The Comedy Writer (28 page)

I don't know what time I fell asleep, but I woke up to someone knocking on my door, and when I opened it I had my sign.

Not
a
midget,
the
midget, the same vertically challenged fellow who'd been insulted outside the Baskin-Robbins when I first got to L.A. He'd been knocking at my door and now he was engaging me in conversation, but it was insane that he should be there and my foggy brain was trying to fathom it and the circuits were shorting out left and right.

“Did I wake you?” he asked.

“What?”

“Did I wake you?”

“No, no, I was awake, I was just … resting. What did you ask before that?”

“I asked if a Henry Halloran lives here.”

I blurted out that I was Henry and, despite the fact that he was standing there in a tweed blazer, brown corduroys, Lacoste shirt, and big smile, I felt a rush of fear. The fucker had tracked me down. How could he … ?

“Gus Anders,” he said, arm outstretched. “I've been trying to reach you.”

This made even less sense. Was this the Gus on my machine, the one who'd read the article? Was that a ploy to get to me, or … ?

“Maybe this isn't a good time,” he said when I offered a dead-fish handshake and similar gaze.

He was around thirty-five with a freshly carved goatee that gave him a vaguely hip presence.

“Wait, I'm sorry,” I said. “How did you find me?”

“You're in the phone book.”

“But … how did you know my name?”

“Um, well, it was in the magazine.”

He said this in a slightly patronizing way, then seemed to catch himself.

“Oh, I should have clarified that. I read your article in the
Times
about … you know … and I have a few questions, if you don't mind. I've actually called a few times, but …”

I played dumb about the phone calls—there'd been at least three—my machine was wacky, I told him, I hadn't received any. After another awkward moment, I asked him in. I didn't have any bloody mix in the apartment, which was a bummer, because I was a little too winded to be talking to a friend of the dead woman's, and that's what he was.

“That you're here blows my mind,” I said.

“Why?”

His congeniality slipped, as if bracing for an oafish remark. I wondered whether this was wise, bringing the ice cream store up, but I had to, there was too great a chance he already recognized me and the tension was excruciating. Besides, the magnitude of this coincidence,
the godliness of it
, was something I had to share.

I'd been there when the big goon had insulted him, I said, and hastily explained how it had unfolded. I tried to convey my embarrassment about the whole thing without further embarrassing him, which, by the way, was tricky.

He claimed to have no recollection of it, that I must be mistaking him. I asked if he had a white van, he said no. Adamant now, I asked if he'd been to a Baskin-Robbins in the last several months. He said yes, then, ah, he recalled the van. It was a friend's he'd been using to move stuff. Now he recalled standing outside the store, too—it was definitely Gus—but the midget crack he'd missed entirely. He'd had things on his mind that day, other things, and he'd paid us no mind.

“Well, I feel a little better,” I said.

“People get hung up too much on stupid stuff.”

Then we talked about the Suicide Lady. Though I'd lived with her sister almost a week, I knew very little about Bonnie Driscoll until Gus showed up. They'd worked together at UCLA Medical Center; he was a psychologist, she a psychiatric nurse. It had disturbed a lot of people that one of their own could do such a thing without anyone picking up the warning signs. Gus had come to get information from me, but I was the one who got most of the info.

Bonnie Driscoll was a manic-depressive who had long periods of stability between bouts. At age nineteen she'd been hospitalized for a year, again at twenty-nine, and when she felt it coming on at age thirty-nine, she couldn't or wouldn't deal with it. That much was explained in a letter found in her car.

“But why jump off a building?” I asked. “It seems so violent, so angry. It would've been a lot cleaner and easier just to run a hose into the car, no?”

“Two schools of thought,” he said. “Sometimes they do it because they're angry, and other times it's for the view.”

I made a face.

“Sounds crazy, but …”

He went on to tell me about the two kinds of people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge—those who jump off the side facing the city and the more determined ones who jump off the ocean side. Almost everyone who attempts to jump on the ocean side succeeds, while those on the city side are often talked down. They're the ones who haven't completely lost hope, who are literally reaching out to humanity. “Which side did Bonnie go?” he asked. “Neither the front nor the back,” I said, “kind of on the side.” He asked if there was anything I'd forgotten to put in the article—maybe a curious
comment, something that made no sense to me—but I said there wasn't, just the thing about it being my fault. That was typical of suicides, he said, holding an individual responsible for feelings they can't comprehend. It was childish and cruel, but so was the final act itself, and I should not let it bother me. I asked him if he knew Bonnie's sister Colleen.

“Oh, yes, I know Colleen.”

“Is she insane?”

“What?”

“Is she a crazy woman? Colleen—is she nuts?”

“No, she's a good kid. A little wild, I suppose, but I wouldn't call her crazy.”

I told him how she'd come to my door, how she'd moved in on me, how she'd made my life hell. Gus seemed surprised by this. The Colleen he knew was a little troubled but had “a big heart.” I wondered if I'd been had by a fraudulent Colleen, but it was her, all right—right down to the checkerboard dress. Because of a ten-year age difference, Colleen and Bonnie hadn't been close while growing up, he said, but Colleen had tned to change that after moving to L.A. She pushed too hard too fast, though, and the relationship never really improved.

“She has a way of doing that,” I said. “Annoying people.”

“It wasn't just Colleen—Bonnie had a hard time getting close to people.”

“Maybe you didn't know Colleen like she did.”

Gus sat on my bed. There he was, the ice cream midget—
the answer to my prayers!
—sitting on my bed.

“Look,” he said, “I know Colleen's got problems, and sometimes her judgment isn't very good, but she's not a bad person. She's been through a lot, that kid. I won't even tell you the shit she
endured growing up. Then when her sister died … it was like … They may not have been very close, but it was as close as Colleen was to anyone.”

“What about Honus?”

“The German? Just a big asshole. That was pretty sad actually.”

“So you're telling me that the woman who drove me crazy a few weeks ago is really a sweetheart?”

“What I saw of Colleen I liked. What's become of her I can't say. When her sister died … I don't know what was going on in her head. I know she blamed a lot of people, myself included, but that's typical. What's not typical is to cut everybody off. I don't know. I tried to talk to her at the funeral, but she didn't want any help from me or any of Bonnie's friends. It's too bad because she obviously needs it.”

He asked me a few more questions about what happened on the roof, but I stuck to my story. He was just searching for something tangible, something that might help him to understand, and so I lied again and told him there wasn't much anybody could do, she definitely wanted to go, that it was quick and painless, and when I saw her on the ground, she looked at peace.

Before leaving, Gus encouraged me to get psychological counseling because traumas such as these could cause problems down the line. I said I was fine, I'd dealt with it on my own. When he thanked me for being with Bonnie Driscoll at the end of her life, I waved him off. He asked if he could take me to lunch someday, that it would mean a lot to him, and I said, “Of course, it would mean a lot to me, too,” and then after he left I took his number and flushed it down the toilet and wiped my brow and took off my damp shirt and prayed for God to forgive me for making the same mistakes over and over.

When the sun had just set and it was still light, I went walking. I took a tennis ball along to keep me company. The shadows made everything outside look black and white, but I could see my neighbors eating dinner in their warm orange boxes or glowing blue in front of TVs. The air smelled of pasta boiling and chicken and pork chops baking, and it made me homesick. I thought how great it would be to go shopping with Amanda and pick up a box of fish-sticks and fries and cook them in the oven, letting the house warm with their smell, and then to light candles and eat the fish and chips on our scratchy coffee table while we watched
jeopardy.
I thought about how lucky I was to receive a sign from God. I didn't deserve it, I knew, but it had happened, there was no denying it. As the shadows bled into darkness, I prayed for a way to follow up on my end of the deal—to make myself what God wanted me to be—and right away it struck me, and it wouldn't go away, no matter how much I fought it, and the thought was so loud and insistent and contrary to every impulse in my body that it occurred to me maybe the voice in my head wasn't mine. So I decided to suck it up and listen.

at the Beverly Hills Police Department wasn't able to find any record of her. No Colleen Driscoll on his “guest list”; hadn't been for the past month at least, he said. I was surprised by the disappointment I felt. I really wanted to find her now. On my way out, I ran into Orange Cop and, after tossing a snippy remark my way, he straightened things out. Colleen wasn't Colleen anymore. She was
Doheny.
First and last. Doheny. Like the street. Not Doheny Doheny. Just Doheny. Madonna, Cher, Sting …
Doheny.
After a lot of haggling, someone gave me the address of a women's shelter in the mid-Wilshire district.

There was something vaguely Russian-looking about this part of town. Rows of nondescript high-rises, cement-colored, same shape; few trees or smiles. The shelter was in one of these boxes, but she wasn't there. They suggested another place east of downtown.