Stabs at Happiness

by Todd Grimson

  THE BABYLONIANS vs. THE PERSIANS

  “I went to Bryn Mawr for a couple of months,” said Kim to a guy at a party, making it up as she went along, “and then I couldn’t stand it anymore. All those snotty rich girls wearing bib overalls and going around with hairy legs, pretending to be serious about every injustice the world has ever known, pretending that they’d like to be a peasant in Cuba or Red China; then they’d just write another check, take another plane to Switzerland or France, meet their parents and complain. You know what I mean? Save me from these hippies.”

  “So what do you do? I mean,” the guy said, “to pay your rent?”

  “That’s a personal question, but I don’t mind. I’m a professional groupie. I run a string of groupies, and when the bands come to town the managers get in touch with my service to make sure the bass-player or the drummer, if he’s ugly, you know, gets a good-looking groupie all his own. Do you play guitar? My favorite band is T. Rex. I love Marc Bolan, though he’s terrible when they play live. I like records better anyway. Are you my main man? Are you now? Are you now? I always want it to sound the same. I hate live shows. I don’t know. I’m so full of shit. I guess I like the messiness of seeing them live. I’m really high. Do you wanna go up on the roof ?”

  Was there a blowjob in the offing for the squarejohn? Maybe so.

  Stock footage: the b&w archers strung their bows, awaiting the order to let their arrows fly. They looked more like Normans or Saxons or Visigoths than Babylonians, but Jean-Luc liked them anyway. His glasses were repaired with tape. The arrows made a slow-motion fragile arc of vectors, coming to rest in the torsos of enemy warriors or clattering off their shields.

  This footage was replayed.

  Kim packed her suitcase to try to escape the fall of Babylon and go to St. Louis, deathly afraid of the oncoming Assyrian hordes and their reputation for atrocities.

  “I’ve heard that it gets real muggy in St. Louis during the summer, but it can’t be any more humid than here in Babylon. God, last year as soon as you got out of the shower you’d be soaking in sweat. I didn’t pay any attention to the things that the Hell’s Angel wanted me to do, I just listened to freak out in a moonage daydream,” and David Bowie faded in, all movement giving way to a static close-up of Kim’s face.

  Cut to the Assyrian hordes.

  The b&w dance sequence featured twenty young women, all costumed after the manner of a typical sexy Hollywood Biblical extravaganza, scantily clad in shiny gold, with elegant headdresses owing as much in style to modern Las Vegas as to ancient Babylon or Ur.

  A shot from above: a roseate pattern. Then it bloomed.

  “I need these pills to survive, uh, the strangeness of existence,” said Kim, as Beverly Hills watched her swallow one with a sip of Coke. “Not just the particular strangeness of my particular existence, though I suppose that’s bad enough. But everyone feels this unnaturalness I think. Everything moving wants to be at rest. Am I making sense?”

  “Yeah,” said Beverly, “It’s like Valley of the Dolls.” She paused so they both could consider this.

  “I liked that book,” said Kim. “Did you ever read The Carpetbaggers, by Harold Robbins? That’s the best one. This girl named Rina Marlowe—Jean Harlow, get it?—spills orange pop on her boobs, and it gets her brother all excited, he gets a hard-on, and she tells him that she’s been spying on him, watching him jerk off, and I can’t remember why they don’t get it on, but… he goes off and commits suicide. Anyway, that’s the first book where I ever saw the word ‘cunt.’ I love that word. Call me that, all right?”

  “Cunt. Cunt. You’re nothing but a cunt.”

  “Great,” said Kim, sighing. “Do it again.”

  The three qualities women look for in nail enamels are:

  – gloss and brilliance

  – depth and coverage

  – exceptionally long-lasting “hold”

  The enamel must be applied to the nail in a single layer with one stroke of the brush. Each coat must dry before the next one is applied. Always start with the little finger or thumb of one hand and use the same order with the other hand as well.

  “That’s disgusting,” Kim might say, or she’d quote Jack Smith, who’d said, “Sex is a pain in the ass.”

  Sometimes she’d insist that she was asexual, that she felt no desire for anyone, man woman or child.

  Other times… mmmm. She looked kind of like Elizabeth Ashley, or maybe Lesley Anne Warren. It was so fleeting, this thing she was after, it required so much upkeep, and sometimes there were terrible down days when she felt ugly and did not wash or get out of bed.

  For a while she worked as a salesclerk in a porno bookstore, but she didn’t really like that job. The customers were such creeps. The pornography got her down. She was much happier when she got a job waiting on tables, flirting, swinging her hips.

  She got a boyfriend, Andre, who she really loved. But he had a tendency to mix alcohol with dexedrine, a combination that made him jealous and unpredictable. Andre sometimes beat her up, not that bad, he pulled his punches, but it hurt, and she didn’t like having a cut lip or black eye. One time he showed her a knife, and she was afraid he was really going to kill her, accidentally, carried away. He wouldn’t mean it.

  By checking behind scenes, you regain sense of direction. A recent dream, properly interpreted, could prove prophetic.

  Artificial, stylized, larger-than-life plants, the leaves having simplified shapes, made more angular and stiff. The famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Kimberly walked among the fake potted plants like a sleepwalker, in a filmy gauze dress, her new round breasts jiggling gently, bobbing, nipples plainly erect. Her hair was tied back, and she looked ethereal, composed, as enigmatic as though seen in a dream. She bent over the fake grass, bright green, and looked at a crawling snake, which was real. She was not afraid of it. It formed an “S.”

  It crawled away.

  Kim was with Jean-Luc, Paulie, Beverly and Clark the sound-man in a bar in Soho when she saw André, dark-skinned and good-looking, slender, a pearl in his left earlobe, and she was scared. She hadn’t kept in contact or been faithful while he’d been in jail.

  He saw her and came over. He was loaded on something, and his eyes looked just like the last time she’d seen him six months ago. He often seemed an unusually tortured soul.

  “Come with me, Kimberly. I need you, baby. Leave these fags and come home with me. I’ll forgive you everything if you’ll just come home right now. I need you, baby. You need me too.”

  “André, no.”

  He nodded, as if she’d said what he’d expected. He smiled then. “Right on, bitch. One of these days, you can bet your sweet ass, I’m gonna show up and shoot you full of holes. Shoot you down dead. Cold blood. You take care now. Remember I love you. Be seeing y’all, folks.”

  “Who was that?” Jean-Luc inquired. “Here, have a Valium. Let Paul light your cigarette. That guy was scary. Did you drive him crazy with love?”

  “No… He was crazy before I ever met him. Let’s get out of here, okay? I don’t feel safe. All those guys hanging out at the bar look like undercover cops.”

  A life-sized articulated skeleton sat in a chair. Princess Beloved danced around, after the manner of Isadora Duncan. That is, not without clumsiness. Would-be Grecian gestures. Her girl slaves danced too, less like Isadora than like groupies backstage at a Mott the Hoople show.

  Big phony mouths opened and closed in the backdrop, which was black, painted with stars, sunbursts, and moons. Kim’s gown was purple, with golden crescent moons in sequins. Violet eye shadow. They were going to perform a magic ceremony. Incense and candles burned. The lights swam in a melting vaselined lens.

  Princess Beloved was helpless, surrounded by soldiers in a circle, enclosing her, each pointing at her, menacingly, a spear. It was a shot that Jean-Luc had long admired, stolen from a bad movie directed in 1954 by Riccardo Freda—Theodora, Slave Empress. Princess Beloved, trembling, groveled. But no, she wasn�
�t to be killed. She was condemned to a fate worse than death.

  Transsexuals almost always manifest some degree of transvestism before the age of twelve, and they usually have spent more time playing with girls, playing with dolls and so forth, than have their boyhood peers.

  Stay clear of self-deception, pie-in-sky schemes. Individual who makes many promises may be sincere but misinformed. Check with Pisces.

  There was something very vulnerable about Beverly, thin and pale, small as a neurotic child—though she could talk tough and act cynical and hold her drugs. She and Kimberly were friends. Beverly wanted to be a writer. She had at first wanted to play the guitar and sing, and had learned some chords and a few songs, but she was too shy to sing in front of the public. Even a tape recorder made her nervous and dumb. She came to New York from Sacramento, California. She looked much younger than she was.

  As far as Beverly was concerned, Kim was sort of like an older sister, and they shared secrets, forming a united front to deal with Jean-Luc when he got too full of himself.

  When Beverly found André in the apartment with Kim, his head now shaved bald, handsome and dark, with his earring and a mustache, she was frightened, but Kimberly seemed wanton and happy and stoned.

  “Let’s get high. You want to get fucked up with us, Beverly Hills?” asked André, with a nice smile that seemed devoid of even a trace of menace or malice. Maybe he and Kim really were in love.

  “Sure,” said Beverly, sitting down on a wooden chair, looking at Kim, who was wearing a red silk kimono with blue dragons over gold lamé panties and bra, her eyes telling Bev everything was cool…

  It was powerful shit. Beverly got very stoned. She thought of the time she’d been smoking with Paulie and Jean-Luc, and Paulie had an asthma attack. It was funny how straight he could look until one heard and saw him speak. Paulie.

  “Bev,” Kim said, eyes alight, glowing, “I want you and André to make it together. It’ll be so good for you both.”

  There was a conspiratorial element to everyone’s pleasure from then on. Beverly’s inhibitions were gradually overcome. She really got into it, losing her identity in the molten flow as André rocked her into several hard-won orgasms. She held Kim’s hand throughout.

  Then so Andre could cum he slowly entered her ass.

  Line upper and lower lashes with Perfectly Kohl Color-Perfect Accent Stick; smudge; smudge lightly.

  Apply Roses from Revenescence Eye Shadow Trio Champagne Roses & Caviar to entire lid, from lash line to brow.

  Contour from inner corner along crease with Caviar shadow; deepen at outer corner.

  Highlight center of lid with Champagne.

  Thicken upper and lower lashes with several coats of Black Instant Lash Builder, for extra sensational lashes.

  Now you have eyes as provocative as the night itself

  Going to the Welfare Office was not the best way to get rid of a headache, but if she wanted to keep getting the food stamps Kim had to take the subway uptown to see her caseworker, who was an obese woman with glasses.

  Kim always tried to wear weird makeup and go there stoned, so that she’d be both numb and sufficiently hard-core unemployed and unemployable to forestall any nonsense about why she hadn’t gotten a job.

  Kim had on blue fingernail polish and glittery eye shadow, silverblue, extending out past the orbits of her eyes. She could tell that Barbara kind of liked her, despite the problems that she posed. She gave Barbara a copy of Valley of the Dolls.

  “You’ll really like it. Everybody in America should read this book. There’s a singer who’s like Judy Garland, you know, and an actress who’s supposed to be either another Kim Novak or Marilyn Monroe, or maybe Jayne Mansfield, I’m not sure… shit, maybe it’s Mamie Van Doren.”

  “Mamie Van Doren?” said Barbara, and laughed her harsh thick laugh.

  Another time Kimberly brought Barbara some flowers. It made for a break in a civil servant’s day.

  “I don’t envy you. This must be the most thankless job in the world, having to deal with all the misfits and fuck-ups. Do you have to know Spanish to work here? I could never do a job like this. It’s not that I’m so unreliable—but my references are all bad; no boss on earth would want to trust me with the combination to the safe…”

  “What about getting another job as a waitress?”

  Kim shrugged. “That’s my ideal, but they’re not hiring at any of the places I could ever work.”

  She’d lost her job at Dojo’s because she was late too often and called in sick too many times within a relatively short span. She had said it was her period but she’d lied. It wasn’t something she was proud of. They had been nice to her there.

  André said, “Yeah, well I admit, you know, that I was fucked up. I mean, I’m sorry about all that shit that I was coming down with. I was fucked up with a lot of foreign substances in my body, but none of that’s any excuse for acting evil. I felt bad, baby, I felt real bad. I didn’t like myself, you know? Kimberly, honey, I never stopped loving you. There’s something between us, some kind of real connection. It’s Fate.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  You are rebellious, creative, and you seldom succeed by following the crowd. You are an individual to your fingertips, you have your own style and you have created your own blueprint for success. Scorpio, Aquarius persons play important roles in your life.

  Beverly found some dirty pictures in the drawer along with the underwear Kimberly, from the bathroom, had asked her to fetch. The photographs were of Kim sucking someone’s cock. Then, delving deeper, Bev found a magazine called Cum in My Mouth. Kimberly was featured—referred to here as Vanessa— giving a blowjob, ending up with semen all over her face. Ah, now Beverly understood: whoever bought this pornography would take Kim for a girl.

  She found herself feeling disgusted, and wasn’t sure why. Kim’s weaknesses had begun to seem more like weaknesses and less like charming little quirks of an interesting and unique personality.

  In the Spotlight Café, at three in the morning, wired, drinking coffee, Jean-Luc was talking a hundred miles a minute to Raymond Faye. “Do you remember those articles where Jack Smith talked about his concept of visual revelation, about the true meaning of Josef Von Sternberg’s films with Marlene Dietrich?”

  “Yes,” said Faye, looking tired and older than usual, unanimated, smoking a cigarette. “The plots have nothing to do with the message of the visuals; the plots are just made up out of some nonsense the studio needed to have, as a formality, on the soundtrack.”

  “I love the idea,” said Jean-Luc, “of that Maria Montez movie Jack Smith edited down from ninety minutes to fifteen, making it fly past the retina, bringing out all the latent myth-patterns…”

  “I think that was Ken Jacobs—he and Jack often worked together, it’s true—but I think it was Kenny who did that one. Just before Star Spangled to Death.”

  A junkie whore tried to bum some money for coffee. Jean-Luc looked around to make sure this wouldn’t start a trend, and then gave her a dollar bill and some change. She thanked him, pathetically skinny and unattractive in her cheap fur, looking about sixteen years old. She realized they were queers and left them alone.

  Raymond had not gone to Paris after all. He had passed the age or point at which he could still look good in drag, and he was only recently, painfully aware of this. It was a real bringdown.

  Paul waited, and his lover didn’t show. He could acutely hear the scraps of conversation, disarticulate words and phrases from the booths of the café, the clatter of silverware against silverware, coins into cash-register, coffee cups against saucers, and he was alone and afraid that he was going to start to cry in a public place.

  Paulie understood love only as expressed through the body —asking the other to look at yesterday’s cut, mysterious black and blue marks, little scratches, needing a lot of caresses and reassuring kisses and hugs.

  Why wouldn’t Lee show up? Why would he say he was going to if he didn’t mea
n it? Paul had said, over the phone, that he just wanted to talk, he thought they needed to talk, and he’d said that if Lee didn’t want to then he’d understand. So if it was such a drag, why did Lee say that he would come, and even pick out the specific time and place to meet?

  It wasn’t the first time Paulie had been dropped, but he wished that, for once, damn it, he’d seen it coming, and so could have managed to cut his losses.

  He saw Jean-Luc and Raymond Faye, and could sense that they didn’t want him to join them. They didn’t think he was a serious person.

  There was no guarantee for the Babylonian that one might ever escape from the assaults of Evil; no hope that Evil might one day be decisively overcome. There was no belief that good works would in any way be rewarded, whether in this life or the next.

  Kimberly was afraid, but since he was André’s friend, she let him in. She wasn’t yet at her most presentable; it was too early in the day. This guy was big, burly, beefy, and dark-skinned. His name was Vernon.

  “The pigs got hold of André, man, they holding him for questioning. In the meantime, he said stash this shit here, and you just keep your mouth shut.”

  “What are they questioning him about?”

  “Walkin’ against the motherfuckin’ light, what do you think? Here, you keep these; I got to stay on the move. You don’t let no pigs in without a motherfuckin’ search warrant, understand? You hear what I say?”

  It was a brown, rumpled grocery bag with a couple of revolvers in it, boxes of bullets, a couple of empty beer cans and a loaf of white bread.

  Kim was too frightened to protest. She knew André had been selling dope. After Vernon was gone, she didn’t know what to do. She was scared to have the guns around, but at the same time… she was scared to get rid of them. She didn’t know what to do. She tried to call Beverly. Sometimes Beverly just wouldn’t answer her phone, not wanting to talk long-distance to her mom.