Survivanoia

by Baroness Von Smith

  So for the second time in less than an hour, Geo packed up his cast and crew. He told everybody he’d call them, except Eddie who he decided take to dinner. On the freeway, he broached Zane’s request of Eddie’s mom.

  “No.”

  “Eddie, come on.”

  “You ask her.”

  “Your mother hates me, she’s always hated me and you know it. My mother on the other hand seems to like you more than she likes me.” Geo sulked in the driver’s seat. At least traffic was lean. Still, he had to pay all those people for a day’s work and he had nothing in the can.

  “Even if I wanted to ask my ma to do another movie, which I don’t, she hates me right now too, so she’d say no anyway.”

  “What’s she hate you for?”

  “She found out about the lawsuit.”

  “You found somebody to take it?”

  “I did. I meet with her on Friday.” Eddie dug his wallet from his pants and read from a business card. “Theresa Tehzan. She’s with Tehzan, Preston, and Guite.”

  “Wow, a partner.”

  “Their slogan is ‘Experts in the Unprecedented’. Which I think is a sustained oxymoron.”

  “Oxymoron?”

  “Like freezer burn, or jumbo shrimp? Dude, I am so buying you a dictionary.”

  Geo shot Eddie a fierce glare. “Why don’t you just steal one?”

  Eddie didn’t answer, which irritated Geo even more. “Just what’s wrong with you anyway?”

  “You mean especially right now, or in general?”

  “Who sues their mother for not aborting him!”

  “The unemployable, uselessly-literate, kleptomaniac son of an aging porn star. Do I need to define any of those words?”

  “You wanna walk home? ‘Cuz I can abandon you at I’ll Tell Ya’s. Won’t be the—holy shit.” He pointed to the vehicle in front of them in the next lane, a chromed-out yellow Hummer.

  “Is that your boss?”

  “Yup.” He checked his rearview. A blue Pluto beside him, so he sped up in his own lane. He glanced left, but the little blue SUV was still there. Desperate, he put on his blinker.

  Eddie cocked his head, frowning. “Her license plate is incongru—doesn’t make sense.”

  The Pluto eased back, and Geo yanked the Jeep into the fast lane behind the Baroness. He looked at her vanity plate: ROSN80. “Why?”

  “I’m assuming that it’s a reference to—you’re driving awfully close, even for L.A., dude—to Don Quixote’s horse. But his horse was all tore up and that’s a new ride. That you’re about to SMASH INTO! What are you doing!”

  Geo licked his lips. “It’s our way of flirting.”

  The Hummer sped up to 95, and Geo kept pace, watching nothing but the gleaming bumper.

  “Geo, my ma will sue your ass if you kill me. Geo!”

  He watched his speedometer creep up to 100. “Going that fast, she’s gotta have a Turbonator in that thing.”

  “You wanna screw her or the car?” Despite his sarcasm, Eddie panted with fear. Geo glanced over and saw his step-brother was nearly milk-white in the bright sun. He was about to tease the kid when Eddie yelped like an injured puppy, “STOP!”

  The shiny bumper rose like an angry beast. Its sparkling chrome reflected the Hummer’s brake lights. Everything slowed. Geo saw the tiny spattering of mud on the bottom of the chrome, made out the patterns in the plastic bumps of the brake light covers.

  He yanked his Jeep’s steering wheel right. A white sedan blared its horn and the driver hurled curses in two languages. Geo pitched back into the fast lane just as the Hummer sped off.

  He sunk his teeth into his bottom lip and shoved his foot against the gas pedal.

  Eddie punched him, hard in the arm. “Knock it off!”

  When he ignored Eddie’s anger it shifted to appeal. “Geo, please. You’re going to get us killed. Or worse, injured badly. I don’t have any health insurance.”

  He relented. The Baroness had maneuvered two cars ahead, anyway, and he saw that the sedan driver was on his cell phone, so there was a very good chance that CHP would be cruising through the area shortly.

  “Some day I’m going to get her.” He said this through clenched teeth. And even as he said it, he knew he wasn’t sure just what he meant.

  III: The High Price of the

  Wild Truth

  CHAPTER 9

  Jackson Blake’s grandfather rattled off his usual morning litany, emphasizing his imminent death and the likelihood of its resulting from the rotten food at the nursing home. “Then they’ll close all the doors, how they do. How’s a closed door gonna’ save us from death? They don’t even lock ‘em! As if—” He stopped abruptly. The old man leaned forward, squinted his wrinkly eyes, and peered at his grandson. With a concern Jackson hadn’t heard since his grammar-school days nearly thirty years ago, the old man asked, “What happened to your face, kid?”

  It was the third in a series of events that convinced Jackson the world was destined for swift and soon destruction. His grandfather’s sudden reversal, the Perfumed Woman in the elevator, and the Coyote. These formed, in Jackson’s mind, an ominous triumvirate.

  He raised a hand to his swollen lip and bruised cheek and eye. At least his nose wasn’t broken. Jackson liked his nose. “A Greco-Roman nose,” TV Guide’s Adam Fitzpatrick had once said about it, “classic and expressive.” Jackson was glad not to have had his expressive nose busted.

  His four-year “Face of a Handsome Boxer” epithet had taken on a new meaning last night. He’d assumed his grandfather wouldn’t see it, just like he couldn’t see the television or the crosswords anymore. “I was helping my neighbor move.”

  “That’s not a helping your neighbor move face. That’s a got-busted-with-your-neighbor’s-wife face.”

  “Not exactly.”

  What to tell Grampa Pedro?

  At three in the morning, Jackson had been awakened by an odd and unidentifiable noise, like glass breaking in slow motion. He’d peered through his peephole and saw his upstairs neighbor—Mel—poised on the upper landing of the cement stairs leading down to Jackson’s doorstep. Mel clutched a four-foot pink plastic crayon and gaped sadly at Jackson’s door. Which Jackson opened.

  “What’s wrong, Mel?” The giant crayon functioned as a coin bank, as evidenced by the ankle-deep pile of assorted change that cascaded onto his feet. “Mel” was Melvina, Jackson’s dress-wearing male neighbor who preferred to be called “she.”

  “Sshhhh!” In a harsh whisper Melvina told Jackson: “I’m sneaking out. I can’t pay the rent and I don’t want to be evicted.”

  “So you’re moving out at two in the morning? You—”

  “SHHH!”

  Jackson whispered back, “You don’t even have a car!”

  “I called a cab; it’s waiting outside. I’m taking what fits in it. I was going to take my crayon, you know, but….” Melvina gestured helplessly at the shiny mess at the bottom of the stairs.

  “If you cashed that all in you could probably pay your rent!”

  “I need it for groceries. Besides, I found a cheaper place. In Hollywood.”

  Jackson questioned the existence of a cheaper place then their fifty-five unit North Hollywood barrio building.

  “East of Vine,” Melvina explained.

  After making Melvina promise not to become a prostitute, Jackson helped his neighbor refill the pink crayon as quietly as possible, by first pushing all the coins into his studio apartment and then scooping them back into the bank.

  “I thought you had a job.” Jackson dropped a handful of coins into the mouth of the giant cardboard crayon. Its point came off, which made filling it easier. The bottom also came off, which Melvina hadn’t known until a few minutes ago.

  “I got fired,” she sulk
ed. “They caught me working on my novel at my desk. But I got my work done. It’s not like anybody who came into the office would ever know I wasn’t working on a report or something. I think it’s sexism.”

  Jackson glanced at Melvina’s five o’clock shadow, and “her” hairy, unshaved legs, visible past her knee-length floral tank-dress. Melvina wasn’t a transsexual. Melvina barely qualified as a transvestite. Melvina was simply a man in a dress.

  “Sexism?”

  “People think it’s over, but far from it. Believe you me!”

  Jackson let it go. Melvina was odd, but intelligent and funny, and the only friend Jackson had made in the six months since he’d moved from bourgeois-artsy Central Coast. So he helped Melvina get the last of her few things—a suitcase and a lamp—while the cab meter ticked. Then Jackson gave her the business card of the Perfumed Woman from the elevator, advising Melvina to be honest about why she’d been fired.

  “You can tell her I sent you if you want. And tell her you’re good with phones. And you don’t like research.”

  “Thank you sooo much,” Melvina gushed gruffly. “I wish I could buy you lunch or something. I’ll email you a copy of the novel! No one else has seen it yet, not even my agent.”

  Jackson agreed that’d be great.

  So he had been helping his neighbor move. But that’s not what earned him the shiner.

  He’d tried going back to sleep but the bar in his fold-out couch had seemed especially uncomfortable. Or maybe it was the heat. Three, no, four in the morning and the temperature still in triple digits. He missed the ocean, wished he had some vodka. Or weed. Or heroin, or gasoline. Instead he found his book, Haruki Murakami’s Wild Sheep Chase. Jackson had loved private investigator books since childhood, when he’d read himself to sleep under the sheets with a flashlight. Tonight, though, just as the sandman came calling, another commotion dragged him from bed. This was a more familiar noise.

  Tanya lived upstairs, next door to Melvina. She and Melvina swapped quick-and-easy-recipes, and Tanya tried to provide Melvina tips on how to be more feminine. But while Melvina sequestered herself away (apparently to write a book), Tanya had a string of bad boyfriends. There’d been musicians, actors, a crooked judge who turned up dead, a handsome Persian prince who got deported, and a doctor who seemed promising until he was arrested for writing phony pain-med prescriptions.

  Now some new clown hollered in the hallway while she shushed him. Jackson squinted through his peephole again. This time he saw Tanya on the landing, pinned against the wall by some lumbering suit. Suit’s hand kept pushing her skirt up her thigh and hers kept pushing his back down. Finally she squirmed away from him. “I think it’s better if you go.”

  Her date laughed. “We been together three weeks, and it’s time I get me a little somethin’ somethin’.”

  SLAP! “I’ll give you a little something!”

  Their scuffle took them out of Jackson’s limited view. Should he intervene? It meant admitting he’d been spying. A snippet of his TV show’s opening song surfaced to memory: “Always help the helpless….”

  Other guys had their college-days radio music, Jackson had his theme song. He sang through it silently. “Always help the helpless, never fear the fearless, be doubtful of the doubtless, give the penniless your change….” He hummed his way through the bridge, then heard a small whine and a dull thud followed by chilling quiet.

  He tossed open his door. “Tanya?”

  He could see her legs sprawled awkwardly on the landing, the rest of her obscured by her kneeling date.

  The Suit turned and snarled at him. “Mind your own damn business!”

  Jackson jolted up the stairs. Some temporary insanity—the heat or exhaustion—made him grab Tanya’s six-feet-plus date by his immense shoulders. He yanked backwards, sent Suit tumbling. Suit tumbled all the way back onto to his feet and out the door, grumbling curses and threats.

  Tanya pulled herself to consciousness. She saw a man standing over her and slugged him in the face with everything she had. That man, of course, was Jackson. And what Tanya had was a full bottle of scotch.

  A kinder world would have given Jackson a new friend. One that shared her late night liquor purchases. Instead, Tanya’s confusion or embarrassment sent her lunging up the stairs, where she slammed her door in Jackson’s face.

  So what to tell his grandfather? Did it even matter? The old man believed and remembered what he wanted. That’s why Jackson was the only one taking care of him now.

  “I was helping a neighbor move and her boyfriend showed up,” Jackson said. “They had a fight and he seemed pretty out of control.”

  Grampa Pedro scrutinized him again. Jackson expected the usual rattle-your-chain treatment, something like “Helping her move, is that what the kids call it these days? Ha ha! You got what you had coming, boy!” But instead, Grampa rested his chin in his hand. “Playing the hero is stupid, kid. But real nice. That’s nice what you did. I guess that’s what you were known for. In your day, I mean.”

  Jackson wondered if his grandfather felt all right. But before he could ask, one of the nurses appeared in the doorway. “There’s our Mister Sailor,” she jingled. Grampa Pedro cringed at her voice. “Breakfast is ready,” she told Jackson.

  Jackson wheeled his grandfather down the hallway, affronted anew by the garish carpet, overstated wallpaper, and wall sconces shaped like flowers. Part Vegas hotel, part funeral parlor. He rolled Grampa Pedro to his place in the dining room, waved at the five other wheelchair-bound inmates, then slipped away quickly, before the horror of old age had a chance to crash over him. Once-dignified people who could no longer hold a fork, who were made to wear bibs just like babies; it struck Jackson as a cruel, nasty end to a too-short life.

  The elevator reeked of whatever horrible preprocessed food they’d brought up for the residents. Not like yesterday, Saturday morning, when it had smelled sweetly musky, like sex and leather and expensive cigars, reminding him of his agent’s office. Yesterday, he’d waited what seemed an extra-long time for the elevator door to slide open. When it had, a woman appeared. Quite a woman.

  Her height struck him first, above his own five-eleven. Then her hair, wine red and down past her hips, even in a complex braid. Godiva, he thought. I’ve met Lady Godiva in the elevator. Jackson stepped inside, needlessly pressed the button for the lobby, and then stared at the floor.

  “You look familiar.” Her voice matched her opulent scent.

  “Maybe you’ve seen me around the home,” he suggested.

  “That’s not it.” Her confidence impressed him. “Turn sideways?”

  He laughed but did as requested.

  She squinted at him. “Say: ‘Consider your ticket punched.’”

  He repeated the phrase dully.

  “Say it right!” she implored, and they both laughed. “You busted me.” He grinned at her.

  She smiled back, her violet eyes gleaming. “That was a good show. Why’d they cancel it?”

  The show she referred to was Ferryman. He’d played the starring role, Jared Ferryman, a hitman’s hitman. His first killing had been to avenge his father, after proclaiming he’d never follow in his father’s gun-for-hire footsteps. Of course, one thing led to another, and every episode had him killing somebody. It was a dark comedy; Jared was a Melrose grunge kid with a tribal neck tattoo and an attitude bigger than a house. The show predated Six Feet Under and Nip/Tuck and even The Sopranos and had been a hit with critics and audiences alike. Still, “Egos got in the way. MGM picked it up for a movie which they filmed but never released because….” He stopped himself from naming names. “You know how it goes.”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “I seem to have a penchant for getting fired.”

  The elevator stopped. The woman exited but didn’t continue to the entranceway. “W
ho fires the famous?”

  “Debt collectors, the Los Angeles Times subscription department, and movie survey people. This month.”

  “Not good with phones?”

  “Not good with people. After my show was canceled, I took the money and ran to Central Coast. Found an investor who keeps me in buttons and bows, and I stay up with the trees and the fish, where it’s safe. But then Grandpa got sick and the money’s not enough to cover two places.” Jackson fell silent, at once saddened by his pathetic state and startled by his own sudden garrulousness. Something in this woman, her impossible colors and her chocolate voice, worked on him like strong liquor.

  “How are you with stuff, objects? Good?”

  “I’d say so, yeah.”

  A business card materialized. “If you’d like a job testing things, phone me. I can use more people in R and D.”

  Jackson took the card, which was made to look as though forged from steel, complete with rivets. A sharp, raised S occupied the center, the ubiquitous S Jackson saw everywhere. But he’d assumed the company an urban myth which in actuality only made clothing.

  “Survivanoia. You make actual stuff?”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe.” Her eyes sparkled.

  “I’ve got a baseball cap by you guys. Lead lined, you know.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Sure. I haven’t, like, needed it.”

  “You mean you haven’t been shot at yet.”

  Jackson nodded. Felt off kilter. Yet?

  “Well, now you can get paid to find out if it works.” She strolled out the sliding doors, leaving Jackson with alarming images of himself bent over in his lead-lined supposedly bullet-resistant baseball cap while somebody took aim at his head.

  Then the woman shot him a toothy grin over her shoulder that startled and shocked him. Because, what with those perfect teeth and the red hair and that clever, daring grin, she looked just like the coyote. The coyote had started it all, Saturday morning.