Bonita Avenue (36 page)

Rusty was possessed by another urge altogether: he flipped open his crocodile-leather diary to book her first shoots. Like always when a newcomer caught his fancy—and when did a newcomer
not
catch his fancy?—he scheduled himself as her first co-star. He was consistent in that respect. This is what he did it all for. Then the snuffbox appeared on the table: coke, Viagra. Wells was hopeless without his magic potions. Seeing as Bobbi considered three
or four shoots in the space of a month a little scrimpy, he phoned up Kwimper Girls with her still sitting there. He praised her to Toby Kwimper, throwing little winks in her direction. Kwimper was a captain of industry from day one, and for thirty years had run his agency from a smoke-soaked Buick in which he crisscrossed the San Fernando Valley every afternoon until deep in the night. “Bobbi is a special lady, Kwimp, and you know what that means if I say so. Bobbi’s got big things ahead of her.”

These were prophetic words. Rusty thought so himself, and he was right. Bobbi Red, the former Meryl Dryzak, became a celebrity, a cult figure, a porn star of new and unheard-of proportions—still mostly underground, to be sure, but known far and wide, and completely crossover. “Bobbi will be the new Jenna Jameson,” Rusty parroted
Rolling Stone
, but Rusty and
Rolling Stone
were both wrong. Jameson was “old school,” an old-fashioned porn queen. Not Bobbi. Bobbi was not to be pigeonholed—Bobbi
demolished
pigeonholes. Although her films were no less hardcore (she won one AVN award after the other), this mysterious, profoundly shallow girl struck a chord outside the Valley. Internet trend-watchers were euphoric about Bobbi, top photographers wanted her to model for them, indie bands invited her to appear in their videos. She was on the cover of the Smashing Pumpkins’ new CD. She let an editor from the
Los Angeles Times
follow her for six months. She posted video blogs on YouTube in artsy-fartsy black and white where she philosophized freely in that loose, serious way of hers about the rough life she led. And now she was going to be on Tyra Banks.

At the end of the interview Bobbi offered us a bony hand and got up to leave. As I accompanied her down the wooden stairs to the lobby I grappled with my urge. In the doorway, as she took
out her cell phone to call a taxi, I offered to let her stay with me, free, no strings attached, so she could get her bearings. She looked at me, surprised, and politely turned down my offer—that, too, was atypical for her kind. But I kept insisting until she gave in.

Why? Every year hundreds of Bobbis washed up in the San Fernando Valley, damaged, grubby, dumb, shrewd, adventurous, broken, victimized sluts who infested the innumerable 1,000-bucks-a-month one-bedroom apartments between Ronald Reagan Freeway and Ventura Boulevard like baby-pink cockroaches. Depressing white stuccoed condos where they lay on their Wal-Mart mattresses, in the heat or the cold, waiting for the phone to ring, their agent sending them the next day, or even that very afternoon, to some anonymous villa with hideous sofas to appear in
Share My Cock 12
or
Cum Dog Millionaire
. Maybe I wanted to have a closer look at this kind of life. Maybe this girl triggered my big-sister gene, material that slumped jadedly on some dead-end side street of my DNA.

Bobbi stayed for two months. I gave her a large room with a balcony looking out onto Sunset and a view of the Pacific. Although I occasionally cooked for her—more nutritious meals than the tzatziki pizzas she otherwise had delivered, we spent at least ten evenings together at the dinner table—we never became close friends. She was either too aloof, or maybe she didn’t think I was interesting enough. All I could pry out of her was that she was raised under the wing of a mother and an elder brother. Her father was killed in 1991 during the first Gulf War, friendly fire, she said drily.

She was constantly asking questions, but they were always practical ones, even when it had to do with my own past. “What did you study?” “Could you also be a director without having studied?” “Do you think about going back to Germany?” “Do you ever use an enema?” “Does that guy Rusty have a family or anything?”
“How did you tell your parents about this?” “How much was this house?” “How’d you get into the industry?”

When I answered that last question by showing her a handful of pictures I’d saved from the Enschede time, she laughed tenderly, maybe even teasingly. “Why,
that’s
not porn,” she said.

Bobbi could spend two hours in the bathroom, in the Jacuzzi with one of her literary heroes, the door open but in absolute silence. On the bathroom stool was a Louis Vuitton bag she took with her to the sets. One evening I snuck a look: washcloths, shower foam, perfume, mouthwash, lube, toothbrush and toothpaste, condoms, a telephone charger, dildos in a variety of colors and sizes, a hairbrush, the enema bag I suggested if there was an anal scene on the program. I caught myself subconsciously keeping track of how often Bobbi went out with that bag. When, after about seven weeks, she came to me with an apologetic pout on her face to tell me she’d found her own loft in Sun Valley, the counter was already on thirty-eight. Thirty-eight films, five of them at Coldwater; based on what she earned with us, she must have hauled in some $40,000 by now.

“Fifty,” she said. “But it’s not about the money, Joy. It’s about the
oeuvre
,” and with that word she let out a rare giggle. “About everlasting fame. It’s neat, isn’t it, that people can always see how I followed my heart.” Oh yes, life in the Valley was everything she’d expected it to be, even
better
, and that was in part, she said sweetly, thanks to my hospitality.

On one of the last evenings she would make use of that hospitality, I returned from Coldwater and overheard, my hand on the front doorknob, muted voices coming from the living room. Unfamiliar voices conversing with Bobbi. I heard the word “Dad” and “absolution.” I entered the room and saw a woman sitting next to my house guest and, seated on the sofa across from them, a
dark-skinned fellow covered in tattoos. I remembered that Bobbi’s mother and brother were planning to come visit her in her new city, an event that kept getting put off; Bobbi harbored a vague dread of this meeting, because she was planning to inform her family of her newly launched career. It was clear she had just done so.

“Hi, Joy,” she said, smiling, straightening her back, “let me introduce you to my mother and my brother.” The hulking young man, who stayed seated when I walked over and offered him my hand, was the exact opposite of his sister in every respect: everything about Bobbi that was petite, elegant, and feminine had found its masculine complement in this half of the Dryzak offspring. The guy was disproportionately muscular and had a gruesomely exaggerated nose and eyebrows; I looked down on a fully tattooed pair of shoulders that bulged out of a sleeveless T-shirt, the blinding white of the shirt inflaming the pitch-black eyes—eyes that, despite being housed in a pockmarked face, were obviously descended from the same jar of kalamata olives as Bobbi’s. He didn’t look at me, but stared angrily at the female wrist he held clamped in his vise-grip.

“I already called the manufacturer,” Bobbi said, “but they don’t have anything in stock. It might take a few weeks, I’m afraid.”

Her mother was a sturdy woman with thick, lank hair and high cheekbones, and who, despite her jeans and leather jacket, resembled a squaw. To reach her I would have had to wade through thick hunks of broken glass that lay on my flokati rug like hailstones. So I didn’t; we just nodded at each other. In her broad lap and on the floor by her feet lay wads of tissues from the Kleenex box that balanced on the leather armrest of the sofa. In the midst of this former family stood the matt-black aluminum tubular construction that once supported the glass top of my coffee table. At the bottom of the tubular cube, amid mounds of glass, Bobbi’s silver laptop glittered, open and unhinged on one side. Across the room, in front
of the open bathroom door, the Louis Vuitton bag lay like a duck shot down in mid-flight; scattered around it the tubes, the jars, the condoms, the enema.

“Joy’s the director of one of the studios where I work,” Bobbi said, more buoyantly than usual. When no one responded, she continued: “Well, I guess we’ll be going.”

Her brother stood up as though he’d been given an electric shock; instead of getting taller, he got broader. He strode over to me in two firm steps and pushed his flattened ravioli-nose almost against mine.

“You’re lucky you’re not a guy,” he said with breath that smelled of sweet potato and fried calamari rings, “or I’d slit you open and rip your guts out. Being a woman and not a man shows that God hasn’t forsaken you altogether.”

After these words he disappeared into the front hall. You could hear his breathing as he waited for Bobbi and her mother to join him.

The Saturday afternoon after his pathetic quest through Aaron’s house, they drive to Hans and Ria’s, friends of Tineke from her Utrecht days. They spend two hours in their air-conditioned Audi, he at the wheel, most of the journey in silence. On Radio 2 an MP is debating the issue of fireworks permits with an industry lobbyist and a government inspector, he picks something up about an aerosol theory. Tineke’s quivering thigh presses against his.

“D’you hear that?” she asks.

“Hear what?”

“About the nitrocellulose. Gun cotton. They found it right after the disaster.”

“What
don’t
they find.” He has no idea what she’s talking about, he does not know what nitrocellulose is, he has other things on his mind. It might be a good idea to listen, though: on Monday he has to meet with the Oosting Commission investigating the fireworks disaster. But he’s preoccupied with that boat. He keeps asking himself what in God’s name he actually knows about his children. A father who hasn’t seen his son in years and whose elder stepdaughter is studying at his own damn university. What does he know?

This morning, while Tineke was at cardio fitness, he dialed the number on the marina receipt (on his cell phone, naturally); the chap who answered did not speak a word of English, it was dreadful, he couldn’t even muster up “I’ll call you right back” in
schoolboy French. He raced upstairs to his study and looked up all the key words in a French dictionary, but when he called back the guy of course didn’t answer. After a quarter of an hour he got him on the line again, and first had to lie that he was A. Bever’s father, only to learn, in pidgin campground-French (the man who aspires to be Education Minister has to express himself in pidgin French) that Aaron was the
owner
of that boat, “
propriété de monsieur A. Bever, né le 8 janvier 1972 à Venlo—oui, c’est ça.
”

It was as though he himself had been side-launched, right into the Arctic Ocean. Following the initial shock, a painful strain on his chest, all sorts of images shooting through his head (drugs, Mafia, female trafficking, Dutch underworld, sex, sex, sex), he scurried into denial—he
must
have misunderstood, those two couldn’t possibly
own
a boat worth millions, a boat you rent in Florida for a hundred grand a week? It was insane—
he
was going insane.

But now he believes it again. Because what do we really know about each other? What do fathers know anyhow? A
yacht
? Is it possible to hide a
sixty-foot pleasure yacht
from each other? What does a father know?

For the answer, he only has to shift the question a generation: what did
his
father know about
him
? He’s just the person to ponder that. Suddenly he is no longer sitting in his car, he is back in Delft, in his parents’ house on the Trompetsteeg, and like most other Sundays he is stiff with muscle pain and bruised from head to toe, and on this particular Sunday he doesn’t give a hoot about the pain, because the previous day he became national champion in the Energiehal in Rotterdam. And his father? He didn’t even know. He sat downstairs, stubbornly not knowing.

1962? 1962. Glowing from his achievement, he stared out of the dormer window in his boyhood room over the alley of a youth he had only just left behind. He most likely played one of his EPs
on his Garrard portable gramophone to counteract the Sunday somberness that reached up through the narrow stairway, pawing the attic like a giant’s hand, wishing he were back in the Kromhout army barracks. He and Ankie and their father had just eaten dinner in the kitchen, and following the circus act with oranges and full-fat yogurt their father had been performing for donkey’s years—completely peeling and dismembering the orange, segment by segment, a messy half-hour exercise—he had gone upstairs counting the minutes until he could pack his duffel bag and cycle back to Utrecht. It was around seven in the evening, dusk settling over the alley, when across the way a front door opened and one of the Karsdorp boys crossed the black cobblestone street in his house slippers and knocked on the window.

“Ank,” his father bellowed from the living room; he heard his sister draw aside the black-velvet curtain and squirm past the bikes to the front door. The greeting, voices-turned-murmur, Ankie on the stairs and her dark-brown curls poking around the corner. “Come quick,” she whispered, “you’re on television.”

On his guard, he wriggled his feet into his army boots. Downstairs, in the dim sitting room, a delineated silence. His father sat at the table in his woolen Sunday suit, reading; the copper hanging lamp cast a searchlight onto one of his night school textbooks, bound in marbled paper; he perused the pages through his half-glasses as though the Karsdorp boy, who stood next to the table studying the worn spots in the carpet, was made of thin air.

“So long, Mr. Sigerius,” said the boy, and he and Ankie followed him over the slick cobblestones to his parents’ house. While they seemed even poorer than his own family, they were still the only ones on the street with a television set. “Watch, don’t eat,” his father admonished. Their living room smelled of cauliflower and fatty gravy and was chock-full of children and grown-ups, extra
chairs had been brought in, and in the corner near the window the eye of a varnished television cabinet glowed with images of that afternoon’s football match.