Dead Stars

by Bruce Wagner

  “I know. I will. I’m sorry.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You still love me?”

  “Yeah. Hell yeah. You’re gunna be the mother of my child.”

  “Not that way, the other way. Do you still love me the other way? Like do you still want to fuck me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then say it.”

  “I love you the other way.”

  “You still want to fuck me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But do you love it, do you still love it?”

  “Yeah I do.”

  “What do you love. Tell me what you love.”

  “To fuck you. I love to fuck you.”

  “Then why don’t you. Why don’t you fuck me.”

  “Like when like now?”

  “Come on come on come on & FUCK me. Don’t you want to make me come & suck my milk? I’ll make you come so hard.”

  “Go in the bedroom, Ima get some weed.”

  “Where.”

  “From Jerzy.”

  “Is he home?”

  “From his stash. He said it was OK.”

  “Not the joints that are dusted.”

  “You know I’m not down with KJ.”

  “It could hurt the baby. If he has roxys, can you bring me?”

  “Are u even supposed to be doin that shit? Roxys n shit?”

  “The doctor said they’re cool. & I went online & there’s a whole list of painkillers that are OK if you’re pregnant.”

  “I’ll look for em.”

  “Then you’ll come back & fuck me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait—tell me what you’re gunna do when you come back.”

  “Gunna fuck you. Ima gunna be all over you.”

  “Who you gunna come back & fuck?”

  “You.”

  “Reeyonna.”

  “Reeyonna. Ima come back & fuck Reeyonna.”

  “Where are you gunna fuck her? Where on her body . . . . . . .”

  “Ima fuck her pussy. Ima fuck her mouth & her ass. Ima fuck that baby out of you, bitch.”

  “You know I’m gunna let you, Rikki.”

  “Then you know I’m gunna be there. I’m gunna be there doin it to it.”

  “Ooh I really miss it Rikki. Ooh Rikki Ima gunna make you feel so goooooodddddd . . . . . . . . . . . .”

  “Then let me go ’n get that weed, girl. He got some Viagra & cialis & shit too, Ima wanna smoke a while & let all that shit hit me so I can get over it, you know help me to get over stickin my dick in & pokin that baby in the eyeball. Ima smoke a little weed & you can suck my dick.”

  “Our baby’s gunna be really happy you dropped in.”

  “Ree, come on now, don’t say that shit!!!!!!!!!”

  “Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!”

  “Now you’re gunna make me all neurotic———”

  “Go on & get that weed, Mr. Neurotica. And dont forget the Viagra. And dont forget the Roxys.”

  CLEAN

  [Jacquie & Reeyonna]

  Celebrity Miscarriages

  The

  theft shocked & hurt, embarrassed her, but what could she do? Her daughter was out there in the world, five months pregnant—no way would she call the police. Even though her small circle of friends said she should. “On Intervention,” said Albie, “they always tell the parents to call the police. They say if you don’t, you’re just helping your kid to stay sick.” There was still no way.

  After the initial shock, Jacquie had a good cry over the loss of the cameras themselves. She pictured them in her mind, saw them, felt them, the reaching for & the picking up, the straps even, the cold compact steely heft of their bodies, the exquisiteness of the machines, saw herself screwing/swiveling the lenses, the battery packs, the armatures as a soldier assembles his rifle, with love & respect, pride of ownership & mastery, stuffing their guts with film, attuned to each’s quirks & hiccups, each its own idiosyncrasies, how she watched over them, like a good mother paying closer attention when they got subtle bugs or technical fevers & if it lasted or grew worse, bringing them to the camera doc, leaving them overnight or even for a week in CCU (camera care unit) to be healed, always worried she might never see whichever baby again, not due to failure or impossibility of repair, but fire in the camera hospital, or . . . theft. They were part of her & she, part of them, for better & worse; each helped carry her through chapters of her life. Yes, they were her children as well, & the irony was not lost.

  She knew that Jerilynn felt

  why had it been impossible to call her Reeyonna? She practically begged me & I wouldn’t, I thought it was silly, to say ‘Reeyonna,’ + I didn’t like her changing the name I had given her, even though it was a terrible slight to her father because the root was Jerry/Jerome, I named her as if she belonged to the Professor, & now, to not call her by her ‘tween’ name seems so utterly hurtful, sadistic, insane

  betrayed not just by her mother but by them, treasure chest of cameras, tireless, ostensible instruments of Reeyonna’s putative wealth & liberation, cheated by the mechanical eyes that had probed & proposed to her whorls of underage skin, she allowed them to with the innocence and capitulation of a child she let them in, she gave herself to them and they failed to protect. Reeyonna once told her that she read in school how the Indians wouldn’t let their pictures be taken because they thought the camera stole their soul, & it had all come true all of it—————

  In her loneliest late afternoon Mt. Olympus moments, palm of hand resting on the melon covered by the very same stretchedskin so thoroughly ogled by her mother’s 1,000-eyed beastie battlework battalions, Reeyonna felt her young girl’s soul still trapped within those leathery, hardbodied, unforgivingly stylish, monumentally indifferent machines. Well. She would not let that stand, no, not now, could not let it stand to have been cheated & disrespected, could no longer let that stand now that she was carrying her own camera in her belly, hatching her own witness/assassin/co-conspirator, could those cameras have been so arrogant not to conceive that by doing the bidding of their mistress they had doomed themselves to chattel? disposable robot trash pawed & pawned to/by strangers for a fraction of their worth? Reeyonna went on www.DigitalPawnshop.com & laughed as she brought them to market, Brothers Collateral Loans, right down there off the hill in W Hollywood, she goofed and chortled as the abducted children click-clanked in the cotton laundry bag they’d been carelessly thrown into, with no regard for their beauty, thrown in with a vandal’s high-spirited abandon, now and then she opened the neck of the bag to literally spit inside it, she’d have handed out all perfectly engineered specimens on Skid Row or set each on a rail to iFilm a traincrush and put it on youtube for Thiefbitch to see, yes she would certainly have done that if she didn’t need the money, she’d have drowned them in the water like in that Eminem song & recorded them screaming and pounding on the trunk of the car and dying, and sent the sounds to her mother & when you dream I hope you can’t sleep & scream about it you could never EVER put a price on them, not for Bitchthief, for Bitchthief their worth was inestimable, incalculable, though they had ultimately failed to give Bitchthief her fortune either, still, Bitchthief had fetishized them, all that worn leather with the little rents here and there, the nicks and dents and whatnot just like or close enough to the vintage guitars of famous old rockers, each one’s metal casings infinitesimally eroded by her mother’s fingers, the cells of her mother’s fingers, how could you how could you put a price on the metal of the ruggedly beautiful armatures each polished by exfoliation, the very cells her mother shed in their handling, the armatures protecting the sacred calibrated innerworkings that allowed Jacquie to memorialize Time itself!—no—one could not put a price on how they’d been prized, adored, ecstatically enlisted in erotic career worship, in sacrifice, human sacrifice! of she, Reeyonna!—all Reeyonna could do was hope that her mother’s soul had been captured too, stolen by ReeRee’s theft, & that Jacquie would die a
little each day, each hour, each moment, that she would feel it in her heart & stomach feel the rape each time they were handled by uncouth foreign hands.

  . . .

  Jacquie cried————————— . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  The wash of memories.

  The Rolleiflex the Professor gave her—her first—that stolen too, out of smashwindowed car while she sat with his dying body. (Dad’s fry cook venues & childhood loneliness.) Her joy & dismay that an older, educated, married man would be interested in her, find her alluring. The rented bungalow, to her, then, the height of luxury—at first—a lovenest—and then—the baby screaming it never stopped screaming, & the adult loneliness. Punctuation of scary illicit rapturously screaming sex. Being pregnant with Jerry. The fear/joy of baby coming, illicit baby, boy baby, scary baby enraptured, screaming. Her useless mother. The kindness of the Professor’s wife, ushering her to the hospital room, Jerome’s hospital room, Jerome who insisted on being Jerry, everyone has a secret name, everyone wants to be called by something else. Real widow leaving fake widow alone to say her goodbyes. A religious act, a saintly act. The Mary Magdelenity of it all, of the 2 women. But Jacquie never thanked her, never thanked the Professor’s widow, never said a word, never even thought a word, too shellshocked by her life.

  . . .

  She was all right after taking the pictures of the stillborn in the manger. The manger at Little Company of Mary Hospital. She was OK in fact for two whole days, on a kind of strange eleemosynary high. Energized. Everything was more vivid, colors, sounds, dreams. Accession of long abandoned hope. Albie said don’t come in but she insisted she was fine, work was good for her. She was grateful to him. The experience left her feeling back in the art game as well. Ah. Hmm. So this is what the mysterious Sears thing was all about.

  Then she crashed.

  She couldn’t get out of bed and didn’t realize she couldn’t or that she hadn’t until Albie called to ask if she was okay—not because she didn’t show at work but because she didn’t speak after picking up—not because she had nothing to say but because in that instant she did not know who or where she was. When he was 16 he answered phones on a teen suicide hotline & the training handily came back. He assessed whether Jacquie was a threat to herself or others and determined she wasn’t.

  He brought food over after work, a gesture that sent her riot-weeping. He sat on the bed and the floodgates opened, she talked about the dead baby, the proof sheets were all over the bedcovers, she pushed them toward him but he didn’t feel now was the time to look. He gathered them in a neat pile and set them on the bureau—a gesture that was executed with such civility that of course it elicited a (not so) fresh jag. Albie was patient, God bless; he wanted her to empty herself out. The blood came back into her body. She sat up against the headboard on the 4 pillows that he with warm and perfect faggotry had fluffed up & rearranged, alternately drinking the chicken soup he brought (Jerry’s Deli!), & reading aloud from the glossy Sears portrait studio booklet not meant to be taken home by customers but only flipped through, called These are a few of our favorite things, reading aloud in a comic delirium of relief brought on by his visit, the sociability of it, of one who shared her experience, who loved her and cared.

  A baby was on the cover, but now all babies looked dead; this one had a superfluous hair band, a decorative touch that to her jaded eye made it look even deader. She read aloud from the Book of Sears.

  NEW BABY/BIRTHDAY

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  The scandalous irony of the read did the job of catharsis in a different way than expected, she thought it would end in hilarity but the moment was as they say too soon, her policeman said flow my tears, copious antediluvian tears of remorse, & depthless worry not just for all martyred funerary mothers throughout time but for her own, remorse & tears for her baby, the one she disappointed, the one demoralized and demolished, the one who stole from her, her precious baby Jerilynn Reeyonna, 16 & pregnant somewhere in Hollywood wandering like a fugitive doing god knows what, the daughter who walked the streets as Jacquie’s own stillalive stillborn.

  She called Jerzy again, she got the idea to call him and asked Albie if he’d sit with her while she did (well of course he would, he wasn’t going anywhere), she said she wanted—needed to get in touch with Jerilynn Reeyonna, had to see her, no matter what. (The gift of focus a dead baby can bestow.) She told him how grateful she was for having that experience, the privilege of it, & grateful again that he came to see her unasked, she thought she was losing her mind just a little, & there he was with the chicken soup & now she was feeling so much better. (They hugged. He said he would make tea. She said to wait until she called her son.) Jerzy didn’t answer. She hung up. Albie said to leave a message. She called again. She tried to be stoic yet impart urgency, the urgency that was her right, the Mother’s Prerogative. Jerry, please call me back. Then, Jerzy, can you please call? More plaintive that time + craftily using the name he preferred, hoping the tactic wouldn’t backfire. Why didn’t I call him Jerzy, ever? I resented that he wanted to change the name I had given him . . . O Albie, I am a lunatic, I am a stubborn & terrible woman, I am a terrible mother whose children have become monstrous with hatred & anguish. She didn’t care if the Jerzy tack did backfire, she was tired of fucking around, she wanted to see her baby. Albie, should I arrest her, should I have her arrested? For stealing my things? Albie, should I? Should I just call the police?

  He said yes, knowing that she wouldn’t.

  In this moment, she had an awakening: time to assert. Get that Mom mojo workin. She phoned Rikki’s fosterparents, they hadn’t recently connected, yet another thing that made her feel remiss, she’d been standoffish because she knew her daughter loved them not her, maybe not loved but respected, always Jacquie’s pride rampaging like Mothra, she phoned and Jim answered & while they were talking she wave/whispered to Albie it was OK to go make tea she really wanted tea so he left the room. Jim sounded cheerful, she always had the sense he was careful in their dealings, as if thinking of/knowing her to be a bit of a loose cannon, Jim said that Reeyonna o my god he actually calls her that why didn’t I call her that was staying with Jerzy he called him that lord what was wrong with her she was the only one Mothra the Destroyer and his girlfriend?roommate. That apparently, according to Rikki who was the source of all their information, they all moved from where they used to live, which wasn’t per Rikki so wonderful, to a much nicer place called Mt Olympus in the Hollywood Hills. Jacquie right there lost her cannon & said too-assertively Enough! This is enough already, as if it all were Jim’s fault—grew suddenly imperious, that talk-to-servants voice she hated in herself all the more pathetic for never having had servants, still she rationalized it was all right to use that tone, tone in the major key of Mother’s Prerogative, she was trying to turn the engine over, engine of her Mothra-sized mojo, I think we should just go & get her. (Noting even as the words came out that she said “we” not I as in I am just going to go get her.) Jim said he understood her frustration, they’d had a lot of that themselves (he & Dawn) (of course they had) but the engineer said he thought it would be a mistake, he told her they’d already put an invitation on the table, already invited ReeRee he actually called her that! the diminutive of a name that she, Jacquie, never gave her what is the matter with me what is wrong to come live at the house. For a second she got pissed, thinking Jim & her daughter must be in open communication, chatting it up on the phone as he waged his little campaign, a campaign she hadn’t even been privy to, so she asked if he was/had been directly in touch with Reeyonna, & Jim said only once when her daughter called him at the house. He went on in that analytic way to suggest that the best strategy was to wait them out. Let’s give it a few more days, Jacquie. I really do think she’ll get tired of struggling out there, s
he’ll get tired of running around, & I think that as time goes on, she will find our offer more conducive. We’re praying on it, anyway. That’s what we’re praying on. She reluctantly agreed but not for more than a week (mojo only a quarter workin but hey). The kettle whistled, a cup of tea sounded divine, served by her dear friend/servant right in bed, she could taste the honey, this new Australian honey she was all hung up on.

  The conversation wound down. She rote-asked after Dawn. Jim said his wife was just back from the hospital and something in Jacquie remembered, barely, but enough to cause her to stifle the impulse to ask why, why was Dawn there, she had that scintilla-recollection, an inpatient stay would be of the nervous/mental variety, briefly awkward, then Jacquie’s rote awkward wishing of Dawn well, Jacquie’s rote kneejerk invite for the two of them to come for lunch or tea or supper or drinks or something, Jacquie’s end-of-call attempt at humor re the whole fucked up situation being possibly/absolutely brightened by a grandchild at the end of the rainbow, & right when she hung up again came the remorse, guilt over her narcissistic ways, it was always about her, and there was Jim, so stoic & kind, the weight of manifold worlds upon him.

  . . .

  She surfed the web without leaving bed for two more days.

  The Internet said Kirstie Alley got fat after her mc, mc being Internet for miscarriage. The Internet said Tori Amos wrote an album after her mc. The Internet said Pamela Anderson mc’d with Tommy Lee & with Kid Rock. The Internet said the Enquirer said Brad & Jen mc’d. The Internet said Valerie Bertinelli mc’d. The Internet said Amy Brenneman mc’d when she was 39. The Internet said Christie Brinkley had 3. The Internet said Nell Carter had 4. The Internet said Amanda Holden had 2 fetal deaths, the most recent in the 7th month. The Internet said Joan Chen had 6. The Internet said Jane Seymour had 2 before having twins/preeclampsia. The Internet said Linda Hamilton mc’d. The Internet said Nancy Kerrigan had 6 in 8 yrs but refused to talk about it. The Internet said Nicole Kidman had one in 2001. The Internet said Lucy Lawless mc’d right after filming the last episode of Xena. The Internet said Demi Moore mc’d in ’97. The Internet said Jane Pratt mc’d twins. The Internet said Brooke had at least 5 & that her cervix was scarred. The Internet said Sharon Stone had a string of mcs. The Internet said Emma Thompson needed IVF because of PCOS (polycystic ovar. Syndrome) and mc’d in 1997. The Internet said Vanna White mc’d in 1992. The internet said that Oprah mc’d when she was 14. The Internet said Sporty Spice had 5/PCOS.