Noise (15 page)

But she was never that fucken dumb again. Started working stuff out pretty quick. Saw the city looking like what it was: a fucken crack-whore house. Hiding behind those palm trees, underneath the stars on the Walk of Fame, everything that isn't glamorous: fucken homicidal Mafia minions who like ejaculating in little babies' smashed-up faces. And worse. Ironic, actually. And to live somewhere like that, to stay alive, you gotta think like a fucken crack whore.

 

On the opposite end of the Strip, across the street from the yellow train car restaurant, she sees a pusher she's dealt with before. A fat guy with a red beard, hiding in the shadows behind the Body Shop. She turns north on Sweetzer, flips around, pulls up right next to him. ‘Hey,' she says, summoning him. He takes a quick look around, at a UCLA student leaving Wal-Mart with a case of soda, at the billionaires' dumb kids, lined up in their turbo Nissans, heading to nightclubs, peroxide updos that cost more than one-bed apartments. The dealer walks to the car, scooches down at the window.

‘Dope?' Melissa says, the bills in her hand. It's all she has to fucken say.

‘Yeah, baby,' he says.

She drives away with the smack on the seat between her legs, towards the hills via Selma, past the Chateau Marmont where
Belushi said
goodnight
. That's all Hollywood is about: death. Charlie Manson drawing cartoon pigs on the wall with the blood of a movie director's wife; Marilyn Monroe lying naked and self-pitying, a bottle of sedatives the only sympathy she ever got; Fitzgerald's heart packing in while he bought a packet of cigarettes in Schwab's; Peg Entwhistle throwing herself from the top of the big white H; an AIDS epidemic in Porno Valley. River fucken Phoenix. Phil fucken Spector. It ain't about bright lights, this. It's about bright lights burning out. People come here searching for a heightened experience of life; glamour and fucken sparkle, but there ain't no such fucken thing. Money can't combat it. Success don't beat it. When you get bored of living, there's only one thing left to do, and they all come to La La Land to do it, whether they know it or not. On a warm night, like tonight, you can smell the mortality, like garbage left in the sun for a week. Stewing in its own rot. It's ironic, actually.

She parks next to a culvert leading away from the Franklin reservoir, way up between Mulholland and Studio where it's dark as hell. She can barely see the sickly glow of Downtown or hear the shrieking of the freeway. She finds the butterfly knife, wipes it in her chiffon scarf. Hitches her purse over her shoulder. She leaves the car door wide open, wanders over to a navy patch of wild vegetation, sits down in a bunch of sorghum grass. She toys what's left of the blow from her hot-pants, snorts it right out of the furrowed plastic. Then she unwinds the bloodstained scarf, feels around for her shooter, unwraps her new fix. Lifting her forearm into the air, tightening the tourniquet, she sees the cigarette burns dotted along the pallid skin on her radius, and on the other side track marks the length of her ulna, clear in the moonlight, like
pop-rivets holding her together. The smack kicks in, mollifies her nerves. She falls back on the ground, the grass stalks collapsing beneath her, her crossed legs flopping open. She feels her throbbing muscles thawing into liquid, her whole body melting and flowing away, dripping down into the earth, until it's all gone, until she can touch herself and not feel anything at all. No bones, no disease, no wounds, just a fucken spirit.

She did this every day, hustled her carcass only in order to free herself from it. Fucken ironic, actually. Those organs and muscles were new, eighteen years old, and yet old, fucken ironic. Perhaps one day she'd OD and she could leave the body there, on the grass, inside the dumpster, the husk, the crust which used to be her. Like one of those big-shot movie stars. But the corpse'd be anything but pretty. And it wouldn't make the E! Channel news.

A Note for Professor Rucker:

Just so you know, there will be no sex in this story. All semester I've watched the stories the other students churn out, with all the sucking and poking and the endings that don't seem to mean a goddam thing. What is this, porno? And the way you encourage them! If it's not sex then it's drugs. And symbolism. (I still don't think you've adequately answered my question, why someone can't just write a story that's a story. And yes, I hear the skittering from the younger students, but goddam it, it's a valid question.) That's the kind of story this story is–a real story about what real people do in their real lives, and a real old-fashioned hero, whose name is Dave Burns. And no symbolism. I get so sick of all the symbolism. Why can't a tree just be a goddam tree? In this story you can bet that if there are trees they will just be trees. Not trees representing penises or pudenda. You probably are saying to yourself, oh here's old John dooming himself to another story that will never be published. Well, if that's the case, then so be it.

I assume from your enthusiasm for all the symbolism and drugs and porno in the work of the younger students that it must be all the rage in the glossy magazines to feature stories with symbols and female ejaculate and threesomes and fivesomes and multi-hour drug-enhanced engorgements. Words like pudenda.

Well, you'll find none of that here! Not that the people in this story are boring or unattractive or non-sexual, they just don't have to go on about being obsessed with putting their things where they don't belong. They're what used to be called ‘adults'. Oh, you'd probably give me an A if I told that other kind of story and, trust me, I was married for twenty-six years so I know a thing or three
about what people do behind closed doors. I'll bet if you just add up the sex, I've done it a lot more than those other students who go on and on about it! But if you're waiting for some description of what Connie and I did, think again. What happens between two people who love each other is sacred. I'd as soon describe the day I came home to find her naked and bled out, slumped over the tub like a goddam bathrobe, as tell you about what we did behind closed doors. Did it ever occur to you that's why people close doors?!?

So if the only point in reading short stories these sad days is the hope of being titillated by this new description of ejaculation or that new coital position then I guess this old bird is just doomed to fail. (And happy to do it!) But just this once I'd like you to put away all those preconceived ideas of ‘conflict' and ‘narrative architecture' and ‘character construction' and Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver (who, I'm sorry, was a terrible writer, God-awful! Would someone tell me what happens at the end of those pitiful ‘stories', and I use the word loosely) and just read this story like a goddam story, the kind of story that real storytellers used to tell, before it all became sex and drugs and liberal teachers (I'm sorry to bring politics into this, but I've seen the bumper stickers on your car. Legalise marijuana? Please!). Maybe you get more money from the university or get some kind of award in your little leftist teaching organisation if your students publish symbolism-filled sex stories in the flesh mags, or in anthologies, or get a story collection with a stylish cover showing a thigh, perhaps, or a filled ashtray, or a shirtless man on a motel bed with his head in his hands, lit through the window by the red ‘Vacancy' sign of the motel.

Not that I am against being anthologised.

But this is not that sort of story.

In this story, there is simply Dave and he's just a good guy. Not complicated. An American. The good kind, no hyphens or dark past, just what used to be called a man. Late fifties but people often mistake him for someone in his early fifties. Worked in sales for years but everyone always said he was a great storyteller and he always knew he had a way with the words. Then his wife passed away of a brain tumour in Victorville (a couple of years before the story starts) and one day he just decided to go to college and he moved to Irvine and that's where the story starts, with him in college, taking undergraduate classes in various disciplines and feeling alive for the first time in years, but also feeling more like an outsider than he thought was possible. He's the oldest student by far, and people don't respect his life-knowledge and the courage it took for him to go to college. In fact, they are openly dismissive of him. He ignores their scorn because what else is he going to do, and so they become bolder in it and he ignores it more and on and on it goes, until they pretty much are laughing in his face. And yet he soldiers on, like someone in a foreign country. So that's the set-up of the story. It's a love story, which I'm sure you'll hate too.

And I know what you're thinking, but for one thing I was never in sales. I worked the warehouse in tool-and-dye, mostly assistant managing, and even though I never took a single business class, I could run circles around those college graduates they hired as purchasing agents and general managers and I outlasted all of them! So it's ironic that here I am in college. There are plenty of other differences between me and Dave too, the biggest being that my wife didn't die of a brain tumour, although I'll argue to my own death that the depression was caused by one, despite what Connie's note said about ‘emptiness' and ‘suffocation,' not to mention
whatever psychobabble that therapist has planted in our daughter Libby about me stifling them both. Sometimes life is just hard, OK? That's what your stupid students, with their ecstasy and their little sex stories full of ironic quips to adults, don't understand. They all blame their parents for their miserable little lives, but you know what? Nobody makes your life miserable. Life makes your life miserable.

And even if Dave does have a few exterior details in common with me, you don't seem to criticise any of the other students for writing about themselves, like that black-haired girl with the tattoos who wrote the disgusting thing about giving a blowjob to her PE teacher in high school, the story you loved so much–hmm, wonder what that's about. If you don't mind a word of advice from someone who's been around some blocks, you should be careful.

Another thing about this story. In the middle part, where Dave decides he's fond of the graceful, fortyish woman who works at the sandwich shop on campus and tries to figure out how to talk to her, they say the kinds of real things that real people say to one another (‘Hi.' ‘How are you?' ‘Nice weather we're having.') and not the senseless and overly symbolic crap that you praise as dialogue in your class. (‘The ground holds its moisture better than it once did.' ‘I hear the salmon have returned.' ‘Lonely is easy on the weekends.') So you better not hold that against me either.

Not that my characters don't feel things deeply, but they do what people do with thoughts like those: they think them; they don't run around speaking in some literary code just to sound smart for the judges in some corrupt fiction contest sponsored by one of those writer's trade journals in which perfectly good stories are form-rejected as being ‘ultimately not for us'.

No, the people in this story do what people do. They get up. They watch TV. They go to class. They're lonely, but they don't go around being degenerates because of it. And if they sometimes imagine themselves with a woman and indulge in…self-pleasure, I'm not going to go on about it (pressed against the mirror, eyes squinting) like the kid with the goatee who wrote four pages about fondling himself like a monkey…and who–I'm sorry, Professor Rucker–is not the genius you seem to think he is. Please tell me where his story about beating off goes because I read it three times and it seems to me that the thing just ends. You don't even find out whether it's the babysitter outside his door or his mother or who! And he doesn't even finish…you know. That's not a story. And yet here you always go, thinking he's Hemingway or some goddam thing. We notice which students you favour, too. You should know that. And this isn't just about me, because you've made it perfectly clear that you don't think I'm going to be making any money any time soon as a writer. I know you think I'm a no-talent, argumentative old cuss, but here's a question for you, sir: why should the talented people be the only ones who get to write books?

Besides, I'm not that much older than you, and those girls in the back row might look at you a certain way now but you are fading away, right before their eyes, and you don't even know it. That's what someone my age could tell you, if you'd listen, how the girls see you, and then one day they don't any more, and how one day there's a part of you that's just living in your memories. And the older the memory, the more clear it seems to be. How after a while, when you close your eyes, you won't even be able to see your wife any more. Not her face, anyway, just her white arms streaked with drying blood and her folded back and the dark red seams of the tile
you laid together in the bathroom–tile that she picked out! How's that for stifling and suffocating?

And when you do search your memory on those times you're…self-pleasing, it's not even about sex. It's about this brown-haired girl from the summer you were a camp counsellor when you were fifteen, the year your parents went to Alaska to see your uncle and you were so homesick until you met this brown-haired counsellor, a year older than you, and freckled, and it was pouring rain and the campers were all in the lodge getting a lecture about ticks and this girl–whose name you can't even remember (God, what would these kids know about an ache like that…an old man mumbling names to himself, hoping he'll come across it)–she put her hand on your lap, on the outside of your camp shorts, and just that little pressure was enough, and just the thought of that pressure now and the sound of a rainstorm one morning brings back the memory of those drops popping away on the tin roof of the dormitory and that girl's hand on your lap and the feeling that you would grow and grow and grow under her hand forever, that the world couldn't stop you from growing under that girl's hand.

But that's not what this story is about. Because I know what you'd say about that if I did write that story, about an old man–a good man–a man everyone blames for his wife's death, even though she did it her goddam self, without a bit of warning! This good man who can't even picture his wife any more and can only seem to think about this freckled girl from camp–obsess about her, almost–that it's ‘sentimental', which is a word you keep using like it's negative, but you know what? I don't mind being sentimental. I'm happy to be sentimental. On my best days, the ones that are bearable anyway, I am exactly sentimental. Don't you see that it's
a kind of gift to be able to find sentiment in life? I am at the end of things and the students are at the beginning and so I don't blame them, but you are somewhere in the middle and here you are with your Legalise Marijuana and your longish hair and your hands always in your pockets and your long pauses…and goddam it, you should know better! You should know that you wake up and you pray for a little sentimentality on those days when it feels black and empty and you wonder whether you've missed your whole life. You should know that but you don't. You think you know everything, but you don't know anything.

No, I know what you're going to think of this story. Too corny, too small, nothing happens. You're especially going to hate the part where the widower Dave gets up the strength to talk to the sandwich woman and she thinks he seems like a decent guy. You'll say you don't believe it, that she wouldn't go for a ‘decent' guy, that there has to be something more to her attraction, but maybe sometimes that's all people want, someone to be decent to them. And maybe that's all some people have to offer. I know you're going to say something like, ‘We need more about the dead wife,' but did it ever occur to you that there is no more? That people die and they're dead and that's that?

So give me a C. I don't care. The story is just going to be a story and not a druggy anatomy lesson. Dave's going to ask the brown-haired sandwich woman to go for a walk and in the end, they're going to hold hands and run to get out of the rain in a little tin-roofed gazebo that I'm putting where there is no gazebo and you can think it's corny or ‘sentimental' if you want, but that's what I want to happen, goddam it. I'm not going to have her make up some excuse why she can't, and have him go back to his apartment
and please himself, even if you think that's more ‘believable'. He's going to say something that he's planned out, something clever and funny to the girl about the club sandwich and joining her club (you've made it abundantly clear that you don't like puns, but did you ever think that maybe she does) and she's going to agree to go for a walk and that's that. And if you can't make a little thing like that happen–a goddam walk between two people, it's not like he was asking her to marry him–if you can't make even that happen in a story, then I don't see why you'd bother writing a story at all! I don't know why you'd even bother getting out of bed in the morning, to tell you the truth.

And, in the workshop, if you urge me to continue the story, Dave and the sandwich woman kissing under a tree, their hands groping all over one another leading to we both know what…and don't think I haven't thought of that, a lot…goddam it, you're just going to have to find another student to do your dirty work. I'm not going to write a sex scene just so you can feel like you've done your job. I would rather die never having published a thing than ruin the moment by having them do anything but hold hands. Dave staring at the freckles on the sandwich lady's face. Rain falling around them.