by Bruce Wagner
“It tends to be—always part of the problemo. If our critter’s found a nice little niche to make his quantum leap to the Great Unknown, there’s not a whole heck of a lot I can do short of taking a few bites out of your wall—which I don’t think would thrill either one of us. To summarize, I’m not actually equipped to do that. I pretty much go under houses, and that’s all she wrote. To summarize, the last time I looked, I didn’t have the Jaws of Life handy. If that is the case and Fluffy has gone and wedged himself in a remote area, these things usually burn themselves out in three to seven days. I’ll still have to charge you sixty-five dollars just for saying hello. Now, if we find our Roger Raccoon or Peter Possum or what have you and it’s purely a matter of crashing a maggot party, we have no problemos. While I’m here, I’ll take a nice look at your screens. I have to tell you that I am against hiring someone to do a patch job; it’s almost part of my covenant. They will rob you blind. If you’re not all that worried about aesthetics—judging by this place, you are!—but if you’re not all that worried, you can spend a fraction of what a professional would charge, by doing it yourself. But I’ll take a nice long look. Part of the package.”
Knowing that this American Gothic, this spindly hired hand, was rooting around below was a source of immense comfort to the old woman, who closed her eyes and listened for subterranean maunderings. She hoped he would find no coons yet the satisfaction derived from knowing the thing was being faced head-on gave her a moment of peace that felt innovative, potentiating the effects of the Demerol. All her life she had taken solace from the good offices of those involved in service—the handymen of Rockwell’s America, armies of commonsense illuminati with natural born dexterous gifts, men who dismantled and trimmed, gutted and washed away, improvised and cobbled, unstopped, unplugged and unstuck; men who removed unwanted things, useless or dead. She wanted him down there forever, guard of the underworld; now and then, he could surface for a meal, sitting with her at the captain’s table of the kitchen banquette as she sipped her painkiller, telling all the Huck Finn things he’d seen from the mystic engine room as they trawled their way to the far sodalities of Raccoon Cove.
It was cool and vast beneath the house. The place was like a showroom, tightly packed dirt so clean it might have been the floor of a natural history exhibit featuring basements of rich suburban hillside dwellers of the late twentieth century. The Dead Animal Guy liked this woman and was faintly embarrassed for her. He knew he would find nothing.
Suddenly tired, Simon sat cross-legged, lighting a cigarette. Maybe he should call Calliope before dropping in—sometimes she went nutzoid if he didn’t. Oh the hell with it. He was so close, he’d stop and have a sandwich on the way back to Huntington Beach. What was the problemo? Visiting the old homestead was a bit of a dysfunctional detour. He should really go straight home to work. Eight months ago, he’d bought half a dozen Blue Matrix episodes at Script City in Hollywood. They’d been gathering dust on the floor beside his bed; it was high time to enter ye olde Writing Phase. Back at Three Strikes Exterminators, before he was an independent contractor, he’d met one of the Blue Matrix producers on a job, removing what looked to be a mephitic, larva-shimmering leather shoe from the crawlspace beneath a Studio City home—ur-Fluffy, in fact. Simon had a Matrix premise concerning a dying Vorbalidian emperor, and the producer, Scott Sagabond, had been encouraging. The veterinary mortician still carried the man’s scuffed-up card in his wallet.
“Mother?”
The voice resonated with eerie clarity, and Simon scurried to a vent. Pairs of feet shuffled above.
“Is that you, Donny?” Serena asked.
“Juana called me in the car.”
“Why did she do that?”
“Actually, I called her. I had a meeting nearby and wanted to pop in.”
The old woman coughed with displeasure. “I don’t know why you called him, Juana.”
“I didn’t, Mrs. Ribkin.”
“I don’t like being spied on.”
“Mother, you’re being silly.”
“No one’s spying, Mrs. Ribkin.”
“Don’t you patronize!” A pause. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m fine.”
“Juana, will you tell Veronica to make a tuna salad?”
“Is someone here?” Donny asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Juana said someone was here.”
Simon stubbed out his cigarette and emerged from under the house. He knocked on the door and the man answered. He was around forty, pudgy, with thinning orange hair. He wore a deep blue suit and glary, tieless white shirt fastened to the top, each button a different size and shape, ranging from chunks of ivory to tiny animal horns. As Simon began his spiel, Donny Ribkin was already digging in his pocket for cash: He sent the Dead Animal Guy packing without benefit of a migratory discourse on vent-cover aesthetics.
As he left, Simon heard the old woman call to her son, the nurse and whoever else might listen: “I tell you there is something dead in this house.”
“Oh hi, Mitch.”
Simon poked his way through the Traulsen fridge. The view of the yard—his erstwhile domain—was panoramic. Gardeners moved like beadles through hedges; swimming pool generator hummed. The guest house presented its anodynous, photogenic façade.
“Didn’t see you come in.” His stepfather’s bogus, in-patient smile lit up the room like a hospital cafeteria.
“I had a job over in Bel Air.”
“We haven’t seen you in a while.”
“I’ve been a wee bit frantic—no estoy el problemo.”
“Does your mother know you’re here?”
“That’s a negative.”
“There’s some wonderful cheese in there.” Mitch took over the Traulsen, reestablishing supremacy. He grinned, scanning Simon’s coveralls. “I hope you’re pretty well dusted off.” He went to the cabinet and got a plate. “How’s business?”
“Things were dead but now they’re picking up.” Simon heh-heh’ed and gulped a Diet Sprite. “Mom with a patient?”
“You mean client.” Mitch smiled correctively at Simple Simon. “Patience is something we lose. We don’t lose clients—not hopefully, anyway.” Through the window, an Asian girl lingered by a table in front of Mitch’s side of the cottage. The stepfather took note then said, “And yes, she’s with a client.”
“I probably won’t see her then. Need to get home to write.”
“I’ll tell Calliope you said hello.”
“You know, I usually charge sixty-five for that—to say hello,” he said, nonsensically. Simon took a parting smear of Brie. “She’s getting a real deal. Tell her the Dead Animal Guy stopped by, she hates that. No! Tell her Ace Ventura, Dead Pet Detective, was here.”
“I think I’ll just say, ‘Your son came by to see you.’ So long, Simon. And clean up after yourself, okay?”
Simon watched through the window as Mitch made a hammily breathless entrance, greeting the Client as if graciously squeezing her between photo shoots and tribute dinners—all he ever wanted, Simon thought, was to be famous like his wife. By the way the Asian looked at him, she was clearly in the honeymoon of transference. Probably some TV exec, but to Simon, she was a dead ringer for the sniper in Full Metal Jacket. “Me so haw-nee. Me analyze you long time.” Simon laughed, warm Sprite fizzing from a nostril. Mitch unlocked the door of his office, each movement performed with craftsmanlike felicity, a kind of in-the-now small-town ardor, a joyous, fraudulent humility that insidiously celebrated himself while reasserting the Client’s pathetic station. Yes: if Dr. Markowitz was on a steady jog through leafy Brentwood byways, then his troubled flock was on a nude, witless jag through Bosnian streets.
Moments after Mitch and the whore from Saigon vanished, a large, elegantly dressed black plunked himself down in one of the Adirondack thrones. Simon did a double take: it was Hassan DeVore—aka Fista, the Vorbalidian antihero of Blue Matrix. The Dead Animal Guy fairly yawped. His very own mother
just happened to be therapist to the Chief Navigator of the Starship Demeter! Simon glanced at the clock; twelve of. He swiped his lips and raced outside.
“Uh, excuse me…”
DeVore gaped at him, thinking he was an intruder.
“I’m Calliope’s son.”
He broke into a smile as wide as a starship bridge. “Nice to meet you!” The actor was known for his basso profundo, as for his courtly, theatrical manner.
“She’ll kill me for talking to you—”
“No,” he said stalwartly. “I won’t let her. And it would be bad for her practice.”
“I just had to tell you how big a fan I am.”
“Why, thank you very much!”
“I’m Simon—Krohn.”
“Pleased to meet you, Simon. I’m Hassan.”
He warmly shook Simon’s hand before settling back onto the chair.
“I went to the last Matrix convention. I didn’t feel great about spending forty dollars to get in—”
“It’s terrible,” he said, with real sympathy. “It’s a lot of money, I know.”
“Some friends and I wound up counterfeiting passes.”
“Counterfeit passes! That’s marvelous.”
“We have a kind of street-gang thing going. You know—hip-hop crypto-terrorists.” DeVore was baffled but charmed. “A little postmodern Yippiedom. It’s retro, but it keeps Big Brother away.”
“How old are you, Simon?”
“Thirty-five going on sixty-four going on twelve.”
As DeVore burst into laughter, the cottage door opened, disgorging Laura Dern. Calliope loomed behind her. When she saw him there, the psychiatrist’s features hardened like ice around the fishing hole of her mouth.
“Laura, this is Simon, my son.”
“You were so great in Jurassic Park,” said Simon.
She thanked him, before exchanging exuberant, fraternal hellos with the waiting Vorbalid.
“The Jeff Goldblum character was my favorite,” simple Simon said. “The whole ‘chaos’ thing. But what I really want to ask about is Rambling Rose—”
“If you’d like an interview, you’ll have to call her publicist,” said his mother, moving between them like Secret Service ready to take a Big Star bullet. Laura made a quick and gracious goodbye. Hassan went into the office.
“I am furious!” she shouted, steering Simon through the halls to the front door. “You are never to approach clients, you know better. This is a safe haven, not the tour at Universal! They come here to get away from that, do you understand?”
“I’m sorry—”
“Not good enough. Jesus, look at you! You embarrassed me!”
“Yeah, I forgot my Armani.”
“You are always to call, I thought that was our agreement.” They paused at the chandeliered entrance while Calliope caught her breath. “You came from a job, didn’t you?”
“That’s me, Mom—Ace Ventura, Dead Pet Detective.”
“Why do you do this to me?”
“Show business is my life.”
“What is your delight, Simon? Why?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Look, I’ll prostrate myself.” He kneeled before her, hoping to make her laugh, but she just glowered. “I’ll even prostate myself—only with a urologist present, of course.”
She yanked him by the elbow like she did when he was a kid. “Get up!”
“Oh come on! What do you want me to do? Not be your son?”
“Right now,” she said, “I want you to leave.”
“Is that what you want me to do? Not be your son? Because that can be arranged!”
She opened the door and pushed him out.
The ignobled psychiatrist composed a mental sentence or two explaining to Mr. DeVore her son’s “history of problems,” but when she reached the cottage, she decided to let it be.
That afternoon, Les Trott was accused of over-prescribing painkillers to Oberon Mall, the famous singer and actress. A bitch from the DEA dared visit while he was needling cow protein into Phylliss Wolfe’s nasolabial furrows. He made the woman wait in his office so she could stare awhile at the photos of bagged and framed Big (Star) Game: Les with international icons, royalty, H.I.V.I.P.s. When he came in, she got right to it, said a whole ring of abusing medicos were implicated. He didn’t believe her, but the piece of shit named names, and except for one, all of them were colleagues. The woman wanted to know why Oberon had a note in her purse written on one of Les’s prescription pads alerting ERs to her chronic migraine condition—a kind of backstage pass to the concert of anesthesia. Les smiled and sweated while an Acolyte futilely tried his lawyer on the phone. Was he under arrest? He wasn’t, said the harridan. He had watched enough television to know it was time to ask her to leave.
He sat there shaking. His support team—soft-treading Mephisto-hoofed angels—fed him Xanax and evinced outrage. Les called a few of the men she’d named. He got through to the one he knew least, an ENT guy who shrugged it off. “They came after me before, the dicks. Listen, they got nothing else to do. I tell ’em to get a life.” Les canceled his appointments and holed up in the Game room, waiting for Obie and Calliope to return his calls. When Les hurt, the Acolytes hurt; they bused in fried chicken from the Ivy, but he wouldn’t eat. Calliope was finally on the line. She heard the familiar panic in his voice and told him “not to go there.” The shrink said it was probably some sort of scare tactic, not that she knew so much about this sort of thing. She asked him point-blank if he had over-prescribed. He said it was all insane. Four thousand Percocets and Vicodins, the woman said, over fourteen months! How was that possible? Obie was his closest friend. He lived in her house for five months after the earthquake while his place was redone. He’d been through the wars with this girl: surgeries, depressions, divorce. He had been there for her, and she for him—when boyfriends stomped his heart. Obie was childless. In sweetly hushed, narcotic late night phone calls, from one wing of the house to the other, she told him to give a gob of sperm so they could make a baby; she was burned out on relationships, she said, but wanted a kid. Les never took her seriously (such a terrifying merge was beyond his wildest fantasies of celebrity bonding) but was flattered and moved nonetheless. He made her repeat the proposition at parties, so everyone could hear.
“Four thousand pills is a lot,” said Calliope.
“It’s not four thousand, it couldn’t be. Are you turning against me?”
She changed tack. “Les, I don’t want you getting paranoid.”
A little after six, he left through the Private Door. His advocate got through to the Lotus (with the LESISMOR plate) and told him not to worry—“there’s no case.” There was something troubling and possibly illegal, he said, something political, about the entire visit. He’d make a few calls; he had DEA friends who would give him the skinny. Not to worry. Les felt better, having mustered the troops.
He couldn’t sleep. He talked to Obie and she was loaded. She said it was all a “bad joke” and was going to break the next day in the Times. They talked about a name on the DEA list, a man Les knew only in passing. He’d seen him at Obie’s and other Big Star homes. For six hundred dollars, Stuart Stanken made housecalls at any hour of the day and night (he had an answering machine instead of an office). If Big Star had root canal or migraine or hint of kidney stone—or if Big Star was depressed over AIDS death or bad breakup, hair loss or loss of movie role—Stu Stanken was there. He’d shoot them with morphine and stay awhile as they nodded, chit-chatting, admiring the decor and general Big Starness as the systemic valentine was delivered. An hour later he’d dispense an intramuscular booster, just to be safe. I don’t want your pain coming back when I’m fifteen minutes out the door. You need never suffer from pain again, he intoned, not so long as I am here to help. Les used to bridle on running into him at Obie’s parties, and he told her so. Being with Stanken was like having a dipso chiropractor in your midst—or an abortionist out of Faulkner. Now, it looked as if they’d be sharing
a line-up.
Three in the morning. Propelled from bed by a nightmare, he stood in his Charvet robe before the bathroom mirror of his eighty-five-hundred-square-foot Santa Monica Canyon house, staring at a pimple. All day long he’d felt its achy inchoation. In adolescence, he suffered from acne vulgaris and bore the scars to this day, minimized by dermabrasion. His years of papular plague had been something out of the Middle Ages—weeping pistachios on forehead and cheek, walnuts on shoulder, pecans on back and buttocks, groin and nasal fold. Sometimes, at the whim of jaded acne gods (having feasted on his worried flesh, they sat at table, sated and snoring, turkey drumsticks still in hand), a lone pimple was sent like a scout to unlikely, mind-bending territories: back of the hand, kneecap crown, achilles heel. The men didn’t seem to care—the men in movie theaters and coffee-shop bathrooms, some sandy-haired, muscular and trouble-free, others with afflictions of their own. The men who picked him up in cars on the boulevard desired him, with or without his mother’s concealing makeup (he could still summon Max Factor’s somewhat acrid, hopeful smell). The piratical flesh of Leslie Trott became his enemy. He resolved to have dominion over the landscape that had ostracized him with such methodical, unforgiving cruelty. In medical school, he envied the Jews their baby faces and wispy beards, their unblemished certitude. They were funny and kind. He was their mascot, the over-achiever with bad-news oil glands, a living laboratory of follicular mayhem. He would show them all.
He took a syringe from the drawer and injected the thing with cortisone. Les still ruled over the dermis—he would save his own skin, at all costs. He padded to the kitchen and sat under the bright lights. The hum of silver appliances and halogen allowed him to ponder what he had dreamed. He had been walking, or gliding, down the middle of Sunset Boulevard. No cars. Something lay in the road ahead. A body. His mother hovered over it—not his mother, but rather a succubus: the DEA inquisitor. When the demon said the body needed to be buried, Les laughed and fled. Next thing he knew the demon was upon him, hurling him face-down. Les’s teeth shattered on the asphalt. That was when the dermatologist felt the weight of the cadaver, its hands clinging to his neck. The demon forced him to stand with his burden, having strapped the body to Les’s back like a nidorous papoose. He was warned that this latest development was born of his attempting to run; if he didn’t obey, the consequences would be unimaginably worse. Les asked the demon its bidding. The demon said the body must be buried before dawn in the yard of a distant house. When he began to walk, the weight was almost insupportable, like trudging up a muddy hill carrying a two-hundred-pound man. He tried desperately to awaken. Then he found himself at the gates of a house. The succubus waited there with pick and shovel in hand. The gates opened slowly, as in a cheap horror film but with chilling effect: the house was his own.
