Chapter 7 #2
I put my spent cock back in my pants and zip up. “You should go.” I turn to look at Harvey. “Both of you.”
He’s already zipped up too, so I don’t get to see his dick. I’m disappointed, and suddenly angry at myself for being disappointed.
His expression returns to its usual indifference. He reaches for Linda’s hand. “Let’s go.”
Margie gives me a confused look and mouths, “Are you sure?”
I avoid eye contact with her. “I’m tired.”
Linda fixes her top and follows Harvey out of the bedroom. She turns to me and Margie. “It was fun.”
“Happy New Year,” Margie replies.
I wait until I hear the front door close before I leave my bedroom. I stand at the top of the steps with Margie beside me. Stains are on the carpet and cigarette butts need to be cleaned up. Confetti and streamers are all over the place.
Her hand touches my arm. “Are you okay?”
I shrug and walk down the steps.
“This is what you wanted, wasn’t it?” Margie follows me.
I’m feeling the consequences of a whole laundry list of bad ideas. And the worst one of all just walked out the door. I drop to the living room carpet and start picking up confetti and cigarette butts.
“Don’t do that now,” Margie says.
“I don’t want to leave it like this.”
After a few moments, Margie gets on the floor to help me. She glances at me. “I don’t understand you sometimes.”
I sigh. “Neither do I.”
June 1978
Harvey has looked at me many ways over the years.
The indifferent, arrogant prince way—that’s the usual one. The I’m-gonna-kick-your-ass way. The smart-ass way when he’s about to say something that will piss me off. There was the way he looked at me in the mirror on New Year’s Eve; a look I’m still not sure how to name.
But he’s never looked at me like this.
I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s as though he pities me and at the same time is waiting for me to explode like a ticking time bomb. It’s not a look I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve seen it before—on different faces that actually gave a shit about me before it happened.
I don’t know why I did it.
Well, I do, but even as I dragged the razor over my skin, I knew it would cause more pain than take it away. I knew it wouldn’t help anything.
I had Quaaludes with whiskey. I’d been thinking.
I remember feeling halfway to paradise anyway, all floaty, so why not go all the way?
I hoped the pills and booze would finish me before I reached for the razor.
I’d built a tolerance. I wasn’t steady on my feet and must have knocked over my telephone causing the receiver to fall off the hook.
I was thinking that nothing was going to get better.
This was it. I’d already had my peak, my time, my fun, my fame, my fortune—and now I faced fifty years as a pitiful has-been with nothing.
I’m defective anyway. I can never tell Bonnie and Floyd the truth about who I really am.
Would they be disgusted with me? I couldn’t bear seeing it on their faces after they’ve been so proud.
And they’re going to die one day. How could I face that?
No, nothing good was coming at all, so let’s go.
I saluted myself in the bathroom mirror, said “so long, sucker,” and got in the tub.
I had three cuts done when a noise rang out in the house and Bonnie ran into the bathroom.
She tried to call a few times, but there was a busy signal.
She said she had a feeling something was wrong.
She pulled me out of the tub part way, tied towels and anything else she could find around my wrist. I bled all over her tropical print muumuu, and sobbed into her chest that I was sorry, over and over again.
Floyd called an ambulance. They pumped my stomach and bandaged me up. I wondered what they did with the mannequins in the stores, when they’re broken.
I didn’t feel anything. I guess they had me on something.
Margie rushed in with eyeliner streaming down her cheeks.
She said she could slap me. I told her to do it, she did, and I didn’t feel a thing.
She got runny eyeliner all over my hospital gown.
I dreaded leaving—everyone must know. If she was here, the tabloids were outside.
She promised no one was out there, and if there were, she’d kill them.
The nurses fussed at her for lying next to me in my bed. She threw a stiletto at one of them.
I later found out Bonnie and Floyd did everything in their power, along with their lawyers, to keep it hush-hush. I had a psychiatric evaluation before they let me go. The official story was that I was dehydrated from the flu. They escorted me out in the middle of the night.
Everyone hovered for days, weeks. Bonnie and Floyd worried they did something.
I hated seeing them like that. I almost wished no one had found me so I wouldn’t have to face the aftermath.
I realized that if anything was going to return to normal, I’d have to put on one of the most important masks I’d ever worn.
The biggest performance. I had to convince everyone I was okay, that they didn’t need to treat me like I was fragile.
The one person who I didn’t want to ever know was Harvey.
After New Year’s and our fight, I had this feeling he’d think this was about him.
That’s something he would do. I thought of him a few times when getting into the ambulance and when I woke up, dazed.
I vaguely wished that our last encounter hadn’t been a fight.
But now he knows. He has a piece of me that he can do something with if he wanted to. I don’t know what he’ll do with it aside from sneak looks at me when he thinks I won’t notice.
While we’re working, I go into the metal shed to look for rags to get away from him. We’re trying to clean off the canoes after we dragged them into shade because it’s hot as hell this morning.
“What are you looking for?” Harvey says from the doorway.
I glance back at him. “I thought we put all the rags and stuff over here.”
“No, they’re over there.” He points to a spot behind me.
“I already looked over there.”
“Well, look again.”
I glare at him, but I move to the shelf and search around for a few seconds. “Still don’t see any.”
He sighs impatiently. He walks inside, stands next to me, and points. “Right there.”
“Those are dirty and they smell like gasoline. We need clean ones.”
“You just said rags and there they are.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I snap at him.
“How the fuck am I supposed to know what you mean?”
“It’s common sense. Any idiot would know I meant clean rags.”
He opens his mouth, then closes it. His shoulders slump. “Fine. Sorry.”
I look at him suspiciously.
“What? I said I’m sorry.”
That’s when I notice no sunlight is coming into the shed. Only a weak light bulb hangs above us.
“Didn’t you prop the door open?” I ask.
“I thought I did.”
I rush to the door and push. It doesn’t budge. “Shit, come over here and help me.”
We both push with all our might, but it doesn’t open. We kick it, ram against it with all our weight, but it’s no use. It’s stuck.
I glare at Harvey. “You were supposed to keep the door propped open.”
He looks around as if there’s another way out and there isn’t. No windows, a packed-dirt floor, and metal walls surround us.
“Somebody’s going to notice if we’re not at lunch,” he says.
“That’s hours away,” I growl at him.
He throws his hands up, defeated. “What do you want me to say?”
I kick the door as hard as I can, mildly hoping that will do it. “Damn it!”
“Will you calm down?”
“I’m going to cook to death in some tin can, and it’s all your fault!”
“Losing your cool isn’t going to help either of us.”
It’s just like him to cause a problem, then act as though I’m overreacting. “You ruin things. You fuck everything up. Why can’t I just get rid of you? I am so sick of seeing your face!”
“What do you want me to do?” he yells. “Huh? You want me to kill myself?”
He tries to bite back the last syllable, but the words hang between us with nowhere to land.
And that space is a gulf. It feels like all the air has been sucked out of the shed.
No one has actually said it. Bonnie and Floyd just refer to it as when you went to the hospital.
Margie avoids the words too. They treat it like some strange superstition—like saying “bloody Mary” in the mirror a hundred times.
Suicide.
Kill yourself.
Harvey stares at the ground. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean…”
Hot tears burn my eyes before I can stop them. I turn my back to him so he doesn’t see. “I don’t care. I don’t care what you say.”
After a few seconds, I hear him shuffle in the dirt as he sits down. Harvey must be a curse I’m carrying from a past life. It’s the only explanation for why he always ends up where I am, and why we’re now trapped in here together.
I find the furthest spot from him and sit in the dirt. I worry about how long we’ll have oxygen in here. And we don’t have any water. The thought makes me suddenly thirsty. I glance at Harvey, staring at the opposite wall. After a moment, he turns his head to meet my gaze. “What?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
“Obviously there’s something.”
I pick at the dirt under my fingernails. “Even though you have no reason not to, I hope you won’t go to the tabloids.”
“Jesus Christ, I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Right. You can’t wait to ruin my life.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Austin.”
I turn to him.
“I’m serious.”
Something about him saying my name—instead of asshole, motherfucker, or Hollywood—makes my eyes sting. He means it. I can tell. He’s dead serious.
I look away from him. “I’m not going to tell you what happened.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“I know.”
It’s hot in here. I tug at my shirt, fanning myself. I spot some shovels in the corner and get the briefly consider digging a tunnel under the shed, but it would be exhausting in this heat, and we don’t have any water.
A few minutes go by before a question pops into my head. “Why do you call me Hollywood?”