Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts (8 page)

“The trash baskets are cute,” said Julia, as she gazed out at the numerous naked 18-year-old bodies lounging around the pool.

“I guess,” I said. “Do you think you could help me make some furniture out of this metal?”

“You know,” Julia said, “I’m kinda hot. Mind if I go for a swim?”

“I’m not sure I have a bathing suit that’ll fit you,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

Not six minutes later, I watched as my naked mother did the breast stroke in the shallow end of the pool while simultaneously managing to engage two of the naked 18-year-old boys in conversation.

My roommate was a 25-year-old graduate student from New York. Her name was Bettina. She was in the art school and had recently created a group show in downtown L.A. at the Woman’s Village with the Lesbian Women’s Art Collective—a collective she had founded.

Bettina was the Queen of the Lesbian Collective. It was her subjective impulses that created the Collective’s operating rules.

Admission to the Lesbian Collective was by application only, a review process for which Bettina had final approval. Only those who were militant lesbian-feminists—no guys (the oppressors), no flowery/‌romantic art (delusional), no make-up or girly clothing (slave garb) were admitted. If you were seen talking to a man for any reason other than necessary functions, wearing a tiny amount of make-up, or behaving in an “oppressed”—traditional female—manner, you were booted from the Collective without warning. For members of the Lesbian Collective, taking classes from male instructors was strictly forbidden.

Of course, Bettina objected to my being her roommate. She called me “a Breeder” because I wasn’t a lesbian. But the registrar’s office told her that she couldn’t select her roommate by sexual orientation, and she either roomed with me or hit the street.

Bettina’s show at the Lesbian Women’s Art Collective was called “I Do… Not” and was performance art about destroying wedding images—literally. It featured Bettina and her Collective Lesbians doing things like demolishing engagement rings with sledge hammers, ripping a bridal gown with shears, and smashing a wedding cake with their bare hands while chanting, “I Do… Not.” Too bad about the cake—it was chocolate. I went to the show and waited to see if part of it was participatory, like everyone would get a piece of the cake. It wasn’t.

But one night Bettina walked in the dorm with her girlfriend, Wanda, wearing the ripped wedding gown and said, “Have a piece of cake.”

“Isn’t she beautiful?” said Wanda, a welder in the art school. Eventually they all took turns playing the bride with the ripped wedding gown. Whoever played the bride got to take what was left of the cake home that night. Wanda and Bettina left me with the cake while they went for their honeymoon at Wanda’s apartment in Van Nuys.

Except for Bettina and Wanda, no one spoke to me outside of class during the first month I was at the school, no one except for this nut on the Theater School Faculty—the dean—who chased me around the school screaming, “Hi Fake!” “Hey Fakie” or “Hello Ms. Fakie.”

I couldn’t find anything at the school because the administration had decided that signs ruined the visual “flow” of the building. The school itself was built on four straight levels with two central elevators connecting each floor, such that the building could be turned into a shopping center, insane asylum, or a rest home if the school failed.

At first I never saw anyone in the school. At most, I would walk down a hallway and see one person who would scurry down the hallway like a roach that had been exposed to light and would never acknowledge me.

A door would open, I’d wait for a person to appear, and the door would slam shut without anyone materializing. I would walk down empty concrete hallways seeing no one, hearing only the sound of my feet hitting the concrete or the hum of the fluorescent lights. And it was freezing. Although the temperature outside could often go above 105 degrees, the building seemed to have a thermostat that had been permanently stuck at 56.

After four weeks, I finally stumbled into the room where the mailboxes were located. Well, to be honest, it took me three weeks to realize that I had a mailbox, and one week to find it.

The mailboxes were situated in a large windowless room framed by three blank white walls and a solid black floor. The floor had been shined to such a gloss that it reflected the bank of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. No one was in the room when I found it. I found my mailbox, opened it, and sat on the floor to read the four weeks of mail that had accumulated for me.

After about eight minutes of reading I realized that someone was standing over me. I waited for the person to leave. After about two minutes I realized that the person was still in the room.

I looked up and saw a slightly overweight guy with short dark hair wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket, jeans that were ripped at the knee, and sunglasses with mirror lenses. An art school
geek
, trying to look tough.

Damn. Where were those cute gay guys from the theater school?

From the ground, I judged him to be around five foot five. He was leaning against the mailboxes, full of art school pretension. I knew he was going for a look like Erik Estrada in
CHIPS
, one of those retro ’70s shows that sporadically appear on Nickelodeon. What he got was more like Barbra Streisand in
Yentl
.

He appeared to be staring at me.

I looked at him for ten seconds. He didn’t say anything. I continued reading my mail. About five minutes later, I realized that he hadn’t moved. I looked up.

“May I help you?” I said.

“Are
you
Courtney?” he said. I seriously wondered if I should answer this.

“I guess so,” I said.

“Hmm. You’re the new girl that everyone wants to screw,” he said.

He walked out of the room.

Six years later, right after I managed to keep a straight face as his fiancée told me that she wanted “Memories” from the Broadway musical
Cats
and The Pachelbel Canon played at their wedding, Ronald Goldstein paid me $100 not to tell her how he first introduced himself to me.

“Look,” he said, “this girl has big tits and likes me. And her dad is loaded. So I don’t have to worry about selling my paintings, which even I think are crap, and I don’t have to worry about finding booty.”

“But, Ronald,” I said, “you made such an impression.”

Right after my mail room introduction to Ronald, I walked back to my dorm room and decided to cook every Velveeta recipe that I had ever eaten. Unfortunately, the cooking equipment I had, a hot plate and toaster oven, was rather limited. However, my repertoire, which included Velveeta junior pizza, Velveeta broccoli-Cheese Nips-casserole, Velveeta enchiladas, Velveeta soup, Velveeta condensed-milk mushroom soup chicken, and Velveeta melt on salmon, was fairly extensive.

Bettina, after deciding that the Velveeta cook-off was not part of some feminist art performance piece about the capitalistic oppression of middle-class moms, was confused. She sat next as me as I thought about my next Velveeta concoction.

“I’m not sure whether I should be repulsed or worried,” she said.

“Why? Want some Velveeta?” I said as I cut off a four-by-two-inch cube.

“Do you want to talk to someone?”

“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

Somewhere in the middle of making Velveeta cheese bread, the dean of the music school knocked on my dorm door.

“Courtney,” he said. “Are you in there?”

Apparently, my Velveeta bake-off had caused me to miss about ten days of classes. In a school with only nine violinists, this wasn’t going unnoticed.

“Won’t you open the door so that we can talk?”

“Listen, Dean Henderson,” I said. “I’m busy right now.”

“So I’ve heard,” he said. “While we all love cheese creations…”

“Not cheese. Velveeta.”

“Right,” he said. “Velveeta. While we all love Velveeta, I was wondering if you were coming back to class any time soon.”

“Well, Dean Henderson, I just need to make a few more things.”

That seemed to satisfy him.

While waiting for my Velveeta cheese bread to rise, a towering six foot two Amazon-like woman with spiky magenta-red hair, closely resembling the crown of Woody Woodpecker, walked into my room from the bathroom. She had no boobs and small shoulders, but a thick waist which was balanced by size 18-plus hips and thighs. Her skin was alabaster white but her eyebrows were thick, long, and jet black. Her nose offered a landing spot for a flock of sparrows and her lips were circled with black lip-liner and painted blood-red. She looked like a cross between a middle-aged Elvis Presley with a spiky-punk hairdo and Marilyn Manson at age 48, but she appeared to have taken makeup lessons from Boy George.

She was wearing form-hugging black stretch pants, a scratchy Shetland wool blue and green sweater, black ballet slippers, and drop gold earrings that hung to her shoulder.

I thought that she must be the mom of my suite mate, Kimmy.

“Oh hi,” I said. “Kimmy’s not here right now.”

She peered at me. “Who’s Kimmy?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Roberta. Are you Courtney?”

My recent experience in the mail room had taught me not to answer that question.

“Who wants to know?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“What do you want?”

“Well, to begin with, this weather is making my hands so dry that I feel my skin is going to shed. Do you have any hand cream?”

I looked around.

“Take this.”

I handed her my Vaseline Intensive Care.

“You can keep it. It creeps me out.”

She squirted some on her hands and rubbed her hands together. I felt sick. “Hmmmm, Vaseline Intensive Care. I’ve never thought of that.” she said.

“Well, uh Roberta, as you can see, I’m very busy right now. You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t show you out.”

“Well, Courtney, I wasn’t planning on leaving right now,” she said. “You see, the dean of the music school, and well, your roommate, are worried about you. Would you like to talk to me?”

“Do you have any good Velveeta recipes?”

“I’m not here to talk about that.”

“Then I need to get back to work. I have to knead my Velveeta cheese bread.”

“Look, Courtney, I’m from the school counseling center. I really want, no, I need, to be present with you right now,” said Roberta.

That was the first time I had ever heard that.

“Um Roberta, I have no idea what you just said.”

She handed me her card.

“Why don’t you come to the school counseling center? We might have some things to work on and we’ll… talk.”

“I don’t think that I have anything to talk about.”

She looked at my Velveeta creations.

“Well,” she said, “we might. And if you come talk to me, I’ll give you my recipe for broccoli and Velveeta soup.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I still haven’t gotten that recipe.

And after fifteen years, I was getting tired of never getting any explanations of “the work” that we were allegedly doing. And I hated that fake hug thing that I had to do when I finished a session or Group.

But the thing I hated most was holding Roberta’s hand.

That repulsed me.

“I know you never explain things. I know that’s not the way you work. But I’ve completely forgotten why I’m supposed to sit here and hold your hand for 45 minutes.”

“Funny how you always forget when someone wants to show how much they appreciate you,” said Roberta, without a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“The part that doesn’t work for me is where I hand you the check for $180 at the close of our time together, twice a week,” I said.

Make that twice a week and throw in an extra $40 for Group.

“Why should that negate my feelings for you?” said Roberta.

“Because I feel like I’m paying you to like me,” I said.

“I don’t see how that makes my feelings any less real,” said Roberta without a trace of irony.

“Isn’t that another line of work?” I said. “Paying someone to imitate feelings for you?”

“When you say things like that, I feel so sad. I see that I still haven’t penetrated your veil of cynicism,” said Roberta.

“It’s not that I’m cynical, it’s just that I have questions,” I said.

“That’s just it. That’s not what our work is about,” said Roberta.

“What?” I said.

“Questions,” said Roberta.

“Why not?” I said.

Roberta shot me an icy look.

Experience had shown me that Roberta felt I was just inches away from pushing some implied therapy boundary and receiving the resulting penalty.

So who were those mythical people who got to leave therapy with Roberta’s blessing?

How does one become “whole” and what did that mean?

When was it that Roberta would tell you “you have no more ‘work’ to do?”

Was it like a ceremony, with robes, music and inspirational speeches where you were given a certificate that stated that you had now graduated to a perfect life?

Or was it like being before a parole board where someone carefully listened to you accept responsibility for your behavior and then decided whether you should be sprung from therapy-prison?

Fifteen years of therapy, on and off again with Roberta, had convinced me that the whole process was closer to a parole board review.

And like any smart prisoner who was desperate to be released, I knew what I had to do.

I had started lying to her.

Instead of telling her, “I was tooling around Culver City at around one a.m. and needed to score. So, I bought myself a pound of Velveeta at all night Vons,” I invented a new scenario. My new scenario featured the person Roberta wanted to see.

I told her, “I was tooling around late, around nine p.m., and I suddenly felt an enormous craving. But like we discussed, I realized that cravings don’t last very long. So I drove home, put on the
Lilith Fair: A Celebration of Women in Music
CD, and concentrated on my feelings. The cravings soon passed.”

I couldn’t look at her after I said these things because I was afraid I would start laughing, so I’d gaze off into space, sigh, and say, “Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do.”