By the end of the Blooms run, Susan overheard Kenny the director say that if Susan ever got a role even as a tree in the background of a high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, it would be as an act of pity. The taping of the final two-hour episode was a bad dream to which Susan returned over and over.
“Susan, dear, you’ve just learned your father has prostate cancer. Your face looks like you’re trying to choose between regular or extracrispy chicken. Let’s do a little wakey-wakey because we’re close to union overtime, okay?”
The cameras rolled: “Dad, why didn’t you tell me before? Why all the others but not me?”
“Cut! Susan, you’re not asking him ‘Where is the TV Guide?’ You’re asking him why he didn’t share with you the most important secret of his life.”
The cameras rolled: “Dad, why didn’t you tell me before? Why all the others but not me?”
“Cut!”
Susan stopped again.
“Susan, less TV Guide and more cancer.”
“Kenny, can I use some fake tears or something? This is a hard line.”
“No, you may not use fake tears, and no, this is not a hard line. Roger? Give me my cell phone.” A bored P.A. handed him a phone. “Susan, here’s a phone—would you like me to give you a number and you can simply phone this line in? Or would you like to do it for the camera, for which you’re being paid?”
“Don’t be such a prick, Kenny.”
The cameras rolled: “Dad, why didn’t you tell me before? Why all the others but not me?”
“Cut! Roger? Please bring Miss American Robot here some fake tears.”
Soon Susan began going to parties each night, not because she was a party hound but because her celebrity status entitled her to as many free drugs as she wanted, as long as she tolerated being fawned over or mocked by the substance suppliers.
I can’t believe Susan Colgate’s here at this party.
Basically, for a gram she’ll go anywhere in L.A. County. For an ounce she’ll be the pony that takes you there.
As time went on, she learned not to stand outside the kitchens, where the acoustics were better and where she was more likely to hear the worst about herself. She had far too much free time on her hands, and with it she began to obsess about Larry. One early evening when Susan was feeling particularly alone and the phone hadn’t rung all day, she decided she was sick of being iced out of his life, and went to his house. Larry had mentioned that Jenna would be away that night at her mother’s birthday in Carson City. Susan knew that if she tried to use the intercom at the gate, or open the front door, she’d be frostily ignored. She cut through the next-door neighbor’s yard, once home to a prized Empress Keiko persimmon tree, and approached the house from the back patio.
She was shortcutting through the yard when suddenly the place flared up like Stalag 17. Five Dobermans with saliva meringues drooling down their fangs formed a pentagram around her, and what seemed like a dozen Iranian guys with Marlboro Man mustaches circled the dogs, handguns drawn. She saw Larry amble out onto his veranda next door wearing his postcoital silk robe, the one he’d stolen from the New Otani back when he’d been negotiating the Japanese TV commercial deal. A naked little fawn named Amber Van Witten from the TV series Home Life scampered out after him, eating a peach.
Larry yelled to the Iranians, “Hakim, it’s okay—she’s one of mine,” and the Iranians, gaping at Amber, called off the dogs who, happy as lambs, bounded toward Susan to smell the urine puddle at her feet.
Larry beckoned Susan into the house. She followed him into his den, where he made Susan sit on a towel he placed on the fireplace’s flagstones, making her burn with humiliation.
“Susan, it’s over.”
She started to say, “But Larry,” but her pants chafed, the urine had gone cold, and Amber poked her head in through the walnut wood doors. (“Oh, hi Susan.”) Susan stopped speaking.
Larry said that he still wanted to be friends—and then Susan really did realize it was over. Larry said he had an idea, and that he could use Susan’s help if she was willing to go along with it. He’d begun managing a new band out of England called Steel Mountain—“head-banger stuff for mall rats.” There had been a screw-up at the Department of Immigration and Naturalization, and the band’s lead singer, Chris Thraice, needed a green card or an H-1 visa. If Susan agreed to marry him in order to get him into the country, she could earn 10K a month, live at Chris’s house—no more Kelton Street—and have access to the social scene as something other than unbankable former child star Susan Colgate. So she asked him what the catch was, and he said that there wasn’t a catch, that Chris was a closeted gay, so she wouldn’t even have to deal with sex.
A week later she married Chris in Las Vegas—cover of People in a black, almost athletic, Betsy Johnson dress. She’d never had so much coverage of anything like this in her career. Music was indeed a whole new level.
She toured 140 concerts per year: all-access laminates; catered vegetarian meals; football arenas and stadiums. Everywhere they went little trolls out on the fringes pandered to their most varied substance needs. It was fast and furious but full of dead spots and time holes in Hyatt suites and Americruiser buses and airport business lounges. Susan felt like she was in a comfortable, well-stocked limo being driven very slowly by a drunk chauffeur.
Larry was around full-time, but he was business only now; fun was over, or rather, fun had moved on. Sex was easier for Chris to find than for Susan. If Susan had liked stringy-haired bassists with severe drug problems and colon breath, she would have been in luck—but she didn’t. The only thing that kept her around was access to free drugs, but a few well-placed questions to the people out on the scene’s fringes allowed her to set up her own supply in Los Angeles, and she camped out at Chris’s Space Needle house in Los Angeles.
“I’d introduce you to my lesbian friends,” said Dreama, “but I don’t think you’d find what you’re looking for. And how can you continue to let yourself be in such a phallocentric and exploitative situation?”
Susan ignored Dreama’s PC dronings. “Chris tells me I should just phone up hustlers and bill them to the company. What a hypocrite he is. He found out I was seeing other guys—or at least trying to—and he turned into the Killer Bunny from Monty Python because I was putting his green card in jeopardy. If he were to walk into the room right now, we’d probably rip each other up.”
“There ought to be some way for you to meet somebody.”
“The only way anybody meets anybody in L.A., Dreama, is through work, which I don’t have.”
Just under three years into their marriage, Chris had an album tank. In the magical way of the music industry, Steel Mountain was, out of the blue, over. The record company withdrew support, money shrank and Chris had to start playing smaller arenas and cities, and he accrued the bitterness that accompanies thwarted ambition. Susan saw his snide side. Chris had his lawyer pay Susan her monthly 10K in the form of two hundred checks for $50, and then the checks started coming less frequently and there wasn’t much she could do about it. One morning Susan went out to her car—a pretty little Saab convertible—and Chris had replaced it with an anonymous budget white sedan which Susan called the Pontiac Light-Days. “It’s like driving a tampon, Dreama.”
A year later Susan had a new agent, Adam, who took Susan on as a mercy client. He owed Larry fourteen months’ rent on office space his B-list agency rented from Larry’s holding company. He phoned and told Susan she had a big break, that a young director with a development deal at Universal wanted her to play the deranged ex-girlfriend in a high-budget action movie he was making. “Susan, this kid is young and he is hot.”
“What’s he done?”
“A Pepsi commercial.”
There was silence from Susan’s end of the line. Finally she asked him, “What’s it called?”
“Dynamite Bay.”
“Why do they want me?”
“Because you’re an icon and you’re—”
>
“Stop right there, Adam. Why me?”
“You undervalue yourself, Susan. The public worships you.”
“Adam?”
“He approached each of the cast members of the old Facts of Life show before you, and none of them wanted to do it. So he chose you instead.”
“Oh. So I’m now retro?”
“If being retro and hot is a crime, you’re in jail, Susan. In jail with John Travolta, Patty Hearst, Chet Baker and Rick Schroeder.”
Susan made the movie, and enjoyed herself well enough, but afterward was again unoccupied, which was worse than before, because she’d tasted work again. Chris was off-tour, and in the house much of the time. He and Susan fought all day, both reeling with disbelief that they were bonded to each other. Susan eventually moved into Dreama’s place, where incense burned incessantly, and where Dreama’s numerology clients barged into the bathroom to ask Susan if a 59 should date a 443. Between her pitifully small savings and her monthly income, she had just enough to rent a tiny Cape Cod house on Prestwick.
As Dynamite Bay’s 1996 release neared, Susan began doing press. She was in New York doing an interview with Regis and Kathy Lee. It was familiar, and this time she loved it. Chris finally got his green card and the two agreed to divorce after the movie had run its cycle. The movie fared reasonably well, but led to no new offers. At the hotel in New York, before leaving for JFK, Susan spoke with Dreama, who reminded her about an upcoming dinner at the house of a mutual friend named Chin. Dreama was going to bring Susan a new set of numbers to help her make future decisions.
Susan felt rudderless. The harmless nonsense of Dreama’s numbers made as little sense to her as anything else. On the way to the airport, Susan asked the car driver to pull over at a deli just before the Midtown Tunnel, where she popped out and bought some trail mix, bottled water and a Newsweek. She had mentally entered the world of air travel, and put her brain into neutral, not expecting to have to use it again until Los Angeles.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Vanessa dissected her first brain one hour before she learned the correct technique for making a moist, fluffy omelet. It was in the tenth grade at Calvin Coolidge High School, Franklin Lakes, Bergen County, New Jersey. She was in biology class, where students were divided into groups of four, each assigned a pig. They were told to stockpile their observations, and then afterward the class would discuss brains. Vanessa had been given her own brain. In the Bergen County School system, Vanessa was always being given a brain to herself. It wasn’t so much that she was a round peg in a square hole—it was more that she was a ticking brown-wrapped parcel in an airport waiting lounge. Treat Vanessa Humboldt differently.
Vanessa dissected her pig’s brain quickly, with a forensic speed and grace that chilled her teacher, Mr. Lanark. Next came home ec, in which Mrs. Juliard demonstrated for the class the proper way to whip eggs, pour them into a buttered nonstick pan (medium-low heat) and use a Teflon spatula to gently lift up the edges of the nascent omelet to allow the runny egg on top to trickle underneath and cook. Once done, the eggy disk was folded over onto itself and presto, “a neat-to-eat breakfast-time treat.”
The students followed Mrs. Juliard’s technique. Near the end of Vanessa’s omelet creation cycle, as she folded the egg over onto itself, her life was cut in two. Vanessa stood in home ec, undoing the fold, and then folding it again over onto itself in different ways. The other students finished their omelets, ate them or disposed of them, according to their level of eating disorder, and prepared to leave, but Vanessa stood rapt. Her classmates were students who’d known Vanessa since day care, who’d seen her reject Barbies, hair scrunchies, Duran Duran and sundry girlhood manias of the era, opting instead for Commodore 64’s, Game Boys and the construction of geodesic domes from bamboo satay skewers. They giggled at her.
“Vanessa, honey—you’re not angry or anything, are you?” asked Mrs. Juliard, who, like most of Vanessa’s teachers since kindergarten, trod on eggshells around her. They feared an undetermined future torture that would subtly but irrevocably be dealt them should they in any way displease this brilliant Martian girl.
As for Vanessa, she looked upon high school as a numbing, slow-motion prison, to be endured only because her depressingly perky and unimaginative parents refused to make any effort to either enroll her in gifted-student programs or permit her to skip grades, which they worried, ironically, might cripple her socially. Her parents viewed high school as a place of fun and sparkling vigor, where Snapple was drunk by popular crack-free children who deeply loved and supported the Coolidge Gators football team. They viewed Vanessa’a intelligence as an act of willful disobedience against a school that wanted only for its students to have clear skin, pliant demeanors, and no overly inner-city desire for elaborately constructed sports sneakers.
But all of this was different now, because of her omelet.
“Vanessa? Are you okay, honey?”
Vanessa looked at Mrs. Juliard. “Yes. Thank you. Yes.” She looked at her dirty utensils. “I’ll wash up now.”
She skipped her next class and waited until noon, sitting on a radiator near the cafeteria. She knew nobody would ask Vanessa Humboldt if anything was wrong for fear that the response could only complicate their lives.
The noon bell rang. She waited five minutes, then walked through the staff area into the faculty room, where teachers were lighting up cigarettes and removing lunch from Tupperware containers and the microwave oven. The vice principal, Mr. Scagliari said, “Vanessa—this room is off limits to—” but he was cut short.
“Can it, Mr. Scagliari.”
Voices simmered down and then stopped. A student in the faculty room was still, in late 1980s New Jersey, a rarity.
Vanessa was straightforward with them, as though she were informing them about a transmission that needed fluid changing, or the proper method for planting peas. She said that she was leaving school that afternoon, and that she was probably as happy to be gone as they would be to have her out of there. She stated what the staff had known all along, that she could ace any graduation test they could throw her way, including SATs and LSATs. She also said she would be contacting the American Civil Liberties Union, the local TV and print media, and that she would locate a hungry, glory-starved lawyer to do her dealings. She had $35,000 in savings stashed away from waitressing and playing the horses and could easily support such a gesture.
The staff masked their surprise with pleasant faces. She sounded so reasonable.
Vanessa went on to say that contacting her parents wouldn’t gain them much ground, as they were more concerned about her prom dress than her future ambitions. In her own head she was already at Princeton and Calvin Coolidge High School was only a bad dream after a strong curry.
She walked out the front doors and over to the parking lot, where she got into the battered Honda Civic she’d paid for herself and put her plan into operation. Within a month she was out of the Bergen County school system, and accepted at Princeton for the next fall in a joint mathematics–computer science program. But as she drove home that afternoon, Vanessa thought of eggs and she thought of brains. She wondered how it was that maybe twenty thousand years ago human beings didn’t exist—and yet suddenly, around the globe, there appeared anatomically modern people capable of speech, language, agriculture, bureaucracy, armies, animal husbandry and increasingly arcane technologies dependent on refined metals, precise tools of measurement and elaborate theoretical principles.
It all had to do with the brain—which upon dissection struck Vanessa as a large flat gooey sheet of omelet elaborately folded over onto itself into the gray clumpen hemisphere. Vanessa had decided that twenty thousand years ago the human brain decided to fold itself over one more time, and it was that single extra fold that empowered brains to create the modern world. So simple. So elegant. And it also helped to explain why Vanessa was such a freakazoid, so cosmically beyond the others in her school. Vanessa realized that her brain had made the next fo
ld—that she, in some definite and origamilike way, represented the next evolutionary step of Homo sapiens—Homo transcendens—and that her goal in life was to seek out fellow Homo transcendens and with them form colonies that would bring Earth into a new golden age.
At Princeton she encountered fellow advanced humanoids and she no longer felt so alone. But she was disappointed to discover that such petty failings as jealousy, political infighting, fragile egos and social ineptitude were just as prominent among her new colleagues as they were among the old. Phil from the Superstrings Theory group was a pig. Jerome the structural linguist was a pedantic bore who lied about meeting Noam Chomsky. Teddy the quark king was a misogynist. Vanessa correctly surmised that her life needed balance, and one polar afternoon, when ducking into an arts building for a dash of heat, she attended a surprisingly enlightening lecture on the Abstract Expressionist paint dribblers. From this lecture she decided that balance in her life would come from the arts, and that fellow Homo transcendens must surely await her in that arena.
She sought out any artistic gesture that proposed human evolution beyond Homo suburbia. She attended The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight screenings for two years running, dressed as Susan Sarandon, which left her with a lifelong yen for midwestern twin-set outfits. She read sci-fi. She tried joining Mensa but was turned off by the bunch of balding men who wanted to discuss nudism, and women who refused to stop punning or laughing at their own spoonerisms.
Half a year before graduation, a dozen companies battled to employ Vanessa, but she chose the Rand Corporation because they were in Santa Monica, California, close to Hollywood and what could only be a surplus of advanced geniuses. She was not above movies—they were the one genuinely novel art form of the twentieth century.
Her work in California was pleasure, and at night she went out into the coffee bars of Los Angeles, meeting dozens of young men with goatees and multiple unfinished screenplays. Some were smart and some were cute, and some were quick to charm, but it was Ryan, three years later, whom she deigned to be the first other member of the new species. She found him by accident late one night, at West Side Video after an evening of hmming and uh-huhing her way through another round of goatees-with-screenplays. She was returning a copy of an obscure but technically interesting early eighties documentary, Koyaanisqatsi, and muttered, more to herself than to anybody nearby, that the film’s repetitive minimalist soundtrack didn’t induce the alpha-state high she’d read about.
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