by Owen Thomas
Cait smiles again.
“Yeah. Anything, including that.”
CHAPTER 80 – Matilda
All that remains of my life is to lie here. And to wait.
All of the technological advances on which my species has pinned its hope for salvation have done absolutely nothing to relieve the excruciating boredom of the comatose. And as for the species, it is all very much the same, really. Technology is a cheap parlor trick. A distraction. There is no salvation there. Not really.
I suppose I should at least set the record straight. Whatever existence awaits my last mechanically-assisted breath, I should like to avoid taking with me the regret of having allowed the tabloids the last word.
I did not try to kill myself. I had considered it, of course. But what person alive has not considered it at some point or another. What greater affirmation of life can there be than fully embracing the power to end existence and yet, even at one’s darkest hour, choosing not to?
I suppose that denying this rumor does me no great service. Were the rumor true, I would have joined a distinguished group of great minds and artists whose depth of thought and feeling has taken them over the edge and yet who then managed to survive and carry on with some greater perspective on living. As it is, however, I must confess to only common stupidity, both in mixing my sedatives and then in talking to my friends about my mistake. In the entertainment world, there is loyalty and there is publicity. Loyalty rarely stands a chance. The articles, as they say, wrote themselves. Distraught over the suicide of Zack West, his co-star and on-again, off-again romantic partner Tilly Johns is said to have locked herself in her bedroom and…
Also, I never had an affair with Angus Mann. That is not to say that I never entertained the notion of an affair with Angus. Because, of course, at that time in my life, that sort of wildly inappropriate coupling would have been perfectly in keeping with the dysfunction that connected one year of my life to the next, from Blair Gaines, to Rufus Einemann, to my Arthurian Legends professor at Wesleyan, to my unshaven, dropout, draft-eligible boyfriends in high school, and so on all the way back into childhood. But with Angus, the notion of an affair never actually manifested as more than an impulse; a familiar urge announced by unbidden, errant thoughts I did not understand and that I poked back down into the unexamined soup of my consciousness.
In any event, it would be the very height of hubris for me to suggest that Angus would ever have entertained such a possibility. If my wasting body were capable of involuntary movement, it would shudder at the idea of Angus contemplating me as a romantic partner. He could have been my father.
In some ways, Angus was my father.
Nor is it true that Angus lured me away from my career as an actress. I did not, as I have read in the unauthorized biographies from time to time, follow him out of Hollywood. In closing the door on her auspicious, if troubled, start as a Hollywood starlet, Tilly Johns followed Angus Mann out of Tinsel Town, leaving it all behind as abruptly as she had arrived.
Nonsense. I moved out of California three years after Angus’ departure or, as he had put it, his escape back across the Acheron. In those three years I actually made two independently produced period dramas, one as a lead character and one as a supporting character. While they exceeded expectations, and while I believe I put in solid work, neither film made much money or registered anywhere on the cinematic Zeitgeist.
Measured by sheer size of the splash – ticket sales, media attention, net points, gross points, residuals – my brief career in the movies never got any bigger than Pryce Point. I owe this less to the quality of the film and my performance in it, than to the voracious appetite Americans have for shallow storytelling punctuated with lots of exploding machinery. I also must credit my agents at the time, Milton Chenowith and Simon Hunter of Chenowith, Taylor & Reid, who, before firing me as a recalcitrant client, secured the role and negotiated an insanely good arrangement with the studio on my behalf. I suppose I should also give a nod to the pornography, drug, suicide and attempted suicide scandals that Zack and I contributed to the marketing effort that riveted the attention of moviegoers.
The critics hated it, of course, and rightly so. But Pryce Point went on to do a huge business around the world and for years following the release, it was Sienna Pryce that people most recognized in restaurants and coffee shops.
If I am to gauge success not in measurements of breadth and volume but by the depth of the love people had for my characters, it never got any better for me than my very first film, Peppermint Grove. People not only recognized Katie Finn, they felt like they knew her. They loved her. Identified with her. The part was extraordinarily well written and, if I may be so immodest, I knocked the ball out of the park on the first swing. Gene Hackman, rest his soul, more than held his own.
The two films I made between the time of Angus leaving and my own inevitable departure kept me focused on something other than the emptiness that washed in to fill the void. Productive work, even if it does not amount to much in the end, has always proven therapeutic. Those films also allowed me to rehabilitate my professional reputation, which, as the cost of insuring my performance on those pictures will attest, was in dire need of attention. From an employment perspective, I proved to everyone that I could do the job without taking time off to sleep with the director or to defend myself to local law enforcement or to overdose on sedatives. Even after the criminal trials were done and over, the paparazzi continued to follow me, but at an increasing distance and with a lackluster zeal. I gave them nothing.
Of course, my good behavior did not stop the entertainment press from keeping my scandals alive artificially, much as I am being kept alive now. The obligatory paragraphs always found their way into the story, reminding the reader or viewer of my various misadventures and associations, at turns romantic and scandalous and tragic. This was especially true around the time of Pryce Point’s release, but also long after that, long after Hollywood, where my scintillating back-story was wedged conspicuously into the coverage of entirely mundane and unrelated events. Tilly Johns’ publisher has announced the dates and locations of the book tour promoting her third novel, “The Long Way Home.” Ms. Johns may be more familiar to some from her previous life on the Silver Screen and the entertainment tabloids…
But despite the heroic efforts to keep that history alive, the world kept turning, spinning its way through space, leaving the past farther and farther behind and all of its characters in various states of suspended, artificial life. Zack West remained thoroughly dead. But he lived on as Jack Pryce and other characters with a life-like vibrancy that only Hollywood can provide. There are still posters in circulation depicting Zack playing poker with James Dean and Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando and Harrison Ford. Brando is dealing. The cards feature an iconic Marilyn Monroe trying to keep her dress down as she straddles a subway vent.
Tiki Emmanuel certainly outlived Zack, but all of that extra living was confined to a federal penitentiary where he served half of a fifteen-year term for narcotics trafficking. The other half of his sentence was cut short unexpectedly by his shiv-wielding cellmate, an employee of Paul “Pee-Kay” Lee. Thanks to Tiki’s testimony, Pee-Kay was sentenced to thirty years for supplying half of Hollywood with illegal drugs.
As part of his plea deal, Tiki owned up to the bags of trail mix found in Zack’s Escalade the night of the accident. As it turned out, Tiki had not been attempting to implicate Zack as a club drug dealer. He explained that he had often used the Escalade as a mobile stash to which he had ready access. It was a rare occasion that he and Zack were not at the same parties and clubs. They often went together and he knew the combination code. Tiki wanted to keep his own car clean just in case. Zack never knew.
Maria Beckwith, on the other hand, did know. She testified at Pee-Kay Lee’s trial that Tiki was using Zack’s Escalade for his own purposes. Tiki’s access, through Zack, to the upper echelons of Hollywood had made him one of Pee-Kay Lee’s primary distributors
. Pee-Kay, who owed his allegiance to a drug syndicate based in Hong Kong, was a frequent guest at the Brentwood home that Tiki shared with Maria. Eventually, Tiki kicked Maria to the curb for having her affair with Zack. Maria, as it turned out, had a very good memory about what went on in that house.
In fact, Maria had not intended to wait for an invitation to testify to exact her revenge. I do not pretend to know Maria’s reasons for the affair. I assume they were for all the same reasons that anyone has an affair. Tiki obviously had his dark side and Zack would have been quite the trade up. At the very least he was great fun and easy on the eyes. She certainly never had any loyalty to me that would have stopped her from poaching my boyfriend.
But when the dust settled, it was Maria left out in the cold. Tiki cut her off, but then promptly patched things up with Zack. For his part, Zack ended the affair abruptly, severed contact with Maria and then, I am led to understand, did little but curse his perfidious heart and obsess over how to win back my affections. Meanwhile, having been simultaneously dumped by two men, Maria took it directly on the chin from the media as the scheming opportunist who broke up Pryce Point’s star couple.
Needless to say, Maria did not take this turn of events graciously or with a healthy perspective. Instead, she made a series of anonymous phone calls to the Hollywood Sheriff’s Department, complaining that two men in a black Escalade, vanity plates ZCKPCK, were conducting drug transactions up and down the Sunset Strip. The minor charges against Maria for falsifying a police report were easily forgiven in exchange for her testimony against Tiki and Mr. Lee. Under furious cross-examination, Maria freely admitted that her purpose in making the anonymous calls had not been to protect the community from the scourge of designer drugs, but rather to deliver a relatively petty comeuppance that might make her feel better for being socially excluded. In her best conception of the plot, the police were to pull over Zack and Tiki on their way to some party, search the Escalade, and find Tiki’s stash. Thereafter, as the police applied their pressure, Zack would point the finger at Tiki and Tiki would try to save his own skin by accusing Zack. Preferably, one or both of them would be biochemically compromised at the time of the arrest. The jury, unable to sort any of it out, was to convict them both and she would occasionally visit them in jail.
Who knows how the plan would have fared had Zack not used the Escalade as a battering ram to take out the entrance of a nightclub on the corner of Sunset and San Vicente. As it turned out, that accident, if it is fair to call it that, was the beginning of the end for Zack. He would not be around for any trials.
Fortunately, albeit for different reasons, I too was spared having to participate in the spectacle of a Hollywood criminal circus trial. For several weeks, the whole of Southern California forgot the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, forgot the mounting scandals of the Bush Administration, and forgot even about the state’s headlong plummet towards insolvency. The Pee-Kay Lee and Tiki Emmanuel trials came to town like telegenic hypnotists with daily coverage and star-studded witness lists, and casts of camera-conscious lawyers looking for that next step on the ladder – a famous client, a book deal, a regular guest appearance on CNN.
I was initially scheduled to testify against Tiki. In fact it was the very possibility that the public might hear details about my time with Zack, my thoughts about Maria, my supposed suicide attempt, and maybe something about the sex video that gave the prosecutions against Tiki and Pee-Kay Lee their electric presence. But Tiki’s prosecution ended rather anti-climatically, halfway through the prosecution’s case and a day before I was to testify, when he agreed to a plea bargain. Having little relevant knowledge that could not be supplied by others, including Maria, I was never called as a witness against Pee-Kay Lee. The public, the circus-goers, hoping that my testimony would be loaded with new and embarrassing revelations, complete with video, were surely disappointed.
As for videos of the embarrassing sort, I am relieved to report that the sex video recorded on Tiki’s pen camera never surfaced beyond the copy he provided to Fox 11 News. I have no doubt that had the police not raided his home, causing Tiki to focus on the prospect of losing his freedom, he would have done irreparable damage in distributing the video, whether for profit or plain malice, including putting my mother into a coma decades before my liver failed and delivered that fate to me.
I can only speculate as to Tiki’s motives. I assume that it started innocently enough. Practical jokes were a kind of connective tissue that held the Zack Pack together. Each of them had been targeted by the others multiple times in their turn and being able to laugh it off was part of the litmus test of membership. Whether the joke had originally been intended for me or for Zack or for both of us, only Tiki knows. He ended up taking that part of the story to the crematorium.
But I have come to believe that, whatever his original intentions, Tiki grew resentful of my continued influence over Zack’s affections. Tiki had excommunicated Maria and had made a show of forgiving Zack, and yet Zack continued to profess a primary and sadly unrequited allegiance not to Tiki, but to me. It is easier perhaps to think of Tiki as a jealous spouse, lashing out at the home wrecker. Maria had her plans for revenge and Tiki had his own. After the affair with Maria, Tiki knew I would blame Zack for the video, that I would never forgive him, and that I would never come back.
For all of the loathsome things Tiki Emmanuel ever did in the world, I hate him the most for being right about me.
My defection from Hollywood, which is how people treated it, began with a press junket to Seattle. I fell in love, at first, with the brooding clouds and the rain, so unlike The Valley. That simple meteorological dissimilarity turned out to be emblematic of a more pervasive vibrational difference. Every aspect of the Pacific Northwest seemed to me more relaxed, contemplative and substantive. Other adjectives offered themselves. Quenching. Authentic.
Of course, a single press junket would not have been sufficient for such comparisons. It took many visits. But I did not make those visits for the weather or for any reason having to do with motion picture marketing. I made them for Brent Wilson.
Brent was a retired, early-forties, Silicon Valley whiz kid with a spacious home on Whidbey Island over-looking Skagit Bay. He had shaggy hair and a boyish face, which at least made him look closer to my age, and kind brown eyes that had a way of staying with me every time I left to return to Los Angeles. Eventually, I stopped wanting to return altogether and L.A. ceased to be the place where I lived and became the place I went to when it was necessary; the place I went when I was not with Brent, ensconced in weather. In that way our lives intertwined and I was as content as I ever had been.
Brent was a great reader and collector of books. We had literature in common. My favorite times with Brent were, first, sailing his boat out on the bay and, second, curled up in the house reading and talking about the books we loved. Brent wrote articles for two different technology periodicals and I regularly lent my editing skills, not used since my days at the LAQ, to make his submissions as engaging and as readable as the subject matter would allow. When we argued, it tended to be over the quality of my editorial judgments. I was never wrong, of course. As I lie here today, steeping in memory, I concede not a single mistake. It was a credit to Brent’s intelligence that he eventually came to accept this fact.
It was this regular diet of reading and editing, in an environment that encouraged inner stillness and reflection that reawakened my long-dormant interest in writing. It started as a kind of creative doodling; arranging nascent plotlines and character sketches around an idea for a screenplay that I imagined sending to one of my old directors. I had largely given up acting, but some part of me still associated Hollywood with, if not unattained success, then at least with a sense of unfinished business.
But soon enough, the ideas began rolling in like the low, fast-moving breakers that Zack liked to call water bumpers, and the screenplay metamorphosed into a novella that was far too interior to lend itself to any sort of cin
ematic adaptation. With much work, the novella eventually outgrew its own diminutive form and became the bloated tome that you may recognize as The Withering Kind, my breakthrough into the realm of the published.
If you are a devotee of my books then you will no doubt have experienced the same satisfaction of my publishers that my advancing years have brought with them an increasing economy of expression. If you are one of those who labored through The Withering Kind, you will be forgiven for not fully appreciating that breakthroughs, as epiphanies of any kind, are almost always a matter of becoming too big for oneself. They require an accumulation of personal insight, memory following memory, word following word, drop following drop, until the dam breaks and containment is simply no longer possible. Economy of expression is anathema to the process.
Aside from sailing, reading and writing, Brent’s retirement hobbies included boat building, art collecting and, as it turned out, sleeping with other women, and men, whenever he left me at home to go into town. This last hobby was not something of which I learned until roughly eighteen months into our marriage; my first, his third. It was an ugly surprise, with little in the way of advance suspicion to soften the blow.
I was confused and angry and heartbroken and all the rest of what you might expect. I was eventually able to reconcile his conduct with the notion of love, but not matrimony. Brent was my first, and my second-to-last, step towards the conclusion that matrimony was an unnaturally optimistic association that was not for everybody. Or, at least, not for me. Brent did love me. He loved lots of things. He loved books and boats and freedom. At least he respected me enough to not deny the obvious or put up a fight.
Of course, after the fact, I noted that the signs were everywhere, from the very beginning, just waiting to be recognized. Isn’t that how it always is? It is always so easy looking backwards, which makes hindsight the cruelest of perspectives. And yet, that is the perspective with which all of us are ultimately left. It’s as if, at the end of things, we’re supposed to make some sense of it all.
