by John Decure
“Actually, there’s a better way. It’s staring us right in our faces.”
“I’m all ears, son.”
“We let Bradlee Aames try the case, let her put on her evidence.”
The idea made sense: I’d seen her stagger out of the Serra building downtown as if she’d been sucked through a wind tunnel. I was confident that if she pursued Dr. Don and his pack of sharks to trial, they’d make chum out of her.
These things I told the Major.
“You know the band ‘Steely Dan’?” Myrna asked the group. I cringed. This bunch of barrio babes would have no idea where she was going with this. I wished I’d never dragged her to that reunion tour show, pumping her with trivia. “Know how they got their name?” No one cared. And by the way, it wasn’t how they got their name, it’s the name they themselves, the band’s two co-founders, selected. Jesus, sometimes Myrna’s stupid comments really wore me out.
I answered Myrna’s trivia question before it completely died on the vine.
“I don’t like it,” the Major said.
“Even with the patient’s unexpected cooperation, the case will be unwinnable.”
“Better hope so, Raw-ool.”
“A shaky psych patient pitted against her semi-famous former shrink? He’s got the smooth patter, she’s terrified. Think how that’ll play.”
He was mulling it over, I could sense that much. I thought I heard the clink of ice in a glass. Was he drinking—while we talked business?
“I see.”
I didn’t care if he was sauced. I was going to sell this concept because it was our best option—and the best way to keep Bradlee close to me, until I could find my way out of my own shadow and make a move. Let her know how I felt about her.
Jesus. You’re such an immature, unrealistic idiot. She’d laugh in your face!
“And only those two can tell the story of what happened between them? It’s a standoff.”
“He said, she said. Indeed.”
“To break the impasse and prove her case, Bradlee will need corroboration.”
“You mean hard evidence. Other witnesses.”
“Right again. But this case won’t have any.”
“Hmm. I like it, Ray-ool. Long as it works. Better say your prayers.”
The Major hung up without further notice or fanfare. Sighing, I studied my free hand and found that during the call I’d chugged my glass of wine dry. The living room bubbled with sweaty energy, the pastels of Mexican bullfighters and troubadours on the walls standing by like befuddled spectators that had wandered into the wrong house. Uncle Ray with his glass eye, pumping out one awful swap-meet painting after another in that rest home off Eastern—Jesus, just because he gave them away every time we visited him didn’t mean we had to bring them home and hang them up. I’d have to talk to Myrna about upgrading the living room décor. Not now. She was seated by the coffee table with Lupe, eyeing a lush purple implement that could have been stolen from a missile silo. Myrna glanced at me.
“Don’t blame me, Raul,” Lupe called out happily. “I’m just the conduit!”
Oh yeah? I got a conduit right here for you, I was thinking. Mental note: no more lingerie parties, ever.
The other women tossed back their heads and sang out their exuberant support for my wife’s freedom to choose.
What I hadn’t acknowledged to myself, until now, was that I’d foreseen the Dr. Don deal unraveling well before it had. Bradlee Aames was precisely that unpredictable. Putting her on the case had seemed, at first, like an act of self-loathing on my part. An invitation to chaos.
Now, by letting her proceed to trial, I’d simply invited more chaos into a rule-oriented arena that tolerated little else than the highly controlled, carefully orchestrated marshalling of facts, law, and evidence.
“Do what you want,” I said to my wife.
So, too, could Bradlee do as she damn well pleased. No matter: at worst, she would lose at trial, then wish she hadn’t fought me on settling this thing.
After that, everything would fall neatly into place. Bradlee would appreciate me for not having stood in her way, for letting her take her shot. Her valiant, if unsuccessful, effort would nonetheless prove that she should be back in action for the medical board, not handling leftover, dinky-board garbage. I’d see to it that her regular case load was reinstated, further burnishing my image in her eyes.
As for the Major, he would be quite happy—make that ecstatic—with a dismissal. And with the Major’s influence, that might put me in line for the senior assistant AG’s job, once old Inglechook finally fades away.
What could go wrong?
Yeah, yeah… very funny.
With some effort I extracted myself from the depths of the easy chair I’d been molded into the last half hour. Across the room Lupe reached up under Myrna, whose hands were clasping the purple sex toy like a baseball bat, and flipped a button. The object hummed to life, the women erupting, paper plates of tortilla chips and veggies tilting in their laps.
Then just as abruptly, the violet orb died.
9
BRADLEE AAMES
My roommate, Reevesy, was lying on the couch—my couch—eating premium banana fudge walnut cream—my premium banana fudge walnut ice cream—when I got home. His first name is David, which is pronounced Dah-veed, because he’s got an overbearing French Canadian mother who did her damnedest to make her mark on her only boy. He’s also blonde, as handsome as Richard Burton without the mileage, and as gay, as he put it when we first met, as a furry pink mascot in an Easter parade.
I threw my car keys on the counter and eyed his dessert. Or mine, depending on how you look at it.
“No, really. Help yourself.”
Like a well-kept cat, Reevesy seemed to have all the time in the world, though he didn’t swallow all of his latest bite before he spoke.
“Thanks, doll.”
He was in his usual faded jeans and white v-neck tee, barefoot, which is all the uniform required of him to do computer-programming work from home. When I met Reevesy six months ago at Pete’s, a downtown restaurant around the corner from work, I was on a bit of a personal downswing, having dreamed vividly the night before that I’d drowned in an underwater canyon beneath the surface of my bathtub. Because I lived alone, in the dream I’d died with the unpleasant knowledge that no one would find my body until it had devolved into a jaundiced puffer fish. A silly dream, I know, because when you’re dead and gone, what difference does the aftermath have anyway? But after that night, I pushed away the ice water every time the waiter brought a pitcher to my table; and now, here was this well-educated looker of a man buying me vodka martinis and telling me he’d hoped to find a place to live, now that his boyfriend had left him for a soccer team in Barcelona. It seemed meant to be, the timing of our meeting.
And David had been a good roommate, keeping his stuff tidied up, the kitchen sano, and the rent paid on time. Even better, last month he’d met Franco, a bartender who lived and worked in Venice and had a condo two blocks from the boardwalk. So now I had my apartment to myself two or three nights a week, which was nice when I wanted to retreat into myself. Like most gays I’ve known, David was an astute observer of human nature, and in the first few days we were together, he’d sensed my withdrawals into an inward landscape replete with blind chutes, nocturnal forests, and abandoned mineshafts. Then again, a lengthy conversation I’d had with God in the form of David’s pet goldfish, Miss Molly, also may have tipped off David, but he’d been too polite to say.
“You look more tan,” I said.
His straight jaw was grizzled with two or three days’ growth.
“Franco wanted to go roller-blading today and the sun was fierce.”
He sized me up.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just, you look like hell.”
“Well, aren’t we speaking frankly, Mr. Shankly.” I tossed it off, but he watched me intently as I went to the kitchen cabinet, took out the Jack Daniels,
and poured myself a three-finger shot.
“Aren’t you the optimist? Your glass is way more than—”
“Half-full? And your humor’s half-empty, guy.”
He finished his ice cream as I sipped, my hold-it-together hurt marinating in the bourbon.
“Girlfriend,” he asked more gently, “let’s start again. What troubles thee?”
“Me?” I was not in the mood for personal revelations.
“I’m not talking to Miss Molly.”
I eyed his goldfish swimming placidly in the same counterclockwise direction she always preferred.
“Look at that little girl go,” I said. “Against the grain, just like me.”
“She’s a true original.”
“More power to you, Molly.” I toasted Reevesy’s goldfish with a single, slow-burning pull.
Without making a conscious decision, I poured myself another. My roommate seemed to follow my movements with studied interest.
“So, what’s jumping at the old saw mill?”
“That’s confidential.”
“C’mon, Brad, I watch those TV lawyers all the time. You change the names to protect the innocent, no worries.”
Oh, hell. What was I afraid of, having a little human contact with my nonthreatening, mostly nonjudgmental roomie? It’s this sense of not knowing my mind, a mild embarrassment that hangs over me, all the time, like an upcoming jail sentence. I have to admit, it wears me out.
“Pour you a glass?”
He raised an eyebrow at my offer.
“I’ve got work to do later, but just a nip won’t hurt.” As I poured he eyed his goldfish. “I know, darling, Daddy’s a lush.”
I dropped four ice cubes into his glass and poured a generous shot.
“I’m working on a case against this TV psychiatrist who couldn’t keep it in his pants with a vulnerable patient.”
“Doctor Don. So I’ve heard.”
“How?”
“Five o’clock news, dear.”
“You’re kidding.”
Reevesy looked at me sideways.
“The fact that he was once a TV talking head himself must make him newsworthy, I guess.”
“Channel Six?”
“Yup. Same studio, so maybe they knew him back in the day and didn’t much care for him.”
I liked the sound of that. “Schadenfreude.”
“They ran some footage with the story, the doc with a headset, taking calls in front of a big hanging microphone. Odd little self-satisfied grin, a little madcap, if you ask me.”
“He looked like that in court, too.”
“Anyone who’d call a TV shrink to talk about their problems on air? Have to be a bit mad as well, eh?”
“Amen. I might be crazy, but not dumb-as-a-rock crazy.”
The buzz was working to hush the background noise in my head. David studied my face with the kind of wonderment one reserves for roadside crash sites.
“Girl, you just downed two triple shots.”
“How about this weather.”
He frowned. “Cheers.”
“It’s one of your business. I mean, none of your business.”
“You’re wording your slurs, doll.”
A sour mash cloud floated up from the base of my throat, but I gulped it back down with everything I had.
“Ha ha. I’m under control.”
Reevesy made a show of studying his fingernails, as if averting his eyes from the spectacle I’d made of myself.
“If you say so. I’m certainly convinced.”
He sighed heavily and closed his eyes.
“You don’t look so hot yourself,” I said.
“Why, thank you, dear.”
“Franco working tonight?”
He glared at me.
“Don’t get bitchy, girlfriend.”
“What?”
David rubbed his elbows absently and shrugged me off.
“It’s not you. Franco and I… we had a little spat.”
I took a seat next to him on the couch. “Hey, I’m sorry.”
“I saw him having coffee with someone just down the street, same guy I’d seen lavishing attention on him last week at a pool party. Got all emotional and possessive, fired off an accusation I pretty much pulled out of my arse, and damned if he didn’t admit it.”
“Ooh.”
“Well, easy come, easy go, hon, right?”
“He’ll come to his senses.”
“Least I hope so. A Canadian mama’s-boy software-geek who doesn’t have a driver’s license—in LA? What would you call me?”
“A catch.”
He looked as if he might burst into tears. Instead, he hugged me. Hard. For me, it was almost like an out-of-body experience, and I yearned for all the previous years I’d lived in the safety of my isolation, alone, no roommate to gauge my weirdness. This kind of intimacy was foreign to me, not my thing. Through all the instability my mind had tripped me with, I’d convinced myself that I could never achieve the Normal, could never bring it off. So I’d quit trying. But then I’d met Reevesy, his sexual orientation providing a natural buffer between us. Bullshitting myself that he could help with the rent, when I could afford it anyway, I let him in. Now, I’d even reached out to him with just a few well-laced words. Shown him I cared. And… holy shit, I did care.
A gutful of JD did nothing to obscure the revelation that my carefully maintained dividing lines were fading. Maybe meeting Reevesy was not at all happenstance. Maybe I was sick of being alone and consciously didn’t know it. Sick to death, until my unconscious took over and guided me to him.
He hugged me harder. I shocked myself by hugging him back.
“I’m gonna get you behind the wheel of my Chevelle this weekend,” I told him.
He chuckled. “Can’t picture myself driving a big, bad American beefcake-mobile.”
“I do it every day.”
“But, girlfriend, you are exceptional in every way.”
In my head I sensed a single black, beady-eyed crow landing on my car and perching like a hood ornament, as if he owned it. The crow was followed by ten others, then a hundred, then a thousand, all cawing the word “mine,” because they owned it now. Then they dug their beaks into every crease and crevasse until they lifted the car up and flew it down the block like a hovercraft. I fought the impulse to run to the window for a better look—and that internal tussle must have registered in my eyes because my roommate… who knows? Hard to tell what he saw; that is, what was in my head versus concrete reality.
I looked away.
“It’s so smooth, it drives itself. You’ll see.”
It took effort to turn toward the sink, but I made it there and dumped my shot glass. Shut my eyes and simmered in the blackness.
“Brad,” he said behind me.
I staggered a half step and put a hand on the kitchen counter to steady myself, my head ringing from the day’s exertions. The drive home tonight had been particularly rugged, as a row of tall palm trees along Crenshaw bent over, dipping almost into the roadway to get a better look at me. Then after sunset, my vision in one eye blurred as if I were looking through wax paper. The only thing that worked to click myself back into focus was to squint through my good eye like a demented pirate. And—oh yeah—sing old punk tunes from memory, screeching choruses out my open window as the cool salt air rushed in.
White riot, I want a riot, white riot, a riot all my own.
“You’re not well, dear.”
“Please, no lecture tonight, Reevesy.”
“My concern for you is real. And I fear you don’t understand what’s happening.”
He rose as gracefully as a dancer from his spot on the couch, his legs unfolding as his bare feet found the floor and gained traction. Gliding by me, he set the pint down on the counter with the spoon still in it, as if it were empty.
“Know why I’m eating your ice cream?” he said over his shoulder.
“’Cause you’re too damn cheap to buy your ow
n,” I said, following him to the hallway.
“Ha. You make me laugh, girlfriend. But, no, it’s because I’m disturbed, upset. And when I get like this, I eat comfort food to calm my nerves.”
“Franco’s a weenie. Forget him.”
He pointed his finger with a snap of the wrist.
“I agree, but this isn’t about him. Follow me.”
Pacing slowly and deliberately, David proceeded down the hall, poking his head into the bathroom on the left and his own room on the right before making a wide left at the end, straight into my bedroom. It’s a decent master with enough space for my queen-sized bed, a free-standing antique armoire, and the large oak desk my father used to have in his study, which I’ve stuck in the far corner. Aside from the usual small piles of clothing I leave almost everywhere, nothing looked out of place. But then, the screen to the second-story window had been removed and was leaning against the wall just below the windowsill. I was confused by that last detail.
“You did this?”
Reevesy responded with his patented diva lip-snarl.
“Darling, don’t be silly. Not now.”
He paused as dramatically as an illusionist introducing a featured trick, then sauntered over to the window.
“I was just back from the boardwalk,” he declared in a lower octave. “When I heard a noise, from back here! Thought it was you, but I said your name through the door, and all was silent. Yet I could hear breathing, so I thought, well, if she’s in trouble, at least she’s still alive.”
I flashed again on my bathtub dream.
“At least. Thanks, Reevesy, I’m touched.”
“Well, excuse me, but do I look like Chuck Norris to you?”
“So, you heard breathing.”
His eyes widened. “Yes. Then, ‘boom!’ This loud, sudden clatter, and then? More silence.” He fanned out his hand with an airborne sweep. “Like, like a big… bird flapped its wings and flew out the window!”
Or a thousand crows. The JD shots were pooling at the base of my brain, sweet and golden and numbing. The room was faintly fluttering, like an old movie, only this one was in color. My thoughts slowed down, way down, slowed to the point where it felt as if Reevesy’s words, and the details of the scene I was taking in, were coming and going, lapping me. To make matters worse, the tub began talking at me, declaring, in the voice of Wally Wadsworth, a smartass kid who used to taunt me on the bus in grade school, that no, I was not at all fit to occupy that tub unless I gave it a good scouring now and then.
