Bruce Wagner - Memorial

YOU cannot be singled out for rate increases or cancellations!

NO age restrictions!

Limited Time Offer Good Through Friday!

He was seeing a lot of Laxmi and didn’t know what to make of it. He really didn’t want to analyze too much. He smoked pot for his pain, and Laxmi smoked along. Sometimes she brought her own. She could roll it too.

He showed her the healthcare fax and she said it sounded like a scam. He knew that, but wanted to know what she’d say. He liked that Laxmi saw through it. She said lately everything seemed “scammy.”

“Did you know the Enron guys were trading futures on the weather? That’s what it says in this documentary I got from Netflix. I’m not even kidding.” She segued into a thing about how cigarettemakers were behind a campaign to send free coasters to young people because they knew kids tended to smoke when they drank. The tobacco industry “positioned itself as antismoking,” and even teamed with drug companies to create inhalers for people with breathing problems. “The people who lobby that shit are among the most obscenely fucked-up dysfunctional entities on the face of the planet.”

The way Laxmi talked cracked him up, even when they weren’t stoned. She took a megahit from the joint and they both guffawed.

She was writing a book about her “molestations.” Her expat father had been in on that, though he wasn’t “primary.” She couldn’t remember exactly what he’d done but there was inappropriate stuff for sure. Chess had a feeling that whatever went on with her dad might have had something to do with why a sensitive hippie chick like Laxmi would get involved with a crass guy like Levin. Another thing that made sense about it was the Jew Factor: the heebs tended to get mucho pussita.

So Laxmi sat on the couch and journaled in her Moleskine (he called it Molestskin) while they smoked dope and Chess watched TV. When they got hungry, if she hadn’t brought food, they walked over to Ürth Café or a tea place on Melrose with a garden in back. He was attracted to her but didn’t have much of a sex vibe going these days, probably cause all the painkillers had done a number on his testosterone. She didn’t seem to care. In fact, he thought she might be relieved in light of her diary and all — being a port in the storm was OK by him. Still, he got Viagra samples the last time he saw his doctor, just in case. For that rainy day. The potential listed side effects spooked him: you could get a headache or your heart might start hammering or in rare cases, V-men went temporarily blind. He knew most of it was bullshit and maybe his pride was the only thing preventing him from giving the blue pill a whirl. (The shape reminded him of a baseball diamond.) Chess wasn’t sure she was all that interested anyway. He didn’t want to rock the vote. He liked her company. They were happy campers.

One afternoon they got completely out of their skulls and watched something on television about “assets forfeiture.” There was a stretch of highway in Florida where cops pulled people over for burnt-out taillights or whatever — everyone from rapper-types to single moms with babies onboard. The cops acted all friendly but just when they were giving folks the greenlight, the pigs would say, Oh by the way, do you happen to be carrying any contraband or firearms, and would you mind if we have a look? The question was so left-field that it kind of blew people away, especially since they’d already been softened up for the kill. The cops then “confiscated” their money, peeling the lettuce right out of their wallets and purses! Told em whatever amount of cash they had was “suspect” and would, like, grab $300 from Mom while her 2 year old bawled in the backseat. The trippy thing being — Chess and Laxmi went from seizures of stoned-out laughter to slack-jawed silent awe — that the whole deal was full-on taped by police car camcorders! That’s how above the law they were! You could go to court and try to get your money back (one guy had 9 grand taken off him, a builder who later proved he was on his way to buy a used tractor) but that alone would cost 20 or 30K. The segment bled over into other forms of corruption and the one that really stuck in Laxmi’s craw was the 60something Grace Slick lookalike now facing 8 years in federal prison for sending Hillary Clinton a New Age “dreamcatcher,” one of those Native American feather-things people hang on their rearviews. Eagles were under an endangered species protection act and even though the woman said she found the feathers while hiking, the motherfuckers were going to put her away! The last thing on the tube was about a kid who’d been raped and murdered. A guy abducted her from school. They finally figured out how he did it. The little girl had been told never to go with a stranger unless he used the codeword Unicorn, which only the family knew. What happened was, the parents got divorced and the husband told a friend about how clever they’d been. So the guy drives up after school and says, “It’s OK, come with me: Unicorn.” Then he takes her to a creek and fucks her in the ass and crushes her head in and they only catch him when he does the same thing (sans codeword) 10 years later. He confesses, sittin with the cops in the interrogation room, and tells em he’s just like an alligator, he comes up and feeds then sinks to the bottom of the river for another 10 years or so, “digesting.” That’s just the way he is, he says, and nothing can ever change im. Laxmi cried hard at that one. Unicorns were the new bogeymans. Jesus! It was grimmer than the grimmest Grimm’s.

REMAR phoned to say the parent company “was willing to settle for 50,000.” Chess would have to sign a general release (like he thought) “holding them harmless” from any future medical bills he might incur. Remar said it was a joke but he was obligated to pass on the information. “They can eat their release and shit it out in front of a jury too.” Chess liked Remar; he made him laugh. Hang tough, he said. The Friday Night Frighters were in for a major scare of their own —and damn well knew it. Things were lookin good. Parent company can rim my black ass. You heard of Meet the Parents? Well, we gonna eat the parent.

LAXMI continued to give him nonsexual massages. She poured her heart out. She wanted to be an actress, and write books too, like Shirley MacLaine, a dream her mother once had. Mom was a “major depressive.” Laxmi read aloud from an incredibly moving article in the Wall Street Journal about an American boy who’d been abandoned in Nepal “back in the day.” His mother, originally from Beverly Hills, was named Feather (in his stonedness, Chess misheard Father for Feather). His dad was a Jew and an artist, just like hers —this was during the 60s — and they lived on a commune in New Mexico before making the hajj to India. (Laxmi said the parallels were weird: she’d been raised in Beverly Hills before living with her parents in a “tribal family” north of San Francisco.) The couple split Sebastopol and went to Europe. Feather got pregnant and had their kid — the boy — in Switzerland. She and her husband, who was kind of crazy, wound up in Dharmsala, where the Dalai Lama makes his home. Feather decided to become a Buddhist nun but the dad couldn’t hack it without her and snapped, begging on the streets of New Delhi until the authorities sent him back to the States. Feather left their child at a monastery. She was this ice queen whose own mother had committed suicide and later, when he was grown, half apologized for making certain choices and told her son the only thing she ever wanted was to give him the dharma —a path free from suffering. That was so tragically ironic to Laxmi because all of the woman’s actions had only caused suffering. It made her cry (she cried a lot when she hung with Chess) because she thought of her father, alive and rich and mentally sound, and his abandonments and pretensions of detachment. He didn’t have schizophrenia as an excuse! Schizophrenia would have been better than narcissism. Laxmi kept the saga folded up in her journal and reread it about a hundred times because it was so resonant. Her mom was long dead from an accident that Laxmi had an inkling was a suicide — the car swerved into a tree on a street called Lasky in the middle of the day — and now her father was in Pune, India, a wealthy, high-functioning guru capitalist. The story of the boy and his parents had motivated her to write the Moleskine memoir of her upbringing on a Sebastopol commune that was later branded a cult. Yes, she was young but so many youngish women now wrote stories of their adventures as drunks and seekers, addicts and adepts. She would do something different, something epic, she would finally be understood, she told Chess that’s what women really wanted, and Laxmi hoped she could manage it without self-obsession. It was so hard. She cut photographs and epigrams from magazines and pasted them in her diary. She made little drawings too but most of the time felt completely lost.