by Lynn Crosbie
The music that Annabel liked the most as a teenager is Charlie Parker.
Then she tells me the rest, leaving a lot out because she finds the past painful and because I find anyone’s past, including my own, mostly monotonous.
Female chanteuses and hardcore hip hop. This Lupe Fiasco song, and Joe Williams, A Tribe Called Quest, Sade Adu — more music she likes.
Here she is, stroking my back as though I am her plush, dreaming pet, and letting me in on some of her secrets.
In 2011, she grows rapidly to her full height, five foot eleven, and skins down to 127 pounds, a little heavy for the modelling assignments strangers thrust at her as she walks down the street.
These agents are willing to ignore her heft because of her electrifying beauty: her Angel Falls of hair, Aphrodite’s face, and bordering-on-obscene body.
She turns all the shoot money into her films and tuition and works three days a week in a smock and a pink uniform, selling Mexican food out of a quilted silver truck. She also buys crates and crates of vinyl at thrift stores and church, lawn, and street sales. Her collection has a bit of everything, from Sahara blues to Nintendocore to Peking opera.
She makes soundtracks by sampling these and conversations she records in school or on the bus: everywhere she goes.
Her favorite collage is a live recording of Julio Iglesias’s “Hey!” pouring over a drunk bus driver’s tirade: “You think I’m driving any of you to the Rapture? No fuckin’ way, beg your pardon, Jesus, but look at these animals.”
“We have known such lonely pain,” Iglesias sings, from a scratched record she divines from.
She films Soledad piping churro dough beside her, lost in a dream as sweet as the dulce she is squeezing onto the hot confections, her eyes half-closed and filled with a man’s dark, delicious skin, his holy vows, and Annabel calls the movie Deep-Fried Sacrament.
“This should be a real movie,” Soledad says when they project it onto the rear of the truck after work.
“Maybe,” Annabel says.
“You start university soon, no?”
She tells her she is going be the only fifteen-year-old at Columbia.
“I’m sure you’ll meet a bunch of freaks like you,” her friend says, blowing powdered sugar at her like a kiss, her first real kiss.
* * *
She blitzes through university, completing a Ph.D. at Harvard on “Psychosexual Pathology and Pleasure” in Kubrick’s and Kray’s films, and moves to Los Angeles.
Her mother has died by then, of breast cancer.
During her illness, they become close: she learns about her grandmother, her namesake, who was a mujer fatale and renowned mathematician, and that her father, “the goddamned son of a bitch,” was a singer and “very handsome, like a painted saint.”
Annabel held her mother’s hand when the morphine hit and ran through her. “He took me salsa dancing every Saturday,” she says. “Everyone watched us, whispered, Míralos, son tan hermosos juntos!”
She misses the man who left her, who was “not always bad,” her skeletal mother confesses.
When she gets to Los Angeles, she sprinkles her mother’s ashes on Miles Davis’s star, her favorite next to John Coltrane, who’s not there.
She longs for a love supreme.
She is an orphan, and is brooding over her fate when she meets Harford at Venue, the nightclub she works at between the modelling gigs she keeps secret.
He deflowers her on their third date: they go to Nobu, then to his place, where he undresses her and slow-claps.
“You are one serious piece of ass,” he says, easing off his gold Toms, Nudie jeans, and floral Reyn Spooner shirt.
He is rail-thin yet yogurt-wobbly. She feels nothing.
After jamming a finger, then two, inside of her, he says, “You’re not a virgin?”
“No,” she says, and frowns. Is she a virgin?
Oblivious, he says, “Good,” pulls her to her knees, and sticks his short, tuberish cock inside her for five strokes — she counts — groans, flips her over, and cums on her back as he pulls her hair.
“Yes!” he says, exultant. “Tell me you love my moves.”
“I love them,” she says.
She is unhappy about the way he treats her, but mystified. She has no experience, and maybe sex is supposed to be brief and listless.
He holds her; wraps his bony legs around her waist in a vise grip and starts snoring.
She looks at him as he sleeps. He is sexy enough, she thinks, as she discreetly swipes between her legs to get a little charge going.
“Oh my God, did you cum?” he says, waking up, and she says, “Yeah, I looked at you and it just happened.”
“Sweet,” he says, yawning, and tightening his hold.
When she interferes with herself, she thinks of the scene in Ultraviolence where Sid grabs a girl beside him at the cinema, forcing her head down.
All you see is her bouffant rising and falling; his angular face as still as a cobra’s, poised to strike.
* * *
“So Will introduced me to the right people, I got tons of good gigs, made a lot of money, and now I can do whatever I want.”
“Hey!”
I had fallen asleep, dreaming of a girl with stiff, teased hair giving me head.
“Sorry. Yes, it all sounds too good to be true. Other than your dalliance with Harford. So why does your face get tiny and pinched when you talk about your life? And why are your little films so grim?”
“Why were you living like garbage when we met?” she counters.
Then we both burst into tears: we are reserved by nature, but unfortunately prone to crying jags that often last, with breaks, for hours on end.
This is a bad one.
I stand up and bury my face in my hands; she falls to the floor, beating it with her fists.
“You’re so mean,” we say at the exact same time.
“I hate you,” we say, and fade to whimpers.
I cannot but notice that the pearl buttons of her antique lace nightgown have popped open; that her breasts are actually heaving.
She, in turn, appears to be riveted by the inflated region of my jeans.
“Sex is supposed to be like this,” she says some time later as she bends backwards, keeping me inside of her while resting her head on my ankles.
I twitch, which sets off a reaction that ends in a blast of fission.
“Yes,” I say, feeling myself grow small and cold, but unable to pull out and leave the carnival, all of its barking and music and gunshots.
* * *
“I left out the part where he — who he looked like — when he raped me,” she says as I fall asleep, dimly aware of her difficulty phrasing these familiar words.
“Listen to my story,” Annabel says. “I am in New York for the essay-award ceremony. That night, I walk through Central Park.
I see three boys.
The tall one, with hair to his shoulders, is attractive. He is slender and fair, dressed in a long black leather coat.
Although I have fallen to the ground and rolled myself into a ball, I see him through the lens of three girls in chiffon, singing.
I sing, ‘then he kissed me,’ from my burrow, and his small, strong friends laugh.
He lifts me up, opens a knife, and cuts away my shirt. Then he slices my tights from bottom to top and tosses them aside.
When his friends start to whistle, I realize they are re-enacting something I have seen before. I forget what it is, I am so petrified.
The first slap has knocked me senseless.
He pulls me into an underpass, slams me against its wall.
The rape is slow and painful: I am filled with shame and terror.
And something else —
Please, I say: I am only thirteen years old, a never-kissed virgin and
a bookworm.
‘Please. They always say that,’ one of the small men says as the tall one moans, then, hearing footsteps, pushes me to the ground.
He takes aim and kicks me in the belly.
‘I’ll find you and kill you if you tell,’ he says.
Then he kneels and says, ‘You’re not bad, you know. I bet you turn into a real beauty,’ flashes a brilliant smile, and darts away.
It is years before I speak about what happened, and Christ! Look who I’m telling —
I have the boot print tattooed on my guts, above the words ne obliviscaris. You’ve seen it. It is an act of defiance,” she says.
“Pain as sharp as the blade he buried in my throat; pain I will not let myself forget.
Later, as the nurse tweezes and swabs between my legs, I sing, ‘I have been blessed with beauty and rage,’ and her eyes roll above her mask.
Parnell, he looked like you!” she says, and crawls under the covers, rolling herself up like a pill bug.
* * *
“Not you, not you,” she murmurs, sleeping now, curled into a ball once more.
Then who? I think, having heard certain bleak fragments. It doesn’t matter. I will find him.
I am preparing the waxen cerement in my pitch-black mind as she moans and cries out for him to stop.
“I will make this right,” I say, and she whimpers, safe in my arms, as I make my cruel and pleasing plans.
* * *
My phone rings in the middle of the night: Annabel, who is enjoying the morphine Dante lifted for her, is out cold, but I am less fortunate.
It is Kray, his sibilant voice still as familiar as my own.
“Come to my office tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll send a car.”
I hang up, go downstairs and pour a glass of whiskey, drain it, and pour another.
I am lighting a cigarette when Annabel walks in: her face falls when she sees me.
“What?” I say, in a low, mean voice.
“I’m sorry,” I call after her as she runs back upstairs, and I look out the window at the low-hanging belly of the sky.
“I was almost there,” I say.
“Happy,” I tell an indifferent lariat of stars.
* * *
There will be no stories of my childhood, a horror show I don’t wish to reprise.
Father, also decamped; alcoholic mother, hunger, neglect.
Down the road and past high red gates was a field of poppies.
When the flowers grew tall, and as the sun began to set, my old black dog, Darkling, would race though the poppies after rabbits, leaping high into the air to find them.
Misery has always stuck to me like a thistle, but the thought of Darkling poised high above the sea of crimson blooms still appears in sanguine dreams, as if we are both still hunting for concealed, succulent conquests.
In school I started acting, which gave me the chance to be anyone but myself.
Every day and every night I watched the tall ships sail in and out of the harbor.
When finally I do leave home, I pack a cardboard box with some bedding, clothes, and a photograph of my parents holding me in front of the church where I was baptized. They look dazed and frightened of the sun: I am slipping out of my mother’s arms and my yellowy-white gown.
I am tall for my age, well over six feet, and look older than I am. Malnutrition and hard living have cut my cheekbones into blades and left smutty marks under my eyes.
I leave Liverpool for London and get to know the streets.
Eventually, I audition for RADA.
My audition consists of a single piercing shriek.
* * *
I fuck my way through half the company that year and seduce many more girls I meet at pubs, through friends, or on the street.
I have cultivated a look: long, loosely layered hair and a single diamond earring, given to me by an old lady — a fifty-year-old admirer I take to bed to thank.
Thank you, she keeps saying as I dress, as she fans her hot bush and takes a final swat at my ass, which she describes, in bed, as “two swollen Asian pears snug in their white netting.”
I wear tight stovepipe jeans or leather pants with motorcycle boots or tobacco-colored Adidas, along with frilly vintage blouses I fasten over savaged undershirts with kilt pins, and a thigh-length, black plush coat with saucer-sized red buttons.
The men who try to copy me look ridiculous; I am just tall, thin, and athletic enough to pull the look off: the girls love this neue garçon/frau aesthetic.
Kray will copy my look outright for the part of Sid Delacroix in Ultraviolence, and take full credit, of course.
I don’t much like looking at pictures from this time. I look so artlessly good it is physically painful. Particularly when compared to the elongated troll doll I see so often in the mirror.
I think of the girls instead.
Of an entire chorus line of my conquests, high-kicking on a vast stage and teasing me with their tiny ruffled pantaloons and quivering teardrop breasts.
* * *
For the longest time, I overlooked Lola, but one day notice her standing at the barre in a rehearsal room, her soft pink leg bent, her fair arms interlocked.
She is eighteen, a romantic who gravitates toward suicides and fairies but is too rosy and plump for these roles.
I develop an attachment to her, and she rescues me from the indescribable room I am renting, asking me to live with her in Chelsea, in a refurbished flat her parents bought her.
I knock her up the first week and she starts to show almost immediately.
We are kids ourselves, but game. The small guest room is painted pink and blue, with a beaming sun on its ceiling. We pick up odds and ends and fix them up: a crib, a chest of drawers, a changing table, and the tiniest clothing imaginable. I keep a truly pathetic sock — orange with black spiders — in my pocket at all times.
Lola goes off sex within a few months — feeling, she says, too tired, too irritable, too goddamned fat.
She is vivid and lovely, but will not hear of it.
One day her best friend, a tart called Heloise, comes around when she knows Lola is at the doctor’s for a checkup, and flies at me like a bloodthirsty bat.
Not that it matters, as it turns out, but I think of Lola the whole time.
Of the first night I spent with my living Fragonard girl, rolling the bed into pie crust, filling it with burst sugared berries.
* * *
I am acting in a play when it happens.
I come home to find Lola howling in bed like a sick cat, the sheets doused in blood. She has visited an abortionist, a highly unqualified one at that, who used old, unsterilized instruments and thrilled at her pain.
Her suitcases are standing in a neat row by the door with a note.
It says, “I will never forgive you. I killed Gabriel and he was old enough to feel it.”
Gabriel is the name she had chosen.
I extend my hand, warily, and help her walk out the door, which she slams.
Shaking, I fold the night’s playbill, then discard it: The Duchess of Malfi, my first real production.
I have only one line, but all eyes turned to me, glittering of my fame.
I sleep on our balcony, mummified in blankets. The baby waddles up to me wearing a single sock.
He is deep blue and mournful: a huge aspiration pulls him away as he reaches for me, as I cry out, “Don’t leave me!” to this portly gallant I know I will miss for the rest of my life.
* * *
I am asked to make a film with Sir Kenneth Welthorpe, an esteemed theater director, who has just procured the rights to Joe Orton’s screenplay Up Against It.
I play Ian McTurk, a licentious cross-dresser and murderer.
Welthorpe, secretly enamored of me, lingers on my every gesture, and inserts a scene in w
hich I undress to “Stray Cat Blues” as the virgin, Rowena — whom I am about to deflower — is seen mounting a wooden chair and heatedly slamming herself against its slats.
The film receives mixed reviews, but I am singled out for praise and panegyrics.
I also become the object of teen girls’ sexual hysteria — and, critically, secure the professional attention of the legendary director Lamont Kray.
He asks for a meeting about a film project and I invite him over. But I am to pack, and must finish today, I am warned by Lola’s raging father.
The project is Ultraviolence: “I keep envisioning you as the lead,” he says, smiling enigmatically.
He is not mysterious to me. I know him, and what he sees when he looks at me.
I put my hand in my pocket and squeeze the orange sock.
“Can you make it all go away?” I ask this stout, impeccable man.
“It’s gone,” he says.
We walk out of the flat and I never return.
In two years, I am a star, living in a Los Angeles bungalow and plucking lemons from my own tree on the bedroom balcony beneath a muster of palms.
I am rich, tan as a stick, and Kray now calls me his “cash bull.”
And here’s where my story takes its first sickening turn.
* * *
Have you ever woken up and felt dread pour into your stomach like hot magma?
Woken and covered your face with the sheets, you are so embarrassed and startled by the magnitude of how bad everything is?
I have. Still do.
After we finish touring with Ultraviolence, Kray asks me to make another movie with him, an adaptation of Les Chants de Maldoror.
“You would make a superb Maldoror,” he says, showing me the storyboard for the scene in which the eponymous creep rapes and murders a boy.
When I am interviewed, at a later time, about working with Kray, I often recite the novel’s warning to the reader:
Unless he should bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a sustained mental effort at least as strong as his distrust, the lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve his soul as water does sugar.