Slick (7 page)

“I didn’t...” I looked to the mother, then back at the daughter. “I didn’t even know deaf people could drive.”

“Yeah. It’s blind people who have the problems.”

“No. I know, but...” This was too strange. “Can you tell her I need her insurance information?”

Annoyed, the girl signed to her mother while talking. “He wants your insurance information.”

Marvel Girl nodded impatiently.
Yeah, yeah. Obviously. But consider this.

Unlike all the interpreters I’d seen on TV, the girl waited until her mother was done before translating.

“She says she has insurance, but she thinks it’s a total rip-off. They’re only going to raise her premiums until she pays back twice whatever they end up shelling out for this.”

That seemed like an awful lot of information for such a quick bit of sign language. But she was right on about the insurance companies.

“I agree. But if she’s proposing some kind of split—”

“You’re actually supposed to talk to her.”

“What?”

“My mother. She’s the one you’re dealing with.”

I looked to the woman. She threw me a wave and an edgy smirk.
Hi.

“Uh, are you proposing some kind of...split... ? Because that’s...”

As I spoke, the mother watched the daughter, who interpreted my words. It was very disconcerting. The mother signed back.

“No no,” said the daughter, “she says she’ll pay for all the damage. She’d rather pay under the table, that’s all. Just get an estimate and she’ll send you a check. She’s good for it.”

Nothing invites cynicism more than the assertion that someone is “good for it.” Reading my face, Marvel Girl held up a finger and went back to her car. Awkwardly, I turned to the daughter.

“I’ve never talked to a deaf person before.”

“You hide it well.”

“What are you doing out so late on a school night?”

“Long story.”

“Oh. Don’t tell me you go to Melrose High School.”

“I don’t. I’m in eighth grade.”

“Really? You look older.”

“Thanks. You know, you’re awfully polite for someone who just got rammed.”

I grinned. “I’m on Prozac.”

“Good. Maybe you can lend some to my mother.”

Marvel Girl reemerged from the car with her insurance slip and a business card. After handing both to me, she signed to her daughter.

“She says if you want insurance, there it is. But please trust her. If you give her an estimate, she’ll give you a check. Or better yet, she can pay in services. She’s a professional web designer. Or so she likes to think.”

I looked at the card.
Jean Spelling, Original X Web Design
. Cute. She was definitely a comics fan.

She signed some more. The girl translated. “Again, she says she’s really sorry. I told her not to talk and drive. She was in the middle of chewing me out, as usual.”

Sensing that her daughter was going off-script, Jean tapped the hood again. The girl rolled her eyes. “Anyway, please don’t report this until she has a chance to pay you. Deal?”

I glanced at Jean. “Look, I don’t care how I get paid. If you can go out of pocket, that’s fine.”

On reading the translation, Jean pressed her hands, shining her relief at me.
Thank you. Thank you.

“Just drive carefully,” I said.

She smiled and quickly signed to her daughter. “What’s your name?”

“Scott. Scott Singer. Yours?”

“Madison. I was the one asking. My mom wants your business card in case she needs to reach you.”

I took a card from my wallet and gave it to Jean. She looked younger up close. Early thirties at the most. I noticed her plain silver wedding band. I wondered if Madison’s father was deaf, too. Could deaf parents even have a hearing child?

Jean touched my wrist and, with a hint of strain in her face, mouthed “Sorry.”

I shrugged. “Take it easy.”

They waved and got back in the car. Sighing, I returned to my damaged Saturn and shut the door.

Miranda cocked her head at me. “So what happened?”

“Did you ever see
The Piano
?”

“No.”

“It sucked.”

“So what happened? Was this woman drunk?”

“No. Just deaf.”

“She rear-ended you because she couldn’t hear you.”

“Apparently she was talking while driving.”

“That’s messed up.”

“You know what’s messed up? That I know the history of Wilshire Boulevard. I know the mating habits of the Hawaiian monk seal. And yet I didn’t know deaf people could drive.”

“That’s fascinating. So are we sleeping together, or am I just ugly?”

I took a deep breath and then a good look at Miranda. She wasn’t ugly.

 

 

I moved to Los Angeles in 1991. Before that, I had never even been to the West Coast. I’d spent the previous four years in Georgetown, until Drea told me to flee. She had been my mentor, my lover, my sugar mommy, my idol. She represented everything I wanted to be. Then, at age thirty-nine, at the height of her career, she fell apart. Some publicists burn out. She went nova.

“Get out of Washington,” she told me. “I want you out of this game. If I ever find you working here, I’ll do everything I can to destroy your career.”

She had said it out of love, not anger. She simply wanted to save my soul. Consumer and entertainment PR were kindergarten compared to the lobbyist arena. I saw some of the tricks Drea pulled. I saw what they did to her. When she told me to run, I ran. To this day I’ve kept far out of politics. I don’t even vote.

Pushing me out west was one of the best things she ever did for me. L.A. suited me. I loved the weather. I enjoyed the people (in small doses). And I cherished the space. The city did not lack for elbow room. I had my own three-bedroom duplex in the heart of Brentwood for the measly cost of eighteen hundred a month. One bedroom was a dusty mini-gym. The other was a dusty office (I do everything by laptop now). The master bedroom wasn’t dusty, but it certainly wasn’t used to company.

Another great thing Drea did was teach me how to properly screw. Prior to her, I was doing everything wrong. This was news to me. In my four years at Cornell, I had partnered with women who were either too young to know, too polite to say, or too drunk to care. Meanwhile, I was busy making up for all the sex I didn’t have in high school. Drea was thirty-five when she took me under her wing and sheets. By that age, she knew exactly what she was doing and what she wanted done to her. I learned much.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was still a mediocre lover. I never got the sense that I moved the earth, rocked my partner’s world, or even had my own world rocked. Usually, sex with me ended like the Fairmont Keoki project: a B+ effort. Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe I simply thought too much.

With Miranda there was no question. The sex was bad. It wasn’t her fault, or my fault. It was the people we brought into bed with us. The living ghosts of Jim and Gracie hovered nearby the whole time. The only thing more distracting and less erotic would be having my dead parents walk in.

When we finished (at least the “me” part of “we”), Miranda broke down. I held her in my arms as she sobbed, but all I could think about was Drea. With the exception of height (Drea was almost six feet tall), she and Miranda were extremely similar. They were both strong-willed, well composed, and very masculine about their emotions. This was the first time I’d ever seen Miranda cut loose with tears. It was uncomfortable for me. I never asked for this kind of access. And I never claimed to have the skills or resources to help her out of her emotional pit.

“What’s wrong with me, Scott? What the fuck’s wrong with me?”

I merely held her and stared at the stucco ceiling. She’d already asked me that question in Honolulu. I didn’t lie. I truly didn’t think there was anything wrong with her, except her taste in men.

The last time I decided to seek an outside life was in December 1997. At the time
Titanic
was causing millions of damp-eyed women to wonder if their own men would die of hypothermia for them. Gracie, as always, was ahead of the curve. Her heart had already gone on. It was my mother’s sudden departure that really shook me up.

On December 15, a ruptured cerebral aneurysm caused her to stroke out in her sleep. She was sixty-four. Prior to that, shed been perfectly healthy. At least physically. When my father lost his year-long battle with cancer, most of my mother died with him. She spent the last four years of her life reading, writing, waiting. Over Thanksgiving dinner, a mere three weeks before her death, she told me that her biggest nightmare was gathering dust for forty more years in some decrepit nursing home.

From that perspective, I was almost relieved for her. But from now on I’d only be sharing my turkeys with friends. I certainly didn’t lack for them (friends, not turkeys), but only if you went by the local definition. Los Angeles, appropriately enough, was the land of the fair-weather friend. Some of the people in my Rolodex required great weather to remain amicable. If the temperature ever dropped below fifty degrees, we’d probably all eat each other.

After my mother’s funeral, I decided to look for camaraderie outside the media world. I’d had enough of the border collies. It was time to get to know some sheep. Unfortunately, I was soon reminded that most sheep were incredibly dumb, especially in Los Angeles.

My haughty solution was Mensa, the high-IQ society. In order to get into this renowned club, I had to take a fun but challenging series of tests. They only accepted those at the top two percent of the national IQ scale. I barely squeaked in with a 135.

Most outsiders picture Mensans as big-domed nerds who sit around speaking Esperanto and plotting world domination. That isn’t entirely accurate. With the exception of a few annual theme gatherings, Mensa is mostly a network of special-interest groups (SIGs). There was a skiing SIG, a writers SIG, a Christian SIG, even a target-shooting SIG, which was no doubt safer than being around stupid people with guns.

The funniest group—a spin-off, actually—was the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, otherwise known as the Super High IQ Society. To get in, you had to retest and rank in the top 0.1 percent of IQ scores. I doubt these super-geniuses skied, prayed, or fired weapons any differently than the rest of us, but I suppose there’s a vain appeal in belonging to an organization where one can kick back and make fun of those idiots at Mensa.

Out of all the factions, I was only interested in the Young Ms. I saw their posting in the local Mensa newsletter (
L.A. Mentary
) and decided to drop in on their weekly game night at a Hollywood coffeehouse. They were indeed smart and pleasant people. Sadly, they were also—as Douglas Adams would say—aggressively uninteresting.

The only exception was Ira.

If there was ever a Super-Duper High IQ Society that only the top minds from the Super High IQ Society could qualify for, Ira would be one of them. And I’m equally sure that within thirty minutes, the other two members would want to see him mauled by a bear. It’s not that he lacked social skills. He just ignored them. He was an asshole savant, with the mind of da Vinci and the temperament of da Vinci after spending six hours in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Worse, his foul disposition had a way of sneaking up on people, masked as it was by a deceptively jovial appearance. He was a large, shaggy-haired man, a cross between Jeff Daniels from
Dumb & Dumber
and comedy writer Bruce Vilanch. Simply put, he looked like a fun guy to be around. He did indeed have a robust sense of humor, but it usually left people in the wrong kind of tears. His tongue was a chainsaw. He was the evil clown.

Classic example: Ira at the pharmacy. Late one evening he picked up his prescription allergy medication, signed for it, and then paid by credit card. The cute young clerk was supposed to check his billing signature against the handwriting on the back of his card. Instead, she checked it against the name he’d just scribbled on the pharmacy slip. Most of us would smirk at the innocent mistake and assume she was simply at the end of a long and tiresome day. Not Ira. He glared at her like she’d just taken a dump on his shoe.

“I can’t believe you just...do you even realize what you did? You took a signature I made five seconds ago and compared it to a signature I made ten seconds ago. What in God’s name were you hoping to verify? That I’m the same person who signed both receipts? I am. I haven’t left your field of vision. Or maybe you’re concerned that, in the five seconds between signatures, I was possessed by some demonic entity that was out to defraud both MasterCard and Walgreens. In any case, I really have to wonder if you’re fit to hand out lifesaving remedies. Don’t they screen people here? What’s the qualification standard? As long as you don’t drool on your shirt, you’re in? Jesus. I hope you accidentally gave me Zoloft, because people like you depress the hell out of me.”

By that point, the clerk was sniffling, crying. Her burly manager had caught the tail end of the cutdown and was fixing to pound Ira into chutney. Wisely, he fled.

Poor Ira. Yeah yeah, what about the poor clerk? Look, she was young and pretty. She probably went home and cried to her boyfriend, who held her, stroked her hair, told her she was beautiful, and then screwed her raw. Ira had no such solace.

I can only assume it was a desire for human connection that had brought him to that Young M event in the first place. Still, it took just one game of Pictionary to clear out the room. The Mensans were too polite to tell him to take his art critiques and shove them up his alimentary. They simply found excuses to go home early, no doubt praying for his absence at the next gathering.