I was the first woman to burn her bra. It took the fire department 4 days to put it out.
- Dolly Parton
bart plantenga
❣
Liz Taylor (in Tennessee Williams’ Boom looking like a self-absorbed Cleopatra pushing a shopping cart through a supermarket): “Your voice, it vibrates in my ears not so much like a voice as like a sensation.”
Richard Burton (looking like royalty trying for beatnik chic): “You’ll make me as vain as a peacock if you go on like this and I have to keep the humility of my faith.”
Liz (swooning): “Is this, then…a time for kissing? (No-nonsense kiss) Aaaah…unnnh…thank you.”
Richard: “A woman doesn’t usually thank a man for kissing her, especially when she’s so lovely—and owns an island.”
Liz: “I have lots of art treasures—including myself.”
Renee (Real name Debbie Dudley. Twirled baton in high school marching band.) liked me because I was a natural ham. Said I looked like Victor Mature in his prime.
When you get to her chicken shack (Somewhere west of Trenton, east of Salt Lake City. By referral only.) she hands you a gilded velveteen menu. From which you select: Appetizer; a quickie, a 3 minute rock video, a 60 second ad. Entrée a la carte; 2 hours, a film. Full-course meal; all night, voyage nocturne, a lifetime of sorts.
After you make a selection she hands you a script. Expects you to learn it as you wait in her satin parlor. I had the stuff pretty much up in my head. I’m what you might call Renee’s most regular regular.
All her scripts (with footnotes and critiques) are neatly transcribed from videos, which she sagaciously studies in her library screening room.
I’d usually call her from down the road a piece. Put in my order. So’s she can be ready. I knew what I liked and she liked that…
Hitchhiking hooked me with Big Bad John (isn’t that every legend’s name?) who taught me a whole lot of whatever: Pick-ups, truck routes, slaughterhouse details—how he hit cattle between the eyes with a sledgehammer—sailor knots, troubleshooting.
But NOT trust, apparently. Thus I have this diary fragment, ripped pages, grabbed at random while BB John, Peterbilt 16-wheeling Odysseus, was out of his (our?) cab getting some greasy take-out.
Was it courage? Something to write home about? Don’t know. I didn’t have much to lose anyway; a p.o.box, a Chevelle up on blocks, some records.
BB John can best be described as a timebomb, a handsome myth about to happen, a sinewy Popeye with veins that popped in his forehead when he spoke. BB John was tanned, stone chiseled, impatient with rolled-up tee shirt sleeves. Even limped like Gene Vincent. Unattached without being detached, married without rigor mortis.
His truck cabin contained hundreds of cassettes strewn about. Cig ash wafting around his temples. Boxes and bags of half-eaten something or others. Rubbery monsters, things dangled and wiggled. His centerpiece: a wiggle waggle hula dancer with the Virgin Mary’s head grafted to it. Which adequately revealed his notions of religion.
His sneaky kid smile was like a basement door letting splintery staves of light in. I’m still trying to imitate it. But lie to him—like when they’d “neglected” to tell him he was transporting nuclear waste from Houston to Idaho—and the smile turns suddenly sinister, ballistic.
And he could talk about anything: cars, Bangkok, interplanetary travel, the Iroquois False Face Society, Alaskan flora, the music of Jimmy Dean, George Jones. I remember the cassettes, him cranking them up so that I’d get the lyrics.
When he pushed through a flytrap screen door people looked up from their games, dreams and plates. A unique amalgam of attitude and movement, a haughty swagger in a halo of smoke. And if he got inside a story he’d use both hands to pull you in. Eyes on—and beyond—like buttons that burned flesh.
I hadn’t thought his stories anything but stories, a way to pass time, make the miles come easier, until I actually read the wad of diary, tucked away in a shady bower of Golden Gate Park. And there and then I realized that most of his underbelly adventures were just too fantastic to not be true.
He left me off near Gillette, Wyoming. And forever thereafter—even today—I think every truck nosing the ridge, making a wide left is him coming back to “re-educate my face” as he’d put it.
It was at the moment I climbed down out of his cab, with the diary wad down my pants, that I joined the adult world, a world where a good bye never means a simple good bye. Every knife was suddenly double-edged. Every conversation fraught with barbs and double meaning.
Renee Sagittaire, was the nom de plume of our bitch savior of aimless souls in search of plot. Like a switchboard operator connecting us with our souls, lost to weariness and worry. Shrewd entrepreneur? Yes. And clean as a nun’s whistle too.
To be with her is like rubbing your nose into a big perfumey mum head. Henry Miller’d need a trilogy of a thousand pages to get her down. She’s known as “The Woman of a Thousand Faces”. I swear on god’s bare ass I’ve never seen her real face. But if she’s gone to these lengths, making masks to fit like surgical gloves, like dreams, then who’m I to unmask her?! Because anyway she is, is real to me. And that’s bottom dollar what counts. Life’s all images we either decide to spit out or swallow anyway.
I’m a basic surface sorta guy. Call it survival if you want. So if I’m watching her Rita Hayworth do her caustic bump and grind in black satin, noir whisper, the kind of strip that had churches nationwide scrambling to denounce her, I’m with her on her way to hell. I’m lucky in a world where surveillance shrink-wraps the dream.
If anything Renee is enthusiasm in the flesh and enthusiasm’s how Renee got into this dream factory. And it was my enthusiasm for her enthusiasm, as Gloria Swanson say, playing a DeMille Babylonian princess in peacock Ra headdress, accented by farflung rays of pearl revealing stretches of shimmering skin. Yea, that’s what led her down the yellow brick road to who knows what kind of redemption.
She’s probably done a thousand faces since she began over a dozen ago. Updates her selections constantly. Keeps it trendy. Today there’s no Mama Cass, Ali McGraw, Patti Page, Britt Eklund or Sharon Tate. Replaced by Madonna, Christie Brinkley, Kirstie Alley, Latoya Jackson, Isabelle Rosellini and Darryl Hannah.
While many faces change just as many remain the same. Peggy Lee is still there and goes for a little extra. She was one of my first, helping dredge up some good memories of my father. He had autographed glossies of her he kept hidden from my mother. I used to call her “Piggy Leak” to tease him. It’s only when I see Renee decked out in breathless crepe dress warbling “Fever” in slutty club style that I begin to understand the true sensuality of blasé.
Perennial faves like Annette Funicello in Mouseketeers cap or in cumbersome 50s bikini that gallantly muzzles her brimming plenitude, (a bosom that had sent seismic tremors of alarm through Walt Disney’s schematic notion of life) seemed to have second winds, 9 lives. So while Patty Hearst and Jessica Hahn each lasted 2 months on her menu, the likes of Tina Turner are approaching a dozen years of popularity.
And Turner’s the one you want if you want to look like you just came out of a brawl with a unique configuration of black and blue. Or you can nestle in the classic fertile valley of Dolly Parton. Or Jane Russell’s while listening to her lecture on proper foundations, showing off her famous “second story balcony”, modeling bras designed by the aeronautics bosom buff, Howard Hughes.
And Renee could play these fulsome (sic) brabusters to the nipple, manipulating the mystique that is the awesome beauty of the bosom, which, as the source of fixation and fetish, intimidates both sexes out of serious camaraderie. She isolated a central cultural dread, women who had, for far too long, depended on cleavage for personality and men who’d confused tit-fixation for affection. Yea, there’s drama amongst all that delight.
Renee had her own stable of faves. They tended to stretch her dramatic skills: Garbo, Dietrich, Bardot, Louise Brooks, Francis Farmer (on and off screen), Susan Hayward, Maureen O’Sullivan, Carmen Miranda, Josephine Baker, Sophia Loren, Sarah Bernhardt, who had over 1000 lovers and said; “it is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.” This summed up the philosophy that drove Renee. Sarah also slept in a coffin that was lined with love letters. That Renee didn’t do. And if Renee wanted to go with one of her faves, contrary to my druthers, I’d go with it. And whatever she cost I never blinked ‘cause I never got short changed.
Most ordinary dames don’t have to cost you an arm or a lifetime. If you know how to shop around. You can spot “IT” (the opposite of the Louise Brooks kind of “it”). The ones that’ll hang from your balls, ring’m like church bells, till you cough up a collection box full o’ green. Terrain, snuffed hopes, diets, sex satisfaction, greed all mark up a face in one way or another.
I used to go mainly for the lonely “bell du jure” (sic) kind. They don’t bitch and aren’t all stuck on vainity (sic) and bored getting into the ooomph of things. And they’re always busy making up for lost time. And they talk it up to drown out the grunts of ecstasy. Telling you why they need your green. Ballet lessons for Lisa. Spending cash while hubby camps in the slammer.
On top of that, any hooker left of Lassie’s going to sap you like a maple. Lead you on like a peep show. Killing any feelings to just go on living. But, by then, why bother?!
On the other hand, Renee wings right into your life like a swarthy flamenco, like a sultry satellite spinning on its slender axis. Yea, stuff gets through despite the masks.
She’s a one-woman show. Costumes accurate to the stitch. Elaborate sets are part of the deal. Meticulous attention is likewise paid to scent, nuance, body language, accents and attitude. She puts you in pictures. But she’s not afraid to fudge her lines to point out some abuse meted out by Hollywood against its starlets. Or avenge casting couch ghosts. How quickly Francis Farmer and Gene Tierney are forgotten, she seems to be saying.
But she’s also been Mamie Van Doren, as provocative mom in High School Confidential and Nastassia Kinski as Tess taking the luscious yearn-drenched strawberry in her mouth. Her repertoire is wide open.
I could have Divine if I wanted, but I don’t. Others do though! Or Eva Braun!! Hitler’s blond bundle, complete with Swastikas, leather knee-high boots. Or Betty Boop. Or Darla Hood, darling “Little Rascals” heartthrob. Yea, I got all done up as Alfalfa once (don’t laugh!), in overalls, freckles, cowlick, yodeling for my Darla. It was OK. Goofy, but OK.
But Renee plays the jailbait trip real cool and discreet. She doesn’t deny the potential for arousal. But she has to avoid dangerous compromises of herself and a possible vice squad visit. She issues a disclaimer and post-performance lecture on child porn. She clarifies that its OK to fantasize that she, Renee, is 12. But she insists on being the screen for the cinematic projections of nubile obsessions. In other words, she has to channel aggressions, collar fantasies that are biting at the bit to go ape. But sometimes things go wrong.
Not long ago a dazed and repressed Evangelical minister beat her up bad. She played Brooke Shields straight out of Pretty Baby and he played George C. Scott in Hardcore, this guy’s own mirror ego of a hardass dad whose daughter gets sucked up into a runaway porn whirlpool. He got his kicks despising the very accuracy of Renee’s portrait. Renee’s take on this holy hooligan is that he wanted to punish Brooke through Renee, as well, punish himself for his own hypocrisy in coming to Renee in the first place!
Life’s not easy and so Renee has to not only be Brooke but play priest, bouncer and social worker as well. In this case she got a black eye and bruised ribs. He ripped off her costume with his chompers! Then ripped it to shreds. And then stiffed her for $200! So wow, for sure she has herself some hidden knives. Knows Tai Kwan Do.
But who is Renee? The sum of her costumes, sequins, laughs, ingenuity, wigs and—the masks she makes herself?
The process of making the masks, fascinating in itself, also sheds light on who she is. First, since most of her subjects are dead or otherwise inaccessible, she’s had to scout out likenesses, busts, statues and wax museums. Then enamor herself to the proprietors to allow her to make the necessary moulage plaster cast of the subject from which she casts her polymer mask. The mask is made of a skin thin latex ultra-polymer, like rubber, thin as a condom or coat of paint. Recently she’s regained her confidence in sculpture so now she sculpts most of the subjects first, then dips the bust in the ultra-polymer.
But why the masks? Well, she used to be a pretty well known summer stock actress, an Off-Off-Broadway director, costume designer, puppeteer—and sculptress. All that and more!
The best I can piece her together is that she had a face that could make even the gift of her body (Hindu goddess curvacious) jealous. Like Grace Kelley. A face photographers might duel to the death over. Photos in her Yale yearbook and in old theatre programs bare (sic) this out. Her face popped out of crowds like a silver dollar in a pile of pennies.
She’d played Cherry Lane and La Mama in New York as well as some bit work in Soaps, Provincetown and Woodstock. She’s done Shakespeare, Ionesco, Tennessee Williams. Which means something to others but not that much to me.
She said I’d like Tennessee ‘cause he does alot about drunks falling apart and weird sexual stuff. She recommended “Sometime One Summer” where a guy parades his sis around as sex bait for neighborhood guys. She told me about this 10 years ago. Holy Christ! I really should check them out—for her sake at least. But bookstores smell like funeral parlors to me.
But why with the masks? Well, now and again we’d belt back a few; gimlets, grasshoppers, mint juleps—whatever was appropriate to the chosen fantasy—and we’d get to talking. I never pried, mind you. Her parents, bitter aging “Mormon Monsters” told friends and relatives that they had had no kids! No daughter! She don’t exist! Can you believe it!?
and the face? It had something to do with a motorcycle. A bit part won in the biker flick Devil’s Angels, where she played the love distraction of John Cassavetes. At a cast party a hot dogging biker, exhilarated perhaps by the fact that she was on his bike with her arms wrapped around his waist, hit a hole and she got thrown with her foot caught between the exhaust and frame. He dragged her a couple of hundred feet before he noticed. And by then her face was scraped off. Leaving her face a crude erasure, a blank slate. I didn’t go into it. I’ve seen my share of dead truckers and highway hamburger.
and by then she changed the subject because she didn’t want to further “muck up the paid-in-full revved-up reveries that must sustain us.”
Told me I was her fave. The only marriageable item around. If only marriage had been more becoming to her. And then there was the small detail of my wife. And it wasn’t only ‘cause I tipped big either. Although a fat wallet that yaks she don’t mind listening to. Maybe all this flattery produces more green. Who knows. But I believe her—even with an Anita Ekberg accent. Even if she says I remind her of Monty Clift. And maybe Victor Mature the next time. I been called worse (sic).
I wasn’t into the knockers stuff much. Anymore than a handful is wasted anyway. (Renee’s are like sun-ripened Bartlett.) The bushel basket racks of Jayne Mansfield mostly leave me queasy like a kid with too much candy. Unreal maumaus make things too cartoony, too much like bad architecture, a parody of desire.
I did go in for her Lilly Christine, legendary “Cat Girl” stripper. How’d she know I’d actually seen Lilly (had I mentioned it, was she psychic?) when as a mere sprout my ole man’d drag me around to smoky joints? I remember the damp arcs of perspiration under rotund men’s arms, the hearty laughter, the click of billiard balls, clank of glasses, the strip joints with exotic feathers, an avalanche of raunchy colors.
and here I was living the rewritten deja view (sic) dream of actual experience. Not only did Renee get the tits right but she comes alive as the sh-boom shimmering perfection of a smoldering ember fabrication during her undulating re-creation of Lilly’s “Pillow of Love” dance. During which she hangs various boudoir articles on my ears, nose, fingers and erection. Then wraps her blond tresses around my face as the canned boogaloo music that Lilli, herself, played percussion on, goes up tempo—wild!
I can smell her perspiration mixed with the glue that holds her fish scale pasties in place. Every tantalizing gyration provokes my pulse and my pulse in turn urges her gyrations on, which in turn, shoves the music along until her sequined gyrations are just this boundless blur, this comet of climax and joy. And when the music finally dies I am dead, I am spent, whittled down to an out-of-breath, pimply, gawky 13-year old.
She wraps her arm around me and leads me with a purr to her “UNdressing Room”. Implores me there, as footman, to remove her shimmering stilettos. Commands me to kiss the crenulations caused by the tight straps across the bridge of her foot. Her entire body aglow, pulsating. I help her from her sequined top with its huge secret diamond clasp. She shimmies out of her fish scale skimpy.
“Thank you, son.” Said my Blond Venus in all her naked splendor. “Lemme give you something for your trouble, my famous autograph perhaps.” Hmmm! Wink Wink. Act III.
For the longest time I would not play Sonny Bono to her Cher. Until she described her brand of Cher one day; “A hippie-Indian princess with notions of being a svelte quasi-anorexic Theda Bera wearing her dazzling Mesopotamian-Dominatrix and Academy Award attending homage to Rambova (first celluloid slut).”
She’d play her role as the goddess of OOmphalos (sic) with a winking jewel of fantastic cut in her most erotic orifice—her belly button. Wear a headdress of sumptuous porcupine at home to lure Sonny away from his songwriting and moustache twirling. And in she bursts with her tanned bare midriff; “I’m home, honey! Come groom me!” and a moment later I’m her Sonny.
I’ve never bothered to enter into the “revolutionary mittsth (sic) of Patti Hearst (long ago deleted) with her tied up in a broom closet, mumbling her revolutionary rhetoric. No licking the white thigh-high boots of Nancy Sinatra. No Anita Bryant. No Mary Lou Retton leap-frogging furniture—too hyper. No Annie Oakley decked in suede fringe. No Joanie Weston, blond bone-crushing roller derby madame. No Astrud Gilberto, fronting a jazz combo, all sultry and blasé in Ipanema micro-kini.
I went mostly where she went—quality. It hums longer. The images linger. Women of depth with some surface noise. Smoke and rumination. Being and always threatening to do. Bardot, Seberg, Gene Tierney, Garbo, Peggy Lee. Women—not dames, broads or girls. Women who read books. And swing a mean barbed tongue. Women like a thick diary with a strong perfect binding, full of references, arrows, circled passages, someone to read and re-read.
I’ve seen Renee 200 times. Gone hundreds of miles out of my way. Hey, but I’m not desperate. A trucker just gets to dreaming out there and Renee draws me into my reveries and that is good. And what, you may ask, do I give her? Well, money, lots of it. But a lot more. I mean, I get into my part, I get involved. And she says she can talk to me. Tells me things she’s never anybody! I don’t know what it is—my face?—but women are always spilling their guts, their deep stuff. Maybe it was just a line. But with her I believe it.
Renee was not launched by notions of mansions and Mercedes (in tax land, discretion is the better part of intelligence) but more by romantic notions of affecting change—dismantling harmful myths about woman—in the collective unconscious of the man-dick.
Fruit fell from her Brazilian straw hat. Rolled around her feet. She wrapped her giddy bod in satin theatre curtain, posed like Gypsy Rose Lee, taunting me way out of myself, shivering out of 100 skins, nude to the bone, discovering the skeleton that holds me up.
She taunts me with the red curtain like a toreador. Says I’m a bull. So I am. I lunge. She sidesteps me. The bull’s neck muscles are severed just before it enters the ring. This drops the bull’s head down so that the horns are more menacingly aimed at the bullfighter.
And here, on my knees, life seemed to reverberate beyond time, belief, so rich in texture that life again began to feel warm, actually real, as if life in all its confusion was meant to be lived as a scene, a play within a play. And then she pops her marionette trick. Pickle tied to strings between her legs. So that by tugging the strings the pickle looks like some Martian boner. You had to be there.
And as she strips away the last gooey rags, the mother of pearl halter, the 2 limpet shells covering her nipples. While she lectures me on how skin and political consciousness converge. Gypsy Rose Lee stripped for the Nationalist Cause, donating proceeds to the Anti-Fascists in 30s Spain. What realm of higher power was I in anyhow? Renee hovering between smoldering body aesthetic and formidable personality, endowed with history, making her dangerous like the Maja Nude with boxing gloves.
When I got involved with her Gene Tierney in Shanghai I wanted it to go on and on, haul around in a rickshaw, take her to bars. Float around in junk. Meditate on Tierney’s face, a face that humbles crystal, mugs you of your breath and yet hid a life of real emotional turmoil. Her trance-like gaze—as if confused by the idea that she might be god—broken only by twitchy hints of madness, a shivering lip.
And then one day I get an idea. When you haul cross-country you get lots of ideas. The more god forsaken desolate the land, the more ideas. Thought I’d surprise her with some flowers. Skip the usual call. But this ain’t advisable with a control freak. You might’s well haul off and hit her. Blind side.
She didn’t know I was there, sort of just hanging in a corner. And I overheard her with another guy. I’m not a particularly jealous guy seeing as reality has imposed this provisionary give and take attitude on life. But what she was dishing was more than I could swallow.
She was drunk. OK. I’ll give her that. Here she was dishing this guy my lines. Same lines just another leading man. And I have to sit there, ass on my hands. Maybe she’s rehearsing for me. Maybe biz is biz and flattery makes all wallets flap wider.
I spot him leave in a featureless new Ford. Government plates. I feel like Stanley Kowalski. I could punch a lampshade. When I confront her she’s no one, not herself, no one I’ve ever encountered before.
She’s supposed to be Ann Margaret. I can’t talk to Ann Friggin’ Margaret! I drop the flowers at her feet.
“I feel like Stanley Kowalski.”
“Gonna be a rough night.”
“And I know my goddamn lines—STELLA!”
“Something’s wrong. What’s with the flowers at my feet?”
“Nothin’. Nothin’s wrong. ‘Cept me. The world just sucks the big one sometimes.”
“Somethin’ happen? A check bounce?”
“How’m I different, Renee? What really makes me any different? Like from all the others.”
“You’re my man, my main guy. Special!”
“Huh! Ain’t that somethin’ just like the line you dropped on Mr. Threads?”
“Oh, I get it. Snoopin’.”
“Well, the volume was tuned way up. Never mind the heat.”
“So my acting’s so effective you can’t even tell a line from the real thing? That’s a compliment but I’m afraid I don’t feel very complimented.”
“That’s right. My mind’s been twisted around so many times I don’t know when real’s real no more. I know like acting is your reality and your reality is like not to have the 2 separated. You, you’re livin’ in a big blender.”
“The guy’s dyin’ for Pete’s sake!”
“Ain’t we all.”
“No, for real. Like real soon. The guy paid up good. He was beggin’. Abandoned by his family and friends. Least I could do for an atheist. I’m closest to a priest for him. Before he’s sent afloatin’ to oblivion.”
“Don’t go gettin’ flaky poetic on me. What is it, syph?”
“Cancer.”
“Whatta you handin’ me bullshit in gift wrap? I don’t know anymore what to believe.”
“Well, you don’t own me.”
“Write me another song that’s already been written.”
“If we were to get married…”
“We might’s well be. I seen more o’ you than my ole lady…”
“I’m jus’ more memorable ‘s all. Anyway, he paid well and in cash for the lies to sound real.”
“Got me there. They sounded real alright.”
“Lemme get the script. I was Cleopatra.”
”Ann Margaret as Cleopatra? Tha’s a good one.”
“and he’s a warrior, Ben Hur-type, like Victor Mature.”
“Victor mature?! Huh! He looked more like Dennis the Menace’s ole man! I’m your Victor, remember?”
“He’s been tossed to the lions. But the script has me fallin’ for him. I risk the throne by commuting his sentence.”
“Wow. That’s hard to swallow.”
“Try. heaven’s nothin’ more’n the way religion candycoats the bitter pill. It’s interior decoration.”
“So you’re his religion?”
“Yea. And you, you’re some kinda reality barometer?
“Don’t go mistakin’ whorin’ for evangelical faith healin’. I mean, lay your hand on me Renee, Baby.”
“OK, so chop me down to 2 bit entrepreneur and you be just a consumer lookin’ for his bargains. We can work it out. Next time you get me cheap. And I’ll break you play with me too much.” By then I’ve had enough. I plunge through the rickety screen door, make as if to storm off—forever.”
“Renee, you’s the one always tellin’ me actin’ aint lyin’.”
“It ain’t. And consoling aint lyin’ either.” I couldn’t take it. I always storm off when there’s no winning. I even consider torching her chicken shack. And in my haste left behind my last script scribbled on the back of one of Lucky’s menus. I don’t recommend the clam chowder. Unless you like already-been-chewed gum.
You’re Maria Schneider playing Jeanne, wayward girl disillusioned by her cinematically-distracted boyfriend who wants to make a movie of your life to prove his love. And I’m Paul, ex-boxer, strung out on grief. He’s struck by Jeanne. So much so he eliminates all manners to get to the soul of living.
Jeanne: “Ooh, what strong arms you have.”
Paul: “The better to squeeze the fart out of you.”
Jeanne: “ and what long nails you have.”
Paul: The better to scratch your ass with…”
And for the next 8 months I went out of my way to avoid her shack in a big way. Was gonna let her stew. But then I got this haul to Couer d’Alene in Potatoland, home to a bunch of numbnut Nazis, only 4 hours from her shack. So I don’t know whether it was forgiveness or horniness—let’s just say my pretension to pride collapsed—and I paid her a visit. What’d I supposed to do, cut off my dick to spite my wife—ER my life?”
So I pull up in the dusty lot. On her screen door, a sign: BACK IN 10 MINUTES. I could wait 10 years but I smell she aint coming back no time soon. So I head to Lucky’s. The tired-skinned sullen waitress who’s never even attempted a smile in her life, smiles (like others spit) when I ask her the scoop.
“You didn’ hear?”
“Would I be askin’?”
“She’s taken up ill.”
“Wha’s that mean?”
“She took some punches. Some crazy flipped on her…”
“Ah, fuck! Where’s she at?”
“Bozeman General.”
I tended to blame myself. Like in a film where we think we can have impact. Where we can make things happen. As opposed to things making us happen. Anyway; Bozeman: blue skies, everything crisp, clear cut. Like hope was a gutted fish. A hush. Traffic is in no hurry to go nowhere. Beautiful old movie marquees hint at a lost grandeur. They don’t want to let me see her. I tell them I’m her brother. All that acting finally comes in handy. They believe me! She’s wearing this gauze post-surgical mask.
“You look like Bogie’s sister. ‘Member The Man Behind The
Mask?”
“John, I’m so…” The gauze mask billowing and collapsing with her every breath.
“Don’t tell me. another act. A new mask.”
“I’m bein’ held together by this thing. You know, like the skin around a tomato.”
“Yea, like a tomato.”
“Hazards of Academy Award acting no doubt.” It took her awhile to spill the story. Voice slurred, flickering and hoarse. Like a distant radio station. Throat had been cut!
“I didn’t know the human body contained so much blood!” Her mouth wired up. Shot up with Novocaine. On Demerol. Each drowsy word like the jab of a dull knife.
“Pain reminds you that you aint dead yet. Funny.”
“Well, I guess ‘at’s somethin’.”
“Maybe it actually did my face some good. Maybe it put some things back where they belong.”
The story was like some sleazy detective page turner. This guy had been a regular. Tense Calvinist claims adjuster. Always ordered up the same scene. Trying to out control a control freak. Needed every detail to be just like the last time. A real stickler.
He wanted Paul Newman as failed jock (closet homo—that’s the irony! but we weren’t laughing), Chance Wayne and Renee played Geraldine Page’s Alexandra Del Lago, withering alki starlet. Every drink, vase, every dusty strawflower, doily, ruffle, mannerism had to be just right. Even had to be posed like the last time.
But Renee tired of this wasted scene of self-degradation and abuse and insisted he choose new scenarios. And that he did. With a vengeance. The next time he chose Alex, main Clockwork Orange droog. And she’s the writer’s wife brutally raped and eventually killed by Alex and his hooligan droogs.
This she didn’t mind. She’s always insisted on certain parameters requiring certain simulations when foreign objects are introduced. And she’s dealt with abuse and rape before. She’s always counseled her clients, insisting on the non-sexual aspects of rape.
But he seemed immune to these parameters. A vicious spoiled preppie who’d learned that all of life had its price. Seemed to enjoy trashing her. Not enjoy perhaps, so much as find unbearably necessary. As if he were “free” for the first time in his life. Like a brat vandalizing his first cemetery. She had to cut the session short. Told him to not come back unless he changed his attitude.
The next time, she said, he chose the corrupt crazed sheriff to her Yvette Mimieux in Jackson County Jail. Where she is wrongly incarcerated and eventually preyed upon. She is brutally beaten and raped.
Renee figured this as the challenge of her life. And in true altruistic fashion took his bullshit by the stink. And wanted to set this guy straight or send him rolling. If not by counseling then by radical surgery—like castration.
But the scene came unraveled. He fell out of character. And when a character falls out and away she’d lose directorial control. And a scenario quickly becomes crime. He’d gone so far out of character and into something far more gruesome, out of illusion, out of play, out of his 3-piece suit, his prim lifestyle, out of protocol, wife and coif, out of all social dimension.
and he reached for her face, yanked away her mask. And he was so horrified by her disfigurement and the betrayal of the illusion of beauty that he flipped and began to bludgeon her with his shoes—expensive Guccis. Too expensive to be wasting on her face. He has the friggin’ balls to say.
“Sometimes my duty should be more to myself and not to the adventure of what I think is myself. Not always go around soothing the savage beast inside man. But sometimes someone’s gotta do it or this planet’ll be in even more trouble than it already is.”
“Yea, OK, OK. Just get better.”
“What’s better.”
“Don’t know.”
“I feel like Vincent Price when his partner torches his House of Wax and he’s forced to witness his precious Joan of Arc melt before his eyes. You know, John. I once killed someone. A customer. As Theda Bera. 10 years ago.”
“You told me that one before. ‘Theda Bera, vamp with bonecrusher hips who handled snakes, slept in a coffin with skeletons.’”
“It’s true. All of it. Me and—or her. I had to drop Theda from the menu.”
“I thought, I don’t know, it was just you bein’ in character trying to shock me.”
“OK, so this guy made a grab for Theda’s hair. Yanked me ‘round the set. Use me as a broom. I was doin’ some coke back then. Whatever came my way. But it’s true. I killed him in a fit of clarity with my suit of armor. Bludgeoned him unconscious. Didn’t stop there. I was beside myself. Someone else.
“Yea, yea. You kept him in a closet for weeks until one night you buried him out on the mesa. Right?”
“No, not exactly.”
“So when’s the truth true for you?”
“When truth serves a purpose. I mean, I embroidered it for you. Actually, I dragged him out to Lucky’s incinerator. Eh, you know the goon you caught me with?”
“Dennis the Menace’s ole man.”
“Yea, well, he aint no ordinary customer either. He’s a tax man. IRS. He knows my story. So he’s extorting hush money. Shakin’ me down. For him to keep his flytrap shut I’ve got to pay him for me to service his fantasies.”
“Like mob stuff.”
“Exactly. He knows the inside dope. He knows I’m a small nation, a little outlaw island unto myself. He even seems to be onto rumors of the ‘unfortunate and untimely passing away’, as he puts it, of a business associate of his.”
“The guy in the incinerator?
“Yea.” and then suddenly she shifted gears. Went into overdrive. Was her old self—or herself—without-self again.
“Oh, so what’s this for?” I didn’t get her question. I mean I’m no improv whizz.
“Remember? ‘Ooh what strong arms you have?’”
“Yea, yea.” I was amazed that she’d kept that script inside her.
“‘All the better to squeeze the fart outa you.’”
“‘and what’s this for?’”
“‘That’s your happiness and my ha-penis…can I open (indicating her gown) that? Hmmm. Wait a minute, maybe there’s jewels in it. Maybe it’s gold. You afraid?’”
“No.” I couldn’t go on. She tried. I was crying. For the first time in years. Crying at the feebleness of this stab at dignity. Crying because in my brain I was already re-writing Hitchcock’s Rope.”
“It’s like I got hamburger make-up. The latest foundation—Steak Tartar!” She joked.
Or maybe I could improve on Compulsion with Orson Welles, improve on that “perfect crime.” What’s their names again, Leo and Lobe or …? Or re-read Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment. Re-read Chandler. Hammett. Yea, I’ve read those guys. But I need to re-read them. Do it right. And for real. Be the lead, the director, co-producer and co-conspirator.
“Brigitte Bardot supposedly once got a lawyer to lower his fees by lifting her skirt in his office. She said, ‘In love is my only profession. My lover is the center of my existence. My limbs and thoughts cling to him.’ I didn’t say it. She did!” Renee went on. She was somewhere else. Had no idea where my own mind was at.
“I’m thinkin’, Renee, when’s Dennis the Menace due back?”
The text continues on at this point but only in the diary of Big (and dare I say “Bad”) John. Or, perhaps too, in the police blotter of some western Montana town. As a crime state. And every time someone is executed anywhere in the states—it’s silly but—I read the articles, hold my breath, looking for his name. My apologies to Big John. Your an amazing guy and I deeply regret if my indiscretion here causes you any grief or legal difficulties.
,