by Bruce Wagner
That’s what the internet said.
. . .
Ginger sent her a beautiful email, thanking her. She also wanted to know when she could see the proof sheets. Jacquie told her she was sick & would it be all right if they met next week.
Ginger said of course and attached an article from The New York Times written by a mohel. A Jewish couple had scheduled their baby to be circumcised but it died 3 days after being born. They always do the bris on the 8th day of life. The parents called the mohel and told him what happened but said they wanted him to do the circumcision anyway. The essay was about what a wreck he was but the parents were calm and from them he drew strength. isn’t that interesting how he said they were so calm? she wrote. thats the way it was with Daniel & me when you were taking our picture. maybe you felt that too
Jacquie googled bris, then wondered if the mohel had skipped the prayer that welcomed the baby into the world.
CLEAN
[Jacquie&Jerzy]
Sicker Than the Remix
“Thank
you for meeting me. I appreciate that.”
They were having lunch at El Pollo Loco in the crappy strip mall at the corner of Sunset & Crescent Heights. A depressing convenience zone at the bottom of the Mt called Olympus.
Her son was dead pale. Jerzy never quite met her gaze, which had the effect of rendering a boyish grin insidious. From the waist up, the body was calm; the legs thundered beneath the table, as if working the pedals that animated him.
“Have you seen her?”
“Just about every day. We live in the same house.”
“Can you tell me what’s going on?”
She just couldn’t bring herself to say Jerzy.
“What’s going on?” he said, genuinely puzzled.
“With Jerilynn. Reeyonna.”
“Nuthin. I mean she’s good, she’s really good. I think she’s been looking for work.”
“Looking for work how,” said Jacquie, with a bite. “She’s five months pregnant.”
“You can be pregnant & work. Porn stars do it all the time.”
Deep breath. He is my son. He is damaged. He smells like chemicals. He despises me, & he is playing, a cat with a mouse. God, give me the strength to be grateful he agreed to see me. Help me not to blow it, God, at least not this far into the lunch.
“Jerzy”—it came out unbidden. “Do you think we can put our heads together?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Don’t call you Jerzy?”
“It’s Jerry.”
“I thought it was Jerzy.”
“Not to you.”
“OK. I didn’t mean to call you the wrong thing.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I just think we need to be kind of a team here. Because I think Jerilynn” (she only reverted because of what he just said. She was completely prepared to say Reeyonna) “is a little out of control. If it weren’t for the baby, it’d be different. We probably wouldn’t be sitting here. Though I’m very glad that we are.”
“Sure, Jacquie.”
His gaze was askew. He seemed to be grinning at something over her shoulder, as if an assassin just walked in—the one he’d hired to come from behind & slit her throat. He had already excused himself from the table three times, twice to the bathroom, & once to get the phone he supposedly left in the car even though it was visible in his pocket as he excused himself. She had no clue who this man was or where he’d come from, something aberrant in the Professor’s seed. She fantasized about being that timid, withdrawn Ocalan girl climbing into a time machine, brought forward to this time, this now, her time machine guide pointing to the tweaky stinkweed deadskinned bum & saying
That. That. That is what your baby will grow up to be.
“Rikki’s parents said she could stay with them.”
“Uh, I don’t really think she wants to do that.”
“But why? Why doesn’t she?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“She won’t speak to me. She hangs up when I call.”
“What can I say.”
Neither of them made even a pretense of eating their food. Jacquie tap-tapped the tabletop. His thighs momentarily slowed, as if to acknowledge whatever message was being imparted by her table-tapping tom tom. He threw that smug, knowing sado-smile at her tippy-tapping fingers, which made her stop.
“Do you know what all this is about, Jerzy? Jerry? Has Reeyonna talked to you about it? Has Jerilynn talked to you?”
She was starting to lose it with the double names & the double bullshit.
“A little.”
“What did she say?”
“You spent a bunch of money that was supposed to be hers?”
“Which isn’t true. Not that a little thing like that matters! There never was any money, Jerry, and none promised. Whatever money I made from my work—& believe me, it wasn’t a lot—whatever money I made was for the household. It was for rent and clothes and necessities. For you and your sister. Because Ronny wasn’t exactly, your stepfather was frugal, he never went above & beyond what the court told him to pay, which was an absurd amount. $550, something like that.” She stared down at the table at her own fingers, which weren’t tapping anymore, they were just laying there. “O what’s the use? What’s the use, there’s just no point. Your sister has this conviction in her head—and she’s stubborn—and there’s just no way to make her see anything different.”
Some fake eating and pushing around of food (Jerzy) and some rattatattapping/tomtom macoute (Jacquie).
Jacquie shrugged, & threw in the towel.
“At this point, your sister can think what she wants to think. I don’t have any control over that. If she wants to make me into the wicked witch, there’s nothing I can do. But I am concerned about her taking care of herself. Because if she’s not taking care of herself, she’s not taking care of the baby. Is she going to the doctor? Do you know if she’s been to see a doctor?”
“I think Rikki takes her to the free clinic. In Venice.”
“Well that’s nice to hear, that’s very good to hear, thank you. Because she’s got to be doing some kind of neonatal care. Because that’s important. I just want my daughter to have a happy healthy baby & be healthy in the process.”
“Right.”
The waitress came along & refilled Jerzy’s tea.
“So how are things going?”
Jacquie was surprised he asked.
“As well as can be. With diminished income and a fugitive daughter. And a son I never see.”
“You’re seeing me now.”
“Yes. I’m seeing you now.”
“So. Nuthin goin on with the career?” (That creepshow grin again.) “Any gallery shows coming up?”
She knew he knew that she didn’t. Please help me God to be gracious. “No, but there’s something I’ve just started to work on that I’m excited about. There’s definitely something there, I’m just not sure what it is yet.”
“Cool.”
She felt like an ass for oversharing.
“And how are things with you?”
“Same old same old. Workin hard, hardly workin.”
“Do you talk to your dad?”
“We kinda had a blow-out when I was in New York.”
She heard about that from her ex & had zero desire to hear junior’s side of the story.
“Still doing paparazzi work?”
“Yup,” he said. “Still a proud papa.”
“I saw a 60 Minutes. Is it true about some of these people making small fortunes off a single picture?”
These people. Like saying: So what do they exorbitantly pay these days for scraping dogshit off the sidewalk?
“Yup. The folks you work for take most of it, but you can do all right. Depends on getting that honeyshot.”
“What’s a honeyshot?”
“A paparazzi term,” he said, goofing on her a little. “For a shot you know you can get at least 5,000 fo
r.”
“Have you ever gotten one?”
“My specialty,” he said, trés insouciant.
MoMA paid the bill & they walked to the lot. She asked which one was his ride. He pointed to the gnarly van (Honeyshot Central USA).
She took a sealed envelope from her wallet.
“I’d be very grateful if you’d give it to Jerilynn.”
Obvious from the heft that it was bread.
“Should I say it’s from you?”
“No. Well—you can. I guess. Yeah, well why don’t you. It doesn’t really matter. She took some things from me, some very valuable things, but I still want her to know . . .”
Jacquie broke it off, her eyes tearing.
“That’s really nice. Of you.”
He put his hand on her arm for a moment; she smiled at the small tenderness. She got into her car & he stood there until she rolled down her window. His voice grew low & different; intimate, strangely focused, out of alignment, compelling.
“You know Ashton Kutcher? From 2½ Men?”
“Uh huh.”
“Who’s supposedly no longer with his old lady?”
He lost her there.
“Have you heard him talk about the apocalypse?”
“No. I haven’t.”
“He talks about it on the Internet. Tho it’s hard to find now; someone did a lot of scrubbing. & you know what kind of resources that takes . . . I think the original interview’s in some kind of outdoor mag. You should google it. He talks all about how he’s stockpiling food & water, building up his body.”
“O my god, are you serious?”
She was glad he was engaging her conversationally, no matter how off the wall. Listening instead of talking relaxed her.
“For real. And that he’s totally prepared to move his family—he and Moore-Willis are still totally together—to higher ground whenever it goes down.”
“Really?”
“Don’t believe everything you hear. They’ll be together forever, you can’t break your vows, not when you’ve been married by the Puppetmather. So Ashton gave that interview—one interview—about the coming Wars, & that was it. Not a single word after. I mean, Ashton Kutcher was saying this shit, not Gary Busey or Michael Lohan! Not even Mel Gibson . . . my point being it should have been huge. The guy’s still in the Twitter Top 10, probably hanging on by his teeth, Taylor Swift, the mudsharkardashians they can really hold their mud!—Obama, Rihanna (all Puppetmather loyalists I might add), fucking Shakira pardon my language is higher on twitter than Ashton, still that’s 8 million people or whatever, right? But nope: nuthin. Silencio! Ask yourself why. Next thing you know, Ashton & Demi are all about sex trafficking, the new spokescouple for saving little girls from pimps. They’re all over it. Suddenly they have this passion, which is funny cause he inseminated those girls, Rumer 1st then Tallulah & Scout, to protect them from the black hooligans who will dominate the 1st segment of the Wars. To protect with the elixir of his blood—the 3rd horse of the Apocalypse. Suddenly they’re all about child trafficking, a topic with that rare quality of being able to captivate and bore the shit out of a person at the same time. You can’t even be cynical because you’re just not going to pay attention long enough. Which is how it was engineered. You hear child sex trafficking and part of you checks out, you say Huh? O—yeah yeah, right, yadda yadda, uh huh, good activism on ya Ashton & Demi . . . like out of nowhere this became their pet cause, and here’s the question to posit: Do you really think that was their decision? To suddenly be the impassioned spokespersons for child sex trafficking? Well I don’t. Because none of these people—from Katy Perry to Suri Cruise to Gotye on down—none of these people do anything without being told, they don’t even shit in their Totos pardon my language unless the Puppetmathers gives em a heads up. The whole trafficking thing was brilliant (who do you think came up with it? EeYo-Veen & M2, um, duh), its goal being to deflect attention from Ashton’s prematurely delivered eschatology because everything he said was true but wasn’t meant to be heard just yet. Ashton marches to his own drum which M2 actually likes, but this time he got in just a bit of hot water because he shot his mouth off before getting the heads-up, jus kinda went ahead & did his own thing & said what he said, the text of which Puppet-M approved but not the timing. So the Puppetmather reigned him in. But it all blew over, don’t believe everything you hear, Ashton remains a beloved mascot, loyal court jester & perennial of the Plantation. Tho be assured the time will come when EeYo-Veen will say, Do it, Ash. You go girl, do it NOW! TALK about it, good on ya. There was a happy ending after all because they were relieved: I’m talking Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, Jada Pinkett, the Olsen/Russiangoogle twins, I’m talking Sean John, Jay-Z, Gwyneth, Anne Hathaway, the Widow Jobs, everyone at youngmoneycashmoney . . . the attention span of the public ain even short anymore, it don’t exist. People can’t be bothered, the Puppetmather counts on that, plus he wisely planted the seed that Ashton was colossally punk’ing himself.”
“What are you saying.”
(What could she say.)
“OK, the Four Horsemen. The 1st is white—victory. The Whites will be victorious, OK? Duh. The 2nd is black—famine. The Blacks will starve, OK? Duh. The 3rd is red, that’s just blood, OK? Red is Black Blood being spilled. But the one you need to pay attention to, is the 4th. The 4th horse is pale, like your grandchild’s going to be. That’s why the baby’s going to be in danger. They will hunt down the remixes.”
“Jerry, I need to go.”
He became contrite.
“O. Sorry. I’m not really serious. I’m just thinking about this stuff all the time. Kinda just me playing chess in my head, but out loud. Hey thank you for buying lunch.”
“Thank you for visiting.”
“Stay foolish. Stay hungry. I wish you way more than luck.”
“Will you please take care of yourself, Jerry?”
“All day long.” He smiled and finally looked her in the eye. She caught a glimpse of the 11 year-old boy. “All day long.”
“Please. Please take care.”
“I will,” he said. “I will.” Then, “I will.”
“If you need any help in doing that, I want you to promise to call, OK?”
“Yeah yeah, sure sure. Sorry I went off. I’m just fuckin around. With words. You should listen to ‘Syllables’—Dre says ‘the torch is gunna burn out before it gets passed, Jay said it’s his last, & 50, & Em, then what?’—the Puppetmathers & all his slaves are on that song, the Puppetmathers is the very 1st one to sing, like he always is, you will notice that on songs he’s always No. 1 & in concert he comes out last to upstage the shameful spectacle of the indentured minstrels he has ordained to precede him, but make no mistake, in Syllables the vastness of his armies are talking about the end of the world not just of rap, they’re saying everything Ashton was saying, but in code. Meaning, the Wars will bring great suffering, there will be many dead on both sides but the Whites will rise like a Phoenix, the wind beneath its wings comprised of Black Archangel Slaves. Some of the code’s on 2½ Men, you just have to watch and listen, do not underestimate John Cryer’s involvement, that would be what they call a Fatal Error. The 2 Chucks—Sheen & Lorre—were made from Cryer’s rib, just as the 2 Carters—DWAYNE MICHAEL CARTER & SHAWN COREY CARTER—were made from O.G. Sammy Davis Jr . . . Cryer is as close to Puppetmathers as Ye is to Hov, as close as the blonde-rooted patsy ?uestlove is to his slavemaster Fallon, ?uestlove who cowers and kowtows to Tina Fey. Britney’s so-called dance till the world ends is in code, preapproved by LA Reid . . . its true meaning that General (All-Seeing) Eye-Veen is willing to face the end of Time, which is his strength, Time, that echo of an axe in the wood. Learn from his example. All see it coming. The Deschanels will sit on the right of the throne, Eye-oh-Veen & L.A. Reid on the left. They are signing everyone up for the fires.”
“Okay. Jerry—”
(Contrite and comical.)
“Ima jus playin! I’ll shut up. Ima jus’ playin . . . . .
”
“Jerry, I really need to go. Maybe you should give me the envelope back.”
“No, it’s cool! I’ll get it to her.”
“Are you sure? Because I really need to count on you, I’m counting on you. You promise you’ll get it to her?”
“No worries.”
“OK then. Please take care.”
“I will. I am. I will.i.am.”
“Just please make sure you get that to Jerilynn.”
EXPLICIT
[Jerzy]
Ebony and Ivory
From: Paparazzo Guy ([email protected])
Sent: Sat 4/21/12 1:30 PM
To: Suge Knight ([email protected])
Inbox (131)
Dear Reverend Suge Knight (president, founder, CEO Deathrow Records).
My name is Jerzy Crelle-Vomes. For several reasons, not to be revealed, I shall be brief.
Perhaps you may remember our last meeting, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in the CCU. I had a heart attack which wasn’t too sever, & was forced to make my residence there for a period of one week. You were kind enough to be among my few and special visitors.
As you know, Reverend Knight, I am a professional photographer of some experience and well standing. My work brings me into contact with famed celebs of all size and stripe, notwithstanding otherwise notable people who have attached themselves (or wished to) throughout the many years to you with great determinedness in order to gain some of your luster, and move within your Many Spheres. Many of them would not even be known to the world without you having given them a wide birth.