Stainless

by Todd Grimson

  Keith is in a terrible mood. He feels bad about what happened to Dr. Rothschild. He’s worried about her. What time is it? 3:15. Keith wonders if it would be possible to reach her through the hospital switchboard. He doesn’t know if, given the conference, she’ll be wearing her pager or not. It would be weird to talk to her on the phone. He decides against the attempt. The operator would ask him who he is. She’s probably fine.

  Dressed, Keith wanders outside. The gardener is here, with his young son. Keith nods at them, goes for a somewhat inhibited stroll, and re-enters the house.

  He misses his pals from the band. Just having them around. He knows he didn’t necessarily appreciate them so much at the time. They were always present, and sometimes they got on his nerves. But they liked him, they upheld him with their affection, and that environment of camaraderie is something he misses. It seems like it was seventy-five years ago, or a hundred. He dreams, now and then, that he’s making up new songs, demonstrating them to his band, and his fingers work, better than they ever did in the real world. Trying to impress Michael with the brand-new song. He’s known Michael since he was eight.

  Okay. It’s 3:49. He gets the phone book out. It makes him nervous, imagining the purposeful, orderly world on the other end of the line.

  “Would you page Dr. Rothschild for me?”

  “Just a moment please.”

  And Keith is left on hold. He thinks about hanging up. He doesn’t really know Tamara. At one point, while being passed amongst others, orthopedists and hand specialists, he was her patient for a while. She’s a neurologist. It was funny. When she came into the examination room, they got along immediately, or at least, perhaps, Keith was more than usually responsive to what she put of herself into her professional friendliness, her manner. She seemed to be in no hurry, to have all day. Like she was reluctant, even, to go back to her grind. Somehow, he was more honest and open with her, admitting his pain, and the mental torment occasioned by the whole situation. He felt he could talk to her, in her white jacket, why not? She wasn’t a type of person he’d known before. Afterwards, it felt strange.

  The next time Keith came, she said that she had bought the SMX CD, and liked it. He was embarrassed. For one thing, he didn’t like to think about that stuff anymore. Second, by “violating” the separation between their two specialties, Tamara revealed her innocence, her unworldliness, and Keith didn’t want to make her feel this. He didn’t believe, for instance, that she had the background or whatever to really enjoy SMX, to abandon herself to their noise. But he didn’t want to make her feel unhip. Maybe she did like it. If so, that was good. He was glad.

  When she called him at home about a prescription, she would say, “This is Tamara,” identifying herself, not “Dr. Rothschild.” Keith was initially flattered by this, until he decided it didn’t mean anything, it was just part of her “new physician” style.

  Of course she had seen people in all kinds of extremity, dealt with them, street people, gang members, liars and assholes and people at the end of their rope, all of which had no doubt contributed to the steadiness of her gaze, an unflinching quality she had. No, strictly speaking, she cannot be said to be naive.

  “Go ahead,” the operator says and clicks off. “This is Dr. Rothschild,” Tamara announces, neutral but friendly, professional, not knowing who it might be.

  “This is Keith. I hope I’m not interrupting you.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Tamara is having a rotten day. She woke up late, really late, and she’s been behind ever since. When the phone call comes from Keith, she’s glad to hear from him, it’s like this is what she’s been unconsciously waiting for all day.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, and she’s embarrassed. She doesn’t know what happened last night, she’s been leaving it unexamined for the moment, but the very fact that he would ask such a question means quite a lot.

  ”I’m all right,” she answers. “I don’t remember very well … exactly what happened after I met you and your girlfriend.”

  “You might have had a little too much to drink, that’s all.”

  “Oh God.” This is so against her normal practice that she can only shake her head at herself.

  “Do you have a hangover?”

  “Do I ever,” she says. “I’ve been feeling very weird ever since I woke up.”

  “How is work?” he asks, and the ease of their familiarity makes her realize they’re behaving as if they’re friends, and she thinks this is good, it pleases her, even as it seems accidental and strange.

  “It’s been terrible. I’m not functioning.”

  She hesitates. There’s something in the back of her mind, but she can’t remember what it is. She worries for half a second that Keith might think she’s coming on to him if she suggests further contact, but she has her secure relationship with Patrick, and Keith has—Justine. Tamara can only dimly recall Justine’s face. She is suddenly intensely curious about them, and asks Keith if he’ll meet her for coffee—tomorrow, since she’s so messed up today.

  Sure, he says.

  Tamara goes back to her stack of charts. A year ago, when Keith was a patient, she bought his band’s CD. It became a point of contention between her and her boyfriend, because she liked it and wanted to play it all the time, and Patrick said it drove him crazy, it was like being on the runway when planes were landing and crashing at LAX. It was too hypermodern for him.

  Tamara thought he wasn’t listening to it right. To her, it suggested all these realms of experience and imagining, dreams of unknown splendor, that sort of thing. It sounded different to her every time out.

  It’s funny. She’s not sure why, but she’s pretty sure Keith isn’t on heroin anymore. But there’s something essentially mysterious about his life now with this young woman from France. Tamara sees Justine’s eyes staring into hers, she has a flash of memory, and for one shaming moment she wonders if what she has forgotten is a menage-a-trois. No, that’s a ridiculous idea. Keith wouldn’t have taken part in something like that. He wouldn’t do that to her.

  Still, there does seem to be some kind of real flavor of danger in the air. I’m too dull, she thinks. She has come to live so straight a life, any little variation seems scary to her. The routine of the medical profession has made her timid, against her nature, which has always been to take chances, to follow her curiosity. One can be so prudent one might as well just hide away from life and die.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Andy calls and says that two large Hawaiian pizzas have come back as undeliverable, are you interested? Jason says I’ll be right there. Out back behind the pizza place, the usual traffic noise making it hard to hear, Andy says, “You’ll get me into Saint Agatha Saturday? Backstage?”

  “Sure,” Jason says. He can’t believe he and Andy once fooled around together for an afternoon, home from school. Andy’s so weak. The pizzas are placed in the van.

  When Jason held his Ian Curtis party, celebrating the famous suicide of the Joy Division singer, who sang incredibly depressed lyrics and then hanged himself on the eve of the band’s U.S. tour, this was way back in 1980, before anyone’s time, since legendary—Andy was one of the boofs who got carried away, cutting his wrist superficially and then smearing the blood on car windshields…. All that got out of hand, what with the hangman’s noose around all these guys’ necks, when the cops came in, everyone’s dicks hard out to here. Actually, it was great. Jason’s status only grew. Now he was extreme.

  Across the street is this late fifties version of space-age architecture, closed up. It’s faded rose-pink. Next door on the white wall is painted an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, bigger than life-size.

  “Gotta buzz,” Jason says, and Andy, ridiculous in his pizza uniform, looking like he expected a kiss or something, stands there forlorn as Jason drives off.

  Jason is thin, blond, and frail. Sometimes he wears eye makeup and black lipstick, his hair coming in kind of a swathe over the left side of his face, pulled back behind h
is ear on the right. He has a severe (or “brooding”) stare. He proudly feels that he has started some fashions here amongst the youth of L.A. Purple or wine-colored velvet jackets, or green, with frilly ruffled white shirts. He thinks maybe he helped bring that back. He’s ambitious to do much more.

  This afternoon, he had watched a black-and-white movie on TV. It was called The Courage of Robert Greasewell. As it turned out, that was the name of a ship. This was back in the Cold War. The ship’s captain, Robert Mitchum, had a bunch of problems. They were docked at Helsinki, or maybe Stockholm, and Robert Mitchum’s best friend was found dead, washed up in the waves. Then there was a dwarf on the big Navy ship, there kept being reports of this dwarf. “Well find him,” Robert Mitchum said. “I don’t care if we have to tear the ship apart.” Ashore, Robert Mitchum’s girlfriend, Elke Sommer, was called “Miss Stenko,” which struck Jason as an interestingly ugly name. There were Japanese sailors dancing in this nightclub, and Robert Mitchum was getting drunk, he’d been relieved of his command. He thought it was an ominous sign, he said to Miss Stenko, that “the dancing has gone downhill.”

  Jason missed the rest, because he went into the bathroom to beat off. When he next looked at the TV, that black guy, Link of The Mod Squad, wearing sunglasses, was looking down at some wounded “brother” on the ground, saying, “You see? Violence is not the answer. The Movement has no need for any more motherfuckers like you.”

  Tiff came home around then, and Jason said, “What a trip, just like in a cartoon,” and Tiff didn’t know what he was talking about, there was some commercial on about buttmuscles and then they watched some band rock out. Tiff said, holding a beer, “I thought I was gonna choke on it at work. What a sucky business.”

  Jason didn’t care. Michelle and Brian came home, and they were talking about Twilight of the Idols, which they were both trying to read. Everybody smoked a joint, got hungry, no one had very much money, and then the pizza solution occurred.

  When Jason gets back with the pizza Ken is also hanging out, and some old Godflesh album is on. Jason wants to tell Ken about this idea he’s had for a video, a short film about this SS officer who is haunted by his guilt and blows out his brains.

  “It’s been done,” Ken says. He’s just trying to bring Jason down, and Jason can’t figure out why he wants to be like this. After some pizza, though, Ken says, What about making him a witch-hunter, putting it back in the Middle Ages? He could torture and burn witches, make them kiss the cross. You’re right, that’s better, Jason agrees. It was the female holocaust, puts in Michelle. Gooey cheese thread from the piece of pizza making it into her mouth. They burned, like, nine million women in a couple hundred years. Burned them at the stake. Use sepiatone, Ken says, to make it look old. Like you just found this film in some old church. Then Ken, who’s very handsome, well sort of, tells them about some torture he’s heard of. Brian tries to one-up, out-gross him, but he can’t.

  They’re in a pink stucco bungalow, rented in Tiff’s name. Her hair is bleached platinum-blonde, in a frizzoid cascading mane. Since she got off work, at the place where she does boring, endless data entry, she’s put on dark ruby red lipstick, etc. She has her eye on dark-haired Ken, who’s getting drunk.

  Around them the other houses and court apartments are sky blue, yellow, tangerine, and salmon pink. There are palm trees, jacaranda, and a new red Coke machine. The setting sun turns the atmosphere bright bronze, shadows brown.

  Ken gets onto his thing, helped out by Brian, about how white people are best. Ken says, “The descendants of Saxons, Goths, Danes, and Celts. Normans. I don’t know about Slavs. Angles and Frisians, though. Franks. Romans and Greeks. The strength of the strong.”

  “That’s where our culture has come from,” Jason says. “Dominance, not submission. Not this kind of communal thing from Africa, where there isn’t any progress, nothing ever changes.”

  Brian, with spiky painted black hair and glasses, agrees. “L.A.’s already pretty much like Blade Runner” he says. “The Hmongs, and the Salvadorans, the Islams … they don’t even wanna learn English. They don’t wanna blend in.”

  Ken agrees. He takes another sip of beer. The white race is doomed. It’s outnumbered. What a tragic end to the history of the world. What a farce.

  Some alcoholics live next door. The guy used to direct porno and a couple of ridiculous horror films, lowest of the low-budget, anyway Minski’s got some kind of disability and he and his wife every so often have these amazing, bad-news fights, sometimes stabbing each other in the arm or something, the wife seems the really violent one though now and then she’ll get a black eye. Anyway, they don’t complain about the noise. Then there’s some Salvadorans. They don’t want any fucking thing to do with the police. It seems like there’s about twenty of them living there, off and on.

  Jason goes into the kitchen. It’s really a mess. Michelle is trying to organize the dirty plates and stuff a little, but it doesn’t seem like she’s having much luck. She looks depressed. It seems hotter out since it got dark.

  “Do you remember SMX?” she asks.

  “Smacks,” Jason replies, finishing off his warm beer. “Yeah. They were okay.”

  “I’d like to hear them again.”

  “Sure,” he says. He works at a new and used record store. Used stuff, he brings home whatever he wants. “I’m almost positive we have their cassette. The first one, anyway. The second one sucks.”

  “Yeah,” Michelle says. “Their guitar player got fucked up and left or something, right?”

  “He got busted for heroin. Why is it that junkies always are the best musicians? Or, the best musicians become junkies. God, I saw Smacks at the Roxy, and they were awesome. You’re making me nostalgic,” Jason says. “There’s nothing worse than nostalgia. I hate it,” he says, just to make a statement of some sort. “It’s counterproductive.” But he’s not sure.

  TWENTY-SIX

  When Justine comes out of her room, she finds the house full of music, and Keith is jazzed up, like he gets sometimes—every so often he’ll have the urge to teach her something he suddenly thinks is important, or it’s always been important only he hasn’t been sufficiently inspired to see that she needs to know it until now. She likes it when he’s like this. She’ll listen, or watch, and try to understand.

  He’s taught her about TV, and TV news. Tabloids. Commercials. Movies about Vietnam. Lots and lots about music. Tonight he’s on the blues.

  Mostly they’re just listening. Now and then he’ll tell her an anecdote, or point out a part that he especially likes. This is the old time, acoustic blues. Lots of stuff with just a singer and a bottleneck guitar.

  “This is Mississippi Fred McDowell.”

  Keith likes the names. Sleepy John Estes. Blind Willie McTell.

  “Not much is known about Barbecue Bob.”

  Justine laughs. It’s always cool when she gets his jokes.

  “I would have liked to have been like that, to have been named Hambone Keith, or Switchblade Keith, something along those lines. Scholars would argue about whether I’d been killed in a knife fight or poisoned by some unknown jealous bitch.”

  “You’d like that, huh.”

  “Sure.”

  “I liked that one by Robert Johnson,” Justine says. “How old was he when he sang it?”

  “Twenty-six, back in 1937.”

  “He sounds like he could be fourteen, or a hundred and five.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I used to try to see old people, like over a hundred. I thought I could read something in their eyes.”

  As she says this, there’s no way she looks much older than mid-twenties. Her skin is so soft and unlined. Nothing about her is old except sometimes her gaze.

  “I also studied people when they were dead, a couple of times. It was hard though. One place, animals kept coming during the day. I tied it to a tree, but they really wanted it. The other time, I saw more, I understood more, but then this man I knew took her away. He thou
ght it was a problem, having her around. I was really looking at her, though, it was like she was my sister, so it was too bad when she was gone.”

  ‘What did you think, when you looked at her?” Keith asks.

  “I don’t know. I felt like I understood who I was, what I am.”

  Keith is silent. They listen to Bessie Smith, singing with a piano player and an old-time clarinet.

  “Do you feel like you need more blood tonight?” he suddenly asks. He’s thinking about Tamara, who is still certainly under Justine’s spell. Maybe, if she needs more, they can go out tonight and find someone else.

  She’s looking at him now like she reads his mind. His protective impulse might be just egging her on, making her want to cross his desire, to be perverse.

  “Yes, I need some. Because of the wounds. Let’s go out.” She changes her clothes. Her immodesty in front of him has a careless quality about it, yet sometimes she looks at him differently, he doesn’t know what she feels. She brushes her hair and puts on lipstick and blush, regards her face appraisingly in the mirror.

  Out in public, she can get along very well. Her affect is often somewhat self-absorbed and remote, but she can also be carefree and flirtatious, she enjoys the interplay.

  “How do I look?” she asks him, and he says nothing, gazing at her up and down, then he embraces her and lightly kisses her neck, making her squirm and laugh.

  Los Angeles is a city of extras, of extra people, homeless and runaways, people without names. Or, they have names, but nobody knows or wants to know what these names are. Nameless people are not missed when they disappear or turn up dead.

  “You pick up someone this time,” Justine asks, and Keith figures this is his prize for them skipping an easy return visit to Tamara Rothschild, whom Justine could rouse and lead outside as she willed.