by Bruce Wagner
When Ree snidely asked how much rent Bolt was paying, Tom-Tom exploded. He isn’t paying ANY, bitch, because if it weren’t for HIM there would be NO FUCKING PILOT OR CAMERA CREW & if you give me anymore SHIT I’ll throw you & that frickin TUMOR you’re growing in your ASS on the frickin STREET. Understand? (ReeRee had to nod and keep her head down, had to sit & take it because she didn’t have a plan.) Motherfuckin nigger wannabe wants to tell me my BUSINESS. 16 & pregnant & she’s all up in my BUSINESS, ain’t THAT a bitch. You better keep a LEASH on her Rikki! You better keep a leash on that fat bitch cause I SWEAR I am gunna go OFF. (back to Ree:) & you DO NOT want to see that, no you DON’T. Because you couldn’t HANDLE it. Little Miss Wiggermuffett wants to sit there on her fat leaky TUFFETT on MY bed in MY house & tell ME my BUSINESS. ‘Yeah ahm the best to ever DO IT bitch, & you the best at never doin SHIT.’ Eatin my FOOD, doin my DOPE—don’t tell me you AINT motherfucker I KNOW you been doin my dope, don’t you think I KNOW that? Ain nobody else like to eat ROXIES like you do too, not even you’re brother. That’s YOU. You like eatin Roxies almost as much as you like eatin fucking ENTEMANN’S FUDGE CAKE y’fat BITCH, fuckin POSER, ‘Reeyonna,’ you WISH you LOOKED like Rihanna, too bad you gotta hairline like DRAKE. Fuckin Eddie MUNSTER. Anybody ever tell you you got a hairline like Drake? So FUCK y’all, I don’t wanna HEAR about it. I don’t wanna hear SHIT from you, Mama Cass. Just get me my MONEY & shut the fuck UP. Do you hear me? Hey! I’m talking to you—”
– (Rikki) Lighten up on her, Tom-Tom.
– I’m talkin to HER not YOU. I’m talkin to HER, not you, do you HEAR ME? (still to Rikki) Don’t just move your HEAD, bitch—
– Don’t be callin me no bitch.
– I’ll call you what I call you, this is MY house. When I’m in YOUR house, you can call me what YOU want to call me. Do you understand? Do you hear me?
– Yeah I hear you. But don’t be callin me a bitch.
– Get out of my face, boat ch’all. Go spread your elephant legs for my buoy here. Otherwise he tends to go ASTRAY. He’s the father of your child, ain he? Better throw him some pussy or he’ll go astray. Men are like that. How do you eat that bitch. Bitch so fat her pussy lips like goin down there & finding a steak pinned to her snatch. Hee HEE! Somebody liked to put a T-bone down there! Now get out of my face boat ch’all.
. . .
“Hello?”
“Hello? Hi! May I speak to Chuck Aaron?”
“Who may I ask is calling?”
“My name is Reeyonna? I met him at the convention?”
“What convention was that.”
“The one for—the reality—the reality show convention.”
“Oh! Right. & may I ask the purpose of the call?”
“He said he was casting something? He was, uhm, he was looking for women who were pregnant?”
(The officious voice suddenly effusive)
“O hi! This is Chuck.”
“O—hi.”
“I remember you. You were worried I was from MTV.”
“Well, not really.”
“I’m so happy you called.”
“Are they still—are you still casting?”
“We’re always casting.”
“I mean for the pregnant—”
“Yes ma’m. What month are you?”
“I’m going into my 8th.”
“Well guess what, that actually sounds pretty perfect for what we need. Is that your real name? Rihanna?”
“I spell it different. I’m R-e-e-y-o-n-n-a.”
“You’re white, right?”
“White.”
“Right, because I remember. But for a second there I’m going, But she’s white . . . so I guess you’re president of Reeyonna’s fan club, huh.”
“She’s pretty awesome.”
“She is—& I’ll bet you are too. I remember you as being awesome.” (She telephonically blushed) “What about today, later on today? Do you think you can make it out here?”
“Uhm—today?” (Taken aback) “Today . . . you know, I really don’t think so. I’ve been having car trouble.”
(She would have to figure out a way to get there. She could take a cab, or maybe Dr Phil could take her, she trusted Phil. She didn’t want Rikki to know she was trying out for something because she was embarrassed, it was something she would never do under so-called normal circumstances but there wasn’t such a thing anymore, she’d left the world of normal circumstances the moment she got pregnant, & now with the break from her mother her banishment was permanent. There was a time not too long ago when she would have laughed at a pathetic pregnant girl calling some casting geek she met at a lameass convention but now everything was different, like for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the house had fallen to Earth only she was stuck beneath, she needed money, they needed money, needed it bad & one never knew. Maybe it was for a commercial, Toyota or Apple or whatever, no, probably it was for a baby product, maybe even for the people with the umbilical cord blood company. Also, she didn’t want Rikki to know because of the casting fiasco he’d just gone thru, she didn’t want him to feel like the same thing was about to happen to her, the same heartbreak, or for him to think she was trying to upstage him.)
“Uhm, tomorrow?”
“To—morrow . . . let me look & see what we’re doing to-morrow . . . aren’t the iPhones somethin? I was synching mine the other day & it wiped my calendar & addressbook clean! Sorry it’s taking me a moment—”
“That’s terrible.”
She’d been so stiff; she wanted to at least sound somewhat personable before they hung up.
“. . . and 2 o’clock it is!”
“OK great!”
“Do you know where we are, Reeyonna?”
“It says Canoga Park on the card?”
“Correct. It’s a pretty sprawling campus . . . I’ve been here 3 yrs & I still get lost!”
She was nauseous, not because of him but because of everything.
“Reeyonna, what’s your email? I’ll shoot you the directions.”
“That’s OK. We have GPS.”
She said we because she didn’t want him to think she was by herself. He sounded totally cool but she wanted to be careful, and smart about it.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m okay. Is there anything special I should wear?”
“At this stage, I’d say anything you can fit into!”
The call wrapped & she pressed END.
She immediately got a text message from a number she didn’t recognize, and thought it was a good omen: MOVIE EXTRAS WANTED! Make up to $300/day. All looks, No Experience Required! To register call 877-589-4432. to unsub reply STOP.
Then:
She tried to stop it but the sick came up, sternum-stinging & vile, bursting from nostrilsmouth into the futile catchbasin of her cupped beggar’s hand, roaring stinging stinking thru the rolling hilled town of her fattened body & into the toilet, bile train express, she flushed flushed flushed and the sick swirled down in its spiraling hurry toward
subterranean
stops
at
stations
un
known.
CLEAN
[Jacquie]
The Heart Is Unholy Hunter
When
Jacquie got home from Scottsdale, she went over to Jim & Dawn’s for coffee.
Jim said he spoke with Reeyonna and got the sense she might be growing tired of what he called “the itinerant life.” He suspected she’d soon take him up on his proposal, “hopefully sooner than later.”
. . .
The Arizona woman was Ginger’s 1st cousin. The timing of the deaths—Ginger’s stillborn & her cousin’s infant—was morbidly preordained. Jacquie was a little more certain of herself than before, but only a little. This was a far different tableau.
The baby was almost four months old. Mom wanted him to sleep in their bed but the dad thought that wasn’t safe; he worried about them rolling over and suffocating it. Bes
ides, they never did that with their toddlers. Both parents fell into a deep sleep. A few hours later, the mom had a nightmare and woke up. She went straight to the crib (foot of the bed) and snatched up her baby, knowing it would be dead.
A neighbor watched the kids while they brought their son to the hospital. In a quiet moment in the cafeteria, the father told Jacquie he kept speeding up, instinctively, as if something could still be done, then slowing down when his wife cautioned his speed. Each time he slowed, he would suddenly remember what sort of errand they were on, that his son was dying. His thoughts would drift to funerals and grieving before abruptly returning to the present, whereupon he would speed up again. A father is not supposed to be the driver of his son’s hearse. That was a thought he couldn’t at that moment give words to. On the 10-minute ride, the only words he did say were directed toward the road ahead. “Is this happening?” His wife didn’t answer.
He was six hours dead by the time Jacquie got there. The doctors suspected SIDS but in these sorts of cases, an autopsy was standard. Child abuse needed to be ruled out; the place of death would be investigated like a crime scene. The presence of toxins, fungus and nitrogen dioxide would be thoroughly delineated. Large stuffed animals would be regarded as suspicious asthmatic triggers. A/C ducts and heating vents would be examined as carriers of mold and second-hand smoke. All manner of things would come into play before anyone might even begin to approach a reasonable conclusion.
The very phrase Sudden Infant Death gave Jacquie the heebie-jeebies. She remembered her own fears, especially when Jerry Jr. was born, back when SIDS seemed to be more talked about. (Perhaps it still was but if you didn’t have babies you wouldn’t hear about it.) It still seemed the stuff of folklore, like those Japanese ghost stories she read in college where red foxes came from the hills to carry off sleeping children. It was a freakish puzzling thing, like spontaneous combustion.
When the pastor explained to the hospital administrator their wishes—to have a portrait taken as a memento—he was given a compassionate response. Their request to take their son back to the house for the photo was denied, but the administrator said they could have use of a doctors lounge or the hospital chapel. They chose the chapel. After the session, they insisted Jacquie stay for supper. Their children were young and well-behaved, & the parents didn’t censor themselves. The mother complimented Jacquie on the portraits she took of Ginger and Daniel’s beloved; her cousin sent the images to her online. She said it was “God’s will and God’s way” that she saw those pictures because not in a million years would she even have thought of doing what they did today.
Toward the end of the meal, the three-year old said from his high-chair, “Is baby dead?”
. . .
She took a 10PM flight home. In the darkness, she held the Hasselblad in her lap as she would a baby. It was new, a replacement for the one her daughter stole. She hoped it did right by her.
Jacquie scrolled through the nightlight of her iPad to the wikipage on SIDS that she loaded in the airport. Statistical pre-natal risks: Teenage mother. Mother doesn’t finish high school. Mother is unmarried. Exposure to nicotine. Absence of pre-natal care——————————————————————
——————————————a strong JOLT. (She’d fallen asleep) The tires hit the runway, just like how it sounds in the movies. Then the thrilling, thundering melodrama of domesticated engines roaring anew to slow the plane down, one last shout-out to show the world they were still wild.
. . .
Jacquie kept her job at Sears. It grounded her. Albie liked having her around, & she liked being around Albie.
At home, she sequestered herself. She studied 19th-century postmortem photography with its daguerreotypes of moms&dads posing with the deceased: newborns, infants, toddlers. The poses of the living were as stiff as those of the dead. The departed wore heartbreaking outfits, miniature breeches, bespoke three-piece munchkin suits and white doily-hemmed cotton smocks resembling pillowcases altered for the occasion, each dead star clothed in awkwardly sublime get-ups—raiments sewn with infinite loving care for those extirpated creatures now impossible to fathom, for softened husks were all that now remained after untold empyreal explosions, supertransmundane stellar remnants of quarky matter that cradled all things, novas and supernovas, beginnings and endings, darkness and light, tiny celestial bodies illumined & decayed. With a final, storm-tossed exhalation (the undomesticated roar of tiny celestial engines) the dead rose to drift and dissolve into the ineffable, the Cloud of Unknowing, which the medievalists declared (the internet did tell her so) could never be witnessed, for how can one see the face of God unless through expired yet still half-open eyes? But there they were, served up on photographic plates: eternally unphotogenic, captured like big (little) game, their lonely hunters—all the sad, benumbed, peculiar, frontier-looking relative-folk—memorialized with their kill.
. . .
She visited Woodlawn Cemetery because to do it all online—“research”—ultimately seemed cheap and disrespectful. The Internet seduced one into believing God was in the details, and nothing was more detailed than the Alexandrian archives of the web.
Mournful Shostakovich in the car to summon the mood. She loved the way cemeteries were always open, like churches used to be. Should she park close to the perimeter? Or go deeper in?—————she drove until she was in the heart of it. Left the car and strolled to an area of flat markers. The 1st stone said: MY DARLING BABY born August 3, 1962. That’s all that was written, a single date would apply to those stillborn, or those who never breathed for an entire day. Then: she was swimming in a sea of darling babies (all flat markers), many with birth- and death dates just a few days or few weeks apart. She saw an engraving that told her this part of the cemetery was called “Babyland.” It sounded like part of a cruel boardgame.
. . .
She pondered her camera’s monstrance-eye, immersing herself in funerary ferrotypes & historical portraiture of the effigies of those who died before reaching the so-called age of reason. All such angelitos enter Paradise, unencumbered—in Mexico, the child’s godparents crowned the head with orange-blossoms while firecrackers announced the coronation of a new angel in Heaven. It interested her how popular belief held that if parents shed tears for their loss, the little one’s soul would never reach heaven. Both sets of parents Jacquie had encountered, both mothers, had that instinctive, preternatural calm, and perhaps this explained it. A calm transcending shock, alone.
That night, she read about a mother’s struggle to get a birth certificate for her stillborn. The woman became a lobbyist for stillborns’ right-of-dignity. (Such was her sad, sacred, postmortem activity—supplanting that of nursing her baby, cooing over it, watching as it slept with a mother’s beautiful, fierce-loved, penetrating gaze.) She called them “angelic records,” noting that such bureaucratic consecrations were the closest we might come to a divine census of souls. All she’d ever wanted was to be a mother, and now that she was—for chrissake, all you need to qualify was to have given birth!—they’d refused her, they’d defaced her motherhood, as womanness, her intangible mysteries. They seemed to be of hell-bent mind that the star she carried in her womb for 8½ months and nourished with her very blood had never existed. Apparently, she could apply for a fetal death certificate but nothing more . . . the records of death took precedence over those of life! The woman was contemptuous of the consolation prize being offered: a non-legally binding “Memorial Certificate of Birth Resulting In Stillbirth.” She didn’t care about the controversies and debates—Pro-Choice feared that with the State’s sanctification Pro-Life would take the fetus-as-child football and run to the endzone—this gal didn’t care a whit. Because once she had been young, daydreaming of the children she’d have after marrying. How could she have fathomed God’s will, how could she ever have comprehended His plan, that her baby would rise into the Cloud of Unknowing at the beginning of its life, not the end?
. . .
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. . .
She got an email from Ginger.
“Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them”
. . .
Pieter called.
Jacquie said, “Good Lord, what time is it there?”
“530AM. I’m on my way to the gym.”
“Jesus. California’s a bad influence on you.”
“Can you speak?”
“Yep. And I’ve got moveable parts.”
“Beth Rader wants to see the pictures.”
“Huh?”
“Beth Rader—I thought you knew her. Well she said she knew you, but I guess she meant your work.”
“She wants to see what.”
“That amazing 5 by 7 you showed me, at the Chateau.”
“Pieter, I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
He repeated himself very slowly, which was annoying.
“Beth Rader wants you to stop by the gallery and show her the photo you took of that family in the hospital.”
“I’m not getting this, Pieter.”
“She’s at Gagosian in Beverly Hills. I took a picture of it with my iPhone & emailed it to her.”
“You took a picture of what I showed you?”
“You can hate me, Jacquie, but this is your major work. I don’t even think you know it yet. I think part of you does, part of you knows. Maybe the part that showed me, the part that let me in. And I’m just really honored to have been able to play that part. To have been in the right place at the right time. That’s where you are too, Jacquie, that’s where you are. The right place at the right time. I think it’s finally all come together for you. But you can’t do it alone—there’s just no reason to.”