Brandy inhales and the dress shreds, she breathes and every breath makes her naked in more places.
“What did I know?” she says. “I was fifteen. I didn’t know anything.”
In a hundred torn holes, bare skin shows through.
At the train wreck, my father said security would be here any minute.
How I heard this was: We’d be rich. We’d be secure. But what he really meant was we’d have to hurry or we’d get caught and lose it all.
Of course I remember.
“The police guy,” Brandy says, “he was young, twenty-one or twenty-two. He wasn’t some dirty old man. It wasn’t horrible,” she says, “but it wasn’t love.”
With more of the dress torn, the skeleton springs apart in different places.
“Mostly,” Brandy says, “it made me confused for a long time.”
That’s my growing up, those kind of train wrecks. Our only dessert from the time I was six to the time I was nine was butterscotch pudding. It turns out I loathe butterscotch. Even the color. Especially the color. And the taste. And smell.
How I met Manus was when I was eighteen a great-looking guy came to the door of my parents’ house and asked, did we ever hear back from my brother after he ran away?
The guy was a little older, but not out of the ballpark. Twenty-five, tops. He gave me a card that said Manus Kelley. Independent Special Contract Vice Operative. The only thing else I noticed was he didn’t wear a wedding ring. He said, “You know, you look a lot like your brother.” He had a glorious smile and said, “What’s your name?”
“Before we go back to the car,” Brandy says, “I have to tell you something about your friend. Mr. White Westinghouse.”
Formerly Mr. Chase Manhattan, formerly Nash Rambler, formerly Denver Omelet, formerly Independent Special Contract Vice Operative Manus Kelley. I do the homework: Manus is thirty years old. Brandy’s twenty-four. When Brandy was sixteen, I was fifteen. When Brandy was sixteen, maybe Manus was already part of our lives.
I don’t want to hear this.
The most beautiful ancient perfect dress is gone. The silk and tulle have slipped, dropped, slumped to the fitting room floor, and the wire and boning is broken and sprung away, leaving just some red marks already fading on Brandy’s skin with Brandy left standing way too close to me in just her underwear.
“It’s funny,” Brandy says, “but this isn’t the first time I’ve destroyed somebody’s beautiful dress,” and a big Aubergine Dreams eye winks at me. Her breath and skin feel warm, she’s that close.
“The night I ran away from home,” Brandy says, “I burned almost every stitch of clothing my family had hanging on the clothesline.”
Brandy knows about me, or she doesn’t know. She’s confessing her heart, or she’s teasing me. If she knows, she could be lying to me about Manus. If she doesn’t know, then the man I love is a freaky creepy sexual predator.
Either Manus or Brandy is being a sleazy liar to me, me, the paragon of virtue and truth here. Manus or Brandy, I don’t know who to hate.
Me and Manus or me and Brandy. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t love.
Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Seventeen
aisy St. Patience only started Spitefield Park because her parents died. If it softens the blow, please know that they died in their sleep. Simply drifted away . . . sorry, Mom, sorry, Dad. The culprit was a faulty pilot light on their furnace. The first cold night of October, and the batteries in their smoke detector had long before preceded them in death. Nobody felt any pain except for Daisy, who knew exactly what words she wanted carved on their tombstone, but no cemetery would allow it. The inscription wasn’t even the worst message that sprang to mind. Go shopping for tombstones, and you, too, will be impressed by the limited selection.
Lady Daisy realized she wasn’t the only one of anything. Other like-minded bereaved must have had money to spend with mixed feelings. The land was cheap, and she was a gal with half a face for the sympathy vote. Daisy St. Patience, her least favorite movie was where Judy Garland does all of that full-color singing and dancing just to end up back in dreary black-and-white. Her dog is the only person who shows any gumption. Before the story even starts, he bites Margaret Hamilton off-screen. The dog rescues Jack Haley and draws the green curtain aside to expose the shenanigans of Frank Morgan. MGM spent a fortune. Yet after weeping buckets of glycerin and being clutched by winged monkeys Judy Garland is happy to wake up in a dirty bed surrounded by men. Nuh-uh. No way. To Daisy that didn’t read as enlightenment.
Daisy St. Patience fixed the pilot light. She sold her parents’ house and put the money toward a good surveyor to eyeball the plot lines. The long-term truth is that people’s hearts change across time. Not just the hearts of the wildly vindictive. Even the widower whose wife was laid to rest beneath a granite marker that said:
I couldn’t be bothered to shave my legs
A year later, even he phoned back to sheepishly inquire about the cost of a new stone.
Again, as Harriet Beecher Stowe asked, “Dude, why can’t you do both?” Why can’t a novel do this? You’re not dead until you’re dead.
What never failed to boggle Daisy was how Judy Garland had only just arrived in this glorious colorful place and she immediately wanted to run back to some boring pig farm. The fact that everyone else loved that film . . . what did that say about people? It says that most people can tolerate being over the rainbow for only about thirty seconds. Regret, Daisy knew, was the only confirmation of a well-lived life. If you didn’t occasionally go too far, you weren’t going anywhere. It was the dog—smart dog! good boy!—who chased the Siamese cat and baited Judy Garland to leave that dumb hot-air balloon which was taking her home. Time and time again, that dog did everything in its power to give Judy a better life.
In the alternate version of that movie, the way Daisy remembered it, when Judy awoke in Kansas, all giddy to be home in that tiresome dust and dirt, in the Daisy St. Patience Preferred Text Director’s Cut, that little dog bit Judy Garland. It jumped into that windblown bed and sank its teeth right in her ingrate ass.
Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Nine
o this is life in the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project.
In Santa Barbara, Manus who was Denver taught us how to get drugs. The three of us were squeezed into that Fiat Spider from Portland to Santa Barbara, and Brandy just wanted to die. All the time, holding both hands pressed on her lower back, Brandy kept saying, “Stop the car. I got to stretch. I am spaz-am-ing. We have to stop.”
It took us two days to drive from Oregon to California, and the two states are right next door to each other. Manus being all the time looking at Brandy, listening to her, in love with her so obviously I only wanted to kill them in worse and more painful ways.
In Santa Barbara, we’re just into town when Brandy wants to get out and walk a little. Trouble is, this is a really good neighborhood in California. Right up in the hills over Santa Barbara. You walk around up here, the police or some private security patrol cruises you and wants to know who you are and see some ID, please.
Still, Brandy, she’s spasming again, and the hysterical princess has one leg over the door, half climbed out of the Spider before Denver Omelet will even stop. What Brandy wants are the Tylox capsules she left in Suite 15-G at the Congress Hotel.
“You can’t be beautiful,” Brandy says about a thousand times, “until you feel beautiful.”
Up here in the hills, we pull up curbside to an OPEN HOUSE sign. The house looking down on us is a big hacienda, Spanish enough to make you want to dance the flamenco on a table, swing on a wrought-iron chandelier, wear a sombrero and a bandolier.
“Here,” Denver says to her. “Get yourselves pretty, and I’ll show you how we can scam some prescription painkillers.”
Jump back to the three days we hid out in Denver’s apartment until we could get some cash together. Brandy, she’s cooked up some new plan. Before she goes under the knife she’s decid
ed to find her sister.
The me who wants to dance on her grave.
“A vaginoplasty is pretty much forever,” she says. “It can wait while I figure some things out.”
She’s decided to find her sister and tell her everything, about the gonorrhea, about why Shane’s not dead, what happened, everything. Make a clean break of it. Probably she’d be surprised how much her sister already knows.
I just want to be out of town in case a felony arson arrest warrant is in the pipeline, so I threaten Denver, if he won’t come with us, I’ll run to the police and accuse him. Of arson, of kidnapping, of attempted murder. To Evie, I mail a letter.
To Brandy, I write:
let’s drive around some. see what happens. chill.
This seems a little labor-intensive, but we’ve all got something to run from. And when I say we, I mean everybody in the world. So Brandy thinks we’re on tour to find her sister, and Denver’s come along by blackmail. My letter to Evie’s sitting in her mailbox at the end of her driveway leading up to her burned-up ruins of a house. Evie’s in Cancún, maybe.
The letter to Evie says:
To Miss Evelyn Cottrell,
Manus says he shot me and you helped him ’cuz of your filthy relationship. In order for you to stay out of PRISON, please seek an insurance settlement for the damage to your home and personal property as soon as possible. Convert this entire settlement into United States funds, tens and twenties, and mail them to me care of General Delivery in Seattle, Washington. I am the person you are responsible for being without a fiancé, your former best friend, no matter what lies you tell yourself. Send the money and I will consider the matter dealt with and will not go to the police and have you arrested and sent to PRISON, where you will have to fight day and night for your dignity and life but no doubt lose them both. Yes, and I’ve had major reconstructive surgery, so I look even better than myself, and I have Manus Kelley with me and he still loves me and says he hates you and will testify against you in court that you’re a bitch.
Signed, Me
Jump to above the edge of the Pacific Ocean, parked curbside at the Spanish hacienda OPEN HOUSE. Denver tells Brandy and me how to go upstairs while he keeps the realtor busy. The master bedroom will have the best view, that’s how to find it. The master bathroom will have the best drugs.
Sure, Manus used to be a police vice detective, if you consider wagging your butt around the bushes in Washington Park wearing a Speedo bikini a size too small and hoping some lonely sex hound will whip his dick out, if that’s detective work, then, sure, Manus was a detective.
Because beauty is power the way money is power the way a loaded gun is power. And Manus with his square-jawed, cheekboned good looks could be a Nazi recruiting poster.
While Manus was still fighting crime, I found him cutting the crust off a slice of bread one morning. Bread without crust made me remember being little. This was so sweet, but I thought he was making me toast. Then Manus goes to in front of a mirror in the apartment we used to share, wearing his white Speedo, and he asks, if I were a gay guy would I want to bang him up the butt? Then he changed to a red Speedo and asked again. You know, he says, really stuff his poop chute? Plow the cowboy? It’s not a morning I would want on video.
“What I need,” Manus said, “is for my basket to look big, but my ass to look adolescent.” He takes the slice of bread and stuffs it inside between himself and the crotch of the Speedo. “Don’t worry, this is how underwear models get a better look,” he says. “You get a smooth unoffensive bulge this way.” He stands sideways to the mirror and says, “You think I need another slice?”
His being a detective meant he crunched around in good weather, in his sandals and his lucky red Speedo, while two plainclothes men nearby in a parked car waited for somebody to take the bait. This happened more than you’d imagine. Manus was a one-man campaign to clean up Washington Park. He’d never been this successful as a regular policeman and this way nobody ever shot at him.
It all felt very Bond, James Bond. Very cloak-and-dagger. Very spy versus spy. Plus he was getting a great tan. Plus he got to tax-deduct his gym membership and his buying new Speedos.
Jump to the realtor in Santa Barbara shaking my hand and saying my name, Daisy St. Patience, over and over the way you do when you want to make a good impression but not looking at me in my veils. He’s looking at Brandy and Denver.
Charmed, I’m sure.
The house is just what you’d expect from the outside. There’s a big scarred mission-style trestle table in the dining room, under a wrought-iron chandelier you could swing on. Laid across the table is a silver-embroidered, fringed Spanish shawl.
We represent a television personality who wishes to remain nameless, Denver tells the realtor. We’re an advance team scouting for a weekend home for this nameless celebrity. Miss Alexander, she’s an expert in product toxicity, you know, the lethal fumes and secretions given off by homes.
“New carpet,” Denver says, “will exude poisonous formaldehyde for up to two years after it’s been laid.”
Brandy says, “I know that feeling.”
It got so that when Manus’s crotch wasn’t leading men to their doom, Manus was three-piece-suited in court on the witness stand, saying how the defendant approached him in some lurid exposed public masturbating way and asked for a cigarette.
“Like anybody could look at me and think I smoke,” Manus would say.
You didn’t know what vice he objected to more.
After Santa Barbara, we drove to San Francisco and sold the Fiat Spider. Me, I’m writing on cocktail napkins all the time: maybe your sister’s in the next city. she could be anywhere.
In the Santa Barbara hacienda, Brandy and me found Benzedrine and Dexedrine and old Quaaludes and Soma and some Dialose capsules that turned out to be a fecal softener. And some Solaquin Forte cream that turned out to be a skin bleach.
In San Francisco, we sold the Fiat and some drugs and bought a big red Physicians’ Desk Reference book so we wouldn’t be stealing worthless fecal softeners and skin bleaches. In San Francisco, old people are all over selling their big rich houses full of drugs and hormones. We had Demerol and Darvocet-Ns. Not the puny little Darvocet-N 50s. Brandy was feeling beautiful with me trying to OD her on big Darvocet 100-milligram jobbers.
After the Fiat, we rented a big Seville convertible. Just between us, we were the Zine kids:
Me, I was Comp Zine.
Denver was Thor Zine.
Brandy, Stella Zine.
It was in San Francisco I started Denver on his own secret hormone therapy to destroy him.
Manus’s detective career had started to peter out when his arrest rate dropped to one per day, then one per week, then zero, then still zero. The problem was the sun, the tanning, and the fact he was getting older and he was a known bait, none of the older men he had already arrested went near him. The younger men just thought he was too old.
So Manus got bold. More and more his Speedos got smaller, which wasn’t a good look, either. The pressure was on to replace him with a new model. So now he’d have to start conversations. Talk. Be funny. Really work at meeting guys. Develop a personality, and still the younger men, the only ones who didn’t run when they saw him, a younger man would still decline when Manus suggested they take a walk back into the trees, into the bushes.
Even the most horny young men with their eyes scamming everybody else would say, “Uh, no thanks.”
Or, “I just want to be alone right now.”
Or worse, “Back off, you old troll, or I’ll call a cop.”
After San Francisco and San Jose and Sacramento, we went to Reno and Brandy turned Denver Omelet into Chase Manhattan. We zigzagged everywhere I thought we’d find enough drugs. Evie’s money could wait.
Jump to Las Vegas and Brandy turns Chase Manhattan into Eberhard Faber. We drive the Seville down the gut of Las Vegas. All that spasming neon, the red chase lights going one direction, white chase lights going
the other direction. Las Vegas looks the way you’d imagine heaven must look at night. We never put the top up on the Seville, had it two weeks, never put the top up.
Cruising the gut of Las Vegas, Brandy sat on the boot with her ass up on the trunk lid and her feet on the backseat, wearing this strapless metallic brocade sheath as pink as the burning center of a road flare with a bejeweled bodice and a detachable long silk taffeta cape with balloon sleeves.
With her looking that good, Las Vegas with all its flash and dazzle was just another Brandy Alexander–brand fashion accessory.
Brandy puts her arms up, wearing these long pink opera gloves, and just howls. She just looks and feels so good at that moment. And the detachable long silk taffeta cape with balloon sleeves, it detaches.
And sails off into Las Vegas traffic.
“Go around the block,” Brandy screams. “That cape has to go back to Bullock’s in the morning.”
After Manus’s detective career started downhill, we’d have to work out in the gym every day, twice on some days. Aerobics, tanning, nutrition, every station of the cross. He was a bodybuilder, if what that means is you drink your meal-replacement shakes right out of the blender six times a day over the kitchen sink. Then Manus would get swimwear through the mail you couldn’t buy in this country, little pouches on strings and microfilament technology he’d put on the moment we got home from the gym, then follow me around asking, did I think his butt looked too flat?
If I was a gay guy, did I think he needed to trim back his pubic hair? Me being a gay guy, would I think he looked too desperate? Too aloof? Was his chest big enough? Too big, maybe?
“I’d hate for guys to think I’m just a big dumb cow is all,” Manus would say.
Did he look, you know, too gay? Gay guys only wanted guys who acted straight.
Invisible Monsters Remix Page 12
