James Lockhart Perry
Exposure
A Love Story
Copyright 2011-2012 James Lockhart Perry
All rights reserved.
Print ISBN-13: 978-1467987714.
Print ISBN-10: 1467987719.
e-Book ASIN: B0063ZQGTU.
Licensing
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Speaking of Lockhart...
Lockhart's Other Stuff
The Mike and Tuesday Comedy Hour
Acknowledgments
For Glinda, of course. And for Edith Parzefall, Carol Kean, and Rhonda Kay, who came along for the ride and ended up helping to steer the boat.
Part I
Sam
Chapter 1
Dead, every last one of them, lives erased without a residue, their souls exhausted, a thin collection of ghosts in no one's imagination except his own. As far as he knew anyway. He being Sam Spaulding, whose agnostic finger touched the high-resolution monitor and smeared a fingerprint across the white shirt of Mischa Spavik, the last of the violent crew to go. All six of them in just five miserable years.
How many times had he opened this photo file to gaze at the final defiant lob of hubris it represented? In all the thousands of photographs—hundreds of thousands—Sam took in his career, this one resonated the strongest. But not until today, at this hour—at this very minute, in fact—did it dawn on him that every one of the six human beings in the fourteen-year-old image lay dead in the ground and long disremembered. Except by him, of course, but how much did that count for? He knew every one of the violent offenders, and now he knew no one. No one who mattered anyway. No one like him.
The photograph wasn't the most original shot in Sam’s portfolio. He had arranged his older brother Henry and his reluctant fallen angels on the sand and rocks of the breakwater south of Redondo Pier before climbing the bluffs above them with a medium-format camera and a telephoto lens. Identical white button-down cotton shirts and jeans, no belts, no shoes, all of them hauling in paunches for a last-minute stab at youth. The sunset buttered their smug, lupine faces to a wrinkled shade of leather. They sat atop the world, they owned the joint. Nothing could defeat them except death itself.
And so it had.
The door to the darkroom burst open. The light momentarily blinded Sam. A quick flick of the wrist and a snap of the mouse button—the computer belched politely to announce the file had closed.
"Didn’t you see the red light?" he snarled.
"Get a grip, old man," Lydia drawled behind him. "This hasn’t been a darkroom for years."
"Get out of here! What do you want?"
"Make up your mind. You got a customer."
"Get the fuck out of here!"
"No problem! I quit!"
The door slammed shut and popped Sam’s eardrums. He hadn’t turned his head, but he could tell from Lydia’s hostility that she was going nowhere. Fifteen years with the woman, and he knew every one of her hostilities as well as he knew his own jagged repertoire. Even if she left, she would be waiting for him at the apartment, hidden behind the front door, a metaphorical cast-iron frying pan in hand.
Sam brought up the photograph again. He stared at the six upturned faces. Damn, he was good, at one time anyway. He took the magnification to one hundred percent and admired the handiwork that had wiped away the flaws in Henry’s face. The age spots, the boulos pemphigoid bruises, the melanoma scars and lesions. Henry, Sam’s older brother, was a photographer’s nightmare, ugly enough to start with, his face a misshapen battleground between nose, chin, and those angry, sunken eyes. But the skin, so soft and smooth in his youth, was what killed him. His fucking skin.
Henry first, then BJ in a drive-by on the Camino del Rey, then the two Daves—Dave G and Dave T—one after the other, from gunshot wounds and cirrhosis. Leaving just Donny and Mischa to hold back the gloomy curtain. Then eight years ago, the indestructible Donny collapsed from a heart attack and left his lover Mischa to defenestrate himself as a reasonable alternative to withering away, alone and loveless, in the grip of an AIDS epidemic.
All so long ago, but it wasn’t until this afternoon that Sam opened the certified-return-receipt letter from his own doctor and let the news prompt him to pull it all together.
A tentative knock at the door took a second to register. Obviously not Lydia. "What!" Sam shouted anyway. He closed the file and let the dismal moment recede.
"We’ve been waiting out here a half-hour."
A woman’s voice, young and matter-of-fact. Sam struggled to his feet in the gloom, dropped his bifocals to the desk, and opened the door. The light from the young afternoon flooded the darkroom. A tiny, black silhouette drew back, surprised. Sam shielded his seventy-two-year-old eyes and waited for her to morph into a three-dimensional human being.
"Where’s Lydia?" he asked.
"The old lady outside? She said to tell you to go to hell."
"She might look old to you. What do you want?"
The girl was actually smiling. Or laughing at him, not that he gave a damn. She fingered a coal-black lock of hair and pointed behind her. "Not me, it’s my boyfriend. He wants to hire you."
"I don’t do weddings or babies. Come back tomorrow, and Lydia will help you find someone who does."
Sam started to close the door, but the girl's snort of disbelief stopped him. "He’s waiting in your office," she insisted. "Going through your shit."
"What?"
Sam barged past her along the corridor past the wedding and baby photographs Lydia had hung to paint a veneer of activity over his nearly defunct business. The sudden exertion speared his knee. He stumbled into the office just in time to catch the boyfriend snoring in one of the two guest chairs. The letter from the gastroenterologist lay untouched where Sam had dropped it onto the desk blotter. Shit. He had hoped Lydia would find it and save him the trouble of breaking the news to her.
"Rudy!" the girl said. "Wake the fuck up. I tracked him down in a closet out back."
"It’s a darkroom," Sam said.
"Darkroom? Weren’t you using a computer?"
The boyfriend stirred and came to his feet, surprised. "Hey, it’s you," he observed. He wore a ghastly purple fedora over a matching garish purple silk shirt split open halfway to the waist. Sam glanced at the girl. She had dressed in black, with a sleeveless blouse and attractive pale arms that the camera would turn into drooping gobs of white flesh. Obviously not a pair of professional models.
The boyfriend smoothed the brim of his hat and pointed behind him at the largest of twenty grainy black-and-white wartime photos Lydia had hung. As if all that pain and fury would inspire a young bride to stop blushing long enough to hire Sam for her wedding. "Is that the Pulitzer?"
Sam took a pass on illumination. He gazed back and forth from girl to boyfriend. Some people were immune to hints, but he tried out his stock answer anyway. "Whatever you want, I’m not doing it anymore. I’m retired."
"Then why are you here?" the girl asked.
"Here?"
"The store?"
"Come back tomorrow and ask Lydia. I have no idea why she keeps it open." Except otherwise, the two of them would have to spend their days staring wordlessly at each other across the dull clutter of a dini
ng room table.
"We want you to take our photograph," the boyfriend said. "We heard of you. We’ll pay your going rate."
"My going rate is zero. You heard of me where?"
"You knew my uncle Mischa."
Sam hesitated. That explained the purple anyway. Mischa always had the worst fashion sense in history, all noise and bombast. But if any member of the gang was destined to leave behind a residue of nostalgia, it would be Mischa. He had always treated Sam well, better than Sam's own brother Henry. Sam was the seventh wheel to Henry’s gang, the cliché of a sibling allowed to hang out, but prevented from getting his fingers dirty by a pact between a dying Marge and her dear firstborn gangster. Nothing changed the sonofabitch’s mind, not even Sam’s stints shooting the Central Highlands of Vietnam and the slums of Beirut and Sarajevo, not even the bullet that took off his right pinky fingernail, or the knife in his left knee that sent him stumbling through the rest of his godforsaken life. Henry didn’t give a shit who killed his baby brother, as long as his own hands remained clean.
"He’s not gonna do it, are you?" the girlfriend said now.
Sam ignored her and turned to the boyfriend. "What’s your mother’s name?"
"Vera, but she’s dead. Why?"
"I knew your mother."
And so he did. Vera, the wild-child Russian and the neighborhood exotic dancer—to use the well-mannered version. So this loud-dressing lout was Vera's long lost brat Rudy. Sam had always wondered what he looked like. He just always assumed that by now, the kid would have followed his unlamented dangerous beauty of a mother down the sewer of her life. "You still living in South Gate?"
"Fuck no. We've been in Hermosa for years. What do you know—"
"Not a damn thing."
Sam could match the young hoodlum all day long for belligerence. The last time Sam saw his mother Vera was at Bud’s, the legendary and long vanished gentleman’s club in Bellflower. Rumors of illicit sex, prostitution, and drug trafficking dogged the establishment until the police raided it out of existence. Vera was a tall, leggy beauty with a raven shock of hair and two smirking green eyes that gazed over your shoulder whenever you sucked up the nerve to talk to her. "Hey Sammy," he could still hear her calling out from the stage, with a leer for the other customers and a finger pointed at his crotch. "Whatcha got in there for me?" Apparently, not enough. Fifteen years ago, a pair of Latino children found Vera's needle-punctured body stuck in a clump of briars in the desiccated concrete trench of the San Gabriel River.
"What's your name?" Sam asked the girlfriend.
"Sheri. This is—"
"I know who it is." Sam couldn't help a grimace, as he glanced from Sheri to her boyfriend. The kid had Vera drawn all over him. What on earth had led him to wander into Sam's relic of a studio? Of all the gin joints...
"Don’t tell me," Sam said. "You want me to shoot you having sex."
Boyfriend and girlfriend lit up with matching gapes of surprise. The boyfriend recovered first. "How’d you guess?"
Chapter 2
"How long?" Lydia asked. She and Sam sat out on the faded gray deck overlooking the Pacific and the dormant Palos Verdes volcano. The muggy, neglected mess of the living room had driven them outside, but even at sunset, the ragged deck brought little respite. Across the Esplanade and out on the water, a schooner rounded the peninsula, its sails tucked away for the night, running lights barely visible in the gathering gloom. The blip of a sun had just evaporated over the horizon.
Lydia’s voice rasped like wet sandpaper on a glum Kentucky morning. The onetime southern belle was on her fourth cigarette in less than a half-hour. Sam always told her she made an ugly smoker—awkward, jerky, with violent sucks at the tube, before stabbing it out in an overflowing ashtray to lunge for another. The cigarettes had thoroughly tested Lydia's fifty-six-year-old skin. Along with too many afternoons in the smoky California sun, too many evil-tongued spats, and too many bottles of booze.
"I don’t know," Sam tried. "A guy I once knew—"
"How long, damn it!"
"Three to six months without treatment."
"And you’re not doing the treatments?"
"No fucking way."
Lydia plunged the half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray and vaulted out of her chair in a cloud of ash and flying butts. The letter from the gastroenterologist floated silently to the deck.
"Where you going?" Sam protested, but let her disappear into the apartment.
Sam almost never came out on the deck. The dead cactus in the corner, the discolored vinyl chairs, the rotten wood and rusty bolts at the joints of the decking itself—all reminded him of problems he had failed to fix, promises he had failed to keep.
"Sonofabitch, I told you to get checked out!" Lydia called from the living room. And she had, repeatedly. She'd told him, helped him, warned him, cajoled him, tried to love and reform him, until he finally wore her out. Sam heaved himself out of the deck chair and pivoted inside. "Shit," he swore under his breath. His fucking knee.
"Say hi to Mac," he told her. She stood across the gloomy chaos, her hand on the apartment doorknob. Next to her, on the wall, hung the nude Sam had taken of her fifteen years earlier when he first hired her as a model. One of the banes of the portrait photographer’s life was the squalid chore of airbrushing and whitening a subject’s teeth. In those days, hers needed no work at all. Even at forty-one, she had beautiful, shiny teeth, immaculate southern belle skin, and a body to start wars over. Now, a film of yellow smoke covered the glass of the portrait like it covered every other inch of this dead end.
On a night like tonight, after an argument like this one, Malloy’s bartender Mac would peel Lydia off a stool at closing time and walk her home. He would hammer on the door, until Sam woke up and dragged her inert mass across the threshold and put her to bed.
"Can’t believe I’ve wasted my life on you," Lydia murmured from across the room. A broken red fingernail stuffed the tears back into her eyes.
"So you’ve said."
"All you ever had to do was give a damn."
Not asking much, was she? She opened the door on the neighbor across the hall. The girl had lived there for three years, but Sam had yet to memorize her name. She and Lydia exchanged brittle pleasantries, then Lydia turned back into the apartment. "I’ll be gone in the morning."
For once Sam took her seriously. It was something in the voice. "Where?"
"None of your damn business, apparently. Home, somewhere, anywhere. How should I know? I just know I’m not going to sit around here and watch you die."
"I don’t blame you."
It was the wrong thing to say. "You stupid, self-centered sonofabitch!" The door slammed shut and shook the apartment, then sprang open again. The second time, Lydia threw her shoulder into it. The apartment shook again, and the nude flew off the wall with a crash of breaking glass. Sam watched it all happen, agape. For a second, he thought about going after her, but then the sound of her running feet echoed out of hearing.
Sam gazed through the squalor of the dining room at the kitchen. A street light shone in through the blinds of a window and cast ribbons of pale blue across the dirty pots and dishes piled up in the sink. Maybe a two-second exposure on an f-stop of eleven. Sam could shoot the grubby still life as dispassionately as he could have photographed Lydia destroying her favorite portrait.
Sam could shoot anything without flinching—he had proved it a hundred times over. His so-called Pulitzer—the photograph that made his reputation and caught the attention of Vera’s kid that afternoon—was a quick capture around the corner of a bombed-out bank off Place des Martyres in 1980s Beirut. Sam stuck out his hand and had the camera shot out of his fingers for his trouble. The gunshot took off the outer joint of his right pinkie and destroyed the film magazine, but miraculously left the frame he was taking unexposed. Smoke spurting out of an ancient revolver aimed straight at the viewfinder in the hands of a bawling six-year-old boy standing over his father’s corpse. It wa
s one of those perfectly timed and exposed shots that horrified the world, won Pulitzers, and set up a photographer for life. But when Sam leapt out to retrieve the camera, the anonymous boy and his father were too dead to care.
Sam crossed to the kitchen, opened the cabinet door under the sink, and rooted around in the acrid, dingy forest of cleaning supplies. Lydia had only recently started hiding her emergency rations, so they hadn’t reached the point where Sam needed to match wits with her. Now they never would.
Sam pulled out the bottle and grimaced—he had always despised Bourbon. But instead of pouring it out this time, he sank to the floor with his back to the sink and took the biggest swig he could manage. The whiskey burned all the way down, then erupted back into his mouth. He coughed most of it out, waited to recover, then drank again. A little less excruciating this time. He took another long swig, then another, then emptied the bottle.
The whiskey burned deep inside him and scoured his bloody stomach ulcer like steel wool on ground glass. He dropped the bottle and writhed on the floor. The pain shot through him like jagged razors all wired together. Twenty minutes of that agony, and he crawled to his feet and lurched through the apartment to the bedroom. By the time he sank onto the bed, his stomach and bowels were all afire.
The fucking gastroenterologist had warned Sam about the booze. No hooch on the menu for a withered seventy-two-year-old corpse with chronic ulcers and an invasion of Stage III colon cancer. Like handing him a road map to a quick, perfect suicide, but with no mention of the potholes, crashes, and bellows of pain along the way.
Sam froze himself into a ball on the ragged pile of sheets. A feeble light shone in through the dirty window. Six seconds at f-eleven—no, f-sixteen, get everything in focus, damn it—forget the eyes, his were clamped shut anyway. He held himself there, wired tight, a pose of cold, dense stone, listening for the faint click of the shutter.
Exposure Page 1