by Lynn Crosbie
She claps. “My lord,” she says.
“Wait,” I say. “Why did you call me last night?”
“To say goodnight,” she says, and kisses me.
Unafraid, I stand bare and free, holding my luscious knight errant.
The blur of dark coats, green scarves, streams of blue wool that rush past us are the sea; the girl is safety and daring. I kneel and kiss her spotless, ice-cold feet.
* * *
“You told me that I raped you,” I say.
We are in the back seat of my car: I was going to round second base, but stopped, distraught.
“I made a mistake,” she says. “I was dreaming and thought you were Sid.”
I hold her face in my hands and sing “Duchess.”
“That’s pretty,” she says, plaintively.
Is she waving me forward? I start for second.
She blows the whistle.
It’s all right and more than enough to kiss and breathe her young girl’s face.
For as long as I am allowed this grace.
Anxiously, I adjure,
Put all the love back in me.
TWO
Parnell and Annabel, koreatown, 2017 horrorshow & luscious glory
I have no idea how she got me home.
I wake up, sick, sweating, and swinish, on a new percale pillowcase printed with daisies.
I have a faint memory of her filling buckets with scalding water and scrubbing my linoleum floors, my grimy windows, and every scuzzy surface in the place. Of her managing not only to clean but brighten the hovel.
After overhearing a string of hushed exchanges between her and Rabi, I get up to see little kitchen curtains alive with happy sunflowers, a bright rag rug that hides the floor, and jars of snapdragons on the sills. The three-legged kitchen table decked out in a pale pink-and-blue-striped cloth.
I am speechless: I write her a note on a piece of cardboard torn from a takeaway box I pluck from the trash bin, thanking her. I say that she made me a palace, and hand it to her, all wobbly and lachrymose.
“I liked doing it,” she says. “I like you.”
She excuses herself: I listen to her in the bath, splashing and singing “Bound 2.” She comes out wearing a towel turban, foggy glasses, and my Sulka robe, a moth-eaten remnant of better days.
Gathers her clothes and tosses them in her giant carryall — a pink vinyl circle with a smiley face and looped strap.
I act cool, like the Magnificat that is her humility and grace is just something nice.
“Hey, thanks,” is all I can manage. She is pure light and I am lost without my shadows, yet overjoyed to see them go.
“I left you a treat,” she says, and dresses in huge jeans and a Snoopy sweater.
Long after she is gone I am still walking around my place, lightly touching everything — smelling, staring. There is an apple pie baking in the freshly scrubbed, ice-white stove, a fat cake of rosemary soap on the sparkling washroom sink.
I remove the pie and, as it cools, wash myself until I squeak. Discover a long, embroidered robe on the washroom door’s gleaming hook: on it, two dragons stand on their hind legs and kiss, making wild, swirling fire.
And I remember: she left her glasses on the damp towels, snapped into two pieces.
This is becoming the best striptease of my life, I think, and — Bam! — I am smitten, stupid with adoration, breathing her in and out, the most vivid of dangers, less a threat than a dare —
Be careful and stay in the light, rodent.
I will.
* * *
As I put off falling asleep — the new violet-sprigged sheets are so crisp and fragrant, the pillows soft and springy — I think of Annabel, her sweetsoppy smell, Bambi eyes, and bouncy walk; how she sat in my lap and, when I apologized again for living in such a tip, said —
“No one is perfect.”
I touch her warm skin, curious, and she deflates.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“For what?”
“Never mind. It’s over,” she says, and the light of Florence fills the room, curving at the corners of the frame and waking me.
Annabel has rescued me, I realize, like a valiant firefighter, from the burning bag of shit that is my life.
Opening a worthless checkbook, I begin a journal. In it, I imagine her naked, and gasping for me. I am in the middle of writing a long, reverent fantasy about riding a barded destrier to save her from a fiery beast, about the fawn-colored inflorescence between her legs, about each swollen filament, when I hear a muffled chime.
I grope at the covers, trying to locate the sound, and seize the new iPhone my son sent me; it was loaded with his music, music that I deleted immediately.
It is a text, holding the image of me with a longsword, in plate armor. How did she — ?
* * *
My other child had given me the same phone — her old one — for Father’s Day, its face smashed to bits.
“It still works, Dad,” she told me once I’d liberated it from its festive wrapping and wearily pushed it away.
Afterwards, I would use it to take a picture of a pot of gardenias I was trying to grow on the windowsill, and see an album called “Venice, Ronnie.”
The first photograph in the album: a nude of my daughter on all fours, naked but for a head harness, a ball gag, a rope, and a spreader bar.
I closed it, deleted the album one shot at a time, then walked the streets of Venice asking every man who passed me, “Ronnie?”
When one wiry guy in leather pants, a fur blazer, and a tube top said, “What?” I beat the shit out of him.
I beat him so bad my hand quails when it rains, rains his indecent blood, and I am surprised, not unhappily, to want to go roaming again.
“Who is Ronnie?” I ask Pudge, calling her from a pay phone on Lincoln, and she shrieks and hangs up.
“Who is Ronnie?” I ask the ocean, and it barfs up half a seal with white zigzags in its tender gray skin, a shredded beach ball, and a little treasure chest filled with doubloons I pawn for enough liquor to make me forget all of it, even the phone lying on the bottom of the Pacific playing “Twinkle” to a besotted vampire squid.
* * *
My relationship with Christine — Pudge is the unfortunate childhood nickname she never lost — has always been fraught, or “sick and harmful,” as she so often writes as a salutation in the rare greeting cards she sends me.
Pudge is a tantrum-thrower, a blame-layer, a loud and unpleasant monstress who cannot seem to shake the idea I am withholding something.
Money, primarily.
Love, probably, though she never says so.
My daughter is an exceedingly unattractive young woman with a large, turnip-shaped nose, cruel lips, and long, thread-fine, buff-colored hair. She is a morbidly obese sugar addict who is, to use the argot of AA, powerless over herself.
Chunky as a kid, though solidly, sweetly so; adolescence deformed her beyond recognition. Almost overnight, the child I thought I knew was swallowed whole. Suddenly, she was comprised of gelatinous shapes and lurid red distortions, all of her: even her forearms were baggy trunks, specked with deep clefts and cut with the livid red marks that covered her skin in massive sectors.
I would find her in the kitchen late at night, buttering bread, then soaking it in syrup, squeeze caramel, and chocolate, and dousing it with handfuls of raw unrefined sugar.
She would eat until her lips bled like another savory food, then poke her fat fingers into jelly rolls and suck out their deep garnet centers; pour bright pink Peeps into her mouth chased by cherry cola; stack sugar cookies into triple-deckers and shove them into her raw, churning mouth.
I try to ignore her. The sight of her confuses and disgusts me.
One day I see her fresh from a shower with two large towels pinned together
and tied around her body, applying white ointment to her chafed thighs and wincing.
Our eyes meet in the mirror.
She sees my revulsion and I see her face change, irrevocably: watch it set into a look of stoic endurance, eyes unfocused and distant, jaw still and hard.
I step forward and stop.
She closes the door.
I decide to visit the skinniest bitch I know, a friend of my wife’s who performs raunchy lap dances for dollar bills and lets me piss on her in the shower.
In ten minutes I am asking her, “Who’s a stick-shaped slut?” as she swallows my balls like the queen of the jholawalas.
* * *
After the divorce, my daughter stayed in Beverly Hills with Allegra, my ex-wife.
Allegra and I had come to loathe each other with whatever passion we had left. Prior to our overdue fissure, she and Pudge were becoming meaner by the day, which barely fazed me, so preoccupied was I with leaving.
I went on a terrific bender the night I moved out, foolishly called my wife and told her to forget any legal wrangling and “keep everything, I’m moving onwards and upwards.”
She did, including all of the Kray film money. That hurt.
The little bit I was able to scrounge from the divorce I converted into women, liquor, and drugs: dear powdery flesh of Christ!
* * *
I look at Pudge’s email, mildly curious since she so rarely communicates with me.
“See attachment,” my daughter has written, eloquently.
I find one of my pairs of glasses and poke the screen until a video appears.
There I am, repulsive and inhuman, holding a skein of chicken feathers and saying, “My angel.”
This is what I’d said to Annabel when she arrived at the commercial shoot, and it is she who has uploaded the tiny movie she has called Swain to something called Dailymotion.
It takes some time and some spiked instant coffee to discover that she is, it seems to me, insanely popular, with hundreds of thousands of followers on this site and on the many links I stab at.
Her avatar confuses me: it is an otherworldly model, coolly naked and carrying a spotted fawn.
One of the comments about me says, “We need to cure old age.”
Another says, “Isn’t that the old guy from Ultraviolence? The one who gets kicked to death by Sid?”
I am Sid. Or I was.
I resign myself to the truth of DiRtyBastid187’s words: I am the old guy.
I feel beaten and tap out an impulsive response to Pudge.
“My new girlfriend made this. Isn’t she pretty?”
She writes back like lightning, “That’s Annabel Wrath, she’s an experimental filmmaker. She goes out with Will Harford. Sorry to blow your fantasy.”
Will Harford is a famous actor, whose charismatic ugliness assaults me from magazines at the bodega almost daily.
He is tall, dark, and emaciated, and dresses like an undertaker.
He played one, a psychopath, in a recent Oscar-winning film.
Fuck me.
As I absorb this blow, I see the little brat has ended her note with a happy face and an utterly horrifying photograph of me taken as I was squatting in my kitchen, trying to catch an enormous cockroach, the one and only time she visited me.
I am coronary event–colored and sweating: the bug is actually lying on its side, bored.
“P.S.,” she writes. “Send this to your girlfriend?”
I am about to send her a picture of Godzilla with YOU in the subject line, but can’t. She’s just sad, I remind myself.
When Pudge was four, she made me a picture of her dad going off to work in a plumed hat, musketeer suit, and gun. She has painted herself watching from the doorway in a sunny yellow dress. Her eyes are hearts and hearts flock around her, some alighting on the word love, which she has painted in pretty red script beneath the two of us.
I still have the painting, folded up in an eight-by-ten envelope containing my valuables — now including my DIY journal and a strand of living Veuve Clicquot hair.
* * *
My crush deepens in spite of Annabel’s boyfriend, whom I find online and stare at, sick with jealousy.
I find a clip from an interview with him that mentions me!
A pretty girl, poignantly oblivious to the tatty bra strap that has fallen from her shoulder, has just asked Harford a question. He smiles.
“Influenced by Parnell Wilde?” he responds, as if this is an astonishing suggestion. “Maybe, in the vaguest possible way, but there’s been loads of bad guys since him, and far better, I might add.”
The girl smiles and nods as he stares into the distance, gently stroking his tall, product-loaded hairdo.
I loathe him.
And I give up — but not on CHANCE.
I write the word in my new journal, a pad of blue Post-its I swiped off a pharmacist’s counter. When I can afford it, I fill out the prescription for a fentanyl patch a crooked doctor in El Sereno wrote me, with repeats. I gave him, in exchange, a hundred dollars and a picture of Heather Locklear I’d ripped out of a magazine and signed, with many kisses, “To Doc Marcus, who wettens me.”
And, when I can afford it, I spend at least a day and night floating and songwriting. My first, promising lyric reads, “The girl with the fizzy-colored hair is everywhere / with her kick-ass ways and apron on / Cellini eyes and legs to there.”
This gets affixed to my dashboard.
I am crushing hard, distracted and flooring it. When I reach a phenomenal eighty miles per hour, I gather the attention of a cop and, because I am so stoned, think I am wheeling through space.
When he asks for my license and registration, I say, “Nice ass,” to get his attention, then press the sticky note to his chest.
I get his attention. And a black eye.
When he finally peels off the paper, he skims it and says, “Not bad, old-timer.”
“Oh, that?” I say. “I wrote it in like — ”
He has left, but when? Judging by the enraged cortège behind me on Olympic, I’d say an hour ago.
They are so angry. I must soothe them.
I strip, get out of the car, and dance.
My reviews are mixed. I listen most attentively to “Move your saggy ass before I shoot you,” and do just that.
Someone, her voice high and euphonious, yells, “Parnell Wilde!” She claps and whistles; sounds I carry with me in my invisible jetpack as I flee the scene, coursing through palms, nipping at fish, and crashing, inevitably, on the less coily and damp end of my sofa.
* * *
After the mondo-lettered CHANCE, I write that Annabel and I shall “revise and repair” each other. However crazy, or impossible, it seems.
“Love each other?” I write, in letters like tiny swarming cell cultures I am tweezing one by one.
The landlord bangs at my door.
“What the fuck do you want, you hairless cunt?” I say, moving to the door in a fury and opening it in time to see him scurrying away.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, big and scowling, and it occurs to me I have something Harford doesn’t.
I’m not weak.
I spend the rest of the night making a sign for Annabel’s and my new enterprise.
STARTING OVER, I write with a chisel on a scrap of wood snatched from the street, gouging in two birds ascending the letters.
I varnish it and wrap it in some old paper Angel gives me, kiddie stuff, clowns and knives.
One day I will buy a fine tuxedo, classy as fuck, and drape Annabel’s sable-colored skin in pearls and priceless stones, proving to her that she could be a very attractive lady with a bit of work.
This day is just cell detritus, floating in my eyes. But, however small and fleetingly I behold it, it is clear that my new life is real and only be
ginning.
“Come and see me?” I write in the comment box below her video, signing my request, “Chicken.”
She says yes, she says yes!
* * *
I start writing short romantic manifestos. One-line urgencies like “The only thing stopping us is us.”
When I have accumulated a large number of these, and when I am parlously drunk one night, I go to Hollywood and Vine and recite them, dressed in a violet frock coat and spangled black slacks I find in a box on the curb.
I want people to know of my oratory power.
I am circled and told to stop.
“Your woman will leave you,” one man says. His wife, a furious behemoth, says, “We’re in from Omaha. Just sing ‘Purple Rain,’ motherfucker.”
I do.
I sing it badly, but with such pain that the woman drops her phone and cries. She takes my hand and sings the chorus with me, her face a wet black rose.
* * *
Annabel texts me:
The masquerade is over
What is she talking about?
She knocks, and I am worried. What if she is a whiskered selkie? Or the dreaded Ligahoo?
She is not.
The tall, slender lady I admit is a luna moth in miles of white crepe. She has black-cherry lips and black lashes like folding fans; her lustrous hair is pinned up with sweet alyssum. Her ears are pierced to the apex; a ruby glows above her dark, lush mouth.
I stare, transfixed.
And remember that I have chosen to dress in denim overalls and a melon-green shirt I think brings out my eyes.
Denim overalls.
She rakes her eyes over this outfit, over my tan suede Clarks desert boots, light-blue socks, and red paisley neckerchief.
And Annabel’s lip curls, fractionally more as she opens my present, which she tosses, barely unwrapped, on the little table by the door.
“Come in,” I say, and try to guide her to the sofa, where two cold Genesee Cream Ales await.