Kamikaze Lust (2 page)

One year later I was on the verge of unemployment with a body ready to betray me, riding its own course toward the day I might end up on television with a plastic bag over my head. The image puzzled neatly into the visions I’d been having recently, visions of disintegrating piece-by-piece in a Miami nursing home as Grandma had, or like Aunt Lorraine getting bushwhacked by cancer. Then there was my ongoing fear of becoming a wild-haired hermit who lived in a cobwebbed studio with an army of cats and the complete edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary.

I reached under the covers for Freddy and pulled her to my chest. I could hold her for maybe three seconds before she started scratching away from me. Some people said it was the operation that made her so prickly—“Really, Rachel, how would you feel if they ripped out your ovaries when you were barely a year old!” But there was another, darker problem with Freddy, the family secret; her parents were brother and sister.

The guy I got her from swore that incest was a sign of royal breeding in animals, though he didn’t tell me any of this until I’d already had her a few months. At least she was beautiful: midnight black with white dots like snow falling in bright headlights. I’d called her Moondust until my ex-fiancé Sam said she looked like Fred Flintstone. Thus she was christened Freddy by a man who hated cats. I should have known then I would never marry him and could have avoided the few farcical years to follow. Blame it on my youth, like Chet Baker said. And how I used to play Dad’s Chet Baker LPs late into the night, amazed by his voice that mimicked the timbres of his trumpet. With an ear that good, I could only imagine what else he’d heard. Which sort of explains the booze, the pills, the heroin. Which definitely explains why he ended up splattered on the sidewalk in front of his hotel room. Yet, to fly from a window in old Amsterdam had to be more spiritual, more celestial, than ending up the subject of a septuagenarian snuff film on American television.

I got up slowly, sniffling from ragweed air, my muscles sore from a string of sleepless nights. It took all I had just to make it to the bathroom.

Blame it on my youth….
I crooned melodramatically to Freddy, who’d long before wrestled herself from my half-nelson of intimacy and beaten me to the shower. This was one of our best times together, her sitting on the tub in between the shower curtain and liner, me turning the hot water up so high it steamed up the bathroom and made my skin pink. I let the jet stream pummel my spine and shoulders, water dripping down into the small of my back, my ass, in between my thighs, until I felt myself slowly coming alive, huffing against the rhythms of morning.

By the time Shade and I made it downtown, the supreme court building was a giant octopus, its cupola standing tall above the swaying tentacles of cars and buses and people. Though I resented paying to park, I pulled into the garage next to the family court building to save time.

Shade slipped her cell phone into the pocket of her suede jacket, and its fringes slapped back and forth. She rolled her eyes, “Showtime.”

I took a deep breath. We climbed out of my jeep and went off to join the octopus.

I was glad Shade had insisted on coming. She had an enviable way of commanding attention without being ostentatious, of making people believe they’d been waiting just for her. I used to think it had to do with her appearance, the yellow-green eyes and egg-shell brown skin, a combination everyone called “exotic,” especially when she braided her hair like a rap diva. But, as I got to know her better, I realized her physicality was merely a promo for the rest of her charms.

Back in Miami, when she had her weekly “Movie Minute” spot on the five o’clock news, strangers used to stop her in restaurants, on the beach, at the Lincoln Road mall. And Shade, whose patience would have made her a good shrink or customer service rep, would talk to everyone, no matter how crazy or disheveled or abusive, though a few in the latter category did force her to whip out a can of pepper spray. To wit: the price of fame. I remember the few times I’d taken her with me to see Grandma at Sunset Estates and all of the Jewish ladies with their personal aides from Trinidad or Haiti went storming the rec room to meet Teesha Marie Simpson. Never mind that I’d just done a four-part series on the home’s abuse of Medicare payments, Shade was on television. She was a
celebrity.
She had three names. If ever the imbalance between TV and print had become obvious, it was during those trips to Sunset Estates. Even Grandma was on her best behavior, and only once or twice opened a sentence with the words, “You people.” Shade handled it well. “We people,” she said. “You mean journalists?”

Shade caught me smiling and said, “What?”

“I was thinking about you and my grandmother.”

“I loved that lady.”

“She was a racist.”

“Listen, my grandmother told me I could spot Jews by the big pores on their noses. Nobody’s perfect.”

We were climbing the crowded steps of the courthouse, the ones they always flashed in the opening credits of New York City cop shows filmed in Hollywood. The pale gray marble cut a dreary outline against the pale gray clouds, giving an air of soiled ethereality, like an angel trying to quit smoking cigarettes.

Inside, the dark corridors were filled with lawyers, paralegals, secretaries, stenographers, and, of course, the media. Shade and I made our way to the press room, but she lingered in the hallway with another reporter she knew. I headed to the soda machine for a diet Pepsi and the right stake-out point. I needed to see who was there, get a feeling for the buzz before talking to anyone.

Andrew from
The Legal Reporter
was on me immediately. “What are you doing here?” he asked, sounding as concerned as a man with a British accent could.

“Same thing you are.”

“But—” He had a worried look I’d seen a lot of recently, mostly from the doctors who diagnosed Aunt Lorraine’s cancer. “I’m sorry about the…about your management troubles. The waiting must be unbearable.”

“Spare the solidarity. What’s up with Kaminsky?”

“I don’t know much.”

“Come on, out with it or I’ll call INS and tell them your marriage is a fraud. Shouldn’t some American have your job, anyway?”

He didn’t bite. “I really am sorry, Rachel.”

“I don’t want your job, it was just a joke. Jesus.”

Andrew clicked his lips and sighed as if life were too taxing this morning. I knew the feeling. We stared at each other for a second before the tension buckled. He smiled. “Their names were Ida and Marvin Salinger, quite a literary ring don’t you think? She had Parkinson’s, he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. They’re up to their ears in suicide notes, living wills, the works. Kaminsky, apparently, had them explain everything on video, step-by-step. They took the pills themselves and even tied the little baggies for each other. All so dreadfully legal, I’m assured.”

“What about the TV footage? Who shot the footage?”

“As far as we know they rigged the video camera themselves, and my guess is they hit the netherworld long before Kaminsky called the TV people. I’m on line trying to get a copy of the reel. And that, darling, is all she wrote.”

“You’re a peach, Andrew.”

Having come through for me, he excused himself to go and check the dockets.

“Now about your job…” I called after him. He pivoted, blew me a kiss, and then was gone. I hung around asking questions, annoyed by the reaction of my colleagues, some of whom greeted me in cloying sympathy as Andrew had initially, while others ignored me as if I had huge red welts on my skin. That was the toughest bit yet. We always shared information, though I found it best not to believe anything anyone said until I confirmed it myself. You never knew when somebody was trying to fake you out of doing a story or to plant a dud in your laptop. Contrary to popular belief, there were not a million stories in the naked city. You had about three a week. If you weren’t floating the few that became water-cooler conversation, you went unnoticed.

I needed Kaminsky. I’d been one of the first reporters to interview him a few months back, and he’d been ecstatic about the coverage. Surely he owed me some kind of exclusive. And with the strike hanging over me, a cumulonimbus ready to burst any second, I needed this story. If I was going down it would be with a bang and not a whimper. I laughed at myself:
You talk a good game in your head, Slivowitz.
When I talked to myself recently I was sounding more and more like Shade.

I left the press room to look for her, figuring I could use her cell to call Kaminsky on his private line. She was standing a few doors down talking to a woman with burgundy hair and a biker jacket. A camera and press pass swung from her neck while she stood, her feet spread and thumbs through her belt loops, as if she were leader of the pack in a Russ Meyer film, and Shade, her sweet prey, leaned her shoulder against the wall, her hips swaying back and forth. Her flirting pose. I’d seen her work it on both women and men—she was bi—but, for some reason, today, I couldn’t stomach watching her. A current ran through my body, and I felt claustrophobic.

I hung back until the feeling passed, then decided to interrupt Shade. We were a team: I was transportation, she communication. Damn that woman, I needed the phone. I started walking toward them when Shade caught my eye and met me half-way. Motorcycle Woman fled into a herd of photographers.

“Give me the phone,” I said, setting aside all thoughts of her and the woman. “Kaminsky’s doing a press conference at three.”

“Forget it, Slivowitz, we’re out. Tina heard it on her police radio, they sent a fucking flotilla of cops up to the paper.”

“Then maybe we should just drive by his office.”

“You’re not listening.” She tugged at my sleeve and looked me straight in the face. “We’re on strike. You’re not going anywhere. You know what they call people who cross picket lines, don’t you?

“Um…employed?”

“Definitely not that.”

“Look, you go strike if you want. I’m not into this…this strike thing, these picket lines, any of it. It’s bullshit…some driver gets a cramp in his back and we’re all supposed to run around like retards carrying placards.”

“Watch it, watch it with the tough-girl act.”

“Tell me you want to spend the rest of the day screaming hey, hey, ho, ho.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “It’s not like a peace march.”

I ran my hand through my hair and looked away. Cliques of media thronging the press room, gray-suited attorneys flocking in and out of the hallway, administrative types wandering outside with unlit cigarettes cupped in their palms… the general life of the courthouse proceeded as usual. It took me back to high school, the cramped corridors, lockers slamming, kids laughing their way into classrooms with tiled floors and dusty windows, as I stood off to the side, watching with institutionalized dread. I hadn’t felt this way in a while.

I turned back to Shade, whose lips were pursed to the side and bobbing.

“Stop biting your mouth,” I said.

“I can’t help it.”

“Well, stop. We should go up there, huh?”

She nodded, “I don’t think we have a choice.”

I threw my bag over my shoulder, and we started walking. “We’re not going anywhere without some M&Ms.”

“Okay, but I get the green ones.”

“You always get the green ones.”

We stopped at the candy counter. I searched the colorful packages for a medium-size bag of M&Ms. “What about the blue ones?” I said, paying off the candy man.

Shade raised the corner of her lip. “They’re so depressing.”

“Depressing?”

“You can have those, I don’t even want to deal with blue candy.”

We were leaving the candy counter when a woman shouted Shade’s name. I knew who it was before she and her burgundy hair made their way over. Shade introduced us. Her name was Tina Macadam, and I immediately thought, phony. Having changed my own name, I suspected the same of everyone else, but
Macadam?
That was like wearing a fake fur or becoming a platinum blonde. Why didn’t she just call herself Tina Motorcycle?

Shade told her she couldn’t talk now, the strike was calling. “I’ll call you,” she smiled at Tina Macadam.

“Good, ’cause I’m ready to roll whenever.”

“Yeah, it sounds great.”

I looked up as if I had important things on my mind while they finished talking about some elusive project and said goodbye. Shade and I were silent on the walk back to my jeep.

“What were you and what’s-her-name planning?” I asked as we were buckling up.

“Oh, she’s doing a film. She wants me to help write it.”

Bullshit, I thought. I didn’t trust Tina Macadam around Shade, who was now saying that I, if anyone, should see how a creative project would interest her. A closet fiction writer, Shade had let me see a few stories she’d written, most of which I found too risqué. Who used the word pussy with the frequency of a conjunction? Nevertheless, I sympathized with her yearning for something greater, a passion that would throw her into a deep depression whenever she interviewed a screenwriter or novelist she believed wasn’t half as good as she could be if she only had the time. “Our lives are shit,” she use to tell me, pluralizing. “We gotta get out of here, everything’s so small-time.”