Pure Drivel Part 2

After pulling into the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset and striking a concrete pylon and maybe the valet parker, the writer slips and slides across the gla.s.sy floor of the lobby to the reception desk. To his left, he can see past the maitre do's podium and the Armani-model hostess to an outdoor restaurant, crowded with people dressed in vinyl and other sauna-inducing unwearables. Behind him, the Beautiful Ones pose themselves around a sofa, and a tiny voice in his head whispers, "You will never have them, because you have not been professionally groomed."

The hissy fit is sustained throughout the day by an unpleasant cranial crowding of facts, comments, and sights, all of which must be simultaneously remembered, until the writer can unsheathe his computer and download his brain. Invited to the producer's house that evening for c.o.c.ktails, the writer sees in the backyard of the subject's minivilla a gravity-defying bronze sculpture of a teen-on-a-swing, and a fibergla.s.s rock over which a man-made waterfall flows. The writer now must chant over and over to himself, "Remember the fibergla.s.s rock." Eventually, the producer greets him and clasps his hand, capturing his audience. One sentence later, he intimately reveals that his therapy involves talking to a doll of himself. Now the writer, with hours to go before ten-thirty, when the party will sputter and die, must keep repeating to himself, "Remember the fibergla.s.s rock, remember he talks to a doll ... fibergla.s.s rock, talks to doll, teen-on-a-swing." This keeps him from taking a deep breath and from noticing that the spreading sunset has saturated the air with a soft orange glow, almost like Paris, and that the view to the ocean is dappled with cottages nestled in a hillside, their lights just flickering on, almost like Portofino. He fails to see that Los Angeles is a city of abundant and compelling almosts.

The journey from the producer's house to the Mondrian Hotel, through an accordion descent of roads from the hills to the flats, requires the navigational skills of Magellan. Driving under the sky with one star, he is still intoxicated by the dizzying combination of white wine, party dresses, and a sense of not belonging, while a truth unfolding outside his winds.h.i.+eld goes un.o.bserved: The New York grid of streets and avenues, with its intellectual sectors leading to artistic quarters leading to shopping Edens, does not lie correctly over this Los Angeles sprawl. For the Los Angeles grid is warped, like the a.s.sumed mathematical netherworld, and must be moved through in an illogical manner. As the surface is unpeeled, a deeper level is revealed, but just below that the surface level appears again. This effect leaves the writer seeing only quark smoke trails, the evidence of something richer that has been missed.

At last, he is back in his hotel room, which unfortunately faces east into the now dead-black hills. Had his room been facing west, he would have noted the sparkling twenty-five-mile vista to the sea, which looks almost like the Mediterranean. He would have noted how the streets of L.a. undulate over short hills, as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath. How, laid over this crosshatch, are streets meandering on the diagonal, creating a mult.i.tude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These are the avenues of the tryst, which enable Acting Student A to travel the eighteen miles across town to Acting Student B's garage apartment in nine minutes flat after a hot-blooded phone call at midnight. Had he been facing seaward on a balcony overlooking the city, the writer might have heard, drifting out of a tiny apartment window, the optimistic voice of a shower singer, imbued with the conviction that this is a place where it is possible to be happy. He would have seen, above the rolling rows of houses, the five or six aircraft that are always floating motionlessly over the city, planes that now so directly connect to his jet lag, which is mysteriously working in reverse: Even though it's 3:00 A.m. in the east, he is wide awake. Instead, he observes how the hilltops have been shorn into mesas to accommodate someone's Palladian-Tudor-Gothic-French-fantasy palais, and as it's too late to call a sympathetic ear in New York, he heads to the lobby bar.

The bar is alive, and he falls into a conversation with Candy. Candy is either nineteen or twenty-five or thirty-two, and she p.r.o.nounces her belief in the powers of the amethyst around her neck as fervently as Constantine for the Church of Rome. The writer knows that next week this belief will be forgotten, or replaced by another, and he remembers it for his article. The hissy fit prevents him from seeing that Candy carries around an even sillier and more poignant belief, one that must be maintained and renewed daily: that she is in possession of a talent that will lift her to the stars. This belief permeates L.a.'s soil; it is in the cars, in the clothes, and in the conversations of the up-and-coming. It is a far-fetched religion, which works often enough to sustain a supply of new believers, and it becomes the mantra of every hopeful, regardless of education or cla.s.s. The writer looks at the explosion of hair sitting opposite him and puts her in a convenient niche, missing the point that the foolish can't write, but boy, can they act.

After a limp and s.e.xless blackout sleep at the hotel, the writer, with a hangover and no sungla.s.ses, waits for his prey at a staggeringly sunny outdoor cafe. The producer, after having called the restaurant twice, each time warning of a fifteen-minute delay, sweeps in a half hour late but with an on-time feeling and cuddles fully half the diners before sitting down. So now two stereotypes, one that is lived daily and the other acquired for the journey, sit opposite each other. The writer needs no tape recorder, since it is not the words that will be reported but only the facts, observable and imagined, that fit the thesis. The hissy fit settles in nicely and filters everything through its eyes. Forty minutes later, the cell phone that is lying on the table vibrates across it, and the meeting is over.

Returning to an already dark New York City on the welcoming shorter flight home, the writer arrives at the melodious and historic acronym JFK and not the atonal, punning LAX. The hissy fit begins to subside. Soothed by the familiar jolts of a taxi ride and a one-hour view of the Beloved City from the gridlocked Triborough Bridge, the writer arrives home with a laptop full of judgments. The autopsy is faxed in, gleefully edited and published, then distributed proudly to concurring family and friends. The New York Writer lies back on his bed, adjacent to the clanging radiator where a rented copy of the producer's latest flop has accidentally melted into a horseshoe. He falls asleep, under the sky with no stars, his grasp slowly loosening from his ma.n.u.script, never dreaming that one should not ridicule one's foolish, fun, poetic cousin.

Drivel Dolly defended me at a party. She was an artist who showed at the Whitney Biennial, so she had a certain outlook, a certain point of view, a certain understanding of things. She came into my life as a stranger who spoke up when I was being attacked by some c.o.c.ktail types for being the publisher of American Drivel Review. It wasn't drivel that I published, she explained to them, but rather the idea of drivel.

One drink later, we paired off. She slouched back on the sofa with her legs ajar, her skirt draped between them. I poured out my heart to this person I had known barely ten minutes: how it was hard to find good drivel, even harder to write it. She knew that to succeed, one must pore over every word, replacing it five or six times, and labor over every pause and comma.

I made love to her that night. The snap of the condom going on echoed through the apartment like Lawrence of Arabia's spear sticking in an Arab s.h.i.+eld. I whispered pa.s.sages from Agamemnon's Armor, a five-inch-thick romance novel with three authors. She liked that.

As publisher of ADR, I never had actually written the stuff myself. But that morning, arising with a vigor that had no doubt spilled over from the night before, I sat down and tossed off a few lines and nervously showed them to Dolly. She took them into another room, and I sat alone for several painful minutes. She came back and looked at me. "This is not just drivel," she exulted. "It's pure drivel." The b.u.t.terflies in my stomach sopranoed a chorus of "Hallelujah."

That night, we celebrated with a champagne dinner for two, and I told her that her skin was the color of fine white typing paper held in the sun and reflecting the pink of a New Mexican adobe horse barn.

The next two months were heaven. I no longer just published drivel; I was now writing it. Dolly, too, had a burst of creativity, which sent her into a splendid spiraling depression. She had painted a tabletop still life that was a conceptual work in that it had no concept. Thus the viewer became a "viewer," who looked at a painting, which became a "painting." The "viewer" then left the museum to "discuss" the experience with "others." Dolly could take the infinitesimal pause to imply the quotations around a word (she could also indicate italics with just a twist of her voice).

Not wanting to judge my own work or to trust Dolly's love-skewed opinion, I sent my pieces around and made sure they were rejected by five different magazines before I would let myself publish them in Drivel Review. Meanwhile, fueled by her depression, Dolly kept producing one artwork after another and selling them to a rock musician with the unusual name of Fiber Behind, but it kept us in doughnuts and he seemed to really appreciate her work.

But our love was extinguished quickly, as though someone had thrown water from a high tower onto a burning dog.

What happened was this: Dolly came home at her usual time. What I had to tell her was difficult to say, but it somehow came out with the right amount of effortlessness, in spite of my nerves.

"I went downtown and saw your new painting of a toaster at Dia. I enjoyed it."

She acknowledged the compliment, started to leave the room, and, as I expected, stopped short.

"You mean you "enjoyed" it, don't you?" Her voice indicated the quotation marks.

I reiterated, "No, I actually enjoyed it."

Dolly's attention focused, and she came over and sat beside me. "Rod, do you mean you didn't go into the "gallery" and "see" my "painting"?" I nodded sadly.

"You mean you saw my painting without any irony whatsoever?" Again, I nodded yes.

"But, Rod, if you view my painting of a toaster without irony, it's just a painting of a toaster."

I responded, "All I can tell you is that I enjoyed it. I really liked the way the toaster looked."

We struggled through the rest of the night, pretending that everything was the same, but by morning it was over between us, and Dolly left with a small "goodbye," soaking with the irony I had come to love so much.

I wanted to run, run after her into the night, even though it was day, for my pain was bursting out of me, like a sock filled with one too many bocce b.a.l.l.s.

Those were my final words in the last issue of Drivel Review. Since then, I have heard that Dolly spent some time with Fiber Behind, but I'm sure she picked up a farewell copy and read my final, short, painful burst of drivel. I like to think that a tear marked her cheek, like the trace of a snail creeping across white china.

I Love Loosely Ricky. Lucy, I'm home! Lucy. Oh, hi, Ricky. How were things at the club today? Ricky. Oh, fine. Lucy. What did you do? Ricky. The usual-rehea.r.s.ed a new number and had s.e.x with an usherette. Lucy. Waaaaaaaa! Ricky. Lucy, what's the matter? Lucy. You said you had s.e.x with an usherette.

... Waaaaaaa! Ricky. Lucy, don' be silly. It was only oral s.e.x. Lucy. It was? Ricky. Of course, Lucy. Lucy. It wasn't intercourse? Ricky. Of course not, Lucy. That would be cheating. Lucy. Oh, Ricky, I almost forgot those pa.s.sages from the Bible you read to me that proved it. Ricky. Now I'm goin' to change, and you go make dinner. Lucy. Yes, Ricky. Ricky exits. Lucy goes to the phone. Lucy. (on the phone) Ethel? Ethel. (on the phone) What is it this time, Lucy? Lucy. Ethel, I'm not so sure about this "oral s.e.x is not cheating" business. Ethel. This is not another one of your schemes, is it? Lucy. Oh no, Ethel. It's just that Ricky claims it says so in the Bible. Ethel. Well, Lucy, why don't you ask a monsignor? Lucy. Where would I find one? Ethel. There's one in the building. Mrs.

Trumble has one visiting her now. You want me to send him down? Lucy. Thanks, Ethel. There is a knock at the door. Lucy answers. It's the monsignor. Lucy. That was fast! Monsignor. h.e.l.lo, Mrs. Ricardo. It says right here in Leviticus that oral s.e.x is not cheating. Lucy. How did you know what I wanted to ask? Monsignor. It's the only thing people have been asking me for months. Men have been joining our church by the thousands! Ah ... ah ... ah choo! The monsignor's mustache flies off. Lucy. Fred! Fred. Lucy, this was all Ricky's idea! Ricky enters. Ricky. Lucy, is my dinner ready? He sees Fred and starts swearing in Spanish. Ethel enters, sees the mustache on the floor, picks it up, and hands it to Fred. Ethel. Here, put this on your bald head for old times' sake. Lucy. But how did Ricky know I was worried that oral s.e.x was actually cheating? Ethel. I've been taping all your phone conversations and selling them to him, Lucy. Lucy. But, Ethel, you're my best friend! Ethel. I was getting even with you for making me wear that cat suit to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ricky. Ethel, tell Lucy you're sorry. Ethel. Oh, all right. Lucy, I'm sorry I taped all your phone calls and ruined your life. Lucy. And Ricky, I'm sorry I thought you had intercourse when it was just oral s.e.x. They all hug. Fred. Can I take off my wire now, Ricky?

Lolita at Fifty Lolita Haze, now Guccioni (though currently single), angled her shopping cart and knelt down for the bottle of fallen fabric softener that her sashaying walk had knocked into the aisle. "Let me get that," mooned a stock boy, and Lolita, peering over her sungla.s.ses, breathed, "I've got it."

The usual crowd had gathered at one end of the aisle, knowing that Lolita herself would be doing the retrieval, but it was the rear view from the checkout stand that was the best: the accordion bend of the long body, the knees locked but the ankles splayed, her arms becoming longer than her entire folded frame as she reached, and the slight s.h.i.+ft to translucence of the yellow mini as it stretched in response to the breathtaking bend. A shudder traveled up the hierarchy of the supermarket, from box boy to general manager. Even the security camera ground to a halt in the middle of its traverse.

Rolling her way to the checkout stand, a teenage cas.h.i.+er only recently elevated from box boy quickly hid the Ten Items or Less sign, hoping to encourage Lolita to come his way. Paying with a check at a snail's pace, she delicately wrote her signature with a heart-dotted i, an action that had three purposes: the first was to sign the check, the second was the three-quarters lean-over that caused a jittery eye motion from the box boy, and the third was to raise the back of her short blouse inches above the yellow mini, creating a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sphere of influence.

Once in the parking lot, Lolita propped herself against her yellow Miata, idly tapping the heel of her half-dislodged shoe against the asphalt, using her toe as a motor. A sweating thirteen-year-old loaded her bags into the trunk. She broke her akimbo slouch (lolita was rarely not akimbo; in fact, her third husband, Mark, observed that at any given moment, a randomly selected part of her body was always catty-corner to another) and drifted over to the remaining plastic bag full of apples, in a manner so lazy that even after the walk was over, it seemed as though it hadn't happened. She hoisted the bag lazily in a locked fist and rested it against the back of her raised forearm, slung the bag into the trunk with a slew-footed twist, and handed the gaping boy a single. Reading his name tag, she raised her eyes and gave him a "Thank you, Rory."

The boy replied, "Thank you, Miss ... Miss ..."

"Lo-lee-tah," she tongued. A column of sweat drained down the boy, and he entered p.u.b.erty.

As she made the twenty-minute drive down Ventura Boulevard in the endless California sun, Lolita's mind grew active. "I'm tired of ranch style," she thought as she pulled into the driveway of the house she had lived in through the tenure of two husbands. Inside, she struck her thinking pose, notching her hip against the kitchen counter and hanging one arm on a cabinet pull. "I'm forty-five years old," she lied to herself. "Perhaps it's time for a change." She thought a nice apartment on the L.a. side of the Hollywood Hills, where there were more people like her, would do her fine.

Lolita had never had a snap of trouble selling any of her houses. She had a real estate license, and as long as one of the prospective buyers was male, all she had to do was be there while the couple poked through the house. Men felt a powerful drive to be in a room with her, especially after seeing her boudoir, which rivaled a house of mirrors. On the vanity stood an array of lipsticks stacked like ammo, which, incidentally, is exactly what they were. A sliding door revealed a closet filled with a rainbow of stretch pants, infinitely reflected from wall to wall. Lolita's skills were such that the wives always remained oblivious to their husbands' deepening interest in velour. She would follow the prospective buyers into the kitchen, where she would lounge indolently in a doorway and point things out by waggling a banana. The husbands would then jump to buy the house, just so they might be in the same room with her at the closing.

This time, however, while waiting for the buyer's inevitable yes, Lolita was experiencing a nagging pull at her psyche: she felt a desire to work. This was a monumental s.h.i.+ft in her thinking, as Lolita had never worked a day in her life, except at being Lolita. I'm husbanded out, she thought. I wouldn't mind strolling into some boutique around ten and strolling out around three, after a nice long lunch that's paid for by the shop. I would love to pop down off a stool whenever a customer came in. I'm good at that. She also thought it would be fun to set the timers at a tanning salon. h.e.l.l, she'd already learned to set her own at Christophe's; why not get paid for it? Yet standing in the kitchen, tugged by opposing ... forces would be too strong a word; nouns is perhaps better-lethargy and boredom-she just couldn't muster enough energy to pick up the phone and make some inquiries in the job market. However, a few seconds later, when her cordless coincidentally rang, the sensory jolt provided her with enough current to get her arms moving, and she answered the phone.

"Don't you hula hoop?" It was her friend Christine from the beauty salon, calling to say that one of her clients was looking for someone to teach hula hoop to a child star for a movie that was set in the sixties. "To get the job, you have to meet a guy named Laszlo for an interview. Here's his number." It was the perfect moment, and the suggestion electro-charged the dormant section of her brain called "work." In the time it took the phone to travel from her ear to its cradle, Lolita had decided to put on her other yellow mini and drive into Burbank for an appointment with Laszlo.

Laszlo, who looked more like a Morty, sat in what was a surprisingly dingy office for someone who must be such a big movie executive. Lolita responded to his first no-eye-contact question: "Name?"

"Lo-lee-tah." She spoke her name like a steam radiator with consonants.

"Last name?"

"Lolita Rooney-Burton-WinnFortensky-Guccioni," she said, omitting a few names for time and adding a few to jazz it up.

"Education?"

Uncomfortable, Lolita squeaked in her seat as the polyester of her dress skidded in the sh.e.l.lacked chair. "Couldn't we do this on the golf course?" she asked. Laszlo squinched his face into a question mark, glanced up at Lolita for the first time, looked over at his wall clock, then snapped his chin once, signifying, Let's go.

Lolita's body was particularly suited for golf, whereas her interlocutor's wasn't. Laszlo swung his three wood as though he were using it to drive a nail into a garden. Sometimes Laszlo's ball would accidentally squirt forward; sometimes it would be driven into the dirt, where it looked like a buried eyeball. Lolita's swing, on the other hand, was a beautiful thing even to hear: a long accelerating whoosh, broken by a bullwhip crack in its fat center. There was also the three-act stage play of Lolita setting the ball down on the tee. Only this time it wasn't box boys and checkout girls watching; it was money managers and stock traders-all embryo husbands, waiting to be born. In her yellow mini, she looked like a small sun rolling from green to green. By the end of the game, not only had Lolita won the job; she had also sold her house to the pro.

When the money came in, three months later, Lolita bought a two-story California-style in West Hollywood and nestled herself between the clink of Beverly Hills gold plate on one side and a self-reliant gay enclave on the other. The only negative consequence of the move was that her supermarket forays no longer had the desired effect. Box boys, instead of giving her the once-over, would now simply spot-check her for an Adam's apple.

Lolita's new location, only seventeen miles from her old one, was a total reformation in lifestyle. She had a string of dates, some of them with the deeply smitten Laszlo, and she conducted her hula hoop cla.s.s on an almost regular basis, which brought in extra money for facials and ma.s.sages. Her fourth husband, Leo, the one she really loved, would pop over occasionally, bringing a gift basket from a Beverly Hills bath shop, and sometimes she would smooch with him in return, but that was all. She was invited to premieres and gallery openings, and she could walk into Beverly Hills to the Pay-Less for the autobronzing cream she now favored over the tanning salons. Lolita's life had metamorphosed, as it always did, with an easy glide and a minimum of effort.

Now, sublimely niched into her new life, with all her powers working utterly, having applied a light touch of makeup in case of an early postal delivery, she slides into the puff pastry that is her bed and glances over at the newly antique photo of a middle-aged man named Humbert, which she has resurrected from the back of a dresser drawer during the move. She looks around the bedroom, which is high enough and secure enough to let her sleep with the window open, and bathes herself in two fine thoughts: that all her lovers have been true, and that her life keeps getting better and better.

A Word from the Words First, let me say how much I enjoy being one of the words in this book and how grateful I am for this opportunity to speak for the whole group. Often we're so busy speaking for others that we never get to speak for ourselves, or directly to you, the reader. I guess it's redundant to say "you, the reader," but we're not used to writing, and it sounds better to my ear than, say, "you, the two giant fists that are holding me" or "you, the large, heavy ma.s.s of protoplasm."

There's also a nice variety of words in this book, and that always makes it fun. We can hang around with the tough utilitarian words, like the, and have a few beers, or we can wander over and visit the lofty perambulate, who turned out to be a very nice verb with a very lovely wife, tutu. Fuzzy also turned out to be a lot of fun; she had a great sense of humor and a welcoming manner that we all learned from. I can never decide whether I'd like to be proletariat or bourgeois in this world of words. The common words, such as the p.r.o.nouns and the transitive verbs, get used a lot, but they're tired (you should see them running around here, carrying their objects). The exciting words, like fo'c'sle, make a lot of impact but aren't frequently called into service. I'm lucky. I'm underpants. Sometimes I'm used innocuously, but other times I get to be in very racy sentences in some pretty d.a.m.n good books. Of course, some usages I find shocking. Which is a point I'd like to make: When you read something that disgusts you, don't blame the word. s.c.r.o.t.u.m goes around here like someone just shot his best friend, but really he's a legitimate guy who gets used in ugly ways by a lot of cheeseb.a.l.l.s. Likewise pimple. I was there when he got used as "a pimple on the face of humanity." The poor guy was blue for a month. He walked around here with a hangdog look and even tried to be friends with hangdog look, but around here, a phrase won't mingle with a word; they just won't. It also irks me that two ordinary words can be given a hyphen and suddenly they're all-important. Me? Of course I would love to be a proper noun, but I'm not, so that's that. Even with the current fad of giving children unusual names, it's unlikely that any couple will call a newborn Underpants.

This is also my first experience being on a page, since my typing on January 23 (birthday coming up!). When I was a computer word, things were great. I could blast through cybers.p.a.ce, scroll across screens, travel to India. Now that I'm on the page, I'm worried that it's going to be mostly dark. My request to you, the person above me, with the two gigantic lenses over your eyes, is that you occasionally open the book after you have finished reading it and give all of us a little air. A simple thumbing through will do. Not that I'm unhappy in here. There are enough diverse words that our little civilization can keep itself amused for the twenty or so years we expect to be on a shelf, or stacked in a corner, or sold in a garage.

I'd also like to say something to you budding writers. Believe me, I do understand that sometimes it's essential to use incorrect grammar. That is fine with me, and the words who are in those sentences are aware of their lot in life. But it's difficult to even hang around an incomplete sentence, much less be in one. I imagine it's like talking to a person whose head is missing. It just doesn't feel right. A friend of mine has been misspelled in a computer file for over fourteen years, and it doesn't look like he's ever going to be spell-checked.

There are a couple of individuals who would like to speak: I'm the word sidle, and it was fun to be in that story about the dog (i couldn't see the t.i.tle from where I was).

Greetings. I'm sc.u.mmy, and I'd like to mention that you are a lowlife.

h.e.l.lo. I'm h.e.l.lo, and I'd like to say myself.

And now we'd like to hear from a group of individuals without whom none of the work we do would be possible: Hi. We're the letters, and we'd just like to say that we enjoy being a part of the very fine words on this page. Thank you.

And last but not least, someone very special to the whole crew here in Pure Drivel would like to end this book: