South on Highland: A Novel

by Liana Maeby

  When Say Tin! started playing a dancy Cure-like tune, I looped Johnny’s arms around my neck and swayed against him. I lit a cigarette and placed it in his mouth. “Let’s go fucking nuts tonight,” I said.

  Johnny laughed. “Okay,” he said in my ear, spinning me around with a display of grace that betrayed his ballet training and made his thin body that much more attractive. I kissed him over and over again, watching that pentagram burn beneath the stage.

  After the show, I invited the band to come back to our trailer. I enlisted a few swooning girls to venture forth and track down booze, and told them to spread the news that there was going to be a party at our place.

  Johnny and I set up the wine and moonshine on our little table and let the party flow outside. Most of the camp wandered over, with no problem accepting that revelry was the order of the hour. Johnny and I convened once in the bathroom to shoot up, and he winked at me over the sounds of a drunk girl pounding on the door. Then he plunged a needle into my arm, and the pounding faded away until all I could hear was a river of blood rushing through my body.

  I was high as fuck and drunker than I’d been in weeks, when Curtis cornered me next to the bush I was using in an ill-fated attempt to maintain my balance. He put his hands against my back and steadied me firmly, like I was a hand truck carrying a load of important boxes rather than simply a human carrying the weight of a million bad decisions. “You want to sit down?” he asked, and I nodded gratefully.

  “So,” Curtis said once we were seated on the steps of the trailer. “Johnny said y’all are out here doing some kind of research?”

  “Yeah, I’m a screenwriter.”

  “And you’re trying to write about this place?”

  “You don’t approve?” I asked.

  “Crap like this is so passé,” Curtis said. “It’s like, yeah, let’s go be free spirits in the California desert. Like that hasn’t been done a million times. Plus, that Kennedy guy is a real egomaniac.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, though I knew I wouldn’t be able to deny it. “You’ve been here for, like, five hours.”

  “Word gets around in the cult world.”

  “The cult world?”

  What do these guys have, some kind of social networking service?

  Curtis stood up and peeled off his shirt. The parts of his back that weren’t covered in tattoos were marred by cuts, scratches, and burn marks. “I’m kind of a collector,” he said.

  Before I could respond, Say Tin!’s drummer, an elfish guy named Ryan, joined in the conversation. “I hear Kennedy’s planning some sort of ritual-suicide thing,” Ryan said. “And he’s gonna get a magazine to shoot it.”

  “No way,” Curtis replied. “That asshole loves himself too much for martyrdom.”

  “So,” I said, not wanting to ponder the possibility of a fashion spread full of dead bodies. “Do you guys . . . consider yourselves a cult?”

  “We’re devoted disciples of the Lord Satan,” Curtis said.

  I laughed heartily. They were stone-faced. “Wait, really?”

  “Nah, that’s just for theatrics,” Curtis said. “What we’re really about is pain. Our MO is indulging in the one thing everyone else is trying to avoid.”

  “That sounds pretty good to me,” I said, surprised to find I meant it.

  Curtis and Ryan exchanged a look, excitement catapulting between them. “You want to try it?” Curtis asked.

  I bit my lip, wondering what I had gotten myself into.

  “Okay,” I said, knowing I could follow no other course of action without sending the party on a downward spiral toward the ordinary. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Pick a spot,” Curtis said. “I recommend the hip.”

  “Hip it is then.”

  “Ryan, make fire happen.”

  Channeling his inner Neanderthal, Ryan gathered a series of twigs and set them aflame. He left for a minute, and when he returned, he was carrying a long metal branding iron and a temporary tattoo bearing that minimalist goat logo. Oh my fucking God, I thought, my legs wobbling with anticipatory sickness.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Curtis asked.

  I nodded, becoming a mute bobblehead of stupidity. I lay down on my side and exposed my hip. I tried to make my mind go blank as Curtis placed the temporary tattoo on my body and spit on it. He pushed his palm against the waxy paper and held it down until the thing had transferred its barnyard evil onto the thin layer of skin that stretched itself over my hip.

  Curtis pulled the metal brand out of the flame and held its glowing tip up to his face, which illuminated a demented and aroused grin. He touched the skewer to my skin and began to etch a shape into my flesh. I screamed. I screamed so fucking loud I stopped hearing myself, and my own voice became a signal of pure pain. The louder I yelled, the harder Curtis etched, and I bit down on my hand to keep myself from passing out. It was far and away the worst, most visceral thing I had ever felt, and this was through a filter of opiates. I realized too late that there was nothing at all enjoyable or enlightening about what these guys were doing.

  Homemade burn tattoos? Ritual suicide? That was it. I was done with parties, and I was done with cults. That night, as I lay awake choking on the smell of burning flesh that radiated from my oozing hip, I told Johnny I was ready to get the fuck out of the desert and back to LA.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  INT. CHATEAU MARMONT ROOM - DAY

  The curtains are drawn, and the lights are off. Leila and Johnny lie in bed. Half-eaten plates of room-service french fries litter the room.

  Leila starts to get out of bed. Johnny pulls her arm.

  LEILA

  I gotta get up. I have a meeting.

  JOHNNY

  Skip it.

  Leila shoots Johnny a look.

  JOHNNY

  I mean, really, what’s the worst that could happen?

  LEILA

  I don’t know. Harlan gets pissed at me? And has to lie to the studio?

  JOHNNY

  So your Hollywood agent tells a lie. And? What’s the worst that could happen?

  LEILA

  The studio notices a pattern. And starts losing faith in me.

  JOHNNY

  Okay, so they get a little worried. What’s the worst that could happen?

  LEILA

  I’m kicked off the project.

  Johnny pulls Leila back down into the bed.

  JOHNNY

  Worst that could happen?

  LEILA

  I can’t afford to buy us any more drugs.

  When we got back to Los Angeles, I effectively moved with Johnny into a room at the Chateau Marmont. If we pushed aside a few tree branches outside our window, we could see an enormous billboard advertising premium jeans. A man broods in sepia tones, wearing the smallest size of raw denim, a hiss of scruff splashed across his high cheekbones. His slit eyes stare directly into the camera, yet he still manages to set his gaze on something a thousand miles in the distance, perhaps a single Pepsi can floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was classic Johnny, and I told him daily that he had never looked better.

  Johnny immediately booked a guest-starring role on a new series about cybercrime, playing an identity thief who heists everything from a nice middle-class family and ends up crumbling in a hail of gunfire during a shoot-out on a beach near the Mexican border. The day Johnny filmed the beach scene, I bought him a pair of the darkest sunglasses I could find and wished him luck not exploding under the sun.

  I was supposed to be starting my first draft of the cult movie, but my heart just wasn’t in it. I couldn’t really remember what the thing was supposed to be about. Every time I thought of my protagonist, I saw Kennedy’s impassive face, unwilling to let me win as I undid the buttons of his pants. I didn’t particularly feel like sitting with that image, so instead of working, I shot more drugs and told myself I was letting the themes of the movie bang around inside my head.

  I avoided everyone I
knew. I would sneak into my apartment only when I knew Mari wouldn’t be home, and once I was there, I’d grab the things I needed so hastily it felt like I was stealing them. On one such trip, I saw that her car was still parked out front, so I drove mine around the corner and waited. When her car finally peeled out, I walked up to our door, and as soon as I pushed it open, I heard something move.

  “Mari?”

  It was probably the mouse, or the mouse’s offspring. I did a cursory check to see if the little guy was around. “You in here, vermin?”

  Nothing.

  “If you’re here, I want you to know that you’re free to take my bedroom. It’s all yours. The bed, the blankets. Anything your little vermin heart desires.”

  I walked into my room and swiftly gathered some essentials. I couldn’t bear to look at my desk, where notebooks full of old writing were piled high. I tried to avoid the gaze of the Virgen de Guadalupe while I threw T-shirts into a bag, and I couldn’t help but feel she was trying to avoid eye contact too.

  Johnny and I ended up at the Chateau because he’d been gifted a room for a couple of nights by the jeans company whose billboard stood next to the hotel, and once we were there, we didn’t really have the physical or mental wherewithal to move out. I knew our drug use had gotten out of hand, but I kept telling myself that Johnny had been doing this for a long time and couldn’t possibly be spiraling into oblivion now. Not with so many things on his horizon and our upcoming project so important to both our careers.

  Despite the tenuousness of our situation, Johnny and I were sweet to one another, pretty much all the time. We had sufficient money and contacts so that procuring dope wasn’t an issue, and we genuinely enjoyed one another’s presence enough that as long as we were high, we could hang around for hours listening to music or playing Scrabble or simply lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling like a pair of honeymooning snow angels. Once a day, we’d order room service, and if the bellhop managed to get it to us before we shot up again, we’d spoon soup into each other’s mouths and split a bottle of Perrier. Maybe all this niceness just came down to the fact that if Johnny and I found ourselves fighting, it would mean we were unhappy, and if we were unhappy, it would mean we had a problem.

  During this period, stimulants started to feel like that stable old boyfriend you’ve outgrown but keep telling yourself you’ll come back to once the flame blows out on your new love. Because he’s good for you, he turns you into your best self, and you’ve been with him for so long that you can’t imagine a future that doesn’t have him in it. You spot him in old family photos, right there in the dilation of your pupils. The size-zero dress he got you hangs in your closet, just a little too big to wear right now. You can’t help but remember how supportive he was on countless projects, and you give him credit for how you got to where you are today. He made you prioritize achievement and success. He made you care about being a person worthy of calling yourself a person. So you go back to him for a day every once in a while and hope some of those old feelings are still there.

  I felt this need to return to Mr. Amphetamine before a lunch meeting Harlan set up to discuss the status of the cult movie. I took a whore’s bath in our room at the Chateau, swiped on some makeup before deciding I’d looked fresher without it, and snorted ninety milligrams of Adderall. The drugs hit me while I was walking to my car, and really kicked in just in time for me to realize I didn’t have a car—at least not one that was parked anywhere near the Chateau. I made a mental note to have Mari check on my vehicle, which was likely putting in some time as a bird latrine outside our apartment. I had the concierge call me a cab, and spent the ten-minute ride down Fairfax furiously trying to force myself to give a shit about anything.

  Harlan was biting his tongue from the moment he laid eyes on me. We sat at a table near the window, and I had to force myself not to squint in the sunlight. When the waiter came by, Harlan placed his order without consulting the menu.

  “Just a coffee for me,” I said when it was my turn.

  “Order a sandwich,” Harlan said.

  “Do you have grilled cheese?” I asked the waiter.

  “We do. A trio of Gruyère, pepper jack, and cheddar that comes on brioche, with a side of house-made potato chips.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine.”

  I put my paper napkin on my lap to keep myself from systematically tearing it to shreds in full view of Harlan. My fork fell off the table and clanged loudly against the floor.

  “So,” Harlan said, after watching me try to settle in without knocking anything else over. “Dare I ask how the script’s coming?”

  “It’s good,” I said. “I mean, it’s in process. I did a shit-ton of research out in the desert, as I’m sure you know.”

  “How could I not? You were gone for fucking ever.”

  “I was getting really good stuff.”

  The expression on Harlan’s face read, I’ll bet, but he didn’t say anything at all. The waiter returned with my coffee, and I mixed cream into it quickly, hoping the ground-up beans would be the thing that finally snapped me into alertness. I sipped and swallowed, but my brain remained somewhere else.

  “And what’s your ETA for it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Time frame. When will you be done?”

  “With the script?”

  “Yes.” Harlan sighed. “With the script.”

  I looked into my coffee and tried to appear pensive, like I was mulling over the answer to his question and not figuring out how to avoid it. “Haven’t you learned by now not to ask a writer when she’ll be done writing?” was what I came up with.

  Harlan sighed again. “Can I ask you something personal?” He didn’t wait for me to respond. “Are you fucking Johnny Isherwood?”

  The shock I felt when Harlan asked the question wasn’t over the fact that he knew about me and Johnny; it was because he didn’t know about me and Johnny. A thrill snuck up my spine as I realized that the life I was living was still somewhat shrouded in mystery, and therefore not nearly as neon as I had feared. Turning this over in my head made me smile reflexively—but Harlan took it the wrong way.

  “Oh my God,” my agent said, leaning back in his chair. “You’re in love with Johnny Isherwood.”

  My lunch meeting with Harlan spurred me to double my efforts at avoiding everything in the world. I half told myself it was because I was going to buckle down and get to work on the script, and I one-tenth believed that was going to be true. But my notebooks remained unopened and Final Draft never even saw the light of day. Instead of working, Johnny and I would lie around with blackout curtains pulled over the window and listen to music. I became a scholar of ’70s protopunk, writing theses in my mind on the Modern Lovers, Television, the Stooges. I spent more time talking to Iggy Pop than I did anyone else save Johnny, who became proficient at singing to me in these perfect Jonathan Richman and Tom Verlaine impressions. I wouldn’t say that Johnny and I were happy, necessarily, but we were content with our small existence made of dope and music. We felt no allegiance to time; what was probably only a week’s vacation in Ignoreland felt like months.

  Our routine was interrupted when Johnny booked another guest-starring role on a TV drama and forced himself to enter the world like a normal human being, while I stayed behind with the curtains still drawn. Every morning when Johnny left for work, I’d tell myself I was going to go out that day too. The two of us would rise and shine with a cup of coffee and a morning shot of heroin. Then Johnny would give hygiene the old college try, kiss me on the head, and take off to meet the driver the studio provided for him as insurance that he’d actually arrive at the set. Usually I’d make an attempt to clean myself up as well, before ending up back in bed with a well-memorized record lulling me into oblivion. If I did manage to push myself out of our cavernous room, it would only be to take a stroll around the Chateau grounds with a cigarette dangling from my lips.

  Thirty-six hours was the longest stretch I went without leaving t
he room. I had been keeping track, and as soon as I hit that mark I forced myself out of bed. After showering for the first time in days, I put on a cashmere sweater that would have been far too warm for anyone with an ounce of body fat. My hair had been towel-dried, and it was offering its last beads of dewy moisture to the patches of sun that peeked through the dense Chateau foliage. It was a beautiful day, and I actually felt pretty good. I was lighting cigarette number who-knows, my mind eternally somewhere else, when a voice called out from a few feet away. “That’s the wrong end.”

  Almost embarrassed, I flipped the thing around and made it spark. Then I looked over at the voice’s owner, a man sitting at a shaded table, reading the newspaper with an enormous cup of coffee in his face. He was handsome, with silver hair and an arm full of tattoos. I recognized Tim Mooney right away and probably would have blushed if there had been any spare blood inside my body. He was one of my favorite writers, and his junkie memoir, Death of the Day, had been turned into a Johnny Depp flick more than a decade ago. I remember reading the book as a preteen and feeling like the movie didn’t do justice to Tim’s vicious and dirty prose. It didn’t capture the poetry he’d managed to eke out via descriptions of trying to burn the germs out of dirty toilet water before shooting it into his screaming veins.

  “Yeah, I did that on purpose,” I said. “Makes it easier to get cancer.”

  Tim let out a surprisingly hearty laugh. “Makes your cough better too, I bet.”

  “You should see what happens when I light my own hair on fire. The surgeon general actually flies in to have me personally committed.”

  Tim lowered his coffee and pushed his newspaper ever-so-slightly aside. “What brings you out and about on this godforsakenly pretty morning?”

  “I live here,” I said. “How cool is that?”

  Tim laughed again. I inhaled my cigarette and smiled. “Hey, do you drink coffee?” he asked. “I could go for a fifth cup.”

  We walked to the hotel restaurant’s outdoor patio and settled into a table. “Four coffees,” Tim said to the waiter. “And some pastries and crap.”