Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

he will see hisself in my

eyes

Bud Wiggins, Returning

Tolstoy

was wrong. That’s what Bud thought, anyway.

As he mulled it over on the way back to Dolly’s, he saw a laughing bum on a bus bench on La Brea, just south of Sunset. More like a laughing Buddha than bum (though maybe they were one & the same), for he was ecstatic; his jaw opened in ravenous hilarity, arms & fingers gesticulated wildly, eyes on fire as he stared ahead at the invisible movie playing on a screen that only he could see — blockbuster comedy of Eternity. The peculiar thing was that just before he turned right on Olympic toward Beverly Hills, Bud passed another ecstatic bum in a FUTURE CELEBRITY t-shirt, this one even more extreme than the last in his appreciation of whatever was being unreeled. For 35 years, Bud had been knee-jerk monetizing his daily experience through a screenwriter’s filter, & this one quickly coalesced into a pitch about a “happy virus” descending upon the meek & the homeless then worked its way up from there. He quickly rejected it, remembering he was no longer in the business that bore him such meager fruit through the decades. Besides, he suddenly recalled that David Foster Wallace’s big book touched on that; Bud never liked being accused of general plagiarism.*

He thought of Tolstoy because he’d seen plenty of unhappy bums of the paranoid type who rage in public places. It was easy for Bud to come up with reasons behind their display of insanity: a fire and brimstone fervor of religious psychosis; anger at the intrusion of Homeland Security, whose voice spoke through their teeth or the radios of passing cars; disgust at Women, whose gender was the source of all disease, all misery. But when it came to imagining what was behind the happy bums’ façade, well, he was fairly certain, if asked, they would not say, “I am at one with the beautiful absurdity of the cosmos!” or even “I am Jesus & I shall save you!”—because, at least in the latter , what would be so hysterically funny about that? No, the difficulty was in discerning what was on the screen that caused such insane joviality. Clearly each was having a singular experience; each was seeing something specific to himself that tickled his madhouse funnybone.

Hence:

Unhappy bums are all alike; every happy bum is happy in his own way.

Take that, Tolstoy.

. .

Nothing had changed, really, in those 35 years. Bud was still addicted to pills and living in the downstairs room of his mother’s rent-controlled, split-level apartment — The Charleville Manor — in Beverly Hills. He couldn’t find work, any kind of work, and relied on the kindness of almost-strangers; friends in the Industry who’d mostly slipped away. A few times a week, he awakened to his own high-pitched screams. The only thing that was different was suddenly being 59 years-old. Recently, the dentist told Bud he was grinding his teeth, and asked if he wanted a night guard. Bud joked, “Why bother? I’ve only got about 15 years left.” Instead of cracking a smile (the dentist’s assistant remained stoic as well), the dentist just shrugged, as if to say, You’ve got a valid point there.

The building Dolly lived in was now owned by a Vietnamese woman with serious OCD. The reign of the Jewish landlord — the building was once owned by the furrier Abe Lipsey — was long over. The VC drove a little Mercedes & her face bore an agéd, frozen, mani-pedi smile; she was as anxious for Dolly to die as Bud was. Dolly had been in that apartment more than 4 decades. Her rent could only be increased x-amount per year, the results being, to the VC’s immense consternation, that she paid less than ½ what the other tenants did — the dogged, nest-building, penurious Dolly (Chinese Year of the Ox) rolled over any financial obstacles in her way. In time, she became Neimans’ highest earner, having fleeced the company through an elaborate system of purchases, returns & swap-outs that involved the bedazzling, bedizened expertise of the aforementioned Mr. Lipsey, furrier & landlord to the dying stars. (Broderick Crawford’s ex-wife, the starlet Joan Tabor, had died in one of Lipsey’s buildings, a suicide Bud remembered The Beverly Hills Courier writing up as an accidental OD of influenza R x.) When she retired at 83, she had a tad more than a million in savings; now, she was a relatively spry nonagenarian whose only fear was falling. Bud hoped she’d soon take a dive because the longer she lived, the more her savings were depleted by the round-the-clock caregivers she’d hired specifically to prevent her from taking a tumble.

Dolly was half-blind and half-deaf but enjoyed her TV golf. She would sit in her chair in front of the set — a $1,300 lazyboy with a motor allowing it to tilt on a 45° angle that made sitting down & getting up fun — and rip into the physical traits of the linksmen. Though if a handsome one was playing, her voice turned creepy & horny.

He sat on the carpet holding her hand. In the last few years, Bud learned something strange & poignantly sad about his mother — she literally didn’t know how to hold a hand, or how to let someone hold hers (like a girl who never learned how to kiss). She would dig with her thumb into his flesh until Bud nearly yelped in pain. Most of the time he endured it, simply by using the mantra the money the money the money is coming but often he was compelled to give brief tutorials on the art of handholding. For a few minutes she’d listen, with a proper sort of acquiescence, before suddenly digging into his flesh again with a cartoon villain’s gleeful. Dolly’s senses may have been dulled but her acuity ferociously lived on. The moment Bud entered her room, she scanned his body, his grooming, his clothes. Are you going to grow a beard? Are those boots or are those high heels that you’re wearing? They’re ugly! Ugly! Ugly! When she wasn’t being critical, she leered, and told him how thin and gorgeous he was. He cringed.

How did it happen that after 60 years, this rancorous crone, this snapping turtle, this weird, decaying dominatrix, this virago still dominated his life?

Bud had been on a daily “maintenance dose” of opiates since the dawn of time. There were five or six doctors he could count on for refills — they’d been treating him for “migraines” for so many years that Bud believed he actually had the malady. He did have migraines but they were what are called “rebound headaches,” caused by the pills. He bought R xoff the Internet once and wished he hadn’t because twice a day he got emails from the “fulfillment department”: Bud, your prescription is ready!

Opiates were constipating, to say the least — a friend of his with AIDS was prescribed liquid opium because it was the only thing that effectively stopped the diarrhea — so Bud had always been rather fussy about his prematurely geriatric toilet. He took 1000 mg of magnesium a day and never traveled too far from his stash of stool softeners and MOM (milk of magnesia). Impaction was a ring of hell to be avoided at all cost. In his day, he’d been forced to go to the emergency room more than once; one visit ended in provoking an attractive young RN to announce, post-enema, “You’ve just given birth!” Bud got chills when he read about the obese woman who died writhing & obstructed on the floor of an ER waiting room. A zeppelin of shit had accreted in her gut for days but the Hugh Laurie at King-Harbor said it was probably gallstones and gave her Vicodin. Her husband begged them to treat her but it must have been a busy night, everyone knows how the triage thing goes. The guy was so frustrated he actually called 911. When they asked for the address, the poor schmuck told them they were in the waiting room of the King-Harbor ER. Bud heard the tape on a website; the dispatcher couldn’t wrap her head around him calling from a hospital , you know, it was like, what a dorkus! Somebody call America’s Funniest 911s ! Of course, she said there was no way they could send paramedics to an ER. . a security camera captured everything, she falls off her seat half-conscious, puking feces, and the janitor comes and just mops up around her like in a silent film! Meanwhile, the zeppelin’s exploding through the sluice (“O, the humanity!”), a razored bowling ball of rockhard shit slipping the surly bonds of bowel to touch the face of God and waxed linoleum. The hour-long footage got leaked —another soupçon offering to the webgods, to the daily unquenchable fatal reality show planet. The woman had three kids, and mischievous hackerh8trs spammed their emails with mash-ups of Mom seizing on the floor, adding Blair Witch screams & Howard Stern farts.