I am scared of her, and piqued as well. I don’t want to be a damsel in distress.
“I was shooting blanks,” she says and, as “Lazarus” plays, as the suffering man rustles that he is in danger, Annabel beheads then holds me.
“Never again,” she says, and I lower my face to hide the fat, juicy tears coursing over my cheeks.
The feathers fly harder and are now exalted: they are a covenant between us.
“You need to be strong,” she says.
Her benevolent hands smooth the shame and fear from my face and as I hold her, I squeeze, as if what is perfect inside her — I imagine a hot, white circle — will light up, that she will light up, pink and all the sun inside her, streaming.
I step outside and she peels off the rest of my costume, kicks off her boots.
Naked, I feel distressed and safe all at once.
In the new moonlight, I hold the chicken head, which is funny to me now.
Annabel. I hold her so tightly she is almost aloft. She is my last chance, and I know it.
“I have watched so many men marching to their deaths,” I perorate. “Myself among them: for an illusion and a little bit of fame.”