Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

In her loneliest late afternoon Mt. Olympus moments, palm of hand resting on the melon covered by the very same stretchedskin so thoroughly ogled by her mother’s 1,000-eyed beastie battlework battalions, Reeyonna felt her young girl’s soul still trapped within those leathery, hardbodied, unforgivingly stylish, monumentally indifferent machines. Well. She would not let that stand, no, not now, could not let it stand to have been cheated & disrespected, could no longer let that stand now that she was carrying her own camera in her belly, hatching her own witness/assassin/co-conspirator, could those cameras have been so arrogant not to conceive that by doing the bidding of their mistress they had doomed themselves to chattel? disposable robot trash pawed & pawned to/by strangers for a fraction of their worth? Reeyonna went on www.DigitalPawnshop.com & laughed as she brought them to market, Brothers Collateral Loans, right down there off the hill in W Hollywood, she goofed and chortled as the abducted children click-clanked in the cotton laundry bag they’d been carelessly thrown into, with no regard for their beauty, thrown in with a vandal’s high-spirited abandon, now and then she opened the neck of the bag to literally spit inside it, she’d have handed out all perfectly engineered specimens on Skid Row or set each on a rail to iFilm a traincrush and put it on youtube for Thiefbitch to see, yes she would certainly have done that if she didn’t need the money, she’d have drowned them in the water like in that Eminem song & recorded them screaming and pounding on the trunk of the car and dying, and sent the sounds to her mother & when you dream I hope you can’t sleep & scream about it you could never EVER put a price on them, not for Bitchthief, for Bitchthief their worth was inestimable, incalculable, though they had ultimately failed to give Bitchthief her fortune either, still, Bitchthief had fetishized them, all that worn leather with the little rents here and there, the nicks and dents and whatnot just like or close enough to the vintage guitars of famous old rockers, each one’s metal casings infinitesimally eroded by her mother’s fingers, the cells of her mother’s fingers, how could you how could you put a price on the metal of the ruggedly beautiful armatures each polished by exfoliation, the very cells her mother shed in their handling, the armatures protecting the sacred calibrated innerworkings that allowed Jacquie to memorialize Time itself! — no — one could not put a price on how they’d been prized, adored, ecstatically enlisted in erotic career worship, in sacrifice, human sacrifice! of she, Reeyonna! — all Reeyonna could do was hope that her mother’s soul had been captured too, stolen by ReeRee’s theft, & that Jacquie would die a little each day, each hour, each moment, that she would feel it in her heart & stomach feel the rape each time they were handled by uncouth foreign hands.

. .

Jacquie cried—————. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ….

The wash of memories.

The Rolleiflex the Professor gave her — her first — that stolen too, out of smashwindowed car while she sat with his dying body. (Dad’s fry cook venues & childhood loneliness.) Her joy & dismay that an older, educated, married man would be interested in her, find her alluring. The rented bungalow, to her, then, the height of luxury — at first — a lovenest — and then — the baby screaming it never stopped screaming, & the adult loneliness. Punctuation of scary illicit rapturously screaming sex. Being pregnant with Jerry. The fear/joy of baby coming, illicit baby, boy baby, scary baby enraptured, screaming. Her useless mother. The kindness of the Professor’s wife, ushering her to the hospital room, Jerome’s hospital room, Jerome who insisted on being Jerry , everyone has a secret name, everyone wants to be called by something else. Real widow leaving fake widow alone to say her goodbyes. A religious act, a saintly act. The Mary Magdelenity of it all, of the 2 women. But Jacquie never thanked her, never thanked the Professor’s widow, never said a word, never even thought a word, too shellshocked by her life.

. .

She was all right after taking the pictures of the stillborn in the manger. The manger at Little Company of Mary Hospital. She was OK in fact for two whole days, on a kind of strange eleemosynary high. Energized. Everything was more vivid, colors, sounds, dreams. Accession of long abandoned hope. Albie said don’t come in but she insisted she was fine, work was good for her. She was grateful to him. The experience left her feeling back in the art game as well. Ah. Hmm. So this is what the mysterious Sears thing was all about.

Then she crashed.

She couldn’t get out of bed and didn’t realize she couldn’t or that she hadn’t until Albie called to ask if she was okay — not because she didn’t show at work but because she didn’t speak after picking up — not because she had nothing to say but because in that instant she did not know who or where she was. When he was 16 he answered phones on a teen suicide hotline & the training handily came back. He assessed whether Jacquie was a threat to herself or others and determined she wasn’t.

He brought food over after work, a gesture that sent her riot-weeping. He sat on the bed and the floodgates opened, she talked about the dead baby, the proof sheets were all over the bedcovers, she pushed them toward him but he didn’t feel now was the time to look. He gathered them in a neat pile and set them on the bureau — a gesture that was executed with such civility that of course it elicited a (not so) fresh jag. Albie was patient, God bless; he wanted her to empty herself out. The blood came back into her body. She sat up against the headboard on the 4 pillows that he with warm and perfect faggotry had fluffed up & rearranged, alternately drinking the chicken soup he brought (Jerry’s Deli!), & reading aloud from the glossy Sears portrait studio booklet not meant to be taken home by customers but only flipped through, called These are a few of our favorite things, reading aloud in a comic delirium of relief brought on by his visit, the sociability of it, of one who shared her experience, who loved her and cared.

A baby was on the cover, but now all babies looked dead; this one had a superfluous hair band, a decorative touch that to her jaded eye made it look even deader. She read aloud from the Book of Sears.

NEW BABY/BIRTHDAY

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The scandalous irony of the read did the job of catharsis in a different way than expected, she thought it would end in hilarity but the moment was as they say too soon, her policeman said flow my tears, copious antediluvian tears of remorse, & depthless worry not just for all martyred funerary mothers throughout time but for her own , remorse & tears for her baby, the one she disappointed, the one demoralized and demolished, the one who stole from her, her precious baby Jerilynn Reeyonna , 16 & pregnant somewhere in Hollywood wandering like a fugitive doing god knows what, the daughter who walked the streets as Jacquie’s own stillalive stillborn.

She called Jerzy again, she got the idea to call him and asked Albie if he’d sit with her while she did (well of course he would, he wasn’t going anywhere), she said she wanted— needed to get in touch with Jerilynn Reeyonna, had to see her , no matter what. (The gift of focus a dead baby can bestow.) She told him how grateful she was for having that experience, the privilege of it, & grateful again that he came to see her unasked, she thought she was losing her mind just a little, & there he was with the chicken soup & now she was feeling so much better. (They hugged. He said he would make tea. She said to wait until she called her son.) Jerzy didn’t answer. She hung up. Albie said to leave a message. She called again. She tried to be stoic yet impart urgency, the urgency that was her right, the Mother’s Prerogative. Jerry, please call me back. Then, Jerzy, can you please call? More plaintive that time + craftily using the name he preferred, hoping the tactic wouldn’t backfire. Why didn’t I call him Jerzy, ever? I resented that he wanted to change the name I had given him. . O Albie, I am a lunatic, I am a stubborn & terrible woman, I am a terrible mother whose children have become monstrous with hatred & anguish. She didn’t care if the Jerzy tack did backfire, she was tired of fucking around, she wanted to see her baby. Albie, should I arrest her, should I have her arrested? For stealing my things? Albie, should I? Should I just call the police?