A Star Is Bored

by Byron Lane

  “What can we do to avoid us burning out?” I ask.

  “Get some milk from the holy cow to put out the fire.”

  “I can’t do dairy,” I say, trying to keep us on point.

  Kathi laughs, opening her jewelry drawer and putting everything on her body, wherever, however it can be attached: multiple earrings in her ears, rings on every finger. “If you could really understand me, you might say it sounds like a plan. As it is, it just kinda looks like one.”

  “Okay,” I say. “The plan is just to get you level, you know?”

  “Maybe you can save me from me, if you’re so good at it. Or explain me away. Far away, where there’s no reception. Wedding or otherwise. Invitation to a beheading. Bring your children. Show them what not to be.”

  “Okay. Can I take you to see a doctor so you can get some meds to help you rest?”

  “No, thanks. Sweet of you. I’ll take some Beethoven to rest,” Kathi says, grabbing for her cell phone on the lanyard around her neck. She starts poking at apps.

  “This seems like it’s going to end badly. Has this happened before? Should I call a doctor?”

  Kathi opens her mouth as if to speak, but instead, from her phone she plays Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major Op. 92-II, Allegretto, the harmony filling the room as if it’s coming from inside her.

  “What do you think of the music?” she asks.

  “It’s pretty,” I say.

  “It’s so pretty, Cockring,” she says, choking up, her shoulders collapsing, her arms reaching out for support, her hands, they find mine.

  “We have to get you on the right medication,” I say.

  The music is building, building.

  “Wait,” she says calmly, listening.

  “Can I see if Dr. Miller is available?” I ask. “Maybe a phone chat is all we need to get some helpful information.”

  She looks at me, tears in her eyes, and raises the volume on the Beethoven even higher, pounding in our lives, in our heads, in her closet.

  “Or I can call Miss Gracie,” I say loudly over the music.

  “No, do NOT call her,” Kathi snaps. “She’s been unwell, and I don’t want you to stress her out and kill her.” She keeps staring at me, as if in a trance.

  I say, “Look, this is not healthy. I care about you.”

  “Let me have this one manic indulgence, and then when this song is over, I’ll take some fucking meds.”

  “Fine. How long is the song?”

  “Could be days,” she says. “I have it on repeat.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Fine, it’s just eight more minutes.”

  “Okay, great,” I say. “What meds will you need? Seroquel? I’ll get everything ready.”

  “First step is, you need to dance with me,” she says, grabbing my body.

  “No,” I start as she spins me around.

  “There you go! Look at us dancing!”

  “This is not dancing. This is technically assault.”

  She whirls me around again. Again. She laughs. The music is building, building, layers upon layers upon layers of instruments.

  “I need you,” she says.

  I put my hand on her waist, an attempt to wrest control, to slow our spin, to dampen this dance.

  “No, no,” she says. “I’m the man.” She moves my hands from her waist to her shoulders, and with her hands on the sides of my pelvis, she rocks me in a melodic sway and says, “You have women’s hips.”

  “Thank you. How much longer?” I clomp, clomp, clomp my feet beside hers.

  “Your dancing is so terrible, Cockring, you’re ruining my manic high.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Kathi stops suddenly, then reverses our spin in the middle of her closet.

  “Wait.”

  “No. I lead,” she insists. “Remember, I’m the man!” Her legs move fast, wide. She steps sideways and my chest follows her, angling as if we’re about to coast across a ballroom floor. “Don’t fuck this up,” she says, dancing me out of the closet and down her hallway, the music growing faint as the orchestra enters a quieter part of the melody, settling, preparing for their next burst from the phone around Kathi’s neck.

  Step, step, step we go, down the hall, together, chest to chest, heart to heart.

  “The gay gene doesn’t include dancing, eh?” she asks as my feet clutter around hers.

  “I had a bad experience dancing when I was a kid,” I say.

  We reach the end of the hallway, our feet stomping upon each other’s, our arms growing sore from being outstretched. Just outside the red room, Kathi looks at me. “Now we go back,” she says, changing our positions and pulling me back toward her closet.

  Step, step, step.

  We move slower this time, our pace matching the increasingly gentle lulls, the tempo coming to an end. I’m not sure if we’re moving slowly to match the pace of the music, for Kathi to stretch out this moment, or maybe both. Maybe we’re all, finally, getting in sync.

  As we return to her closet, Kathi releases my arms, removes her hands from my waist, and looks me in the eyes. “Thanks, Cock,” she says, turning from me and muting her phone, ending the song without regard to its final seconds. She retreats to her bedroom as I head to my stash of her meds in my desk, fishing out some of what’s needed.

  I bring her a soda and a few Seroquel. She’s standing by her bedroom window, looking out at her backyard, shaking her butt, still in dance to the music now only in her head.

  “Time for rest,” I say, guiding her to bed.

  “But…”

  “No,” I say. I hand her the soda and pills, and she grumpily sits on her bed and takes them as promised and then finishes off the soda.

  “You’re no fun, Cockring,” she says.

  “I know.”

  Assistant Bible Verse 6: Never let them get away with murder. Or spit food at you. Or throw things at your face.

  “You really are a B-plus assistant.” Kathi hands me her now-empty glass of soda. I put it on her nightstand.

  “Am I? Are you sure? You seem under duress today.”

  “True,” she says. “We will have to reconsider your grade when my mind is back home with itself.”

  “I can live with that,” I say, making my way across the room to sit in a side chair.

  “Thank you for the lovely dance, Cockring.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Assistant Bible Verse 7: Always make time to dance.

  I look at Kathi, but she looks away.

  “You know,” she says, “the mania is great. It’s the coming down that sucks.” And in the quiet moment that follows we’re in sync yet again, dancing a careful emotional dance, where she has space to make her moves. And I start to have space to make mine.

  And now it’s me who looks away. “I’m sorry if the pill mix-up was my fault.”

  Kathi pulls her blankets tight again, urging them from the tucking between the mattress and box spring, and lies back down on her pillows.

  She says, “Don’t worry about it.”

  “How often do you have manic episodes like that?”

  She says, “They’re very rare.”

  She says, “They’re very fun.”

  Kathi pulls the bedding up to her chin. She holds her phone over her face so she can continue looking at it—texting, reading news, I have no idea.

  I watch her fondly. I’m thinking, B-plus, I can live with that.

  I put my hand in my pocket, its home base, my left fingers finding my key ring, and I guess where each key fits—her front door, her shed, her pool house. Then my fingers find the locket. I remove the keys from my jeans and take a look. That aging empty locket, the places it has been, the years it has traveled until this very moment, bearing witness to me caring for my beloved Priestess Talara. I slowly unwind it from the key ring, freeing it at last, after its long journey from a Perris basement to this Beverly Hills mansion.

  As I hold it up to marvel at its su
rvival over the years, the dangling locket looks awkward without a key ring, naked, precarious—like a dog with no collar.

  “Hey,” I say, the impulse arising within me and spitting itself out like its own living being, like the thought is an exorcised demon with a great personality. “I have something for you,” I say.

  Kathi jolts up in bed. “A prostitute?!”

  “No.” I stand at her bedside and she turns to look at me. It feels like a scene at a hospital bed, that familiar scene in almost every movie where there’s even the slightest injury and someone ends up laid out under emergency care. The powerless patient looks up at the adoring visitor, but here, instead of beeping machines and the smell of pee, I’m dazzled by the fog of Beethoven from a cell phone and Tom Ford Amber Absolute.

  I open my mother’s locket and say a silent goodbye, looking at my reflection in its surface, definitely not the face of young Charlie.

  Kathi squints to identify the object in my hand. “What’s that?”

  “It’s yours now,” I say. “It’s a gift.” I dangle the locket in front of her.

  “Did you steal it?”

  “No!”

  “You stole it and now you’re planting it on me so I’ll go to jail for you?”

  “No. It belonged to someone special. And now I’m giving it to someone special.” I hold it out to her.

  The locket, swaying between my fingers, starts to reflect the colors and lights in Kathi’s wizard-ish bedroom, absorbing the enchantment, suddenly and dazzlingly at home in her world, free from the beige of mine. It seems to like her, as if maybe Mom does, too.

  “Okay. Give it to me,” Kathi says, her hand reaching to receive it.

  “No.” I pull it back, having second thoughts about putting it in the hands of someone in mental crisis.

  “What?! You just gave it to me! It’s mine! I want to hold it and see how long I can clutch it before I lose it or break it!”

  “Exactly,” I say, turning from her.

  “Where are you going, Cockring?”

  “Bathroom.”

  “I’m learning your pooping schedule after all,” she says.

  I grimace at the thought, but kinder feelings flow within me. I walk into Kathi’s bathroom and close the door. I walk to her purse, unzipped on the counter. I reach in and take out her key ring—her collection of jagged metal bits that are less functioning keys and more an archive of her past lives, past residences, old cars. Kathi Kannon’s purse—like my mother’s—is a graveyard.

  I see myself smile in the locket’s reflection as I let it go, as I start to wind it onto Kathi’s key ring. I twist, twist, twist and wiggle the clasp delightfully onto its new home. This locket is a protector, swimming with my mother’s magic and miracles, and now I leave it to serve Kathi.

  8

  Agnes wobbles toward me slowly, bracing herself on the colorful hallway walls. “I have a message from the boss,” she says quietly. I watch from the living room as she stops in the doorway to the kitchen, winded, weak. She takes a breath.

  “The boss seems fine,” I say. “She’s asleep.”

  “Not Kathi. The other boss, the real one. Miss Gracie wants to see you. Right away.”

  Assistant Bible Verse 8: Everything is an emergency, always.

  I bounce up. Hey, Siri, this is my chance to expand my universe. If only I had a second locket, to place in the palm of sweet Gracie Gold, to show that I’m here for both her and her daughter, to show how thankful I am that this job is saving my life.

  When I finally told my dad I was working with Kathi Kannon, he yelled, “WHO?!”

  I told him, “Kathi Kannon is Gracie Gold’s daughter.”

  He perked up. “GRACIE GOLD! HOLY SHIT!”

  As Kathi is a star to my generation, Gracie Gold is a star to his. I stand a chance of impressing him now, possible redemption as a bump on a branch on Kathi Kannon and Miss Gracie’s family tree. My dad hated me being terrible at sports, hated that I idolized strong women, hated that I worked for liberal media. But finally I have a job he might like. Or at least a boss. Or at least a boss’s mom.

  My job responsibilities include mending my relationship with my father.

  “Be careful,” Agnes says as I rush away from her. “Miss Gracie thinks she knows everything. She once starred in a movie with a dog, and now she thinks she’s an animal expert. One time she played a cheerleader, and now she thinks she’s an athlete. Another time she played a nurse, and now she goes around giving medical advice like she’s a real doctor.” Agnes shakes her head in disapproval.

  Hey, Siri, take note: Miss Gracie can perform an emergency tracheotomy, if it ever comes to that.

  Agnes says, “Don’t let your guard down.”

  I rush to Miss Gracie’s house at the bottom of the hill, in the shadow of Kathi’s home. I stop at my Nissan and pull out an emergency sport coat I keep in my trunk for moments like this—interactions with celebrities, royalty.

  Miss Gracie is so bold and fearless in her life that she hired one of her most extreme fans—some may even have called him a stalker—to be her assistant. It was certainly convenient. A teenager named Roger would stand outside of the stage door after each of Miss Gracie’s performances. He followed her from city to city. Miss Gracie would perform; Roger would be waiting outside, a familiar face among the throngs of her other fans. Eventually he no longer bothered to get her autograph, content to stare at her, make eye contact, and just casually wave as if to say, See you tomorrow. And so, as Miss Gracie recounted on an episode of Oprah, her right hand twirling in the air to accentuate her point, as if she were entertaining royalty, “When I needed a new assistant, Roger was around all the time, anyway,” Miss Gracie said. “Plus, he already knew everything about me. Why not?”

  Agnes also warned me about Roger. He lives in Miss Gracie’s home with her and her dog, Uta Hagen. Agnes says Roger is an old-school gay with a delicate mix of sass and class you don’t see much anymore: He uses hairspray, he’s never worn shorts, he uses a padlock to keep Miss Gracie out of his bedroom. He has a signature fragrance—he either applies some sort of scented talcum powder every day or he’s simply pickled from having been inseparable from Miss Gracie and her luxury lotions and oily perfumes for decades. Roger is mysterious to me, a ghost. I rarely see him, adding to the lore that he’s a sultry, salty veteran of this lifestyle, someone who knows the politics of what’s going on here, someone I can maybe turn to for answers when needed.

  Beyond the fluff and fun of Kathi’s home is the fake cute of Miss Gracie’s world. She lives in what used to be the groundskeeper’s house, but after Kathi bought the property, Miss Gracie remodeled the home endlessly. Agnes says she added a huge master bedroom and master bath, which includes a bathtub that’s actually a small in-ground—the size of a hot tub—filled with salt water, which stays full constantly, filters always running, water always swirling, in a room just off her bedroom.

  All the plants outside of Miss Gracie’s cottage are bright and beautiful and fake. Her car is a maroon-colored Lincoln Town Car—old and solid, real steel, not like new cars with their pathetic fiberglass. There’s a neon diner sign that says GRACIE’S DRIVE-IN, which should be lit up but is always turned off because, Agnes says, “Miss Gracie hates it.” It was a gift from Kathi.

  I round the corner, past the Lincoln Town Car and the neon sign, and there’s Miss Gracie’s back door. Mysteriously ordinary.

  I tap on the glass.

  “Come in,” a man’s sweet voice sings. I’m thinking, Roger.

  I push the door open. Entering Miss Gracie’s house feels like a trap. It smells like food and old lady. It smells like history. And it’s full of it. The walls are lined with photos of Miss Gracie with celebrities, mostly dead, fixtures of Hollywood’s golden age. Miss Gracie with Bette Davis, Phyllis Diller, a host of men I don’t recognize. Some pictures are autographed. Some are just snapshots from this party or that. Her life is framed in black and white all over the walls of her kitchen, her din
ing room, her laundry room, the guest bath. Her Facebook wall is her actual house. Other than the pictures, it’s a normal-looking home.

  In the kitchen, there’s food cooking on the stove; at the controls is an older man, slightly pudgy, fragile bottled-brown hair coiffed just so, and a tired look in his bright-blue eyes.

  Uta Hagen starts barking.

  “Shut up! Quiet! Ya turd!” he yells. And the barking stops.

  “You must be Roger. I’m Charlie.”

  “I know who you are.”

  Uta Hagen approaches me, sniffing me, judging me.

  “Git!” Roger yells, and Uta Hagen offers some very skilled side-eye and shuffles down the hall, leading the way for what I suspect is my eventual path to Miss Gracie.

  “That smells good,” I say, referencing whatever Roger is cooking on the stove. “Making yourself some lunch?”

  “Not for me,” he says. “Never for me.”

  “That can’t be true,” I say sweetly, trying to nourish a bond between us, a real one in lieu of the unavoidable one we both share in our roles as family assistants.

  Roger stares down at the stove for a moment, then he looks up and says, “Good luck. She’s in there.” He nods to a hallway, to my fate deeper in the corridors of this old house. Miss Gracie’s voice, now calling out impatiently, “Hellooooo? How much longer am I supposed to wait for you, dear?”

  I cross into the dining room. It’s dark. There’s stuff everywhere. Several dozen dresses hang, crammed onto a wardrobe rack in what used to be a bar. Dishes are packed inside of a china cabinet—an impossible number of gold-plated dinner plates, saucers, teacups—like it’s not just one person’s china collection but multiple lifetime collections of collections of collections. Side tables are full of candle sconces, like this is a home that only recently got electricity. I can’t help but reach out and touch one of them as I pass, trying to lift it slightly, if only to feel the heft in my hand, but it barely budges.

  I hear a voice call out, “Richard Burton gave me that candelabra as a thank-you after we made love in July of 1954.”

  I don’t dare turn around. I know it’s her.

  “I wanted so badly to have his child,” she says. “I laid on my back with my feet in the air for hours following our congress, but no luck.”