Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

“He watches a lot of TV. He has to monitor the culture, you know.”

“Of course,” Nash said.

“He took me to the wax museum last month.” Miranda finished the last of her coffee and hated the fact. “Madame Tussaud’s, I’m not kidding. Have you ever been to one?”

“No,” he said. His halfhearted, slight smile.

“Well, the line was a half-hour wait, on a weekday. And it cost nineteen dollars to get in.”

“Is this Josh culturally slumming? Is he there to sneer at people? Can’t he get enough of that watching daytime TV?” Nash said, suddenly annoyed.

“You really don’t like Josh, do you?” she said. “I thought that too, but he really wanted to see the wax museum. It is pretty insane, I mean as an indicator of things, as a barometer, or whatever. See, you go through these rooms and there is no pretense made to it illustrating history, or whatever. It is all wax celebrities. Even the historical figures are more celebrity than anything else. That’s the whole point: if you don’t really know what a person looks like, you’re not going to really be impressed with the verisimilitude of a wax likeness, are you? I mean, are you going to be impressed by a wax depiction of Diderot or Princess Diana?”

Miranda started back on her scone and then realized eating it would complicate telling her story. “But here’s the thing, all these wax figures, you know, Oprah and Madonna and Cher, they are not in some glass diorama, apart from you. Here is the crux of it, here is why people wait on line to get in: the wax figures are all around you and among you. So people can take pictures with their arms around Nicole Kidman’s waist, or put a two-fingered antenna behind the head of Giuliani. Or put a hand on Diane Sawyer’s upper thigh. People are allowed to touch, to walk among, to desecrate these lofty beings. See how short and helpless they are, smiling and unmoving? And although you can’t actually damage the things, you can do whatever else you please, and it was something, the minions loose among the celebrity dolls. There is a real air of hostility toward these creatures, people put real energy into these feelings. It was a sick scene.”

“It’s so good to see you,” Nash said.

“We were appalled, fascinated, freaked out. We understood, though. And no one else seemed to think it odd, which was maybe the most disturbing thing about it.”

“I really don’t like Josh.”

“He took a photo of me embracing Castro,” Miranda said.

Miranda returned to her hotel. Josh sat at his computer and didn’t say anything when she came in. The room was dark. The TV and the computer gave off the only light.

“Did you go out at all today?” she said.

“I have a lot of work to do.”

“Like what?”

Josh sighed and turned to her. “We’re launching the website for Ergonomica, and I had to make sure everything works.”

“Really? Making sure it can’t be hacked?”

Josh turned back to his computer. “Something like that.”

Sometimes her own boyfriend gave her the creeps.

WHEN YOU finally figure it out, it seems you knew it all along.

I hadn’t given any of it any thought for quite a while. Not true, of course. I thought about it all the time, but I hadn’t actually made any progress on it. Gage wanted to watch VH1’s Lost Videos . As a rule I try to avoid VH1. This despite the fact that they have, particularly in their classic rock and California rock specials, a nice fixation on all things Beach Boys. Naturally, I find this nostalgia embarrassing. But Gage was shameless. He was over his ’70s thing, and now he had fixated on late-’60s American psychedelia, specifically the band Love. You may remember Love. Classic candidates for obsession: forgotten but once quite known. Several hits and a great, dated, specific sound. And two African-American members. And we are talking 1966. Most important, Love was led by a neglected, self-destructive genius who is currently rotting in jail. Arthur Lee scared the shit out of the hippies; he was an angry black punk who called his band Love and then played as though he hated everyone. He used hard drugs and finally got busted in the ’80s on a concealed-weapon charge. Gage seemed to find this element most fascinating. Admittedly, I like Love. Their attitude, their look and their badass freak sound, simultaneously baroque and garage. Not at all groovy or flowery — it was tough and new and kicked hard.

Of course, if Gage was interested in black proto-psych rock-and-roll, you’d think he might be into Hendrix. I mean we lived in Seattle — Hendrix is a native son, a local hero. And he died tragically. And no one dressed cooler, ever. Ahh — but you haven’t been paying attention. The very fact that Hendrix is a near god here makes him an impossible choice for Gage’s devotion. No, Love’s Arthur Lee was it — both first (which counts) and forgotten (which really counts).

Anyway, I went over to Gage’s to watch “California Classic Rock: The Lost and Forgotten.” I agreed, knowing that even VH1 might still have something I’d want to see. Like the infamous Lost Love Movie . Which I had never heard of, but I pretended I had.

“That was made in ’68, right?” I said.

“No, I think ’69, actually. After the decline had set in.”

“I never saw it. I heard about it,” I said.

“Apparently the bootlegged copies are floating around again. I saw it for sale once, and I should have bought a copy while I had the chance.”

Shortly into the part of the program about the great bands of L.A. in the late ’60s, they went into the story of Love. Love discovered the Doors and Hendrix. Love never toured, which is why they never got as big. And Love took so many psychedelic drugs that they finally disbanded because none of them could even play their instruments anymore. And oh yeah, there is an underground film about them, known as the Lost Love Movie . While the voice-over glossed on the film briefly, they didn’t show a video clip. They showed two black-and-white stills. One was of Arthur Lee in sunglasses on a bench in a park. The angle was quite low. He leaned back on the bench with his thumbs hooked through his belt loops and his legs spread. He wore wide-wale cords and a wide belt. Then they showed another still. This still was shown for maybe six seconds. A long time. I don’t remember what the voice-over said. But the photo depicted three people on a ledge next to the freeway. The person closest to the camera was Arthur Lee, in the same pants and glasses. The person to the right, the farthest away from the camera, was another Love band member (although as I recall he was technically no longer in the band by ’69), Bryan MacLean. Also in sunglasses. But the person in the middle, the person between them, was not a band member and not wearing sunglasses. Despite the graininess of a still garnered from a video of an old film, I could see that this person was unmistakably my mother. A younger, prettier version of the woman I live with every day.

I gasped and quickly coughed to cover it. I stared at Gage. He was barely paying attention and clearly had not noticed.

“Bogus. Just show the fucking film, don’t talk about it. Let’s turn it off.”

“No, it’s almost over,” I said. I wanted to see the credits. No mention of the film or film stills.

After I got home from Gage’s, did I storm into my mother’s room, demanding to hear all about her life as a California groupie? No, I didn’t. Because I know, absolutely, that that isn’t the story. That there is a bigger secret, something that makes my mother the sort of odd person she is. I know, somehow, what it is. I just can’t quite name it yet.