“Are you breaking up with me, Ben?” Jack said, with a sarcastic smile.
“We’re worried about you, Jack,” Lindsey said. “We think you might need some help.”
His eyebrows went up as the meaning behind our gathering finally dawned on him. “What,” he said. “I get a little fucked up one night and you think I can’t handle myself anymore?”
“You know it’s a lot more than just that last night,” Alison said.
“No,” Jack said. “I don’t. I’ll tell you what the problem is here.” He got to his feet, his face suddenly flushed with anger. “The problem is that my friends read all the Hollywood glamour trades, the bullshit magazines that don’t know shit from a shoe box, and they read about how all these movie stars are getting fucked up on heroin, like River Phoenix and Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Slater. So naturally, if Jack shows up hammered one night, he must be in the same fucking boat! Poor Jack can’t handle the pressures of stardom, got himself a little heroin problem, but then, he never was the bright one. Jesus Christ!”
“Cocaine,” Chuck said to him.
“What?”
“It’s cocaine. Your aggression and increased energy are consistent with an acute intoxication from a sympathomimetic-like drug such as cocaine. Heroin is an opiate. Much tougher to function with. You’re keeping way too busy to be nursing a heroin habit. Not to mention the ulcerated tissue in your nose.”
“Thank you,” Jack said to Chuck as he began to back out of the living room, his eyes blazing. “That was genuinely informative, and I think we’ve all learned something. But I’ve got a show to get to and this is getting very boring.”
“Jack, don’t go,” said Alison. “Please, stay and talk to us. We’re your friends.”
“Fuck you, Alison,” he spat at her, and she winced visibly as if slapped. “Fuck you and your little feel-good therapy session. If you were my friend you’d be able to talk to me as a friend instead of ambushing me.”
“You know that’s not what this is,” Alison said softly, her lower lip quavering.
“Hey!” Lindsey said, jumping to Alison’s defense. “How the hell can she talk to you when you’re either stoned, puking, or being carried out the back door by your agent?”
“You know what I think?” Jack said, turning to leave the room. “I think your lives are all so boring and empty that you’ll do anything to create a little drama for yourselves, to feel a little better about your pathetic, little lives. Even if it means trashing mine.”
“You know that’s bullshit,” I said, getting angry in spite of myself. “Just because we don’t have glamorous cocaine habits like you doesn’t make our lives pathetic.”
“Really, Ben? Why don’t you talk to me when you publish something a little more substantial than ‘Five Essential Evening Accessories.’”
“Shut up, Jack,” Lindsey said.
“I’ll do you one better,” Jack said. “I’m out of here.”
He spun around and a few seconds later we heard the door slam. Alison, standing in the center of the room, stared after him, her jaw hanging open in disbelief. The rest of us sat on the couch, feeling like shit.
“I think we handled that pretty well,” Chuck said.
Later that night I sat in front of the blank screen of my computer, as was my habit, waiting in vain for inspiration to strike. It didn’t, as was its habit, and as my mind drifted I found myself remembering my earlier conversation with Alison and Lindsey concerning our generation’s utter reliance on pop culture as our common frame of reference. It was like this game we often played back at NYU, describing people in terms of the movie star they resembled. If art imitated life, we wanted to make sure that we were all represented. We were big cinema-heads back then, which is probably what drew the five of us together in the first place. Movies tend to go out of style in college, especially for NYU students who feel a moral obligation to seek out the more avant-garde forms of entertainment available in the cultural smorgasbord of New York’s Greenwich Village. Those of us who eschewed the drag-queen coffee shops, tattoo parlors and art-house flicks for good old-fashioned cinema were bound to find each other.
If Lindsey were a movie star, she would be a young Michelle Pfeiffer, with soft, mocha skin, emerald eyes, and an exquisitely full upper lip curling into a lazy smile that’s somehow both seductive and sincere. When I met Lindsey in our freshman year, she was so wildly desirable that I instantly decided I had no right to be friends with her. Beneath her beauty and in-your-face sexuality was a sharp intelligence and spirituality, which did nothing to make her less desirable. If resisting sexual impulses toward a close friend was an Olympic event, I would have a few gold medals hanging on the wall next to my diploma.
Alison would be Mia Farrow in her early Woody Allen days. There’s something about her that makes you want to kiss her on the forehead and tell her that everything will be all right. At twenty-nine she still seems impossibly innocent despite her Connecticut, white-bread sophistication, wide eyes, perfect teeth and a bearing that bespeaks a childhood of violin lessons and country clubs.
Chuck is Jack Nicholson, down to the widow’s peak. He also has Nicholson’s mischievous-bordering-on-mad smile, his infinite reserve of confidence and penchant for incessant flirtation. Chuck admits with no shame that he’s in surgery for the money. He views the current trend toward what he calls the socialization of medicine with open distaste and quiet alarm. He is a staunch, unapologetic Republican to the point of caricature. He’s actually read Rush Limbaugh’s book. I don’t know Jack Nicholson’s politics, but somewhere in the eighties I read an interview in Rolling Stone where Jack said that he would vote for Gary Hart “because Gary Hart fucks and I think we should have a president who fucks.” That’s Chuck.
If I were a movie star, I’d want to be a young Mel Gibson, but who wouldn’t? The cold hard truth is that I’m probably closer to Dustin Hoffman in The Marathon Man, although without the schnozola, thank you very much. Athletic, optimistic, sarcastic, although my heart’s not always in it, and only mildly introverted. On the plus side, like Hoffman, I, too, have had marginal success with women who, from a Darwinian standpoint, shouldn’t have given me the time of day.
Jack is the easiest. If Jack were a movie star he’d be himself.
I looked up at the monitor in order to make sure that I hadn’t gone into a trance and written some award-winning fiction while lost in thought, and after confirming that my screen remained stubbornly blank, I hit return for good measure and began to type a list.
After doing the lists at Esquire for a while, you get into the habit of thinking about everything in terms of lists, .especially stuff like this.
Ten CDs you’d be likely to find in Chuck’s car:
1. Van Halen: Best of Van Halen
2. Led Zeppelin: 4
3. Foreigner: Records (A greatest hits album)
4. Guns N’ Roses: Use Your Illusion 1 and 2
5. Kiss: Greatest Kiss
6. Aerosmith: Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits
7. Def Leppard: Pyromania
8. AC/DC: AC/DC Live
9. Whitesnake: Saints & Sinners
10. Poison: Look What the Cat Dragged In
Lindsey was right. There might really be something to this whole pop culture thing.
Ten CDs you’d probably find in Lindsey’s car:
1. Juliana Hatfield: Become What You Are
2. The Ramones: Too Tough to Die
3. No Doubt: Tragic Kingdom
4. Joe Jackson: Joe Jackson’s Greatest Hits (My influence)
5. REM: Life’s Rich Pageant
6. Barenaked Ladies: Stunt
7. Peter Gabriel: Shaking the Tree
8. Crash Test Dummies: God Shuffled His Feet
9. Liz Phair: whitechocolatespaceegg
10. Sheryl Crow: Tuesday Night Music Club
Here’s what you’d find in my car, in the unlikely event that I had a car, and in the further unlikely event that it had a CD player:
>
1. Billy Joel: The Nylon Curtain
2. Joe Jackson: Look Sharp
3. Ben Folds Five: Whatever & Ever Amen
4. John Hiatt: Hanging Around the Observatory
5. Elton John: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
6. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
7. Elvis Costello: This Year’s Model
8. Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run
9. Sting: The Soul Cages
10. Peter Himmelman: Flown This Acid World
Alison, predictably, is into what Chuck calls “vagina music”:
1. The Indigo Girls: Rites of Passage
2. 10,000 Maniacs: Our Time in Eden
3. Jewel: Pieces of You
4. Sarah McLachlan: Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
5. The Cranberries: No Need to Argue
6. Lisa Loeb: Tails
7. Alanis Morissette: Jagged Little Pill
8. Shawn Colvin: Fat City
9. Stevie Nicks: Bella Donna
10. Lisa Stansfield: Real Love
The truth is, most of the music we listen to now is the same stuff we were listening to in college. Around age twenty-six, in an effort to stave off thirty, I began embracing the new alternative angst bands, like Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Bush, Stone Temple Pilots, et cetera, but at thirty, little of that remains. At thirty, you’re back to the comforting sounds you grew up with. You have enough genuine angst of your own, you don’t need it in your music.
Once, while we were visiting Jack in LA, he took Chuck and me to a party thrown by a producer friend of his in Beverly Hills. Jack had dressed us for the occasion in dark single-breasted Hugo Boss suits, Dolce & Gabbana loafers, pale shirts and no ties, and I felt like I had “impostor” stenciled on my forehead in bold ink. We shared a joint that Jack produced in the limo which gave me a sore throat but helped me to arrive at the party feeling loose and hip. The house was a single-story ranch surrounded by dense foliage, with stucco walls that had long since been colonized by aggressive ivy. You couldn’t tell where the house stopped and the foliage began. We stepped through the front door and down three steps into a giant sunken living room that felt more like an auditorium, and everywhere you looked there seemed to be groups of tall blonde women in little black dresses. “Whoa,” Chuck said appreciatively. “Hey mister, is this heaven?”
“Next best thing,” Jack said with a smirk. “AMW’s. Hollywood’s greatest natural resource.”
“AMWs?” I asked.
“Actress/Model/Whatever,” Jack replied with a shrug.
“Amen,” Chuck intoned reverently.
Jazz was being played much too loudly on the stereo. I noticed that there were clusters of men throughout the room, and most of them were dressed similarly to me. Weaving expertly in and out of the crowd was another class of men, all well built in tight vests over short-sleeved shirts, with sculpted hair and dazzling teeth. These men carried trays with colorful hors d’oeuvres, but they seemed to be socializing as much as everyone else. I turned to ask Jack if he had an acronym for them as well, but he’d already disappeared into the crowd, so rather than assigning them the same letters as the blondes; Actor/Model/Waiter, I designated them Pretty Boys.
I looked to my left and saw Jack approaching a group of four men in suits, the fattest of whom was beckoning to him frantically, waving his cigar around as if he was trying to spell something. “There he is,” the guy yelled theatrically, and it sounded like he had pebbles bouncing around in his esophagus. He threw his arm around Jack’s shoulders. “There he is! This guy! Let me tell you about this guy!” Jack was absorbed into a cloud of smoke and suits, leaving Chuck and me to navigate on our own. We made our way over to the bar, manned by one of the Pretty Boys, and Chuck got himself two drinks and carried them over to a bored looking AMW standing against the wall. He rapped to her for a bit and although her expression never changed, she accepted the drink even while her eyes continued to patrol the room over his shoulder.
Left alone at the bar, I had two quick shots of Absolut Citron to bolster my incipient buzz and then took a glass of something fruity to occupy my hands as I strolled around the house. It had been about four months since Lindsey left. I was still an open wound, and there was something intoxicating in the notion of hooking up with one of these exotic strangers for a night of dispassionate sex. Self-degradation as validation, or maybe some misdirected form of revenge. Sex as Novocain. Either way, thinking about it reminded me that I was horny. I walked slowly past one of the dark leather couches, where an emaciated woman with skin the color of barbecue-flavored Pringles was complaining about her latest cosmetic surgery to a guy in a black blazer with Elvis hair and a unibrow. “It was so upsetting,” she said. “I mean, he’s supposed to be the best, isn’t he? That’s what everyone says. And then I wake up with this,” here she indicated the left portion of her supernatural bosom.
“I don’t believe it,” the Elvis guy said sympathetically. “Is it really that pronounced?”
“Look,” the woman said and pulled up her brown, clinging blouse, revealing a startlingly round bare breast that seemed to almost glow against the dark backdrop of the couch. Despite her vertical posture the breast didn’t hang, but seemed to protrude independently from her chest. There was something erotic in that, and in the blasé way she unveiled it for inspection. I couldn’t discern any defects, but Elvis continued to nod sympathetically, and I became aware that I was staring at the precise instant that they did. She flashed me a disdainful look and slowly lowered her blouse. There were rules here, I realized. You could look, but you couldn’t show too much interest. Indifference was the currency, and without it you stood out as an alien, instantly exposed and summarily dismissed. Chagrined, I moved on.
There were French doors behind the couch, and the party had spilled out onto a wide patio that surrounded a kidney-shaped swimming pool. The only lights in the yard were those shining up from the pool, and in their dim glow the milling guests looked like shadows. I spotted a woman sitting alone by the side of the pool, one leg dangling lazily over the edge of her lounge chair. Cute, but not nearly as striking as most of the women at the party, which made me feel like I had a chance. With Lindsey’s departure I had become a committed believer in the notion that a man’s reach shouldn’t exceed his grasp. I walked over and sat down on the adjacent chair. “How are you,” I said, affecting a slightly mid-western accent for no reason I could think of.
“Great,” she said guardedly. “You a friend of Ike’s?”
“Ike?” I said, realizing too late that she meant the host of the party.
“Wow,” she said sardonically. “What were the odds?”
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
“Nothing.” She took a sip of her drink. “I’m just being a bitch.”
I sipped my own drink. “It’s Ike’s house?” I asked her.
“Yeah.” She leaned back in her chair and stretched. I could see a small strip of smooth, white skin below her naval as her shirt rode up. “I’m his sister,” she said. “What’s your excuse?”
“I’m just here with Jack,” I said.
“Jack Shaw?” she said, instantly perking up.
“The same.”
“Cool.”
I hadn’t deliberately dropped Jack’s name, at least I didn’t think I had, but I still wondered if it had gotten me anywhere. I sat back quietly, waiting to see what would happen next. It didn’t take very long. “Could you introduce me to him?” she finally asked.
“Sure,” I said. We got up and were headed inside when a technicality occurred to me. “I don’t know your name,” I said.
“Oh, right. It’s Valerie.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. She didn’t ask for my name.
We walked into the living room where I found Chuck drunk on the couch, building a large pyramid out of about twenty used shot glasses. “Don’t worry,” he assured me. “They weren’t all mine.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
“This party sucks,” he complained, carefully adding another glass. “These girls are all seven feet tall and they won’t talk to you unless you’re like, Steven Spielberg or something.”
“This is Valerie,” I said.
He looked up. “You found the only short one,” he said with a sigh. I looked to see if Valerie was insulted, but she was too busy scanning the room for Jack. “Have you seen Jack?” I asked.
“Downstairs,” he said.
Leaving Valerie with Chuck, I found my way into the kitchen, where the Pretty Boys were fussing over some burners for the fondue, and I located a door that led to the basement. I followed the stairs down into a dimly lit, finished basement, which had a couch and some easy chairs all facing the biggest television I’d ever seen. The sound was off, and on the screen Bruce Lee was silently kicking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s face in. The noise from upstairs was now muted, and I savored the quiet as my eyes adjusted to the dark. There didn’t appear to be anyone down there, so I turned to head back upstairs when I noticed a door to the left of the television. Feeling suddenly like an intruder, I approached the door and pushed it open tentatively. At first I saw only darkness, but then, as what little light there was poured in from the doorway, I was able to make out bookshelves and a desk at the far end of the room. Jack was leaning against the far wall, his head tilted back as if he’d fallen asleep standing up. I was about to call out to him when I noticed that he seemed to be swaying slightly, forward and back; and as my eyes strained in the semidarkness, I was able to make out the form of someone else, a woman, kneeling between his legs, her bent form undulating as her head bobbed in and out of his groin. I let the door swing shut quietly and just stood there for a moment, slightly dizzy, my fingers resting lightly on the wooden door. Then I turned and went back upstairs, woozy from the pot and alcohol, which weren’t sitting well together, and conflicted over what I’d just seen.
Plan B: A Novel Page 4
