Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

“Laura, this is Simon, my son.”

“You were so great in Jurassic Park ,” said Simon.

She thanked him, before exchanging exuberant, fraternal hellos with the waiting Vorbalid.

“The Jeff Goldblum character was my favorite,” simple Simon said. “The whole ‘chaos’ thing. But what I really want to ask about is Rambling Rose —”

“If you’d like an interview, you’ll have to call her publicist,” said his mother, moving between them like Secret Service ready to take a Big Star bullet. Laura made a quick and gracious goodbye. Hassan went into the office.

“I am furious !” she shouted, steering Simon through the halls to the front door. “You are never to approach clients, you know better. This is a safe haven, not the tour at Universal! They come here to get away from that, do you understand?”

“I’m sorry—”

“ Not good enough . Jesus, look at you! You embarrassed me!”

“Yeah, I forgot my Armani.”

“You are always to call, I thought that was our agreement .” They paused at the chandeliered entrance while Calliope caught her breath. “You came from a job, didn’t you?”

“That’s me, Mom — Ace Ventura, Dead Pet Detective.”

“Why do you do this to me?”

“Show business is my life.”

“What is your delight, Simon? Why? ”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Look, I’ll prostrate myself.” He kneeled before her, hoping to make her laugh, but she just glowered. “I’ll even prostate myself — only with a urologist present, of course.”

She yanked him by the elbow like she did when he was a kid. “Get up!”

“Oh come on! What do you want me to do? Not be your son?”

“Right now,” she said, “I want you to leave.”

“Is that what you want me to do? Not be your son? Because that can be arranged!”

She opened the door and pushed him out.

The ignobled psychiatrist composed a mental sentence or two explaining to Mr. DeVore her son’s “history of problems,” but when she reached the cottage, she decided to let it be.

That afternoon, Les Trott was accused of over-prescribing painkillers to Oberon Mall, the famous singer and actress. A bitch from the DEA dared visit while he was needling cow protein into Phylliss Wolfe’s nasolabial furrows. He made the woman wait in his office so she could stare awhile at the photos of bagged and framed Big (Star) Game: Les with international icons, royalty, H.I.V.I.P.s. When he came in, she got right to it, said a whole ring of abusing medicos were implicated. He didn’t believe her, but the piece of shit named names, and except for one, all of them were colleagues. The woman wanted to know why Oberon had a note in her purse written on one of Les’s prescription pads alerting ERs to her chronic migraine condition — a kind of backstage pass to the concert of anesthesia. Les smiled and sweated while an Acolyte futilely tried his lawyer on the phone. Was he under arrest? He wasn’t, said the harridan. He had watched enough television to know it was time to ask her to leave.

He sat there shaking. His support team — soft-treading Mephisto-hoofed angels — fed him Xanax and evinced outrage. Les called a few of the men she’d named. He got through to the one he knew least, an ENT guy who shrugged it off. “They came after me before, the dicks. Listen, they got nothing else to do. I tell ’em to get a life.” Les canceled his appointments and holed up in the Game room, waiting for Obie and Calliope to return his calls. When Les hurt, the Acolytes hurt; they bused in fried chicken from the Ivy, but he wouldn’t eat. Calliope was finally on the line. She heard the familiar panic in his voice and told him “not to go there.” The shrink said it was probably some sort of scare tactic, not that she knew so much about this sort of thing. She asked him point-blank if he had over-prescribed. He said it was all insane. Four thousand Percocets and Vicodins, the woman said, over fourteen months! How was that possible? Obie was his closest friend. He lived in her house for five months after the earthquake while his place was redone. He’d been through the wars with this girl: surgeries, depressions, divorce. He had been there for her, and she for him — when boyfriends stomped his heart. Obie was childless. In sweetly hushed, narcotic late night phone calls, from one wing of the house to the other, she told him to give a gob of sperm so they could make a baby; she was burned out on relationships, she said, but wanted a kid. Les never took her seriously (such a terrifying merge was beyond his wildest fantasies of celebrity bonding) but was flattered and moved nonetheless. He made her repeat the proposition at parties, so everyone could hear.

“Four thousand pills is a lot,” said Calliope.

“It’s not four thousand, it couldn’t be. Are you turning against me?”

She changed tack. “Les, I don’t want you getting paranoid.”

A little after six, he left through the Private Door. His advocate got through to the Lotus (with the LESISMOR plate) and told him not to worry—“there’s no case.” There was something troubling and possibly illegal, he said, something political , about the entire visit. He’d make a few calls; he had DEA friends who would give him the skinny. Not to worry. Les felt better, having mustered the troops.

He couldn’t sleep. He talked to Obie and she was loaded. She said it was all a “bad joke” and was going to break the next day in the Times . They talked about a name on the DEA list, a man Les knew only in passing. He’d seen him at Obie’s and other Big Star homes. For six hundred dollars, Stuart Stanken made housecalls at any hour of the day and night (he had an answering machine instead of an office). If Big Star had root canal or migraine or hint of kidney stone — or if Big Star was depressed over AIDS death or bad breakup, hair loss or loss of movie role — Stu Stanken was there. He’d shoot them with morphine and stay awhile as they nodded, chit-chatting, admiring the decor and general Big Starness as the systemic valentine was delivered. An hour later he’d dispense an intramuscular booster, just to be safe. I don’t want your pain coming back when I’m fifteen minutes out the door. You need never suffer from pain again , he intoned, not so long as I am here to help . Les used to bridle on running into him at Obie’s parties, and he told her so. Being with Stanken was like having a dipso chiropractor in your midst — or an abortionist out of Faulkner. Now, it looked as if they’d be sharing a line-up.

Three in the morning. Propelled from bed by a nightmare, he stood in his Charvet robe before the bathroom mirror of his eighty-five-hundred-square-foot Santa Monica Canyon house, staring at a pimple. All day long he’d felt its achy inchoation. In adolescence, he suffered from acne vulgaris and bore the scars to this day, minimized by dermabrasion. His years of papular plague had been something out of the Middle Ages — weeping pistachios on forehead and cheek, walnuts on shoulder, pecans on back and buttocks, groin and nasal fold. Sometimes, at the whim of jaded acne gods (having feasted on his worried flesh, they sat at table, sated and snoring, turkey drumsticks still in hand), a lone pimple was sent like a scout to unlikely, mind-bending territories: back of the hand, kneecap crown, achilles heel. The men didn’t seem to care — the men in movie theaters and coffee-shop bathrooms, some sandy-haired, muscular and trouble-free, others with afflictions of their own. The men who picked him up in cars on the boulevard desired him, with or without his mother’s concealing makeup (he could still summon Max Factor’s somewhat acrid, hopeful smell). The piratical flesh of Leslie Trott became his enemy. He resolved to have dominion over the landscape that had ostracized him with such methodical, unforgiving cruelty. In medical school, he envied the Jews their baby faces and wispy beards, their unblemished certitude. They were funny and kind. He was their mascot, the over-achiever with bad-news oil glands, a living laboratory of follicular mayhem. He would show them all.