Dead Stars

by Bruce Wagner

  “So I would say that your mother is more than a neophyte.

  “The course takes 9 months, it’s very comprehensive. Now, you know Dawnie’s been depressed since she stopped teaching. That’s not a secret. You can’t live in this house & not know that. She’s had troubles on & off all her life with depression. Rikki, it’s a disease. And I think that taking this course, this going-back-to-school, but this time as a student, really lifted her out of the gloom. The gloom & doom. She probably needs to change her medication, up it a little, I’m getting into that. But this place—up north—is a Buddhist operation, the people who run it are all Buddhists. Dawnie printed out the application from their website and went through it very thoroughly. They asked her—they asked everyone who applied—to write an essay—we both had the impression it wasn’t, the essay wasn’t, it wasn’t an audition for the course. Not strictly speaking. They just asked that you write a personal essay conveying why you wanted to take the course & do the work, what you expected to get out of it, that sort of thing. They wanted to know a little what you imagined your plans were for the future, in the sense of utilizing whatever you learned with them. But not in any serious detail. I think it was more about hearing you explain your passion. That’s what they wanted to hear. Maybe a little about your experience too, in life. With the ‘great mystery.’ Because you may not know this but Dawnie’s had a lot of death in her life. Her mom at an early age, her brother—a drunk took him out—her dad, just a few years ago. She had a little sister who died at five months. Dawnie was 4. She’ll never talk about it, but believe me, she remembers it vividly.

  “Dawnie was very excited about it; the course is only a few months away. That’s what our trip was about last month—looking for an apartment close to the Zen Center, a single. Dawnie called it her ‘room with a view.’ A room of one’s own. It’s a long time since she felt her independence, that sense of herself as a unique & separate individual on the planet, someone worthy and productive, a woman not just a wife, mom, teacher, or whatever the world chooses to describe her. She showed me the essay she wrote for those people, & Rikki, I tell you it was really something. Really something. One day, I’ll ask her to show it to you. Spectacular piece of writing. I didn’t think she was capable of that—no, that sounds wrong, that’s not exactly what I meant. I knew she was capable, let’s just say I didn’t think she had the tools. Rikki? I was completely floored by it.

  “Long story short, Dawnie didn’t get in. I don’t think they really even considered her. They wrote her a letter saying they were sorry but the course was only open to professionals at this time. We were floored. I asked her if she wanted me to call, you know, speak to someone at the Center, to push a little and find out what the hell was going on, but she was adamantly against it. So, it completely—her plans were completely thwarted and I think there was some embarrassment too because she was so confident, and told some friends as well. Where she was going, & how long she would be away. The whole idea of going up there to be engaged in that kind of work touched her soul . . . I looked at the ad, the one clipped from the magazine, Buddhist magazine, looked at it very carefully, & to be honest, I still think it can be read either way. In other words, there aren’t any flashing lights that say CIVILIANS NEED NOT APPLY. I think someone in their outfit needs to take a closer look at wording, at how things are worded. Because I’m an engineer, I pay attention to that sort of thing. But evidently, we both misunderstood. Because I read the ad right along with her.

  “That’s what put her to bed. It has nothing to do with your situation with Reeyonna. In fact, Dawnie said something to me about it this morning. She hasn’t talked much, but she was worried you’d think you weren’t on her mind or that she wasn’t going to offer any support or guidance. She wanted me to convey that. Because I know she plans to, soon as she pulls out of this little nosedive. This has happened a few times before. It’s a lot of darkness, what the therapists call ‘family of origin’ stuff. Early trauma, all that PTSD rigmarole. It’s real, but I don’t think knowing the reasons behind it helps.

  “I’m not going to let her go on like this forever. If she doesn’t improve by next week, I’ll take her to see someone.”

  Jim heard his wife crying & excused himself to go to her. He got as a far as the hallway then turned back to Rikki.

  “I keep kicking myself. Wondering if it was a mistake to include the check—the tuition was $5,000 & I sent a check along with Dawnie’s application. The check of course was returned. I keep second-guessing that maybe they thought that was arrogant or presumptuous. Sending along the check, like it was a fait accompli. But it was a completely innocent thing! We both were excited, I was excited for her. See, I thought it was essentially a done deal, we both did. But jeez, maybe someone thought it was a bribe! I need to stop kicking myself. Still, it’s there. ‘If I hadn’t sent the check, then she’d be in.’ What they call magical thinking. Isn’t that dumb?”

  . . .

  The selfish relief Rikki felt was quickly overtaken by apprehension about his fostermother’s condition.

  He went to his room and called Reeyonna because he’d been giving her updates & wanted to tell her it wasn’t the baby thing that was freaking his mom, but something else. I mean, she probably is flipped about the baby, but right now my dad said she’s flipped she lost this job that she thought she was gunna get. Or this job she was paying for to get. She thought she got hired but she didn’t. My dad was telling me.

  Ree said she was almost ready to ask her mom for the trust money. He didn’t say anything; that was her business. The whole reason behind her asking for the trust money made him overall nervous. Having a kid was huge enough, but now ReeRee was talking about moving out & getting a place of their own. They were going to buy a bungalow in Hollywood, depending on how much money she got from her mom. And if they didn’t buy the bungalow, Ree said they’d rent a duplex, maybe over on Fairfax. He never had his own place like that, didn’t know shit about it. When he pictured the new place, he saw himself sitting on the bare floors wondering who you even called to set up the wireless. And plus, he was going to be a father. It was all so huge & fucked up he couldn’t even deal.

  Rikki smoked & got his email. A friend sent a video of four guys in A&F/HOLLISTER hoodies banging this girl at school who never turned down a rape. They were all wearing Obama masks, it was kinda funny, kind of okay. He scanned the stickamgirls/facebookam/Talk To A Stranger sites where the screen’s split into webcam twos: like, a girl would be in her bedroom on the top screen, watching the stranger in his bedroom on the bottom, & there’d be a scroll of whatever they were keyboarding each other usually just shit like show it to me, you’re so fuckin hot, show me your tits—bullshit like that. For some reason the girls always showed their faces but the strangers typically made sure the webcam cut em off at the neck so that all you usually could see was their hands strobe-stroking their big dicks. The one he started to watch was funny because the girl’s little sister burst into the room in the middle of it & saw what was going on and shouted “Perv!” at her sis then left, slamming the door. A 9-year old calling a 12 year-old a perv cracked him up.

  Rikki got out the bong & settled in for some hardcore tubin’ but suddenly got hungry. Went to the kitchen and made a bigass sandwich—double turkey, double roast beef, beaucoup Jarlsberg, lettuce & tomatoes & jalapeños & grey poupon. Big bag of honey mustard kettle chips. A water pitcher filled with crushed ice & coke zero. He tried picturing the kitchen as the one in the new bungalow/duplex, but it wasn’t a nice fantasy, it made him bummed.

  On his way out, he saw the letter on the breakfast table.

  * * *

  Z E N H O S P I C E P R O J E C T

  Dear Dawn,

  Thank you for submitting your application for our End-of-Life Counselor Program. Regrettably we will not be able to include you in our fall training. We are very pleased to have received an enthusiastic response to our Call for Candidates including applications from hospice caregivers,
psychotherapists, chaplains, and healthcare professionals.

  In order to select participants we carefully review each application assessing each candidate’s established experience, commitment to end-of-life care and the merits of their proposed plan for use of the training. We appreciate the obvious attention you gave to preparing your application.

  Please understand that this decision is not meant to discourage your interest in caring for those with life-threatening illness. On the contrary we feel that the culture needs more people with your demonstrated dedication to improving end-of-life care. We hope you will continue your efforts in service and that you will remain in contact with Zen Hospice Project and The Institute on Dying.

  Yours,

  Frank Ostaseski

  Founder & Guiding Teacher

  Zen Hospice Project/Institute on Dying

  * * *

  Back in his room, Rikki fell into his own kind of funk. He was even more guiltstricken now for laying the pregnancy trip on his fosterfolks. The timing was so shitty—right in the middle of his mom’s depressathon. He’d always wanted to make them proud; now this was how he chose to repay their loyalty and commitment, their unconditional kindnesses. He wouldn’t let them adopt him, he’d spare them of that additional hassle-y heartache.

  He felt like a monkey, not a man.

  That’s right: they had a monkey in their house, a ganja-smoking monkey that ate their food & yanked his dick & got his load off watching Jap schoolgirls getting raped.

  It was time to put away childish things.

  . . .

  New father, new baby, new life.

  (Permanent new legal parents, Dawn & Jim.)

  New dreams, new ambition.

  (Uhm, there weren’t really any old ones.)

  All these lets and shit were always buying houses for their parents. They’d turn, like, 18, & say, “The birthday present I got myself was buying a house for my mom & dad. It was the best present ever,” some such shit, & Rikki would smirk and call them dicks but now it was like Who the fuck am I, they’re out there doin shit & I’m just smokin weed and pullin my pud. Mom ’ould damn well come out from her room if I knocked & said, hey moms, it’s Rikki, can I talk to you a sec? I, uh, I just, well uhm I just bought this house for you & Dad. It like has a pool? It’s, like, a mansion in (Malibu) (Hancock Park) (the Holly Hills)—so many rooms (in my father’s new house)—you know I don’t mean to break confidences but Dad told me about those buddhahead mutherfuckers. Sorry for the language Mom. But like, uh, I made a donation? And they wrote another letter, I’ll show it to you, it said they were REALLY SORRY for what they did, they want you to COME UP & do that job they originally didn’t want you for. I bought a ticket for you, 1st-Class, for you and Dad. Got you a room too at the 4 Seasons right near where the buddhaheads are doing their bullshit.

  He suddenly had an Idea, the Idea of his young life.

  Rikki’s epiphany was to seek out his heroes & take counsel from those bigger-than-life fathers whose movies had sustained him during the Lost Years when he wandered the DCFS* desert of dark, crappy, DVD-stocked dens, trekking by court order from group- to residential- to assigned-family homes, till (free at last) he reached the promised land (Dawn&Jim): Laurence Fish., Denzel W., Forest Whit., Morgan F., Wesley Snipe. He knew they were approachable—if he could find them!—& would see themselves in little boy Rikki, crying for help. Wikipedia said Fishburne lied about his age to get his first part in that war movie, said he was 17 but he was 14 . . . could I do something whack like that? Something dope/fucked up for real? Naw, prolly I’m just a punkbitch. He needed to go hunting for courage like the lion in Wizard of Oz. He’d yellowbrick it to the Wizard—his BIGGEST role model hero Antwone Fisher—the man whose mama was in jail when she gave birth to him, & whose papa was a gangsta just like Rikki’s (Antw.’s daddy got shot before Antw. was even born) . . . . . . . . Antwone Fisher, soul brother/teacher/father, raised in the System just like Rikki was except Antw.’s best foster family happened to be his very first one, but the state (like they do) took him away from the good fam & put him in with hella bads & Antw.’s life went to shit till he joined the Navy . . . whereas Rikki’s best placement wasn’t till the very end, the rest of them before, before Dawn & Jim, the rest being multitudinous shitholes—though, no matter how shitty or crazy the placements, each made sure to have its dark, DVD-stocked den, not only because it kept the kids occupied, but for the show&tell required to impress the [very] occasional visiting social worker . . . a key difference being that Rikki didn’t join the Navy, not yet anyway, & didn’t see how he ever would———

  Antwone made himself a player out of sheer guts, got a job as a studio guard, infiltrated the Hollywood System so he’d be heartbeatclose to what was going on. Sitting there daydreaming in front of the paused porn, he started to think maybe he would even apply for a job like that once they got settled in their new space.

  He’d write a script about his life just like Antw. did, then get Antw.’s advice if the script was any good & see maybe if Antw. could help get someone to direct it into a movie the same way he got Denzel to direct his. Or maybe Antw. would read Rikki’s screenplay and want to direct it himself.

  It was all good.

  He knew he had a shot with those niggers, especially Antwone because of the whole shared hard knocks/DCFS/gangsta dad/crackhead mom/adoption thing. Yeah yeah he would sure to have a shot because

  he willseehisselfinmy

  eyes

  CLEAN

  [Bud]

  Bud Wiggins, Returning

  Tolstoy

  was wrong. That’s what Bud thought, anyway.

  As he mulled it over on the way back to Dolly’s, he saw a laughing bum on a bus bench on La Brea, just south of Sunset. More like a laughing Buddha than bum (though maybe they were one & the same), for he was ecstatic; his jaw opened in ravenous hilarity, arms & fingers gesticulated wildly, eyes on fire as he stared ahead at the invisible movie playing on a screen that only he could see—blockbuster comedy of Eternity. The peculiar thing was that just before he turned right on Olympic toward Beverly Hills, Bud passed another ecstatic bum in a FUTURE CELEBRITY t-shirt, this one even more extreme than the last in his appreciation of whatever was being unreeled. For 35 years, Bud had been knee-jerk monetizing his daily experience through a screenwriter’s filter, & this one quickly coalesced into a pitch about a “happy virus” descending upon the meek & the homeless then worked its way up from there. He quickly rejected it, remembering he was no longer in the business that bore him such meager fruit through the decades. Besides, he suddenly recalled that David Foster Wallace’s big book touched on that; Bud never liked being accused of general plagiarism.*

  He thought of Tolstoy because he’d seen plenty of unhappy bums of the paranoid type who rage in public places. It was easy for Bud to come up with reasons behind their display of insanity: a fire and brimstone fervor of religious psychosis; anger at the intrusion of Homeland Security, whose voice spoke through their teeth or the radios of passing cars; disgust at Women, whose gender was the source of all disease, all misery. But when it came to imagining what was behind the happy bums’ façade, well, he was fairly certain, if asked, they would not say, “I am at one with the beautiful absurdity of the cosmos!” or even “I am Jesus & I shall save you!”—because, at least in the latter, what would be so hysterically funny about that? No, the difficulty was in discerning what was on the screen that caused such insane joviality. Clearly each was having a singular experience; each was seeing something specific to himself that tickled his madhouse funnybone.

  Hence:

  Unhappy bums are all alike; every happy bum is happy in his own way.

  Take that, Tolstoy.

  . . .

  Nothing had changed, really, in those 35 years. Bud was still addicted to pills and living in the downstairs room of his mother’s rent-controlled, split-level apartment—The Charleville Manor—in Beverly Hills. He couldn’t find work, any kind of work, a
nd relied on the kindness of almost-strangers; friends in the Industry who’d mostly slipped away. A few times a week, he awakened to his own high-pitched screams. The only thing that was different was suddenly being 59 years-old. Recently, the dentist told Bud he was grinding his teeth, and asked if he wanted a night guard. Bud joked, “Why bother? I’ve only got about 15 years left.” Instead of cracking a smile (the dentist’s assistant remained stoic as well), the dentist just shrugged, as if to say, You’ve got a valid point there.

  The building Dolly lived in was now owned by a Vietnamese woman with serious OCD. The reign of the Jewish landlord—the building was once owned by the furrier Abe Lipsey—was long over. The VC drove a little Mercedes & her face bore an agéd, frozen, mani-pedi smile; she was as anxious for Dolly to die as Bud was. Dolly had been in that apartment more than 4 decades. Her rent could only be increased x-amount per year, the results being, to the VC’s immense consternation, that she paid less than ½ what the other tenants did—the dogged, nest-building, penurious Dolly (Chinese Year of the Ox) rolled over any financial obstacles in her way. In time, she became Neimans’ highest earner, having fleeced the company through an elaborate system of purchases, returns & swap-outs that involved the bedazzling, bedizened expertise of the aforementioned Mr. Lipsey, furrier & landlord to the dying stars. (Broderick Crawford’s ex-wife, the starlet Joan Tabor, had died in one of Lipsey’s buildings, a suicide Bud remembered The Beverly Hills Courier writing up as an accidental OD of influenza Rx.) When she retired at 83, she had a tad more than a million in savings; now, she was a relatively spry nonagenarian whose only fear was falling. Bud hoped she’d soon take a dive because the longer she lived, the more her savings were depleted by the round-the-clock caregivers she’d hired specifically to prevent her from taking a tumble.