by Dan Vining
Valentine glanced at the screen, handed it back to her. “Nope, no blondes here,” he said. Half of the women in the room were blondes. He double-clicked again and laughed at his joke, all out of proportion.
“Is Vivid coming in tonight?” Ava said fast, offhanded, hoping for a fast, honest answer.
“We never know,” Valentine said, just as fast.
Everyone knew Vivid owned The Shinola. She tended to buy any place she went to if there was a wait to get in. (She also owned The Rings of Saturn supper club down the beach.) Without warning, sometimes on a Sunday night—everyone knows how lonely Sunday nights are—Vivid would dance through the front door with two or three or four or five girlfriends, stopping The Shinola’s patrons midsentence, suspending cocktails on their way to lips. It’s her! Some of those nights she’d just sit in the dark in her booth in the back with her posse eating skinny fries with truffle oil. Sometimes, she’d stay ten minutes and then blow. But other times she’d hang around and take the stage and sing and the crowd would be mesmerized, barely breathing, feeling unspeakably lucky. She’d sing for hours, as if she were afraid to go home. She’d burn through every song in her catalogue of hits. And then some. Vivid was addicted to lying. She’d lost any sense of the difference between what was true and what she wished were true. And of course no one would call her out on anything. She’d sit up there on the stool under her signature pink lights and take a drink of water and say something like, “This is new. I just wrote it. I just wanted to try it out on you guys. It’s just what I’ve been feeling a lot lately.” Then she’d nod to her keyboard man and sing some songwriter’s song her management firm or a producer had pushed on her that afternoon. And she’d make it hers, which is what stars do.
Vivid also was known for fans who cut their hair or bought wigs like hers, girls (and a few boys) who dressed like her, who spoke like her, who said “just” a lot, too. Who lied a lot, too. They followed her around, tried to guess where she’d show up next, read everything there was to read about her, watched everything there was to watch, bought the most expensive tickets down front at the Hollywood Bowl or the ObamArena and sat together, shoulder to shoulder, singing along to the songs. Even the covers, which Vivid would also intro as her own, even when it was an old Madonna hit or John Lennon’s “In My Life.” When one of them started to cry, happily, the others would pat the crier on the knee, and then they’d all be crying, crying and singing, happily. They didn’t have a complicated name. They were just “Vivids.”
Tonight, three of them sat at a table just below the stage drinking some blue drink in a square glass Vivid had been seen drinking a week ago at a bar down in Poodle Springs. It wasn’t hard to look like Vivid. All it took was a lot of black around the eyes, a mole or spot over the lip on the left, bright perfect teeth behind purposefully smeared lipstick. It was a bruised look, a rehab-in-progress look, a not-there-yet look. As for the hair, it was ever-changing, often shock-pink or banana-yellow or silver-silver, sometimes snow-white then shoeshine-black an hour later. These three Vivids wore silver wigs, which meant they matched the chrome frond-heads of The Shinola’s palm trees. They didn’t seem to be much digging the Black crooner on stage right in front of them, since they were talking among themselves.
Ava was watching them. Beck’s Cali didn’t seem to be a Vivid, a superfan, at least not from the pic Ava had. Vivid always looked like what was new or what was next while Cali looked more than a little like what had been, a classic California beach girl. But maybe, Ava was thinking, Cali had started out as a fan, then had somehow managed to get close to Vivid for real. At least close enough to walk a mile in her shoes.
Across the club from the three Vivids, staring at them, a tall man sat alone in a black suit and a pink tie, a man with a gun tucked under his armpit. Any fool could tell about the gun by the way he left his suit coat unbuttoned, the way he kept shrugging his shoulders, as if the holster wasn’t comfortable. Or maybe he had just picked up the shrug watching old movies. But then the pimp Action Man came over to him with a nasty grin and a whispered message, which meant the skinny gunsel was for sure up to no good.
The lithe Black on stage sang the last sad word of his last sad song and then said, “Goodnight,” bowed at the waist, and stepped off stage left.
The crowd made a little noise.
A disembodied basso profondo voice, an MC, said in pearly tones, “Johnny Blue. For remembrance…” He let the ceiling fans rotate a couple of orbits—so they all could continue to pretend they were in a movie—and then said, “Now for the mind…The Duke.”
A young White in a creamy suit stepped to the microphone from stage right. The spotlight went to icy white. He had no props, not even a fake cigarette. Just words and a rich, dramatic voice. His eyes were fixed somewhere over their heads.
He wasn’t just another singer. He was a reciter. He opened his set with…
When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once and of their shadows deep…
The crowd went back to their drinks and chatter. The three Vivids picked now to head to the powder room.
Ava stood. “Thanks for the toot, Silk,” she said.
Valentine nodded. He watched Ava follow the Vivids toward the door marked Damas. “I’ll be on the roof,” Valentine said to the one-handed bartender and stepped away. On his way through the club, he nodded and click-clicked to a few customers but walked right past the young woman alone at a table next to the mirrored wall, unsteady, drunk or stoned or just too blue for words. Her lipstick was bright red and smeared in the Vivid fashion. She had black hair and every few seconds she brushed it off her face.
This as The Duke spoke the next verse…
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty false or true.
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
Not that Cali heard him or had any thought that it was about her.
www
Two of the three Vivids were leaning into the ladies’ room mirror, smearing their lipstick. The other was in a toilet stall.
“Love your shoes,” Ava said to the girl closest to her, the one wearing open-toe knock-off heels like the gold pair the Shoemaker had made for Vivid but in silver.
“Thanks?” the girl asked.
The girls at the mirror looked at each other, stuck as to what to say next. Ava wasn’t much past thirty but to the Vivids talking to her was like talking to their moms. Or stepmoms. They fidgeted, rolled their eyes, fluffed their silver hair, sighed. The toilet whisper-flushed and the third girl came out. Up close, this one almost looked enough like the real Vivid to pass. She washed her hands like a good girl and then went to work on her lips in the mirror.
“What’s your name?” Ava said to her.
“Vivid,” the girl said.
“I mean in the daytime.”
“Laurel,” the Vividest Vivid said, somehow projecting bored and angry at the same time. It surprised Ava that she gave up on the I am Vivid thing so quickly. The two other girls looked both hurt and annoyed in a way that said this had happened before, Laurel getting special attention because she looked the most like the real Vivid.
“My name is Katy,” the girl in the copycat shoes said, without being asked.
“Wow,” Ava said to all of them, “Vivid has been all over the tube lately, huh?”
“It’s so unfair,” the nameless third girl said, fluffing up her silver wig. “Why won’t they just leave her alone?”
“They can’t,” Katy said.
“Think how it must hurt her, what they’re saying,” Laurel said to the face in the mirror.
“It’s none of their business!” Katy said.
“I hate them so much, all the snoopy-snoops, the reporters, and the news-readers,” the third girl said. Now it was as if Ava wasn’t there and they were just talking the way they just talked every day and night.
“It’s not ‘news’ if it hurts someone,” Laurel said.
“Really,” Katy confirmed.
“Hey, do you guys know Cali?” Ava whipped out her little dub-screen again, the I love you…loop. They barely looked at it. It was clear they knew who Cali was. They traded some looks, thinking they weren’t revealing a thing.
“Who are you?” Laurel said.
“Her hair is so pretty,” the third girl said, still looking at the little Cali movie on the screen. “Is this old? She doesn’t look as much like Vivid in this.”
“Yeah,” Katy said. “Who are you?”
“A friend. Of Cali’s. From high school.”
“That’s a big fat lie,” the third said, flaring. “Number one, she’s young. Number two, she wasn’t from here. What, you got on a plane and came all the way out here from Florida just to find her?”
“What we do is our business!” Laurel said, glaring at Ava as if she was Mom. She looked away.
It was then that Ava saw the scars under the line of Laurel’s jaw and at the hairline, evidence of some recent cut-and-paste, a stitch job, and not the kind the stars get in the secret clinics out in Two-Bunch Palms. This was a cruder makeover, perhaps with a more desperate purpose than trying to ease aging. Laurel was too young for that. She must have wanted something else, wanted to be someone else, leave herself behind, cut away herself.
“Leave us alone, lady,” Laurel said and grabbed her clutch purse. She yanked open the door and looked back at Katy and the third girl until they grabbed their bags and followed her out, like you’re supposed to when you’re in a gang.
“Who does the work on you guys?” Ava asked. Too late. They were gone.
Had she really called Ava “lady”?
www
Out in the parking lot, Action Man had Cali by the arm, leading her toward a boxy Bentley from the late nineties. It was the color of tarnished silver. The tall gunman in the black suit and pink tie from the club stood beside the open back door.
Ava came out of club just in time to hear Cali say, drunkenly, “Please, I’m no good to you now.”
“Let her go,” Ava said.
“She works for me,” Action Man said. “Stay out of it, Ava.”
“Let her go,” Ava said. She said it in the tone of voice people use when they have a gun in their hand. The skinny man by the Bentley looked as if he was a second away from going for his gun, but he didn’t. He shrugged his tough guy shoulders instead.
“Let her go,” Ava said.
Action Man turned loose Cali’s arm and Cali fell to the ground. “There, I let her go,” Action Man said.
Ava knelt beside her. “Are you all right?”
“Who are you?”
“We can talk about that.”
“Just leave me alone,” Cali said and pulled away from Ava, ran toward a taxi cruiser across the lot, a low-slung four-passenger helo.
“Wait,” Ava said. “Beck sent me.”
At the sound of Beck’s name, Cali stopped. She turned and looked at Ava with a face that seemed about to break into pieces. “I can’t,” she said. “Tell him.”
The tall man beside the Bentley had seen enough. He slid behind the wheel of the big cruiser and fired it up and sped away, blowing out a white cloud of old school stink, burning dinosaur bones. Ava stood there, watching it go, breathing in the perfume of the exhaust cloud. Nostalgia was going to get her killed some day.
There was no tag on the back of the car, just a plate with the initials DL.
“Down Low?” Ava said to nobody.
The air taxi lifted. Cali looked down out the window and brushed her black hair off her face, so sad and lost, as the bemused moon slid away off the glass.
Chapter Six
Ava drove away from The Shinola.
“Let me take the wheel,” the Hudson’s voice said. “You’re blowing a point-oh-nine.”
“I had one drink.”
“Tell it to the judge.”
“Fine!” Ava said and lifted her hands from the wheel.
“Where are we going?” the car voice said.
“I thought you knew everything,” Ava said.
The car voice laughed warmly.
“You know,” Ava said, “you’re getting way too familiar.”
“How about I take you home?”
“Penny!” Ava said.
Penny came on screen. “I was hoping you’d check in,” she said. “What happened with Cali? Did you find her?”
“Sort of. Ask me in the morning,” Ava said. “Get me Chang.”
Life had gotten cheap and information had gotten dirt cheap. Not much was considered private anymore. What do you want to know? Who was a crusher, an addict? Who was dying of some shameful fourth-world virus? Who was diddling whom? Who was suicidal and calling the hotline? Who was in jail? Who was in church on his knees? Who was crying her eyes out in the back of a helo-cab?
Edward Chang appeared on screen. “What do you need?” Chang said. “Ten dollars.”
A woman was shouting in Chinese in the background, unseen. Ava had always guessed that Edward Chang was thirty-something, but maybe she was wrong, maybe he was a teenager, still living at home. He’d let slip once that he lived over a restaurant in Chinatown.
“What do you need?” Chang said again. “Ten dollars.”
“Yellow AirCab three-oh-eight-C.” Ava made a C with her finger and thumb.
“Ten dollars.”
“Nine dollars? I’m not paying you eight dollars!”
Edward Chang had never stopped typing since he’d come onto the screen. Who knew how many ten-dollar jobs he was juggling at the moment. He said, “Yellow AirCab three-oh-eight-C, Destination: Twenty/Four/Seven Admiralty Way, Marina Del Rey. Ten dollars.”
”I’m sorry, how much do you charge?” Ava said. She slapped the button on the dash before he could answer.
“Did you get that, Mr. Nosey Car?” she said.
“Nine minutes,” the Hudson voice said. “We’ll be there by four ten.”
And so Ava rolled south on Lincoln Boulevard. This time of night, the traffic was almost free-flowing traffic, the hours between the night people dragging home their spent selves and the rest of LA getting up and heading off to their cubicles or the unemployment office. It was smooth sailing, except for having to dodge four or five abandoned cars every block.
Penny returned on the screen. “Beck has called like nine thousand times. We talked for fifty-two minutes. He was so…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not tonight,” Ava said and punched Penny’s lights out.
Beck. Her client. The job. Ava didn’t know what she was going to do when she was face-to-face with Cali again, without pimps and Bentleys and gunsels around, assuming she could find her at the address. A little woman-to-woman talk? In person, Cali looked about nineteen, no older than the girls in the ladies’ room. Beck didn’t see fit to mention that, did he? The cradle-robbing, lovesick jerk. A woman-to-girl talk? Ava wasn’t thinking that far ahead. All night—all day—she’d had just been putting one foot in front of the other. She wondered if everyone’s life was like hers. Improv. Reactive. Impulsive?
The autopilot slalomed around two Feds parked side by side in the middle of Lincoln, a couple standing between them, waving their arms, flailing around, fighting. Or maybe they were dancing. No, there was no music.
It had been a long day, a day that had started two hours too early for her taste with a call from her mother, who wasn’t doing well, her mother who had lost something that just had to be there somewhere in the house, but she couldn’t find it. Ava had crisscrossed the city in
the Hudson four times that day, first from her apartment in Hollywood across to Pasadena and the family house, then downtown to see the CRO Nate Cole. Then, while she’d been in the neighborhood, she’d scarfed down a $100 steak at The Original Pantry—What beef shortage?—then drove out to the office in Westwood, then to the candy shop and then back west to The Shinola. She was tired, tired of the miles, tired of the traffic, tired of the stop-and-go. Tired of people she had to see, tired of the people she couldn’t find, tired of the people she had already found, tired—if the truth be told—of the glib bullshit she’d heard herself say all day long. What else? Oh yeah, she also was tired of the way she looked when she’d caught sight of herself in the blue mirror behind the bar at The Shinola, tired of everything being lost, or on the way to lost.
She slapped herself to snap out of it. “Ouch,” she said.
And Ava couldn’t forget that one of the Vivids had called her lady. Laurel. Laurel was also the Vivid who’d said, It’s not “news” if it hurts someone! The girl had gotten it precisely back-assward in that way only the young can. Vivid herself wouldn’t be news if she wasn’t coming apart on a daily basis, if she wasn’t hurt, if she wasn’t hurting the ones who cared about her. Cali wasn’t famous like Vivid, but she wouldn’t be news either if she wasn’t publicly coming apart. Ava wouldn’t be looking for her if Cali was healthy and happy and whole, if she wasn’t lost, if she wasn’t bad news.
The Hudson parked itself on Admiralty Way. Ava got out, looked up. Twenty/Four/Seven was a twenty-story residential tower that overlooked the boat slips and the bight beyond, built in the shady eighties, probably with cocaine for mortar. Huge fake elms held forth out front and the whole scene was bathed in the ugly orange of the anticrime streetlights. Down here the ocean-adjacent air was always misty. At least there was that. Ava stood beside the car and huffed a lung full of it. It smelled good, salty, a little sour, but alive. Like her.
She used a Pik-Lok to get in the lobby door. Cali’s apartment was on the seventeenth floor, three floors down from the penthouse: 1717. There were no names on the backlit lobby directory, just faces, little moving digital images, all of them smiling—except for the old people, most of whom looked like they’d just been awakened from a nap. Here was yet another version of Cali. Big surprise. This Cali on the lobby directory didn’t look like a teenager; she looked late twenties. Her hair was light brown and shorter and she was smiling and tilting her head to one side at the end of the loop, an endearing gesture. Better days? Maybe it was just better acting. At least she wasn’t mouthing, I love you… over and over without even being able to see the person she was talking to.
