Thrill-Bent Read online

  I heard rustling outside the bathroom window. The only window was small and slatted, overlooking the backyard patio. A lemon tree stood directly in front of it, obscuring any coherent view either in or out. I had gotten used to the shadows of branches and the ripe-sweet smell of lemon flowers penetrating my privacy, but this was a new sound, a sound too fidgety and irregular for nature. Before I could swing around to locate the source of the noise, I was distracted by something in the mirror; something was floating behind my head, stenciled onto my image like a halo or a superego.

  It was a face full of being human, a pair of eyes that dug hollows into mine. I saw the Condor’s face rise in the dull late-afternoon light, pressed like a polestar up against the window, branches in his ears and eyebrows, lemons sprouting from his head. I didn’t know how he got there without my hearing him. Perhaps it was when I had the water running for the bath. Could he have been standing there for so long, clutching a branch to stay aloft? Had he heard all my whispered comments? Seen my display in front of the mirror? Had he stared unmov-ing while I perfumed my breasts, ground my hips into the mirror, pumped up and down on my knees like a piston? I grabbed my towel and clutched it to the front of my body. Then I remembered the mirror; my bare ass would be facing him. I reached behind me, aiming for the dangling terry cloth. But the more I tried to catch the tail of the towel, the further it flew from my body, and I twirled in a furious dance with rage and modesty—all my frustration was poured through that solid gold funnel: covering my nakedness seemed paramount. I finally managed to wrap the bath towel around all vulnerable parts of my flesh. I was shaking so badly I thought the sloppy knot would vibrate off, so I kept clutching the ends together with one hand. With the other, I turned the creaky handle to the window slats until I heard them squeak shut. Then I gave it an extra turn, to insure air-tightness. I did all this without looking out the window, forcing my eyes to the sink, the tub, anywhere except the world outside the powder-blue bathroom, with just my arm thrust out to make the irrevocable gesture, as though the rest of me was oblivious.

  I didn’t have to look. I knew he was gone. It was a flash meeting, a bolt of lightning that lit up what had long lived in darkness, invasion and lust, green lemons on a knife-sharp tree.

  I had danced for him. I had danced because it was the only way I knew to win an argument. Even if he hadn’t been standing in the branches of the lemon tree, he would have been perched on a bleacher somewhere in me, applauding wildly for the one strategy he couldn’t compete with: my body. It was the only way in which he wasn’t me.

  Valley of the Dolls

  My plane arrives at Los Angeles International Airport two hours behind Betty’s, and she picks me up in her rented Audi outside of Terminal 3 wearing huge white sunglasses, her gold hair tied up in a scarf. It’s time for a little R & R along the frothy skirt of California’s cheesi-est stretch of coast. I am definitely ready for an expense-accounted convertible, for tube tops and taco trucks, for rollerblades and cocktails made with muddled cucumber, for the sight of young men peeling off tight rubber casings to reveal tanned, salt-beaten flesh (I’m looking forward to this even after learning that surfers often pee inside their wetsuits to keep warm).

  Betty finally convinced BadMouth’s managing editor to let her come to LA by agreeing to cover a show in San Francisco this weekend. Pussy Posse is a band led by a guy named Kevin who’s gotten famous by being Leonardo DiCaprio’s best friend. Knowing Betty’s ruthless prose, I feel sorry for the guy already. She has a reputation for being BadMouth’s hard-nosed columnist from hell, but really she just describes exactly what happens at a show in such precise detail that what emerges is a frighteningly clear picture of the (often) myopic musicians at work. And I happen to know that, though her scrutiny can be stinging at times, Betty lives for those rare moments of true communal experience, those pockets of time when the music is all that exists, when noise and melody and flying beads of sweat obscure the accepted hierarchy of social status: beauty, talent, money, personality, wit. Her column is called “Flak Jacket” because it’s printed on the back jacket of the magazine, usually with a token photo: a phone number scrawled on a bar napkin, a chewed-on guitar pick. Once it was a blood-spotted thong that she managed to photograph after it was removed from the bleeder’s body but before it landed on the oblivious lead guitar player’s boot. I don’t know what she’ll snap this weekend, but we have seventy-two hours not to think about it.

  The boardwalk that runs from Venice through Santa Monica is lined with tattoo parlors, souvenir stores, char-broiled burger stands, and inflatable jump castles, and manages to retain an air of quaint charm, even while hundreds of gang bangers strut and loiter like sailors on leave. We amble in slow motion behind the rollerblad-ers, bicyclists, and jog-strollers, licking a couple of Big Sticks and enjoying the ridiculous oiled pecs of bodybuilders flexing along Venice’s legendary Muscle Beach; the sunlight skittering across the endless pan of turquoise water; a co-ed beachside volleyball game whose participants seem culled from the cast of American Pie 2. It is a completely civilized seventy-four degrees here by the sea, and breezy.

  An anemic roller coaster sits perched on the Santa Monica pier next to a big ferris wheel and a cluster of brightly painted carnival rides that look as though they’d been shrunk to fit onto the narrow quay. This new-ish kiddie coaster isn’t on my list—it isn’t slated for demolition, but I wouldn’t miss it if it was axed. An early twentieth-century carousel is still housed in a peeling Moorish Hippodrome at the base of the pier, next to a tackle shop where a couple of old fishermen reel in palm-sized, khaki-colored perch. This isn’t the first time I’ve lapsed into nostalgia upon seeing a modern remake of a lost treasure; I can’t help thinking of the grainy photos I’ve seen on the internet: in 1916, a carousel carver named Charles Looff (who later built the Big Dipper coaster in Santa Cruz, California) bought one of the original racing coasters from the 1915 San Diego Exposition and opened an amusement park on the pier, which also included the world’s largest circle swing, a flying boat ride, and a separate pavilion for bowling and billiards. He even convinced Pacific Electric to run a trolley from downtown LA. Then in the 1920s the fancy La Monica ballroom was built, hosting big bands and swing dances, not to mention some of the earliest national television broadcasts, until it was destroyed by a storm that cracked most of the pier’s pilings.

  I kneel down to peek through a wide knothole in the boardwalk’s slats; the patch job looks sloppy. As she helps me up, Betty slips six tablets into my hand. They are small and yellow, with a tiny “H” printed on each one. She looks at me in bug-eyed surprise, like she’s been pinched.

  “Don’t get all aghast,” she says. “It’s haloperidol. I bought it from a Mexican pharmacy on the internet.” She speeds up slightly, pacing herself a couple of feet ahead of me. “I told you about this. I mean, I told you I was thinking about doing this.”

  “You also said you were thinking about adopting a Mandarin baby and naming it Kitsch.”

  She sighs and pries a cigarette out of an old pack she finds in the recesses of her denim shoulder bag. “You want?”

  I nod. She is trying to quit. She throws her head back and swallows a fistful of pills, washing them down with another drag off her cigarette. Then she picks a piece of tobacco off her tongue.

  The truth is I’d forgotten about Betty’s plans to become Tourettic. When I first told her that my dad was afflicted, she’d gone on this fervent research kick, poring the web for information about neurological disorders, and found out that haloperidol, the neuroleptic medication most commonly prescribed for Tourette’s, had some aspects that looked promising for ordinary seekers like us. It’s a dopamine suppressor. Haloperidol is what ER doctors give to kids who overdose on ecstasy. But it turns out that decreasing the release of central norepinephrine in the brain actually lowers blood pressure by causing the veins to expand, so there’s more oxygenated blood flowing through you at a slower rate. That’s basi
cally what Quaaludes do, and ketamine. Any of those drugs that make you feel like you’re swimming through Jell-O. It all seems pretty slipshod to me; they give the same drug to ravers, psychotics, and people with tics? Pharmacology is a primitive science. I remember my dad mentioning that he had begun taking haloperidol years ago, but I could never tell any difference in the frequency or intensity of his outbursts.

  “Cunt, snatch, twat, beaver, furburger, love muscle, taco, altar of love ...” Betty begins. She plays this game when she’s trying to cheer me up.

  “Beautiful, fragrant, man-eating flower,” I add automatically. “Slippery little anemone that grips when you least expect it.”

  “Take your medicine,” she says, boring into my eyes like a Christian camp counselor. I shrug, then trot over to the water fountain on the pier’s edge. I take all six pills with a slurp from the trickle of lukewarm water that tastes like eye drops. I don’t know what the haloperidol will do to us. For all I know it may not work unless we’re symptomatic.

  “Atta girl,” says Betty. “It’s got to at least make us woozy.”

  I attempt a smile and brush a wayward white ash off of Betty’s cheek. “I haven’t been woozy in a while,” I reply.

  We decide to drive the thirty miles to Betty’s mom’s house in the Valley. We want to get there before we start feeling the dolls. That way we can abandon the car and embark on a journey to the center of our respective earths without having to risk getting pulled over by some humorless highway patrolman who has forgotten all about the pleasures of recreational drug use.

  Sherman Oaks is where Betty spent her formative years, carpooling from mall to mall in 110-degree heat, stashing shoplifted pairs of jeans throughout the ranch-style house, the large mortgage of which her mom still pays with a combination of alimony checks and wages from her part-time job as a Beverly Hills beautician. She works at one of those fancy spas that looks like a private chalet, with valet parking and an actual butler answering the heavy, Louis XIV door. There are always exotic, state-of-the-art beauty products lying around her mom’s house and we figure we can get high and sit in the hot tub wearing masks made of manatee placentas or something.

  I am secretly hoping that the haloperidol will allow me to feel as free as Betty seems to, moving through the world as a lobster skitters on the ocean floor, unfettered by any bipedal obligation to gravity or self-loathing. Though she is my best friend, I am never free of the thought that Betty is unfamiliar with my most basic mentality. I don’t think she’s ever been really depressed or picked at a mosquito bite until it bled or called somebody in the middle of the night and cried inconsolably when they answered. She rarely questions the wisdom or consequences of her impulsiveness, her tongue-kissing of strangers and spearheading of midnight road trips, the way she creates an ongoing mosaic of haphazard worldly heat that never needs revising or regretting.

  I examine my hand while it reaches up to flip on the mirror lamp. The narrow beam of light beam pours across my skin like a spilled stream of milk and I forget what I’m supposed to be doing; my hand looks like a hand from one of those Dutch paintings, a white lily poised on the wrist of an expressionless lady. I hold it up, cupped and swivel-ing. I read somewhere that Tourette’s is hereditary; seventy percent of adults with a Tourettic parent exhibit some neurological symptoms of the disease. I look more closely at my hand, at my gnawed cuticles and at the constellation above my wrist, three mauve scars from where I poked at my skin with a freshly sharpened pencil while doing the New York Times crossword puzzle until pellicles of graphite merged with purple eruptions of blood to create three tiny Etnas on my right forearm. It is ugly the way only something self-inflicted can be ugly, like a bulimic’s red-veined eyeballs, or anyone wearing spandex.

  It is almost dark when we park in the roomy driveway behind the turquoise carport. Jackson, Betty’s slightly younger brother—though not so much younger that it isn’t a stretch of the imagination to conceive of why he would still be living at home with his mother—is splayed on the front lawn wearing gray sweatpants, cut off at mid-calf, and a Conjunction Junction T-shirt. He is a tall, wiry young man with the thatched-roof eyebrows and curlicue grin of the Grinch.

  “Jesus, Jackson, give it a rest,” is Betty’s muttered salutation.

  I wonder what the story is. Whenever Betty has mentioned Jackson to me, she’s employed a satirical tone that defies analysis. “He’s the babyest of baby brothers,” she’ll quip. But looking at him now, romantically illumined by a lemony bug light, Jackson looks neither infantile nor particularly dumb. His arms are ropy and tanned, and his eyes are open. He discreetly darts a glance at Betty while she stomps up the short row of stairs to the front door, but his gaze springs back to me without missing a beat, and he tosses his dirty-blond hair back from his face with a defiant lurch. Either I am coming on the haliperidol, or every other toe on Jackson’s bare feet is painted with glow-in-the-dark glitter polish.

  The lawn is plush and cool on my bare feet, and it takes me a moment to realize that is not made of grass but of some sort of tiny, clover-like ground cover. My foot leaves an ephemeral print, a ghostly green indent that fades back into smooth perfection after a few seconds. I sit down and try making impressions with different body parts, delighting in the spongy texture of the carpet under my limbs, a moist bed that seems to be miraculously supplying all the nutrients and oxygen I need to go on living. “Look! It’s the Virgin Mary!” I say to Jackson, as I lift my face from the fertilizer-smelling depths. But Jackson, like the silhouette of the mother of God, has already vanished.

  I tiptoe into the empty living room,which is a large, color-coordinated expanse whose central ideology is a large Navajo rug spread out in front of a pink brick fireplace. A few beauty magazines are fanned out on the coffee table.

  A crash from somewhere in the back of the house startles me, and then I hear the long shush of water running through pipes. I head down a marigold-hued hallway covered with tasteful arrays of framed family photographs. All the pictures of Jackson seem blurred and indistinct, his lithe body heading somewhere out of the frame, his hair wrestling an invisible wind.

  In the master bedroom, a Confederate general’s uniform hangs next to the bed, suspended from a display hook on the wall. It’s cobalt blue and nosebleed red and prison gray, like a giant parrot dangling there next to Betty’s mom’s tackle box full of Retinol creams. Her new husband is one of those Civil War reenactment guys. It seems to me that if you’re going to spend a lot of money and time attending to the perfectly authentic look and feel of a historical event, you could flag a more interesting page in the tome of history. Party with King Herod, or burn a few witches at the stake. Enjoy a twelve-course meal with the Romanovs, give out tabs of acid with the vodka and caviar, then flee to Siberia.

  Betty sits naked on the floor of the master bathroom. She is surrounded by thousands of tiny multicolored iridescent beads. They cover the whole surface of the tiled floor, and between her crossed legs there is a hill the size of a New Year’s party hat, leaving a lunar lavender stain on the insides of her thighs. She looks up at me and sighs.

  “What are these things?” I ask, leaning down and rolling one of the pellets between my fingers. It looks like a radioactive tapioca pearl and feels like a stone, but when I pierce it with my fingernail it bursts into chalky powder.

  “I’m not sure,” Betty says. She looks a little disoriented and pale, her head wobbling slightly. Her shoulders are bony and tanned, and there is a ring of tangerine-colored freckles that I don’t remember seeing before circling her right aureole. “I tried eating one but it tasted like dirt.” She gazes up at me seriously.

  “Okay, let’s just review our options,” I say, squatting down beside her. “It’s not food, and it’s probably not art.” I sniff my fingers. “It smells like talcum powder,” I muse. I look around for a whisk broom or a Dustbuster.

  Betty lets go of her head completely now and stretches out on the b
athroom floor, resting her feet on the porcelain surface of the tub. The luminous pile that was tucked in her crotch topples as she moves. She rolls back and forth on the bed of pellets, and giggles. When she swivels, I see that her asscheeks are stippled like a Seurat painting. The beads are bursting on her skin and leaving distinct pastel spirals. She rolls around, crushing the talc beads and grinding them into the white bathroom tiles; pink and purple polyps are stuck in the grout like berry-heavy hedges.

  “What are you doing with your clothes still on?” Betty asks, reaching up and tugging at the hem of my shorts. She nudges me off balance as she hangs onto my knee and leans way down to press her underarm into the space between the tub and the toilet where a few stray beads have rolled. I am not usually one to strip off my clothes at the merest suggestion, especially in the presence of a cellulite-free sylph who is known to be a troublemaker, but Betty is making this look like too much fun. I wriggle out of my backpack and quickly strip, then do a slow push-up into the pile of mystery balls, letting the hard pellets burst against my skin and roll down my neck onto my chest, where they tattoo me with faint butterfly-wing opalescence. A glittery cloud of fairy dust rises from the floor around us. I am a giant sugar cookie being decorated with colored candy sprinkles. I close my eyes and roll around the textured surface of the floor, bumping into Betty and various cool porcelain fixtures, ricocheting off of them in slow motion.

  At some point, our ballet slows, and we sidestroke through the atmosphere in drowsy unison, our bodies barely touching as we paint the floor again and again, until we lie side by side on our backs, perfectly still. The silence comes back into the house then, and I can hear the air dissolve into each big room. Betty’s breathing sounds like a waterfall in the distance. After a minute, I turn my head to look at her, her body stretched out shimmering in the glow of the day/office/evening makeup mirror. She feels my gaze, and turns her head to look back at me. We smile, our teeth as white as the surrounding porcelain. We are both covered from head to toe with strange encrypted messages, orange swirls and smudged pictographs, dotted codes and feathery sky-blue maps. Betty’s pubic hair looks like a sugary Mexican pastry. Mine looks like an exotic sea anemone. Through the frenzy of scribbles, I again notice the hoop of wobbly freckles on Betty’s right breast.