by Bruce Wagner
Jobs-who-is-always-standing-in-front-of-a-big-
screen-image-of-himself-have-up-his-sleeve loop (one year it was a rare cancer). CEO porn: hedgehogs with half-a-billion-dollar cash payouts (“the new status symbol”) and other assorted unjailed swine making 200,000,000 a year, retiring with guarantees of thousands of free hours on private jets (you didn’t even have to be on the plane yourself, you could just send it for friends like a taxi) plus eternal use of company-owned skyboxes, bodyguards, chauffeured cars, and “home lawn maintenance.” What irritated Joan most being that architecture was now firmly in the loop-the-loop consciousness of public domain. The same new bullshit modernist house in Santiago that was in 10 X 10_2 only took a month or so to work its way to Vogue, the smart-aleck Details fauxfags, and the Travel Channel’s oafish Amazing Vacation Homes. The Master Builder’s emporia information orgy was like some Philip K Dick PR firm automaton regurgitating to the tick of a nuclear clock: loop-the-loop artists endlessly rediscovered-repackaged with ballsy new psychosex bios, the Year of Bontecou, the Year of Goya, the Year of Arbus, the Year of Caravaggio (it was always the Year of Gehry, Koolhaas, Piano, and Hadid), before beginning again, looped in on itself, sniffing its own fulsome shit and vomit. Joan wasn’t even who she thought she was, merely a skin-sack of Diet Coke sugarwater and ruined ovarian eggs playing the role of Joan Herlihy, increasingly neurasthenic, bitterly nympho’d, aging mannequin manqué. Barbet, the playful playboy business partner and sometime lover of outsized libido and ambition; Pradeep, the debonair Delhian manchild who got off on hooking her up with a richie; Freiberg the satyr Medici, a Jack Palance in her customized version of Contempt. It was all some big dumb telenovela: even the sheer observation was “loopy”—Starckly unoriginal, banally incontestible, radiantly reliable. It was scary. Like the sage once said, we are not living, we are being lived. I don’t want to hear about Marfa anymore. I want Marfa to die like New Orleans. I don’t care about 60-lb Didion and her brave, beautiful Broadway-bound deathmarch. (The producer’s coup would be to fix it so she expired on the day of the premiere, like the Rent guy.) I just want this Mem. Please God let me do—In the file lay more taxonomized, staggering memento mori that could never be hers: the templelike Taiwan earthquake mem with its 2,455 lotus-blossomed inscriptions representing each victim; pedantic WW2 memorial—lowered Rainbow Pool and wallfield of 4,000 stars for every hundred soldiers dead; sunken, doomed, watersheeted voids of Arad’s footprints; canopied Arizona Memorial and ghostship of 11-hundred-and-77 souls (survivors of the attack are allowed to have their ashes interred within); Ando’s floating Fort Worth museum, and grassy skylit subterranean repository on the solemn lonely island of Naoshima; the 2,711 undulating Art Spiegelman cartoon steles of Eisenman’s mem to the Murdered Jews of Europe; Yad Vashem’s domed Hall of Names hovering like a deathstar over a bottomless well; Anouska Hempel Design’s buried Bahian resort within Itacaré’s verdant, vertiginous cove; Calatrava’s avian Sacramento River span, and Vebjørn Sand’s da Vinci footbridge in Norway (& those of Robert Maillart as well); the small, elegantly winged 9/11 altar on Staten Island honoring its 260 residents who died on that day; a Princeton student who won an Archiprix for his virtual Wave Garden just off the Pacific coast—torn veil mirroring electrical grid generated by waves and surfers; the churchified “hooded tower” of the Aires Mateus brothers’ orthogonal limestone Rector’s office at New University of Lisbon (unforgiving unblinking slits like those of Thom Mayne) with breathtaking attachment of banked Epidaurian steps; Testa’s gorgeous carbon-fiber skyscraper, woven like a basket, airily billowing naked except for elevator shafts; that burnt gnome Louis I Kahn’s unbuilt FDR mem on Roosevelt Island, linden trees leading to open stone room at the end of a finger that touched the sea; Michelucci’s meditative Chiesa di Longarone rotunda near Belluno; Johannesburg’s inner-city apartment block with Babel-barreled core, a hollowed-out basement filled with 3 stories of rubbish—Pawson’s anthology: ancient spiral tower at Samarra. Watery silence of Barragán’s magisterial Los Arboledas. Mexican grain silos. Neutra’s chapel at Miramar Naval Station. Noguchi streams and boulders. Dreamtime moonview platform, Katsura Palace. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty! Spiral Jetty! Spiral Jetty! Spiral Jetty! Spiral Jetty! Spiral Jetty! Stone enfilades…Shaker chairs…Orkney standing stones…Aqueducts…Pyramids…Bowls…Boxes…Balance…Pools…Harmonics…Reduction…Walls…Ramps…Mass…Economy…Ascent…Infinity…
She sat like a dazed animal.
She could still feel Lew’s come inside her.
The office hummed with undepressed interns.
She wanted to leave before Barbet arrived.
She decided to go visit her mother.
XXVI.
Ray
HE was thinking about his kids. Ghulpa said, with a kind of wonder, that he’d never spoken so much about them as he had to the visiting cop. He shrugged and stared at her teeth, which seemed to have found tortured new angles in their effort to escape her mouth and view the world.
BG was right. (Thankfully, she never judged him on that, or any account.) He’d done wrong by them and it pained him to talk of the past. Sure, things had soured between husband and wife, but was that any reason to excommunicate his own children, his blood? Cut them off at the root? They were good kids. Tough times back then, economically—a lot of keeping up with the Joneses. It killed Ray not to be able to provide: the Don Ho vacations, the once-a-week to Chasen’s, the new car every year and whatnot. God bless, but Marj was a ballbuster, she was rough on him for not being a bigger breadwinner, bitched him out right in front of the kids. That hurt. The bottom line was, no one could hold a candle to his father-in-law. That sentiment was always front and center. Ray actually liked the guy, which made it even harder.
He used to take the brood miniature golfing on Robertson just to get away from her. That’s what got him on the entrepreneurial kick. He secured a loan against the house her dad bought for them so he could buy in to Kidz Links, a 9 hole course that Chess and Joanie loved. $15,000 was a shitload of money back then. (He thought he could make it work but his partner was a thief.) The Links had bridges and tunnels and little windmills that swatted the ball away if you didn’t time it right—all kinds of fun things. The children played for free, of course, and got popular at school. Finally, it folded. Ray wanted so much more for them than he could give. It never sat well with him the way he treated his boy. When he was 5 years old, Chester used to ask for money every time the ice cream truck came. For a while Ray said the truck played that tune only when it was out of stock—the ice cream man’s way of saying “sorry” to the neighborhood. His thieving partner got a laugh out of that and played along. They told Chess to stay inside until it went away so the driver wouldn’t feel bad. It worked for about a week until he got wise and bawled his eyes out. Now Ray wondered, What was in my head?
He wondered plenty: where they were: if his children were even alive. You never knew. People had accidents and abductions (he crossed himself reflexively). Maybe Chess was in prison for torching an ice cream truck…the girl would be close to 40 now. He called Joanie his “princess.” Back then all the dads called their daughters Princess. Chester, he called—what—Chesterfield. (That’s what Ray used to smoke.) Occasionally, he thought of trying to get in touch with Marj. He couldn’t remember who told him but the old man knew she had remarried, a wealthy guy, one of those country-club types. A real-life duffer with no time for kiddie links. A breadwinner. He wondered if they’d had kids themselves. Maybe so…or he could have had some from another marriage. Eight Is Enough. Yours, Mine and Ours…anything was possible. Ray imagined large family gatherings in La Jolla or Oceanside or Carlsbad, seersucker Sunday brunches on the yacht. Champagne and Eggs Benedict. Probably a corporate man. Someone his ex father-in-law would approve of.
Maybe Ray was even a grandfather now, the thought of which compounded his remorse. At the same time, the possibility made it easier to distance himself. There were so many chasms to cross. He could do some
of that in his head, too old for the rest. What was the point of raking himself over the coals? There was a whole horde out there just like him: the gimpy fellow you passed on the sidewalk, the lonesome-looking lady boozer waiting for the light to change. Everyone had a history. Still, a divorce or even the death of a child was one thing but the deliberate amputation of a life, 2 lives, a wounding of innocents through absence born of self-indulgence, cowardice, or plain perversity was a cardinal sin. You heard about those sort of people but mostly they were mentally ill, vagrants or jail faces. At the end of his tug-of-war, Raymond Rausch considered himself an ordinary retiree who’d grown insular, dependent upon his dog and a woman from a country that was as exotic as whatever high tone beachside town he fantasized harbored Marj’s new life. Maybe the kids lived in Europe, where they’d been to boarding school, and learned other languages. They could have become doctors or lawyers. Chester might even be working for the ACLU! Wouldn’t that be something…Or maybe Marjorie was dead—again, he crossed himself. Joanie and Chester would probably spit if they saw him on the street. Not that they’d know who he was. He’d have to be wearing a sandwich board saying JOAN AND CHESTER RAUSCH’S FATHER, WITH THE DNA TO PROVE IT.
Ghulpa sensed his reflective mood and let him be. He sat in front of the TV eating lentils and rice. A great Cold Case was on. Somewhere in California. Marine has a fight with his pregnant wife. Leaves the house to go to Jack in the Box and cool off. 10 or 11 at night. Only gone about 45 minutes but in that time, a serial killer breaks in and bashes his old lady in the head. Rapes her. Later, neighbors say the Marine and his wife fought a lot. The swabbed semen belongs to just 15% of the population—the Marine being in that group. (The days before DNA.) Wife loses the kid but survives. Her short-term memory isn’t so good but she remembers all the trouble between them and tells police that he did it. They lock his ass away. After 4 years in San Quentin, the guy says one day his body begins to shake so violently that he decides to throw himself off the tier and end it. That’s when the lightbulb goes off: he’s in prison for a reason, and everything will sort itself out. 16 years go by. It’s friggin Papillon. The Cold Casers finally get on it. Track down the real killer, currently in the penitentiary, a black sonofabitch who bashed in ladies’ heads. That was his MO—bash and rape. Killed about 7 of ’em. The Basher and the Cold Casers have a heart-to-heart. They tell him he’s done a lot of bad things in his life that he can’t make good. But there’s one case where he still can make a difference. Ask him about the Marine. Turns out the Basher’s a Marine too. Tells the cops it was the only one of his crimes that ever really bothered him—because a fellow Marine had been falsely accused. Semper Fidelis! He confesses, and they release the husband. State gives him a hundred dollars a day for all the years of incarceration. Something like that. Comes out to $600,000. He cuts a check to the lawyer for 200 grand and blows the rest in the stock market. “If God wanted me to be rich, I’d win the lottery. So it’s not that big a deal. But paycheck to paycheck that’s my life back, my prayer. And that’s what I got.” He’s free.
Ghulpa joined him for the last 15 minutes of the program.
“They broke in your house too,” she said sagely, before collecting his bright orange bowl for a refill. “Just like that monster. Don’t you forget it.”
Ray said he wanted to visit Friar in the morning.
He was going to take him home, no matter what the doctors said.
XXVII.
Chester
CHESS enjoyed not returning Maurie’s calls.
Laxmi came by a few times, with raw foods and various herbal concoctions. Shit like Gaba, Traumeel, and L-Tryptophan. They smoked dope together, and in the back of his mind he always thought something sexy might go down. (He let her rub the Traumeel on his shoulders but nothing “happened.”) He told her not to tell Maurie she was visiting and Laxmi seemed cool with the request. Not because they were doing anything illicit—it just wasn’t anybody’s business. Though maybe he shouldn’t have voiced that; he doubted if she’d already blabbed but wondered all the same. (Maybe his remark would give her an incentive.) Chess didn’t even really know if she and the Jew were still “together.” Since Laxmi hadn’t said anything to the contrary, they probably were. He could just see them patching things up—if the guy laid another half-grand on her, she’d chill right out.
That isn’t fair. Laxmi wasn’t like that. She’s a good girl. Must be the pain talking.
It wasn’t until after she left that Chess realized he hadn’t been turned on by the minimassage, and that spooked him. Could be the fistfuls of vikes he was taking…or maybe it was nerve damage. The nerves that feed my dick. It was so fucked up.
Some functionary from Friday Night Frights called to ask about getting the tape back. He couldn’t believe they’d be that cheap—maybe it was a legal thing. But the guy was asking about a 2nd tape, the one “sent by mistake.” The dumbfuck asked him to leave it by the door for a messenger to pick up. Chess didn’t even get the chance to say what the fuck are you talking about.
He searched the big envelope the compilation DVD and his “audition” tape had arrived in, and there it was, overlooked. Chess remembered clocking the 2nd tape subliminally, then being so thrown by the veterinary clinic clip that he forgot it was there.
He popped it in the VCR.
There was Maurie, in-studio, talking to camera in the role of Perp—laying out the patsy game.
I’ve known Chester a long time. We’re buds. I’m a director and I usually have him do all my location scouting. I think lately his life is on the dull side—I don’t think he’d mind a little spicing up.
“On the dull side.” The motherfucker. “Buds.” What did that mean? Like some word out of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “I’m a director.” Right, you’re Ridley fuckin Scott. “I usually have him do all my location scouting.”
Mah nigger!
THEY met at a patisserie on Doheny called In Conversation. Mr DeConcini was early and stood to greet him at a tiny outside table, sympathetically watching his client move slowly toward him, clearly in distress. They shook hands and Chess winced from the strength of the grip. He got a stabbing pain. The attorney apologized.
Remar was bald, black, buff, and gay, one of those aggressive queers in delicate, rimless glasses that you don’t want to tangle with. Chess was right—the lawyer confirmed he’d been tipped by someone on the show. They chitchatted before the plaintiff gave the waiter his order: orange juice, latte, chocolate croissant. He knew the breakfast was a freebie.
Remar asked for an egg-white omelet, and red Tabasco.
“You know, this is really a growth industry in terms of recent litigation. Some of these shows are just outrageous! It’s not just the injuries—which many people don’t even report, because they wind up, for God knows what reason, still consenting to be on the broadcast. That’s America—we love to be on television! The fame game. Born and bred for it. I think it’s one thing if you’re a 19 year old kid and all your friends watch this garbage and somehow it’s cool to be made a jackass. When you’re 19 you’ve got a whole different mind- and body-set, you’re out there on weekends indulging in dubious activities anyway—I know I was!—skateboarding, gettin concussions, whatever. So you’re used to being knocked around. But it’s something else entirely if you’re an adult person, fully grown, awakening each day with the reasonable expectation one’s privacy is not going to be violated in an egregious, frivolous manner, for the sport of others. How old are you, Chester?”
“41. I’ll be 42 in 3 months.”
“You’re 41—you’ve put away childish things. Now, I don’t know what in the world your so-called friend had in mind to think that you would somehow enjoy a hazing. Which is what this was. A dangerous, unregulated hazing. It’s actually worse: at least fraternity kids know what to expect, to a degree. This is more equivalent to an act of terrorism! I am not exaggerating, my friend. This sort of thing is a cultural fad that is going to have major legal consequence
s for the networks and their parent companies. It already has. We will not tolerate bloodsport, Mr Herlihy. We are not living in Roman times—yet, anyway! All of these cases are landmark, because they will help reverse a horrible trend, a low cultural watermark. Collectively, we are beginning to deplete their pocketbooks, and that is the only way to get their attention. So I see this as an opportunity, Mr Herlihy. An opportunity to make you more than whole.”
Chess liked what he was hearing. “Aren’t there limits on this sort of thing? ‘Ceilings’? Isn’t that what they call—I mean, if it’s tied to income…if you need me to put together tax returns for the last 5 years, it’s not going to be pretty. I don’t know if I’ve even filed.”
“Those ‘caps’ only refer to noneconomic damages involving medical malpractice. This is not that, my friend. This is close to criminal negligence. We ain’t got no cap. In my experience, claims like these can generate jury verdicts in the high 6’s—that’s without punitive damages! No guarantees, of course.”
“What about Maurie? I mean, would he be part of the suit?”
“Might be.”
He removed his lenses and methodically cleaned them with a fine-knit cloth. Chester thought it was a move he probably made while in court, for the benefit of a jury.
