Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

He headed toward the car, pausing at another stone:

DOROTHY STRATTEN

FEBRUARY 28, 1960—AUGUST 14, 1980

IF PEOPLE BRING SO MUCH COURAGE TO THIS WORLD THE WORLD HAS TO KILL THEM TO BREAK THEM, SO OF COURSE IT KILLS THEM… IT KILLS THE VERY GOOD AND THE VERY GENTLE AND THE VERY BRAVE IMPARTIALLY. IF YOU ARE NONE OF THESE YOU CAN BE SURE THAT IT WILL KILL YOU TOO BUT THERE WILL BE NO SPECIAL HURRY

WE LOVE YOU DR

Strange. He wondered if the mom had written it. Maybe. In a raging delirium of grief, no doubt.

Star 80 was probably Fosse’s best film. His most director- like film, anyway.

She was only twenty. Star 20. . . . .

Some were made like his dad, royal tortoises mobb deep in guardian angels, while others breathed ICU nursery O 2-tank air for a few mayfly minutes before expiration.

One needn’t be a philosopher to grasp the insignificance of temporal goings-on; one needn’t even be pretentious (tho sometimes that helped). In the design of things, there was utterly no significance in whether you lived an hour, a year or a hundred years — the span of human life was cloud graffiti. Michael couldn’t remember the context, but one of his doctors in Montreal used a wonderful word, blessure , which meant injury to tissue, a break in the skin. (The actor rearranged it in his head as “surely blessed.”) Last night as he fell asleep, he meditated. If every soul who’d ever lived and died on Earth — Yahoo! put it just over 100 billion — were to suddenly manifest & vaporize, the Unknown* would have no more awareness of the thunderous lamentations accompanying their collective outgoing breath than an insect would have knowledge of a microblog devoted to its industrious ways. The unfathomable cessation would incur no celestial blessure , the Ineffable not suffer the slightest bruising whatsoever. Something he read in his college days at UC Santa Barbara stayed with him all these years, something one did have to be a philosopher to have said, or a philosopher-poet, anyway. “Life is the rarest form of death.” Wasn’t that wild? The old joke of life being a near-death experience. Was that George Carlin? Or Mr. Nietzsche?

MD came out the other side of his catastrophe with the firm belief that cancer was his teacher. Cancer had urged him to accept (or die trying) earthly life for the dream it was— fleeting , as they say, tho such a perception seemed impossible to achieve (if one could call it an achievement) for anyone but saints, idiots & visionaries. Yet since the diagnosis, he strove to live in that blissful, acquiescent state, that unreachable cliché of presence in the moment , yes, in this moment, not moments past or moments to come. This moment was all he had. In this moment, he was alive & cancer-free. In this moment, from a cemetery, he conjured his wife, beckoning. In this moment, he could see his children crying, laughing, sleeping. In this moment, he had more money than he could spend in a hundred lifetimes.

By the time a too-close bird ended his train of thought, the actor’s tour was almost done. It wouldn’t have been complete without Marilyn.

The plaque on the drawer of the cinerarium bore only her name, and the year of birth & death. Thirty-six years-old at the age of blessure. . A long time ago, a businessman bought the space right above her. He told his wife to make sure they buried him facedown, in the missionary position — just for the kamikaze cosmo-comic eterno-skeleto-fuck jokey thrill of it — an inspired wish that his widow evidently wryly carried out. Then bogeyman Madoff swindled her and she had to auction off the spectral fuckpad penthouse, she got five million for it (if memory served) & buried him elsewhere — exhumation in flagrante postmortem delicto . It was common pop-cult knowledge that’s where Hef was going, years ago he bought the crib beneath Monroe, so he could properly stick his candle in the wind. Karma was a funny thing: Norma Jean was molested as a child, & she’d be molested in the afterlife. It was ironic too that Dorothy Stratten always wanted to hang at the Playboy Mansion; now, Marilyn and Hef would be partying, with Dorothy just outside the gate, for all eternity.

The Wheel of Karma kept on turning.

MD understood those people who thought burial was for squares, for whom cremation was the magic word — to be sprinkled here & there, over the ground or into the wind & water of a place one loved. He understood the feelings of those who were stingy/proprietary about recycling theirs or loved ones’ organs, even those who thought there might be bad voodoo in signing the donor’s form on the back of a driver’s license. He understood how a person could feel in their untransplanted heart that mutilation — that posthumously violent, nonconsensual blessure —regardless of the alleviation of the suffering of the living, just wasn’t the way to go.

He didn’t care about any of that now. They could scoop his eyes & pluck his corneas, whittle his kidneys, grand theft his thorax, fry up his liver, & harvest his skin on a special edition of Piers Morgan. They could tear off cock&balls at the root and laminate them for teaching hospitals. They could feed him to the dogs & piss on him, because by then his soul would be in another dream.

He was over it.

Ctrl + Z

Tea

with Michael Douglas was heaven.

Gwen was on Cloud 9, she’d had a crush on him forever. Telma wore her new Marc Jacobs dress and was so excited that getting a part on Glee was hardly discussed, even though she couldn’t believe his wife was actually guest-starring . OMG! It was all so adorable, watching her daughter interact with the legendary star, & Gwen thought he couldn’t have been more charming. Sylvester Stallone, Tilda Swinton & L.A. Reid were in different parts of the sunlit room having tea. It was beyond beyond.

When Telma got her diagnosis, a few people told Gwen that cancer was a gift. She wanted to strangle them, but now she understood.

. .

A few days later, she got a call from an attorney who said he represented St. Ambrose. He wanted to talk; when Gwen pressed what for, he said it was a matter best discussed in person.

Century City was walkable from the house. The request for a rendezvous was strange and slightly mysterious. On the stroll over, she had fleeting, preposterous fantasies of why she’d been summoned . She had a feeling it was a good thing.

That feeling changed when Dr. Bessowichte entered the conference room. After a cold, rabbity greeting — no shake of her hand — his wan smile withdrew, skittering under a rock. “Dr. B” (St. Ambrose happened to be the patron saint of bees & beekeepers, and schoolchildren too) had been with them from the beginning, right there in the trenches. He was the ex officio tsar of Telma’s Troopers, whose equanimity & genius for decision-making sustained them through all manner of bloody, crazy-making stratagems, artifices & bombardments of the cancer wars. In Gwen’s eyes, he was the single person most responsible for having saved her daughter’s life. He never retreated, not once. He was part of their family.

Something awful had happened… it came to her head that he was going to announce that he was sick, that he was going to die. But why wouldn’t he call or just come to the house? Why wouldn’t his wife Ruth have called? They could have asked her over to their house — they were all that close, it was that kind of bond.

Why would a lawyer call with that kind of news?

Nothing she came up with in a handful of seconds made any sense.