Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  Ollie said the odd thing, the unexpected thing. Ollie looked away from people as she spoke, she stared up at the ceiling, she stared at her sneakers. Sometimes she covered one ear and cocked her head as if she were intercepting a message from a satellite. She laughed occasionally, and she threw her whole body into laughing—making no sound at all. Sometimes she rocked back and forth on her heels in silence (this was the crucial behavior in the diagnosis of possible autism) but I saw that Ollie was not in a pathological trance, I saw that Ollie was thinking hard. Ollie was (for the purposes of being Ollie) functional. And what else matters? I thought hotly, as I changed lanes, remembering that day at the specialist’s. The kind of kid she is, she is. I’ll protect her, her different way of looking at the goddam storybook, the goddam model galaxy. I thought, burning, of Sillitoe’s “qualifying” test—each child was asked to parrot back a mindless narrative, some computer-generated “listening text,” verbatim.

  I swung the wheel too forcefully and she slid sideways in the seat and looked up at me. I smiled reassuringly at her.

  At times like this, I longed for the lab. I was calm there, when I was making calculations or working on soundless, endlessly reconstructible sequencing patterns. Glass beakers in sun, polymer ladders, dot-matrix readouts ... dust motes in the slow dim fluorescent air, a scribbled page of equations next to a CATS coffee mug. Peace. Dreams. I rubbed the headache in my left temple, looking in the rearview mirror, driving south out of the Valley on the Hollywood Freeway and over the hill, exiting on Gower, following it past the drive-ins (“Home of the Whopper”), then the lots and studios where the sitcom taping signs were up: ALF, FULL HOUSE, DESIGNING WOMEN, and the studio-audience lines, long as Soviet food lines, wrapped around the buildings.

  The crowds were in sweats, Rambo headbands, and neon spandex tights, spilling over the curb. I eased the car around a heavy woman with a “Roseanne” haircut, who stood in the street, laughing and gesturing to her companions on the sidewalk. A friend was photographing her. She put her hands at her studded belt and executed a kind of bump and roll with her hips. I honked once at her, gently, and she gave me the finger.

  I glanced nervously at Ollie and she coughed and sank lower in the passenger seat.

  “Are you sick? Do you have a temperature?” I reached across the seat and held my right palm against her brow.

  Ollie turned her head away to look out the window. A bright red spot had appeared in the center of each cheek.

  I stared glumly through the windshield at the thin brownish haze on the horizon. A toxic stew boiled in my head: formaldehyde, sulfur dioxide, hydrocarbons, acrolein, nitrogen oxides.

  “Daddy,” said Ollie suddenly, sitting up. “Daddy.” She pointed at the bright metal bas-relief globe turning on top of the Paramount building.

  I attempted a feeble stand: “You’re sick, we should go home”—then, against my better judgment swung a quick left on Melrose and another through the rococo gates and into the Paramount lot, braking at the guard booth. There was a young guard at the gate, a small man who was working on resembling Paul Newman.

  “We’re here to see Jay Tallich. He’s T.D. on Drastic Measures.”

  The guard cocked his head at me and slowly smiled. He shifted his weight, hooked a hand in his belt, looked up to the heavens, arched an eyebrow, then scratched his upper lip. “Did he call your name up?”

  “No, but I’m his wife. I think I remember what soundstage he’s on.”

  The guard leaned out the other side of his booth and waved a van through.

  He turned back to me with a dreamy look, humming a little. The hair under his cap was the color of clotting blood, as if his scalp had vacuumed up all the plasma from the capillaries in his face.

  “Sorry, I can’t just let you on. I have to call up. See if they left you a pass.”

  I smiled sweetly and ran one hand back and forth on the leather wheel cover.

  “You don’t have to call up. It’s really no big deal.”

  The guard smiled too and hung his head a little. “Sure I have to. What am I here for then? It is a big deal. I’d say, in fact, it’s kind of a huge deal.”

  His smile disappeared. I watched him work at a daunting expression. “People try to get in here all the time. But they don’t get far.”

  I leaned out of the car window in a confidential attitude. I knew what I was going to do and I was shocked at myself, but not enough to change my approach.

  Still smiling, I felt behind me on the backseat for my bag, pulled out my wallet, and flipped it open to a fan of ID cards. I held up my UGC Research Laboratories clearance badge and a card identifying me as a professor of biochemistry.

  “Look, my friend, you got me. You’re too savvy to try and bullshit. I’m going to tell you the real, frightening story. I’m a biochemist, an underground operative, in effect, a spy for Superfund Toxic Dump Cleanup.”

  I sighed and shook my head sadly, staring through the windshield. I could feel his eyes on me.

  “Oh God, where to begin? Did you know that there are giant, illegal liposuction dump sites all over Los Angeles? Think about it for a second—have you ever wondered where all that fat they suck from jiggling thighs and bellies and buttocks actually goes?”

  I looked around furtively, then leaned out the window, speaking sotto voce. “I’ll tell you where it goes. You may not wanna look at it, my friend, but the reason we’ve been having so many earth tremors lately is because they’re piping blubber by the pound under the ground surface of L.A.—soon we’ll all be skateboarding on a layer of subcutaneous (subterraneous) fat. Hey, don’t laugh!”

  He shook his head, pawing the ground like a pony, his expression scornful. But he did look a little shaken. I saw him glance again, furtively, at my ID.

  “Hey, I’ll tell you more. The La Brea Tar Pits are an adipose swamp, a seething mass of old love handles, eyelids, and saddlebags—and nobody knows. I’m here today, posing as a visitor, but the fact is, you’ve got one of the biggest Blubber Depots in the city, right here on the lot, outside your Executive Offices, and my orders are to check it out.”

  We looked straight into each other’s eyes. He moved his lips but no sound came.

  “Do you think,” I said, staring into the back of his head, “I’d be here at all unless the situation was really grave? Do you think I’d bring my kid into this?”

  Then he got mad.

  “This is not funny, lady. And you’re not intimidating me.”

  As he spoke, I covered my mouth with my fist and pumped out the background music from Jaws, which Jay had recently gotten me to watch.

  “Jesus. You’re weird,” he said. He rolled his eyes heavenward. “Why do I do it? Why do I put up with this kind of treatment?”

  “Because you’re a whopper,” said Ollie suddenly from the passenger seat. “You’re a whopper in the sky with diamonds whopper little Lucy.” She began humming atonally and kicking the glove compartment in front of her.

  “Soundstage Thirty-two,” I threw this out quickly, dropping my hand. “Ask for Paloma.”

  The guard stuck his head a little way into the car, glaring at Ollie, who crossed her eyes at him. I noticed, belatedly, that his nameplate read S. LUCY, and I suddenly got Ollie’s joke. I’d been playing my old Beatles records for her lately.

  “Your kid’s real funny. You train her to do that?”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t care if people don’t say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ to me—that I don’t mind. I do mind when people insult me outright.”

  His face had turned as brick-colored as his hair. Too late that face reminded me of dumb mistakes I’ve made my whole life, going too far with people who, as I should have been able to tell, didn’t want to get it, or who didn’t think my humor was funny. I would find myself blundering into sudden hostile depths awash in wreckage: missed punch lines, solemnly answered rhetorical questions, fundamentalist interpretation of my smartass one-liners.

  “Whopper,”
chanted Ollie, “whopper whopper Lucy Lucy foolish.”

  “Please. Just let us in.”

  “Whopper, diamonds, whopper ...”

  “I’m not myself,” said the guard, running a hand across his eyes. “I been playing a skinhead in a waiver production and I’m not myself.”

  Just then, miraculously, I saw a friend of Jay’s, an assistant director, whose name I’d forgotten. He answered my wave and came loping over, figuring things out on the way.

  “Sherman!” He threw his arm around the guard’s shoulders. “This is our technical director’s wife—you know, Jay Tallich? On Drastic Measures? It’s OK to let her in.” He pointed to his headset, wired to a walkie-talkie on his belt. “If you want, I’ll get a special OK from the office.” Sherman scowled and the director smiled dazzlingly. “Hey, we’ll bend the rules just this once. It’ll be all right.” At last Sherman nodded, glaring at me, and two minutes later I was parking the car near a cement bank of terraced flowers. I got out with Ollie lagging after. We slipped into the maze of outbuildings and barnlike studios, passing the West Seventy-second Street subway stop in New York City, a Hopper-like 1930s gas station, a block of Western saloons near a hospital, its EMERGENCY sign neon red.

  I thought, chastened, about the exchange at the gate as we walked. OK, I’d known as soon as we’d driven on the lot that Sherman was (in my husband Jay’s terminology) an “actomorph,” a would-be actor. I should have known better than to act at him. Acting “at” an actomorph receptionist could bring out the “Tara” speech from Gone With the Wind, could encourage the dental hygienist to abruptly crack stand-up jokes and palm an invisible mike while you sat, the inner lining of your mouth being sucked dry by the drool vacuum. It could elicit a Tom Selleck wink and heavy breath on your neck from the garage mechanic and an Ice-T rap as you tried to pay the baby-sitter or the reaction I’d elicited—fury. Nobody got madder than a would-be actor at being upstaged.

  Ollie and I stared at a large flat of pure blue sky set on rollers, like a rebuke to the yellowish original above, then turned to the peeling posters on the prefab soundstage walls; L.A.’s Watteau-esque light flickered across the lovely peach-shaped breasts, biceps, tremulous lips. The faces dreamed, set in emblematic grooming: expressions quickened by the desire to express, not the self, but the self as somebody else.

  Around a corner we found Soundstage 32, pushed open the frameless door, like a flap sheared from the particleboard wall. It was cavernous inside, hangarlike, with huge lights on tracks above.

  Four- or five-tiered bleachers were pushed against one wall, and the bleachers were filled with people: visitors, fans, taping junkies. This audience was loud and restless, mostly young people in Madonna garb and soccer jackets. A hapless comic, the warm-up act, ran frantically up and down the bleachers, cracking jokes, soliciting hometown information and insults.

  Ollie shrank away from the bleachers and, murmuring under her breath, turned her attention to the center of the floor, where human beings rode by on long-necked camera cranes, like chimps on the backs of giraffes. There were rolling boom platforms carrying sound equipment, each projecting a long boom arm with a dangling mike and an attendant who followed humbly behind the boom platform, making sure no cables got stuck. There were other people in earphones wandering about, whispering into mouthpieces. Thick black cables crisscrossed the floor like snakes. Ollie tripped over one and looked up at me, embarrassed.

  “Whopper, whopper, whopper ...”

  Opposite the bleacher were brightly lit rooms, three-sided, missing the front wall, lit from above: a barroom, a drugstore, and a kitchen. The center room, the kitchen, was brightest lit. At the edge of a long radiance, a large sign printed in reflecting letters said DRASTIC MEASURES.

  In the center “room” were the actors, dressed as Hell’s Angels and their girlfriends. They wore leather jackets and boots, rainbow spiked hair, heavy metal crosses and skulls; their jeans were studded with gemlike brads. One of them had a huge fake wound on his forehead, dripping red gore. Ollie stared at the fake blood. Makeup people milled about, touching up the actors’ faces; the actors ignored them, sipping coffee, talking over their heads or around them.

  I looked about, intimidated, for a familiar face. I had been on this set only once before, on blocking day, when the actors memorized their final positions for the three cameras and their angles. There were far more people on the set now.

  I hurried forward, towing Ollie, stepping gingerly over cables and props. A painfully thin woman in earphones, with very black frizzy hair and heavy theaterish makeup, hurried by.

  “Paloma!”

  The woman blinked, then focused on my face.

  “Is Jay in the booth, Paloma? We’d like to join him.”

  Paloma looked annoyed, then saw Ollie and smiled. Her wolflike face relaxed.

  “Hi cookie, hi sweetie. How old are you?”

  “Whopper!”

  Together Paloma and I watched Ollie collapse on the floor and hunch over, struggling to put her mouth on her shoelace. Paloma looked bewildered.

  “Can we go to the booth?” I repeated. My headache was worse. I should have known better than to indulge Ollie. Out at the gate, I’d remembered Paloma’s name and face only by chance. She had worked with Jay before, I’d met her on another set, some months earlier, but my memory for “industry-related” people (as Jay put it) was generally very bad. Through some chance synapse stimulation the exotic name had popped back into my head. I smiled gratefully at her, but she wasn’t looking at me.

  Paloma glanced at Ollie, a little worried frown on her face. She tapped reflectively at her headset with her long red nails.

  “You’re Jay’s wife, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Um, I don’t know what to say ...”

  “Whopper, whopper, whopper!”

  “I’m sure it’ll be all right.”

  I watched in horror as Paloma’s fire-engine-red lipstick broke down before my eyes into its chemical ingredients: dye sucked from the glittering bloodred irises of rabbits, sluggish castor oil, fats, sheep piss, wax, and lanolin, that mixture of high-molecular-weight esters and alkanes dredged from petroleum. As the woman’s lips moved, I saw the coating twist alive, deconstructing again, as if I’d turned up a microscope’s power, into the color-producing atoms—chromophores and auxochromes—teeming like a nest of insects under Paloma’s nose. Dizzy, I stepped back, almost colliding with a boom platform.

  She began another conversation with her earphones. “I’m sure it’s OK,” I heard myself say again. Paloma, still looking annoyed, motioned for us to follow her.

  The director’s booth was located in a trailer right next to the soundstage. In this very cramped space, a wall of TV monitors rose, and before this wall three people sat: the director seated in the middle with the assistant director and the technical director on either side of her.

  Ollie and I followed Paloma, who pointed toward a row of plastic chairs against the opposite wall. It was air-conditioned in the booth, but the atmosphere was heated, kinetic: the director, a woman with shaggy blond hair, spoke to the floor crew through her headphones, turning script pages and snapping her fingers each time she wanted a camera angle changed. Jay recorded the change, counting out loud, and the picture on the monitors jumped, altered. Jay had told me that this finger pop was directors’ shorthand: she snapped, the story got told.

  I stole a glance at Jay, sweating beneath his headphones even though it was cold in the booth. He hadn’t noticed us. He kept counting as the snaps came: “One ninety-five, one ninety-six ...” I saw the producer suddenly—how could I have missed him? The producer was a tall rangy Kris Kristofferson type in faded leather and denim; despite his relaxed garb, he emanated discontent, a petulant expression on his broad face. “Let’s go ...” he kept repeating, sotto voce. “What’s holding us up here? My actress is losing energy.”

  I watched Ollie watching the monitors—the same scene, two actors about to embrace, viewed fr
om three different angles on nine screens. One screen displayed, close-up, a young woman with a desperate expression frozen on her face. The other revealed a handsome longhaired man in a leather biker outfit, holding a gun to the young woman’s temple, grimacing cruelly; the last showed these two people locked together in a death embrace, which quickly dissolved as the director called out, “Cut.” The two moved swiftly away from each other, their expressions growing identical: twin raptors, starved. The young woman rubbed her eyes and bleated, “Cherry Diet Coke? OK, Roz? With ice? OK? Two more minutes under these lights and I’m beef fuckin’ jerky!”

  I laughed and Ollie stared up at me, then laughed too, silently. The producer glanced in our direction, but did not laugh.

  Jay turned around and saw us. He looked surprised, then slightly irritated.

  “What are you doing here? I th-thought you were at that school interview thing over in the Valley.”

  “We were. It’s all over.”

  Jay stood up. He was a tall man, but appeared slight. He had shaggy brown hair and an earring and his eyes were sad. He had a very slight speech impediment, a glimmer of a stutter.

  “Ollie,” he said softly. “C-come here and meet Lee.”

  Ollie held both hands up in front of her face and counted her fingers aloud. “One, two, three ...”

  Jay glanced, embarrassed, at the director, who was pulling off her earphones and turning toward them, smiling.

  “Ollie,” repeated Jay. He looked at me, expecting me to do something, to make Ollie respond. I shrugged. Ollie slid to the floor and hugged her knees, still counting.

  I stood up and put out my hand to the director, who had a pretty, freckled, Huck Finn face. Her name was Lee Shallat.

  “Hello,” I said, my voice cracking. “Sorry to interrupt you but we were driving right by on our way back from the Valley.” I paused. “This is my—our—little girl, Ollie.”

  Ollie was completely silent now, rocking.

  “She’s sh-shy,” said Jay to the room. “Really a shy kid.”

  The director smiled down at Ollie, reaching into her shirt pocket, pulling out a stick of gum. She knelt down, unwrapping it, and offered it to Ollie. Ollie, miraculously, peeked out at her, then reached for the gum.