Gonzo Girl

by Cheryl Della Pietra

  “Start drinking then.” She pushes the wineglass toward me.

  “Okay, okay.” I take the cigarette and lean into the Bic lighter Claudia is cupping in front of my face. She retrieves a starfish-shaped ashtray from the dish drain and sets it down between us.

  “Walker does not like to party alone. It’s a deal-breaker if you’re not going to partake. That’s as plain as I can put it.”

  “Wait. He’s going to force me to do drugs?”

  “Of course not. No one’s forcing you to do anything. He just won’t ask you to stay. As plain as I can put it.”

  “Got it.” The idea of “partaking” with Walker Reade is not undaunting. Walker’s drug abuse is legendary, the very backbone of his most famous works. I have no idea, aside from The Tray, what else might be coming my way.

  “Rule number two: don’t get caught up with the celebrities. Walker is famous people for famous people. Everyone wants to say they did a line with him or shot a gun with him. It’s Rome out here. There’s a lot of ‘When in Rome . . .’ People misjudge sometimes . . .”

  “Okay.”

  “. . . what they can handle. What they’re doing.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Just try to stay focused.”

  I am writing furiously in my notebook about guns and Rome, but I have no idea what Claudia really means. I can’t yet. “You’re saying this because of Larry?”

  Claudia gives a quick nod. Apparently it wasn’t all my imagination—Larry Lucas was kind of checking me out. “Larry’s a nice guy, but it’s just better to not be involved with anyone while you’re out here. If you stay, you’ll get enmeshed with Walker—you have to in order to do it right. With him, with his book.” Claudia starts to continue but stops, once and then twice, rolling the end of her ash around in the bottom of the tray. “The book . . .”

  “Yeah, the book.”

  Claudia takes a long drag and tamps out the remaining half of her cigarette. She takes a bite of steak and a sip of wine, then leans back in her chair. “It’s awful. You know that. But all of a sudden, there are a lot of mouths to feed out here, mine included. At this point, we just need pages. Lionel will fix it.” Lionel Gray is Walker’s longtime editor at Burch Press. “You’re the first person out here who I really think might be able to do this.”

  “What on earth makes you think that? You don’t even know me.” I put my cigarette out, too, and finally start eating. The steak is one of the greatest things I have ever tasted.

  “I know people.” She dips a piece of steak into the scotch sauce. “We’ve had two kinds out here: smart people who were no fun, and fun people who were not smart. Walker needs someone who can be everything he needs when he needs it. Plus, you strike me as a little more grounded than some of the characters we’ve had. Walker teased you about your schooling because the last Ivy Leaguer we had out, princess needed her beauty rest. She couldn’t do a single toke without spiraling into paranoia, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, my father is the only person who ever called me princess, and that was with a healthy dose of sarcasm, so I think we’re safe.”

  Claudia lights up another cigarette midchew and picks up her wineglass. “Do you have a boyfriend back home?”

  “Sort of. Sort of not.” Claudia nods firmly, as if she intuitively understands the pathetic nature of my current love life. As if she knows everything there is to know about Tom—the rich kid from Long Island who has been booty-calling me for two years. All of this seems loose enough to Claudia’s satisfaction. I am effectively free of distractions. No fiancé is going to show up at the doorstep wondering about anyone’s intentions out here—though I’m not sure I can say the same about my brothers.

  “What’s the deal with Devaney?”

  “Don’t worry about her.” Claudia waves her hand in front of her face. “Walker’s already bored and it’s only been three weeks. But he made her quit her hostessing job to stay up here full-time, so that’s one more mouth to feed. If she gets in your way, you tell me. My guess? She’ll be gone in about a month.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your job: keep him writing. Hours: in general, I’m the day shift and you’re the night shift. We’ll overlap some of the day, but I won’t get in your way, and you won’t get in mine. It’s just easier that way.”

  “Define day and night.” Something tells me this is not as obvious as it seems.

  “I take care of Walker’s affairs from eight to eight, then I retire to the cabin. You come over when he asks for you—usually sometime around three in the afternoon—and work all night with him. The general rule is hands on the typewriter by two a.m.”

  “So, wait. What happens between three p.m. and two a.m.?”

  Claudia lets out a sharp laugh. “Let’s put it this way: anything can happen. You’ll see.” I’m trying to make sense of the math but can’t—eleven hours before any work potentially starts?

  Claudia pours me more wine. “Okay. Now put the notebook down. You’ll see. Don’t worry.”

  “Hold on. One last thing: He still uses a typewriter? It’s the nineties for crying out loud.”

  “Yes. And he hunts-and-pecks, too, so it takes long enough even when he’s on his game.”

  “Does he even own a computer?”

  “There’s a Mac Classic and a printer in the den. I don’t think he even knows how to turn them on. You’re welcome to them.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Look, he’s not a total dinosaur—he just fell in love with the fax a few decades ago—and, you know, old habits. . . . Nothing’s going to change, so you have to adapt. I presume you know how to use a fax machine?”

  “I’ve been an intern at Beat for almost a year. My index fingers work.”

  “Good.”

  I take another cigarette from Claudia’s pack and light it. “About tonight . . .”

  “Here’s rule number three: keep your skin thick. Walker gets mean, but it’s just from ‘the drug.’ He’s not dangerous. He won’t hurt you in any way. And he will apologize. Trust me, he’s going to ask for you tomorrow when he gets up. So be ready.”

  I ponder the meaning of the phrase be ready. I have no idea what that means out here. For a normal job I would do as I’ve always done—keep my eyes open and try to act right. But I have a feeling that in this job it might feel better to close those eyes, like I would on a roller coaster or a plane that’s going down. And I have even less of an idea of what “acting right” means out here. Maybe it’s simple, like Claudia said: Relax. Drink more. Smoke up. Say yes. If The Tray comes my way, a few lines won’t kill me. If that’s what it takes to ensure that I never again have to put ice in a shaker while some guy from Jersey watches the pour on his Long Island Iced Tea, well, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

  I finish helping Claudia wash the dishes and retire to my spartan bedroom—little more than a full-size bed, a small card table that I suspect is to serve as my desk, and two shelves of books built into the wall. I pull out a picture of my family, one taken at a party they threw a year ago, before I left for New York—my mother looking every bit like the caterer. Her brow is furrowed. She has one hand on a tray of eggplant, another on a bottle of Frangelico. She’s pouring cordials for my dad and uncles, who are playing boccie on our front lawn, but she’s clearly not happy about something—most likely that I’m leaving. I pull out another photo from the same night of me with my three older brothers: Mike, Stefano, and John Dante. We’re on one of the West Haven, Connecticut, beaches, wading in Long Island Sound. I remember how shortly after the photo was taken I was unceremoniously thrown into the water. The overriding emotion registering on my face in the picture: a visceral restlessness that even my smile can’t mask.

  I take out a third photo, of Tom and me at a graduation party at his parents’ estate on Long Island. Tom has never called himself my boyfriend nor I his girlfriend, though we have mutually violated each other regularly since our senior year in college. Ours is a deeply confusing bon
d, charged by our both knowing that Tom is slumming it with me. In college I served food to him and his frat brothers at the dining hall. Now that we’re both in New York, little has changed. A year out he’s already making gazillions of dollars doing something boring and morally sketchy in finance—a job Daddy was glad to hand him. Meanwhile, I’m working for free at a magazine, slinging drinks to amateur alcoholics on Bleecker Street, sharing a mouse-infested studio with my old college roommate. Tom’s nothing that I have to actively deal with right now, which is nice. Still, I’m glad I have this picture, just in case I need it.

  I place the photos on the shelves drilled into the wall next to my bed and peruse the book spines: P. J. O’Rourke, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway. The younger of these are Walker’s contemporaries, although Walker’s literary niche—the blurring of the line between fiction and truth, coupled with scathing political discourse and an almost mythical ingestion of drugs—is his and his alone.

  Then I take out my own manuscript—a book I have been working on since college. Working title: Pegasus. Perhaps the notion of a horse with wings who carries Zeus’s thunderbolts might seem an inappropriate metaphor for a book based on the life of a twenty-two-year-old recent college grad. But getting this book published is mostly the reason I’ve decided to come out here, and I’m desperate to conjure whatever lightning strike I can.

  I only have one duffel for this, my three-day trial period, after which I will either be asked to go home to pack and return—or go home for good. I rummage in the bag for my pj’s, make myself comfortable, and curl up in bed with Walker’s book. My lids grow heavy around midnight, and even though I’m tired, I find that sleep does not come easily. Claudia’s words keep coming back to me. Be ready. Months later, when I recall this moment—me, having smoked just two cigarettes; me, with trouble falling asleep; me, with my little notebook at the ready—it will all seem so unbearably quaint, so ridiculously naive, I’ll think I’ve remembered it wrong.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Good morning, Sunshine.” Walker says this without a trace of venom as I step into the breezeway, the screen door squeaking, and I’m flooded with something like relief. I’ve lived to “audition” another day.

  “Good morning,” I say cheerily, turning into the living area, although I gather the term morning is used loosely around here. It’s 3:15 in the afternoon, and Walker is sitting on the barstool where he was yesterday, only now a Selectric typewriter is on the raised counter in front of him. To his right is a window that looks out onto the front of the property. Next to the window is a cabinet, and underneath that is a CD player. Behind him is a stove and a microwave; in front of the long counter is the circular couch and coffee table. On the far wall, past the couch, is the largest television I’ve ever seen—easily four feet wide. It must weigh two hundred pounds. CNN is on with the volume off, and a Lyle Lovett CD plays quietly in the background. From this position in the room, Walker can basically cook, work, play music, watch TV, socialize, and monitor the front yard, all without moving an inch. He is in a light blue cotton bathrobe, like one you’d find at a luxury summer resort, smoking a Dunhill red cigarette with a filter on the end. He’s sipping a black coffee that Claudia prepared for him before I was asked to come over. Next to the coffee is a large glass of scotch and water.

  “How’d you sleep in our oxygen-deprived mountain air?” Walker’s compound is a mile and a half above sea level, which I will find annoying later when it takes me three tries to bake a respectable cake.

  “It’s not any worse than New York. Pollution-choked versus oxygen-deprived. Kind of a wash.”

  I see the edges of Walker’s mouth turn up ever so slightly, and I start rummaging through the cabinets and the pantry on the other side of the room. Between Claudia’s admonishments and my own intuition, I decide I must do two things: act like I can take charge of a situation, and do something fun. I also need something to calm my nerves. Drinks seem an obvious way to accomplish all three.

  The pantry contains an inordinate number of canned goods, enough to survive on for a few months if you weren’t afraid to ingest that much sodium—although if last night’s cokefest is any indication, any actual sodium probably gets snorted around here. There is a veritable Warhol installation of Campbell’s soup—about two hundred cans—plus green beans, baked beans, black beans, tuna fish, crabmeat, baby shrimp, chickpeas, carrots, tomato sauce, baby corn, mushrooms, canned salmon, hearts of palm, beets, white potatoes, artichoke hearts, chili, green peas, pineapple chunks, mandarin oranges, sauerkraut—even a few cans of SPAM.

  “Did you raid some school’s hunger drive or what?”

  “What are you, from the ATF? What are you looking for?” I had seen in the news that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had actually paid Walker a visit recently, so this joke is not without an edge.

  “A pitcher.”

  “Behind the bar, for Christ’s sake.”

  I glance around the room, taking it all in, in a way I was incapable of doing last night during my initial “interview.” The decor is best described as deer hunter meets sports bar meets quilting bee meets Architectural Digest. Walker, I will later learn, likes to tell people that he lives in a “crude log cabin,” but it’s the outskirts of Aspen in 1992, not Abe Lincoln’s boyhood home. For all of the debauchery that apparently goes on here, there are still smart leather coasters, handmade quilts, hand-carved African masks, and vintage guns—comforting touchstones for someone like me who expected bong water in her coffee cup, not the Maxwell House Walker pours for me now. I poke back behind the bar in the living room and find a two-quart, cut-crystal pitcher.

  “Jeez, you could kill a man with this.” I grab the handle and curl it like a dumbbell. The thing must weigh ten pounds.

  “You can kill a man a lot of ways,” Walker says offhandedly.

  “Is that supposed to creep me out?” I grab a cigarette. Walker has three packs in front of him. His Dunhill reds, the English cigarette that he smokes through a short filter, along with a random pack of Marlboros and a tin of colored Nat Sherman party smokes, presumably leftovers from yesterday’s gathering. This seems as good a time as any to start saying yes, so I take a Marlboro red. “May I?”

  Walker cups a Bic lighter in front of my face and hands me the mermaid ashtray. He motions for me to sit on the stool to his left, leans over with his left arm, and starts rubbing my right shoulder; his eyes are clear and soft, like a panda’s.

  “Sorry about last night, sweetheart. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes.”

  “It’s okay. You’re right. I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. I’m actually glad I got the opportunity to read Traffic.” Here I decide to lie: “I thought it was pretty fantastic.”

  “You did, huh?”

  “Yes. Come to think of it, that’s what last night’s reading reminded me of. Chapter six. You know, the way the whole thing is paced, the tension between them, the audacity of the crime spree, the whole Bonnie-and-Clyde subtext, the humor . . .”

  Walker doesn’t say anything but continues to knead my shoulder, staring directly at me. This goes on for so long that the point of sizing me up comes and goes. He’s so close I can smell him. Walker Reade smells like Irish Spring, tobacco, and whiskey. He smells like men used to smell. After a few more minutes I can’t tell what the point of this staredown massage is if not, in fact, to simply release some tension in my neck. His hands are large and strong. The man can give a massage. Then it just becomes awkward. I finally break eye contact, reach for my cigarette in the tray, and take a long drag.

  “Marlboro reds, huh? That’s a real cigarette,” I say finally.

  Walker stops kneading but leaves his hand on my shoulder. He’s closer to my face than I’m usually comfortable with, but it’s not menacing in any way. “Who do you think you’re dealing with, sweetheart?”

  I place my left hand on Walker’s right shoulder so we are now face-to-face. “Don’
t worry,” I say, now looking at him straight on. “I’m well aware you’re a real cowboy.” I take another drag and blow the smoke out of the side of my mouth—either succeeding in looking cool or failing miserably by trying too hard. My radar out here is jammed.

  “Hmph,” he says, releasing his hand and reaching for his own cigarette. “What’s the pitcher for?”

  “Bloodies, of course. Where is your spice rack?” I ask, getting up.

  “Hot dog! Now we’re talking.”

  He points to a cabinet and I rummage through, taking out black pepper, celery salt, regular salt, Tabasco sauce, and Worcestershire. I pull a can of tomato juice from the floor of the pantry—one of about a dozen—and find an opener and a wooden spoon in the drawer next to the sink. Walker looks at his watch and pulls out a yellow envelope from the cabinet.

  “Can I presume that you have cowboy boots?” I ask. “Don’t they make you buy them when you enter this town?” The cowboy boots, as I noted upon landing, did not discriminate in the Aspen airport: they were worn with equal contrivance by anorexic plastic ladies with black leggings, midlife-crisis fat-guy wannabes, gay guys, Hollywood types, and actual real cowboys.

  “None that I wear. Larry gave me a pair of snakeskin boots, but it’s not really my speed.” Indeed, if Walker parties like a rock star, he doesn’t appear to dress like one. Yesterday he had on a polo shirt with khakis and Converse Chuck Taylors, looking more Mister Rogers than Keith Richards.

  “I didn’t realize there was a speed you couldn’t handle,” I say, opening all of the spices and pouring the tomato juice into the pitcher. Having worked the brunch shift at a midtown-Manhattan hotel bar, I know from Bloody Marys. I add all the spices, stir the whole thing, and give Walker a taste from the wooden spoon. His eyebrows go up.

  “You’re overlooking the difference between not being able to and not wanting to,” he says.

  “You take horseradish?”

  “Nah, it’s perfect.”

  I find a bottle of Stoli in the freezer—three actually—so I fill two glasses with ice and pour a shot and a half of the vodka into each one. I top it with the bloody mix and pour each glass into an empty cocktail shaker and back again. I cut two lemon wedges and hang one over the side of each glass.