Find Me I'm Yours

by Hillary Carlip

  But I suddenly felt like the Half-Ton Teen on the Discovery Channel. So overwhelmingly heavy that I couldn’t lift one limb.

  “Why would he do this to me?” my mother asked.

  Like this was about her? Oh, Narcie, really?!?!

  “I know I shouldn’t dump this in your lap.”

  Uh… you mean like you have with everything else since I was seven?

  “…I just don’t know what to do…”

  “How about calling Aunt Pam?” Since she lives only a block away from you, OH, and she’s AN ADULT WITH MONEY.

  “Good idea.”

  “Let me know when Cooper’s back home so I can talk to him.”

  “Will do.” And she hung up.

  Fuck. I know my brother’s a pothead. In fact, he wanted to move to California with me because medical marijuana is legal—but I assured him they wouldn’t consider an old broken ankle injury from when he was nine and collided his skateboard into a hot dog cart as a valid medical excuse. But selling pot? What could he possibly need the money for?

  I felt so lost and laden, I didn’t know what to do except call my NY bestie (and ex), Liza. She always has something positive to say, some way of looking at the world that always makes me feel better. Her phone rang and rang, no answer. So I texted.

  All hell has broken loose. CB ASAP!!!!

  After I pressed SEND, I realized I was being selfish. So I texted again.

  You ok? Kelly? Miss you so much!!!

  I had been so caught up in the bullshit of work, the excitement of the hunt, and the drama of Jason, I hadn’t even told Liza all that was going on, or heard anything about her life in way too long.

  I willed my half-ton limbs to move, put on Toupee and Boo’s leashes, and without bothering to change clothes, I hit the streets in just a long T-shirt and flip-flops, accompanied by my dried mascara-streaked face. I didn’t care.

  S.H.A.R.I.’s door was closed and I didn’t know if that meant she had come home yet or not. It was just as well. It was too early for me to go ballistic. I needed at least two cups of coffee for that. I turned onto Sunset.

  OH. MY. EFFING. G!!!!! What do I fucking see? LADY MACMETH. MAKING OUT! WITH AN EQUALLY TOOTHLESS DUDE!!!!!! Feeding each other the remains of a sandwich, excavated from the nearby dumpster, no doubt, and laughing and kissing between bites.

  Fuck. Even Lady Macmeth has a soul mate.

  Chapter 14

  DAY 3—MORNING

  A forty-block walk and three cups of coffee later, I started to get a grip. Well, until I returned home and who was waiting for me?

  “Can we talk? Please,” my wretched roommate begged.

  I let Toupee and Boo off their leashes and they ran to my room. They wanted no part of it, and I couldn’t blame them. “Make it fast,” I said.

  “I’m sorry if you were upset, but you and Jason broke up!”

  “You could have asked me. How hard would that have been? Just like you could ask me when you steal my clothes and my tattoos. What is your problem?” I was now shouting.

  “Uh, hello… he’s not yours. It’s been like months since you guys dated.”

  “Dated?! We practically lived together! And not months—one month, one week, and six days.”

  “Still, I don’t think you can claim any steak.”

  What the fuck does she mean? Stake any claim? I couldn’t take any more. I couldn’t breathe. It felt like our apartment was placed in one of those AS SEEN ON TV food dehydrators where fruit and meats are dried and then hermetically sealed in plastic bags with all the air sucked out. She was now stealing that, too.

  “I have to be somewhere.” I ran to the front door and as I was slamming it I heard, “In your pajamas?” No doubt she’d be featuring that look any day.

  Well, it WAS a little challenging riding my scooter in just a long T-shirt (all right, not that it’s any of your business but I DID have cute underwear on.) But I didn’t even care if I flashed the world.

  Coco answered her door with a welcoming, “Come in, you look like hell!” I was so relieved to hear that Blake was at a sound check for a gig he was doing that night. Coco made me Mexican hot chocolate with fresh mint leaves, and served it with warm mini croissants. For as bubble bursting as she is, my L.A. BFF can also be very nurturing. It all made me cry.

  “What’s up? Tell me everything.”

  So I did. ISH. I told Coco about Cooper. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her about Jason.

  “Damn, that’s rough. Sorry to hear it.” She refilled my hot chocolate like that would help. And in a strange way it did.

  “So what about you? Did you watch the tape?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Did you bring it so we could watch together?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’m so proud of you!” Coco squealed.

  She thought I had some kind of willpower. Little did she know that the real reason I didn’t watch the tape was that I was totally willpowerless, and got my ass kicked so big and hard for it.

  “So tell me more about Mark,” I asked. “Do you think he’s ready to date? Do you think he’d like me?”

  “Why wouldn’t he? You’re amazing.”

  “Thanks. Does he have any of his work online? I want to see.”

  Coco opened her computer and brought up the website for the gallery where Mark’s show was opening. “Check out current shows.”

  www.MadelynEvansGallery.com

  His photographs were phenomenal. Evocative and provocative, full of intricate details and soulful saturated colors. And each one wasn’t just a candid moment that happened to be caught. They were all deliberately and elaborately staged and styled with complete unhasty commitment. Like this:

  “They’re beautiful,” I said, and started to cry. I tried to hold back, but it was no use.

  “Are you upset you’re not doing your art right now?”

  I shook my head yes. Then no. Yes, I am; no, that’s not why I’m crying.

  “Are you upset about Cooper? Is that why you’re crying?”

  Same YES-but-NO combo platter NOD, SHAKE.

  “Are you upset with me that I keep telling you to forget the hunt?”

  Again. Same.

  Coco’s the kind of person who would continue trying to guess all day long if I didn’t stop her. “I’m sorry.” I sobbed even harder now.

  “For what?”

  “For doing what I did. For not telling you.”

  “What the hell’s going on, Mags?”

  So I told her. Everything that had happened since she and Blake dropped me off what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “That fucking Jason!” she yelled. “Now are you convinced that he’s not for you?”

  I shook my head, a pathetic yes.

  “And honestly,” Coco added, “Mark is just not ready for all you want. I guess there’s only one thing we can do today….”

  Chapter 15

  DAY 3—AFTERNOON

  Like a one-person SWAT team, Coco went to my apartment, swooped in, and picked up the tape we got at the Villa Seaside Apartments. For once, timing was on our side as the Asstress was in the shower. Well, that was luckier for S.H.A.R.I. than for Coco. The betraying biatch would remain unscathed for at least one more day.

  When Coco returned with Toupee and Boo, it made me cry even more. We all bundled up in a fleece blanket on her couch, Coco put the tape in the camera, and we watched.

  Click the pic to watch the video:

  If you didn’t go watch it, here’s what it said:

  Hey. So far so good. You might be wondering why I’m sitting here wearing only one boot. Well, as you know, I’m looking for my SOLE mate. All you gotta do is find my other boot, which is somewhere in this region here [points to map on his lap], and you’ll be one STEP closer to finding your prince. Maybe not Prince Charming, but I’m definitely not a HEEL.

  Cool, are we done? Cut? Good, because I think there’s someone coming actually.

  OMGggggg!!! He was
sitting on some outdoor stairs wearing only one boot. Seriously, THAT WAS ALL! (Now you gonna go watch?!)

  Coco was laughing her ass off.

  “How could you not fall for that?” I asked.

  “He is funny. And not bad eye candy,” Coco relented. “If he’s for real,” she couldn’t resist adding.

  I threw a pillow at her.

  “OK”—she was back to being nice—“so last time we cracked the first clue by figuring out where he was when the tape was shot. Why don’t we start there again?”

  Great. A purpose. A plan.

  “Well, he’s outdoors on some stairs,” I offered, with my oh-so-keen powers of observaysh.

  “Maybe it’s one of those stair walks,” Coco deduced. “I’ve seen books about them at Skylight.”

  Skylight is one of the coolest independent bookstores in L.A. still standing. I go in there all the time to see, feel, and even smell the pages of real books. Also, they still sell a zine I did a while back in one of my productive phases.

  If you wanna make some art that you can touch and hold, you can get my zine—which is chock-full o’ kick-ass images, scraps, and “Snip Its” (®, not) that you can cut out to make your own collages—at a smattering of independent bookstores. I keep a pretty updated list of who carries it on my website:

  www.DIYCollage.com

  I returned to the task at hand. “But aren’t there like a million stair walks in L.A.?”

  “Well, there are also a million dog parks—that didn’t stop us,” she said. “There should be just as many websites about stairs, too.”

  She put the computer on her lap and started clicking away. I was fading, having only slept about an hour the night before.

  “We need more brainpower,” I said. “Be right back.”

  I went to the kitchen and returned with two glasses filled with my own cocktail concoction, a mix of Drambuie and Red Bull.

  “Here’s a Drambully.”

  We drank and searched. We found a site with a map of eighty-one different stair walks, from Topanga to South Pasadena. But there were no pictures, so how would we ever match Mr. WTF’s stairs? We found videos of people on stair walks, books (the bible being Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles), even an iPhone app from the book’s author. But no pictures. With addresses. Which was what we needed. And couldn’t find.

  “Wait a min! Wait a sec! Hold on! I think I found something!” Coco shouted. “Stairwalksla.com. Anything sound familiar?”

  “The la.com?” I guessed. “Like dogparksla.com, right?”

  Coco perked up. “Maybe that’s a clue, like his initials or something. Get out the pic you took at the Villa Seaside Apartments.”

  I grabbed my phone and looked at the list of tenants. “There’s an L.A.! L. Astin! We so rock, we could freakin’ solve freakin’ murders if we freakin’ wanted to!” We tried to high-five and missed. It took four times before we connected solidly.

  “I’ll start researching L. Astins,” Coco said, “you check out the site.”

  www.StairwalksLA.com

  I looked at it on my phone. “Well, it’s a way better design than Sandi Stern’s,” I reported. It suddenly made me a little sad to think my new friend Sandi, of dogparksla.com, may not be a real person. Which of course meant that Mr. WTF might not be as well. What if the troubled, homely old housewife with the severely handicapped twin stepsons was behind this? What if Coco was right? I had to focus. “The girl who does the blog has some funny icons describing the stair walks on it—like PEE ALERT, NOSY NEIGHBORS, and CARRY MACE. And there are PICS! With addresses! Halle-fuckin’-lujah!”

  “Let’s check ’em out.” Coco joined me, having found nothing on L. Astin except that Lastin is elastic used for sewing cloth diapers. Good to know. There were four photos on StairwalksLA.com that we decided could possibly be of the stairs in the video. We would start there.

  “Ready to go?” Coco asked.

  “What do you think?”

  We gathered our stuff and my dogs and piled into Coco’s car. As we drove to the first set of stairs, my phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, honey.”

  It was Liza. That’s one thing I’ve found a lot of gay women have in common—they call each other “honey” even well after they’ve broken up. And of course they mostly continue on being friends with their exes, so if they’re all at a party and someone calls out HONEY, every head turns.

  “Hi, sweet pea.” I like to mix it up, keep it fresh.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah. No. Whatever. First, how are you? And how’s Kelly?”

  Liza caught me up and when she asked once more how I was, I broke down. In between sobs, snorts, then laughing at my sobs and snorts, I filled her in on everything that had gone down. Coco had me put Liza on speaker, and she joined in, adding, embellishing, and commenting to her East Coast counterpart (minus us ever having sex!).

  Usually when people think of New York, it’s dark and edgy. And L.A. is bright and sparkly. If that were true, Liza and Coco pulled a Freaky Friday. For as cynical and unbelieving as Coco is, Liza is a sunshiny optimist. In fact, she works for a motivational company that has the big, phat, cool spiritual/self-help website:

  www.eVolveTransmedia.com

  She runs a site for them called TEXT YOUR WISH where people… uh… obvs, text their wishes! And then wishes are picked and fulfilled.

  www.TextYourWish.com

  Note to self—maybe it’s time to give it a shot and wish for $500.00 to help out my brother?!

  So when Coco said, “You’ve seen Catfish? Don’t you think it’s crazy to be doing this hunt?” of course Liza effused just the opposite.

  “It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard! What are the chances of you getting a camera to begin with, and that one in particular? It’s TOTALLY meant to be!”

  Coco withdrew a little, seeing she was outnumbered. Liza made me promise to Skype her and show her the tapes when I got home.

  After hanging up, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t thought of Jason in about an hour. At this point it was all about my future. No looking back.

  Oops, I just did.

  As dusk was rapidly approaching, the dramatic pink sun sinking behind the 405 freeway, it was a little hard to see anything once we got to the first set of stairs in Santa Monica Canyon. Nothing seemed out of place, except for a Luna Bar wrapper on the fourth stair from the bottom.

  By the time we got back across town to one of the Beachwood Stairs in Hollywood, it was as if the Survivor tiki torch had been extinguished, and it was almost pitch-black out. We used the flashlights on our phones to light up the area, but saw nothing. Just stairs. And three cigarette butts.

  “I think this might be a daytime job,” Coco said.

  “Agreed. We could totally be in the dark, in the dark.” I would have to investigate the other two in the morning before work. I couldn’t ask Coco to join me—she’d be up way late tonight with Blake’s show (which she tried to convince me to go to). The least I could do was let her sleep in tomorrow.

  It was now up to me, and me alone, to find Prince Charming’s glass boot.

  Chapter 16

  DAY 4—MORNING

  I woke to my phone alarm at 7:00 a.m. with a definite Drambully-over, not to mention puffy crybaby eyes. Boo, Toupee, and I were all squeezed onto my twin mattress, which I had bought for $15.00 from some aging actor’s estate sale in North Hollywood. He was selling his old 8 × 10 headshots, too. I still regret not buying one.

  I FaceTimed Cooper. Nothing. I called him. No answer. I texted him. No response. Hopefully he was out of jail and back at school. I’d try again in the afternoon.

  After I walked the kids and fueled up on K & C Donut coffee, I splurged next door at Subway and used some of my remaining $7.00 to get a Mornin’ Flatbread for $2.50—cuz you can “Add-vocado!” And I did. Then I set out for the third stairs on our list, between the Hollywood Bowl and Universal Studios.
>
  I had never been to the Hollywood Hills so early before. It seemed like a small town—newspapers being delivered into driveways with a thud, sprinklers rotating, catching the morning sun in their spray. The stairs were nestled between two beige stucco houses, both with white railings leading to front doors. Very 1970. Or maybe 1980. Definitely 19Ugly.

  The one thing that set these stairs apart from others, and made me hopeful, was that halfway up, there was a rickety red fence bordering the right side. It looked like I had a match!

  No boot (or lap-map!) was in sight, but there was a lot more trash on these stairs than Coco and I had spotted on the last two. Candy wrappers, receipts, and a scrawled TO DO list that included “Pick up tiara.” SWEARS! But nothing seemed significant. That is until I found, slightly hidden under a crunchy leaf… THE GOLDEN TICKET!!!

  It really felt just as dramatic and life changing as Charlie finding his ticket out of potato soup poverty into the riches of the Chocolate Factory!

  Sole Mates Shoe Repair?! Isn’t my husband-to-be so damn clever?

  I whipped out my phone and searched for info, including what time they opened.

  www.SoleMatesShoeRepair.com

  It seemed so legit. Would this be the ticket to Mr. WTF’s other boot? I called Coco. “How was Blake’s show?”

  “Ugh… most of the acts sucked, and Blake’s latest band attempt didn’t go on till 2:00 a.m. and then played only three songs. I wasn’t that thrilled about any of it.”

  “Well, you’ll be thrilled—UH, MAYBE?—to know I found the stairs AND the next clue!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Swears! There was a ticket for a shoe repair shop in Burbank called SOLE MATES! Genius, right? So my question is—do we go together after work, or do I go now, come in late, and risk Malcolm’s wrath?”

  “Well,” Coco answered, “I have to leave work early today to help Mark set up at the gallery. So I guess since that pesky root canal you got the other morning still looks really swollen, you understandably need an emergency follow-up appointment this morning.”