by Lynn Crosbie
And then laugh lightly, as if being playful.
Quailing with revulsion, I tell Kray it is time I branched out, and decline.
He says he regrets, but accepts, my decision.
And so his fervid crusade begins. He tars and feathers my name everywhere, indicating en masse — I learn through one loyal old friend — that to work with me is to work against him.
But I am young and arrogant. He will change his mind, I think. My talent will win out in the end, anyways.
It does not.
In addition to spreading fabricated stories of my villainy, Kray informs everyone I am a gay man — in far more ghastly language — who prefers the company of very young men: as in barely-adolescents.
Never mind that everyone I work with is gay. Their secrecy is steadfast, and my alleged proclivities make everyone sick.
I cannot defend myself against blind items, innuendo, and gossip.
The fall is fast and steep.
* * *
My posh agent quits, and my representation grows worse and worse. I have to resort to the Yellow Pages, and my pay scale plunges accordingly, as does the caliber of the work.
The chicken-hawk rumors die down when I am never seen doing anything but squiring my listless wife and frightful children around.
And crying brokenly on sidewalks or in traffic.
Enough gay men stand by me that I am able to get work, which is why there is a triangle branded on the underside of my wrist.
I make B movies — I am always cast as the villain — which, thankfully, very few people see.
And go back to the theater, but the plays are horrid: Gorboduc performed by men and women in diapers and paper crowns; an experimental work called Mr. Dirty Man, mounted by a women’s collective who beat me half to death on opening night.
During Titus Andronicus, which runs several weeks at the Asylum, I get drunk and greet people I know, or wish to know, in the audience.
I am fired the night I sit on the stage’s edge eating a large piece of cheese and playing vulgar games with a laser pointer.
I shoot TV pilots and guest appearances on increasingly unpopular, mean-spirited shows where I am asked to respond to such lines as “Hey, who invited stinky Grandpa?”
Changing tack, I make infomercials for a potato peeler that doubles as a universal remote, and for a male hair-loss product called Harvest, which is, essentially, a bag of seeds and dirt.
Then I write a memoir, with a ghost, naturally, called I’m Still Here! (I lobbied, unsuccessfully, to add You Heartless Bastards). It is remaindered the week it comes out.
Shortly after its release, I come across a second-hand copy in a shambolic Hollywood bookstore, painstakingly inscribed “To my dear daughter, from her devoted father.” I slip it into my breast pocket, slink outside, and dry-heave by the entrance.
And this is where you found me, more or less.
In my tenth domicile or so, on my fifth car; entering my deplorable career as a chicken huckster.
Kray transfigures everything, like holy magic.
I try to remember this when the bile-hatch opens each morning, filling me with fear and other poisons.
* * *
Was I dreaming of Kray, my nauseous stomach wonders as I sit bolt upright and barf an Exorcist-green arc.
Annabel is on top of it. She has the bed stripped and changed in a flash as I brush my teeth and wash my parboiled face, while assiduously avoiding my reflection.
She dresses me in clean white pajamas and pours me a Scotch, neat, in my old sippy cup.
“You were talking — well, screaming — in your sleep,” she says, raking Zen lines in my hair.
“What did I say?” I ask her and tremble. Not this, no.
She pauses and looks at me sorrowfully.
“I couldn’t make it out,” she says, and if she is lying, I cannot tell.
I fall into the ring of her arms and dream of many bright toy dinosaurs circling a full-blown yellow rose.
Mon semblable, she murmurs as the room fills with music: “Keep Me in Your Heart.”
“A song for you,” she says.
A song about dying, I think. And the few bright sparks in life, an otherwise insufferably long, dark passage.
My likeness — what does she mean? — sings along as an aurora of bees dive-bomb the flower, drinking greedily of her inexhaustible sweetness.
As I swipe lightly at her open lips and rich hazel skin, at the straps of her filmy salmon-pink slip, sleep, in the guise of a ten-foot-tall T. Rex, plucks at, then swallows me whole.
Take me to your dreams, Annabel, my mango-bellied starling, sings.
The dinosaur, now small, hears her and claps his little hands.
“You were wrong,” he roars. “He is not his doom’d son’s spirit.”
She nods, lifts him by the tail, and swallows him whole.
Annabel will watch over me for hours — but needlessly, as my dreams have become Fantastic Voyage.
Her blood is an 1865 Château Lafite with a complex flavor, something like willow-tree shavings stirred into a strongman’s blood; and a clear, ruby appearance, legs to here.
And so I remain in her arms and deeper, inside of her splendid veins, euphoric and afraid of nothing until my phone alarm sounds and I, as Caliban, cry to dream again.
* * *
KRAY DAY is what I have written on the bathroom mirror with the eyeliner I apply each morning in strictest furtiveness.
I dress slowly and move even more so, thinking of the Bataan Death March and of rifle stocks jabbing me forward.
Kray’s office is in Century City.
I sit on a soft white block as his Bardot look-alike secretary drifts around with bottles of water and a sympathetic smile.
“I’ve seen that video your girlfriend made, the sexy one. I get off on it,” she says, rushing back to her desk as Kray’s shadow enters the room.
“Please ignore this dumb bunny,” he says fondly, and pats her head. “She gets off when sea turtles mate on the Discovery Channel.”
“So what if I do?” she says, and pouts. I am tempted to crawl onto her lips and take a long cleansing nap.
Kray takes my elbow, and his hand is a glacier.
We sit in a room empty of everything but two hard-back chairs, an abbreviated desk, and his film posters.
“So, let’s talk about the movie,” I say, my legs crossing and uncrossing convulsively.
“No time for catching up?” he says, and smiles, revealing rows of tiny amber-colored teeth.
“No,” I say, but I am paralyzed, lost in his stabbing gaze.
“You are still beautiful,” he says, and leisurely reaches forward to cup my face in his great, rough paw.
I stare back at him helplessly.
This is how it starts all over again.
* * *
I don’t remember leaving the office, or getting home.
Just that I sat in the living room drinking whiskey from a jar, with night falling on me like the cape of a count.
Or blanket, the blanket she shook over me while speaking softly in my ear: “Let me help you.”
Words that I push away: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But I do, I do,” she says, as if she is marrying me; as if she is my new bride, she lifts a veil of light and kisses my lips.
Cold, medicinal lips like a plantain poultice: I fall asleep and wake up still wrapped in the blanket that is covered in a print of smiling bees. “Buzz” is what she most often calls me, my Annabel, who is gone.
I find her in the living room, in a fort made out of sofa pillows and a tablecloth.
She is lying on her side, her fingers splayed across her face.
I watch her adjusting Tubby, who has been conscripted to serve as a pillow, and burrowing in my
old coat from the hard times: a carefully mended M-51 field jacket with ersatz red windmill buttons.
“My sweetheart,” I say, and her eyes snap open.
“You have to talk to me,” she says, shrugging off the coat. “We are so much more alike than you imagine, and — ”
I don’t want to hear this and halt her by covering her mouth and producing a black bullwhip I bought in West Hollywood.
She melts.
And lashes me hard enough to leave open, bleeding welts I know she’ll repair with her first-aid kit.
Later.
She is my reverse cowgirl now, and I am starving for a taste of the golden pear that is her waist and hips, the supple stem of her refined neck.
“I’m sorry,” I say, breathless and lowing, and she silences me with a flick of the whip — just a taste really — and I know I am off the hook, for now.
My cell rings at the worst possible time, and I throw it across the room.
“Who is Alexander?” she says when she retrieves it later on.
“My son. Remember his kiddie picture, the one where he’s setting my house on fire? He’s not named after the Clockwork Alex, though. It was my wife’s father’s name.”
She is agitated, starts pacing.
“I’m a bad father, I know,” I tell her, still reclining, not at all interested in the conversation, and fascinated by her from this angle.
“I should have mentioned him before. It’s just — ”
“What? What is it?”
“Oh, we don’t get along. I can’t imagine why he’s calling.”
“Call him,” she says, throwing on a robe.
I do, unhappily, and he gets right to the point. Can I give his latest girlfriend a part in whatever I’m working on? he asks.
“No,” I say, and Annabel grabs the phone.
“Your father is joking; of course he’ll help you,” she says.
He says, “You sound sexy, what’s your name?” and she tells him and hangs up and goes outside and screams until she cannot speak and is spitting blood.
“Don’t ask and I won’t ask you,” she says elliptically.
I see us colliding in a space accident that a Venusian anchorman reports in a series of shrill beeps and a single flat blast: my mouth opens and shuts as the distance between us lengthens.
We are in danger, I think miserably.
Baise-moi, she says, crying. I am so gentle she becomes furious and slaps me until my ears ring.
* * *
Pudge calls. “Annabel Wrath is my age, Dad. And she’s — ”
“She’s what?”
“Never mind,” she says. “Call Mom right away. There’s a very serious problem with the pool.”
My strange daughter hangs up abruptly as I lie in the demolished fort, after cleaning my cuts with witch hazel; after waking Annabel with promises of coffee and admiring her sleep-creased backside making its way upstairs. Reluctantly I call Allegra and sort out the problem, which turns out to be “an unusual smell.”
“I can’t be alone in thinking it’s coming from you,” I say.
When her breathing becomes rapid, I promise to send over a handyman, laughing as I spoon coffee grounds into the press.
* * *
I fell for Allegra Swan when she was giving me my first pedicure on Rodeo Drive, shortly after I arrived in America, flush and successful. This was not long before Kray’s offer and revenge.
She teased me with thrilling views of her cleavage as she sanded my neglected feet, speaking in an irresistible Southern accent that she has fabricated, I will later discover, entirely.
I have just filmed my first American movie, History Repeats Itself, with the vivacious and equine Karen Allen.
I play my first significant good guy, in mutton-chop sideburns, a bald spot, and various rayon blouses. I am an archaeologist in love with a mummy played by Miss Allen, who devises a transparently impossible way of travelling back in time to meet her in her original form, trapping us both in ancient Egypt with no way back.
My high hopes of crossing over are dashed by a very large number of reviews stating that the movie is ludicrous, deadening, and, “if the title is true, a call to arms.”
I turn to my aesthetician for comfort in my shock and shame, and soon discover she is not Allegra Swan, twenty-five, but Angie Sales, a thirty-seven-year-old barber from Staten Island.
She cries so pitifully when she confesses that I shrug and let it go. We drift together as my star fades; as it explodes, we manage to pass many unhappy years.
Just as I decide to move back to London and start again, she gets pregnant, first with Alexander, then with Christine, who is born only eleven months after her brother.
Her body changes and it disgusts me. Zigzags of maroon appear all over her poultry-white skin; her vagina could pass a pickup truck, and her breasts!
They are distended bulbs, also electrified with stretch marks, which leak through her clothes, wetting the bed and disgusting me at the dinner table.
“You’re no bargain either,” she tells me after I have rebuffed another of her crude advances (ball-cupping followed by stale, sloppy kisses). “Your ass stinks and your cock is never hard, your nose and ears are stuffed with hair, and you have a bag for a belly.”
“Then let us not touch each other,” I say, relieved and deeply offended. Allegra takes to sleeping in a separate bedroom, smoking and seething, writing what she calls an “explosive memoir.”
I sneak a look at it one day. It is a pad of legal paper and on each page is a tear, glistening at the corner of one of her distinctive cornflower-blue eyes.
There are hundreds, captioned with times and dates, and that is all.
I am uneasy about her instability and creative virtuosity. I put the pad away; this Rachel’s sea of weeping, the drowning of all she had hoped for, reached —
Only to lose.
I want to leave, but I am very partial to my children, and I stay with my wife because of them.
Pudge is kind, even to worms in the garden I am ready to strike with my spade, kind to me when I am hungover, patting my forehead with wet facecloths and resting one dimpled hand in mine.
And Alexander —
When my son was born, I was elated. We bonded at first sight: our eyes locked as I held him; he sighed deeply and stopped yowling, only to resume when the nurse or his own mother reached for him.
I saw in him a small, uncorrupted me. I saw another chance and something far bigger, beating everywhere like a telltale heart.
I envisioned his candy heart filling my own nearly barren heart with redolent messages: Sweet Pea, Me & You, O Kid!
He grew so quickly, in inverse proportion to my career.
By the time he was a sturdy, flaxen-haired three-year-old, I was working on a film that demarcates the moment at which my life went off the rails completely.
It was pitched to me as Richàrd, the story of a man in the grip of a “Kafkaesque loneliness,” whose moonlighting at the city zoo has led him toward a tragic empathy with a rhinoceros slated to be euthanized.
My French-Canadian character, unable to save his friend, would lock himself in his vacated cage, becoming an exhibit himself.
It was a good and very moving script, and the director, Jaime Sommers, was a cherished old friend who had worked with me at RADA on a number of revenge tragedies, stories we liked for their emotional candor and highbrow gore.
But she was fired, and a hack with a megaphone and cowboy hat Western-stitched with the only name we knew him by — CHEESE — was brought in, who changed the title to Nightmare in Tusktown!
He changed my role too, making me a sort of a were-ungulate, lingering on scenes of my agonized transformations; on stops, mid-escape, to peer into women’s bedrooms to watch them undress by night lights; and, for reasons best known to him, on a le
ngthy quarrel with the zookeeper about “the best anal bleach technicians. Right here in Tusktown!”
I was perpetually mortified and locked into an ironclad contract that did not preclude their lowering my pay as they pleased.
But being with Alexander made everything all right, including Allegra’s company, for she doted on him also.
He had an outrageously bad temper and disposition, yet he had countless friends, friends I knew were bound to him by fear. I admired his magnetism and confidence.
The worse he got, the sweeter he was with us, with me especially, and so, like the great, damned Rex, I blinded myself.
When our pets went missing, when his teachers sent urgent letters, when he attacked little Pudge so often that we had to install a deadbolt on her door and a security camera, when he wrote Devil on his forehead with a heart over the “i,” using a razorblade, when he turned twelve and started smoking and dropping acid —
It exhausts me to continue.
Still, he flew at me every night when I came home, asking me about my day and calling me so cool. He begged me to read to him from books he had obviously jacked, embarrassing pulp novels like Tigress, Kill Baby, and Swamp Brat.
And he kept his hand over mine at dinner, and whenever we sat near each other.
I liked him, I must have loved him, but that changed, irretrievably.
By the time he was thirteen, I had abandoned any pretense of being a respectable actor.
My job at the time was a recurring role (involving another transformation premise) on a comedy set in Transylvania, Louisiana, called Night Shift on the Bayou.
I played a hotel manager-slash-vampire who disappeared during the day, causing all sorts of problems for guests wanting to check in or find their cable listings.
My sidekick was a Cajun alligator named Beau, whose catchphrase was “You be cooyon.”
Humiliating is not the word: Beau made more money than I did and, during a swamp scene, bit a half-moon out of my ass, leaving a livid scar.