Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  “Not a goddamned thing,” I say, and weep for our stupidity, born of vanity and fear.

  * * *

  We wrap the next day, and the last scene has me throwing myself off a bridge for the love of Gloriana, who is nothing but a gleaming skull I carry in my hands as I fall, grimly, without making a sound.

  “I hope it works,” I say to Crispin as the wrap party winds down.

  “It may, it may not,” he says nervously.

  We are speaking of Annabel’s work. It doesn’t matter anymore, but I feel honor-bound to use her strange, splendid footage.

  He promises to do his best; he has gestured to her screenplay by throwing all those frogs into a shootout at the Santa Monica Mountains.

  I made sure they were unhurt, and given a large terrarium-trailer.

  Maybe he’s leery of me or maybe he’s a decent guy. It’s a bit of both, I think, as I clap his back and thank him.

  “You salvaged the best of me, and almost obliterated the worst.”

  “Oh, I think I did a bit better than that,” Crispin says with his endearing arrogance.

  We go to a titty bar and spend a fortune.

  Big things are about to happen, we say, slapping palms, to more than a few lap dancers, and the girls, the lovely, curious girls, cautiously extend their own grubby little pincers for stacks of sweet-smelling, newly minted cash.

  And a few specks of love they paste to their nipples and shake for us until the night hits the wall and cries, Mercy!

  * * *

  In January, Deadly Nightshade sweeps the Golden Globes after the fastest release turnaround in cinema history.

  Best movie, screenplay, director, actor, and actress. We are going to take the Academy Awards too; the odds in our favor are overwhelming. The reviews are ceaseless raves.

  Every time I win, I think of Annabel admiring me, envying me, wanting me.

  And brush her off.

  She is nowhere to be found, so I have no idea how she is reacting to my silent treatment. I have Ash arrange for an in-depth interview with Barbara Walters. I will tell the kind lady everything, and coax out Annabel in the process.

  We talk for an hour about my career — a “fever chart,” she calls it — about my troubles, she says delicately, and my love life.

  “Is there someone special?” she asks, and I lean back, legs open, my chin on my steepled fingers. I am muscular and fresh from my assemblage of groomers, wearing a rose velvet suit and jade shirt with short, red suede boots and hair bound with a pink ribbon. I look so ripe that Barbara leans in hopefully.

  “Someone who — ?”

  I punch ellipses into the air, pause.

  “Left me,” I say, strategically dropping my head.

  I scratch my shoulder, where an old fentanyl patch is still releasing small fronds of opium, and feel the sympathy and desire I have aroused.

  I feel thousands of cunts — maybe tens of thousands — throbbing my name onto silk gussets.

  Nervously, I feel Annabel’s displeasure as well. I have lied by omission and she is already standing at her cauldron, twisting into it foul roots and using an eyedropper to release smoking drops of revenge.

  I’m not afraid, I tell myself. I am almost dead already.

  Still, there are things to do and say.

  * * *

  I have used my anger as an engine throughout, to carry me through the tedious post-production of the film, the award-bait press and interviews, and the hope that has been implanted in me like a microchip by anxious producers, having sunk a fortune into a has-been and an extremely late sequel.

  My PR people tell me to keep my sob story to myself.

  “The old bags feel sorry for you,” they say. “But nobody else. You two were a hot couple, play that up.”

  Their ruthlessness appeals to me.

  I am so tired of being angry.

  And I am better by far sequestering myself inside of my memories, where something living, expectant, is still lodged and prepared to burst.

  And so when I am named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, I replenish my patch and offer the magazine several shots of me and Annabel: intimate, happy pictures of us in the pool, riding quilted rafts and splashing each other; smashing milk bottles with hard balls at the arcade; sound asleep and dishevelled in the back seat of a limo that has pulled up to a big industry event.

  When asked about our status, I am coy. “Let’s just say that we’re soulmates,” I say, “two broken pieces that, when fitted together, make a perfect whole.”

  It is possible that I pick this remark out with a knife while befriending a butterfly called Severin.

  “She took up the faux fur–trimmed whip and said, Bleed for me,” I may have said as well, but the interviewer is practised at ignoring drug-induced psychosis and is, she tells me, on my side.

  “I hope you get your girl back,” she says, timidly holding out her hand for the gift of the butterfly, who will perish before she reaches her car.

  As I conduct his funeral — “Severin loved not wisely, but too well,” I recite — the magazine locates Annabel, but she declines to comment because she is “hard at work on a new book about Freud, Hitchcock, and Edith Head.”

  When I appear on Conan, I am basically clean. I cannot locate the pharmacist, whose shop is belted with police tape.

  I have a finger of vodka, cross my fingers, and when he mentions Annabel, I say that she and I are “on a brief hiatus,” an ambiguous remark I bury quickly by talking about us taking a yoga class once and disrupting it by deciding to share a mat and invent a move we called “downward doggy–style.”

  I almost get censored but the story gets big, generous laughs and the host’s scandalized reaction, combined with a shot of the beautiful Annabel, secures the moment.

  Later, I am afraid the press will ambush her and she will deny the story, but she does not.

  When TMZ corners her at Ralph’s holding armfuls of greens and big, veined melons, she smiles and says, “We did do that, yes. We never could get enough of each other.”

  I get a note from her later: “I said that to make you look good. I know how important the movie is. But the truth is, we have had enough of each other.”

  This hurts so much I feel winded. I write her back, “I have not,” and receive an error message.

  So she never receives my weepy sad face :_( or my RIP Tommy.

  “Your loss, baby,” I say loudly, swallowing tears. Our loss.

  The anger is now entirely sadness.

  I have known the purity of pure despair.

  * * *

  I bring my bird poem to an open-mic night at Small World Books on Ocean Front.

  I am immediately recognized, which causes a frisson of excitement.

  “I am here to listen and to share,” I tell the group, who seem to be waiting for an announcement. “I am a lousy poet and broken-hearted bastard, nothing more.”

  The mostly young writers welcome me, beckoning me to a good seat near the front and elbowing one another fiercely in order to sit beside me.

  I listen to poems about the choppiness of the ocean and the ocean chopping onions and crying its salty self sick.

  A long story about a woman’s decision that she “deserves a better life.” Tears all around; some repeated statements — YOU fornicated ME — angrily declaimed, and a poem by a latecomer, a fastidious Korean man in a green chima, yellow Chucks, and a red CHVRCHES T-shirt.

  He reads this poem:

  Your dad beat on you,

  You hate him, you are mad

  Your boss reamed you

  Your friends clowned you

  Your girl left you

  You are so mad you are seeing red

  But are you mad or is it dread?

  That they are right and you are bad,

  That scratch that
anger and Bam!

  You are sad.

  He gets a polite wave of applause, though I distinctly hear the words “an embarrassment” and “how awful” as the saint, who has just explained my entire life, steps off the stage, walks through the room and out the door.

  As a moto-dyke is reading a sexy poem about her girlfriend busting a nut in “brown papery panties stained with your shining gunk,” I get up and follow the wondrous poet.

  He is standing on the street, bathed in white light.

  “I like your poem,” I say. He smiles and disappears, leaving a pink lotus flower where he stood.

  I pin it to my lapel and go back inside to read my poem — drunk off my ass, did I say, and crying like a huge pussy because life is so terrible and then there is grace.

  Now pop that pussy.

  This is me giving Annabel instructions, having just had a pole installed in the bedroom.

  Because I have been having some difficulties and cannot stomach Viagra, she goes along with the plan, going so far as to outfit herself in stripper lamé, a long white wig, and six-inch platforms with ankle straps.

  She is very nimble on the pole and as she spins, easing off the straps of her ventilated one-piece, I feel all the blood rush to my groin.

  Oh, this is such a good memory, I think, as I jam pillows over my face to block out the sunlight and sound.

  I stood and she stayed in character, pushing me to the end of the bed and grinding against me until I almost came in my pants.

  And then she unzipped me and lowered, so slowly, her Oriental-lily mouth over the tip of —

  “Dad!”

  I force my eyes open, cough, and say, “What?”

  “I have your breakfast, let me in.”

  I run cold water over my penis until it curls up, put on my robe, and accept Christine’s pretty ceramic tray of buttered toast, melon, coffee, juice, and a small potted cactus.

  “I thought the cactus was more you than a cut flower,” she says, and I smile, indulgently.

  Close the door because I am excited again, about the needles of a cactus forced into the pollen-drenched center of a big swollen bloom.

  When I was living on the street, my daughter had the pole removed and I am too embarrassed to ask why.

  Spin faster, I think, and I can almost see my sweetheart, her knee crooked around the metal, her face rapturous for driving me so hard for her.

  I use a pen to make a cross on the floor where the pole was, and write GOLGOTHA beside it, kneeling and praying: God, won’t she ever come back.

  * * *

  Now that my daughter and I have reconnected, I spend a lot of time with her.

  I follow her around in my drunken stupors, telling her stories and imploring her to join me for “some spirits or perhaps a nice cold ale?”

  She is good-natured enough to pour herself a glass of juice and join me as I talk about the film and Annabel, pausing occasionally to ask how she is feeling, if the baby has kicked, then interrupting her short, happy replies.

  “The film could be my comeback — no, my arrival. Ash is already fielding offers from big directors, and I have done so many sensational photo shoots, I feel like a slightly older Bradley Cooper — no, better than that. I mean, he’s so bland.”

  Then, “When I have more awards than I can hold, when I am so famous I can’t walk down the street, she’ll love me again, right?”

  Christine takes my hand.

  “Sure, Dad,” she says.

  “Sometimes,” I say, “I wake up and I am holding her pillow and I think it’s her and when I realize it’s not, I fall apart.”

  “I think you should try to meet a nice lady, and start fresh,” she says.

  “I don’t want a nice lady. I want my darling girl,” I say, and the wailing resumes.

  My daughter takes my hand and leads me to my room, tucks me in and kisses my forehead.

  “Try to have nice dreams,” she says, and I do.

  Annabel is teaching tiny, limbless children to swim in the Caribbean Sea as I flake out on the shore, reclining on a sail-sized beach towel with a copy of The Spanish Tragedy.

  She walks out of the water, pulling the children on a raft behind her.

  In a sheer white bikini and pounds of wet, lucent hair, she is looking so good.

  “Buzz, come swim with me,” she says, and I jump up.

  Leave the book open, right here: Give me a kiss, I’ll countercheck thy kiss.

  I don’t mean it anymore. Come home, baby, I plead, wrestling the pillow until it explodes, crowning me with a jillion little feathers.

  A new batch of tears fastens the feathers more: I turn the light on, grab a pen, and write SO LONELY and I COULD DIE on my hand.

  I want to remember what these long, knifey nights are like.

  I want to tell her, and have her make it better: she, the celestial creature who is always just out of reach and high, perched so high among the unnamed and transient stars.

  * * *

  I write a poem for her every day, and have an assistant proofread and type it. He prints each one on fine Japanese paper, adding it to a corrugated binder embossed with a swelling sea.

  I read some at the bookstore, where I have made several new friends, but they are too kind.

  I suspect they are not listening so much as staring at me, at my big movie-star head, my costly accessories, and my well-packed jeans.

  My suspicions are confirmed the day I read a deeply unpleasant piece about killing Annabel and dismembering her, lingering on the image of her flesh caught in the saw’s teeth.

  “That was beautiful,” Sasha says. She is a burlesque dancer with an intriguing gap between her front teeth; she squeezes my arm as I sit back down.

  “Did you like it when I cut her up?” I ask into her Camay-creamy neck. The reading is over, and I am pushing Sasha into the rear of the bookstore.

  “Yes, I loved it,” she says, combing my chest with her spangled nails and groaning when she feels my hard cock distend against her belly.

  “And when I kissed her skull, what about that?”

  I knead her underwired breasts, slip a finger inside her volcanically hot box.

  “That was so good,” she says, and kisses me.

  A soft, hesitant kiss, filled with spearmint and unspoken questions.

  I answer them.

  “Never,” I say. I turn on my heels and walk away, pecking at my face with my handkerchief and tucking in my shirt.

  “Bastard,” she says, her face wrecked, her clothes mauled.

  “I’m not,” I say. “I belong to someone else, that’s all.”

  She cries: O soave fanciulla.

  She is lovely in the moonlight, I think on my way to an old tattoo parlor on Ventura, where I have PROPERTY OF ANNABEL inked on my lower back.

  The cashier calls it a tramp stamp and laughs, showing off about an acre of pitted gums.

  * * *

  When I have finished the last poem — the violent one is not included — I look through the sixty-page manuscript.

  I am sorry to have misrepresented myself, though. The saw-murder poem is a good rendering of my extremes, how far I might go on the wrong day.

  The last poem is, instead, another entire alphabet. It is everything she taught me, from the Battle of Tsushima to Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and the vagaries of time travel in Zarlah the Martian.

  I remove the poems from the binder and add them to my now-huge VALUABLES envelope — this is crayoned in seashell pink on its rumpled back.

  I retrieve each item — including the Holy Spirit — and each poem, placing them one by one on the nice fire I have prepared in the living room.

  When everything has imploded, I add the envelope and sit back with a stiff drink.

  An occasional letter or word pops out: mostly mine, and most o
ften “sweet” or “girl.” Finally, “She doesn’t need to see this.”

  My need, my large gaps of idle time: I had even made clay figures of us, hand in hand, that were bound to the manuscript.

  These get thumped by my fist and swept into the trash.

  I taught her things too, is my forlorn thought.

  Then, Oh! S’mores!

  * * *

  I meet with Crispin to finesse the way in which I talk to the media about the film.

  He says, “Is it a Senecan tragedy? A revenge play? Yes. But it is more Elizabethan than Jacobean or Caroline: the Hamlet through-line is the loudest. And then there’s Kubrick and Kray, and our revenge on them. In any event, the screen is littered with bodies in the last act.”

  I remember doing a run of revenge plays and stepping over corpses in the end.

  “Are you ready to be a superstar again?” Crispin asks, twitching and rubbing his nose at our dainty table at La Bruschetta.

  “I don’t care anymore,” I say, realizing, grimly, that this is true.

  “You don’t want all these bastards to eat shit, after writing you off for so long? This is vindication,” he says.

  “No,” I say. “I once thought that was important. I once thought that so many things were important. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” I say, while making a little gnocchi log cabin with my fork, “but I’d trade everything that has happened or that could happen for another day in my bed at the Elsinore with Annabel, drinking warm Almondage and holding her tight, breathing in all the ambrosia of the world — ”

  “Hey,” Crispin says, standing up and smacking my back as I sputter and cough, drowning in tears, “everything will be all right.”

  Which is the song she played for me, and so I go off like a foghorn and he stays standing beside me, dunking a napkin into my water and using it to soothe my big, miserable face.

  FIVE

  Parnell and Annabel,

  hollywood, 2018