‘I’d be happy to utter sweet nothings to you all day.’
‘That’s why I’m here. To do just that.’
‘But, you were saying?’
‘Well, at this stage, I want to be a person with roots,’ Saskia explained. ‘I want to write. I want to be in one place. I don’t want to do it in a rat-cage with self-interested types trundling up to my door and infiltrating me with their blather. You wouldn’t believe how often some jerk comes around for a chat-up.’
‘Poor kitten!’
‘I knew you’d understand, baby. These diesel-powered egomaniacs. They fancy me, but they don’t give a Yorkie candy bar about me or my work.’
‘You’re too fucking high-class for them. That’s why you’re here with me.’
Saskia did a loving snort.
‘I know! Why do you think we’re deep into negotiations right now?’
‘I’m so glad we are, girl. You don’t know how much.’
‘I do. I tell you, I do.’
‘Keep talking. Your belly button tastes good.’
Justy was already down on her knees on the throw-rug by the sink.
‘Oh, yeah. That’s nice. Well, I’m at your disposal. I must write. All day, if I can.’
‘You could, here.’
‘If he says.’
‘We’ll see. It would be a blast.’
‘Wouldn’t it?’
‘I’ve always wanted to be with someone like a writer.’
‘Now you can be.’
Justy stopped kissing Saskia’s tummy for a moment.
‘Let me tell you though, his cock is king. Isn’t it? But, it isn’t the only game in town.’
‘His cock is indeed king. We know that, surely. Not that we need kings – or queens. Or princesses! That is, I’m assuming. This isn’t my way of getting to it, you know…’
‘Oh dearie Saskie! I know, I know! Even if it was… As long as you’re here!’
‘Your love is so pure!’
‘And so’s yours, girl. I know it, which means I know it!’
‘Cocks and kings!’ Saskia joked. ‘But yes, not the only game in town.’
‘No, they aren’t, girl. Couldn’t possibly be. But his is a pretty good game, nevertheless.’
‘And we’ll play it, won’t we?’
Justy grinned lustily. ‘Oh yes! This is one of those situations where, we… Well, we can… have it all!’
Saskia shivered with pleasure. ‘I concur.’
‘Glad that’s settled.’
‘You’re down in the right neighborhood, Jay-Jay.’
‘Mmm.’ Justy paused. ‘Hey, what do you mean, you’re assuming?’
‘About his –?’
‘About his cock, yeah. His John W. Thomas. You said assuming, a second ago.’
Saskia laughed, ‘You know that term, then? John Thomas?’
‘Now listen girl, don’t get away from me. I’ve got international flavors you haven’t tasted yet.’
‘Oh, how can I get away? You’ve got me trapped.’
‘So, what do you mean, you’re assuming?’
‘Well…’
‘You mean you two have never – Ever? You mean you…?’
Saskia spread out her hands, shook her mane and cocked her hips.
‘Well, no! No we haven’t! We haven’t had a leg-over! Not even close! Well, not close enough.’
Justy liked her rhythm. There was that shy crossing of her own knees while she was standing, again.
‘Cute girl! Man, you’re going to be happy here.’
Seeing Justy’s viola-shape bod projecting below her, Saskia pulled her gypsy dress down a notch and toyed with her collarbone-length strands of hair.
‘You know, funny thing. When I saw him first, riding that monster crane at the studio, do you know what instantly popped into my mind? The first thing I thought was, I want to go down on him in the worst way. Not only that, I have to go down on him. Still do, lassie.’
‘As well you might, girl. And you will. I’ll be there to hold your hand in case you get a little shy.’
‘When things get primal, I’m not shy. But I want you there in any event. Think he will?’
‘Baby, we’re a combination that is not only hot-damn gorgeous, we’re a force not to be denied. Of course, we’ll be gentle.’
Saskia now knew what she could do. Accept the offer, join the new ménage. After the recent line of experiences, she would be happy to alter her Butterbugs fantasy, which had so bubblingly formulated during her fermentation over ‘The Albigenses’ scripting. After all, she never really believed that she could export him to live on an Oxford canal’s longboat, or that she could have the seductive power to change a movie star’s astronomical course.
There was so much more now to consider. Past first Butterbugsian impressions, or fantasies, there were new imperatives to pay attention to.
Fact: she loved this Justina woman. That was easy.
Fact: she loved this Butterbugs fellow. He had worked with her, been there for her, enacted her literary dreams on the screen for her.
Therefore, she faced a heady possibility: that she had achieved the best that life could give, by having irrefutable truth demonstrated, right in front of her. As concretions, not just notions. For once, there were no choices to make, no intimidating possibilities of dithering. She was home, and she knew it in her soul.
Ring-ring. Ring-ring.
1: Yo! Carmina! Hola!
2: Yo! Dina! Ho-la-la! You just get off work?
1: Yeah, Googie’s was hoppin’ and skatin’ and I got all the good tips.
2: Always the lucky girl.
1: We were all talkin’ tonight. You know what? Have you seen this Butterbugs?
2: I saw him first!
1: I called you first! To tell you.
2: He is holy, super.
1: Oh, yeah! He is wholly super.
2: I want a wedding dress! I want one!
1: Get in line. I’m way ahead of you.
2: I saw him first. Don’t be a bitch.
1: Isn’t he just the most?
2: Dream-boy!
1: Are you going?
2: Which one?
1: I wanna see ‘The Albigenses’ first!
2: Crazy! I don’t even know what it’s about.
1: You don’t need to. But OK, here’s the deal, it’s about –
2: Shut your mouth! If you don’t, I’ll stick my fingers in my ears and move ’em around, and I’ll start screaming if I can still hear you!
1: Well, I don’t know what it’s about either, but it’s at the Mastbaum Mega-Palace.
2: What time?
1: Seven, and midnight.
2: Let’s do midnight!
1: OK!
2: Can I bring Lonna, Seraphina, Lody, Yean, and Terri-Lee?
1: Girl gang!
2: Yo, Dina!
1: We’re gonna make love tonight! Butterbugs! Gonna make butter-butter-butter-buh love tonight! Are you ready???
2: Oh yeah!! I can’t believe it! Yesssssssss!!!!
1: Yessssssssssssss!!!!!!
2: Dina???
1: Yesssss!!!!!
2: Dina…?
1: YESSSSSSSSS!!!! What? What you want?
2: Dina? My jeans are wet…
48.
The Prestige Of The Office
Butterbugs knew that he could have been president.
For some time now, he had been getting entreaties from all quarters, and at last he was plastered with emails, voice messages, and excited SRO faces – in person – at Lotta Bludchowder’s Antique Californian Ravintola.
‘Are you going to run, or what?’ came a voice exactly like former Senator Kwester Jeeritonian’s. It was Moishe, mega-mogul-supreme, and mega-mogul-supremist Isaac Davis’ youngest brother. No one to kid around with.
The occasion required Butterbugs to rise from the wrought iron garden chair he sat on while taking tiffin. Then he stepped up on it with elegant agility, and made a statement,
his head orbited by paper lanterns and grape bunches.
‘My people!’ he announced, hopefully categorically, ‘I do not know what life has to give. I, I cannot choose now…’
The crowd dispersed, the fires went out, and the doors closed quietly. Butterbugs stepped down.
But at no time was the message regarding administrative aspirations made more poignant than when Butterbugs took off on a solo spin one day, in his 1949 Nash Ambassador (a new addition to his garage, yet another from ’49, which gave him great pleasure). He had decided, because of an unexpected gap in his shooting sked, to check out some of the scenes that saw his will to power.
Joyride.
Up into the Cucamonga-Mt. Baldy zone, he chanced to find himself at Moby’s Corner pop shoppe, just as the sun reached its torrid zenith.
‘Wow, I think I remember actually stopping here… For a beverage, I think… Crazy. What a ‘noonday witch’ sort of place. Might be perfect for a location shoot, if I ever do an existential/horror-dialogue-based picture.’
He glanced around the Planet X-like desolation.
‘Oh yeah, I think the recollection’s coming back now…’
No one about. He approached the sadly ramshackle counter of the facility, which appeared no better than a stable. How the place had changed since that golden day, so long ago, when so many raw emotions had surrounded him like a period costume. So many great expectations, so much dizzying intent, streaked with optimism, spiced with thrills of the unknown, the maybe, and the certain.
Apparently, this unplanned visit was also a return to introspection, something he had not chosen to engage in for quite a spell. He fell to pondering, without even noting the dusty plank counter, the busted light globes with the county-fair reflectors, the fossilized National Cash Register, and the quite pungent bouquet of indeterminate rot. The urreen that was cooking in the sun was the most oppressive. There was nothing audible but a distant cry from the noontime crack-bird, down the draw.
‘Butterbugs! We thought you dead!’ came a feeble but startling voice from back in the shadows. There, amidst a hoarder’s storm of indeterminate stashings, almost prone on a trashed-out patio chaise, lay Moby Kenderson, his entire frame withered by the wrap-up stages of systemic cancer.
‘Whoever could… Whomever… M-m-m-Moby? Is…
‘You know it’s me.’
‘It is, then.’
‘And we thought you dead!’
‘Why – Why no, Moby. I live yet.’
‘And here you are, returned now. To settle. To dwell in this land. Hollywood has defeated you. Oh, I knew it would. The first moment I saw you. You knew it too.’
‘Moby, I –’
‘There’s a canvas lean-to across the lane out back, on the way to the latrine. We merrily call it ‘La Treen Lane’! No one who’d ever dwelt there has ever minded the urreen. Didn’t you know? Oh, didn’t you? It’s yours now. Live there. As long as ye want! If only you would deign to join our community, there is, for us all, the possibility of joy, of happiness. If there is anybody who is up for such a quest, it is you, it is you, it is you! And some day you will inherit this pop shoppe. And you can live as I did, with delusions, memories, and dreams – more shattered than intact. But through it all, such things have been mine own! Oh, they are treasures, fiercely guarded by we who have tried to scale the heights of glory, but were turned aside by an uncaring and unfair world. Ye see me so now.’
Enough. This pathetic human remainder had to be straightened out, and straightened out now.
‘But Moby, for Pete’s sake, that’s all rubbish. Didn’t you know? I am indeed a star. In pictures, of which there are now many for your perusal. I don’t happen to have any specimen DVDs (or more current and hip formats) on my person at this time, but they are available at your nearest entertainment dealer or cinema hall. Yes, I succeeded. In spite of everything. Things you can’t imagine. I’d guess though, that they were the type of things in life that sent you scurrying back to the safety of this place, far before your desires could ever have come to pass. Yes, I have suffered, but I have triumphed. And I will go on. I get the feeling that perhaps you cannot even comprehend what I am talking about. Where’ve you been, anyway?’
It was a rare moment of Butterbugsian assertiveness, activated no doubt by Moby’s absurdist assumptions. Perhaps though, such were the observations of one who not only had been brought low by a totalitarian disease, but also from some sort of associated softening of the brain. Therefore, with careful consideration, the actor applied a specific, honeyed gentleness to the latter lines of his explanatory lecture. Not to instill a sense of jest, but to ease a perceived severity in their message, in case vocal tone might be detected by his listener more avidly than content. How many times had he seen fellow actors fail at this method, yet how many times had he employed it with much success! Such were an actor’s advantages in applying psychodrama technique to a disadvantaged audience. Quite frankly, sometimes he craved a sustained return to the stage.
Moby’s dried up, piss-amber eyes betrayed vestiges of jealousy, envy, longing, and, most undeniably, admiration.
‘I loved you once!’ sighed the remnants of a human body. ‘But I received no homoerotic vibes in return. Now I shall never love again. Even seeing thy sacred face does not give rise to any profane flame within my breast. I am wasted, and soon I shall perish. I do not entirely hate you, but, from thy statements this day, they have destroyed my will to go on. I let them finish me.’
He sniffled.
‘But! I behold you as a leader, and ye should lead! I tell you, yes, why shouldn’t ye lead? Someone must save us. Yes… save us! We must be saved! Even though I, who once loved you, am now lost.’
‘Moby, ye have not the will to comprehend mine own narrative. I’m just here on a sentimental jour –’
‘Oh, but I have comprehension that makes yours look like a dismal jimmy! I have flown high, high, higher than you have! You can’t imagine the glory of we failures here in this wayside haven. If only you would give us a chance! Abandon your Hollywood life, and dwell with us! Our somber life! Why, there is such an austere beauty here, a sullen quietude, which I just know will be your serving of tea-flavored cup-filler. I tell you, we live with our heartbreak every hour, every sennight. Some of us choose to endure in agony, some within the acceptant peace of the zen. You, having made your noises, will no doubt suffer fiercely at first, as your loss will be keenly felt.’
‘Moby, you’ve got this all wrong. I –’
‘Oh, but how ye are deluded! It is the only means for ye! Have you, you know, ever strolled about our campus, hereabouts? Well, have you? I acquiesce that it is cheerless, overheated, dried, insected and enwearied. But oh, man, the existential fulfillment! The Euphorias of the Defeatism! The anxious, unfulfilled, loveless nights! The longings over what might have been, what should have been, now that all possibilities have fled!’
‘Moby, you –’
‘It is true that you will find resentment amongst us. Hatred, too. But ye will find your place because of it, and thou wilt stay there – for us to relish – and we will feel better about ourselves, of a sudden!’
‘Misery always loves company…,’ Butterbugs managed to mutter.
‘You dare! Whatever do ye know of us? Or care? Mine God, man, we are the Epic of Our Race here! No wonder we have contempt for ya! No wonder your place is right here – where we can rightfully control thee!’
‘Moby, I’ve never heard more outrageous rubbish from –’
‘Shut up!’
‘You are one sick puppy, Kenderson!’
‘Sick??’ Moby shrieked. ‘By St. Yarbo, I’ll show you who’s sick!!’
With that, he wobbled forward and just stood there in presentation mode, in front of a tray of rejected onion rings without the onions. He was wearing a greasy, sweat-rimed raincoat and beneath it, an unpleasantly soiled jersey, so yarn-bare that its knit looked like it would decompose at the merest chicken-flick.
It was
all very icky, and gave Butterbugs a degree of heat exhaustion just by witnessing this scene.
‘See?? SEE?? Behold and regard!!’
Moby’s jittering hands seized the neckline of the jersey and pulled the hem weakly down. It was certainly enough to shatter the weave. Behind it, a fresco of dermatological degradation, from scrofula to Jharry’s disease to yaws.
‘You hateful pig-boy!’ he sneered, with a sort of triumph.
‘I meant, in your mind, Moby.’
Butterbugs stood firm, while Moby glared, but was compelled to retreat to the only space in the world that would still harbor him: his repugnant chaise.
‘Our life here will never heal you,’ he continued, as if no interlude had just disturbed his ravings. ‘But it will allow you to live with your wounds, as I myself have, as I await martyrdom! You plainly belong here. Otherwise, what brought ye back to my welcoming ken?’
‘I just tried to tell you Moby, it’s merely a Sunday drive. A sentimental jour –’
‘Oh, where else could you possibly quo vadis, but here! Here, amongst thine own kind! You have arrived at your destiny…! At last! If I loved you once, it was from afar. Oh, some of us here saw your stupid newspaper photos and little newsy bits. All the incident-ses of your escape from us. Those silly movies…! What ever gave you the right? I grudgingly admit, your undeserved success did not go unnoticed here. That is why my unconditional love flipped so quickly – into pure hatred. In fact, I blame you for my current state. It is you who have prostrated me with curses, for if you had stayed and dwelt here, as I implored you to do (even garbing myself in the Roman styles so as to win you; remember??), my love for you would have protected me from anything. I would have had you all to myself, here, where ye see me now. For I was more deserving of fame than thou, and if I could not have it myself, then I would keep ye from having it, too.’
Butterbugs could scarcely believe the slurred slop he was hearing, so ineptly delivered with ersatz Archaic Tongue attempts, too.
‘Yet! As I dissolve into meat and bone dust, I realize and recognize the gift thou shalt award me now. Oh, I knew you’d return! You knew it, too. By your miraculous re-appearance, ye shall transform my hatred back into love. But ye shall have to earn it. Yes, ye have returned to your fate. That much, at least, is settled, for all time. Ye shall never, ever leave! And when we make love, my bodily curse will enter your own, and we shall die together, at the same time (though you, a few minutes earlier), in each other’s arms. Now follow my orders. Enter this here pop shoppe fry-up stall, simply by raising the counter gate. Strip thy garments from thy body. Approach my settee. Tenderly remove my bib overalls. Lay by me. Suck my lesion-wracked cock as if your life depended on it, for it does! As does our joined death! Our joint headstone, perhaps only a rude slab of styrofoam, shall nevertheless withstand the ages, planted above our mutually-entwined remains, in yon potter’s field, not nine leagues from this sad spot, up on the blasted heath. Oh, mournful spot! And on it shall read, in the legendary script of our ancestors: THEY LOVED – THEY WERE CLOVEN – THEN MADE WHOLE AGAIN – AS ONE – THEY LOVE AGAIN. Oh, oh! Now get over here, escaped convict. Thy chains await. Ye fucker! Ye shall never escape, this time…!’
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