Miss Fortune

by Lauren Weedman

  “Uh-oh!” Kate says, very cheerful. “Uh-oh!”

  I look down to see what’s “uh-oh.” Milk is pouring out of me. My boobs are spurting like I’ve cut an artery.

  There’s a knock on my door. “Hey, Horny! Feeling sexy?”

  Things are starting to feel surreal.

  It’s time to shoot the scene. Thomas Jane gives me a quick glance. “I just had a baby.” He walks away to find a coffee cup to put his cigar out in. “It wasn’t yours!” I yell after him.

  We get the “Okay, let’s go” cue to take off our robes. Thomas takes his off and this time he’s wearing a little sock on his stuff. He must have gotten in trouble for not wearing one. I imagine the producer telling him, “Tie this tea bag around your penis or you’ll be fined. Bark once if you understand me.”

  Horny Patty is supposed to be on top and “humping the shit out of him.” I can’t. At all. My hips won’t hump. I can’t get any sex beat going. They are completely stiff.

  It hadn’t dawned on me to warm them up. Oh, how I’d judged the porno people I saw when I first moved to LA. They’d be in the gym, standing in front of the mirror wearing pink spandex and just humping the air. I feel like I weigh five hundred pounds. Thomas looks angry. He’s not used to reality like this. He’s married to Patricia Arquette. He slaps my hips and tries to get me going. “Come on!”

  Leaning down, I whisper, “My hips hurt. I just had a baby.”

  My hips will not move and I’m slowing down. Getting tired.

  I lean down again. “I’m glad all of this is being recorded for all of digital eternity.” I’m being paid to do this. It’s bizarre but not the worst way to pay for diapers. For a moment, I worry that my muscles are going to simply give out, but they don’t. I wind myself up, and, in the sage words of a redneck comedian, I git ’er done.

  Finally, the director calls “cut” and they throw a robe over me. Thomas starts to leave but turns around and comes back to say something to me. I’m worried he’s going to yell at me for squishing him.

  “Uhm. Congratulations.”

  “On getting through the scene without lactating on you?”

  “On your baby. Boy or girl?”

  “Boy.”

  “That’s great. Okay. Well, see you later, funny lady.”

  And he did see me later. Horny Patty came back for multiple episodes. For months after the show aired I got emails from fans: “Dear Horny Patty, you sure have big titties. You have one big old cow tittie and one small little cow tittie. Why is that? Keep up the good work.”

  Babies really are magic.

  Serial Killer Blues

  Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

  Carpe diem.

  Be here now.

  I keep repeating these things to myself, but nothing’s working. Today still feels like the last eighty-eight million mornings on the playground. Boring. I’m glad Leo is having fun going up and down the slide. Up and down the slide. Up and . . . Wait, maybe he’s going to . . . No, there he goes, down the slide.

  It’s the same cliques as always on the playground. The Euro moms dominate the sandbox, the Santa Monica moms are in the west corner under the oak tree, and the Spanish-speaking nannies in hospital scrubs (which I really hope was their idea and not their employers’) are sitting on the benches.

  The redheaded dad from Chicago is pointing out to me how one of the ladders on the climbing structure is wood and the other is rope. “That one, do you see it? It’s wood. All wood. The other one, not the wood one but the one next to it, it’s rope. I didn’t realize that until yesterday.” I want to scream, “YOU DIDN’T?!” in his face, but I don’t want to ruin Leo’s reputation, so I point toward the sky. “What’s that?” I ask and walk away to see what sort of soup the Euro moms are feeding their kids for breakfast today.

  By the time I stroll over, they’re finishing up breakfast and watching their kids play with handmade felt dolls that look alarmingly like Aunt Jemima. I invite myself to sit down next to the German woman with braids on both sides of her head. Not cool Björk-like braids, more like heavy eighties Princess Leia braids that could tip her over and bury half her head in the sand. The way she dresses Drajum, her two-year-old boy, in scratchy old-man suits makes me think she may be the dark comic of the group, so I lean over to her and say, “I think the only people that playgrounds are fun for are pedophiles.”

  My life has been exhausting and surprisingly isolating since Leo turned one. It’s like being a sober buddy for a drunk celebrity who’s fallen off the wagon, like if a movie studio assigned me to follow Charlie Sheen around and try to prevent him from getting into trouble. It’s also so much more isolating than I thought it was going to be. I assumed I’d gather a little posse on the playground and we’d be sharing secrets and mimosas, but it’s so boring. The last thing I want to talk about is kids. Yet it’s all everyone talks about. The book publisher who warned me about writing a book about motherhood was right. She said, “Unless you’re a zany drinking mom doing crystal meth and using diapers to sop up their spilled tequila shots, nobody really wants to hear moms tell stories about their kids.”

  Finally, a middle-aged mom parks her Winnebago-size stroller next to me and gives me a big crazy smile. She needs to talk. I can tell. Her hair is giant frazzled bed head; her blouse has coffee stains down the front and is completely misbuttoned. I like her. She comes right up to me—“Well, I’ve had a morning!”—and starts hysterically laughing. Pressing her for details, I get different variations of the same response—“Put it this way. It’s been quite a morning!” “What a morning! Can I go back to bed yet?!”—followed by the same unhinged laughter. Something is clearly going on with her. What is it? Her husband dragged her by her hair because she didn’t feed the dog? She can’t trust her sister with her foster children? She’s in the middle of a bipolar manic episode and all she wants to do is paint rocks by the swing set? I need details.

  “Let’s just say, it’s been a MORNING!”

  Nothing. I get nothing.

  Carpe diem, Leo. Let’s go home.

  Leo’s naptime. Time to check Facebook for some action.

  If friend requests show up on my Facebook page, I hit the Sure! button and toss them on the stack like a fat man’s licked-clean chicken bones. I collect friends like a Santa Monica housewife collects Adderall, like a hoarder collects toenail clippings and adult diapers, like a child collects wishes and raisins. My point is, I don’t give it a lot of thought.

  “Facebook is for friends and Twitter is for fans,” a stranger once wrote on my Facebook page. I didn’t like to be reprimanded in front of all my fake friends by a woman I’ve met only three times. (Actually, I can remember meeting her only one time, but it was at Martha Plimpton’s house for a political event and since a celebrity was involved, I bumped it up to three.) Having family and friends all mixed together works for me for the same reason New York City does: It’s never boring and there’s great people watching.

  So it isn’t a huge violation of my personal space bubble when I notice a message from a name that’s completely unfamiliar to me in my inbox.

  Scott Bauer writes: “I want you to write my life story.”

  I write back: “I’M IN!”

  He responds immediately: “This is amazing. Thank you so much. It’s a story with a lot of ups and downs but laughter, too. I know you’re the right person for it. Thank you so much.”

  I was kidding! He might as well have written me a message that said:

  “Build me a bridge to the stars.

  “Mouth kiss,

  “Your friend you’ve never met—Scott”

  A life story is a huge undertaking, especially for someone who doesn’t write about anyone but herself. Unless he’s four years old or just wants a little pamphlet to hand out at his funeral, who’s got that kind of time? His glib “and you’re welcome to hav
e been chosen” tone isn’t helping either.

  I may have another John Harris on my hands.

  In the years that I’ve had a Facebook page, I’ve really had trouble with only one guy, John from Houston, Texas. Nobody was as excited about my pregnancy as John. He was the first to comment and he just couldn’t get over it. “FANTASTIC NEWS! IT’S HAPPENING!” He got along well with my other half-stranger friends and struck up conversations, saying things like “You guys, I’m really feeling she’s going to have a boy. What do you think?” He was such a constant presence and supporter in my life that after a while I forgot that I had no idea who the hell he was. His profile picture showed a guy with a large moustache, poufy black wig hair, and sunglasses covering half of his face. Not only did it look like he was wearing a disguise; it looked like the photo was taken either by a surveillance camera or by the cops on a stakeout in the early seventies. He had five friends and none of them were mutual. His name had sounded mildly familiar. He was either the insurance guy my sister went to high school with or the dude in Florida who sent me his book he wrote about managing money that had a cartoon of a frog using an ATM machine on the cover. Having John on my feed hadn’t really mattered to me until a friend of mine died and I posted that I was “mourning the loss of Seattle’s own Jose Hernandez. Sad day.” John was the first to comment: “Seattle via MEXICO more likely!” I couldn’t delete and block him fast enough. Since then I’ve tried to be a little more careful, but it’s still not a big surprise that I’ve never really noticed Scott.

  Before I write him back and see if he’d be interested in a new kidney, I should check his Facebook page to make sure he isn’t a Seattle lesbian fan who goes by the name of Scott trying to get my attention.

  The first post I read says, “I’ve been sobbing all night. The pain is unbelievable. I love you all so much—so much. So grateful to have had you in my life . . .” Within the first ten seconds of reading his posts it’s very clear that he is a dying man. His post “I’m a dying man” clued me in.

  “Goodbye, Anne, you’ve been a wonderful friend. Nobody better.”

  “They say there’s no hope, but I’m not giving up.”

  It’s hard to piece together any details about what he has—oh, wait—

  “Cancer, ouch.”

  Yes, ouch indeed.

  There are several posts asking if anyone knows the singer/songwriter Jewel because he wants her to write a song for his friend Ben, who’s been giving him rides to his doctor appointments. I wonder what stage of his illness he is in. Hospital? Hospice? Living in a car with a shotgun and a bottle of Jack? A few “Scott what exactly is going on with you?” posts have popped up, but he never responds, which is odd because he’s such an energetic responder. If someone merely “liked” one of his posts he’d respond: “Thanks, Paul! Can’t listen to The Smiths without thinking of you, my friend!”

  Why couldn’t he be more like my sweet friend Andrea? When she was dying of cancer she posted pictures of the lasagna they served in the hospital and her little baby-chick head as her hair grew back. Her suffering was polite. It was implied.

  The thought of anyone witnessing me in real pain, even something minor, like nausea, scares me. The last time I had the flu, I sat at a dinner party, pouring sweat, and finally ran out of the house to throw up in the front seat of my car into a plastic bag. The sack had a hole in the bottom so I threw up directly onto my lap and had to change from a party dress to workout clothes that I had in my trunk. I walked back into the party wearing high heels and bleach-stained hiking shorts yet still wouldn’t admit to having any trouble. I’m aware that having a mild stomach bug doesn’t really compare to terminal cancer, but it was simply a very foreign concept to me to let people know about personal pain without jokes, metaphors, or the possibilities of movie deals.

  Come on. The guy should be able to post whatever he wants. Who am I to say how someone should suffer, how he should face his own death? There is no doubt in my mind that when—and not if, but when—I get cancer I’ll be running naked through the streets: “WHY ME!? WHY NOT YOU!? AHHHH!”

  Ultimately, I guess he just wants someone to listen to him. That I can do.

  Outside of watching Leo go up and down on the slide, my schedule is pretty open. Yet I still felt like since I didn’t know him I had to set a boundary. I needed to be cautious. Even hospice workers don’t just hand over their pearls.

  I write, “Hey, Scott, sounds like, based on your Facebook page, that you’re in the middle of a tough time, and I’d be honored to help you out. If you are able, why don’t we start with you writing out some details about your life growing up, earliest memories, etc.”

  “Hello there!”

  Again, his response is immediate. He must be in the hospital with nothing to do but be on his computer. Poor guy.

  “Well, Lauren, this is going to be a long journey but we’re going to do it together. I trust you. It’s going to be fun, and there’s a part of the story that needs to be told that’s been a secret for a long time but it’s time to get it out.”

  Shut the front door. Did he say “secret”? What a coincidence, because I have a secret too, and it’s that I love secrets.

  I switch to instant messaging.

  “Hey, Scott, if talking is easier for you we could set up a time for you to dictate to me over the phone for an hour a week. You let me know what would be best for you.”

  “Sounds great! Thanks again, Lauren. Really.”

  Wait. I don’t want him to go before he tells me what this secret is. Of course, I don’t want him to think I’m some cheap sensationalist. I need to be subtle, so I type

  “How are you today? Oh, and hey, when you say secret, what do you mean exactly?”

  He writes back: “I’ve done some crazy stuff in my life. But it’s been a wonderful life. Had my ups and downs like anybody. I killed nine people and want to tell the story.”

  I slam my computer shut, jump up from my chair, run into the bathroom, shout, “HE JUST TOLD ME HE KILLED NINE PEOPLE!” run back and open my computer, and type:

  “That’s a lot.”

  Wait, he doesn’t mean he killed nine people. He probably managed a McDonald’s or was a producer for Marilyn Manson or wrote reality television. He metaphorically killed people and he can’t shake the guilt.

  Once I stop running around the apartment in circles I want to respond more but cannot think what to say, so I tell him that he shouldn’t be hard on himself. We all regret things we’ve done.

  “Yeah. Thanks. It was 4 in Seattle and 5 in Portland. But that was a long time ago. I’m not a bad guy.”

  “Of course not!”

  He tells me the killings were through the FBI and that it’s time for him to tell his story. He thinks that keeping the secret of the murders is what gave him cancer.

  “If anything would give you gas, that sure would!” I type.

  Scott and I must have been a part of the same social circle in Seattle, because we have more than a dozen friends in common.

  Many of them have been the ones writing the “Sending prayers!” and “You’ll pull through this, Scott!” posts on his page.

  I’m going to send a group message to all of them to see if they have any insights into what’s going on with this Scott fellow.

  I’m not going to mention the killing part yet. There is no way to word it without coming off as lurid.

  I worry that if I send anything that comes off sounding like “You guys! He says he killed 9 people! WTF?! Is he nuts?!” I’ll get a response like “Yes, Lauren. That’s right. On good days he claims to be Maya Angelou and on bad days he’s a killer for the FBI. Dementia is a side effect of his rare brain cancer. If you think this is entertaining, I’m sorry that you’re missing out on his tremors and partial paralysis. They’re a real hoot.”

  I’ll just ask people if they are good friends with him, and I’ll wait to see if
the killing stuff comes up naturally before I ask if anyone knows if he had a killer-y nickname. Like Charles in Charge or Officer Friendly.

  The next day, I’m checking my phone constantly on the playground. The Euro moms offer to share their lentil soup and I don’t even care. I’m dying to know what my friends know about Scott.

  All of the responses are the same. Nobody seems to know him, yet everyone has one uncertain fact about him. “I think he got hit by a car once” or “I think he fell off a building one time.”

  Brady is the closest of the mutual friends Scott and I have. He directed some shows of mine back in the day. I text him: “Hey, Brady, I have a question for you—you know Scott Bauer, right? He sent me an email asking me to write his life story for him. I know he’s sick, so I was willing to but he just told me he killed nine people. Do you know exactly what is going on with him?”

  “Hey Buddy, saw your message. Don’t know him that well. Seems like he’s pretty sick. I think he was in some accident involving a moving van. Wild about the killing part.”

  “Wild”—that’s it? Brady was obviously the wrong person to ask. He’s a big stoner. Nothing riles him. Or maybe he has a day job and is too busy to care. But come on! How can you hear about anyone claiming to kill even one person and not care?

  My friend Elizabeth who runs a dance company in Seattle sends me a long response. I’m trying to read it while I push Leo on the swings. Elizabeth recently went through a pretty brutal bout of cancer. Everyone has cancer these days. I blame Facebook. She didn’t really know him either and couldn’t remember why she was even Facebook friends with him, but she has a theory—