Amputation, page 9
‘Oh!’ said Karen. ‘Aali, I would love to see your room!’
‘And by the way,’ said Zahra. ‘You’re not being baptized alone, Squirrel-girl. Aaliyah wants to take the waters herself.’
Unexpectedly moved, tears came to Karen’s eyes. The two women embraced then walked down the hall to join Aaliyah in the bedroom.
She looked at the walls, puzzled. They were completely covered in words and sentences, beautifully rendered, glued to the walls in a stunning collage.
‘She did this herself,’ said Zahra. ‘FSXers can be way OCD.’
For a moment, Karen was speechless. ‘My God, she’s so talented, Zah.’ She turned to Aaliyah, who was beaming, and said, ‘Baby! You did all this?’
When the mayor looked closer, she was suddenly faint. Zahra guided her to the bed where she sat to catch her breath.
‘You okay?’
‘Yes,’ said Karen. ‘I’m okay. Long day, that’s all. Long week.’
‘For me too.’ She smiled and said. “Did you know, dear one, that when you looked at me today, just before you began, that I was standing in front of Mama’s house? Alice was watching us. That was God’s hand.’
83
* * *
[Nextdoor]
Jonah Littleton
Santa Monica Beach-Wilmont 11 mins ago
Has anyone seen Mailbox Zoomer (?) with hoodie and Supreme (?) backpack scooting on Hillside toward Musch Trail. He presents as white and has long blond hair. Surfer? Here he is on surveillance camera with what look like burglary tools
Sarah T.
Palisades-Lower Las Casas 17 mins ago
During a portion of FOX 11 interview released Tuesday, Mayor Karen Bass stated that she believes the timeframe for rebuilding and getting people back to their homes in the wake of the fires in the city ‘is three years would probably be the fastest, but, probably, it would be more like five.
Colm Murphy
The Highlands 36 mins ago
Da Mayor’s on FIRE! She just appointed a SLOTH to the Resilient Rebuild Advisory Committee
Gerty Mack
Topanga 43 mins ago
Nothing Has Been Done, Mile After Mile of Equipment Just Sitting. It’s like that old Groucho joke, ‘Do you believe me or your lyin eyes’—remember sleepy Joe drooling thru the state of the union & all the legacy media echo chamber had to say was Wowwww, he’s Fiery and Focused
Sunder T
The Highlands 1 hr ago
Shame on you thatis cruel and unfair. Biden is a good man and history will show one of the greatest of presidence.
84 Ezeia Staunton
North of Montana 2 hrs ago
Chase safety deposit boxes news blackout after two months so insulting and pathetic. Oh but they put up a banner yesterday that said Chase, We are Rebuilding the Community
Enrique D.
Castellammare 2d
Why is Gouging not being enforced/reported? Realtors Need to be Prosecuted For Nonreporting. It is Sinful!!!!!
* * *
Marjorie
Betty called nonstop. Double-Wide was a real chatterbox. Marjorie’s housekeeper was a chatterbox too, which was good because the old woman found Alejandra’s eccentric, broken English patter comical. Betty and Alejandra would talk forever before ‘Molasses’ got the bright idea to pass her the phone.
Betty kept nattering about some young fool who wanted to interview Marjorie, a neighbor of hers in the mobile home park who was shacking up with some other fool. Betty said he was a real handsome fellow, a Hollywood trick rider interested in hearing all about Grammie May. Said he wanted to make a movie about her. But no can do: Marjorie didn’t talk about her family anymore. She was tired of telling the same stories—how Adohr Farms was named after her mother (Rhoda spelled backward)—and how three times a week Will Rogers rode a horse from his ranch in the Palisades to their Malibu house. And so on and so forth and so on. How Roy used to do rope tricks for Marjorie and a playmate who went by the name of Shirley Temple. How during World War II, the Coast Guard 85stayed in the pool house and bivouacked in tents on the beach, keeping watch for invading aircraft and submarines. And she definitely didn’t want to talk about how the men that worked for her grandparents thought nothing about murdering pelt smugglers and cattle rustlers or about her father shooting himself in the head because of the cancer that wouldn’t go away … and the time their neighbors, the Havasupai tribe, made Daddy a blood brother and nicknamed him Smoke. The Malibu Post pestered her for years but finally got the message.
The only time she agreed to an interview was with a schoolboy for a paper he was writing. He was a descendent of the Ventureño Chumash. But she didn’t tell the boy that the Rindges once owned every bit of Chumash land—Point Dume and Big Dume and Little Dume and Pirate’s Cove. They owned the cliffs and the arroyos and the sun shrines and the 10,000-year-old shell middens and the ancient ladles and the asphaltum melting cups and the stone knives in the shape of whipsnakes or silvery legless lizards. They owned the wrens and the mourning doves and the bank swallows and the pond turtles and the roadrunners and the towhees. They owned the coyotes and they owned the wind. (And the fire the winds brought too.) They owned the lemonadeberried gullies and the false heather and the prickly pears and the giant sea dahlias and the sagebrush and the wild oats and the black mustard and the grassland poppies and the spineflowers and the Sonoran maiden ferns.
She didn’t say a word of that to the Chumash boy.
She did tell him that after painstakingly careful excavations, no Chumash burial sites were ever found—but not about the vanished street once called Indian Mound and how skeletons were desecrated and trashed by construction crews in the 1970s. She didn’t mention that the father of her three children shot himself in the head just like her daddy did, not because of illness, but for embezzling monies from the sale of large swaths of family property that was needed to pay taxes. She didn’t tell him one of her daughters went mad and died in Camarillo or that a second daughter 86died by the hand of her husband in a murder-suicide. She didn’t tell him she hadn’t spoken to her surviving child—a weepy, dotty parasite—in more than forty years.
And she didn’t tell him about Rader. How they lay in each other’s arms in Pirate’s Cove the week after he ravaged her on Sugar Hill, their shared skin like seaweed, and how he was like a stone knife. How they were membranous ancient artifacts, liquefied mummies of alabaster and obsidian, possessed of and by the most rancid smells of human backsides and the bodies of washed up sea lions—together they were the size of the great Lion’s Mane jellyfish that Rader found dead on the shore of the Cove one night—entwined, they became a parfumerie of myth, raptors and foam, made sweeter by the betrayal of rules and race and decency. All those things she recalled hourly now …
And what a funeral he had! She never saw more people cry in her life. The West Adams jazzmen played from Heaven and Hell as a riderless, Raderless horse was led to a burial ground that needed no archaeologists to uncover. When she asked to see the body in the casket, Grammie May stopped Marjorie’s mother from following her in.
When the girl looked at him, she stayed calm. Her only prayer was to be entangled with that black, blackened, blackest corpse because she did not fear its smells and tastes. She wanted her mouth and everything else to smear the rubies she found when it cracked open in the terminus of an embrace. An old woman now, she knew he was galloping toward her and would scoop her up during her wild, dead run.
As she fell asleep that night, she thought maybe it was time to talk. A kind of farewell. Maybe she would tell some stories to the handsome young stuntman. Why not? Why not talk to someone other than the ghosts and gods about her love—and how they would soon be together, pulled into the waters of the blown-out midnight miracle sea that lipped and lapped at Pirate’s Cove.
87
* * *
Stephen
The three brothers found themselves in the branchy, cradling arms of Fangorn the Ent, moving slowly through the emerald dingle. They sang Hobbit songs to the creature who insisted to be called Treebeard, ‘because only the best of friends are allowed to use the name.’ In a lovely contralto, Peter sang
Don’t discard me
just because you think I mean you harm,
but these cuts I have,
oh, they need love to help them heal.
Don’t let the sun go down on me,
although I search myself,
it’s always someone else I see
and the majestic, splay-footed creature was so moved that it resolved to help them conquer the Orcs of Isengard, who ‘incinerated so many forest friends and loved ones to feed their monstrous forges of war.’ As it made the noble yet somehow indolent pronouncement, tumbleweed whiskers tickled their cheeks, forcing the boys to suppress a fit of giggles, which would have been terribly disrespectful.
Treebeard’s promise to join forces was sealed by a roaring acclamation of leaves and a rumble of roots: Ra-hoom-ra! Ta runda runda runda rom!
When things calmed down a bit, Stephen ruefully said, ‘Your help is much appreciated, Treebeard. But I wish Gandalf were here. Do you think there is any way that Gandalf—’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Treebeard with great sadness, ‘that the great Wizard’s story has ended.’
‘Not so, not so!’ cried Peter. Paul shouted, ‘He returned to Middle-earth as Gandalf the White, more powerful than ever!’
88 They were going by the book, so to speak.
Treebeard shook its head, which of course had a ripple effect on the boys. ‘It breaks my heart to tell you that Gandalf was in fact the pilot of the Eastern Airlines plane that plunged from the sky on the Eleventh Day of September, Year AD 1974. It was during the battle with the Balrog that he and your father fell into the chasm. And there in the chasm, the Wizard remains—wheeling, spinning and turning, in desperate search for the father you’ve been separated from and with whom you hope to reunite. But if Gandalf himself has had no success …’ He glanced down at Peter and Paul. ‘How the two of you managed to escape remains an intriguing mystery.’
Listening to the postmortem of Dr. James William Colbert Jr’s purgatory sent the comedian into a chasm of his own. He spun and turned until pinned beneath the tree again, a conifer with none of the Ent’s charm—in fact, with no charm at all. The sudden absence of his brothers was agonizing. He closed his eyes and offered a prayer. ‘If you can hear me, Treebeard, bring us to Father so we may give him the wedding ring and restore Love to the strange worlds we are traveling through. It isn’t Mordor we seek … but a mystical place that is all too real. A place called Ardor.’
He felt hands on him, palpating his hips—but were they real?
His eyes opened to see a hooded figure rifling his pockets. The young man kneeled, comparing what he saw to the name and photo on the driver’s license.
‘Oh shit! It’s you. Fucking Stephen Kohl-bair … that’s fucking rad!’
‘Thank you,’ he said weakly. ‘Can you—can you please—can you please call for help?’
‘Dude, there’s no reception but totally. As soon as I get down the hill.’
‘Thank you. Please! Thank you.’
The thief surveyed the tree, shaking his head. ‘Oh shit. That’s fucked up, bro.’
‘Thank you please.’
89 ‘No worries. Hey, maybe you’ll have me on the show if I do?—I mean, when I do. Name is Trooper, don’t forget it. Tell your people I’ll be calling! But they’re gonna need some heavy equipment to get this lil bitch off you.’
As soon as he was gone, the older brothers returned. He was overjoyed to see them but blanched when he saw their drawn, frightened faces.
‘Our guide is here,’ said Peter.
‘His name is Sméagol,’ said Paul, equally tormented.
Other hands were on him now—but this time, they belonged to a bug-eyed, wizened, crouching figure whose breath smelled of rotting fish.
‘Sméagol, yes!’ he rasped. ‘Do call me Gollum,’ adding with a wicked wink, ‘Only the best of friends are allowed to use the name.’
Without warning, the wiry aberration tried to snatch the ring from Stephen’s necklace. A great struggle ensued as it screeched like a Ringwraith while embers swirled madly and the faraway cries of a dying show dog rent the air.
* * *
Roderick
A few days after Rod’s New Year’s Day Queen of Malibu pitch, Rocky invited the stuntman and his girlfriend to the ranch. Esther kept around twenty horses at the former avocado farm, about half belonging to boarders. Groom ’N Dume had a climate-controlled riding hall in the style of Barragán and a mid-century modern bunkhouse in the style of Saarinen. The property bordered the Backbone Trail and you could trail ride past the Escondido waterfall straight up to Santa Barbara. Rocky wasn’t sure why he told them the place belonged to his father-in-law—the offloading (or transferring) of his wife’s immense wealth was a peculiar habit, born of embarrassment. The only person who didn’t think of him as a gigolo 90was Dexter Keaton but even Dex probably had her doubts. It was a dumb lie but better than saying, ‘Did I tell you my wife gives me an allowance? I don’t own a thing, not even my Nissan Leaf.’
Rod thought they were going to talk more about Queen (and the best way to get a ‘sit’ with Taylor Sheridan) but when he and Sonata arrived, their host was in the midst of a lavish lunch with two ladies. The stuntman immediately recognized Mikey Madison, the star of Anora. The other woman was in her late forties and was introduced as Finchie, ‘an amazing writer. She’s doing a script for us that’s totally bonkers.’ Rocky told them that Rod was the ‘best stuntman in the world and a new member of the Unsafe and Effective team.’ Sonata blushed with pride.
‘Finchie’s writing a true crime thriller,’ said Rocky. ‘Mikey’s going to star.’
‘I love it,’ said Rod. ‘And by the way, I’m a huge fan of Anora.’
‘Oh, thank you! How did you see it?’
The film had only played at Cannes.
‘We went to a screening at Mary Parent’s. I know her because of Dune.’
‘Tell them about Myopia, Finchie.’
‘It’s such a crazy story. There was an eye doctor who lived in Zuma. Textbook bipolar. So, he’s in Venice having a frozen yogurt at Penguin’s. He’s minding his own business when in walks a yoga teacher and her hairdresser boyfriend. He’d just gotten out of lockdown for a suicide attempt.’
‘Wait,’ said Sonata. ‘The hairdresser?’
‘The eye doctor!’ Everyone laughed, mostly because it was fun to laugh while at a Hollywood lunch, especially when a celebrity was there. ‘He invites the couple to his house and they move in—like, immediately—cause he’s lonely and they’re insta-besties. It’s kismet and was meant to be. And what do insta-besties do? They shoot him up with ketamine and dose him with acid.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Mikey, hand over mouth. There really was something so innocent about her. Rocky said that Mikey was going to star but 91it seemed to Rod like she was hearing the story for the first time. Maybe she was just acting, to bolster the writer.
‘With friends like that, who needs dealers?’ said Rocky.
‘He gives them power of attorney,’ said Finchie. ‘And they start draining his accounts. And it turns out the doctor’s fecking rich. Fun Couple soaked him for twenty million.’
‘Whoa,’ said Rod.
‘Tell them about the massages.’
‘So, Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s doing boatloads of ketamine—’
‘That’s his name? Eckleburg?’ said Rocky.
‘No,’ said Finchie. ‘That’s from The Great Gatsby.’
‘We totally need to change his name to that!’ said Rocky.
‘—he’s doing boatloads of ketamine and Emdr and fecal fecking transplants—and getting twelve-hour massages.’
‘Esther likes a two-hour,’ said Rocky. ‘I can barely do forty-five minutes!’
‘Twelve hours?’ said Sonata incredulously. ‘How does the body even take that?’
‘It doesn’t!’ said Finchie. ‘The eye doctor starts vomiting nonstop from all the wellness shenanigans but by then the couple full-on control the staff—the fun couple doled out a shit ton of Eckleburg’s money—so they look the other way.’
‘I so want to see this movie!’ said Sonata. Rod loved how his girlfriend behaved around industry people. So easy, so fun, and supportive.
A housekeeper walked another guest in.
Rod was surprised to see Steve Guttenberg—they worked together when he was stunt coordinator on Holey Moley. Just last week, they waved hello across the patio while having lunch at Hank’s in the Village.
Rocky stood. ‘Hi, Steve! Thank you so much for taking the time.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘Steve, this is Mikey Madison, our ‘Anna Moore.’ Hey,’ he said, in an aside to the actress. ‘You were Anora, and now you’re going to be Anna!’
92 ‘Happy to meet you!’ said Mikey.
‘And this is the wonderful Elisabeth Finch, who’s writing our wonderful script. And this,’ he said, pointing to Guttenberg like he was Door Number Three, ‘is Dr. T. J. Eckleburg!’
‘T. J. Guttenberg,’ said Finchie with a wry smile.
Steve didn’t get the reference, but let it go. ‘Hi Elisabeth,’ he said warmly. ‘Nice to meet you.’ He scrutinized her for a millisecond. ‘You’ve had quite the journey—I watched the documentary. You’re a woman of many talents.’
Rod felt an undertow of controversy but didn’t know what it was about. Whatever was going on, it was clear that Guttenberg wasn’t being snide; he was a people person who didn’t have a mean bone in his body. That’s why Rod liked him so much. Mikey was nonplussed. It was obvious she didn’t know what Steve was talking about either, yet wondered, in that innocent way, if she should have.
