Helms
J
osie parked halfway down the block-long defunct bakery in Culver City, with its enormous Thirties sign, HELMS, OLYMPIC BREAD, its stars-and-stripes shield. Nick told her they used to take field trips at Helms Bakery when he was a kid, they got tiny loaves of bread at the end. “Beat the shit out of the Star-Kist tuna plant,” he said. Even now, the place smelled of yeast and caramelized sugar. David Doll’s band played here on New Year’s Eve, in a failed electric-car factory leased by a hippie guy named Merlin, a laser artist who put on light shows and let bands play for free. She still had the hangover—Paul Angstrom had found her passed out in the can, wrapped around a bottle of voddy.
She’d never worked for this photographer before. It was an ad for skateboards, she was the boarder’s girlfriend. When she’d asked over the phone what she should wear, the photographer just said to wear what she wore to the casting. Her yellow coat, some patent-leather knee-high boots with stacked heels, the plaid schoolgirl skirt she’d bought at Goodwill, a child’s T-shirt, her outrageous hair braided into two tiny pigtails. She normally avoided her modeling agency like leprosy, a cheeseball place in Hollywood, but work was work, and she needed it now.
It took her a while to find the photographer’s suite in the warren of workshops and studios. As she walked into the studio, “Heart of Glass” played on the stereo. No wonder he liked her look. A Blondie guy. The photographer stood at the chest-high counter, looking at some film on the light box. Old, maybe forty, with a trim build and curly dark hair, Josie could tell he worked out—he wore a tight black T-shirt to show off his precision-cut muscles. What was his name? Walker, or Parker, something like that. She came over and saw he was actually chopping some coke on the light-box glass. With a quick glance to his assistant, a smart-looking, heavy-featured girl in Elvis Costello horn-rimmed glasses, he laid out lines, did two of them, and handed Josie the rolled-up bill. She did hers up quick. He unrolled the hundred, wiped the last of the grains from the green and ran his finger over his gums, put the bill back in his pocket. Then he looked at her, impersonally, and she could tell he’d forgotten her name too, more interested in her skin. “You have some powder? You’re shiny.”
She powdered down at a mirror nailed to the wall by the phone, while the assistant adjusted the lights. The coke turned up the volume, a nice sparkly buzz. She checked the mirror to see if there was a rim around her nostrils, and wondered what the assistant was getting paid an hour. She looked smart, probably an art-school grad, and what was she making, ten, maybe twelve? When she, the imitation human, was getting a hundred dollars and free blow for standing still for an hour. What a freaky world. There was no point in looking for meaning. Life was a fucking stretch of surf, and you rode your board, it was all you could do. In the mirror, a face out of Picasso stared back, some cubist nightmare. If her cheekbones weren’t there to stretch it out, her face would fold in on itself like wet tissue.
You can get some shots, I know someone
. . .
The photographer directed her to join the other model, a skateboard kid shifting nervously on the white paper drawn down from a big roll on the wall, like the paper that covered the doctor’s bed when you went for a crotch exam. “Stand behind him, cop some ’tude,” the photographer said.
Cop some ’tude?
She could hear Michael. But she knew what Parker meant. It was no different from life drawing, you made an interesting composition in space. She imagined the tangible shape of herself and the skateboard boy, then let it go negative, where the space was the solid and they were the absence.
“This is a bogus board,” the kid told Josie, as the photographer’s assistant adjusted the reflecting umbrellas, the lights.
She didn’t respond, just let the coke shimmer in her body, finally feeling good for the first time in so long.
“I never did this before.” The kid popped his knuckles, nervous as a third grader taking a test. Normally she would have felt sorry for him, but today she saw him the way the photographer did. A shape in space.
“Don’t worry, he’ll tell you what to do,” Josie said. There was always someone to tell you what to do. It was only when you tried on your own that you got into trouble.
After the lights had been adjusted and readjusted, the reflectors tilted and moved and tilted again, the assistant gave the photographer his Polaroid, and he shot off a few frames, moving around, dancing to Blondie, getting into the whole
American Gigolo
vibe. Photographers had one advantage over artists, they could easily change their own perspective. Some shots he took practically from the ground, angling up at the kid and herself looming behind him. “Yeah,” he said as he watched the Polaroid develop in his hand. “Like that.”
He showed it to Josie and the kid craned to see. They came off as cool and threatening, towering over the observer, with the graffiti-style logo of the skateboard company showing on the bottom of the board.
“The board should be all shredded,” the kid said. “This is bullshit.”
The photographer wasn’t the least bit concerned. He and Josie were both tuned in to the same station, they’d entered the Blondie world, its cosmopolitan slickness, bright and stylized movie versions of themselves. But the photographer thought it was him, where Josie knew it was just the coke. She ran her tongue over her teeth.
“Like I’m supposed to be this cool hip shredder, with this bogus board,” the boy complained over his shoulder to Josie.
“Try getting a real job,” Josie said. What she wouldn’t give for a ciggie.
“Black-and-white,” the photographer said to his assistant.
The assistant handed the photographer his 35 millimeter, took the Polaroid from him, and slid Josie a conspiratorial smile.
I know he’s a jackass, but I gotta work here.
Assistants didn’t get any coke.
“I thought you were supposed to be my girlfriend,” the kid pouted.
“I am,” Josie said. “Your dom girlfriend.” She nudged him in the ass with her boot.
“Love that,” said the photographer, squatting down, lower than the kid. “Hold it.” He started shooting the roll. Three from one position, two lower, and the final four lying down, the camera propped on a sandbag. Josie had to admire his limber, compact form, tanned and intricate with muscle. Kind of grotesquely fascinating, like watching a snake, close up.
“My legs hurt,” the kid said. “Can I stand up now?”
“No.” The photographer shot a couple more, then let the kid up. Josie was glad of the coat, the studio was freezing. The kid towered over her, awkward and simple with his bogus board, a junior from Venice High the photographer had found on the boardwalk. He did a funny little dance, to get the circulation back in his legs. “I hate that prickly thing, you know? I can’t feel my feet.”
They waited for him to finish, then the assistant put a chair on the paper roll, handed the photographer the camera loaded with color. They did a couple of shots with her leaning over to kiss him, a cutesy Fifties pose, her ass sticking out, and then one of her walking across him and off to the right, him looking after her. Then finished up outside on a bus bench, the two of them waiting for the bus, the board in the middle. “That’s the one,” the photographer said as they went back into the bakery. “That’s the ad. I knew it would be that all along.”
“Then why shoot the other ones?” Josie asked.
“So the client has a choice.” He didn’t pay Josie, but wrote out a check for the kid. The modeling agency would pay her after they’d taken their cut. “The choice I want them to make. Can you stay? I’ve got some more marching powder. Joanne, don’t forget, the shoot starts at nine at the pier. Stop and pick Danny up, yeah?” The assistant already had her coat on. She gave him the
heil Hitler
salute and took off.
Josie put her purse over her shoulder, took out her cigarettes, lit one. Yeah. Yeah, she could use a little more marching powder. It felt good. It felt damn good.
“Don’t smoke in here,” he said. “I quit last week.”
He turned and she gave him the finger behind his back. She went outside. Could she really stay for some more flake with Parker or Walker? Let him take her in his tight workout arms? It was so tempting, just to surf that wave. He’d bark out instructions, maybe put her in costume and fuck her in the ass, something to make her abasement complete.
Then she noticed the kid, sitting on the curb as if he was waiting for someone. Probably his mother. He had his real skateboard with him, that was worn to the wood right through the sandpaper, the ends blunted with repeated impact. “Hey,” he said. And she realized that he had been waiting for someone. Her.
She sat down next to him, tucking her skirt around her thighs so she wouldn’t expose herself to every passing car. The speed as they whizzed by. Her heart pounded, arrhythmic, a limping gallop. Her lame horse of a heart. She inhaled on her Gauloise. What if she just got up and walked out into traffic? Just a few steps, that’s all it would take, someone would hit her for sure. Take her right out.
Do it.
No. What was she thinking? It frightened her, the clarity of it. Mangled underneath some car wheel. That’s what she wanted? She had to think of something else.
The boy was smiling at her. His eyelashes were curly and he was getting a zit right in the middle of his forehead.
“Look, I didn’t mean to be such a bitch,” she said, flicking her cigarette. “A friend of mine just died.”
“Wow,” he said. “I never knew anybody who died.” He was so young. So sweet. She suddenly wanted to run her hands through his spiky hair, she wanted to kiss him, go down on him, something he would remember the rest of his life. “What’d he die of?”
She sighed and blew out a series of smoke rings. “Death.”
The boy spun the wheels of his old skateboard. “Are you really a model? I mean, I thought they were supposed to be tall.”
We’re all small
. . . “I don’t get much print work. I do some stupid stuff like the Penney catalog. They make me wear a wig.”
“I think your hair rocks.”
The whirr of the ball bearings in the wheel as he spun it, like a prayer. Michael once told her about the prayer wheels of Nepal. A huge one they had in Katmandu. That they inscribed prayers on the wheel and as you spun it, the prayers went out into the universe, it was a sacred machine. She liked the idea, something praying for her, even if she couldn’t do it for herself. She didn’t believe in anything, not anymore. “Give me your board.”
He handed it to her. She took out a black pen from her bag, thought about what she should write. She didn’t know any prayers.
Help,
she wrote on one wheel.
Please God,
on another.
Sorry,
on the third. And then there was just one left, and on it she wrote the prayer that was too late to pray.
“You’re not going to fuck that guy, are you?” the kid said anxiously, gesturing back to the studio. “He’s an asshole. He reminds me of my dad.”
She wrapped her arms around her knees. Sitting here with this kid on the curb made her feel old. She had been planning to stay, but now she saw she couldn’t. “No, I’m not going to fuck him. I’m not fucking anybody these days. Look, can I give you a lift somewhere?”
She gave the kid a ride out to the Marina, where his mother lived in the Marina City Club, the circular beehive towers housing the old coffee-tea-or-me crowd from the Swinging Seventies, grown slightly older and staler, more comb-overs, more crow’s-feet under the Farrah hairdos. She parked sideways across two spaces.
“Want to come up?” the boy asked. “I’ve got some weed. My mom won’t be home until nine.”
The ultimate high-school come-on. Shitweed nursed and carried like a condom in a kid’s back pocket. She stroked his face, the skin was soft as her own. He was maybe, what, fifteen? She leaned over and kissed him. His lips thin and chapped, his mouth soft, surprised. “Be good,” she said, and reached across him, opened the door on his side. The cold, damp sea air rushed in.
“Come on, it’s cool, really,” he said. “I swear. There’s a Jacuzzi and everything.”
She sat quietly until he collected his pack and board and got out.
“Can I have your phone number at least, just to, you know, call you?”
Call her. She had never been a girl boys called up, made a date with. She was the kind of girl someone drove by and honked the horn, a girl you asked to stay for a beer or some ludes and fucked and sent home. Walker or Parker knew who she was. Who she used to be. Now she didn’t know who she was. Michael saw something else in her, but then he stopped seeing it. She found a piece of paper on the floor of the car, the agency’s directions to the shoot, and wrote Pen’s number on the back. “Pray for me,” she said. She reached out and spun a wheel of his board, the last one, the one that said
True World.
S
he drove by the house, but didn’t stop. There was nothing inside but the paintings he’d given up on and the books he’d stopped reading, a bed they would never make love in, journals whispering in the dark. Instead, she bought a half-pint of voddy at Gala’s, and drove down to the river, a dead-end street where there was a tear in the chain link. She pulled it apart and climbed through. Walking along the top of the embankment in her cracked patent boots, she watched the water flow through ryegrass and cottonwoods. This was better. A flight of ducks rose, and winged in unison off toward their roost at the Silverlake Reservoir. Nature was always there, no matter what. Up above, on the bridge, traffic inched its way along Fletcher Street. Thousands of people passed by here every day and not one noticed the water tumbling on the rocks, the miniature forest that sprouted up through the concrete river bottom. Real water from mountains, that no one had invented, it would be here long after they scraped the city from the face of the earth. The sooner the better.
This was where they had seen the heron that shining morning. A giant blue bird, three feet high, standing in the water, poking through the reeds at the edge of the little island. And time just stopped. The true world glowed in the morning light, the bird and the water, sparkling. They’d held hands, they both saw it, it was right there, the true world. She didn’t know how long they stood there because there was no time, it only started again when, eventually, the bird flew off, under the arch of the bridge. They watched it fly upriver, and knew the moment had passed, but they had seen it. The world was an open door. He’d built a little stack of stones to commemorate it. A duck, it was called. “It’s how you mark trail in rough country,” he said. “Then travelers can look for the next duck, and know they’re on the right path.”