by Ni-Ni Simone
“He was my man first, Kitty!”
“Which one, Camille? Who, Harry? Tom? Bill? Lionel? Ray? Joe? Do tell, dear. Because we both know you had to pull a name out of the hat just to pin it on someone.”
Camille jabbed a finger through the air. “You shut your filthy mouth with your lies!” she shouted. “You know who my man was, Kitty. Richard, that’s who. So don’t you dare go there! That man was mine. And you know it. I gave him everything.”
I blinked. Took in the heated exchange between Kitty and my mother, my hand tightly gripping my phone.
“And look at you now, Camille. With nothing,” Kitty declared. “No career. No life. No money. Milking off your daughter’s measly earnings. Stuck in a time capsule wearing old relics from some forgotten movie set. It’s no wonder Heather is such a mess. Look at who her role model has been: a damn drunk whose spent her life chasing a lie!
“And no matter how many head nods you garnered back in your heyday, no matter how much dust has collected on that nineteen-nineties Oscar you covet, you’re still a nobody! Nothing more than lily-white trash, Camille. So spare me the I Know Who I Am monologue because no matter how many bottles of scotch you try to drown your sorrows in, you will always be the same dirty, snotty-nosed Norma Marie Schumacher with the dingy panties whose hick daddy loved crawling—”
Slap!
Camille’s hand landed across Kitty’s face.
I blinked. Ohmygod! I couldn’t believe—
“How dare you?!” Camille shouted as her body shook. “You seem to have forgotten that you’re from the same backwoods of Mississippi as—”
Slap!
Kitty’s hand seared into Camille’s left cheek. “Get out!” she yelled. “You and your bastard child get the hell out of my office! Or, so help me God—”
“You evil biiiiiiitch!” Camille stepped out of her left shoe and threw it at Kitty. It flew over Kitty’s head and hit the wall in back of her. “Screw you! Screw your television show! And screw your damn money!” Camille yanked me by the arm, pulling me out of my seat. “Let’s go, Heather. We’re outta this hellhole.”
She stormed toward the door, hobbling on one heel while dragging me in tow.
My heart sank. My career with Kitty Productions was officially over.
Thanks to my mother.
And all I kept thinking as I was being dragged out of Kitty’s office was, “Way to go, Camille.”
8
Spencer
“I think I know you,” Daddy said as he turned his head toward me and narrowed his eyes. He did that sometimes. . . well, um, most times. Forgot. Then miraculously remembered.
This afternoon was obviously another one of those days when his mind jumped from thought to thought. Scatterbrained, that’s what he’d become. His brain was one big scrambled egg. Oh, it was horrid.
Daddy’s Alzheimer’s was chewing out his memory. And I hated seeing him like this. Vacant. One big parking lot full of jumbled recollections.
I stared at him. He was donned in a black velvet smoking jacket and red silk ascot stretched across the sofa. A fire blazed in the hearth of his sitting area despite it being a deliciously warm eighty-seven degrees outside.
I blinked four times.
What in the heebie jeebies?!
From the waist down, Daddy was in a pair of striped boxers, with his black dress socks on pulled up over his calves and a pair of burgundy dress shoes.
I sighed inwardly. “Daddy, where are your pants?”
“Now that’s none of your business, gal,” he said tersely. He stretched an arm and pointed his finger at me. “I do know you.”
“I know, Daddy, you already told me.”
“Ooh wee,” he said, slapping his knee, “you were one sassy gal. Fast, too.”
I blinked. “Excu—”
“Never could keep your skirt down,” he continued. “Always somewhere tryna show your pocketbook.”
“To show my whaaaat? My pocketbook? Daddy, lies! I don’t go around showing anyone my, my . . .”
Ohmygod! Realization bloomed. Daddy wasn’t talking about one of my coveted Chanel or Dior bags, he was talking about—
Ewww.
I stomped a heeled foot with perhaps more vigor than needed. Danggit, I could have broken my heel! “Lies!” I snapped. “You ole nasty goat! I will scrub your mouth out with bleach. You filthy heathen!”
Daddy laughed. “Simmer down, kitten. The truth don’t tell no lies, and a lie don’t tell no truths.”
My lashes flapped. I wasn’t in the mood for any of Daddy’s riddles today. I took a deep breath and counted to fifteen in my head. I had to remind myself that he wasn’t really Daddy. I mean, he was, but then he wasn’t. He looked like Daddy. But he didn’t act like him. Most times I didn’t know who he was.
He was becoming more and more of a stranger with each passing day. And obviously I was becoming more of one to him as well.
“Daddy, are you taking your medications?”
“Duh, no.”
I frowned. “And why not? You know you need them to stay sane.”
“I’m already sane,” he said over a laugh. “I’m the most lucid one in this entire gated prison. It’s you and the rest of the world who are crazy. Keeping an old man under lock and key.”
I let out an exaggerated sigh. “Oh, Daddy, stop. You’re not in prison. And no one’s keeping you under lock and key.”
He glanced over at the two hired orderlies with bulging muscles stuffed in white uniforms on the other side of the room.
“Oh, well. Not really. They’re here for your safety. To keep an eye on you.”
“Dammit!” he swore as the fire hissed and crackled. “I don’t need to be eyed! I need to be entertained! Lock me up with three strippers in sparkly bikini bottoms. Not those”—he flicked a thumb over in the orderlies’ direction—“two hunky dorks.”
I looked over at the two men, who both pretended not to be fazed by Daddy’s ramblings. They both acted as if they weren’t in the room with us.
“Well, there’ll be no topless hoochies watching over you,” I stated firmly.
“Fine, Joy Kill. Be like that. Deprive a dying old man of his last wishes.”
I swallowed hard. “Daddy, stop talking foolery. You’re not dying. And you still need to be taking your meds.”
He snorted. “Hush, li’l darling,” he stage-whispered, placing his finger to his lips. “The walls have ears. Everything you say, everything you do, they’re recording.”
“Who?” I asked, glancing around his ginormous suite. “Who’s recording us?”
“Big Brother. Martians. The feds. CIA. The po-po,” he rattled off, adding a sly wink. “They see”—he lowered his voice to nearly an inaudible whisper—“and hear everything.”
I rolled my eyes up in my head. I counted to sixteen this time, then backward. I was so, so confused. How could Daddy be so fascinating and frustrating at the same time? How could I love him and yet be so angry with him?
I swept my eyes around his suite, locking my gaze on the wall of priceless artwork. I needed a distraction from the thoughts slowly swirling around in my head. I wanted to claw Daddy’s brains out. Yell and scream. And have one of my big fancy tantrums. Oooh, I felt a fit of vandalism coming on, ripping down curtains and smashing out light fixtures.
But I couldn’t do it.
Not with Daddy. He was still Daddy to me. Still the man who had loved me all of my life. No matter how far he’d traveled in his day, he’d always made time for me—always calling, always e-mailing and texting, always bringing me back some delicious, shiny trinket and juicy tales of his most exotic adventures.
So how could I slap him upside the head with my purse? I gripped the handle of my handbag tighter as guilt swept through me for having had such unkind thoughts.
I had to remind myself that Daddy was the one who loved me most. Even when he was somewhere on the other side of the globe, he’d still felt more present in my life than my own mother. Kitty cou
ld be right here, in the same house with me, and still be so far, far, away.
Distant. Detached. Disinterested.
And yet Daddy brought life (no matter how jumbled) into an otherwise dead space. He knew how to fill an empty room with excitement. Even now, in all of his feebleness, he knew how to breathe life into a room.
I blinked Daddy back into view and tried to force a smile to spread over my face. But it was hard fake-smiling when all I saw was a shriveled shell of a man lying across a sofa in a pair of boxers and dress socks.
All I saw in my mind’s eye was Daddy with a bunch of oozing bed—well, sofa—sores. Ugh.
Finally, after standing in the same spot for almost forever, I whisked over toward the sofa, then leaned in and kissed him on the forehead.
“Okay, Daddy. I gotta go. Please take your meds. Okay?”
He stared at me through confused, wrinkled eyes and said, “I think I know you.”
My bottom lip quivered. “I think I know you, too,” I whispered, before turning on my heel and moving swiftly toward the double doors.
And then the entire room moved. At first, I thought it was because the ground was shaking from an earthquake or that the floor was just dropping out from under my feet, but then I realized Daddy had leapt from the sofa and had grabbed me by the arm and swung me around to face him.
“Get me out of here, Cleola.”
* * *
“Tell me now. Who is she?”
I heard Kitty’s breath hitch. Then she clucked her teeth. “Who is who?”
I paced the length of my wraparound balcony. “Oh, don’t dilly-dally with me, lady. And don’t play dumb, although you do it so well. Who is Cleola?”
“Oh, for the love of God, not this again. Heather and her wretched mother just stormed out of here, and now I need to—”
“Yes, Mother. This again. And you need to start flapping your gums,” I said, placing a hand on my hip as I stalked up and down and around the length of my balcony. “I don’t care about Heather or her cockamamie mother storming out of your goshdiggity-dang office. Daddy called me her name again. And I want to know why. Why does he keep talking about her? It’s not making sense. I’m getting tired of him talking about this ole biddy, if she even is one. Maybe she’s not some old slore; maybe she’s his mistress.”
“And maybe you should delete my numbers, Spencer,” my mother said snidely. “I have more pressing matters to contend with, like destroying a career, like teaching little tramps a very valuable lesson about life and business. Now—”
“Oh, shut it, Mother! All I want to know is who in the heck this Cleola Mae is?”
Kitty huffed. “Spencer, darling, tell me why I ever gave birth to you? Why did I carry you for nine excruciating months, then suffer through twenty-three hours of labor to only push out a dimwit, huh? Please tell me, my darling child. Because clearly you calling me about the ramblings of some shriveled old man with more cobwebs in his brain than reality is beyond the scope of my intelligence.
“That man needs to be put down. He needs to be thrown out into the wilderness and left to be eaten by wild boars. He’s useless. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see how scattered he is, huh, Spencer? The man spends his days picking his nose and trying to remember which day of the week it is, smelling like the inside of a zoo, and you have the audacity to call me about some imaginary woman named Cleola? You damn ditz-ball! How am I supposed to know? Maybe she’s some dead woman, some ghost your father sees in that little pea-brain mind of his.”
I blanched. Felt the blood from my face drain. Kitty’s unexpected tirade felt like I’d been shot up with a vial of Novocain, and suddenly I felt numb. I felt my throat closing.
“Who is she?” I pushed out over a choke.
“Spencer, I’m warning you: Don’t bother me with this nonsense. It’s nothing but foolishness. Your father is sick. Demented. I don’t even know why I ever married him in the first place. I should have married that Ahmed boy, the young Saudi Arabian prince I met in that scandalous sex club in Greenwich Village in New York, instead of getting hitched to some old mule. Wealth or not, I should have known something like this would soon happen.
“Take it from me, my darling Spencer, never marry an old man with money or you’ll end up with an old coot whose man parts don’t work and all he has is a mind full of mothballs. Now stop this madness, Spencer. There is no Cleola Mae. She doesn’t exist. She’s some crazy figment of your father’s overactive imagination. So let that man have his imaginary friends, and let me get back to teaching your junkie-whore friend and her mother the lesson of their miserable lives, before I forget you’re my daughter and give you a tongue lashing that’ll make your ears bleed and wish you were deaf.”
“Oh, bring it on, Kitty!” I screamed into the phone. “You wanna rumble with me, huh, Kitty? You wanna get your edges pulled back? You, you, leech! You bloodsucking harlot! You don’t want any of this fire I spit, lady! I will burn you down, Kitty! Set your entire life ablaze! You, you . . . !”
Silence.
“Hello? Hello? Kitty?”
The line was dead.
“Aaaaah!” I screamed, grabbing the crystal goblet I’d left on the small round table and throwing it over the side of the balcony.
9
Rich
I was at Lavender Lounge.
A small boutique bar in Beverly Hills.
Solo.
I should’ve been a duo with Spencer, though.
But I wasn’t.
Why?
Well . . . let’s see . . . there were only two other places Whore-bie could be . . .
On her knees.
Or in the backseat of some MCM’s car unlatching her jaw.
Needless to say, she was over an hour late, leaving me to violate my usual diet of clean eating with a platter of bacon-wrapped, barbeque-dipped hot wings and a pitcher of beer, straight from the tap. Olde English, to be exact. Or malt Community Service, as I liked to call it—my way of giving back.
You gotta do it for the people sometimes.
Can’t be bourgeois all the time, which is exactly why I poured a li’l beer from my mug onto the bar.
“And exactly what are you doing, Miss Girl?” The bartender snapped, quickly wiping up my wet shrine.
All I could do was snort, ’cause obviously he wasn’t ready. “Bish, please!” I looked him over from the red flip-flops on his feet to the jelled spikes in his black hair. “Now snap, snap, zap! Run along!”
He frowned, shook his dome, and walked away.
Ask me if I cared.
Not one raggedy damn. As long as he kept this beer flowin’ and these hot wings greasy, his small thoughts were of no moment to me.
Chile, cheese.
Boo, please.
What. Ever.
Any. Way. Like I was sayin’, Spencer or no Spencer, I was gon’ sit at this pink glass bar, heels off, and toes stretched out, while I sucked barbeque juice off my fingertips, rocked my shoulders to the beat of the stage, and was entertained.
Rosita, a six-three man-queen, donned the small stage in a glittering kelly-green bodysuit, five-inch matching heels, and a layered honey-blond wig that swung from side to side. And this heifer sang not one, but was on her third give-me-life number! About sweet love, making love, giving up good love, and why you should never trust love. All of which touched my heart and set my blue-blooded soul on fire!
She sang to me, honey, saaaaaaang!
Rosita belted out, “Love shouldn’t hurt/And if it’s not sweet like 90’s R&B, I don’t want it . . .”
“Sang, bish!” I screamed, a barbeque-drippin’ hot wing in one hand and the other testifying in the air. “If it’s not sweet like 90’s R&B, baby!” I said, then grooved into a hum.
Rosita sang, “I don’t wanna say good-bye/But I gotta go/I gotta leave!”
“Preach!” I waved another hand to the heavens.
Rosita greeted my praise with a wink, while the bartender wiped up the barbeque juice that d
ripped onto the bar with a groan.
Ig. Nore. He was invisible to me. All that mattered was Rosita as she sang my love story.
“You got tears pourin’ from my eyes /And divas don’t cry.” Rosita interrupted my thoughts. And shut. The. Whole. Bar. Down!
The crowd went wild.
Tears filled my eyes, but I refused to cry. Like this heifer had said, “Divas don’t cry! They give good love. And testify!”
Rosita had torn both ends of her boxin’-panties with me. All I could do was stand up and give a slow clap after every word I spoke. “You. Better. Have. Church. Up. In. Here. Tootsie Roll!”
I stomped my stocking-covered foot as Rosita continued on.
“You betta talk about it,” I screamed, reaching for another hot wing as I retook my seat.
But.
Just as I stuffed a hot wing in my mouth, the music came to screeching halt, and Rosita said, “Wait, just wait.” She blinked in disbelief, then walked to the edge of the stage and placed her hands over her eyes like a sun visor. “I knew I knew you, honey. Is that Miss Rich Montgomery? The. Rich. Montgomery?” She squinted. “Oh, my God, it is you. Well, clutchin’ pearls! The queen of the Pampered Princesses is in the lounge tonight!”
I pulled a bone from my mouth and stopped mid-chew.
“Yasss, honey!” she squealed. “That is you! The diva of all divas, honey!”
I gave her a closed-mouth cheese, waved my barbeque-drowned fingertips in the air, and finished chewing my hot wing.
“I can’t believe you’re here! Clutching, pearls, chile, cheese!” She carried on, mocking me. I swallowed and smiled but didn’t say a word as Rosita carried on, “Girl, we love you up in here! I know you over there tearing up them wings but, ummm, Miss Girl, you’re the turn-up queen, and I need you up on stage with me!”
