Pure Drivel

by STEVE MARTIN

  The incidence of the hissy fit has risen in direct proportion to the airlines’ cutbacks in oxygen levels on New York-Los Angeles flights. The longer flight time from east to west convinces our sojourner that even the headwinds are telling him not to go. It deprives his brain chemistry of valuable happiness molecules and gives him an agonizing arrival headache. He reads the Los Angeles Times on the plane and is disturbed by the typeface. Then, landing in the bright California sun after leaving New York on a cold, sunless day, he becomes doubly irked when he realizes he has left his sunglasses behind. Walking down the concourse, he sheds his forty-pound overcoat, peeling down to his wool shirt and furry vest. Now, overheated and overloaded, he recalls the words of a wheezing and sniffling SoHo gallery owner: “I was just in L.a. and got a raging cold in that ninety-degree heat,” not recognizing in this unscientific pronouncement that if Los Angeles were an ethnic group, the comment would be a slur. Thus the hissy fit begins: The open palms move reflexively to the ears, in a nice approximation of Munch’s The Scream. Nervous brain impulses tap out in Morse code, “I am not one of you ... I don’t belong here ... are there any others like me I can talk to?” Oddly, these thoughts are from the same writer who has climbed gun towers in Bosnia and gone undercover in street gangs.

  Furthering the agony, the beleaguered writer finds himself in a rental car on the San Diego freeway and realizes he does not remember how to drive.

  After pulling into the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset and striking a concrete pylon and maybe the valet parker, the writer slips and slides across the glassy floor of the lobby to the reception desk. To his left, he can see past the maitre do’s podium and the Armani-model hostess to an outdoor restaurant, crowded with people dressed in vinyl and other sauna-inducing unwearables. Behind him, the Beautiful Ones pose themselves around a sofa, and a tiny voice in his head whispers, “You will never have them, because you have not been professionally groomed.”

  The hissy fit is sustained throughout the day by an unpleasant cranial crowding of facts, comments, and sights, all of which must be simultaneously remembered, until the writer can unsheathe his computer and download his brain. Invited to the producer’s house that evening for cocktails, the writer sees in the backyard of the subject’s minivilla a gravity-defying bronze sculpture of a teen-on-a-swing, and a fiberglass rock over which a man-made waterfall flows. The writer now must chant over and over to himself, “Remember the fiberglass rock.” Eventually, the producer greets him and clasps his hand, capturing his audience. One sentence later, he intimately reveals that his therapy involves talking to a doll of himself. Now the writer, with hours to go before ten-thirty, when the party will sputter and die, must keep repeating to himself, “Remember the fiberglass rock, remember he talks to a doll ... fiberglass rock, talks to doll, teen-on-a-swing.” This keeps him from taking a deep breath and from noticing that the spreading sunset has saturated the air with a soft orange glow, almost like Paris, and that the view to the ocean is dappled with cottages nestled in a hillside, their lights just flickering on, almost like Portofino. He fails to see that Los Angeles is a city of abundant and compelling almosts.

  The journey from the producer’s house to the Mondrian Hotel, through an accordion descent of roads from the hills to the flats, requires the navigational skills of Magellan. Driving under the sky with one star, he is still intoxicated by the dizzying combination of white wine, party dresses, and a sense of not belonging, while a truth unfolding outside his windshield goes unobserved: The New York grid of streets and avenues, with its intellectual sectors leading to artistic quarters leading to shopping Edens, does not lie correctly over this Los Angeles sprawl. For the Los Angeles grid is warped, like the assumed mathematical netherworld, and must be moved through in an illogical manner. As the surface is unpeeled, a deeper level is revealed, but just below that the surface level appears again. This effect leaves the writer seeing only quark smoke trails, the evidence of something richer that has been missed.

  At last, he is back in his hotel room, which unfortunately faces east into the now dead-black hills. Had his room been facing west, he would have noted the sparkling twenty-five-mile vista to the sea, which looks almost like the Mediterranean. He would have noted how the streets of L.a. undulate over short hills, as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath. How, laid over this crosshatch, are streets meandering on the diagonal, creating a multitude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These are the avenues of the tryst, which enable Acting Student A to travel the eighteen miles across town to Acting Student B’s garage apartment in nine minutes flat after a hot-blooded phone call at midnight. Had he been facing seaward on a balcony overlooking the city, the writer might have heard, drifting out of a tiny apartment window, the optimistic voice of a shower singer, imbued with the conviction that this is a place where it is possible to be happy. He would have seen, above the rolling rows of houses, the five or six aircraft that are always floating motionlessly over the city, planes that now so directly connect to his jet lag, which is mysteriously working in reverse: Even though it’s 3:00 A.m. in the east, he is wide awake. Instead, he observes how the hilltops have been shorn into mesas to accommodate someone’s Palladian-Tudor-Gothic-French-fantasy palais, and as it’s too late to call a sympathetic ear in New York, he heads to the lobby bar.

  The bar is alive, and he falls into a conversation with Candy. Candy is either nineteen or twenty-five or thirty-two, and she pronounces her belief in the powers of the amethyst around her neck as fervently as Constantine for the Church of Rome. The writer knows that next week this belief will be forgotten, or replaced by another, and he remembers it for his article. The hissy fit prevents him from seeing that Candy carries around an even sillier and more poignant belief, one that must be maintained and renewed daily: that she is in possession of a talent that will lift her to the stars. This belief permeates L.a.’s soil; it is in the cars, in the clothes, and in the conversations of the up-and-coming. It is a far-fetched religion, which works often enough to sustain a supply of new believers, and it becomes the mantra of every hopeful, regardless of education or class. The writer looks at the explosion of hair sitting opposite him and puts her in a convenient niche, missing the point that the foolish can’t write, but boy, can they act.

  After a limp and sexless blackout sleep at the hotel, the writer, with a hangover and no sunglasses, waits for his prey at a staggeringly sunny outdoor cafe. The producer, after having called the restaurant twice, each time warning of a fifteen-minute delay, sweeps in a half hour late but with an on-time feeling and cuddles fully half the diners before sitting down. So now two stereotypes, one that is lived daily and the other acquired for the journey, sit opposite each other. The writer needs no tape recorder, since it is not the words that will be reported but only the facts, observable and imagined, that fit the thesis. The hissy fit settles in nicely and filters everything through its eyes. Forty minutes later, the cell phone that is lying on the table vibrates across it, and the meeting is over.

  Returning to an already dark New York City on the welcoming shorter flight home, the writer arrives at the melodious and historic acronym JFK and not the atonal, punning LAX. The hissy fit begins to subside. Soothed by the familiar jolts of a taxi ride and a one-hour view of the Beloved City from the gridlocked Triborough Bridge, the writer arrives home with a laptop full of judgments. The autopsy is faxed in, gleefully edited and published, then distributed proudly to concurring family and friends. The New York Writer lies back on his bed, adjacent to the clanging radiator where a rented copy of the producer’s latest flop has accidentally melted into a horseshoe. He falls asleep, under the sky with no stars, his grasp slowly loosening from his manuscript, never dreaming that one should not ridicule one’s foolish, fun, poetic cousin.

  Drivel

  Dolly defended me at a party. She was an artist who showed at the Whitney Biennial, so she had a certain outlook, a certain point of view, a certain understandin
g of things. She came into my life as a stranger who spoke up when I was being attacked by some cocktail types for being the publisher of American Drivel Review. It wasn’t drivel that I published, she explained to them, but rather the idea of drivel.

  One drink later, we paired off. She slouched back on the sofa with her legs ajar, her skirt draped between them. I poured out my heart to this person I had known barely ten minutes: how it was hard to find good drivel, even harder to write it. She knew that to succeed, one must pore over every word, replacing it five or six times, and labor over every pause and comma.

  I made love to her that night. The snap of the condom going on echoed through the apartment like Lawrence of Arabia’s spear sticking in an Arab shield. I whispered passages from Agamemnon’s Armor, a five-inch-thick romance novel with three authors. She liked that.

  As publisher of ADR, I never had actually written the stuff myself. But that morning, arising with a vigor that had no doubt spilled over from the night before, I sat down and tossed off a few lines and nervously showed them to Dolly. She took them into another room, and I sat alone for several painful minutes. She came back and looked at me. “This is not just drivel,” she exulted. “It’s pure drivel.” The butterflies in my stomach sopranoed a chorus of “Hallelujah.”

  That night, we celebrated with a champagne dinner for two, and I told her that her skin was the color of fine white typing paper held in the sun and reflecting the pink of a New Mexican adobe horse barn.

  The next two months were heaven. I no longer just published drivel; I was now writing it. Dolly, too, had a burst of creativity, which sent her into a splendid spiraling depression. She had painted a tabletop still life that was a conceptual work in that it had no concept. Thus the viewer became a “viewer,” who looked at a painting, which became a “painting.” The “viewer” then left the museum to “discuss” the experience with “others.” Dolly could take the infinitesimal pause to imply the quotations around a word (she could also indicate italics with just a twist of her voice).

  Not wanting to judge my own work or to trust Dolly’s love-skewed opinion, I sent my pieces around and made sure they were rejected by five different magazines before I would let myself publish them in Drivel Review. Meanwhile, fueled by her depression, Dolly kept producing one artwork after another and selling them to a rock musician with the unusual name of Fiber Behind, but it kept us in doughnuts and he seemed to really appreciate her work.

  But our love was extinguished quickly, as though someone had thrown water from a high tower onto a burning dog.

  What happened was this: Dolly came home at her usual time. What I had to tell her was difficult to say, but it somehow came out with the right amount of effortlessness, in spite of my nerves.

  “I went downtown and saw your new painting of a toaster at Dia. I enjoyed it.”

  She acknowledged the compliment, started to leave the room, and, as I expected, stopped short.

  “You mean you “enjoyed” it, don’t you?” Her voice indicated the quotation marks.

  I reiterated, “No, I actually enjoyed it.”

  Dolly’s attention focused, and she came over and sat beside me. “Rod, do you mean you didn’t go into the “gallery” and “see” my “painting”?” I nodded sadly.

  “You mean you saw my painting without any irony whatsoever?” Again, I nodded yes.

  “But, Rod, if you view my painting of a toaster without irony, it’s just a painting of a toaster.”

  I responded, “All I can tell you is that I enjoyed it. I really liked the way the toaster looked.”

  We struggled through the rest of the night, pretending that everything was the same, but by morning it was over between us, and Dolly left with a small “goodbye,” soaking with the irony I had come to love so much.

  I wanted to run, run after her into the night, even though it was day, for my pain was bursting out of me, like a sock filled with one too many bocce balls.

  Those were my final words in the last issue of Drivel Review. Since then, I have heard that Dolly spent some time with Fiber Behind, but I’m sure she picked up a farewell copy and read my final, short, painful burst of drivel. I like to think that a tear marked her cheek, like the trace of a snail creeping across white china.

  I Love Loosely

  Ricky. Lucy, I’m home! Lucy. Oh, hi, Ricky. How were things at the

  club today? Ricky. Oh, fine. Lucy. What did you do? Ricky. The usual—rehearsed a new number

  and had sex with an usherette. Lucy. Waaaaaaaa! Ricky. Lucy, what’s the matter? Lucy. You said you had sex with an usherette.

  ... Waaaaaaa! Ricky. Lucy, don’ be silly. It was only

  oral sex. Lucy. It was? Ricky. Of course, Lucy. Lucy. It wasn’t intercourse? Ricky. Of course not, Lucy. That would be

  cheating. Lucy. Oh, Ricky, I almost forgot those

  passages from the Bible you read to me that proved

  it. Ricky. Now I’m goin’ to change, and you go

  make dinner. Lucy. Yes, Ricky. Ricky exits. Lucy goes to the phone. Lucy. (on the phone) Ethel? Ethel. (on the phone) What is it this time,

  Lucy? Lucy. Ethel, I’m not so sure about this “oral

  sex is not cheating” business. Ethel. This is not another one of your schemes, is

  it? Lucy. Oh no, Ethel. It’s just that Ricky

  claims it says so in the Bible. Ethel. Well, Lucy, why don’t you ask a

  monsignor? Lucy. Where would I find one? Ethel. There’s one in the building. Mrs.

  Trumble has one visiting her now. You want

  me to send him down? Lucy. Thanks, Ethel. There is a knock at the door. Lucy answers. It’s the monsignor. Lucy. That was fast! Monsignor. Hello, Mrs. Ricardo. It

  says right here in Leviticus that oral sex

  is not cheating. Lucy. How did you know what I wanted to ask? Monsignor. It’s the only thing people have been

  asking me for months. Men have been joining our

  church by the thousands! Ah ... ah ... ah

  choo! The monsignor’s mustache flies off. Lucy. Fred! Fred. Lucy, this was all Ricky’s idea! Ricky enters. Ricky. Lucy, is my dinner ready? He sees Fred and starts swearing in Spanish. Ethel enters, sees the mustache on the floor, picks it up, and hands it to Fred. Ethel. Here, put this on your bald head for old

  times’ sake. Lucy. But how did Ricky know I was worried

  that oral sex was actually cheating? Ethel. I’ve been taping all your phone

  conversations and selling them to him, Lucy. Lucy. But, Ethel, you’re my best friend! Ethel. I was getting even with you for making me wear

  that cat suit to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ricky. Ethel, tell Lucy you’re sorry. Ethel. Oh, all right. Lucy, I’m sorry

  I taped all your phone calls and ruined your

  life. Lucy. And Ricky, I’m sorry I thought you

  had intercourse when it was just oral sex. They all hug. Fred. Can I take off my wire now,

  Ricky?

  Lolita at Fifty

  Lolita Haze, now Guccioni (though currently single), angled her shopping cart and knelt down for the bottle of fallen fabric softener that her sashaying walk had knocked into the aisle. “Let me get that,” mooned a stock boy, and Lolita, peering over her sunglasses, breathed, “I’ve got it.”

  The usual crowd had gathered at one end of the aisle, knowing that Lolita herself would be doing the retrieval, but it was the rear view from the checkout stand that was the best: the accordion bend of the long body, the knees locked but the ankles splayed, her arms becoming longer than her entire folded frame as she reached, and the slight shift to translucence of the yellow mini as it stretched in response to the breathtaking bend. A shudder traveled up the hierarchy of the supermarket, from box boy to general manager. Even the security camera ground to a halt in the middle of its traverse.

  Rolling her way to the checkout stand, a teenage cashier only recently elevated from box boy quickly hid the Ten Items or Less sign, hoping to encourage Lolita to c
ome his way. Paying with a check at a snail’s pace, she delicately wrote her signature with a heart-dotted i, an action that had three purposes: the first was to sign the check, the second was the three-quarters lean-over that caused a jittery eye motion from the box boy, and the third was to raise the back of her short blouse inches above the yellow mini, creating a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sphere of influence.

  Once in the parking lot, Lolita propped herself against her yellow Miata, idly tapping the heel of her half-dislodged shoe against the asphalt, using her toe as a motor. A sweating thirteen-year-old loaded her bags into the trunk. She broke her akimbo slouch (lolita was rarely not akimbo; in fact, her third husband, Mark, observed that at any given moment, a randomly selected part of her body was always catty-corner to another) and drifted over to the remaining plastic bag full of apples, in a manner so lazy that even after the walk was over, it seemed as though it hadn’t happened. She hoisted the bag lazily in a locked fist and rested it against the back of her raised forearm, slung the bag into the trunk with a slew-footed twist, and handed the gaping boy a single. Reading his name tag, she raised her eyes and gave him a “Thank you, Rory.”

  The boy replied, “Thank you, Miss ... Miss ...”

  “Lo-lee-tah,” she tongued. A column of sweat drained down the boy, and he entered puberty.

  As she made the twenty-minute drive down Ventura Boulevard in the endless California sun, Lolita’s mind grew active. “I’m tired of ranch style,” she thought as she pulled into the driveway of the house she had lived in through the tenure of two husbands. Inside, she struck her thinking pose, notching her hip against the kitchen counter and hanging one arm on a cabinet pull. “I’m forty-five years old,” she lied to herself. “Perhaps it’s time for a change.” She thought a nice apartment on the L.a. side of the Hollywood Hills, where there were more people like her, would do her fine.

  Lolita had never had a snap of trouble selling any of her houses. She had a real estate license, and as long as one of the prospective buyers was male, all she had to do was be there while the couple poked through the house. Men felt a powerful drive to be in a room with her, especially after seeing her boudoir, which rivaled a house of mirrors. On the vanity stood an array of lipsticks stacked like ammo, which, incidentally, is exactly what they were. A sliding door revealed a closet filled with a rainbow of stretch pants, infinitely reflected from wall to wall. Lolita’s skills were such that the wives always remained oblivious to their husbands’ deepening interest in velour. She would follow the prospective buyers into the kitchen, where she would lounge indolently in a doorway and point things out by waggling a banana. The husbands would then jump to buy the house, just so they might be in the same room with her at the closing.