by Chris Eaton
Then one of Monterossi’s technicians developed a urethane compound that could be color-infused. With the rise of interior design magazines, there was a higher demand for fixtures – particularly electrical outlets and light switches – that were more favorably delicate on the color spectrum. Traditional plastic fixtures were difficult to paint, so this new invention allowed all manner of new living environments. Within six months, Monterossi and Sons was the brand people asked for by name at their local hardware stores. Ernest was richer than he’d ever dreamed, and was able to buy new homes and automobiles for his mother and all his sisters, most of whom had already married and started having children of their own. By the time the competition caught up, the company still owned the patent on the process, and so he continued to make money even when consumers went elsewhere.
Ernest remained unsatisfied. How much talent or skill did it take to make plastic wall covers? But his schemes all seemed to fall back on him, like when he tried to take on the fashion industry, using this same color-infusion technology to create the first ethnic mannequins. He even changed the company name to Hollywood Montrose to sound more American, as many Italian companies were left floundering after the war. But before he could get them into market, Pucci launched a new test series of headless abstractions in Munich and Prague, enabling stores to avoid the whole race thing altogether while also not alienating their current Caucasian base. The same thing happened in the nineties, when he tried to create the sexiest mannequins on the market. Hence the reason why he needed Chris Eaton to help out. And then the young starlet Ema Hesire showed up at the coldest Oscar night on record and suddenly they were looking for ways to stick the nipples back on again.
This kind of cycle seemed to repeat itself indefinitely until Ernest, too, was also bought out by the behemoth Silvestri and went to work for the enemy.
***
Chris Eaton worked the nipple line with Ernest’s nephew, Angelo, who was trying to get into gay porn, of which Ernest was in firm support. Finally, a Montrose in show business. Of course, Ernest had no idea about his stage name: Ian Dowd (although he’d also considered Phil Anders, which he considered too high brow, P. Hugh Birdie, which was too kiddie porn and too clever by half, and Dong Juan, which was far too ethnic, even if his skin was dark enough to pull it off). Angelo was working on a mockumentary-style film he made with some friends parodying Michael Moore’s Roger and Me, called Rogering Me, which they managed to show once in a friend’s apartment but couldn’t convince anyone to distribute any more widely.
Angelo was a mooch, with no obligations to anyone or anything but his dream, and at first they just made out a couple of times after work. The last thing Chris Eaton wanted so soon after leaving Albert was a steady relationship. But there was something about the way Angelo spoke – and his belief in unattainable dreams, his faith – that had Chris Eaton completely transfixed. He was an enigma. He swirled his wine before drinking it but didn’t even know what Brie was. Within a month, they had moved in together. He nearly came out to his parents.
Then, naturally, things turned sour. Chris Eaton became less comfortable with Angelo having sex with other people, and more resentful that he was the one paying the rent while Angelo lounged around in a bathrobe all day drinking. He was also beginning to worry that others were defining him by his relationship to Angelo, who was frequently opinionated in public. He tried to leave several times, but on each occasion, Angelo broke down crying, told him he’d change, and convinced him to stay. For the next month, everything was fine again. Good, even. And then they’d be on a subway platform screaming at each other.
In the final month of their relationship, after Chris Eaton would no longer lend him money for more film, Angelo began stealing from him. They often fought in public. Then, shortly after they split, Angelo was involved in a horrible bike accident, catching his wheel on an unseen chain while jumping a short flight of stairs in Central Park. His forward motion ripped him from his seat, but his pant leg became hooked on the bicycle’s chain ring, thrashing him wildly, like a killer whale with a seal, and he came down hard on the railing and slipped into a coma. Chris Eaton made a special trip to the hospital to see him, just to verify that the story was true and not merely a way to get out of his debt. Then he left the city to start over back in St. Petersburg.
He started dating a city planner, and as far as she was concerned, the State of Maine should be shut down. It was a burden on the system. In a future without oil, it was crucial to base civilizations around the larger centres, more people packed into smaller spaces, to reduce any need for mechanical transport. Maine was too far away from any hubs and too far north to grow the crops it needed on its own, so rather than maintaining all those aging fishermen through social assistance and trade incentives, depleting one fish stock after another after another, it made more sense to move all of them to high-rise living in Boston. He was mildly offended, as he’d also been raised in a small town. But he’d also just come out of another relationship that had left him confused, and perhaps looking for fights.
When they met, the city planner was already living with another man. Chris Eaton knew about the other man, and the other man knew about him, and he knew that the other man knew, but it was unclear whether or not the other man knew that he knew about him. The other man did not like to have sex. The city planner, on the other hand, liked it very much, although she was not particularly good at it, or not very good at reciprocating, or perhaps both, not that Chris Eaton noticed anyway, unfamiliar as he was at that point with good sex or even the idea that there was anything more she could be doing.
Whether or not the other man knew that he knew was further confused when the city planner would invite Chris Eaton to their place. At the first invitation, he had assumed the other man must know that he knew, or that he would find out. But naturally these occasions only occurred when the other man was out, and on entering the apartment, Chris Eaton was surprised to find it lacking in any characteristics that were not hers. There were no men’s boots in the foyer, no distinctive shaving supplies in the medicine cabinet, no dandruff shampoo. The cupboards contained no canned meat. Everything in the refrigerator was covered. In fact, he briefly wondered if there was no other man at all, that it was just some sort of tactic she used to increase devotion. Then gradually he began to assume that this must have been part of their deal, that the other man never wanted to meet the other men, and that he never wanted anyone to know that he was being cuckolded, even if it were by his choice. He also assumed, then, that the other man must not know that he already knew about him, unless all of this was just some strategy they had concocted to make Chris Eaton feel less uncomfortable. Or, he wondered again, there was no other man at all.
The only thing that gave it away was the CD collection, which easily went beyond any sorts of references she had previously made to music. She danced, when they were out, a lot, and to the same popular songs you couldn’t escape on the radio but with extra bass. But the shelves in the apartment were full of bands and records he had never heard of, with a strong element, in particular, of punk (e.g., Richard Hell and the Voidoids, The Heroin Cats, Nina Hagan, The Slits…) and world music, including Victor Jara (arrested and shot shortly after the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973), Silvio Rodriguez’s Cisne Harto (1978; an ode to nature, recorded while still in his optimist phase, in the same session that produced Mujeres), and Stina Verda’s first CD, Charo (1980). On subsequent visits, Chris Eaton would listen to many other discs in the collection, but this last one was the recording he would always come back to, seemingly named after the Spanish flamenco star and sex symbol of the eighties, completely unaware that the passionate, self-assured voice was only nine years old.
***
It was likely because of this CD that he and the city planner took their first vacation together to Panama. She loved to travel. The other man, if he really existed, did not. Having never traveled to Central America before this, Chris Eaton and the city planner were unp
repared for how hot it was. The room they slept in for the first few nights was an unventilated oven, with nothing but his grossly under-padded yet over-insulated Gore-Tex jacket as a pillow, and a few sheets of cardboard for a bed. Of course, their living situation was his own fault for not learning better Spanish before he left. When you’re arranging accommodations with someone who has broken English at best, furnished and furnace can sound very similar. As soon as they stepped off the plane in the capital, he was struck first by the heat, like stuffing wet gym socks down his throat, and then by the throng of people wanting to do them a favour. The cabbies rushed to help with their bags, firing “Taxi?” and “Where going?” and he was so overwhelmed with their helpfulness that they left with the first one to wrest his backpack free.
The second thing that struck him was the poverty. After America’s completion of the legendary Panama Canal, so many men had been left unemployed that it had created an entirely new class of financial barrenness. And he wondered what he could do to help.
For the city planner, the vacation was only marred by a film shoot in Bocas del Toro, which transformed their secluded paradise into a mini oasis of America. The production company was working on the final scenes of a horror/action/thriller called Sloth vs. Manatee, starring Ema Hesire and Ian Dowd, which would go on to be a cult hit, gross hundreds of millions of dollars, and actually start a sort of franchise. But in order to make the Panamanian beach look more exotic, they had brought in thirty mature palm trees from Hawaii and were in the process of reshaping the entire lay of the coast.
“Hay las palmas en Panamá,” said one of the village elders. And the government’s Tourism Minister, Ruben Blades (who’d also been given a minor role in the film), translated.
“Are you kidding me?” the production manager said as they started digging the holes. “Those things? The Western public expects a certain something from their paradises, and if they’re really going to accept your beautiful country as their new vacation dream spot, then there’s gotta be the right kind of palm trees…”
Blades translated back. The elder looked unimpressed.
But the Panamanian government wanted a piece of the action that Costa Rica had. And Cuba. So they stood back as the foreign palm trees were shipped through their famous canal (where several itinerant Eatons once came to dig, he noticed when he visited the locks at Miraflores), and some of the locals were even enlisted to help dig the holes. The beach was perfect. All it needed were those few extra touches to drive it home. So they tied old, dried-up coconuts to the branches of the palm trees, because no one would ever recognize a ripe, green one. They bleached full stretches of sand to make it whiter. They even re-landscaped several of the dunes so they could capture the right shots from the water, and extended the beachscape by hacking away at the mangrove stands that bracketed either end. After they had finished shooting, they restored the beach to its original shape. But without the proper shore grass holding it together, several of the dunes collapsed the next rainy season. The dens of the hermit crabs had been trampled so frequently, they packed their shells and never came back. With their main source of food used in campfires for the crew, the manatees did likewise. And you’d be lucky to spot one in Panama today.
Soon after they returned home, Chris Eaton suggested another trip – to Peru. But the city planner’s horrific memories of Panama still needed time to wane, and the relationship soon ended.
***
Stina Verda, on the other hand, remained a lifelong obsession, Christina “Stina” Maria Rosita Verda, born in the US military hospital in the Canal Zone of Panama City in 1971, the daughter of a forbidden love between a Panamanian housekeeper and a Hispanic-American soldier. After the flag riots in the mid-sixties, where twenty-one locals and four soldiers were killed, tension remained high between Panamanians and the American military, and when it was discovered that Officer Verda had fathered a child with the woman, it was decided it would be safer for everyone concerned if they were sent back to America.
In Florida, little Stina showed an early showbiz bug doing celebrity impersonations, and was discovered by a producer named Luke Harmon while taking part in a talent show at a mall in Miami. The competition had strict rules that the age of all children involved should be over ten, but somehow eight-year-old Stina convinced her mother to lie for her, or her mother coaxed Stina into it, or perhaps her mother just didn’t understand English very well, and before anyone could really stop it, she was gyrating across the stage in a sequined pantsuit, shaking her non-existent breasts at the audience and screeching cuchi-cuchi to beat the band. The Spanish musician and actress Charo was riding a second wave of popularity, appearing on such television hits as The Love Boat and most of the popular variety shows, including Donny & Marie, The Captain and Tennille and a short-lived show of her own called Charo and Sevirat, with the king of ventriloquism at the time, the Frenchman Camille Sevirat (still the record-holder of the most words thrown while drinking a glass of water), and Stina’s performance, rather than shocking, was an immediate hit. Her reproduction of Charo’s guitar stylings was also spot-on, and her voice stopped Harmon in the middle of buying a Cabbage Patch kid for his niece.
By the age of nine, Stina Verda had her first hit song. Harmon released it on his own label, and it attracted the attention of the head of Warner’s Latin Music division, as well as the folks at Disney, spawning both a television show and a larger recording contract. At eleven, she was the most popular Latin artist in America, and had the top-selling CD in most Spanish-speaking countries: a concept record called Ven Hartar Sodica. To celebrate her thirteenth birthday, she appeared with the real Charo on one of her last Love Boat appearances. Her third album swept the Grammy Awards.
At seventeen, she fell in love with her bass player, and much to the dismay of her parents, they became engaged.
At seventeen and four months, they broke up.
And just two weeks before her twenty-first birthday, she was found floating face down in the rooftop pool of the Hotel Montreal in Panama City.
***
The police investigation was conducted in both countries simultaneously. At first, most people assumed it to be some sort of drug overdose. She was, after all, a rock musician, thrown into fame so quickly and early, and stereotypes, as one of the detectives in the US told the press towards the end of the investigation, existed for a reason. Everyone was the same. Everyone had the same hopes and dreams, more or less. And everyone fell prey to one vice or another. It was only the state of the body – completely swollen from head to toe and covered in large red welts – that seemed to indicate foul play.
Within a few weeks of the scandal, most of Verda’s albums were monopolizing the Billboard charts. By Christmas, her label had managed to cull together a box set of greatest hits and unreleased material – surely not the last of it – called Archivador Estan. A film of her life was supposedly in the works. The tabloids were covered with pictures of her last days, or shots of the hotel in which they had found her body, still covered in police tape and roses. Speculation was already circulating about who might be responsible. The welts and swelling would seem to have indicated a struggle of some sort, and there were traces of semen in and around her vagina. But there was also no internal tearing and her clothes were completely undamaged, which led police to suspect she must have known her assailant, and possibly even had consensual sex with the murderer directly before her death. Verda’s lover, a part-time stuntman in Brazil, was brought in for questioning, but he had been out of the country shooting scenes for Sloth vs. Manatee 3D, so they turned their attention to her boyfriend, a Panamanian politician and the son of a past President, who was approached while leaving the legislative assembly and brought in publicly for official questioning. The Minister had recently been involved in a bribery scandal that had taken months of police work, only to be thrown out by the country’s Supreme Court, so police commissioner Perlas Archipelago was particularly happy to have him in custody again, if only to retur
n the favor of his national humiliation. The Minister refused to cooperate, claiming emotional brutality to accuse him of the murder of the woman he loved. The sperm was a match, but his alibi was solid, and the American forensics experts who’d been flown in to help with the case acknowledged that the sample, if she had not douched since then, could have been there for days, and perhaps longer if she’d been underwater for very long, creating a seal to keep out the air.
In the US, meanwhile, investigators began building their case against Stina’s manager. For so much of her career, she had been a minor, and so most of the profits from her royalties and performances, minus a generous allowance for her and her family, had been placed, on Harmon’s advice, in an account that she would be able to access when she came of age. As the police delved further, however, they discovered Harmon had been embezzling funds for at least the last ten years and probably more, registering all of the songs in his own name and telling no one. They couldn’t be sure if Stina had ever found out, but it could have explained why the Verdas had decided to fire Harmon, and would provide a fairly strong motive. When Harmon could not be found at his home, a massive manhunt was launched, and luckily for the humiliated Panamanian police, they were the ones who picked Harmon up trying to board a plane to Kuna Yala. At an unorthodox press conference, his lip split and left eye swollen tightly shut, Harmon confessed. Both countries rejoiced, but the Panamanians were particularly celebratory. It was like a soccer victory over the US, or at least a tie, and it was agreed, for national stability, that the trial should take place in Panama, but in the American-occupied zone so Harmon could also receive a fair trial as a US citizen. As the trial progressed, Harmon changed his story to say it had all been an accident. When asked why he was changing his story now, he said he was afraid. This wasn’t his country. He didn’t know what would happen to him. And when prosecutors drilled him about the events leading up to the murder, it became clear that he had no idea how Stina Verda had even died, had been in Panama merely on a scouting trip to find a replacement for his old star, and had only confessed after a thorough beating.
