Gonzo Girl

by Cheryl Della Pietra

  When he’s through with the second page, he whips it out of the typewriter and hands me both pages. “To Lionel!”

  “You got it. Great.”

  “I need to get some shut-eye, sweetheart. Thanks. Here.” He hands me the .22 and goes to wait by the window until he sees the front light of the cabin flick on and off.

  Then I get down to business. Just as I’ve done every time I’ve received pages from Walker, I fix myself a pot of coffee, light a cigarette, and sit at the kitchen table instead of the couch, so I don’t fall asleep. I get the lay of the land, reading through it slowly, then match whatever is there to the previous pages. Not that all of Walker’s pages are created equal. Those written at the tail end of an acid trip have a certain rhythm, with another for those written completely sober (which is almost never). If Walker is coked up, everything moves quicker, but the pages are not necessarily good. The best pages come when he’s only been drinking; Walker Reade puts the “fun” in functional alcoholic. I usually take a half hour to smooth things over, then type my changes into the Mac Classic, print them out, and fax them to Lionel from the mini-fax on Claudia’s desk. Then I try to go to sleep.

  But tonight, as I look over these two pages, I begin to sweat. It’s like that moment in a movie where the doctor says, “It’s airborne,” or the scientist says, “They’re here,” or the cop says, “The call is coming from within the house.” It’s that moment of blind panic when your worst fears have come true. The pages aren’t exactly “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” but they’re not far off. They’re a mashup of the two different story lines—it almost reads as if Walker were half-asleep, as if he were having a dream about his unwritten book. I can make out some of the Walker Reade DNA, though, so I get to work, connecting the dots until a picture appears, fairly proud of what I’ve turned it into. I type the whole thing into the Mac from my paper edits, print it out, give it one more read, and fax it to Lionel as the sun starts to come up. I try to convince myself that these pages were just an anomaly, an off day. If not, I’m officially scared.

  I lie down on my bed and realize, as always, that I’m completely exhausted but that sleep is far off. I’ve ingested too many substances, drunk too much coffee. It’s hardly a surprise. After several months on the vampire shift, I’m finding it so hard to come down that I’ve devised a three-step sleep plan: (1) masturbate, (2) read, and (3) make notes about Walker’s book. Sometimes I’m asleep after step one. If after step three I’m still wide-awake, I’ll take out my own book. Tonight, though, my thoughts turn to Larry—his hands, his smell, his hair—and I decide that it can’t hurt to repeat step one. This time when I’m through, I barely exhale before I’m out cold.

  CHAPTER 15

  “There were no nipples,” Larry says.

  “What?” My voice is giddy with relief. This is the first time I’ve heard Larry’s voice in almost a month.

  “On the suit. You were right.” Larry is calling me from the set where he’s filming.

  I’m at the cabin, and Claudia is puttering about the kitchen as I sit at the desk in the living room. It’s a small cabin so it’s almost impossible for her not to eavesdrop. Still, I try to contain myself. “No way.”

  “Way. No nipples on the suit. Like I’m some kind of eunuch or something. So I had my agent call the director, who sent it up the chain, and I had to threaten to walk.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it was a six-hundred-thousand-dollar fix. They totally had to scrap the five suits they’d made and design new prototypes for the action figures. The producer tried to call my bluff. Said they’d get Nic Cage to replace me. But I’m a bastard in a fuck-you staredown. They caved. Now those nipples are so big I could fucking lactate in that suit.”

  “So it’s going well?”

  “I feel . . . transformed. Superhuman.”

  “Well, that’s kind of the point, yes?” I can tell Larry has already immersed himself fully in this role. He sounds different. More steely. More crime-fightery. More actorly.

  “Listen, we’re going at it hot and heavy the next couple of weeks, so I might not be in touch.”

  I decide not to dwell on his not having been in touch in almost a month. “No problem.”

  “But we’ll have one break. So I’ll probably head out there.”

  “Great. I can’t wait.”

  “Gotta run, Al.”

  “Bye.”

  When I hang up, Claudia steps into the room, a cigarette dangling casually from her hand. “You all set there? I have some work to do.”

  “Sure, Claude.” The phone rings, and I hear Walker barking into the receiver at Claudia.

  “Her mother” is all I can hear Claudia say, and I know she’s covering for me. “She’ll be right over, Walker.” She nods at me. “You’re on.”

  “All righty.”

  “Alley . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Claudia looks at my beaming face and the ridiculous outfit I’ve put on in anticipation of Walker’s call—a red cha-cha number with black patent-leather pumps and an updo—and smiles. “Never mind.”

  “What the fuck are you smiling at?”

  “Well, hey, hello. . . . You don’t like it much when I’m happy, do you?”

  “I like when you appear desperate. It makes me feel less so. Who the fuck were you talking to all this time? I’ve been trying to reach you for a half hour.”

  “My mother. I have a mother, you know.”

  “Yes, well, I need you right now.”

  “You are only about twenty yards from the cabin. If it was that urgent, you could have just come over.”

  “Just stay off the phone, okay?”

  Devaney makes her entrance in a blue polka-dot bikini. She’s apparently heading to the hot tub. She’s wearing bright-red lipstick and raccoon makeup on her eyes. Her body is ridiculous.

  “Devaney, get this girl some of your makeup.” Devaney looks me up and down, seemingly unsure that it will do any good. “Now!”

  Devaney heads to the back bedroom.

  “I thought I was sufficiently dolled up for you, Walker.”

  “You look sweet, but you need something on your face. Something . . .”

  Devaney comes out with four different lipsticks, a tube of mascara, an eyeliner pencil, and a compact full of ten different colors of eye shadow.

  “Do, like, the girl thing,” he says to Devaney.

  Devaney sidles up close to my face; her breath smells like lime, like she’s had a few margaritas. Her hand is steady, though, as she lines my eyes in black, then paints on gray shadow.

  As she fluffs on the mascara, she smiles. “This is actually helping.” I squint, ever so slightly, at the buried insult. “Wait till you see this.” The red lipstick she’s painting on matches my dress.

  I can see Walker peeking over her shoulder. “Let’s see. I knew it. See?”

  I head into the bathroom and check myself out in the mirror. It’s not that I’ve never worn makeup before—just not this much and never with this lack of subtlety. I look like I’m selling it on Cinco de Mayo. But I have to admit, whatever I’m selling, the price probably just went up.

  “Now, some drinks,” Walker bellows as I emerge from the bathroom.

  “What does everybody want?” I ask.

  It’s one of those nights when we’re not really doing anything, but everything we’re doing is ostensibly leading to writing. More important, everyone is in a good mood.

  “Do y’all know how to make frozen margaritas?” Devaney asks me. The editor in me cringes—as it does every time—when she refers to me, a single human being, as y’all.

  “Yes, I’ll get the blender.” I get to work, mixing ice, tequila, triple sec, and lime juice.

  “Come here, Chiquita,” Walker says, removing a red rose from a vase Claudia has put in the living room. As I’m blending, he cuts the rose and tucks it behind my ear, fastening it with a bobby pin from my updo. I salt three large margarita glasses and pour i
n the mixture, handing one to Walker and one to Devaney. “To the hot tub!” Walker says.

  Devaney hops in, and Walker takes off his shirt, settling in with his shorts on. In moments like this, I’m struck by the notion that for a man who’s ritualistically abused his body for decades, he looks remarkably good, with a natural athletic build. I lounge on my side on the edge of the hot tub in my outfit, cradling my head, watching Walker and Devaney splash about. For perhaps the first time, I can see how they might actually be in love instead of just mutually using each other—how Walker might see in Devaney a nice down-home girl from the South, like the ones he probably spent the fifties necking with in the back of his Ford Fairlane in Kentucky. He clearly likes that she can hold her own out here, and I’m endeared when he moves in and gives her a peck on the cheek. For Devaney? The attraction is clearly more complex—if not an actual complex. Father? Mentor? Protector? God only knows.

  “Alley, we need a movie and some food and a little bit of the drug. Do you mind?”

  “No, not at all.” Translation: We’re going to write at some point tonight but I’d like to cop a feel with my girlfriend in private right now.

  I head to the kitchen and peruse the movies. In light of the margaritas and my cha-cha dress, I’m thinking Scarface. I go into the pantry and grab a can of black beans. In the fridge I find tomatoes, a red onion, a jalapeño pepper, some cilantro, and more limes and set about making a black-bean salsa. After that’s done I take some nacho chips from the pantry and spread them on a cookie sheet, sprinkle some shredded jack cheese on top, and broil those until the cheese is melted, then spoon the salsa all over it. Since Walker has a chronic sweet tooth, I grab a six-pack of red-velvet cupcakes that Claudia brought back yesterday from the Aspen Bake Shop. As I’m hauling everything into the hot-tub room, I can see that Devaney has her bikini top off, and the two of them are canoodling in the corner. Devaney’s back is to me, and Walker catches my eye when I freeze, waiting for direction. He motions for me to come in. Devaney, I notice, is lolling about in the water. She suddenly seems extremely smashed.

  “You might want to get out, honey,” he says to Devaney. “Let’s get you out of here. Maybe get you some food.”

  I hand Walker a cupcake, and he feeds a piece to Devaney. He wraps a blue, oversize, plush towel around her, and she leans against the wall.

  “More please,” she slurs. “That cupcake is dang good. Gimme some . . .”

  I put in Scarface and start nibbling on the nachos. I kick off my shoes and put my feet in the hot tub, pressing them against a jet.

  “You’re positively glowin’ tonight,” Devaney says. “Doesn’t she look good, Walker?”

  Walker looks me up and down. “Very nice.”

  “She got laaaaid,” Devaney says. “Wasn’t that, like, a ton of weeks ago? It must have been gooood.”

  “Can I just eat my nachos, please?”

  “That sounds sexual.” Devaney laughs. “Eat my nachos. Ha.”

  “You coming in?” Walker asks me.

  “I don’t have a suit.”

  “You don’t need one,” he says.

  “I am not getting buck naked. Sorry,” I say, considering for a moment that I actually might.

  “Come in with the dress on.”

  “I’m not ruining this dress.”

  “Where is the drug, by the way?”

  “Oh, sorry.” I head back into the kitchen and take the yellow envelope from beside Walker’s typewriter and grab a tray from the dishwasher. I can hear Devaney starting to drunkenly berate Walker, and I can tell by the cadence of the conversation that things are heading rapidly downhill.

  “You laaaaaaak her,” she drawls, imbuing the word like with about fourteen syllables.

  “Put a shirt on, Devaney.”

  “Fuck you. I don’t waaaaant to.”

  “Cover up, sweetie. You’re getting sloppy.”

  “You think she’s smarter than me, don’t you.”

  “Devaney, the nacho chip on this tray is smarter than you right now.” I know the comment will hit Devaney in a way Walker doesn’t understand. It’s every boyfriend, probably her dad, too, telling her she’s an idiot.

  “She does stuff to yer book, you know. After you go to sleep. Rewraaaaatten and stuff.”

  I step into the room with the tray and they both go quiet. I decide it’s best to let her comment hang in the air, as if I didn’t hear it, where it will hopefully die a fast death.

  “Who do I have to fuck around here to get some drugs!” Walker barks.

  I put the tray down on the side of the hot tub.

  “I guess her,” Devaney says. She gets up and stumbles into the wall.

  “Dev—”

  “Y’all shut up. I’m faaaaane.”

  After Devaney leaves, Walker sighs, stares at the bubbles, then does two lines of the coke and hands the tray to me. In a desperate attempt to fill the vacuum left in Devaney’s wake, I do a fake line, then put my pumps back on and step down into the hot tub until the water is at my waist. The dress billows up around my hips.

  “Forget about that craziness. She was doing tequila shots before you came over,” he says. “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know. I think I like your idea about coming in with the dress on.” Walker smiles, and I ease my way into the water until I’m up to my neck. I’m glad Devaney is gone. I don’t care what she had to drink—she tried to sell me out. Plus, I need pages, and there’s no easier way to get them than by being a good sport.

  “Now float,” Walker says pointedly—a man with a plan. He reaches out of the hot tub and grabs a Polaroid camera from underneath the TV. I lie on my back, and my updo immediately undoes. The rose falls out, too, but Walker places it delicately on my chest as my long, black hair spreads out behind me. Walker gets out of the hot tub so he has an aerial view with the camera. “Close your eyes,” he says, then clicks the Polaroid. When the camera spits the picture out, he waves it in the air as he sits on the side of the tub.

  “How about this one?” I put the rose in my teeth, and Walker laughs, sipping on his margarita. I glance sideways, flirting as he snaps the photo. He lays them out side by side, waiting for both to develop. When the first one appears, it is beautiful and unsettling.

  “Eeeew. I look dead.”

  “You look beautiful.”

  “Not mutually exclusive.”

  As the second image develops, Walker and I stare at it. I’m thinking, with this thick makeup, my wild hair, the crazy dress, that sly look, that I resemble nothing of the person who first arrived here in her Amish funeral-director clothing and sensible urban shoes. I kind of look like a babe. I can tell Walker is thinking the exact same thing.

  “What do you say? Want to work a little?”

  “Yeah . . . ,” Walker says quietly. “I guess.”

  I get out of the tub and wrap a towel around my soaking dress. “I need to get some dry clothes from the cabin.”

  “Don’t go back over there. Borrow some of Devaney’s. I’m sure she’s passed out in the bedroom.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. Go.” Walker does another line of coke and wraps a towel around himself, settling in at the typewriter.

  Even though I’ve been out here about three months, it dawns on me that I’ve never been in Walker’s bedroom before, and it’s markedly different from what I expect. I’d pictured low futons and lava lamps—beads, tapestries. But Devaney is fully ensconced on a sensible mattress with tasteful bedding. Paintings from local artists are on the walls, and the whole room is minimal and tidy, save for an enormous deer’s head that’s hanging on the right wall as I walk in. I start going through the dresser and quickly discern that Devaney owns the top two drawers, which are filled with colorful off-the-shoulder shirts, short skirts, and entirely too much jersey material. The drawers smell like her.

  Devaney reels up suddenly like a corpse come to life. “Just whaaaaaat do you think yer dooooooin’?”

  “Can I b
orrow some clothes, please? I’m all wet.”

  “Fuck you and shut up.” Devaney passes out again. I take an orange, off-the-shoulder shirt and a gray jersey skirt and hang up my wet dress in the small master bath on the far side of the room.

  When I come out, Walker is sitting at the typewriter doing another line, and a cigarette is burning in the ashtray. “My drink, sweetheart. A beer, too.”

  I walk behind the bar and pause to consider the specific nature of my enablement of Walker’s phenomenal alcohol and drug use. If I were to attempt to peel back the layers of it all, it would probably go something like this: Psychedelics on the outside—the ostensibly quirky substances that afford him his sixties cred. Then the other drugs—prescription, pot, etc.—the soothers, like having a social drink would be for normal people. Walker, for all of his massive intake, would never do heroin or crack—those, as he says, are for crazy people and crackheads. A fine distinction, to be sure. Close to the center would be the alcohol—a physical necessity, plain and simple. And at the pulsing core of this volcano would be the coke. Call it what you want—an addiction, an obsession—there is no satisfying his need for it. It’s the one thing, up close, that makes me feel for Walker. The one thing that puts the lie to the cartoonish antihero role he’s created for himself and his lifestyle. The one that reduces him to a mere addict.

  I mix him a Chivas and water and get a Heineken out of the fridge. A blank piece of paper rests in the typewriter, and Walker keeps rubbing the top of his head—I’m unsure if the coke is making him jittery or if he’s simply trying to think of the next word to write.

  “Christ. Where were we?”

  “Sacramento. Remember?” The road-trip structure of Walker’s book is the perfect vehicle for someone with perennial writer’s block—a linear structure where crazy things can happen at each stop. There are arcs and threads. Anarchic moments. Drug-fueled mayhem. Sociological insights. Paranoid rants. He’s clearly writing by muscle memory though. I mean, it’s not exactly Proust.