Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

Sight Unseen

Letters to My Firstborn

by Sara Radisson-Stein

My darling Samson…

I wanted to put down in words how much I love you. I’m so glad we gave you that name — you’ll need all your strength in this terrible, wonderful life. I’m sitting beside you as I write; the faintest of light falls on your marzipan cheeks. You’re the sweetest plum, and sleep so soundly; still, I’m afraid the scratching of my pen will wake you. Perfect boy! I stare into your eyes any chance I get — to become familiar with them, to make friends so there’s no fear, no estrangement. You won’t need them, to know me — you feel me within as I felt you all these months. One of those monsters said I was “in denial.” People should go to prison for using that phrase. This Adult Child Monster — she’s infertile, that’s all she ever shares at the meetings — wondered how I could say you were a perfect baby. She wants me to hang my head and weep so we can all be losers together and guzzle Prozac with our Starbucks Frappuccino. But you’re perfect as could be, perfect as you wanted. If you had no ears, would you be “less” than normal, “more” normal than a blind boy? Who makes the rules, Samson? We do, that’s who.

Shelby came to see you today and cried ‘cause you’re so beauteous. I told her I wanted to work, needed to work on something wondrous. I’ll blow a fuse if I have to go back to Warner Bros. — I’ve had it with Blue Matrix and “Vorbalid” cattle calls, the well-oiled casting machine that chews up sad English actors, and others who had no right leaving the New York stage. (Well, Hassan was an exception, but Hassan would be a star even if the DeBeers commercial was the only thing he’d ever done.) Teorema is such an interesting project! It’s my time now, time to get off the TV treadmill — it’s been a grand office party but I stayed too long and began to hate myself a little the last few years (till there was you. There were bells …). But don’t let Daddy hear that, Mama’s just having a kvetch. You won’t tell him, will you, little Boy Blue? One day, I’ll be a producer. That’s why I want to pick Phylliss Wolfe’s brain— what an interesting lady. The real deal. She’s got style to burn and rots of crass (as our Chinese friends might say). Well look at you, you’re smiling! Did you like that? Was that a funny joke Mama made? Are you the smilin’ Chinaman? Or is it something you ate?

…warm winds dancing leaves around the pool and Jeremy’s worried I’m not sleeping enough. I always awaken just after four, long hangover from the earthquake; guess that makes you one heck of an aftershock. There: I’ve changed you and kissed you and turned off the lamp… do wish you could see the moon throw its pastel spotlight on your dad like he was the dead-drunk ringmaster of Beddy-Bye Circus. Hurry, hurry, step right up, see the silvery chest hairs where you nestle your buddhahead. You know, if I put my ear to your (Buddhist) temple, methinks I can hear the bones grow.

You’re asleep now. You know, you look like something God threw together for a booth at eternity’s science fair. I’ll risk kissing your dark lids…they tremble like abandoned nests. You stir and suckle (that’s okay — I shake and bake). O Samson, my Samson, of what do you dream? Surely it’s not that you had eyes, that much I know.

Then I won’t dream it either.

*** The Thief of Energy

\\\\\\\\\\ Portrait of a Masseuse //////////

by Gina Tolk

…after rubbing Donny Ribkin, I took a stroll on the Via Rodeo and made purchase of several cigars at Davidoff’s of Geneva; Helen Hunt was there and I told her how much I enjoyed her work. Afterward, the woman showed me a humidor at a cost of thousands — I demurred. I will give the stogies to the agent on my next appointment. Donny Ribkin’s hard-on is full-blown now before I even begin; he is in my web. The first time I rubbed him it was the night before his mother was entombed. I could feel the residue of her on him like blue smokey tentacles, pulling him into the Earth. The raccoons saw her energy and came close. Donny said they were her friends — they were loaded with her energetic droppings, which they gleaned from foodstuffs she left for them on the patio. I like his energy; it’s orange in hue and looks like kelp — or sleepy eels — floating on the surface of a pinkish coral reef. (Agents have good energy that they generally misuse.)

Bought a red leather daybook from Francis Orr and have started to write again. Mustn’t forget I have always written and consider myself a Writer by definition above all else. Perhaps (I don’t think I am deluded, at least not in this case) my story may eventually be deemed fit enough to film by the likes of a Gus Van Sant, a Jane Campion or a Tim Robbins. My saga does resemble a latter-day Shampoo , with elements perhaps shying toward Polanski, or so I am told. (I’m compelled to note I am writing with a stunning, rather bulbous Cartier silver pen ‘appropriated’ from a client with a vast collection. There is a blue jewel of some sort on its non-writing end, I believe called a Cabachon. They don’t make this particular one anymore, or so I am told, and I noticed coincidentally that in Francis Orr’s glass display case, one was there among the paperweights at the price of twelve hundred and seventy-five dollars. I would say I definitely got a deal!)

Since I was a girl at Horace Mann School in Beverly Hills (one of the ‘Four Sisters’ of the Beverly Hills elementary school system: Beverly Vista, El Rodeo, Hawthorne and Horace Mann — the latter being the poorest; Hawthorne and El Rodeo with the most star-studded scions), I remembered being lauded for my literary efforts. My story ‘The Drought’ was deemed ‘Best Written’…the short, gripping tale of a primitive village that underwent a terrible onslaught of drought. This was in Junior High; I was, I would say, the tender age of eleven. The story was only five pages long. On its penultimate page the rain finally came, the ironic ‘twist’ being that it would not stop . And the village sank under, so the final sentence told us, as in ancient times! This morbidly effective divertissement was of course written under the spell of O. Henry and Bret Harte (and even, perhaps, The Twilight Zone ), whom I greedily admired. I uncovered the pages of ‘The Drought’ recently, and while it is somewhat Hemingwayesque, one clearly would not necessarily associate it to being written by a child of that age. I have since progressed to more sophisticated authors, Jane Smiley, Stocker Vidra, and Gogol’s Dead Souls —not to say I don’t indulge in the occasional Grisham, Koontz, Straub, Crichton or Krantz (sounds like a law firm) — but this latter quintet, only in bathroom or den. I will not have them in my bedroom, because they sully. My saga will cover the Early Years of my life, with special poignant emphasis on the death of my sister, Wanda — this will beautifully set the stage. There will of course be discussion of the subsequent, infamous kidnapping (which marked me indelibly); I will discuss and share my apprenticeship in the art of massage and festively detail my subsequent acquired intimacy with celebrities on the calibre of Jodie Foster, Laura Dern and Whoopi Goldberg. How I took from them, and gave, too.