“I won’t kid you,” he says. “You have overshot my ambitions. I send you out for some hambone chamber of commerce photos and you come back with Mona Lisa in toe shoes. Plus a flying Pomeranian.”
Karen snickers. Dr. Al gives her a schoolteacher stare.
“Oh laugh while ye may, young lass. But you have made extra work for me. I lack the capacity for ignoring the arts. So here’s my deal. I want you two to pull one of these masterpieces out of your butts once a month, and I will attempt to assemble a Jackpot calendar for next year. Do whatever you can to make the little town look grand, and work in the dog whenever possible. I realize that this will require keeping Karen in town, but I will do anything I can think of to keep you employed. Can you speak? I mean, publicly?”
“Yes, sir!” Karen barks. “Three fourths of a degree in theater arts.”
“Not surprised. I may have some emceeing for you. Gerry? Thoughts?”
“So we’re… branding?”
“Exactamente. Karen is our Jackpot Girl.”
“I’ve got a wedding shoot this weekend. Won’t pay much, but…”
“I’ll take it!” says Karen.
Al rubs his hands together. “Dandy. Anything else?”
“I need to… move,” says Karen. “Someplace permanent.”
“Gerry?” says Al.
“I’ve got an idea.”
Al smiles. “It’s like I’m back playing point guard. Okay, I’ll be in touch soon. Meanwhile, I will have this little masterpiece hung in the buffet room.”
“Wow,” says Gerry.
They scoot from the casino and Gerry leads her to his house. He takes an unexpected left and goes to the adjacent unit. He reaches under the mat for a key, then opens the door to an interior that’s a blank identical of his own.
“Like it?”
`She looks out the kitchen window, across the golf course, a sandy butte to the south, and imagines a sunrise.
“Yes.”
“Three hundred a month, payable whenever. The landlord’s a friend of mine.”
“Amazing! And why do I deserve all this?”
“Apparently because you’re photogenic. And cute.”
Karen thinks about it. “I’ll take it!” And gives Gerry a large hug.
Twenty
When it comes to the Durangos and Laredos – a western wedding if ever there was one – Karen is a wizard, herding bridesmaids and nieces like a cattleman fetching dogies. It’s a Super Bowl wedding inside the casino, with quarterly number-winners announced during the reception. Gerry and Karen achieve the rare photographer’s feat of not interfering, or at least so little that the agenda runs right on time. Gerry shoots the candids at the reception and soon they’re off to the buffet for a celebratory meal. Karen smuggles in a bottle of champagne from the reception and afterward they stumble home.
But home is different. Gerry has set a mattress on the roof next to a space heater and a pile of camera equipment. They climb a ladder and crawl the shakes. Karen’s looking woozy.
“What’s this, then?”
Gerry smiles. “The Super Blue Blood Moon.”
Karen sprawls across the mattress and grabs a pillow. “Explain, please.”
“Supermoon is when it’s as close as it’s going to get. Blue is the second full moon in the month. Blood is a total eclipse, which causes the surface to go reddish-orange. And that’s why Gerry has his tripod on the roof.”
“You’re a romantic.”
“All photographers are romantics.” He turns a bucket upside-down for a stool and screws his camera onto the tripod. “I’m going to have very little light for this, so I’m going to need stillness.”
“Tell me about Angela.”
“Oh no,” he says. “I’m going to need more champagne for that.”
She hands him the bottle and he swigs.
“Okay. I was up at Indian Rocks with Hari on a stormy day. Great shots. I was driving home on this narrow mountain road when a deer ran in front of me. I braked hard and hit something on my right. And then there was… a dog on my left, whimpering. A pink leash.”
He takes a big swig and wipes his mouth.
“I ran her over. She tripped and fell into my path. My wheels crushed her head. Her face was just… gone. There was nothing human left. The EMTs found me next to an oak tree, rocking back and forth, hysterical.”
“This is why you don’t drive.”
“Yes. It took me years of therapy to recover. One… trick I learned was talking to the victim. Angela’s been with me ever since. I’m sorry if that makes me crazy. But not as crazy as I could be.”
He turns to the tripod and squares up the face of the moon, which has grown a shadowy cap. This is how easily the story is told. He feels Karen’s limbs around his torso and smiles.
“I’ll give you a half hour to stop that. And then you can tell me your story.”
“I had an affair with a chef in Oregon,” she says. “I had to leave.”
“So stay here and don’t.”
“I love you, Gerry,” she whispers.
“We are intertwined by disaster,” he says. “That’s good. Angela would like that.”
“Good.”
“One bloody moon, coming up.”
Twenty One
He’s got his January shot, and the way the weather operates in Jackpot, he’d better get his February shot soon. The call comes on a Tuesday, when a light powder gessos the golf course. He wakes Karen at first light and requests simply that she look perfect at six in the morning. He hands her a wedding gown with angel wings.
“Where the hell did you get this?”
“The newlywed boudoir collection. That dress has seen a few things.”
He pulls out his golf clubs. Karen stands there like a surprised puppet.
“That’s you?”
“That’s my clubs.”
“No! I mean, you’re the snow golfer. I saw you from the hotel, before I met you. And that was Sophie, tracking your golf balls.”
“Yes, yes and yes. So the gig today is, you are the nymph of winter who lives in the woods and steals my balls.”
She bursts into laughter. “If you could just replay that sentence…”
“Yeah, yeah. Joker. But I think you and the doggie have this friendly rivalry. You’re trying to keep the balls, but she’s so cute that you also want to make her happy.”
“Persephone and the pomegranate seeds.”
“Huh?”
“Look it up, Joseph Campbell.” Karen picks up Sophie and kisses her on the cheek. “Cause cuteness is your superpower.”
They walk to the course, which is frosted in diamonds. Gerry and Sophie play the way they usually do. Karen flits along, pretending to control matters as if she is actually pulling strings. She drops onto a green to make a snow angel, and has immediate regrets.
The magic arrives on the 8th hole, beneath the sprawling oaks, precisely where the aggressive hawks make their summer home. Karen, feeling rambunctious (which is, after all, her job), nabs the pink Titleist and climbs a low branch, covered in sinewy gray bark. She hangs from it, dangling the ball just out of Sophie’s reach. Sophie yaps and jumps – determined, apparently, to only appear in photographs while in mid-flight. Gerry snaps away, aware that he is digging up gold. Eventually, everyone gets exhausted.
“Am I done?” asks Karen.
Gerry looks up, his eyes full of stars. “No. Take off your clothes.”
“I’ll freeze!”
“I’m an artist, baby! And nymphs are often naked. Work with me.”
“Family calendar?”
“Strategic positioning of parts.”
She stops and rubs a hand along the rough bark. “Only if you strip, too. That way we’re even.”
And so would a passerby see it, a barren oak sprouting human limbs, a dangling pink fruit, a candy red camera, a ball of fuzz barking like Toto.
They get decent and manage two more holes before the wedding dress is filthy and the photogr
apher all shot out. They tramp homeward, loose in the limbs. Gerry stops by the office to leave a twenty and is met by the marquis greens of Kerry.
“Hi Kerry. This is Karen. My model. Kerry is the mistress of the Jackpot Golf Club.
Karen shakes Kerry’s hand, and notices how her eyes narrow in study. Walking away, she says, “That woman is a cat. Have you slept with her?”
He laughs. “Not that I know of.”
“I think you will. If you want. She was putting off heat.”
“Are you my pimp?”
“Are you mine?”
He smiles. “You’re my nymph. So… maybe.”
“I will get you that girl.”
“Agreed! And I will find you a boy.”
“No. A man.” She stops and kisses him. “We’re different, you and I. We will rewrite the book.”
“The book needs it.”
Twenty Two
He shuffles through the paraphernalia of his recent Karenization: Kleenex, popcorn bowls, two wine corks, several pillows and a remote. Then he finds the unexpected, a tattered old paperback titled The Girl in the Flaming Dress. In the illustration, a man stands on a boat as lightning strikes the mast, sending burning timbers down on the brunette heroine. The author’s name is Harry Optic. He pours some coffee and opens it up.
The Girl in the Flaming Dress
I’m due to beat the skins at FDR’s, but I’m running early. I’m always early. Manny hands me a flight of brews, but it just puts me to sleep. I wake at the glass, one eye on my Toyota. I lost a window to a smash-and-grabber and right now it’s as open as a library.
The gig is special – rowdy crowd, good drinkers, chair dancers – but afterward my singer is putting me in a flummox. She up-and-downs me, leaving eyeprints all over my clothing. The thing is, she’s comparing me to my former self, Fat Johnny, and she’s dazzled by the results. No miracles, really, just joining a gym and not being a pig. Granted, I don’t pump iron to be ignored, but it’s still me inside and her ex-boyfriend is my lead guitarist, ten feet away. And, she’s still out of my league. My former flabby self can’t handle the attention.
Of course, I’m an idiot. But Pamela is disrupting the natural balance of evolution. I bullet out of San Francisco in my Toyota, the plastic blowing over my window like the tarps at Candlestick Park. I try not to think about the way Pamela kept taking off her leather jacket during the gig, revealing her backless top. And then I open the other window.
My antidote arrives at Frankie’s Lounge in the form of Cha-Cha Flores, my favorite drink of mocha and unofficial alcoholic niece. She’s got her hair all curled up around her teddy bear eyes and I swear I want to take her home and add her to my plush toy collection. She’s nervous about getting married (who wouldn’t be?) but I know her Jimmy and you can’t find better. I sing the Tender Trap regardless and I’m gone.
I’m up the next morning far too early on accounta some blind date at my golf course. The actuality is a testimony to photographic weight-reduction techniques, but I’m willing to take one for the team. I deliver a bouquet of drugstore flowers and chew on a meatloaf as she talks about life in the big cubicle. But my mind is already on the range, where I will use my new driver to inscribe 300-yard parabolas against the green-blonde hills. The clouds chug by like trolleys and all is good.
But yeah, something’s bugging me so here’s what it is. Stevie. Stevie who walks into Frankie’s on a Saturday night, strikes a pose and takes over the joint. And freezes my heart. She sent a response to my latest begnote that bamboozles me. You are so funny! Perhaps in another life…
A simple no would have been so much better.
This, this is from the Sphinx. What exactly is keeping us apart? Am I a Montague, she a Capulet? Am I under an ancient curse? Have I lost an extremity? Amongst a hundred women with their eyes on me, the one that bugs me the most is the one who’s not interested.
So I report home to wash the regret from my skin, and I put on my best funeral clothes for a night at the opera.
Yeah, I know. I surprise myself sometimes. But this one is a professorial type, mousy, brainy, irresistible, and you do what you gotta. She tells me not to arrive early, so naturally I arrive early, and I run out of stalls at her curbside so I take a hike around the block.
Palm Haven looks like forties Los Angeles with the Craftsmans, bungalows and art decos shadowed by high palms. It’s the kind of neighborhood that’s so pretty it kinda scares you. I’m hoofing it around this triangular park, the shadows making me feel like Sam Spade on a junket. A cloud of blackbirds traces me, wearing little copper badges, peppering me with questions. Do you have business in this neighborhood, sir? Is there an address you were looking for? Have you been drinking this evening?
I finish the loop, expecting cholos and junkies, but all I get are techies and Pekingese. I’m still five minutes early, but I’ve had it, so I step into the chamber of Donna’s porch and hit the knocker. It’s an adobe wth fine lines, mission-style. I think St. Francis lives here. I see polygons of sheetrock on the floor, a safe path for the mugs who just tiled her kitchen.
She appears at the corner of the door, straight dark hair, vanilla skin, green eyes. Donna is no beauty queen, but her body has a personality all its own, a 50-year-old personal trainee from heaven.
She opens the door and smiles. I’m not actually certain what I’m looking at. I wait for her to talk so she’ll walk away, so I’ll stop hallucinating.
“You are early. But not too. Let me get you some tequila.” She walks away. And yeah.
Her dress rises in terraces. It starts out a smoky black, just over the knee, then graduates to red, to orange, and then to tangerine at the bust. She is a human flame. I’m finding it hard to breathe. She hands me a shot of Patrón, a slice of lemon. I shoot and suck, and when I resurface I have words.
“This dress is amazing.”
“Thanks! I wore it to a party this summer and it was so bright today I…” and keeps on talking like she has no idea that she has gone and turned herself into a goddess.
I’m a wreck. I drive her away in my pathetic car. I follow her up the stairs of the parking garage, my eyes directly at her hips (I can’t say “ass” when referring to a goddess).
In the outside world, I am my fake charming smile. We enter an opera house whose furnishings have been adjusted to complement her dress. A flaming golden sun rises over the proscenium. The show is about a mariner who’s been condemned to sail the seas for all eternity, unless he finds a true woman and I got news for him this might take a while. But there I am in the seventh row, reduced to puberty, afraid to take those white fingers in mine on accounta what it might imply. On the way to intermission, I place a hand on the back of her dress, her muscles firm underneath, and I want to touch her everywhere but she is on fire and I shouldn’t. It takes a post-opera martini to force the truth out of me.
“I am walking around with this elegant creature on my arm, and I am feeling completely flummoxed.”
Donna gives me a blank look, but I think she is giving me the polygraph. Apparently I pass the test, because later she tells me, “It was nice to be complimented on my dress. And more than once!”
I hug her at the door and I leave. The stars are too bright, and I am afraid that when she takes off that dress she will return to mortal form. It reminds me of this other opera, where a warrior princess saves the whole operation by burning herself alive. She could fly, this one.
In the mariner opera, the woman is untruthful, so the captain goes back to his cursed ship. But then the woman hurls herself into the bay, comes out an angel, and she and the captain fly away together.
But there’s your fix. You can’t worship a woman that much. She might catch fire, and she might have to jump into the ocean to put herself out.
Tonight, I’m calling Pamela. What the hell.
Twenty Three
He was right on time with the snow shoot, because now all things are melting. The town of Jackpot is one big drip. Gerry slaps
his way to Cactus Pete’s, wipes his feet at the door and noses the labyrinth back to Dr. Al’s. The doc is listening to Sinatra. As Gerry enters, Dr. Al holds up a hand for silence. Sinatra’s baritone dies down to a pulse and ties up at the dock.
“Sorry. One does not interrupt the Chairman of the Board. I was working a club in the Bay Area once. The Circle Star. They handed me a roast beef sandwich and said, Room 14. And there he was. I cannot overstate the effect of being alone in a small room with Mr. Sinatra. And boy was he hungry! That song I was playing just now was Stars Fell on Alabama. I want that sung at my funeral. It was inspired by a meteor shower that fell on Alabama in the 19th century. There were so many meteorites that people had to stay inside for safety.”
Dr. Al stops and coughs. He slaps both armrests.
“You slipped by on this one, you dirty dog. The casino council acknowledged that they do, in fact, run adult operations, so your nudy treeclimber passes muster. So long as the ladyparts remain behind the treeparts.”
He sets the photo on his desk. It’s stunning to see it again. Karen is wrapped around the branch like a Burmese python; in black and white the contrast between flesh and bark is minimal. The only color in the shot is the blinding pink of the Titleist, which gives it a radiant presence.
“Speaking as an artist,” says Al, “God damn you Gerry Vincent for being a genius when I’m not. Are you sleeping with this girl?”
“Ummno.”
“Okay. You’re not entirely a genius. But God that girl puts out heat. Maybe it’s for the best you’re not keboinking. Keboinking. I just made that up!”
“Doc?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you look at this?” He hands him Karen’s book. Al’s eyes light up.
“Harry Optic! Holy crap. Jack Kerouac with a dick, this one. Where did you get this?”
“Karen left it on my couch.”
“Well. That’s something. I love this man. Always wondered what became of him.”
The Girl in the Flaming Dress Page 5