Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

Calliope told Les he didn’t look well. She said he needed time off and gave him “permission” to recharge in Rancho Mirage.

Les left Thursday and drove back Sunday night, top down all the way. He hadn’t done that since college. The freeways were clear, the night a velour, spangled dome. He thought about Obie, turning the pages of the memory album while “Streets of Philadelphia” repeated itself on CD. They had some hilarious times. As the air knifed around him, the physician felt grateful and alive. I’m not paralyzed , he thought, then said it aloud. And said it again, louder this time, as if courting danger, shouting his Schadenfreude to the stars. The words soured in his mouth and he felt naked and foolish, unclean, ashamed. He recoiled as he heard the voice: You should really try to stop being such a fag ….

Les drove to the hospital.

The cot was empty and a curtain was drawn around Obie’s bed. A small light shone within.

He hesitated to enter, thinking her in the midst of some intimate minor procedure. He tried to discern silhouettes, then went in. The two laid atop the sheets, Oberon in her mother’s puissant arms, mouth fastened to nipple. Edith’s tear-streaked face looked up and smiled, lips trembling like an ecstatic clown. Les’s mouth was open too and he covered it with one hand while the other felt for a chair. Eyes riveted, he backed up, noiselessly lowering himself as if onto a pew.

“Hey, there.”

Eric was at the Sweets bar when Donny walked in.

“There he is,” said the agent.

“Here for dinner?”

“No — I was at Muse.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“Absolutely. Absolut.”

It was a Monday crowd — the place had become so hot that Monday was the only hip night left.

“Have you been to see her?”

“Yeah,” Donny lied. He hadn’t visited once.

“Pretty horrible, huh.”

“Pretty horrible.”

“Do you believe — is it true about the root canal stuff?”

“Yeah, it’s true.”

“Jesus. Phylliss was really freaked out.”

“A lot of people were.”

“She went over to see her.”

“To the hospital? You’re kidding.”

“It really freaked her out.”

“What did she say? That she was rewriting the part for a quadriplegic?”

“Yeah, right!”

They laughed darkly and sipped their drinks.

“I heard your mother died,” Eric said. “I guess this hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for a lot of people.”

Donny impulsively asked if he wanted to go somewhere else. The assistant was flattered and surprised. He ducked into the men’s room while the agent waited for the valet. A few boisterous associates came and went, and Donny was grateful to have been standing there alone. Eric said he was parked on the street. They left his car and wound up at a club in Silverlake.

“I thought you were straight,” said Eric as they got out of the car.

“As an arrow.”

They drank and watched men dance. They were joined by a friend of Eric’s named Quinn. Quinn had some coke, and ten minutes later, Donny actually found himself on the dance floor, two-stepping with the boys. They had more drinks and more coke and he invited them back to Carcassonne Way. Quinn followed on his blue-and-white Harley.

Donny showed them around the house. When they got to the patio, Eric stripped off his things and jumped into the pool with a whoop. Donny asked Quinn if he was into cars, and they went to the garage.

The day Serena died, he brought the old Impala over and left it there, as if for a period of mourning — wild car of his youth back in the coop to pay its respects. Quinn ran a finger over the hood. Donny opened the door and climbed in. Quinn slid behind the wheel, shirtless. He asked if they could hear music and Donny handed him the key. Quinn turned the radio on then leaned over and kissed the agent on the mouth. His hand snaked into Donny’s pants.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“You’re Quinn,” Donny said, blankly.

“You’re married, right?”

“Uh, was.”

“Your wife has an angel tattooed on her butt, right?”

“Last time I looked.” The agent was curious now.

“I went home with you. You live in Laurel Canyon, right?”

“Jesus.”

“With the scarf, remember? That was pretty hot.”

“All in the family,” the agent said, unbuckling his pants. The old acquaintance got out a tiny tube of K-Y. Donny took it and greased Quinn’s cock. Donny asked if he’d tested and Quinn said, Every three months. Donny just wanted it inside him. They did some coke and the agent leaned back against the door, legs up in the air. The windows fogged and the Senior Veepee winced. Is this what his mother felt? This kind of cancer…A shape appeared through the misty glass. Bracing with his body, wet from the pool, Eric carefully opened the door, so the agent wouldn’t fall out. Donny arched, groaning as he rode up on Quinn. Eric braced Donny’s back and neck while Quinn scooted back like an insect, taking the stuck agent with him. Eric put his knees against the seat and his balls in Donny’s mouth. Donny twisted his head so that in his agony he could get at Eric’s prick. The agent was stoned enough that the twisting nearly made him black out.

When his father first bought him the car, Donny took Serena for a ride. She sat in the back and he chauffeured her to Linney’s, the deli on south Beverly Drive. When they got back home, she sat and wept. “You’re all I have now, Donny.” It would be years before he learned what she meant.

Eric watched like a naturalist as Quinn began fucking faster. The agent conjured his mother, sitting in back, staring past them; a coliseum-sized roar as Serena was torn from the prow, a whirligig Ursula taking her place, with Tiffany in tow — mascara of dirt and tears, firecracker eyes. Donny jacked himself, hand crushed by Quinn’s hard belly, Eric slowly pulling his own gummy head at the agent’s crown like a deep sea geiger; Bernie and Calliope before him, agent close to puking now, two-step funhouse vertigo, father’s B horror trailers — entrailers — blood hammering, hilarious vaudeville pneumatic sucking of Donny’s asshole; Katherine, love of his life. Donny beside her on the Laurel Canyon bed, Quinn fucking both like a piston, cold Thai on the counter, forgiving her beloved, forgiving him everything, never a bigger love, never bigger than theirs, never could be, staring at each other, Bonnie and Clyde just before the bullets but senses dead, no Pop poetics, Donny holding back the tears, awareness searching like a snail’s antennae for something to hold on to, something to hold him down, to ground him, he found it, the crazed wet smacking of the vinyl seat and the painful button at the small of his back kept him conscious. Then the beauty of the hood ornament glimpsed through mouth fog carried him over….

As soon as it was done, he could join his mother — wasn’t he all that she had? — under the house.

On weekends, Les put in time at the Venice free clinic. The Medical Board asked for two hundred hours; the six months he spent there revitalized him. He felt like a real doctor again.

Obie remained paralyzed and there was no improvement in her speech. Still, he understood her better than anyone. He painstakingly assembled something of a secret language, until one day he gained fluent trespass to the sandcastle’s sodden, crumbly rooms. Visitors and nurses alike marveled, though sometimes Obie’s requests, as channeled through Dr. Trott, were filigreed enough to elicit unspoken derision. The day she asked him to kill her, he immediately called Calliope. The psychiatrist warned of the consequences, legal and moral. Until he was able to separate Oberon from his mother, she said, his motives would be tainted. Luckily, Big Star pulled out of her depression — or seemed to, anyway. She stopped bringing it up.