The False Man
By David M. Antonelli
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
David Antonelli on Smashwords
The False Man
Copyright © 2011 by David M. Antonelli
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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There are a few people I’d like to acknowledge:
Paul Antonelli is thanked for designing the cover page. Marylu Walters is thanked for editing an early version of this manuscript. Joanne Kellock, is thanked for guidance while writing the early drafts of this book.
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The False Man
By David M. Antonelli
Consequently I showed her no more of myself than an image, which, constant and faithful to the past as it was, grew falser day by day.
From The Imoralist
by André Gide
1. New Year’s
I
The phone rang. It was Nicola. I hadn’t seen her since she left for Chicago two weeks ago. I could tell by her voice she was eager to go out. I wasn’t.
“It’s me,” she said.
“Oh,” I said whitely.
“I mean, ME.” Her voice hit a false note. After an uncomfortable silence, I continued. “How was it? Chicago, I mean.”
“Cold. So cold I bought a pair of earmuffs for you. I know it never gets cold down here, but they’ll look really good on you.”
“You’re an angel,” I replied, realizing in mid-speech that I might have come off sounding more sarcastic than I had intended.
“Thanks. Can we get together tonight?” she asked, her warm southern accent buttering all over me. I guess I hadn’t sounded so insincere after all.
“I don’t know. I might have to go out with Mark to talk things over. He and Vera were arguing again at work.” Mark was our editor and Vera was his girlfriend and assistant. We all worked for a guy named Wilkinson on a low-budget rock/fashion magazine called Shrapnel.
“Were they throwing things?”
“Yes. All over the place. But after a few minutes they cooled off. By the time they went home they already seemed in better spirits. I think the sponsorship problems were getting to them.”
“It’s scary when they argue like that.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Listen...” I yawned.
“Do you want me to call later?”
“Sure. I have a busy day ahead of me and I’m already wiped. Maybe after lunch.”
“You’re not drinking this early, are you?”
“No.” I poured myself a scotch. “I’ll call you.”
“Sure.”
“Oh,” I said. “I almost forgot. Happy New Year!”
“You too.”
We hung up at the same time and I extended my fingers into a bowling ball that was balanced on top of a water dispenser beside my desk. It wasn’t that I was angry with her. Not at all. It was much deeper than that. I’ve been thinking for a while and I’ve come to some major realizations. In short, there’s something wrong with this place. Something wrong with it, and something wrong with me. Maybe it’s these freeways. Maybe it’s these hills. Or maybe it’s those wretched palm trees that sway back and forth like giant metronomes, as though marking the pace of my every step. Who knows? But don’t go thinking this excuses the placid blinking of television sets in sparsely furnished rooms, or the endless rain which shouldn’t even be falling (isn’t this supposed to be California?) but falls anyway as though to spite us. Don’t even start to think it does. Yes, there’s something about the whole works and it’s starting to bother me.
It never used to affect me back in the early years - just after I moved here to take up a job as a photographer - but now it eats into me so much it takes hours just to fall asleep at night. I lie awake in the darkness, tucked loosely between my sweaty sheets, staring endlessly into the cool white blackness that hovers in the center of my room.
Even worse, when I finally do fall asleep, the rain cuts perfect incisions into my dreams and pokes its latex-covered fingers into my thoughts as though searching for a tumor. Perhaps there is a tumor somewhere deep inside that clouded mess I call my brain. If so, I refuse to acknowledge it. That simple. I can’t let it change me. Don’t the strongest governments refuse to pay heed to the rioting minorities? If political leaders listened to the every whim of the rabble they wouldn’t be in charge, now would they? So I ignore it, proclaiming a sort of spiritual despotism, a martial law of the soul. But in the process of ignoring it, doesn’t it gain a kind of tacit importance? Enough. This is getting ridiculous. There is no tumor and that’s final. No means no.
But does this negate my other memories? The ones that slide under my door in the middle of the night and squirm across the linoleum floor: the barking dogs and the Mexican kids drinking and fucking outside the prison walls; the mossy sewage pipe peering through the ground like a giant telescope focussed at the center of the Earth; and that dead German – not him again - lying on the ground in a pool of dark blood.
I have to get on with it. I made my choice and I have to stick with it. I’ve come to accept that the truth is whatever you say it is and nothing more. Or at least until I met Nicola. Now it’s a daily fight to maintain my standards. If she ever found out about me, everything would be in ruins. I can almost feel the glowing green saucers of her eyes probing for a past I’ve long since forgotten. I even think I might be in love with her. I can’t resist the way she swaggers across the room, her platform breasts strutting around like some kind of upscale Motown act. And those searing red-velvet pants she wears when we go out clubbing. But she’s so approachable for such a beautiful woman. Maybe that’s how they raise them down south. Her father owns a small tobacco business in Mobile and flies planes in his spare time. He apparently has a big old house in the suburbs. She says she grew up chasing swans around a backyard pond. I guess that’s why she’s so sweet and honest. She’s no dummy either. Not like the usual slags that go trumpeting through my life. Her mind is like an atomic clock. Precision to more decimal places than you’d care to count. I bet she even knows the radius of Jupiter. She’s level headed, too. Starry-eyed, but still level headed.
I saw her for lunch in the afternoon and she started asking those questions again. We met at a café on Beverly Boulevard. I was still waiting for a table when she showed up in her beat-up Corolla. She sauntered up to me, tossing her keys back and forth between her hands. I joked that she should get a new car. It wasn’t becoming to drive such a wreck in this glorious sea of white convertibles. It’ll hurt her career, I said. She brushed off my advice like a sprinkling of dandruff on her shoulder.
“You’re too fashion conscious,” she said, sweeping her hair back like a Russian spy in a Bond film.
“But, fashion’s everything,” I replied.
“Oh?” She raised her eyebrow in an expression of mock enlightenment and then turned her figure in the direction of the door. A waitress stood smiling at us beside a set of outdoor tables.
“For two?” she asked brightly. I nodded. We followed her to a table by the back wall beside a blossoming orange tree. We sat down and I chipped a cigarette in Nicola’s direction. She just pushed it away.
“Yesterday I met up with the chief representative of Wind Tunnel fashion,” she said, her coffee-colored eyelids fluttering as she spoke.
“Wind Tunnel?” I raised a doubtful eyebrow and stiffened my arms. I noticed my shirt was uncomfortably tight, locking my shoulders in a pretty good half Nelson.
“Funny name, I know. They’re run by this tiny little Polish woman who claims to have studied fashion in Paris under Coco Chanel.”
“Sounds like baloney to me,” I said.
“I called them the other day to see if they’d like to run an ad. They seemed interested and sent this young buyer over to have lunch with me. About three quarters of the way through he started giggling about how stoned he was and how he couldn’t cut a deal because he forgot the documents. I was so mad. He seemed so impressed with himself for showing up high. A real rebel…give me a break.” She shook her head disapprovingly. She always expressed her intelligence with such grace. It must have been all those swans back in Mobile. Most women these days will post it on your door like a death threat. But not her. She floats on it; she flies on it. It’s her little magic carpet and I like that. “He even tried to get me to take some,” she said in disgust.
“So, did you take any?” I’d been trying to get her interested myself, but to no avail. She was pretty prudish on the drug issue. Just look at her use of words. People didn’t take drugs anymore – that was nineteen fifties narc talk - they smoked them, dropped them, shot them, snorted them…they did everything but take them…you get the picture.
“No, of course not. I have pride in the sanctity of my mind and body. Stoned people are so boring. They all seem to think that their stonedness is some greatly unique individual expression when it’s really just the same as anybody else’s.”
“I don’t know about that…”
“Come one. On any given drug - alcohol included - people always act the same. Drunks stumble around slurring as they waver back and forth between violence and sympathy, opium addicts just smile and evaporate into the carpet, e-heads, ravers, or whatever they’re called all come up and hug you like you’re their long lost brother. It’s like the drug dictates a set code of behavior, but everyone is convinced that their experience is somehow unique. That’s why drugs always seemed like a bit of a lie to me.”
“All the more power to them. You need them to mask the grim realities of life. And besides, just because people feel similar on the same drug, doesn’t mean they’re having exactly the same experiences. I like to think of it like this: a drug is like a picture frame and you’re the artist. The frame gives you some size and shape restrictions, but you’re free to fill it in however you want after that. If you take speed you’ll be racing around at warp factor nine, but where you race and how you race is up to you.”
“I don’t know. Regardless of what drug that clown from Wind Tunnel was on and how unique his experience may or may not have been, I still wasn’t too impressed that they sent a guy like him to do business with us. I don’t know what they were thinking. I thought they were seriously interested, but if they keep sending marshmallows like him over we’ll never get anywhere.”
After about half an hour talking about work and some new developments on the business side of things she started asking about my life before I came here. In the past, I could always swerve away from the issue and no one seemed to pry, but she’s more tenacious and demanding than anyone I’ve ever met. What makes matters worse is that I can feel her hot pussy winking behind her smile and I don’t know how long I can last. As it was, I told her what I tell everyone: that is, I was an MFA photographer from a New York art school. I didn’t elaborate any further and quickly turned her attention to a couple at the back who were locked in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. Our conversation lightened and a few minutes later we paid and drove back to the office.
II
Santa Monica Boulevard stretched out before me like a row of peep shows in a seedy amusement park. I’d never seen so much smut in one place. This part of Hollywood was normally pretty bad, but today it seemed worse than ever. I checked my watch as I eased to a complete stop at Normandie. It was getting late. Almost too late to catch last call. Although I’d already had three Martinis at home, I needed a few more to guarantee a good sleep. I twisted my car into gear and accelerated down La Brea, the open air rushing headlong into my windshield and neatly over the cockpit of my Triumph convertible. I turned on the radio and that Public Enemy song came hammering over the waves. I was hyper-energized.
Zero, Zero. She watch, she watch, Zero. Zero. She watch Channel Zero.
These guys were deep, I thought. They really had their ears down to the proverbial rail. Yes, there was certainly a lot of Channel Zero buzzing around out there. See that soda-pop chick over there with the hippy love beads? I bet she really grooves to it. See that fat balding guy in the two-block stretch limo? I’m sure he watches it too. Even as we speak, he’s probably plugging his face into some miniature screen in the back of his car salivating over the latest CZ broadcast. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Yes, chances are even that blue-haired snow boarder over there garbed in the day-glow Mad-Hatter Tee-shirt is tuning in. By Christ, he’s probably the producer. My train of thought ground to a halt when it occurred to me that I was probably being a little too harsh. After all, we all watch a little Channel Zero sometimes. Even me. Especially since Nicola came pouring into my life. Yes, if she finds out the truth about me I’ll probably be watching a lot more Zero than anybody.
I straddled the lane markers just to see if it would annoy the carload of Latinos behind me and then slowed to a halt when I spotted Ricki. She was a hooker I sometimes stopped to bullshit with on my way home from West Holywood.
“Hey, Paul. Fuck you,” she shouted from the corner, a fat smile bulging from her wide, almost tribal, face. Her hair was hyper-crimped and fell down her forehead like some kind of primitive armor to protect her eyes. In the darkness I couldn’t tell what color her halter-top was, but her mini-skirt was a cool electric blue and was as short as a toothpick was wide.
“You too. Suck my dick,” I shouted back. That’s the way we talked. Friendly banter.
“Since when are you in the green? I only fuck rich guys.”
“Yeah, but they don’t only fuck you!”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Freedom of the press, that’s what’s most important,” I said, trying to think of something as unrelated as possible.
“Yeah, the world’s goin’ to the dogs. My brother’s out on the streets. Too many creeps in this town slurping up all the best pussy.” She extended her long pink fingernails into the glistening valley between her breasts and spit out a wad of gum.
“Sure, baby. What else is new?” I replied.
“Certainly not you. Any time you want to fly, just open the door.”
“I’ll take a rain check,” I yelled as the lights blinked to green and I drove off. She was great. One day I might actually take her up on it, but for the time being I had enough on my plate as far as that was concerned.
I navigated my way to the nearest bar and downed two quick martinis to the sound of Frank Sinatra on the jukebox. Then I drove home and went to bed without further event. I had to get in earlier than usual the next day for a meeting. We had to run over some budget figures for the new fiscal year, or maybe that was next week’s meeting - I really wasn’t sure. I never could get meeting agendas straight in my head, but it wasn’t such a problem anymore. Everyone at work had long since given up on me in the memory department.
The next day I walked in twenty minutes late to find Mark and Vera sorting through a pile of assorted rock magazines. Mark was British and rakishly slim. He had a nasally northern English accent and short hair - flattened to the temple with long side burns jutting down his cheeks like Florida into the Gulf of Mexico. Vera was his girlfriend, a splintered violin from an upper class Scottish family. I don’t know the whole story, but somehow she managed to fall from grace with her parents and end up with Mark, someone whose social standing and occupation they never would have approved of. She had been in California so long, I could hardly detect an accent when she spoke. She had a thing about dolls and would sometimes go on for hours about the ones she used to have when she was a girl. And one other thing: her tits. I had heard the British were big on tits, but I never really believed it until I met her. Small on central heating, but big on tits. Maybe that was their substitute for heating. All those cold windy days in Northumbria with nothing to do but bury your head in a nice pair of warm tits. Man. I’d give up all the heat in California if I could have a go with her. But she’s Mark’s woman and I’m in love with Nicola. Besides, I’m not the sort to chase after my best friend’s girl. Just a small fantasy, a forgivable and ultimately inconsequential dream. And wasn’t it the great Deborah Harry that sang dreaming is free?
I walked over to the desk and picked up a copy of Urb, a rival magazine that focused on the feel-good counter revolution. You know: raves, ambient music, crystal balls, that whole ultramarine pillow-world of bell-bottoms, ethereal sounds, good-vibes, and post-AIDS sex that’s been splashing all over the streets of LA lately. Needless to say, Mark hates it. Urb has a bigger readership and soaks up a lot of the advertising revenue we might otherwise get our hands on. We represent the darker side of the whole underground scene. Winters of discontent, coal in your stocking, dead seagulls and oil spills: that’s our headset. Page seven of this month’s Urb had an article about the so-called “baggy” fashion and its roots in the zoot suit. Page 12 had a feature on why we should be spaced out to attack the system, and page 20 - a spread from some modelling agency - showed three vacuum-tube chics, Nina, Takio, and Zamara, all decked out in these silly little Vampirella fuck-suits wearing King-Louis-XVI shoes.
I balanced a copy on my head and tossed it in the trash. Then I looked over at Vera.
“Spin?” Vera arched her perfectly waxed eyebrow and hissed like a cat. She had a pile of magazines cradled in her arm and was tossing them into the garbage one by one. Her red hair brushed over her shoulder as she turned to face Mark. He was sitting at the layout desk with a mess of photos and text in front of him. I stood on the other side of the room, cigarette balanced between my fingers, staring out the window onto Melrose Avenue, pretending I wasn’t listening.
“Bad.”
“A.P.?”
“Bad. I hate the way they offset the text from the margins. All lay out and no substance. Fucking pretentious,” Mark gagged. I could see from the bags under his eyes that he was hung over. I think we all were. His party had worn on into the afternoon hours on New Year’s Day.
“NME?”
“Very bad. Excessively bad. Almost incomprehensibly bad. I should know. I used to bloody well work for them.”
Just then Wilkinson burst into the office and pointed an accusing finger at Mark. “Is that all you do?” Wilkinson yelled. “Just sit there and put down our rivals? I bet that they make in a week ten times what we make in a year.”
“First of all, your holiness, they aren’t our bloody rivals. We’re on a completely different level. There’s no comparison. None at all. What sort of owner doesn’t even know what his magazine represents? And another thing, I put so much more time into this than you could ever dream of. Magazine work isn’t the sort of thing you can just squeeze between lunch and tennis.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? I’m the fucking owner of this operation and what I say goes. I gave you a break in hiring you and this is all you can do for me. There’s a million editors out there and I really can’t see what makes you so special.”
I could tell he was mad.
Mark tossed a wadded up piece of paper at Wilkinson’s feet and turned away from him as if to dismiss him from the office.
“Alright,” said Wilkinson. “I’ve had enough. Start packing and be out by morning.”
“Oh, no. You can’t,” pleaded Vera. “He needs the work. He’s already depressed enough as it is.”
“You stay out of this,” Wilkinson said with a condescending sense of grace that belied his obvious anger.
But before he finished speaking Mark had already turned around and leapt on him like a jackal. I’d never seen him so livid. All that British reserve blowing up like a geyser in Wilkinson’s face.
I stepped back as Vera flung herself on top of Mark and tried to pull him off.
After delivering a few quick punches, Mark jumped up and stormed out of the room, Vera close on his heels. After the sound of footsteps had dissipated, all I could hear was Vera shouting and crying. Wilkinson looked at me and shook his head in disgust. Without saying anything further he walked across the hall to the bathroom. As soon as I heard the sound of running water, I ran out of the building as fast as I could and hopped into my car.
That night I ate Sushi at a restaurant in Glendale, staring vapidly into my rice until the cute little toy-land waitress brought me the bill. I could have made a move, but I just paid and drove home instead. There was nothing on TV, so I ended up going to bed early. But it was so hot in my apartment that I didn’t fall asleep until four. It was just that kind of day.
III
Fortunately, it only took a week for things to settle down at the office. Vera begged and pleaded with Wilkinson until he finally broke down and gave Mark his job back. The two men made up - if only superficially - and things went quickly back to normal, i.e. healthy, chaotic friction. At home, on the other hand, things started to get rather strange. I can’t even remember the last time I could hear the woman upstairs crying so much. She can really get on a roll sometimes, and when she does it gets so loud I can almost feel her tears seeping through the cracks in my bedroom ceiling. At times I’ve even been convinced they’re penetrating my skull cap and trickling down the tangled web of neural pipes that make up the micro-expressway I call my brain. One night I could swear my entire bathtub was filled with her tears. The water had this soft saline quality to it and there was an irritating moaning sound like a cat in heat as I drained it...
Anyway, I think she’s seeing some Latino guy. On the basis of what I’ve heard up there, I’d venture to guess that he’s an asshole. A prime cut. I’ve never seen him, so I can’t say for sure. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen her either. But one day their fights are going to get so intense I’ll have no other choice but to go up there and find out what’s really going on.
Ten days after the incident with Wilkinson I went out with Mark to catch a forgettable B-movie in Santa Monica. Vera stayed home with the flu, spending the evening reading in bed with a teapot purring beside her bed. Although his anger was still simmering from the incident with Wilkinson, Mark knew it was in his best interests to hide his feelings for the time being and wait until things had really smoothed over.
We left Santa Monica at ten and took the long way back through Westwood. As we edged into Beverly Hills going west on Sunset, Mark pressed hard on the accelerator of his British racing green Aston Martin and grinned.
“What was she like?” he asked, referring to Tanya, a frizzled blonde I’d taken home the night before from a party in Venice.
“Serious.”
“In bed, you mean?”
“In all her aspects. Even bed. She wanted to be a journalist and kept on bragging about all her contacts in London.”
“British?”
“No. But she spent a few years in Cambridge and likes to flaunt her pedigree. In fact, I’d say she was pedigreed out of existence. The Cambridge way.”
“Ick.” He puckered his face. “Imagine that. Pedigreed out of existence. Like a line of dogs bred so much for their hair that they’re eventually born as disembodied puffs of fur.”
“Emphasis on fur,” I said with a grin. “I think you met her.”
“Only once,” he replied, wiping a bead of perspiration off his forehead. “Wasn’t it at some dinner over at your place?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What about Nicola?” he asked in a more probing tone. “I like her. Maybe she’s too nice for you, though.” He was suddenly more candid, his warm boyish eyes melting through that cool British veneer. Although he lived behind a wall of mordant wit, I always sensed that deep down inside he thought the world was a watery blue ball soaring through space at some vast cosmic theme park in the sky. “Still,” he went on, “you’d be doing yourself a favor to lay off these other girls and concentrate on her.”
“Funny hearing that from you.”
“What are you implying?”
“Far be it from me...” I said.
“What?”
“When Mark starts a’ drinking, the slime wheels start a’ rollin’.”
“If that ain’t the bloody pot calling the kettle. You’ve been chasing ass like it was going out of style.”
“Ass will never go out of style,” I proclaimed as though stating a maxim.
He broke out laughing. Then he continued. “Look, mate, I think neither of us are saints. So let’s just drop it.”
We gazed in silent awe for the next twenty minutes as we drove through the narrow corridor of streetlights and neon signs that stretches down Sunset Boulevard from Beverly Hills all the way to Vine. We stopped at a gas station in the five thousand block and Mark stepped out for a breath of fresh air. I stayed in the front seat, quietly studying the intricate dials on the electronic dashboard. It was strangely pacifying with its circles and dials of deep green light. I suddenly felt sleepy and started thinking about Tanya: her huge Eurasian eyes and soft, fluidic lips ravaging my body like a candy-coated crocodile of love. And my pillowcase reeking of her perfume - Opium I think it was - for hours afterwards. As I sat there in the car I could almost see her hot pears-and-chocolate buttocks bouncing in rhythm on my hips as we fucked deep into the night. It was just as I’d imagined sex as a teenager: her left shoulder docked between my chin and chest, her back dipping provocatively out of view, her smooth derriere rising boldly from the horizon defined by the sheets and the far edge of the bed.
I’d only met her once before, but I allow myself such pleasures. Even though Nicola is starting to rotate at the center of my turntable, I still allow them. No explanations necessary.
Mark opened the door and jammed a tape into his new car stereo.
“Latest thing out of London.”
“You always say that.”
“Just listen for once. Lush. Harpies from heaven.”
I listened closely to a couple of songs. I felt like an angel was ramming a forty thousand volt screwdriver through my head. I wasn’t sure if I liked it. There was something too dry and calculated about their whole approach. But it was certainly better than the last stuff he tried to push on me. The Birthday Party, Nick Cave’s “legendary” early project. Vocals like a man choking on a cup of powdered lye and a bass line that crawls up your ass like a cockroach on Jim Beam. Torture-chamber blues I once heard it called. If the Marquis De Sade had a band, it would have been The Birthday Party.
“The two lead girls are a dish,” he added as if it somehow raised the quality of their music a few notches. The third song ended and he pressed the eject button, his face suddenly frozen.
“I have to talk to you about something,” he said with unsettling sobriety.
“Vera?”
“What else? She’s driving me crazy. She lives in this world where everything is a drag if it doesn’t measure up to her fanciful vision of life.”
“Fanciful visions are dangerous.”
“She wants to save the world from poverty, she wants to travel, she wants to experience life, but she can’t even get out of bed on time. She couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery. It’s as though she expects everything to be dreamy and wonderful without the slightest bit of effort on her part. If I tell her we can fly to some place like Turkey for a quick romantic getaway if we save and work overtime for a few months, she’ll complain about how dull her job is and how she can’t bear to work overtime. And the way she dwells on her childhood you’d think she wished she never grew up.”
I didn’t know what to tell him, as they were exactly the same complaints she had about him. After a few minutes he stopped talking and we continued in silence to the Hollywood freeway exit, turned, and launched onto the racing expressway. The lights were so bright I thought I was trapped in a hospital corridor. Everything was shiny, and everything was quiet. It made me think of everything all over again. How quiet it’s all been the last few days. Indeed, it has been quiet. The fight between Mark and Wilkinson had blown off just enough steam to calm us all down. I even fell asleep last night without a single drink. No visions of the dead German staring at me from the ceiling with his colorless eyes and sullen bony face, and none of those jaw-faced dogs menacing the alleyways of my dreams. For a moment it seemed I had finally escaped the spectre of anxiety that’s been clouding my life since I started seeing Nicola. I hope it doesn’t come back to plague me. But, one can never know…
I walked into work the next day and watched the sun’s first rays part the thin layer of gray clouds suspended in the sky. I read a few pages of Spin over a quick latté and later met with Wilkinson. He handed me a list of enlargements for the print deadline and we did Dim Sum in a funky new place downtown. I had one of everything the waiters offered us and Wilkinson paid the bill – how can you beat that? Yes, one could say that things were sailing along quite smoothly. I even feel more secure. More secure about Nicola, too. Just a few days ago I thought I could never hold out and she’d eventually discover my secret, but today I flex new muscles. My only fear is running into someone who might recognize me from before. But how remote can remote be?
2. On the Threshold
I
Today is Valentine’s Day. Everything is pink, everything is horribly pink. Nicola’s gone back to Mobile for two weeks and I’ve yet to get as much as a peck on the cheek from her. Not to be completely denied, I’ve entertained the odd lover over the past few months to keep me in practice. With one girl, an elvish little Japanese model that came flouncing through one of Mark’s parties a few weeks ago, I ended up naked on a 20x20 sheet of clear neoprene in her hotel room, two hits of ecstasy playing racket sports in my head. She was a part-time artist and said she liked doing things in plastic. By the end of the evening I was convinced that plastic was the new wave and it wouldn’t be long before I’d be doing a whole show in the stuff. I guess there’s nothing like a little plastic to wake up the artist in everyone.
Yesterday I went down to Venice to look at an antique shop. They had an old oil lamp from the Spanish American War that I’d been hankering for since last Christmas and I wanted to see if they’d lowered the price. They hadn’t. So I went for a quick coffee. The streets were crowded with droves of smiling tourists, but as the afternoon passed I became overwhelmed with loneliness. It was as though I was the only real person in LA and everyone else was an oil slick mirage or wisp of sea mist. I sat down on a bench beside a small kiosk and it all came back again – yes, you guessed it - all the painful details of my past. I lit a cigarette and stared out into the vast and windless ocean. A few solitary boats were sailing on the horizon. For a moment they looked like tiny snails inching their way across a giant cement ledge. I watched them until a woman crossed the line of my sight. She smiled and immediately I thought of my old wife – or maybe she still is my wife, I’m really not sure. I could almost see her standing there in front of me in her night gown, her face lit up by her thin smiling lips. But I couldn’t quite remember the shape of her eyes. Were they like almonds or pearls?
Yes, just like miles of open sea, the past distorts things. Or is it really the future that does the distorting? I can’t even tell the difference any more. The past, the future: just different stages of the same thing. The past is just the future grown old. Nonetheless, I feel it grabbing onto me, begging for some kind of acknowledgement. When I walk down Hollywood Boulevard, gazing at the melange of leather boutiques and taco stands as I pass, I feel like I’m living someone else’s life. Worse still, when I reflect on the past I feel like I’m an intruder in someone else’s history. How odd, to be little more than an unwanted voyeur in one’s biography. But it’s not just the past that bothers me, it’s everything. I feel as if nothing in my life is really my own. Not my body, because I’ll eventually end up dead, not my memories, and certainly not the present. And do you know what? It scares me to death.
I strolled along a rectangular strip of sand, which formed a kind of barrier between the reddish tides and the beachfront trinket shops, and took out a pair of binoculars I bought from an old man in Santa Monica a few days earlier. I focused my sights on a tiny barge on the horizon and it all came back. Hazy, distorted, but still there.
I used to be someone else. A guy named Robert Smith. I was born in Philadelphia in 1958 and I spent most of my life in New York. I worked as a waiter at a number of different restaurants, trying to support myself as an actor. My wife Jenny was a quirky brunette from a small town in Pennsylvania. She was an art student turned department store clerk who liked to decorate our garage with pictures of her family and cover the refrigerator with as many ornamental magnets she could get her hands on. She used to spend Sundays scouring garage sales for them and told everyone who dropped by she had the largest collection north of Charleston. I met her while visiting some old college friends in Philadelphia. She was training to be a sculptor but gave up and ended up working as a cashier in the lawn furniture department of Macy’s. We married six months after we met and lived in relative happiness for the next couple of years.
Not long after we moved into a new house it started to dawn on us that our life had become shapeless and routine. Suffocated by our own private dreams and financial savings plans for the future, we had no room left for anything else. Every drop of adventure had been leached from our existence. I’d go on living with Jenny, I’d eventually make it as an actor, and that would be it. I had nothing but the future’s bland promise of prosperity to look forward to, and therefore nothing at all. Nothing but death. My relationship with Jenny quickly began to crumble as the arguments got worse and worse. What had started as a great journey into the mythic realms of love had turned into just one too many visits to Costco. There’s only so many times you can watch your wife thawing out a freezer before you realise that your marriage just isn’t the same any more.
As our love grew ever more stale, I sank into depression. It wasn’t long before my deflated spirits started to affect my professional life. I gradually became disillusioned with acting. My career was going nowhere and I was reduced to minor roles in second-rate productions in venues so far from central Manhattan they may just as well have been staged on icebergs in the Antarctic. Statten Island, Long Island, Yonkers, New Jersey. And all I really wanted was a shot at being in the movies. I had originally taken up theater under the belief that actors were like shaman or magicians that could bring the unconscious desires of the audience to the surface with a mere thrust of a sword or pledge of undying love, but I soon discovered that most people were numb to my performances, no matter how moving I thought they were. I guess I should have known better. It doesn’t take Shakespeare to figure out that most audiences are composed of corporate executives entertaining clients or society types who think that “one simply must go to the theater” without any idea what it really was or why they should go there in the first place.
One day when things looked like they couldn’t get much worse (I’d just lost my job at a greasy spoon and was reduced to selling tires at a Puerto Rican auto shop) Jenny confessed she had been seeing someone else behind my back for the last six months. She had already emptied her things from the closet and was moving out the very next weekend. When I first heard the news I was so devastated I considered taking my own life. Even though our love had become a dry routine, I didn’t know what I would do without her. I did everything in my power to convince her to stay, but she refused. She had already set things in motion with her new lover and was determined to see where things went with him.
With nothing else going for me, I drove to Mexico. It seemed like a drastic measure, but I had to get away for at least a few weeks to clear out my head. They said it was cheap down there and a man could live for next to nothing without a care in his life. When Jenny found out I was leaving she did a sudden flip-flop and begged me to stay. She was confused, she said, and kept insisting there might still hope for us if things didn’t work out with the new guy. She just needed time to sort herself out. But there was no way I could just stay there and wait for her. I just couldn’t go on. And that’s when everything started to get strange.
I went out boozing one night with a bunch of U.S. Marines in Tijuana and ended up getting so drunk I passed out in my hotel bathtub. When I woke everything was dark. All I could hear was a dull scream coming as if from under a mound of earth. I looked out the window and couldn’t see a thing. A few minutes later the police came banging in. A woman had been brutally murdered in the hallway outside my door and I was the only suspect. She’d been strangled and there were no witnesses. The police found me in the bathtub when they came, no doubt trying to clean off the last traces of the crime, they said. The victim was so rich and beautiful they had no trouble inventing some crazy money-sex motive. In no time I was charged. I tried calling Jenny, but I forgot to get her new phone number before I left New York. I tried calling her parents, but I just kept getting their answering machine. Since my parents passed away when I was in high school, it looked like I was alone, completely without allies. So I left a message on Jenny’s parents’ machine and hoped for the best.
The trial was held almost immediately; the court’s decision was unanimous and they gave me the death penalty without hesitation. Before I knew it, I was locked up in a cement prison somewhere in the middle of the desert desperately praying for a reprieve.
My cell was empty except for a few basic necessities. The walls were a combination of chipped plaster and crumbling brick and the floor was concrete. In a few places the concrete had either worn through or cracked so you could see the red soil underneath. Each inmate was given a tiny pillow and a urine-stained mattress on a squeaky gray cot. There was a small barred window opposite my bed and a light on the ceiling encased inside a cage of densely woven wire. The on/off switch was located outside so only the guards could control it. It looked as though somebody had tried to dig through the wall in a few places using a screwdriver or knife but didn’t get very far. In every way it was exactly what you’d expect a Mexican prison to be: Spartan, dirty, and miserable. I spent the first few days tucked inside the east corner of my cell, head tilted downwards in sleepless despair. I knew it was the east corner because of the way the shaft of sunlight from the tiny window on the wall moved across the floor. It didn’t take much to figure that out. With an unfair trial and virtually no chance to put together a sound defence, I felt like the victim of some great cosmic joke. Never before had I felt such bitterness in my life. I did told every aspect of the truth, yet I still ended up in prison with a death sentence hanging over my head.
At first I was kept in solitary confinement and food was shoved under the door. A week later I was given a uniform and allowed to eat with the other inmates. Little was said in the dining hall. Any attempt to strike up a conversation with the other prisoners was immediately squelched by the guards or taken as a sign of weakness by the other inmates. The few men that always tried to whisper under their breaths were ostracized by the silent majority and left to eat alone on the far end of the table. I quickly learned to say nothing and eat with slow deliberation to help whittle away the time.
In the afternoon we were allowed to walk or jog around a small cement courtyard that had a tetherball pole in the center. To my disappointment, most of the inmates preferred to sit around like patients in a hospital waiting room, expressions of grave acceptance pinned to their faces. At the end of this recreation period we were always herded back inside and forced to take cold showers before being locked up in our cells until dinner. It was an empty and repetitive existence completely devoid of hope or pleasure.
II
Several months passed and my hopes began to fade. With nothing left to live for I slowly withdrew into myself. Silence became my normal state. I stopped eating. I rarely showered. I lost weight. The only way I had of entertaining myself was to watch the fleas dancing on my pubic hair while imagining that it was all a part of some strange religious opera in which the tiny black insects were singing in Latin about how my solitude was some source of penance that would ultimately save my soul and bring me closer to God.
I felt a sudden burst of hope one day when a letter was slipped under my door. Recognizing Jenny’s handwriting on the envelope, I opened it immediately. She started by apologizing profusely for abandoning me – although she completely avoided the topic of her present personal life - and then went on to swear that she would do everything in her power to save me. She heard the phone message I left on her parent’s answering machine and had since been talking to several lawyers while relentlessly chasing down the Mexican authorities. I felt vindicated for her infidelity and forgave her. I even had fanciful visions of us getting back together once I was released and everything had blown over. But to my disappointment, I only got two more letters from her over the next three months. Each explained with regret how expensive the lawyers were and how little progress she was making with the Mexican authorities. She put it down to problems with money and the blatant unfairness in the justice system, which always seems to favor the wealthy over the innocent.
One day the warden marched in. His hair was thin and black and his uniform stretched across his chest like Saran Wrap across the rim of a vegetable bowl.
“Come with me,” he said densely.
I followed him without a word as I dug my fingernails nervously into my palms. We passed a few empty cells and then entered a large comfortable room with a desk standing in the center. I guessed it was his office.
“You have been found guilty of murder, despite your wife’s efforts to prove otherwise.”
“I’m innocent.”
“Innocence is not a question of guilt. Are you that much of a simpleton? There are other avenues.” A gilded smile slowly spread from one cheek to the other.
“My wife has money.”
“Don’t be foolish. You Americans are filled with such stereotypes. Do you actually think that I’d accept a bribe? Please, don’t insult me. I’m a well off family man much like you once were.” He emphasized the past tense as if to assert his command over my destiny.
“What do you mean?”
“You see, we have a need for people in our police service who have no identity. Well...” he gazed off into space to search for the right words and then gave up. “My English does not permit me to express this as elegantly as I would like, so I’ll be more blunt. You have two choices. The first is execution under the jurisprudence of the Mexican State for committing the murder of a young woman.”
“I’m no murderer,” I said with stern dignity. I fell out of my chair and broke into tears. All I remember was starring into the aluminum legs of his desk hoping he’d show some clemency. I looked up for an instant into his watery black eyes. I could see there was a different and much softer person somewhere beneath the hard shell of the uniform. If only I could reach this other man.
“Your second choice,” he continued, completely ignoring my desperate plea, “also involves a death of sorts.”
I stood up and wiped the tears from my eyes. He continued gazing soberly in my direction for an instant and then his face brightened.
“I must apologize for my lack of sympathy. Please don’t beg any longer. It won’t help. I’m just following orders. A milkman must deliver his milk or he’ll get fired. The same stands for me, however the consequences are far more severe.”
“But this is...”
“As I said,” he interrupted, his face suddenly more rigid, “you have one other choice. We can simply pretend you were executed and then you could join our service. A sort of false man is just the type of person we need to infiltrate certain nests of filth and depravity, so to speak. There are a few others like you. Many others, in fact. Americans.”
I stopped and thought for a moment, staring at a dishevelled stack of papers on his desk. The whole thing smacked of conspiracy, yet it was possibly my only chance to get out. “Would I ever see my wife again?” I asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Once you’ve joined, you will be given a new identity and any attempt to see your family will be grounds for severe punishment. Most of the others forget their families after a while. The lifestyle is exciting. Easy to lose yourself.”
I narrowed my eyes and sat down in my chair. His proposal was a farce. There was no way I’d let the government use me as a pawn. No doubt they’d use me to commit some cheap murder and then wipe me out afterwards to destroy the evidence. At least in the prison I had the remote chance of escape.
“No,” I said to him.
“If so you choose. I thought I could help you. I consider myself a benefactor of a kind. The way I see it you don’t have much choice but to accept my goodwill. But if you prefer death, I must honor your decision. I am a Catholic man of traditional values.”
I spat on his desk and pursed my lips. There was no way I was going to give up my freedom to work for the Mexican authorities. With all the stories of the drug cartels I would probably end up decapitated in a Mexican slum before I got my first pay cheque. I’d prefer to die unjustly at the hands of an executioner. The warden calmly wiped the spit off his desk and called a guard to take me away.
III
Three weeks later the first warden was replaced by a stout matronly woman with the charisma of an oil drum and I was promptly given notice of my execution. I had but six months to live. Over the next few weeks the prison walls almost seemed to glisten with my blood. I started hearing sounds from outside that I’d never noticed before: dogs barking and gangs of Mexicans shouting and smashing glass. Sometimes I thought I heard women’s voices and I imagined scenes of sexual revelry springing forth like magic fountains outside the prison walls. Hot-wet skin, mud-colored hair, and the feverish tangling of silky brown legs. I had to escape.
A month after the new warden’s arrival I was assigned my first cellmate. His name was Enrico. He came from Panama and had been charged with repeated thefts. My first inkling was that the authorities felt a strange pity for me and he was put in the cell to make my last months more tolerable. But since there was nothing in the guards’ behavior towards me that suggested they had anything but contempt for me, I decided they must have done it out of mere necessity because they had run out of space. As for the first warden, who knows? Perhaps he resigned out of choice, but there was also the slim chance he was being punished for failing to recruit me. I never found out.
Enrico had a grizzly, but soft voice and knew a small amount of English. He was sullen and moody at first, but soon I discovered another side to his character: a rustic warmth and strong sense of composure. Initially we said almost nothing to each other, but after a few weeks we began to talk more. I learned he was an ex-soldier whose wife had died at the hands of an American policeman out on a drinking binge. Enrico wore a small amulet around his neck, which she’d given him after their wedding. He said he didn’t think about her much any more, although for the first year after her death he turned to looting and carousing to help block her from his mind.
As the weeks passed our cell began to fill with wicked humor, hushed and pessimistic talk of escape, and countless drinking stories, often deep into the night. When we got too talkative, the guard would move me into an empty cell across the hall, but within a few days I’d always end up back in the old cell with Enrico. That much seemed to be a given. Enrico was from an entirely different world than I: he had a criminal record and no education. I would have completely avoided such a person in New York, but I was beginning to realize how sheltered my life there really was. Returning to that existence seemed like such a distant a possibility, as if it were an abstract theory with no experimental means of verifying its conclusions. As time passed I even began to wonder how my experiences in prison might affect my chances of reintegrating into a normal life, if I ever actually got out.
One morning Enrico leaned over and showed me a map on his palm. At first I couldn’t decipher the scribbled lines and smears of ink. He pointed to my cot and gestured for me to climb underneath it. I followed his instructions quietly so the guard outside wouldn’t suspect anything. There was a small duct in the wall. I’d never noticed it before because the cot was pushed so close to the wall and I’d never cared to look under it. The duct was about six inches across and covered in a thick layer of dust. He pointed to a spot on his palm where two of the jittery lines on the makeshift map met.
“Here,” he whispered.
“What?” I didn’t quite understand.
“Escape.”
“How?”
“Here.” He pointed to his hand again and then to the duct. It was then that I realized he’d drawn a map of the entire duct system of the prison. He made a sort of swimming motion with his hands as if to suggest we could make it through the drainage system.
“How did you find out?” I asked in a hush.
“My friend,” he said under his breath. “He was here. Not this cell. He escape last year. He send me map yesterday on inside of cigarette package.” Large parcels were strictly forbidden, but occasionally a small package might make it through the mail system.
Enrico climbed under the cot and brushed away the dust on the duct. He reached in until his forearm was no longer visible and bent it upwards so he could pat on the wall about a foot-and-a-half above the opening, suggesting it was large enough for a man to crawl through.
I stood back and looked around the cell. I shook my head in disappointment with myself for never wondering why there were so many partially dug holes in the wall. I pointed to one of the smaller ones as he pulled his arm out of the duct and stood up. He seemed to understand the implied question hiding behind my expression and leaned over to whisper in my ear.
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