by Tony O'Neill
· · ·
“Well,” Bower was saying, “there’ll be nothing hardball today . . . I know that you can’t comment on the specifics of the case. Maybe I can talk to you about how crazy young Hollywood is acting these days, with the Lindsays and the Britneys . . .”
“Sure, sure . . .”
“Other than that—”
“GENTLEMEN! TWO MINUTES!”
“Well,” Dr. Mike said apologetically, “it looks like we’re up!”
“Good luck.”
Bower sat down. The pretty girl again appeared at his side and began to powder him. As she bent slightly, she became aware of Dr. Mike’s gaze on her. She half turned to him, smiled, and then scurried away.
“In four . . . three. Two. One.”
It was showtime.
And in households across America, Dr. Mike’s brilliant smile flashed in instantaneous transmission: it shone out indiscriminately from gargantuan flat-screen televisions mounted on the walls of monstrous Beverly Hills homes, battered black-and-white portables sitting atop ancient chests of drawers, color televisions glowing in dark bars where already a smattering of shaky, early-morning drinkers were waiting for their nerves to settle down.
“ . . . so Dr. Mike, with the myriad perils you have mentioned in the world of celebrity . . . the, uh, easy access to drugs. The adoration. The pressure. I mean, what advice would you GIVE to someone like Britney Spears, who does seem to be having some very serious difficulties at the moment?”
· · ·
“Well, Matthew,” Dr. Mike said, leaning in, “in many ways you are touching upon something that makes my new show, Detoxing America, a revolutionary television event. Because what we are showing here is that there is NO difference between a celebrity who suffers from this terrible disease and the millions of ordinary Americans who struggle with addiction every day. I have made it my MISSION to bring recovery to those who cannot access it any other way. If you want my advice to Britney, I can give it to her right here and now.”
Dr. Mike turned to the screen, and looked seriously through it. Across America people quieted down, sensing that something important was about to fall from the doctor’s lips. Beers froze, hovering inches from the mouths of the drinkers.
“Britney. The new episode of Detoxing America goes out on VH1 at ten o’clock on Thursday evening. It is repeated on Fridays and Tuesdays. We have a full roster of recovering celebrities for this season, but next time I would be honored to have you as a guest. For now, like everybody else, just watch, and listen. Open your heart. Let go, and let God. Please don’t shy away from the miracle of recovery.”
Dr. Mike’s eyes were glistening. They shone with the kind of sincerity that only comes with years of practice. And then it came, like the first rays of dawn bleeding across the horizon: the smile. It radiated from five million or so television screens in awesome synchronization, before reluctantly segueing into an advertisement for antidepressants.
Chapter Three
Jeffrey made it to Tyler’s place around three o’clock. So much for his resolution to stay away. It was a spacious, two-bedroom apartment on Franklin and Vermont. Outside the building a row of tall, raggedy palm trees rose up into the mercilessly bright skies like a parade of malnourished crack whores. He rang the bell, and Tyler buzzed him in. Tyler was on the ground floor. The door was unlocked.
“Oh, come ON, T! I NEED something . . . !”
Jeffrey could hear Trina’s nauseating whine floating through the door. He knew this scene already. He opened the door.
“Tyler, what’s up?”
Jeffrey walked into the dim cool of the apartment. He dragged the suitcase behind him. The wheels rattled against the polished hardwood floors. The living room was sparse, just an empty bookshelf, coffee table, leather couch, and flat-screen television. Trina and Tyler were on the couch. Tyler was stoned, regarding Jeffrey blankly through a haze of gray marijuana smoke. Trina was nervously crossing and uncrossing her legs, clacking her absurd high heels against the wooden floor. She was smoking a cigarette. The television was on. The television was always on.
“Hey, bitch,” Tyler said to Jeffrey, “what’s with the case? You moving in?”
Jeffrey closed the door behind him.
“Can I hang out today? I’m checking into rehab tomorrow. I need a place to stay until a bed becomes free.”
Tyler cocked his thumb at Trina.
“You wanna take this cunt with you?”
“Hey, FUCK YOU, T!” Trina snarled.
“What’s up, Trina?” Jeffrey said.
“What’s UP,” Tyler sighed, “is that little Miss Silicone here thinks she can blow all of her cash on titty jobs, and then come here begging for freebies!”
Ah, thought Jeffrey. New titties. So that’s what’s different about her. She had gone for that classic ’80s porn star look, and now her painful, shiny-looking tits were pointing straight out from her ribs, making her waist seem even more ridiculously tiny. Trina’s pockmarked face darkened.
“It was a work-related expense! I need these for my career!”
“Oh,” Tyler sneered, “dancing at Crazy Girls is a CAREER now! Who knew?”
Jeffrey walked over to her. “They look good,” he said.
“Thanks! Wanna feel?”
Trina popped a swollen breast out of her top and presented it to Jeffrey.
“Gurl . . .” Tyler laughed, rolling his eyes.
Jeffrey gave the absurd breast a squeeze. It seemed ready to burst. The nipple stood out a good inch from the breast, in a state of permanent, numb excitement.
“Feels really . . . big.”
“Thanks! So I was just explaining to Scrooge here that I need some Oxy for work. It’s my first day back. I’m out of refills and I’m getting sick. I had to take three weeks off to recover, you know. . . .”
Jeffrey joined them on the couch.
“I get off at eleven p.m.! I’ll pay you then!”
“I don’t do loans, Trina. If I front you today, I’ll have every one of those pill-popping bitches from the club hanging out here with their hands out. It’s bad business!”
Trina pouted. “I won’t tell.”
“Trina, hon, you got a big mouth. The answer’s no.”
“Just TWO!”
“No. Come back with some money and we can talk.”
Trina looked at Jeffrey. “Hey, can you lend me eighty bucks until tonight?”
“I’m flat broke,” Jeffrey lied. “Sorry.”
“Okay, okay,” Trina sighed, as if Tyler had just negotiated a major concession from her. “I’ll fuck you. But I want four pills to fuck you.”
There was a moment of silence. Tyler looked at Jeffrey. Then they both burst out laughing.
“What? WHAT?” she whined.
“Girl, are you smoking crack?” Tyler demanded. “You ain’t got the right equipment for me! You’d better go see that surgeon again if you wanna fuck me!”
“What? What’s so funny? You’ve fucked me before! Shit, a hole’s a hole. You said it yourself!”
Tyler rolled his eyes. “I was on METH, hon. World of difference.”
“I have some meth,” Trina said, quietly.
Jeffrey watched the television for a moment and quickly remembered why he didn’t own a set himself. Trina had finally gotten a break.
“Okay, Christ. Lemme have some ice.”
Trina handed him a small baggie containing a dirty gray powder. Tyler dipped his knife into it and paused with the tip inches from his nose.
“Two pills,” he warned her. “This is a sympathy fuck. Two pills, okay?”
“Shit, okay.”
Tyler hoovered up the meth.
“You wanna watch TV for a bit, Jeffrey? We won’t be long. . . .”
“Okay.”
Trina got up and clip-clopped to the bedroom. Tyler turned to Jeffrey and whispered, “This is the LAST time. This bitch is driving me crazy!”
Later, Jeffrey and Tyler were watching The Vi
ew on TiVo. Trina had already left for Crazy Girls, with the OxyContin. Tyler was wearing sweatpants and an ancient, faded “Frankie Says Relax” T-shirt. He was still tweaked and shiny with sweat.
“You know who I’d like to fuck?” Tyler asked.
“Who?”
“That Hasselbeck bitch.”
“Who?”
Tyler pointed to the television. On-screen several unattractive women were talking about the death of a Hollywood actor.
“That one. The little blonde with the mean, pinched face.”
“HER?”
“Yup.”
“You know something? I think you’re going straight. I mean, you’re banging strippers left and right, and now you wanna fuck . . . her?”
“Do you watch this show?”
“I don’t watch TV.”
“Dude, she’s a total bitch. I mean, she’s a Republican, stuck up, a real churchgoing cunt. The worst kind of a cunt. She probably has a Bible on her nightstand.”
“Uh . . . right. And?”
“And she’s a WOMAN. I mean, I’ve fucked Republicans before, they’re the sickest fucks out there. But she’s a Bush-lover, a Christian, a fucking woman, you know? I find her, like, so fucking REPULSIVE, I just wanna fuck her. You know what I mean? To, like, teach her a lesson.”
Jeffrey took a pull on Tyler’s joint.
“Seriously, bro, I think you need to lay off the meth. It’s like fucking up your brain. You should hear the shit you say when you’re on it, sometimes. You freak me out.”
“You’re so boring, dude.”
“Please . . . welcome the host of Detoxing America, Dr. Mike!” said the television.
Applause.
On-screen a studious, gray-haired doctor walked onstage. He waved to the crowd and gave a semi-apologetic “Aw shucks, me?” grin.
· · ·
“I hate this motherfucker, too,” Tyler announced.
“Who’s this guy?”
“He’s a fucking doctor. Dr. Mike—can ya believe that name? Dr. Mike! He’s like he’s something off of Sesame Street or something. Imagine having a doctor called Dr. fucking Mike? He runs a rehab. He’s like Mr. Recovery. Every time I turn on my goddamned TV this fucking clown is on it talking about somebody. Britney, that dead actor, what’s-his-face Michaels, anybody. He’s such a fucking whore.”
“He has a TV show?”
“Yeah, dumbshit! Detoxing America. They get a bunch of washed-up celebrities and put ’em through detox. Only most of ’em don’t have a real drug problem. They’re just desperate to be on TV. He has that rehab, Clean and Serene, out in Pasadena. The one that Robert Downey was always in. . . .”
“What? What did you say his place was called?”
“Clean and Serene.”
Jeffrey was pulling a piece of paper from his back pocket. He looked at the paper. Tyler watched the television impassively. Dr. Mike was talking about why young Hollywood uses drugs.
“Because drugs feel great!” Tyler shouted at the screen.
“ . . . the addictive personality is certainly encouraged by the excess of Hollywood, which is something that I discuss in detail in my new book, Narcissism and Narcotics . . . ,” Dr Mike was saying.
“Bro, you ain’t gonna believe this,” Jeffrey said.
“What?”
“That’s the place I’m going to tomorrow. Clean and Serene in Pasadena.”
· · ·
Tyler looked at Jeffrey. He whistled. “For real?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow, that’s a nice place. Did the old man pay for it?”
“Well, yeah. Kind of.”
“That’s wild. You’ll probably see tons of famous people in there. Can you take pictures?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That sucks.”
Jeffrey watched the television for a moment. Dr. Mike was talking about his television show, telling the women of The View that Detoxing America is reality television that saves lives.
“Wanna smoke some crack?” Jeffrey said.
“Oh, sure. Hey, dude, you should totally fuck Dr. Mike.”
“Yeah, maybe I should . . . ,” said Jeffrey, as he started pulling the coke and the pipe out of his bag.
Chapter Four
In the dream Randal was looking out toward a perfectly clear horizon. The powder blue sky lay hard against the sapphire blue of the farthest point of the ocean. The water was crystalline, lapping at the shoreline with a gentle undulation. He was sitting on a beach chair. The one-eared girl was sitting in front of him, just as she had been before. Her single earring, a large hoop bearing the legend “Esmeralda” in script, twinkled in the sunlight. This hypnotic twinkling, in time with the bus’s steady lurches, had lulled him to sleep originally. It kept up its steady rhythm here, as he ran his hands over her smooth, oiled back.
Then they stood up on the hot sand and walked toward the water hand in hand. The water was warm. As they walked, their feet at first smushed into the soft white sand. Farther on, they found themselves in a patch of dark green sea grass. Here they stopped. She sat, so only her head was poking above the water. As Randal sat beside her, he felt the warm slush of the sand and the slimy weeds collecting around his ass and his thighs. It was this sensation, warm, viscous, that began to bring him around. That and the driver with the bulldog neck, who applied the brakes and frantically looked back over his shoulder, barking, “YOU! SIR! Wake up! Get off my goddamned bus!!!”
He blinked. The mid-afternoon sunlight burned his face through the scarred glass. Someone had scrawled “FUCK THE LAPD” in Magic Marker here. There was a rank stench. Esmeralda was here, too, on her feet and looking down on him with unconcealed disgust. The smell of his own shit made him gag. He looked over toward the driver, who was standing now, about to walk toward Randal and physically drag him off the bus. An old Latin lady stood behind the driver guiltily, having informed him of what had happened. Half retching, Randal staggered to his feet and said, “I’m going!”
Delirious, he staggered off the bus and onto the sidewalk, leaving a trail of excrement in his wake. He sat under the Hollywood sun with crap leaking from the legs of his destroyed $1,500 Yves Saint Laurent suit. The bus tore away from him, and he was alone on the hard plastic bench.
Randal’s receding hair was dyed platinum. His once handsome face was hollowed out beyond recognition. He still had the eyes, though. Soulful eyes. Eyes that earned more forgiveness than even he thought he deserved.
He was on the corner of Hollywood and Highland. He walked toward a pay phone, noting the dinosaur bursting from the roof of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, with a clock clamped between its jaws. He called his brother collect. Across the city, white-knuckled behind the wheel of his Lexus, Harvey accepted the charges.
“You’re a motherfucker,” Harvey said.
“Harvey. It’s Randal!”
“I know who it is. Nobody else calls me collect on a regular basis. I guess you’re calling to see how the funeral went? It was good. A lot of people showed up. Susan Sarandon was there, the Cruises, Bobby De Niro came. Can you believe that? It’s been, like, what? Fifteen years since they’d worked together? He showed anyway.”
“Harvey, man, listen—”
“Shut the fuck up for a moment, okay? I’m telling you about Pop’s funeral. Don’t interrupt me. You’re so fucking RUDE sometimes! Anyway, De Niro spoke, oh and shit, you’ll never believe who was there. Sidney Poitier. Sidney fucking Poitier. Can you believe that shit?”
“Wild.”
“Yup. So you calling me with some brilliant excuse for why you didn’t show up?”
“It’s not an excuse. I just got out of the psych ward. They held me for seventy-two hours, dosed me with lithium, the whole fuckin’ bit. I woke up strapped to a bed, in a ward with a bunch of nut jobs. There was this chick that kept trying to catch invisible butterflies and a guy with shaved eyebrows who screamed all night. I called the suicide hotline when I was fucked up. . . .”
“Again? My goodness, aren’t you the reckless one. Well, I’ll be sure to let Mom know. . . .”
· · ·
“You’re such a callous prick sometimes, Harvey. I’m sick. I lost my wallet. I got shit in my pants. They gave me a fucking bus token and sent me off into Hollywood. I’m standing outside of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
“You ought to be inside of it. Hold on. HEY, ASSHOLE. WHATCHA DOING? INDICATE, FUCK FACE! YEAH! THAT’S RIGHT! YOU DUMBSHIT.” Harvey sighed, “Hey, shitpants. You still there?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, Randal, listen. Here’s the deal. Mom, Lori, and I had planned an intervention for you. We like flew this professional interventionist called Autumn down from fucking San Francisco, and we all wrote letters about how much we loved you but we don’t wanna see you die, all of that shit. But, uh, I guess you were indisposed. So I’m gonna give you the Cliff Notes. You’re goin’ to rehab or you’re cut off. No apartment, no credit cards, nothing.”
“Can you come pick me up?”
“Hold on, shitpants. Don’t cut me off before I get to the best bit. Randal, are you willing to accept the gift of recovery that we’re offering you?”
“Sure. Whatever. Can you send a limo? I need to change.”
“No changing. You’re going straight to rehab.”
“I need clean pants. I shit in my pants!”
“Don’t be a pussy. I’ll bring you some fucking pants, okay? You’re meant to be experiencing a, uh, rock bottom right now. So experience it. They’re waiting for you to check in. It’s a good place. The guy who runs it has that TV show, Detoxing America. You seen it?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that asshole. I do have a TV, you know.”
“Well, anyway. He seems like a good guy. He deals with celebrities, so I’m sure he’s used to spoiled fucking speed freak assholes like you. Just hold on, ’Kay? I’m calling a car service.”
Randal returned to the bench. He waited. Was this a rock bottom? He wasn’t sure. When money is not an object, rock bottoms are hard to find. There are mostly trapdoors, which lead to ever more dark and deep caverns of degradation. He thought about scoring some more meth before the car service arrived. It was hopeless, though. Drug dealers never accept collect calls.
