The Deep Whatsis (14 page)

The next day
, when I get up and get dressed and sign my discharge papers and go outside, I am wearing the same Adriano Goldschmied jeans and J. Lindeberg shirt I came in with, and I decide to walk to the beach rather than take a cab; it’s not that far and it’s early so I’ll arrive at the hotel before anyone even gets up. I’m rested and in a good mood; I do, after all, have a plan: I’ll go to the shoot, make up some story about having been mugged or kidnapped, temporary amnesia perhaps, I’ll add value at the shoot, redeem myself to the clients and the agency, thereby restoring Barry’s confidence in my abilities, at which point I will make a deal with Barry that if I agree to work for nothing my salary will be divided up among Juliette and the others, something like that. One of the good things about LA, I’ve always thought, is it’s easy to know which direction you are going; the sun rises in the east and sets in the west out here, no
doubt about that, and there are hills to the east, there’s an ocean to the west, and so on. It’s simple. If you can see the beach and you go in the opposite direction you will hit the hills. If you can see the hills and go in the opposite direction you will hit the beach. And that’s what I do. I see the hills and orient myself away from them, although there’s not a through street coming off the medical center, so I have to cut across the UCLA campus. When I get to Sunset it isn’t clear which direction goes toward the ocean, because Sunset is kind of curvy around here, and as I remember it hits the beach pretty far north of Santa Monica, and Shutters is at the southern end of Santa Monica anyway, so I take a right. I figure I’ll get to some other major cross street and take that down toward the water. But as I’m trying to walk on Sunset, and cars are speeding past me on their way to the 405 and their jobs farther east or in the valley at one of the major studios, I realize that I can’t really walk on Sunset, there’s no sidewalk, at least in Westwood, and so I have to take the side streets.

I turn off Sunset at a street called Loring, beautiful homes from the 1940s, I am the only person walking on the sidewalks and I know this makes me a suspicious subject, and I turn onto Thayer and continue south. Then I turn right on Le Conte, counting the number of Mexicans cleaning their employers’ driveways with air blowers, I’m up to four at this point, and several minutes later when I get on Westholme and then back to Le Conte, I take a left on Hills. After a few minutes I hit Loring again and realize that I’ve gone in a big circle. I’m not lost exactly, even though without my phone I have no idea where I
am. I keep going till I get to Hilgard and I take that to Westwood. Westwood is a street I know, and it’s wide. There’s a bus that goes down it, there are no lawns or pneumatic Mexicans, so this route should be more direct. When I get to Pico I stop at the light, remembering that in LA you can actually get a ticket for jaywalking. I have no idea which direction I should be going but judging by where the sun is I turn left. I walk.

After half an hour I realize I should have hit the beach so obviously I’m going in the wrong direction; I’m heading east toward downtown LA. It’s amazing what you miss when you’re driving here. Every block features another two or three strip malls on either side of the road, and every strip mall is a kind of highly coded, veiled respository of people’s hopes and dreams; every one is a Zolaesque Balzacian Dickens novel, a compendium, a vast collection of stories that on the surface look unconnected, random, but if you look deeper you’ll see the threads that join them into a tapestry of human narrative and feeling. I’m standing at Pico and Sepulveda. There’s a SuperCuts, SRS Shoes, Beds Etc., Good Feet, La Salsa Fresh Mexican Grill, and that’s just on one corner. A little past it, LA Overhead Garage Doors. And just past that, Pet Supplies 4 You. I could stand here and make up a million tales about these places, the people who opened them, the customers who have come here for years, or I could just let my own memories flood into me; memories of my childhood, I’m looking at the Good Feet storefront, thinking about the time I stubbed my toe on the kitchen table running after my brother and I had to go see old Dr. Granach,
some podiatrist we got referred to, because I had a blood blister. He gave me anaesthetic and then he popped it and drained the blood; afterward as I left I had no feeling in my right foot and it seemed like I was hobbling with one leg like a pirate ghost. And then my mother, she was still alive then, said I could stay home from school even though my father forbade such sissiness; she knew, as obviously this must have been one of her cogent periods, that I was easily shamed, and would have felt mortified limping around those hallowed halls. This is one of my best and most cherished memories of her.

A minute later I’m passing Pet Supplies 4 You, still floating in the past, remembering that we had a dog back then, and every Saturday when I went shopping with my dad one of our tasks was to buy a big bag of dog food, and we went to the discount pet store across the tracks, that’s the kind of shopper my dad was, he was well-to-do but had been raised by parents who had lived through the Great Depression, so he was always looking for a deal. My mom, when she was with it enough to know what was happening or what day it was, would get angry because she said he could afford to buy dog food at the Kroger like everyone else, and get the better brand, and how does it make sense to drive all the way across town to the discount pet store for one bag of dog food, why don’t you buy ten bags? My dad would just shrug, he didn’t really have a reason why he did it that way, he just enjoyed it, and my mom would roll her eyes, how could anyone enjoy buying dog food? They didn’t always get along. Our dog was named
Race, which is not a name you could give a dog today, I don’t think, but my brother and I had not named him that for any sociological or politically concious reasons, we had named him after Race Bannon, who was a character on a 1960s cartoon called
Jonny Quest
that was in heavy rerun mode when we were kids in the ’80s; they even tried briefly to revive the show with all new episodes in ’86 for one season but it failed. In the cartoon, Jonny Quest and his father, Dr. Benton Quest, along with their bodyguard and pilot, Race Bannon (who had worked for a shadowy agency known as Intelligence One), travel in a jet plane to exotic locales in search of adventure. The other characters on the show were Hadji, an extraordinary Indian boy who had been adopted by Benton Quest, and Bandit, their bulldog. My brother and I had discussed at the time naming our dog Bandit, as you could imagine, with him staunchly in support of the idea and me opposed. I was eight years old but I remember making the argument that to name our dog Bandit was to merely steal someone else’s dog name, the people who made the TV show
Jonny Quest
, it was theirs, their intellectual property, and thus entirely unoriginal if not wrong of us to copy them; we might as well name the dog Lassie. Tim persisted and so I suggested that we name him something else from within the
Jonny Quest
fanverse that would be both an homage to our love of the show during that golden time (as we were already beginning to age out of it) as well as a subtly ironic take on pop culture. I don’t think I used the phrase “subtly ironic take on pop culture,” I think I might have said it would be an “inside joke.” My brother,
whose name is Tim, as I said, and who today is an insurance broker in Dallas, and who is a year younger than I, would have nothing of it; he wanted to name our dog Bandit, even though he wasn’t a bulldog, he was a Lab. But I continued in my insistence that it was ridiculous to name him Bandit, and everyone would think we were dolts, and that if he wanted to name him Bandit that I would from that day on have nothing to do with the animal. Parents were brought in and in the end I prevailed because I was the oldest; I believe that tears may have been involved. Whether you’re right or wrong it’s important to stand your ground and fight for what you believe in. But maybe I take these things too much to heart. Or is that simply what an Artist is? Someone who takes everything to heart? Am I an Artist? These days art is nothing but an alternative currency created for the purposes of money laundering. Walking east on Pico past blocks and blocks of Korean businesses, with signs in Korean and no English anywhere, I realize that if I had my phone with me I would call my brother and perhaps, if he failed to recognize my number and actually answered, I would apologize to him for being so insistent about naming our dog Race. That’s exactly what I would do. After all, what would it have mattered in the final analysis if we had named him Bandit? The animal is no longer around. A few years after we got him, when we were ten and eleven, Race was hit by a car and killed instantly. That’s what we were told. Much later, when I was in college and we had gone out and had a few beers together, my father told me the truth, which was that Race indeed had been hit by a car, yes, but he was
not killed instantly at all, in fact he was writhing around in the middle of the street, and that Mr. Manning, our next-door neighbor in Canfield, had come out and yelled at my dad to do something about it, and my dad didn’t know what to do. He had tried to pick up the dog but Race was so crazed that he bit my dad on the hand, and my father was freaking out about that, so the neighbor went into his garage and came back with a sledge hammer and he smashed our dog’s skull with it, putting him out of his misery. Then the two men quickly put the dog in a bag and tossed him in the trash and hosed down the street before Tim and I got home from our tennis lessons. It was a Sunday. We were upset to hear that Race had died, Tim especially, me less so, as I remember it. But I’ve always had a sixth sense when it comes to lies, and I knew that something about my dad’s story didn’t add up. I don’t know why, but I knew that Race had not been taken away by the police to be buried behind the police station, that didn’t make sense to me, and so I looked in the trash and that’s when I saw the bloody bag. I didn’t open the bag but I knew there was a dead and mangled dog in it, I just knew. At first I didn’t say anything to Tim about it but then I realized he should know, it might help him deal with his grief. That night I went into his room and told him that Race was in a plastic garbage bag in the trash can that would be emptied out Monday morning, if he didn’t believe me he could go and look at it. Tim got up and we took a flashlight outside. It was late. I stepped back while Tim went up to the can and stood there, hesitating. He stood there for a
minute debating, I guess, whether or not he really wanted to see his dead pet, and then turned back and looked at me.

“Should I open it?” he said, and I think it is the most serious question that anyone has ever asked me. “Should I open it?”

That’s when I told him I was only kidding.

He stood and looked at me.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “I think you’re only saying that.” He reached for the lid to pull it off and I came up behind him and put my hand on his hand to stop him. I pushed down hard and prevented him from doing it. We started fighting and I was bigger than him and I kept him from opening the lid. He started punching me with his fists, fury and grief a heady brew. Then our father came outside in his Brooks Brothers boxer shorts and shook his head. “What the hell is wrong with you kids?” he said to us, and then looked at Tim, who was crying at this point.

“Go to bed,” he said.

When I went out drinking with my dad some twenty years later I told him what had transpired between me and Tim and Race that night. “You’re dwelling on it,” he said, and then got up and went to the bathroom. We got pretty drunk and ended up arguing about something (not my mom); we’ve never been in a bar together since.

By the time I get through the Korean section of Pico it’s late afternoon, almost evening, I’ve been walking all day, which is good, I needed the exercise, I needed to sweat it out. I feel good. I’m almost downtown now; I see a taxi and wave it down and
get in. A few minutes later we are on the 10 heading toward Santa Monica. It takes us nearly an hour because it’s rush hour, but that’s a lot faster than if I had walked back. I consider having the cabbie take me directly to the offices of Gangrape, the production company, but I can’t remember where they are and besides, I need my laptop, my tablet, and my phone. When we get to Shutters on the Beach I pay the cabbie, the bellman opens the door for me, I go in, and as I’m heading across the lobby toward my room I see her standing there, twirling.

“Hey-dee-hi, heyo, yo!”
she says with a broad smile that seems, insanely, genuine. It kind of lights up the place. “Fancy seeing you here!”

She’s wearing American Apparel purple tights under a vintage Christian Dior skirt, on top of that she’s got a frayed Van Halen T-shirt from the ’80s and at the bottom of it all, ballet slippers, and on top, a purple sunset smudged below her eye. What is she doing? Is this some kind of art project? Of course she looks ridiculously beautiful (in the moment, it occurs to me that I have never been able to give her a tagline; I stand there, stunned, incapable of coming up with one, and AFTER MUCH COGITATION NOTHING SUITABLE COMES TO MIND™.)

“What are you doing here?” I ask, thinking that I am being disarming, or starting at a complete disadvantage, I don’t know yet.

“Here? You mean LA?”

“Yeah I mean LA, I mean this hotel.”

“I guess I’m doing the same thing you are.”

“Me? And what am I doing?”

“Standing in the lobby of Shutters on the Beach.”

“Oh is that what I’m doing? Thank you, I never would have guessed.”

“Wow, really original sarcasm,” she says with a wink. “Aren’t you surprised to see me? Aren’t you even going to thank me for the fruit basket?”

“Answer my question first,” I say with a fake sternness.

“I’m here for the FreshIt shoot, dude!” she giggles. “Tom said I could come out as part of my internship. Don’t worry, Eric, I paid my own way, I’m not screwing with your production budget, I know how important it is to put as much of every dollar on the screen as you can,” she says, sounding like she’s done some homework. “And I’m not stalking you, even ironically like before, I’m just trying to learn everything I can about the business. Love the ’boards, by the way, this is a great concept, I threw in some ideas for the director, hope you don’t mind.” It’s the most she’s said coherently since I met her.

“I think we need to talk,” I say.

“About what? And where you been, yo, everyone thought you had quit and gone to Bali or something!”

“I’ve been walking,” I say. “I’ve walked from one end of Los Angeles to the other and I can safely say it is the greatest city in the world.”

“Cool,” she says. Then we stand there for a moment and I go, “I have to get my phone. I have to get to the shoot.”

She follows me back to my room; I don’t object to this, as I might as well sit her down and have the talk that we need to have, explain to her all of the strange and difficult shit she has caused in my life including, tangentially, the recurrence of oddly pleasurable and at the same time vaguely troubling memories from my happy Midwestern childhood, including but not limited to my recent full-blown and highly entertaining sense of metanoia, an ancient Greek term meaning, “everything you know is wrong.” We cross the pool deck and go down the hall, and when we get to my room my key card doesn’t work; Intern says she thinks they may have checked me out because of the fact I disappeared for two-and-a-half days.

“Let’s go to mine,” she says.

We go to her room, it’s one level up and around the corner on the ocean side. I know technically speaking it’s not a good idea for me to go with her to her room, but the new addition to my medication regimen that they gave me at UCLA had taken away most all my sexual proclivity, although my penis is, I think, sort of semitumescent as always. We get to her room and I ask her how she’s affording this room if the company isn’t paying for it and she isn’t getting remunerated as an intern. This is my proof, I realize, this is my proof that she is under the employ of Barry, brought in here to mess with me, to destroy me so they can get out of my contract.

“My parents,” she says. “I told them an internship is like graduate school. It’s expensive but it’s the only way to get a job anymore, and so they sprung for it.”

“There are cheaper hotels than Shutters on the Beach,” I remind her. “I think the Four Seasons is cheaper than this place.”

“I hate the Four Seasons,” she says as she opens her door, and I imagine her having an affair with Barry Spinotti at the Four Seasons; he’s been flying out here to do what he called some “triage” in our LA office recently: got it, Bar, say no more. We walk in. She lets the door slam closed and we stand there in the dark. The room, what I can see of it, is bigger than mine. She looks at me and this makes me uncomfortable so I go to the curtains and throw them open; she has a view of the bay. Then I go to the bathroom and turn on all the lights.

“Harrison Ford stays at this hotel when he’s in LA,” she says.

“I know.”

She tosses her Freitag messenger bag on the bed and looks at me again. Then she sits down.

“What are you doing?” I ask her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. She reaches for the phone. “I’m going to call the front desk and see what happened to your room. What was the number again?”

“Put the phone down,” I say in my serious voice.

She puts the phone down. “What?”

“We need to talk.”

“About what?”

“About that eye.”

“What about it?” she says. “Is it a problem or something?”

“Well when a nineteen-year-old girl tells her employer that one of her superiors fucked her and punched her in the face, yeah, that does cause some problems.”

There’s a long pause and then she says, “What are you talking about?”

“I was told you told them at Tate that I punched you in the face.”

“You were?”

“Yes.”

Then she laughs.

“Why would I tell them that? Are you fucking with me? I fell into the doorjamb in your loftlike aparment, as you call it, remember, the night we did those Black Beauties I bought from that French guy at Dressler. Shit, I wish we hadn’t done that. What were we thinking?” She smiles in a jaunty way. “It was fun, though. And who told you I’m nineteen? I’m twenty-four. Look, I get that you can’t have a relationship with me now that we work in the same company, do you think I want to get us in trouble or something? No way. I’m trying to figure out my life, not fuck it up. By the way did you watch that Alejandro Jodorowsky movie I left on your desk?
El Topo
? I really think you would love it.”

I’m facing the big picture windows and she’s sitting on the bed, facing me, so she’s mostly in shadow. I’m having a hard time reading her, so I step back and turn on some lights. There are about sixteen light switches by the door and I just slide
them all up so now the place is lit up like a sound stage. Every one of the five hundred threads in each of the sheets is hot white and every nook and crevice of every decorative conch shell is glowing pink and florid as it would in, say, Florida.

“Listen,” I say, “I don’t know what kind of game you think you’re playing with me, but it isn’t funny.”

“No?” she says, allowing the tiniest bit of pouty girlishness into her voice. “Why don’t you think it’s funny?” I’m standing right over her now and she takes her eyes off my eyes and looks at my belt. Then she’s reaching to undo it but I step away.

“Don’t do that,” I say.

“Why?” she says. “Why not? Oh come on, no one will know, and I promise we won’t do it again, you can totally trust me on this.”

I consider telling her the whole story, giving her the entire rundown that a) I’m not in the mood because I checked myself into the hospital because I was having a panic attack and thought I was going to die, and then I trashed the ER and they put me in the psych ward, where they gave me Halcion and Abilify and zinfandel and who knows what other antidepressants and antipsychotics, which have limited my desire to have sex and b), I don’t even remember what b) is, I’m trembling so much as she undoes me.

“Because I don’t want to,” I say.

“No? You don’t want to what? Do you realize we haven’t even properly made love yet? Yeah, we’ve done shit, but we haven’t actually had intercourse and I think it would be something of a shame if we didn’t know what that felt like.” Her little
pouty voice again. I stand there shaking a bit, inside, maybe it’s just my stomach, due to the fact I forgot to eat during the long Pico journey. There were so many options and I had decided I would investigate them all visually, at least the taco-related ones, and stop at what seemed like the best on my way back to the beach, but that didn’t happen. She gets up and takes a step toward me and smiles, tilts her head to one side, this really is her best feature, not her face exactly but the youth and I suppose guilelessness that emanate from it when she smiles. She is too beautiful right now to attempt description; I don’t move, I don’t speak.

“I want to take a picture of you looking just like that,” she says.

“Why?” I say.

“Because there’s this website, it’s called Look At This Fucking Douchebag, I could put your photo on it!” Then she laughs. “Just kidding. You look nice. You look different out here, you look rested, it does you good.”

“Funny,” I say. Then she tells me about a series of pix that she and her friend took back in New York, they found these little stuffed animals that someone had thrown away, and they also found a Cincinnati Bengals jacket, and they put the stuffed animals inside the Bengals jacket in various funny and compromising positions and took dozens of pictures with their phones and made a Tumblr of it and got something like twenty thousand views in the first week.

“Cool,” I say, not really understanding anything at this point.

“It was Kaytlin’s idea,” she goes on. “She’s an artist.”

“I don’t know if I can believe a word of what you’re telling me,” I say.

“Good,” she says. “I like it that way.”

Then she gives me that look again and takes another step toward me; I don’t back off, I just stare at her. She takes my belt and undoes it. Then I grab hold of her wrists and stop her before she can unzip the AGs.

“Don’t.”

“Aw,” she says, maybe giving up for now. “And I was going to give you a Deep Whatsis.” I don’t know what that is; I just look at her blankly.

“What’s a Deep Whatsis?” I ask.

“Exactly. This boyfriend of mine, he said it was beyond the power of the human mind to comprehend, so that’s what he dubbed it,” she says. “But I made it up. It’s a super deluxe blowjob is all, using this certain kind of oil and, um … some other things.”

She looks up at me and smiles. I don’t smile back. Though I want to. But I know what will happen if I do.

“Oh well,” she says, “oh well.”

I look down at her, wishing I was still in the hospital, at least there I was safe. Ten seconds later I’m lying on the bed, she’s pulling my pants off and tossing them onto the floor. She reaches into her messenger bag and takes out a bottle of almond oil and a box of Fisherman’s Friend cough drops. I prop up my head on about five goose-down pillows and watch as she takes the top off the almond oil bottle, very slowly, and pours some on
my now fully erect dick. She rubs it in with her left hand. Then she pops two lozenges into her mouth and upturns the bottle. She empties it and swishes the oil around between her cheeks, sucking for a minute on the menthol drops. Then she straddles me and gives me a look before going down on me, thrusting my cock into her fully lubricated gob, and thus it begins. The almond oil, she explains later, is an excellent a lubricant, and the menthol acts as a stimulant, increasing sensation in the nerve endings, and indeed it’s the first time I’ve ever experienced anything remotely like this. Her tongue and mouth go up and down and around my member with supreme conviction. She’s adept at understanding when I’m about to explode and backs off long enough to keep me in the game, over and over, again and again. This goes on, as I remember, pretty much the rest of the afternoon and into the night; when finally she lets me get off I see stars behind my eyes.