Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

“Bernie?” A familiar face peered through the passenger window. “It’s Fred — Fred Toschen.”

“Hiya.” Bernie managed a smile but it was awkward keeping handkerchief to cheek at that angle.

“Jesus, what happened to you?”

“Had some surgery — coupla stitches. Started to bleed again. On my way to the doctor’s…”

“Are you okay? Can you drive?”

“I’m fine.” Who was this man?

“Look, I wanted to say how sorry I am about the other day. If it was me, I probably would have punched Pierre out — and that little a-hole Denny. But you were great . Anyhow, I just wanted you to know I was not involved in their practical joke. I was in that room as a fan , pure and simple.” Bernie beamed like a gargoyle, stifling a cough, afraid of the pain and spewing of blood. “I don’t know what it’s all about, but Pierre seriously has it in for your son, that’s the agenda . It’s like a pathological… grudge . Something that happened when they were kids—”

The producer was sweating, the pain in his chest unendurable. He started the engine.

The valet pulled up in the lawyer’s car and Fred smiled obliviously as he took his leave. “I know how you can get your revenge. Go in there and say you can do it — tell ’em you can shoot the thing in an hour ! A sixty-minute shoot! Go in with a budget and everything! I’ll walk into the son of a bitch’s office with you!”

The Range Rover jerked into the street. There was a jam at the crosswalk — wheelchairs heading for the clinic — so he hung a right to Robertson via Burton Way. Right again at Chaya Brasserie. A lung collapsed as the emergency room hove into view, and Bernie blacked out. The car jumped curb, hurtling toward the foot of the Thalians Mental Health Center steps.

A crowd of women watched curiously as the black bumper struck them down.

Troy Copra

It rained the night of the show. A goodly group of friends and invitees attended, but they lost around half during the performance. That was because technical problems caused the taping to take twice as long as had been announced.

There were cheerleaders and cronies from the Adult world and stage actor friends from the old days — now voice-over mavens grown round from the weight of the years. Kiv brought her roommate, Jabba, and wangled an agent, a casting person and a hotshot exec from New Line. She even charmed a guy from the Reporter into coming, on condition he wouldn’t review if he didn’t like what he saw. Missing in action were Sir Lancelot and big-ass Guinevere (they never RSVP’d). Troy hadn’t heard boo about Zev Turtletaub’s birthday reel and assumed it went the way of all flesh.

After the show he took Quinn, Kiv and Jabba to Tana’s. Kiv wasn’t drinking. When Jabba, teased her, she came right out and said she was pregnant. Troy didn’t mind. Everything was changing — no place left to run. He would ask Kiv to move in, officially. Soon he’d be editing Skin Trade , splicing together a new life. He might even land a festival: all Troy needed was an “audience favorite” award and distribution would be guaranteed. It didn’t matter what happened now. Directing was the equalizer and he had his reel — he’d come into his own, leveling the playing field forever. Troy felt a keen sense of victory and knew it wasn’t the Cristal or the coke Quinn slipped him in the grungy head.

Dabney Coleman sat in a booth across the way, Ellen DeGeneres in another. Troy belonged — a gladiator just like them. Kiv kept bringing it back to the show, giddily recounting each roller-coaster moment. From the winner’s circle, Troy kissed her sober mouth, Kiv so happy, grasping his hand, moving it over swollen belly as across a Ouija board. They bussed some more, unnoticed by Dabney and Ellen, who, now bent in communion, shared secrets — gladiator lore — leaning together at the hinge of adjacent booths, opposing cameos charismatically shutting out the room.

Zev Turtletaub

Certain pointless vignettes crowded his Dilaudid-steeped consciousness. One was particularly cunning.

A few years ago, he dropped seventy-four thousand dollars at Maxfield’s on clothes and jewelry, gliding from room to room, attended like a famous assassin (or murderous cardinal). At transaction’s end, the owner’s hauteur unexpectedly crumbled. “You’re my hero,” he said, ringing down the curtain on Zev’s exotic fantasia. What galled the producer was that, for a moment, his native misanthropism flagged and he actually believed him. The ridiculous phrase— you’re my hero —had recurred like a punishment ever since, compulsive and deracinated, cropping up for hours, even days on end. He sometimes playfully countered such importunacy by silently singing back, We don’t need another hero! which echoed itself as well, so that Zev was doubly irked. He endured these petit mal sieges with a vague smile on thin lips that usually concealed flat, pearly canker sores, sweet to probing tongue.

The RN came to change his dressing. Zev refused to look at the wound. Flexor muscle and tendon had been torn away and would require a graft. It was too early to test positive for HIV; the concern, for now, was controlling the staph. Anything else was simply not a possibility…he would reject her AIDS as he had rejected everything about her, always: every doomed, sickly thing about all of them, from Mother’s metastatic CA to Father’s catatonic depression and cirrhosis-induced ascites, stomach fanning out big and hard as the Liberty Bell. The lurid pediatrician joked about Zev’s floppy breasts (he was fourteen): Your sister should be so stacked . Aubrey heard their dad use that on him and Zev put her in her place to shut her up; that would be a hole in the ground. Everyone would have their hole. Eye for an eye, hole for a hole, every dog his doggie-do. Zev Turtletaub would puke the world — their world — then bury it.

His only thoughts were to keep the incident from the press; that possessed him, more than the pain. Leslie Trott came up with the spider-bite strategem, flukily believable — the culprit being a brown recluse at his rock-molded Moab canyonland cabin (were there brown recluses in Utah? He’d have an assistant confirm) — something that caused wildfire tissue necrosis.

In a week, his sister would be dead. He bit down on a towel while the nurse lavaged the macerated crater of bicep. What had Aubrey done with her son? He would find him, there was no doubt — he already had people looking. Zephyr was his charge. Raising him would be his duty and his joy.

Was not the boy named for him, after all?

Chet Stoddard

He phoned the hospital in Sherman Oaks, but Aubrey wasn’t there. He drove by the Oakhurst house for almost a week, at different hours of day and night. There were no lights and nothing stirred. Chet revisited some NA/HIV meetings and was able to track Ziggy down.

The garden apartment was just south of Sunset, by the Virgin Megastore. The “infected faggot” cordially asked him in — that’s what Ziggy liked to call himself. A burly volunteer from one of the AIDS organizations was just leaving. When he was gone, the shut-in held forth from the center of the living room, in trademark stand-up despot mode.

“Why do they send me this straight guy who can’t clean? I’m sorry, but the straight guys do not know how to clean a kitchen floor. He comes and he sits, with his Ziploc’d tuna sandwich and his little apple. A polished little apple! My ultimate horror is that when I’m bedridden, this motherfucker’s gonna sit there and read aloud from Marianne Williamson! I mean, what is he doing here?”