by Bruce Wagner
• • •
THAT NIGHT, BECCA, Annie, and Larry Levine went to a party with a Kiss cover band whose members were all midgets. It was funny for about a minute.
Afterward, they cruised the Chateau. Annie recognized Paul Schrader sitting on one of the epic couches of the cavernous living room–style lobby. Larry was excited, but Becca didn’t know who Paul Schrader was. They were a little drunk by then and went over to introduce themselves. Larry went on about Raging Bull and Annie said how much she loved Auto Focus. Mr. Schrader was cordial and told Becca that she looked like Drew Barrymore. Annie of course spewed that Becca was a professional look-alike, and Mr. Schrader seemed all interested in that. Mr. Schrader keenly referenced the Spike Jonze movie, in which Becca said she had a small part. Then Larry spewed that Becca’s boyfriend was in it too and that he was a Russell Crowe “body snatcher.” Mr. Schrader, himself a bit tipsy, really got off on that. Becca gave Larry a little frown while telling Mr. Schrader that she didn’t do look-alike work anymore and that she also worked for Viv Wembley as her personal assistant. Mr. Schrader said he knew Viv and that he was supposed to have done a movie with her and Kit Lightfoot that was a kind of sequel to American Gigolo. Larry said that he’d auditioned for the Aronofsky movie that Kit was about to star in before he got brained. Mr. Schrader knew all about the Aronofsky movie too and said that, as far as he was aware, the project had been completely scrapped. (They weren’t going to recast.) Annie said that Larry was written up in the L.A. Times a few months ago because he got a job at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf posing as a retarded person as research for his role in that very film. Mr. Schrader, who really did seem to know about everything that was happening in the world and especially in Hollywood, burst out laughing and said he actually remembered reading something about that on-line. He couldn’t stop chortling about Larry’s I Am Sam bit. Then Mr. Schrader’s friend returned from the rest room, and Becca instantly recognized him from the set of Six Feet Under—the “other Alan,” Alan Poul. (Alan Ball was the creator, and Alan Poul was, according to Mr. Ball, “the engine.”) On inebriated impulse, Becca spoke of her not entirely satisfying, semirecurring role as a cadaver, and Mr. Schrader, deeper in his cups, tried to cajole Alan into giving Becca a short monologue to deliver on the next show. “You’re wasting her talents,” he said. “Have the writers give the stiff a few lines—that’s a no-brainer. Doesn’t Alan Ball go for all that pretentious, surrealistic shit?” “No,” said Mr. Poul, gamely, “that would be you.” “You could have a dream sequence of nude, talking corpses,” suggested Mr. Schrader indomitably. “Only if we can insert Bob Crane,” said Mr. Poul.
Buddhism for Dummies
WHAT HAD HAPPENED to him?
An untold time, staggered by pain and fear. Drowning: cyclonic; then, a battering of seawalls in his head. The nurses said that for a while he kept asking if he’d been struck by a big blue bus.
There was the period he thought he’d been shot. That someone had abducted him, and stuffed him in a car trunk.
Then he thought he had a bad flu that migrated to his head.
• • •
CEDARS TIME: aside from medical staff, the Quiet People came to sit in chairs by the bed. It seemed like they came just to close their eyes. Nothing ever disturbed them. Others visited, familiar imprints—Agent, Friend, Fiancée—now he could summon their genealogies, but in Cedars Time, he could not. Impossible to trace ancestries. The only faces he knew were those of his parents. For a week, R.J. hovered before him, changing sheets and soiled bedclothes. She comforted him in the night when he cried out. So beautiful. R.J. told him she had learned to live with the cancer and that it was a stern but thoughtful companion who would never leave her like his father did. She said not to be angry with Burke for he was doing the best that he could. It was true: he had been so tender. Sometimes when he sauntered in with that Dad-aftershave and a horny word for the nurses (they loved it), Kit was so happy to see him that he burst into tears—Burke daubed his cheeks with a custom handkerchief reeking of piquant fatherhood regained. He left the handkerchief behind, and Kit held it through the night, burying his nose in the softness like a glue sniffer when he woke up terrified. His father grew fiercely protective; hospital security did a fine job, but it wasn’t enough. He hired a gentle giant, a bodyguard from Fiji whose life Burke had saved in South Vegas, to sit at the door and make sure no one trespassed because there were wily, fucked-up people who’d become distraught and obsessive since the incident, who meant well but were determined to lay hands on Kit for a healing. The nurses told Kit he was a famous star, and he took their word at face value even if it couldn’t be processed. A large plasma screen was installed in the Cedars suite, and Tula and Kit and the Quiet People (later to become the Shaved-Heads) watched DVDs. Burke fired an R.N. when he found out she’d brought in a stack of Kit’s movies. He watched one but didn’t recognize himself. Why was his father so mad.
• • •
HE COULDN’T REMEMBER anything that had happened in the months before the assault. (Albeit he never made much effort.) It took everything he had to be present and fight the panic of being entombed, synaptically stuck in a berserk new reality. Not until he was transferred to Valle Verde did Kit try to recall what life had once been like. In rehab, there was much more space and time. Ram Dass came, angel-faced and self-deprecating (Ram was an initialism for run at the mouth, he said). He told Kit to remember his Buddhist teacher, Gil Weiskopf Roshi—and Kit realized he’d been thinking of the guru all along, visualizing his face before him, whenever, as in Ram Dass’s phrase, he “surfed the silence.”
Ram Dass jovially, gently, literally guided him back to vipassana, got him focused on the breath beneath his nose, on body and sensation, dispersement of pain and dread. The pain and dread would arise and fall away, he said, the fear would come and go, though nothing ever came and nothing ever went, there was only the luminous fullness of the now. Vipassana, he said, was the gift that dissolved all makeshift borders. Ram Dass brought him a light and sound machine so Kit could watch the universe switch on, dancing beneath the goggles. He became a particle in the rainbow’s spectrum, a divine, lowly microbe. Now he remembered his first retreat, awakening at four in the morning, sixteen hours of vipassana a day for two weeks, remembered the silence and segregation of sexes, the prostrations, walking meditations, and mealtime prayers, cosmos in a teacup, all barriers transient, dissolved, impermanent. At Valle Verde his practice slowly returned, long preceding the recalled details, the linear landscape, of his life. Wasn’t that as it should be? Wasn’t the practice the only thing that was real?
He couldn’t remember meeting Ram Dass at Yoga House, yet his mind lit on the Getty boy: beneath goggles’ pyrotechnics, Kit saw himself in an elevator, rising . . . stepping from the gunmetal door that opened with a whoosh to the invalid’s master bedroom, then, as in 2001’s finale, standing at the foot of the bed where the ruined scion lay—himself now prone, Coptic prince dead on a sepulchre, though made not of stone: wizened and unborn, timeless and untimed.
Nakedly clothed in the great Self.
• • •
THE MONTHS PASSED, and he was not so imprisoned.
His body was stodgily effective and hadn’t lost much tone. He had gained weight because the cocktail of drugs made him ravenous. He could finally look in the mirror and court the being who stared back. He knew him a little more each day. He would know him intimately and be filled with compassion and resolve. Such was the power of his will.
• • •
(THE WILL THAT, to his celluloid image, had married and mesmerized billions of eyes.)
• • •
THE QUIET PEOPLE patiently tutored. They reasserted that the name of the Buddha meant “one who is awake,” and again and again offered up the Three Jewels—the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. They said “Buddhism” did not exist. That Siddhartha Gautama was simply a man who saw things as they were: that to live was to suffer, that suffering was caused by at
tachment, that there was a cure for suffering and that cure was the Eightfold Path. They said bodily sensations gave rise to aversion and craving and that one could train oneself not to react to what inevitably arose then passed away. Over and over they told him that the difference between buddhas and sentient beings was that a buddha realized all phenomena were totally devoid of arising, dwelling, and ceasing, and had no true existence, whereas sentient beings believed all phenomena to be real and solid; a buddha understood that things and the world were nonexistent, whereas sentient beings believed that things and the world existed. None of this was new to him, but of course everything was new and infectiously, primally urgent. Kit had no choice but to passionately embrace the diamond-pointed construct, to dissolve in it, and in time he became grateful that his own temple had collapsed, it had after all been shoddily built, its upkeep wanting, its materials poor, already in shambles when it came down, he was grateful to near ecstasy that the foundation had remained and proved sound, grateful he’d long ago taken refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, and that for all his warped and lurid rendezvous, his sleazy affairs of self, the vows still held. At Valle Verde he took refuge again, a sacramental honeymooner with no choice but to rewed infinity, and all the mysterious rigors and ceremonies that honed consciousness, he could either do that or give himself to madness because his life had at last become nothing but what it always had been—a dream.
. . . Beginner’s Mind. Again and again, over and over they spoke of the irrefutable peace as prescribed by the Great Scientist, guiding Kit through the Four Sublime States and Four Vows, the Three Sufferings and Three Stains, the Three Poisons, Three Dharma Seals, Three Aspects, and Three Lesser Pains:
Not getting what one wants.
Meeting with what one does not want.
Being separated from loved ones and encountering enemies.
Mediation
A GRAY DAY at Department 11 of the Superior Court of Los Angeles, California, the Honorable Lewis P. Leacock presiding.
The flag had been dutifully faced; principles for which it stood, recognized; pledges and oaths, sworn. A phalanx of attorneys lined up before the judge, who busied himself with paperwork, ignoring them. An unhappy Burke Lightfoot sat eight rows back.
“I see there was a motion for sanctions and that motion was denied,” said the judge.
“Your Honor,” said an attorney, “as a matter of housekeeping, the court has bifurcated those original issues.”
“What happened to the one-oh-one?”
“The one-oh-one,” said another attorney, “has been compromised through the public administrator.”
“You’re saying the eleven-seven hundred is frivolous?”
“Your Honor, the petition was never consented to.”
“Then doesn’t it make sense to get all these things before one person?”
“Counsel is asking the court to put the remaining matters over to March,” said a third attorney.
“You’re not answering the question,” the judge said testily. He looked over his eyeglasses. “I repeat: doesn’t it make sense to get all of these things before one person?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” said one of them.
“We are simply asking that 070441 be consolidated into 070584,” said another.
The judge said to a fourth, “Do you have a problem with that?”
“No, Your Honor.”
He returned to his paper sifting. “Then 070441 will be consolidated into 070584. This looks like it’s ready for mediation. Let’s clear the notes. When would you like your hearing date, with the understanding it will not be continued again?”
“We’d like ninety days, Your Honor,” said the first.
“All right. How about the week of April the twenty-eighth?”
“Your Honor, I have a three-day trial on the thirtieth,” said another.
“How about the second week of May—May seventeenth?”
A third said, “Your Honor, I have a five-day trial on that date.”
“June the fifteenth.”
A fourth said, “Your Honor, I have a three-day trial on the sixteenth.”
There was some laughter from the spectators though not from Mr. Lightfoot.
Or the judge. “Whichever trial comes first takes precedence! There’s a lot of money involved in this case—I should think that would act as an incentive. See you on the fifteenth!”
• • •
AFTERWARD, THE CORRIDOR was choked with lawyers, marshals, pregnant women, and tattooed men.
Team Lightfoot stiffened slightly as Burke approached. “I thought you were petitioning to unfreeze the assets.”
“Court won’t do it, Burke. We’ve been through that.”
“They don’t seem to have a problem disbursing legal funds, Lou,” said Burke, sardonically. “For y’all. And what’s this shit about mediation?”
“We’re gonna give it a shot, Burke. Frankly, I think we’re better off settling than taking this to trial.”
“Jerry’s right,” said a cohort. “We’ll have a much better shot.”
“I don’t know how much longer I can hold out, boys!”
“We can’t advance you more monies, Burke.”
“What are we talkin’ about, guys?” said Burke, livid. “We’re sittin on sixty million dollars, kids, ten of that more or less liquid. And you’re tellin me the court won’t toss me a SAG royalties bone? Lou, I got expenses. I got a full-time freakin bodyguard.”
“He’s paid out of the estate, Burke.”
“Not the food he eats, gentlemen! Fill that loophole, will ya? I should have stock in fuckin Koo Koo Roo.”
“Nothing compels you to buy him dinner, Burke.”
“Right. Nothin but doin the right thing. Remember that? What a concept. Listen, Tula is the thin blue line between my boy and a very hostile fuckin world. I should have five Tulas but I cain’t afford it.” He took his foot off the pedal. “I should say fat blue line, cause he sure knows how to eat! Eats more than Dick Cheney.”
“Keep your receipts,” said the counsel. “And submit.”
“Keep a log of every expense.”
“Have you arranged for the tutor?” asked a cocounsel.
“I’m settin it up.”
“Don’t drag your feet on that,” said the other. “If we do wind up going to trial, it has to look good in terms of provision of care.”
“If anyone thinks they can do a better job then I have, they’re welcome to try. I can’t believe this is even up for grabs! I’m his daddy. It’s a slam fucking dunk! Listen, kids: it’s a hardship.” He could see how his personality grated on them, but what could he do? He would rim their greedy assholes if that’d help loosen up some funds. “And I know that you know that. And you guys are doin a helluva job. So don’t think I’m not grateful. I know it’s all going to work out in the end. At least I sure fucking hope so. Cause I am sure as hell not going to stand by and watch my son’s money handed over to the state. Or Mr. William Morris or whomever. But you gotta know that once we’re past the established five-block radius, we are fair fucking media game. The police do a pretty good job and the neighbors have been great—though who knows how long that’s gonna last—but I’m tellin ya, it’s like living in a serious cocksucking fishbowl over there! Hell, I can’t even conduct a romantic life! Fellas! C’mon! What good does Viagra do if you don’t have the opportunity for usage? The paparazzi, by the way—in case you didn’t know—are now flying choppers over my motherloving airspace! And that’s illegal. So put yourself in my Nikes and see how long you’d last. Kit’s barely been out of house—as his guardian, I can’t risk having a telephoto of him not looking his GQ best ending up in some tabloid.” He paused, inhaling martyrdom. “I’m tellin you, kids, I am really in the trenches here. Is the court aware of that?”
“Gotta tough it out, Burke,” said the attorney, beginning a slow retreat down the hall. “There’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
“At the end of my a
sshole maybe.”
Counsel fled, en masse.
“But not at the end of yours,” said Burke to himself. “Fuck it. We’ll make do until the ship comes in.” He called after them: “My son’s in great shape—he’s fit and he’s feisty and he’s got a daddy who loves him. Tell that to the fucking mediator!”
Transference
THERE WEREN’T ANY guards at the Benedict Canyon estate. The gate was flung open to a cadre of indifferent gardeners, who came and went, wrestling with hoses and foliage. Lisanne strode in, businesslike. No one paid attention.
She shivered again with the same feeling she’d had at the Riverside house—that somehow she belonged—except this time, she felt the chill of his absence. The place seemed frozen in time, like an obscure, well-funded theosophical foundation or museum of atrocities committed in past or even future centuries—or the temple where a mythic hero, wounded in battle, had returned to die. Even now, within sight of the flat obsidian column of infinity pool and dark wood cope of the famous zendo in its grove of eucalyptuses, there was blood, there was blood, bone, and death, it hung in the air like gas, oppressively colorless and odorless, and if one could properly read the signs, one might have translated all the terrible things that had manifested: miscarriages and mayhem, and the messy, fragrant anarchy of impermanence.
She stared through the windows, hoping to see the Sotheby’s Buddha, imagining Kit home again, in a beautiful robe of Thai silk, having bargained her life away for such an impossibility, brokering a deal with Tara (born of tears shed over the sufferings of sentient beings) for his health and sanctity to be returned—the provisions of the contract being that he would never know of Lisanne’s sacrifice, would never even have a thought of her again (which she anyway assumed he hadn’t, not a proper thought anyway, since the day they met in the trailer), because she had argued nobly, selflessly for the monstrous event to be forever expunged from history and memory, and her wish had been granted, the assault had never occurred, this was the agreement that Tara, daughter of Avalokiteshvara, had consented to and so decreed. All that Lisanne had asked was that she be allowed to see him one last time in his habitat, vital and free from worry, restored to grace before Tara—whose face gathers one hundred autumn full moons, who blazes with the sparkling light of a thousand stars, who dwells amid garlands and completely delights her entourage—carried Lisanne off to the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
