by Bruce Wagner
CLEAN
[Bud]
The Mother Load
Naturally,
Bud followed ICM’s lead & contacted the office of Rod Fulbright, David Simon’s rep. In a two-week period, meetings were set, bumped, reset, and bumped again. Because both cancellations had been last minute, Fulbright’s asst phoned and emailed.
The meeting was set for 8AM at Soho House. The phone rang at nine on the night before; when caller ID announced “C A A,” the burgeoning novelist jumped out of his skin, fearing the worst. In Bud’s experience, a 3rd strike signaled the end of a meeting’s life cycle. The good news was, the agency was confirming.
There was always the chance it could abort in the morning. Bud told himself that wasn’t likely because of the earliness of the set hour—a bullshit rationale that still managed to provide feeble comfort.
. . .
His golf ball-size, precancerous prostate nearly had him under house arrest; it ruled over him like a despot, forcing him to piss every 20 minutes. He envied his mother because at least she was diapered & didn’t have to get up 17 times in the middle of the night. No wonder he was chronically fatigued.
The urologist never suggested medication that might help (even Dolly was on Renessa), and for some reason Bud always forgot to ask. Seemingly, the only arrow in Dr. Deconcini’s quiver was a technique called “the double void.” The maneuver entailed remaining at the urinal when you were done, & willing yourself to pee all over again. The first and only time he tried it was in a public restroom. As Bud stood idle, ruminating over his novel, his mother’s money and his bladder, he eventually noticed a guy washing his hands a little too long, trying to catch Bud’s eye in the mirror, like he was maybe looking for action.
He almost blew off Soho House, out of sheer exhaustion. Dolly’s caregiver had a family emergency, and it was too late to find a replacement. Bud slept—or rather, didn’t—on the fold-out couch in the living room. The baby monitor was stuck at an insanely loud pitch; putting cushions and pillows over it didn’t much help. (He couldn’t bring himself, morally, to shut it off.) Under the nonstop drone of Fox talking heads, he could hear Dolly farting and belching and muttering to herself. “They want me dead”—“Dirtycunt lying bitch”—“Then why don’t you go and fuck yourself?” As he drifted off, she began to call out, at first shy & plaintive then insistent, imperious: “Bud? Bud . . . Bud? Bud. BUD!” When he asked with a shout what she wanted, Dolly’s answer was always the same. In a pitiable Baby Jane voice, she cried, “I don’t want to fall! I’m afraid, I’m afraid! They’re all falling! Nancy Reagan! Betty White! Zsa Zsa! Hips are breaking, right and left, left and right!” He bellowed reassurances but she kept at it until he was forced to climb from the couch and go to her room. He’d tell her that she wasn’t going to fall, that neither he nor her caregivers would allow it. Her mood instantly brightened, her wrinkleless face transforming to a sweet little girl’s. Then she’d pass on a nugget or two from the tabloids he brought her each week.
“Who’s the one on Dancing With the Stars? Not this year—the whore. The whore that was married to Hefner.”
“Ma, I don’t know.”
“They threw her off . . . whenever it was. Why can’t I remember her fucking name? Anyway, they say she stinks. In the magazine you brought. Her publicist said she has bad b.o.”
“Her publicist?”
“Not her publicist, her stylist. You know what I mean.”
“I don’t watch that show.”
“Well you should. Kendra Wilkinson! I knew I’d remember. The whore with the cute little body. Letting herself be pawed at by that old, old man. Can you imagine? Well I can! I would have done the exact same thing. But first I would have had to get in line. I hope she got money out of it, she better have gotten millions. She’s smart, I admire her—there’s nothing wrong with being a whore, Bud! . . . and that little girl, who’s that little girl? They said she doesn’t like to wash—why can’t I think of her name. Shit. What is it——Reese Witherspoon.”
“Reese Witherspoon was on Dancing With the Stars?”
“No! I was reading. In your magazine. Apparently she has an allergy to soap, if you know what I mean. That’s me being nice. And Uma, Uma Thurman, remember her? It said she stinks even more. Than the others. But you know who they say is the stinkiest of them all? Guess.”
“I don’t know. Who.”
“Sarah Jessica Parker. They said she’s foul & I believe it.”
Dolly assiduously used a person’s entire name, as a testimony to her mental acuity. She often recited out loud a random catechism of phone numbers, names/dates of holidays, & obscure family tree birthdays/wedding anniversaries—she wanted Bud (and the world, however small it’d become) to see that she was still with it.
“Bud, do you know who has fungus? On her fingernails? Jennifer Aniston. They’re splitting right and left. I used to wait on women like that, I saw everything, in the dressing room at Neiman’s. They were filthy under the arms and everywhere else. Anyone who has fungus on the fingers has it on the toes. O yes. You better believe if you have finger fungus, your hygiene leaves something to be desired. Because fungus doesn’t come from out of the blue. And if you’ve got it on the fingers, you’ve got it on the cunt. These girls spend a fortune on waxing their holes, but they can’t afford to buy a bar of soap? And her friend from Friends—what’s-her-name who was married to the kook—she’s got hairy feet. Courteney Cox. It says she’s got hair on her toes, just like a man.”
Instead of counting sheep, Bud counted the money he’d acquire upon her death. In his fantasy, he was merciful—instead of breaking a hip in a fall and succumbing to pneumonia, Dolly died peacefully in her sleep.
She had doled out some of her fortune over the last few years, a thousand here, a thousand there, always on unpredictable occasions. He felt like a waiter getting a tip but knew better than to ask for more. Dolly withheld her dowry, still intent on marrying him off “to money.”
Dolly tried marrying money herself & failed. She regretted wasting her best years on Bud’s father, a preening, narcissistic spendthrift. After the divorce, she confessed to Bud that she’d run a bit wild. She spent time in bars, and once brought Lloyd Bridges back to the apt for what she called a “c-hunt.” She had a thing for rich, black-out drunks. Hook-ups frequently took her to Vegas where the scenario included Dolly being given a few thousand in hundred-dollar chips to play with while her paramours shatpisspuked themselves in the honeymoon suite. At night, crawling into the alcoholic bed, she told them she lost everything at the tables; the chips were safe at the bottom of her purse. (If stray chips dribbled from their pockets while they were out cold and she scooped them up, well that was OK too.) Go where the money is was her most important slice of parental wisdom. You should have married the Duchess of Alba. 85 years-old! That’s Hefner’s age! If Kendra could do it, so can YOU. Do you want to know how old the groom was? EXACTLY YOUR AGE. She has palaces! She’s so rich she doesn’t have to kneel for the pope! She’s allowed to ride a horse into the cathedral in Seville! You should have met her, Bud, why couldn’t you have found a way to meet her? Because her husband’s HANDSOME but he’s faggy, he can’t HOLD A CANDLE, he isn’t BUILT like you. You should have met her & given her a good FUCK, you should have fucked her to death! Early death! Cause that’s what he’s planning, you better believe it!
He rocked himself to sleep, fantasizing what he was going to do with Dolly’s money. He knew he wanted to spend a few days walking around with a big wad, just to see how it felt to have 20 or thirty-thousand in his pocket. His father used to walk around with a wad & Dolly hated it. Now Bud understood the man’s motivation. He empathized . . . . . .
———————BLASTED awake by his mother at 2AM, her voice triple-amplified by the monitor, singing in her sleep
THE TEACHER TOLD HIS MOTHER
SHE’D TAKE HIM RIGHT IN HAND,
TEACH HIM A THING OR TWO!
LIKE HIS OLDER BROTHER
HE BEGAN TO UNDERSTAND,
LEARNING EVERYTHING
HE THOUGHT SHE KNEW . . . . . . . .
At a quarter to 4, awakened again––––––––
“Bud? Bud? Bud? Bud. Bud? Bud! BUD! Bud, I need you!”
He roused himself, practically stumbling into her room.
“Mom, what’s wrong!”
“I need to shit,” she whispered. “That’s what’s wrong.”
It took 10 minutes to maneuver her onto the seat of the walker that was kept beside the bed for this very contingency. He told her to raise her feet up so he could wheel her to the powder room. When they reached the doorway, Dolly said she needed to stand & move herself to the toilet, on her own power. It didn’t make much sense to Bud—it would have been easier just to push the walker past the tub to the bowl, but she wouldn’t be swayed. “This is the way we do it! This is the way Marta said to do it.”
When she reached her destination, he understood; much better that she was already standing. Dolly militantly barked orders—time was of the essence.
“Get rid of the walker!”
While she held tight to a diagonal safety bar on the wall, Bud removed the obstruction. She sighed, winced, & took a few pained breaths. He thought something might be wrong.
“Why are you wincing?”
“Because . . . because . . . because I haven’t had a shit in three days, does that answer your question? Because if it doesn’t, I’ll tell you again.”
She gave him a hard stare, as if to poison his eyes. His stomach contracted then he let it go. She slo-mo pirouetted until she stood in front of the toilet facing him, barely covered by her stained, debris-splattered robe.
Bud averted his eyes in modesty & disgust.
“Now I hold the other bar, and you—don’t move! Why are you moving around?—listen! What I want you to do is pull the diaper down around my ankles. Then I’ll grab your shoulders & you’ll lower me down. That’s how Marta does it.”
Bud tried to lower it but there was some sort of tape on one side, and he had to fuss with it. He got it unstuck and began to push the diaper down with both hands as Dolly snapped, “Come on, come on! Don’t be shy!”
Suddenly, she screamed. From his crouch, he looked up at her face, a mask of agony—he froze.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!”
On the fourth Ow, brown & yellow stool erupted from her anus, accompanied by a marching band of flatus. She began to lean backward; Bud reached around to brace her fall.
She hit the bowl with a muted clunk.
“Are you OK?”
She had the biggest smile on her face, & sang out:
“Plop plop, fizz fizz, O what a relief it is! Marta said I was due. She said, ‘You’re expecting. You’re going to have a baby.’ I said, ‘Make it a little girl, will you? I already have a little boy—’”
He was winded & nauseous.
“Cry, Marta, & let slip the dogs of war!”
Another fusillade as she emptied her bowels again, & Bud stood, woozy. He felt the sharp sting of a pulled lower back. With ecstatic voice, Dolly picked the song up where it left off.
“All the kids to the teacher carried—candy & ice cream cones!—but who do ya think the teacher married?—Wood’n head Puddin head Jones!”
CLEAN
[Bud]
The Art of Fiction, Part Two
“As
you know, David wrote the novels The Wire and Treme.”
“They’re novels? I mean, they were novels?” said Bud, flummoxed.
Michael Douglas was four tables away, having breakfast alone. The smell of his mother’s shit was still in his nostrils.
“They weren’t book novels, but David calls them—we all call them novels because of their dense narratives. And because of the feeling you have after you’ve watched them. It’s indistinguishable from the feelings you have after reading a novel.”
Bud kicked himself for spacing on Xochilt’s caveat. He wondered if David Simon was late, or if he was coming at all.
“They’re pretty much regarded by critics as literature. Did you know David won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for The Wire? They basically created a new category—The Novel as Filmed Drama.” Bud didn’t think Pulitzers were actually won, but why quibble? “David even did an ‘Art of Fiction’ interview for the Paris Review. You know Richard Price, don’t you? His work? He’s an amazing writer. He won a National Book Award. Or maybe it was a Pulitzer. Richard called The Wire a ‘Russian novel’*—we love Richard, he wrote some of our best shows. The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books have practically devoted whole issues to The Wire. I think if you sit down & watch all seven seasons, there is no way you would say at the end, ‘That was great television’ or even ‘That was great cable television,’ because The Wire is no more a TV show than it is a drama about police or about drug dealers or about Baltimore. David always says it’s not about any of those things! People make a serious mistake when they try to summarize what The Wire is about. You know, put it in a pigeonhole. If a gang of professors at Harvard, Cambridge & Oxford are still trying to figure it out—did you know they teach The Wire in universities all over the world?—then I really don’t think that a television critic, or even our viewers”—she speedily corrected herself—“our readers, are going to be able to nail.”
“Wow, no, I guess not.”
“The syllabus for the course Joyce Carol Oates teaches on The Wire at Princeton says that David’s book has darkly glinting Aeschylean moral textures. Don’t you think that’s perfect?”
“Very, very accurate.”
“She says these amazing things about the show, even David doesn’t understand some of the things she says! I shouldn’t say that. Joyce is beyond brilliant, and so is David. I know that David got annoyed with her though—they’re crazygood friends by the way, & he thinks she’s wonderful—but David got a little peeved because she teaches a course on Battlestar Galactica, & tells her students that she thinks it’s a ‘sy-fy Aeneid.’ David thought that was just a little over the top.”
“Yeah. Just a little!”
“David thought the essay about Mad Men was crazy too. It talked about Don Draper’s secret past creating a real dramatic crisis in the Aristotelian sense and conflict with an elegantly Sophoclean geometry.* David said, Get over yourself!”
“How many have you seen?”
“The Wire? All of them,” he lied. “Big fan from early on.”
“Have you seen Treme?”
“Love it.”
“Treme’s a really good book but I’m emotionally closer to The Wire because they were only in their 2nd season when I started interning for David.”
“Wow. What an amazing opportunity.”
“I’ll send you the pilot. Toni Morrison’s become a very serious fan. She is amazing.”
“Of Treme?”
“Of Treme AND The Wire. She came to The Wire late—her friend Fran Lebowitz turned her on—Fran’s a huge fan of The Wire. She was going to write something for us but for some reason it didn’t happen. Though I guess Fran not writing something isn’t so surprising!”
She arched her neck Michael Douglas’s way.
“He looks so great. Amazing man, amazing life.” Back to Bud. “Do you know Mike Schur?”
“Uhm, I don’t think so,” Bud said, tentatively.
“He’s a showrunner—The Office and Parks&Recreation.”
“O sure! We’ve met.”
“Mike said he wished he’d created The Wire. Mike said The Wire was Shakespearean.”
“Wow.”
Bud wanted to make points, & wondered if now was a good time to bring up Lorrie Moore’s essay on Friday Night Lights from The New York Review of Books, wherein she called The Wire a “visual novel.”*
“Did you know John Updike was watching The Wire when he died?”
“Wow. Incredible. Uhm . . . what about Mad Men?”
She went cold.
“What about it?”
>
“I was just wondering what David calls Mad Men. I mean, is it, does he think of it as a book?”
“You’re not joking?”
“No—I’m just trying to get a flavor of . . .”
“Mad Men is absolutely not a book—a novel. Mad Men is more like a novelization—no. Wait. I shouldn’t even say that, because David is the only one who is writing novels for television. Mad Men is more like a . . . cartoon, a manga. Mad Manga! But please, if you meet—when you meet David, please don’t talk about Mad Men.”
“My agent said David was developing—is developing—a new . . . a new novel about Hollywood.”
“Yes! That’s why he wanted to talk to you. He loved the little book of short stories you did about Hollywood.”
“He read that?”
“Very much.”
“I’m flattered.”
“When did you write that?”
“Probably about 25 years ago.”
“David thought they were more a novella than a book of short stories. But not a novel. He wanted to know if there were any more you’ve written.”
“O yeah!” he lied. “A bunch. But I’ve really been focusing the last few years on, well, I guess you’d call it a book.”
“Taking place in Hollywood?”
It sounded like that was what she wanted to hear—that he was working on a collection of “Hollywood” stories—so Bud decided to go with the flow. They’d apparently reached the meat of the interview.
“Yes! I was calling it a novel, but I guess it’s not, really—not the kind David writes! Which are so layered & . . . well, Sophoclean! And wonderful. Would you excuse me a second?”