Gray (19 page)

She climbs into the passenger seat of the SUV—the photographers bringing their cameras low just in case she’s not wearing underwear—and we pile in the back. Her friend is driving, driving right through the throngs of photographers, honking her horn almost as an afterthought. They pound on the windshield and snap away; the light from their cameras is blinding. Now I understand why celebrities are always wearing sunglasses. From the front seat, she is laughing, and she turns back and smiles at me.

“Sometimes they’ll stick their feet under the tires on purpose,” she says. “So they can sue you. That’s why Cookie is honking the horn. You have to prove there was no malicious intent. Look at them, they’re so . . . ridiculous.”

She says
ridiculous
the way normal people say
rat
or
cancer,
with pure disdain. We pull away from the madness and head up into the Hills. At a red light, a couple in the car next to us look up and do a double take. They start waving and she smiles, says, “Whateverrr,” under her breath. We pull away and the couple have a nice story to tell everyone at their next dinner party. We climb higher
into the night, and she is skipping through tracks on the CD player now and rolling down the window, sticking her head out into the night and shouting to no one in particular, “Fuck!” Everyone in the car laughs and nods. They know exactly what she’s talking about. The Disaster and I exchange glances from the backseat. She lights a cigarette and talks to the car about the house of Balenciaga or something, laughs loudly at some joke Cookie makes, calls her a “cunt.” We bend around curves, the headlights illuminating the road ahead. We pull up to a gate that opens slowly, then we are inside. The lights in the house turn on automatically. No one is amazed by this except for the Disaster and me. Everyone piles out of the car and goes inside. More drinks.

She sits on the floor in the middle of the room, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette and talking about Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull. She makes wild gestures with her arms; her voice is low and scratchy around the edges. It sounds as if it hurts her to speak, but she only stops when the mirror gets passed her way, then she ducks her head down and makes a few lines disappear. Her hair is long and straight and covers her entire face when she’s snorting. When she’s done, she knocks her head back and brushes the hair out of her eyes, laughs, and screams, “Oh, my Goddd.” Her friends all laugh. Now she’s at the stereo—what the rich refer to as “the entertainment center”—fumbling through some CDs, knocking stacks of them onto the tiled floor. She’s shouting for Cookie to come help her find the Stooges album . . . “Cookie! Cooooookie, you cunt, where’s the
Stooges?” she cackles. “Cookieeee! Stoooges!” She is out of her mind. “Coo-kie!” she cries, then, silence, some more rummaging, more shit falling onto the ground, followed by “Found it!” She walks away as
Raw Power
cranks from the speakers at unfathomable volume, pulls open the massive glass doors to her balcony, and dances out into the darkness as Iggy wails about being a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm. She is shouting and thrusting her middle fingers toward the heavens. Judging from the looks in the room, this occurs fairly regularly. Her neighbors must hate her.

I excuse myself from the room, and nobody so much as looks at me, not even the Disaster, who is sunk deep in an armchair, watching the show in disbelief. I wander down the hallways, upstairs to another massive sitting room, lined with leather-bound books, unopened, bought for decorative purposes, with a fireplace filled with candles, spatters of wax on the floor. “Gimme Danger” is blasting downstairs, nearly drowning out her voice but not
quite,
and I can hear her laughing about something and squealing with delight. I go into an adjoining room, this one filled with religious artifacts—a hanging cast-iron cross, a book covered in golden Sanskrit—as if her interior decorator were trying to cover all the bases. The flat-screen TV on the far wall has probably never been turned on; the remote and the manual sit on a glass coffee table, still wrapped in plastic. I go into the bathroom for no other reason than I can—I mean, how often do you get to see a bathroom like this?—only it’s clear this isn’t
her
bathroom, just one reserved for her many guests. You
can tell no one’s been in here for a while; the medicine cabinet is empty, the sink is clean. This whole wing of the house is like a natural-history museum. I look at myself in the mirror and just smile. . . .
What am I doing here? How is this happening?

When I head back downstairs, side two of
Raw Power
is already under way, only it’s blasting to an empty room. Everyone has gone off to their respective corner of the house, to do whatever it is you do when you live in the guest wing of a celebrity’s mansion (more cocaine?). The Disaster is gone too, which makes me chuckle a bit to myself. This kid from Florida, this wonderful son of the New South, is probably passed out in bed with a swan-necked model folded around him, a mirror on the bedside table, a mirror on the ceiling, smiling and snoring and dreaming big American dreams, the kind that aren’t possible anywhere else but Hollywood. Tomorrow he will be bloated and red-eyed and hoarse, but he will still tell me all about his adventures, will spare no detail, will begin most sentences with “An’ got-damn,” will end them with a weary chuckle. He is perhaps the most predictable person I’ve ever met, the most dependable. You can set your watch to him.

“What are you laughing at,” she purrs from the balcony, just as “I Need Somebody” is trailing off.

I smile and shrug. She beckons for me to come outside. I don’t have any choice in the matter. The air is crisp, slightly cool. The lights of Los Angeles twinkle in the distance. She is leaning against the railing of her balcony, her amber hair flowing out into the canyon. She is looking
right into me, biting the corner of her lip again. She is getting ready to sink her teeth into me.

“I think it’s so cute how you little punk boys act like you hate girls,” she jokes, lighting another cigarette. “It’s like we’re your enemies or something.”

I tell her to replace
girls
with
everyone
and she’d be onto something. The whole night has been leading up to this moment, when we would be alone in the dark, her friends gone off into their own little worlds. It has been perfectly planned, a well-organized, businesslike seduction. You get the feeling she has done this before. She knows what she wants. She draws closer to me, her eyes looking up into mine, and she puts her hands on my chest, inching her lips closer, and then we kiss, and she bites my lip and pulls back, asks me, “Where are you sleeping tonight?”

It’s a mere formality. She already knows the answer.

T
he
sun is coming up but we’re still awake. She lies next to me, in all her glory; the morning light is soft and blue and makes her skin glow. I want to trace the freckles on her shoulders into constellations. I want to map every square inch of her. She smokes a cigarette and looks up at the ceiling, casually stroking my leg, sighing. I kiss the top of her head to keep up the illusion. She keeps excusing herself to the bathroom and I know how it goes.

I fall asleep and have the most insane dreams. She shakes me awake a few hours later, her face hovering above mine. She tells me she’s been watching me, says it was adorable. The ashtray by the chair backs up her story. I don’t think she’s slept—I don’t know, she could have—and she’s still as wired and lean as she was last night. She tells me we’re going to a hotel, and I don’t understand why, but I agree. I have to. I take a shower and put on the same clothes I wore the previous night. We barrel back down the hill in her SUV, and at least three cars are trailing us, photographers who accelerate around blind curves
and try to overtake us, try to box us in. They dutifully fall back into line with the approach of oncoming traffic, then attempt to zoom ahead again when the road is clear. She is laughing and calling them “fuckers.” It is the most pointless car chase I have ever been a part of.

We walk to the coffee shop in the hotel lobby, making our way through a wall of even
more
photographers, all of who seemed to know we’d be lunching here. She is careful not to grab my hand as we navigate past the lenses. Inside, we take a seat that’s near enough to the window—a happy accident—and everyone in the place notices. They’re all either blatantly staring at us or trying hard to make it look as if they were not. Either way it makes my skin crawl. I hide my eyes in the shoulder of her jacket. We sit next to each other—not across from each other—at a booth. Outside, the photographers trample the shrubbery to take our picture. She pretends not to notice. I can’t do the same.

“Should we, you know,
move
?” I ask.

“It’s fine,” she says flatly, like I’ve let her down. Then she strokes my hair with her hand, laughs at nothing in particular. It is a great photo op.

I struggle to stay awake, but we’re both so fucking out of it. She’s high on whatever comes out of that little bag and goes up her nose in the bathroom. I’m just along for the ride. I am aware of exactly what we are, and exactly what this is. Business, pure and simple. A way to make the tabloids. “Who Is Her New Man?” the headlines will scream. If only they knew I’m just her man for the day, someone preselected to give her the
edge
her career
needs. Her “rocker boyfriend,” as the tabloids will put it. The waitress comes by and I order a ginger ale. I pull my hood over my head and kiss her neck to keep up the act. The hotel manager lowers the screens on the windows now, as a courtesy to her. It’s feeding time at the zoo.

After lunch, we go up to her suite at the hotel. She has it reserved for all of infinity. I look around at all the furniture and mirrors and artfully arranged flowers and realize this is probably as close as I’ll ever get to domesticity. She disappears to the bathroom again, and I follow her down the hallway, my feet padding on the cold wooden floor. Through a crack in the door I watch her shadow move. She runs the tap so I won’t hear her snorting up the little lines. I’m not sure why she bothers with all the mystery. I already know exactly who she is. I think about leaving while she’s in there, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I am fascinated by all of this, by her, because deep down I suspect she’s just another sad, lonely girl. I think I can make her happy, can rescue her from her life and take her someplace far away. It is the hero in me. The ego. She turns off the tap and I slip back down the hall, sit in a chair and pretend to be interested in the latest issue of
LA Magazine,
which they always have in places like this. She walks into the room wearing only a bathrobe, traces her finger across my shoulders as she heads for the bedroom. She opens the robe a bit, and her golden shoulder peeks out of it. I dutifully follow her in.

She lies on the bed, the robe unfurled around her like a flag. Old Glory. I stand in the doorway and want to believe that this is going to be something more than it is.
Only I know it’s not. She tells me she has condoms. It is like signing a contract. Initial here . . . and here. Notarized. Filed. One copy each for our attorneys. The hero in me dies a tragic death, as heroes tend to do. We complete a fruitful and successful business transaction while the photographers wait for us downstairs.

Later, as she sits on the floor by the bed, smoking a cigarette and talking to me about Transcendental Meditation (or, as she calls it, “TM”) and how it “saved my life” or something, I get up and start getting dressed. She stubs her cigarette out and asks me where I’m going, and I tell her I’ve got to split. As I’m buckling my belt, she crawls across the room to me, wraps herself around my legs, looks up at me with hungry eyes, and purrs, “Sta-ayyy.” I tell her I can’t, that I’ve got to get back home, and I step through her grasp. You can tell this doesn’t happen to her often. As I’m pulling on my shirt and walking out of the bedroom, she sits on the edge of the bed and pouts, legs crossed, then lights another cigarette.

“You don’t have to do this, you know.” She exhales. “You don’t have to prove a point to me.”

I tell her I’m not trying to prove any point, that I’ve just got to get back to my place. We both know that’s a lie, but I can’t stand being here any longer, trapped in this penthouse with her. I don’t want to be a part of this anymore. I don’t want to be pulled back down by her, don’t need another addiction to (mis)handle. I’m heading out the door when she shouts that she’ll call me, and then she cautions, “Leave out the back . . . it’ll be easier that way.”

I take the freight elevator down and exit the hotel
through the kitchen. A couple of Mexican kids in aprons are smoking out by the loading dock. As I walk by, they smile at me slyly. I’m probably not the first guy to leave this way. I walk a few blocks up to Sunset, call the Disaster, but he doesn’t answer his phone. I hail a cab by a gas station and ride back to my place, making the driver take me back by the front of the hotel before we head into the canyon. Photographers are still out there, leaning on the hoods of cars, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee out of paper cups. Their lives are one long stakeout. For the first time, I feel sort of sorry for her.

I try calling the Disaster again, but it goes straight to voice mail. He might still be at her house, asleep with a model wrapped around him and a smile on his face. But as the cab pulls up to our place, I see him on the front porch curled up in a wicker chair, asleep. I can hear him snoring as I walk up the dusty driveway. I kick a stone at the porch, but he doesn’t stir. I shout his name . . . nothing. He finally wakes up as the cab rattles back down the canyon; a dry, sickly grin crawls across his stubbled face. He looks sunburned and ragged, as if he’d spent the day crawling through the Sahara. He’s out on the porch because, last night, he lost both his keys
and
his phone.