I’m Losing You (5 page)

As DeVore burst into laughter, the cottage door opened, disgorging Laura Dern. Calliope loomed behind her. When she saw him there, the psychiatrist's features hardened like ice around the fishing hole of her mouth.

“Laura, this is Simon, my son.”

“You were so great in
Jurassic Park
,” said Simon.

She thanked him, before exchanging exuberant, fraternal hellos with the waiting Vorbalid.

“The Jeff Goldblum character was my favorite,” simple Simon said. “The whole ‘chaos' thing. But what I really want to ask about is
Rambling Rose
—”

“If you'd like an interview, you'll have to call her publicist,” said his mother, moving between them like Secret Service ready to take a Big Star bullet. Laura made a quick and gracious goodbye. Hassan went into the office.

“I am
furious
!” she shouted, steering Simon through the halls to the front door. “You are
never
to approach clients, you
know
better. This is a safe haven, not the tour at Universal! They come here to get
away
from that, do you understand?”

“I'm sorry—”

“
Not good enough
. Jesus, look at you! You embarrassed me!”

“Yeah, I forgot my Armani.”

“You are
always
to call, I thought that was our
agreement
.” They paused at the chandeliered entrance while Calliope caught her breath. “You came from a job, didn't you?”

“That's me, Mom—Ace Ventura, Dead Pet Detective.”

“Why do you do this to me?”

“Show business is my life.”

“What is your delight, Simon?
Why?
”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Look, I'll prostrate myself.” He kneeled
before her, hoping to make her laugh, but she just glowered. “I'll even
prostate
myself—only with a urologist present, of course.”

She yanked him by the elbow like she did when he was a kid. “Get up!”

“Oh come on! What do you want me to do? Not be your son?”

“Right now,” she said, “I want you to leave.”

“Is that what you want me to do? Not be your son? Because that can be arranged!”

She opened the door and pushed him out.

The ignobled psychiatrist composed a mental sentence or two explaining to Mr. DeVore her son's “history of problems,” but when she reached the cottage, she decided to let it be.

That afternoon, Les Trott was accused of over-prescribing painkillers to Oberon Mall, the famous singer and actress. A bitch from the DEA dared visit while he was needling cow protein into Phylliss Wolfe's nasolabial furrows. He made the woman wait in his office so she could stare awhile at the photos of bagged and framed Big (Star) Game: Les with international icons, royalty, H.I.V.I.P.s. When he came in, she got right to it, said a whole ring of abusing medicos were implicated. He didn't believe her, but the piece of shit named names, and except for one, all of them were colleagues. The woman wanted to know why Oberon had a note in her purse written on one of Les's prescription pads alerting ERs to her chronic migraine condition—a kind of backstage pass to the concert of anesthesia. Les smiled and sweated while an Acolyte futilely tried his lawyer on the phone. Was he under arrest? He wasn't, said the harridan. He had watched enough television to know it was time to ask her to leave.

He sat there shaking. His support team—soft-treading Mephisto-hoofed angels—fed him Xanax and evinced outrage. Les called a few of the men she'd named. He got through to the one he knew least, an ENT guy who shrugged it off. “They came after me before, the dicks. Listen, they got nothing else to do. I tell 'em to get a life.” Les canceled his appointments and holed up in the Game room, waiting for Obie and Calliope to return his calls. When Les hurt, the Acolytes hurt; they bused in fried chicken from the Ivy, but he wouldn't eat. Calliope was finally on the line. She heard the familiar panic in his voice and told him “not to go there.” The shrink said it was
probably some sort of scare tactic, not that she knew so much about this sort of thing. She asked him point-blank if he
had
over-prescribed. He said it was all insane. Four thousand Percocets and Vicodins, the woman said, over fourteen months! How was that possible? Obie was his closest friend. He lived in her house for five months after the earthquake while his place was redone. He'd been through the wars with this girl: surgeries, depressions, divorce. He had been there for her, and she for him—when boyfriends stomped his heart. Obie was childless. In sweetly hushed, narcotic late night phone calls, from one wing of the house to the other, she told him to give a gob of sperm so they could make a baby; she was burned out on relationships, she said, but wanted a kid. Les never took her seriously (such a terrifying merge was beyond his wildest fantasies of celebrity bonding) but was flattered and moved nonetheless. He made her repeat the proposition at parties, so everyone could hear.

“Four thousand pills is a lot,” said Calliope.

“It's
not
four thousand, it
couldn't
be. Are you turning against me?”

She changed tack. “Les, I don't want you getting paranoid.”

A little after six, he left through the Private Door. His advocate got through to the Lotus (with the
LESISMOR
plate) and told him not to worry—“there's no case.” There was something troubling and possibly illegal, he said, something
political
, about the entire visit. He'd make a few calls; he had DEA friends who would give him the skinny. Not to worry. Les felt better, having mustered the troops.

He couldn't sleep. He talked to Obie and she was loaded. She said it was all a “bad joke” and was going to break the next day in the
Times
. They talked about a name on the DEA list, a man Les knew only in passing. He'd seen him at Obie's and other Big Star homes. For six hundred dollars, Stuart Stanken made housecalls at any hour of the day and night (he had an answering machine instead of an office). If Big Star had root canal or migraine or hint of kidney stone—or if Big Star was depressed over AIDS death or bad breakup, hair loss or loss of movie role—Stu Stanken was there. He'd shoot them with morphine and stay awhile as they nodded, chit-chatting, admiring the decor and general Big Starness as the systemic valentine was delivered. An hour later he'd dispense an intramuscular booster, just to be safe. I don't want your pain coming back when I'm fifteen minutes out the door.
You need never suffer from pain again
, he intoned,
not so long as I am here to help
. Les used to bridle on running into him at Obie's parties, and he told her so. Being with Stanken was like having a dipso chiropractor in your midst—or an abortionist out of Faulkner. Now, it looked as if they'd be sharing a line-up.

Three in the morning. Propelled from bed by a nightmare, he stood in his Charvet robe before the bathroom mirror of his eighty-five-hundred-square-foot Santa Monica Canyon house, staring at a pimple. All day long he'd felt its achy inchoation. In adolescence, he suffered from acne vulgaris and bore the scars to this day, minimized by dermabrasion. His years of papular plague had been something out of the Middle Ages—weeping pistachios on forehead and cheek, walnuts on shoulder, pecans on back and buttocks, groin and nasal fold. Sometimes, at the whim of jaded acne gods (having feasted on his worried flesh, they sat at table, sated and snoring, turkey drumsticks still in hand), a lone pimple was sent like a scout to unlikely, mind-bending territories: back of the hand, kneecap crown, achilles heel. The men didn't seem to care—the men in movie theaters and coffee-shop bathrooms, some sandy-haired, muscular and trouble-free, others with afflictions of their own. The men who picked him up in cars on the boulevard desired him, with or without his mother's concealing makeup (he could still summon Max Factor's somewhat acrid, hopeful smell). The piratical flesh of Leslie Trott became his enemy. He resolved to have dominion over the landscape that had ostracized him with such methodical, unforgiving cruelty. In medical school, he envied the Jews their baby faces and wispy beards, their unblemished certitude. They were funny and kind. He was their mascot, the over-achiever with bad-news oil glands, a living laboratory of follicular mayhem. He would show them all.

He took a syringe from the drawer and injected the thing with cortisone. Les still ruled over the dermis—he would save his own skin, at all costs. He padded to the kitchen and sat under the bright lights. The hum of silver appliances and halogen allowed him to ponder what he had dreamed. He had been walking, or gliding, down the middle of Sunset Boulevard. No cars. Something lay in the road ahead. A body. His mother hovered over it—not his mother, but rather a succubus: the DEA inquisitor. When the demon said the body needed to be buried, Les laughed and fled. Next thing he knew the demon was upon him, hurling him face-down. Les's teeth shattered on the asphalt. That was when the dermatologist felt the
weight of the cadaver, its hands clinging to his neck. The demon forced him to stand with his burden, having strapped the body to Les's back like a nidorous papoose. He was warned that this latest development was born of his attempting to run; if he didn't obey, the consequences would be unimaginably worse. Les asked the demon its bidding. The demon said the body must be buried before dawn in the yard of a distant house. When he began to walk, the weight was almost insupportable, like trudging up a muddy hill carrying a two-hundred-pound man. He tried desperately to awaken. Then he found himself at the gates of a house. The succubus waited there with pick and shovel in hand. The gates opened slowly, as in a cheap horror film but with chilling effect: the house was his own.

Donny Ribkin sat at a table with Oberon Mall and the producer Phylliss Wolfe. They were lunching at Sweets, an ICM haunt on Beverly and Sweetzer. Phylliss really owed him for this. She'd been trying to put together an indie remake of Pasolini's
Teorema
for years now, with an interesting spin: the Terence Stamp role of the libertine stranger would be played by a woman.

Phylliss Wolfe was lanky and elegant, with buttery hazel skin. She apotheosized all the New Yorkers Donny'd ever known—brusque and intimate all at once, quick to laugh and trigger-haired when it came to perceived affronts. Although she'd been a fixture on the independent scene for more than a decade, the last few years had been colorless; Phylliss hoped
Teorema
would change all that. She knew how difficult it must have been for the agent to have gotten Obie's attention, let alone nailed down a lunch. The fact that Katherine Grosseck, his beloved ex, happened to be the writer on the project further martyred him.

“Did you go to the screening at Zev's last night?” asked Donny.

Obie nodded, attacking the chef's salad. “I have
never
laughed so hard in my
life.
I was
hemorrhaging
.”

“What movie?” Phylliss had a mouth full of onion rings.

“The new Batman. It was horrible.”

“Let's cut to the chase,” Donny said. “Did you play Rim the Host?”

“He had the runs—how could we resist?” Phylliss laughed, and Obie lit up. “Can you smoke in here?”

“Can
I
? No. Can
you
? Probably.”

Just then, a waitress approached and said she'd have to put out her cigarette. Obie scowled at Donny while she stubbed it in a butter dish.

“Told you,” he said.

“Anyway, Moe—Trusskopf—started coming up with titles for porn movies. Mostly gay, of course.”

“This is so much more wholesome than I imagined.”

“There were all these categories and sub-genres…”

“She used the
S
word!” interjected Phylliss.

“The
S-G
word,” Donny added.

“We did movies:
Sleepless in the Saddle
…”

Phylliss submitted
Forrest Rump
. Obie practically spit onto her plate, gratifying the producer.