It took exactly fifteen hours for the bumper stickers to appear. ‘Don’t shoot me,’ read a Corvette on the Hollywood Freeway, ‘I’m driving as fast as I can.’ The stretch limo taking me to the studio changed lanes incessantly. All the other cars were just as twitchy. It was like being in a school of four-wheeled fish. According to the miniature television embedded on the back seat, so far today there’d been a bomb scare at the LA DA’s office, only two freeway shootings, a Rottweiler had devoured a small child, three people had been shot dead in a drugs bust, as well as the usual corpse count from gang warfare downtown. And all before breakfast. By the time I got off the freeway, I had severe faceache from smiling at every passing driver.
Paradise Studios was located in one of the seediest parts of the city – which in LA is really saying something. The shops catered for fast food and fast sex. It was a chaos of rubber underwear and rissoles, hot dogs and inflatable dolls, burgers and bondage gear. The limo manoeuvred into a congested backstreet. We crawled past men lounging on street corners, their flies at half-mast. ‘Hey, yo mutha-fuck-uh!’ These guys really knew how to greet a girl. ‘Show us ya puss-ee!’ This entire tangle of crack dealers, copulating dogs, and decomposing car bodies was framed by the massive letters of the ‘Hollywood’ sign straddling the barren hill above.
Getting on to the lot was dead easy. I gave them everything except a urine sample and drove straight through. Stencilled nameplates in the multi-tiered car park labelled the stalls of each 500-horsepower Mustang, Maserati or Mercedes. I read the names as we spiralled upwards: Abe Epstein, Ping Sufuentes, Phoebe Mercedez, Pierce Scanlen, Rondah Rivers. Rondah’s stall was painted pink, the cement floor patterned in a silver star of hubcaps.
I wandered down on to the lot. It was not yet lunch-time, but the air crackled with heat. The lot was like a concentration camp: chockers with windowless buildings and graffiti-free walls. Almost all the current major situation comedies and soap operas were filmed here every week. I was standing in the nerve centre of America’s imagination, the heart of the world’s dream machine. And it was a nightmare. During my first wardrobe call on my first day, as I was being hauled in and out of jodhpurs and jumpers, leotards and leisure lounge suits, automatic gunfire rat-a-tatted outside. Hobbled by the lycra jumpsuit I’d let fall at the sound of shooting, I blundered towards the window. Beyond the barbed wire fence, a police helicopter swooped, vulture-like, down over the street, its human prey scurrying. Sirens yelped. People scattered. Bullets thudded. The wardrobe mistress, Betty, nonchalantly informed me that it was a drug bust. Betty levered open the window and called down to the gateman. ‘Hey bud, what’s the score?’
He cupped his hand over his mouth and called casually back up to her. ‘Three dead. Two maimed.’
Pierce, his head bracketed by a Walkman, was being fitted with the latest fad in faded denims. I peeled back one earphone. ‘Excuse me, but, um, well, while we’re inside making comedy, people are outside being killed.’ Pierce shrugged with his lips. ‘Well, doesn’t that strike you as being just a little bit weird?’
Pierce readjusted his Walkman and tweaked my earlobe. ‘I said you wouldn’t last long, kiddo.’
The only thing that shocked an Angeleno was someone being shocked. You’d have to have all your limbs sawn off with a nail file and your brain sucked out through your ears by a straw, before you’d get the slightest bit of sympathy. A bump in the fender of a hundred thousand dollar Maserati, however, was enough to send all and sundry into apoplectic spasms. ‘You’re about as sensitive as a, as a …’ Pierce took a leisurely tug on his roll-your-own as I squirmed for the right word, ‘as a, I dunno, a corpse. Didja know that?’
Pierce looked at me lazily, then made for the door. Watching the retreat of his denimed buttocks filled me with a sudden feeling of despair. It was Friday. An empty weekend yawned before me. At the party, Abe had tried to coerce someone into looking after me. But Phoebe Mercedez had a crystal therapy workshop. And Ping was tied up with her dog psychiatrist, and then she was hanging out with her mates, Cindy and George. (It was clear by the tone in her voice that she meant Lauper and Michael.) ‘Um, hey, Pierce, what are you doing, you know, over the weekend?’
He didn’t even bother to turn. ‘Decomposing.’
After the wardrobe call, I was shepherded into Make-up. The President of Make-up, a middle-aged bloke named Cosmo Vinyl, eyed me clinically, then twirled me towards the mirror to deliver his verdict. For the next ten minutes, I listened while he prescribed a dizzying array of day creams, bust creams, eye and thigh creams, fade and freckle creams. Glossy four-foot photos of his famous clients beamed down smugly from their walnut frames, as Cosmo bombarded me with bio babble about collagen and elastin and liposomes and microsomes – which all just sounded like an insanely expensive array of multi-coloured globs and blobs. I’d always thought the only way to prevent wrinkles was to stay out of the sun. But, hey, what would I know?
‘So,’ he concluded, ‘for today, we’ll go for the leg wax, lip depilation, tanning salon, hair cut and streaked, cuticles softened, eyelashes curled, nails …’ He splayed my fingers and studied them. ‘Malibu Sunset, eyebrows reshaped, nourishing emulsion and Brumisateur hydration. Apart from that, we’ll go for the natural look.’ He then gave me a dirty big wink. I kind of liked Cosmo. The poor bloke was halfway through a hair transplant. Up close, his scalp looked like a little plantation of palm trees. And he didn’t laugh when I said I wanted to wear my Speedos in the tanning salon.
Rondah was laid out on a slab, rotating every twenty minutes, like a chook on a rotisserie. She was already the colour of my mother’s mahogany sideboard.
‘Oh, hi,’ I greeted her. She stretched a lazy arm towards a bottle of oil and dripped translucent globules on to her big belly. ‘Great party,’ I lied. Still no response. Cosmo pulled a face behind her back, then handed me a pair of goggles. Cosmo’s salon was equipped with two regular full-tanning machines and four high-speed. The ultraviolet rays were ‘safe enough’, he assured me, ‘for a new tanner’. Through the windows I could see the sun shimmering mercilessly off hot car metal.
I stripped and tentatively stretched out on the toasting pad. It was like getting into a Breville sandwich-maker. The mauve beams beat down on me. All that was missing was the marjoram and rosemary. ‘Um, so, what are you doing over the weekend?’
Rondah looked at me as though I was radioactive and turned over.
After I’d been basted and browned, I went back to the make-up room so that Cosmo could attack my hair. As my head was dunked like a teabag, in and out of the basin, I caught snippets of the conversation. It was all about Abe’s party. Two of the ‘extras’ related the jacuzzi confessions on underpants swapping.
‘You bunch of deviants,’ Cosmo whined with mock indignation. (If his voice had legs, it would have minced.) ‘Am I the only like normal one on this entire lot?’
I was about to ask Cosmo what he had planned for the weekend, when I felt a hot whisper in my earhole. ‘The guy gets cocks shoved up his bum for Chrrrissake. You can’t get more normal than that.’ Squinting open one eye, I glimpsed a blinding flash of teeth as Pierce sank into a nearby chair. He had the whitest teeth in the entire world. In fact, I doubted that Pierce Scanlen would ever reach his twenty-fifth birthday before being kidnapped by ivory poachers. He was wearing a jumper with a large embroidered ‘P’ and ‘S’ on the pocket.
‘Spoken by a bloke who has to have his initials on his sweater ’cause he’s too thick to remember his own name.’ It was difficult to think when I’d last met a man as downright pukesville as Pierce Reece-Scanlen Jnr (the Third).
Lounging in the chair like some Greek God, Pierce tilted back his head, exposing a slender neck, opened his lips and dropped in a round red grape. His Adam’s apple rode up and down his throat like a tiny elevator. I suddenly realised that I hadn’t eaten anything since the plane. I looked hungrily at the next succulent grape he broke off the bunch.
‘I’d offer you one, but …’ he gloated, glancing at my fingers which were splayed out on the formica counter in front of me, nails glistening wet with ‘Malibu Sunset’. I leaned forward and, like a seal, gobbled a grape from between his fingers.
Pierce laughed. He had this warm, lovely laugh, like Golden Syrup dripping off a spoon. Just as he was extending me another grape, a voice, swollen with insincerity, purred at my back.
‘Dah-ling.’ Rondah, now swathed in a silk kimono, kissed my cheek as though I was the most alluring person in the whole of America. She manoeuvred herself into the space between me and Pierce and shook free her popcorn-coloured hair. Up close I saw for the first time the hint of dark roots. Without a doubt, ‘blondes’ are the most significant contribution science has made to the Californian way of life.
‘No shit, Rond,’ Pierce exclaimed, gobbling grapes. ‘I didn’t know your hair was highlighted.’
‘It’s not. This is my real colour!’ Leaning into the mirror, she proceeded to take Pierce on a guided tour of each follicle. ‘Cosmo dah-ling jest puts a little touch or two of streaks up here on top, and an incey, wincey, tincey liddle highlight here and there, but it doesn’t detract from the real colour ’cause …’
‘Sounds like a “yes” to me,’ I said. It was a dumb thing to say, I know, but I just couldn’t stand the way she was pretending to be so nice to me all of a sudden. I’d never met anyone so two-faced: this woman was positively bi-facial.
Pierce laughed and leant in front of Rondah to reward me with another grape.
Rondah’s eyes, as she watched me nibble it from between his fingers, narrowed into two black holes of pure hate. She gave Cosmo the nod and my head was plunged back into the basin. I emerged, spluttering, in time to see Abe barging into the make-up room.
‘Vondah!’ Abe gushed, covering her in kisses. They were practically playing tonsil-hockey, for God’s sake. ‘And vot haff you got lined up for zee weekend? Somesing vunderfull no doubt?’
Rondah mused that she couldn’t decide whether to opt for a raging time in New A’wlins or a quiet restful break in a luxury resort in the Rockies. ‘And, well, for that I’d need to take someone recov-rin’ from like major surgery, or someone deeply dull and borin’.’ She flashed her insect-squashing eyes at me and smiled sweetly, ‘Katrina, maybe y’all’d like to come?’
Honestly, Rondah Rivers made the ‘bitches’ on Dallas look like door-to-door collectors for the multiple sclerosis fund. Pierce miaowed and clawed the air.
Rondah looked at him all wide-eyed with innocence. ‘What?’ she purred.
My only other invitation was to Mimi’s Colonics Party. I nearly accepted until Pierce explained the protocol of those parties. After dinner, group enemas are administered and guests help diagnose each other’s dietary ailments.
People began packing up and making ‘going home’ noises. To tell you the truth, it made me feel just a little bit depressed. Forgetting about my nails, I grabbed at Abe, leaving a crimson splodge on the arm of his jacket. ‘Abe, Abe, um, what are you up to at the …’
Abe peeled a pile of notes from the wad in his pocket and pressed them into my palm. ‘Veal do lunch.’
‘Great!’ I enthused, relieved. This was the most interest anybody had shown in me all day. I flipped open my appointments diary. It looked like the Nevada desert in there, no kidding. A snicker ran through the room.
‘I’ll get my zecretary to get on to your zecretary, cupcake,’ Abe said abruptly, and left. Ping and Phoebe Mercedez chortled derisively. I hadn’t yet learnt that ‘Let’s do lunch’ is a euphemism for ‘Fuck off and die’. If Californians kept all the lunches they promised, they’d be booked out till the turn of the century. And that’s if they had lunch for breakfast, dinner and lunch.
Abe was putting me up in a real posh place called The Beverly something or other, a giant, pink, 300-room marshmallow. I took a magazine from reception and followed the tuxedoed trail of waiters bearing trays of brightly coloured concoctions. They were rushing to and from a swish bar called the ‘Polo Lounge’. It was full of glistening women and serious men in dark suits. The maître d’ bloke slipped a surreptitious glance at my jaded jeans and perished T-shirt, trying to ascertain if I was just a common old dag, too poor to afford good clothes, or so rich and famous I didn’t give a damn what I wore.
Exuding rich and famous feelings, I straddled one of the bar stools. Every seat was occupied by a woman. They leant sinuously on to the bar, all coloured talons, ginormous cleavages and those white, bright teeth. It was the Barbie doll look again. I wondered if they could bend their legs up round their necks and rotate their arms 360 degrees in their sockets.
I ordered a drink, then flicked through the magazine. On page three, nestled between ads for super dooper pooper scoopers and designer space in Heaven (all you had to do was send $2,000 and a picture of yourself to a Reverend Hogg in Biloxi) my eye was snagged by an ad for a casino called ‘Nirvana’ in Las Vegas. I scoured the ad twice to make sure I wasn’t misreading it. The casino was advertising a blackjack game in which they offered to show you the second card. Now, the only wisdom my father had imparted to his only offspring over the years was how to hot-wire a car, cheat in Monopoly, say ‘fuck off’ in sixteen different languages, palm cards, deal from the bottom of the pack, stack the deck, and play blackjack. Being able to see the second card was a mind-boggling advantage.
I imagined my father’s face creasing into eager laughter. ‘No bull? The second card? Hells Bells. A good punter never grumbles, a good horse never tumbles and a good mug never stumbles,’ I could hear him saying in his strident voice, as he shucked on his shoes without untying the laces, squishing down the heel the way my mother hated, before disappearing into the depths of the casino with the rent money. (My father always told people that we lived in a nice little fibro bungalow overlooking the rent.)
With a start I realised that I’d been ambushed by thoughts of my father. Alarmed at this unexpected residue of affection, I slammed the magazine shut and swore out loud. The ladies at the bar glanced at me, disconcerted, and swivelled away. Their flaccid curves, corsetted into too-tight cocktail frocks, squeaked reproachfully on the bar stool leather. As I took a loud sip from my Jamaican Flirtation, it finally dawned on me that I was the only one who wasn’t. Flirting, that is. I dismounted and moved to a small table by the bar.
A young woman was already sitting there. She was petite with large breasts that bulged over the top of her black cocktail dress. Plonked in front of her on the table was a huge handbag. I wondered what on earth was in there. Most probably all her vital organs, I decided, noting how thin she was. She wore a black cocktail hat, the veil of which shrouded her face. I remember thinking that it was the sort of hat you wear to a murder.
‘Excuse me, do you mind if I sit here?’
She shrugged dramatically. We both stared straight ahead at the row of sequined women. No kidding, if you could harness the glow from designer Hollywood dresses, you could illuminate all of Sydney for centuries. ‘I think those ladies are on the game,’ I whispered. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘Well, of course they are. Where do ya live?’ my companion inquired sarcastically. ‘In a box?’ She lifted the veil, revealing a bright, eager, over-made-up face that was examining me closely. ‘You’re Australian? No shit? Hey, what kinda cars do ya drive over there?’
‘I don’t drive,’ I confessed.
She eyed me with a mixture of disbelief and alarm. ‘What are ya?’ she exclaimed. ‘A weirdo, or what?’ In the next breath she revealed that she’d just surfaced from a twenty-four-hour orgy with a rock group. ‘I woke up’ – she checked her watch – ‘about an hour ago, upstairs in some suite, with a strange man’s cock in my mouth. Shocked?’ she asked hopefully.
Truth was, I’d needed a shock absorber for my brain ever since I’d arrived in this town. ‘Huh? No, well, I mean …’
‘What?’
‘I just hope you don’t grind your teeth in your sleep, that’s all.’
She laughed then and sat back in her chair to appraise me. ‘My name’s Tash,’ she said. ‘Short for Natasha. My Mom wanted me to be a spy or a gypsy but all I could get was a job down the mall in McDonald’s.’
A waiter briskly mopped the table and asked if we two gals would like another round of cocktails. Tash looked disapprovingly at the creamy residue in my glass. ‘Sure, Mack. Get real. You’re talkin’ to women here. Two Lime Sodas.’ She turned to confide in me: ‘No calories. So,’ she said, craning across the table to read the name on my drinks tab, ‘Katrina Kennedy, what’s ya favourite sexual position?’
‘What?’ I felt myself blush. Like I told you, the other reason I wanted to become an American was so I could stop blushing all over the place. It’s positively illegal to blush in America. ‘I dunno. At this stage in my life, anything involving a male. Why? What’s yours?’
Tash didn’t miss a beat. ‘Standin’ up, backwards, covered in custard.’
‘Your boyfriend is a very lucky bloke,’ I said. ‘On the other hand, the man is going to die.’
‘Got any drugs?’
My drug days began and ended on my thirteenth birthday when I’d sniffed some Airfix glue and stuck my right nostril to my upper lip. ‘Sorry. In that department I’m about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.’
She looked at me strangely. ‘You sure do talk funny,’ she said in her thick gangster kind of drawl. I talked funny. Since arriving here, I had hardly understood one word spoken to me. People were always either trying to ‘blue sky’ me, or take me to ‘the max’ or ‘run it past’ someone or other. ‘So, ya like it here or what?’
I shrugged. ‘I’m azz-im-ilating,’ I said grimly.
Tash suddenly stiffened, screwed up her eyes and stared intently over my shoulder. She clutched at her bag. I think she was actually trying to get inside it. ‘Oh shit.’
This Arabian bloke was making a beeline for her across the carpet. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Well, I can see that.’
‘No. A real Arab,’ she gushed. ‘We’re talking camels, harems, oil derricks.’ She waved her arms in the air. ‘The whole sheikh shit.’
He pulled up short at our table and started blathering. I edged back. Well, you never knew in LA. The guy might have had a loaded pit bull in his pocket. He seemed to be saying something about a ring. Waiters and managers swooped. They locked Tash by the elbows and hoisted her up out of her seat. Her stilettoed legs pedalled the air like a cartoon character’s.
‘Yeah, yeah?’ Tash’s bluster returned in a flash. ‘I’ve got ya ring, buster.’ She grabbed a fistful of her stockinged thigh. ‘Right here.’ She kicked the waiter in the shin, slithered to the carpet and, pursued by the Arabian bloke’s tirade, tottered towards the door. In her lopsided hat and high-rise heels that were too big for her, she looked like a little girl’s drawing of what a grown-up lady should look like. I followed. A big bloke at the bar chuckled and, as we passed, asked if he could buy us a drink.
Tash’s anger momentarily abated. She smiled demurely. ‘Why thank you, sir.’ Slapping our tabs into his hand, her voice shifted back into gravel rash gear. ‘Two Lime Sodas and a –’ she glanced at me –
‘Jamaican Flirtation,’ I said, and raced after her out the door.
‘Move ass,’ Tash hissed at me, heading for the car park.
‘Wait,’ I darted back between the legs of the waiters, retrieved the magazine with the Nirvana casino ad, pocketed it and POQ-ed.
Tash didn’t talk until she’d manoeuvred her battered black Chevrolet sports car (it had red upholstery, Mag wheels, a pair of fluffy dice dangling from the rear vision mirror and a dashboard carpeted in lime green shag. She called it her ‘pimpmobile’) into the ‘Tow Away’ zone on La Cienega. ‘Camel fucker,’ was all she said. I followed her into a café called Ed Debevic’s. It was an old-fashioned Fifties sort of diner. The waiters rollerskated by, singing ‘My Guy’ and ‘California Girls’. The waitresses whooshed by too, their hairy beehives toppling forward precariously. A sign by the door said, ‘If you don’t like the food, Mack, then go some place else.’
She persued the menu with delight. ‘Ya must be starvin’.’
‘No. Not really. I –’
‘Ya must be. Rage burns up to about, oh, 200 calories per minute.’
‘No, actually I’m not.’
‘Yes. Ya’ll have a wickedly creamy cocktail and a huge disgustin’ cake and a Fudge Sunday Delicious Surprise Supremo,’ she declared, relenting in her role as Calorie Kommandant. ‘Oh and a cream donut.’ Tash placed the order then inserted a quarter into the mouth of the miniature jukebox at our table.
‘Where’d you meet him?’ I asked finally. ‘Through his parole officer?’
‘Are ya sure you dunno where we can get some coke?’ When I suggested the Golden Triangle she sighed and punched the jukebox buttons. ‘I used to do some modellin’ and shit, right? Well, on this shoot one day, I met this Arab guy. He kinda like, fell for me, ya know? Arab guys are kinda weird about women. They just, like, eat and play cards and ignore ya all night then, about midnight, grab ya for a few minutes of fast sex. They just kinda order ya up, like pizza. Anyways, then, in Paris, he, like, gives me this ring, see. I took it to Cartier’s to get it like, appraised. They kept it for a day or two. And then, ya know what they finally told me?’ ‘What you have here, Madam,’ she lapsed into a bad French accent, ‘is a tiny piece of the moon.’ This goddamned Arab guy had bought the rocks off of NASA. Can ya believe that? Pretty poetic huh? A little piece of the moon.’ Her wistfulness evaporated. ‘So I sold it and hightailed it home on the proceeds.’ The little jukebox whined into life. The song she’d selected was ‘Bikini Girls with Machine Guns’, by the Cramps. ‘That Arab guy was really startin’ to give me the creeps, ya know?’
Tash looked just a few years older than me. About twenty-three. ‘You just sleep with total strangers?’
‘Only on a recreational basis.’
‘For money?’
‘No, but I get presents. Which I, ya know, sometimes sell.’ She peered down the front of her dress with the professional detachment of an architect inspecting a building site. ‘I’m savin’ up for a breast reduction.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Aren’t two the normal number?’ What was it about Californians? Why were they always melting, moulding or rearranging their body parts?
‘It’ll cost me four thou for both, with a medical rebate of $980 bucks, for each tit that is, and three to four days in hospital. And the only, like, side-effect, is a change in nipple sensitivity.’ She took a slurp at her glass of water. ‘I’ve gone, like, right into it.’
‘Oh,’ I said stupefied. ‘Right. But, um, couldn’t you, you know, save up on a straight job?’
‘Had a straight job once, when I first came out here from Chicago an’ all. As an office girl. But they only hired me for T and A.’
I gazed at her blankly. ‘Travel and Adventure?’
She looked at me as though I was speaking a remote Bolivian mountain dialect. ‘Are you yankin’ my chain?’ she snapped then, satisfied by my head shake, explained, ‘Tits and Ass.’
‘How do you know that? I mean …’
‘They were always making me file things under “Z”.’
‘So?’
‘Accounts and Beverages? Where do ya live?’ she asked me again. ‘In a box? They jest wanted me to keep bendin’ over. Everybody’s peddlin’ their ass in this town.’ Tash sounded like, not a B, but a C grade movie. ‘We’re all gettin’ screwed,’ – she trowelled the icing off my cake with her little finger – ‘in one way or another.’ And licked it clean. ‘So why’dja come to America?’
I told her about the margarine competition and the show and about the actors and how everybody had ignored me and how I had no mates here and how I desperately wanted to be an American.
‘Well ya can’t be an American without doin’ drugs. It’s our only culture, for Chrissake. Come to think of it, I do know where we could get some ecstasy.’
‘Some what?’
‘Oh, get real. Ecstasy.’ She looked at me expectantly. ‘MDMA?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Methylenedioxymethamphetamine? It ain’t everyone’s drug. Some people experience like, nausea, sweatin’, seizures, vomitin’, blurred vision, coma, convulsions, delirium, ataxia, anxiety, anorexia, headaches, paranoia and jaw tension. Others report fallin’ in love.’ She ducked her head and with her tongue decapitated the froth from my Fudge Sunday Delicious Surprise Supreme. ‘Personally it gives me the most fan-tab-u-lous orgasms.’
‘That’s what I want.’
‘Fantabulous orgasms?’
‘No. To fall in love. That’s the real reason I came to Americ …’
Tash suddenly catapulted forward, cross-eyed. She thrust her finger down her throat and started making choking noises. Before I had time to call an ambulance, she just as suddenly stopped. She leant back in her chair, legs akimbo.
‘Don’t make me sick,’ she said. ‘This is the butt end of the twentieth century. People don’t fall “in love”. I mean, get real. Believing in love is about as plausible as believin’ in UFOs. You’re gonna haveta toughen up, ya know that?’
She excavated the remnants of icing from beneath her long painted nail. About a week’s worth of gunge came out with it. After examining the gunge thoughtfully, she scraped it on the tablecloth, screwed up her eyes and scrutinised me, as though deciding something important. She gave a dramatic sigh, then folded her arms across her ample bust. ‘Didja know,’ she asserted, ‘that doctors at the LA County Hospital extract six to eight gerbils from the assholes of gay men every week.’
‘Gerbils? Those little guinea pigs? Those little furry …?’
‘First they de-claw ’em, chloroform ’em, and then insert ’em up each other’s assholes.’
My mouth echoed the hole in the cream donut the waiter put down in front of me. ‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘The sexual pleasure, apparently, comes from the little creature wakin’ up and squirmin’, ya know, as it suffocates to death.’
This was my first introduction to Tash’s LA survival technique. She called it her TT – Tolerance Threshold. To toughen herself up for the abuse she regularly received from raving Arabs, megalomaniacal record producers, pushy landlords, and men in general, Tash was increasing her threshold of pain. Her theory was that by talking about disgusting things she could take herself to the limit, push out her pain envelope. It was sort of the Chuck Yeager Theory of Self Development. From gerbils to German war atrocities, from real-life Rambos to rain forest destruction – every day she pushed a little further. One day there’d be this sonic boom and she would have broken through into the Shockless Zone. Then nothing could hurt her, ever again.
As I gagged, Tash touched my hand solicitously, before pouncing on my donut. ‘It’s the only way to toughen up,’ she said, cream spurting between her fingers. ‘Believe me, I was greener than you when I hit town.’ She gave me a sidelong glance. ‘Though maybe not. Anyway, I’ll start ya on ya basic racist and sexist stuff, then, when you grow immune to those insults, we’ll graduate to jokes about paraplegics, pederasts and fist fuckin’. Okay? Come on.’ With that, she swallowed the rest of my donut, drained my cocktail and squeezed into her stilettos. ‘Let’s be culture-vultures.’
Tash was one of those people that you only have to meet for ten seconds to feel as though you’ve known her for ten years. That you went to kindy together. Got your first periods together. Smoked your first dope together. Got fitted for your first cervical caps together.
Assimilate, I said to myself, and followed Tash at a sprint, through the revolving door, without paying.
I felt like Scott leaving his Antarctic base camp.
Los Angeles has the shortest attention span of any city in the world. This town went through fads so fast that by the time you traded in your see-through suitcase for the latest swami and switched your dog from canine psychiatry to a Tibetan dietitian, you were already out of fashion. The latest trend this month, this minute, this millisecond, was clubs. Not a club. Just clubs. There were thousands of them. Some for tap dancing. Some for yodelling. Vampires Anonymous. There were even clubs for people who didn’t want to belong to clubs.
Our first stop was a seedy saloon at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. It was a flimsy fibro construction. Snoring ceramic Mexican figurines lounged up against a neon sign which read ‘Ugly Unlimited’.
The bilious lights of the lobby illuminated a strange assortment of dwarves, women whose facelifts had sagged unevenly, cripples, anorexics, transvestites and pincushioned punks with no part of their bodies unpierced. It was not such a beautiful sight. Tash slapped the back of a muscle-bound dwarf who was taking tickets at the door. ‘Kat, meet Hercules, the bouncer. To keep the Bewdiful People out. Ain’t that hilarious! Got any blow?’ she asked, lowering her voice. He led the way up the stairs, taking each step with panting ferocity.
The living room was chock-a-block with prematurely balding men who looked as though they were all called Trevor, and large women with dandruffy shoulders. A lady in a lycra leotard, which accentuated the fact that one of her breasts was missing, ushered me into a photographic cubicle, ‘No, um … see, I didn’t come to join up or any …’
‘Jest quit blabbin’ and fill in the whatsamacallit.’ She grilled me for details – name, date of birth, weight, star sign – then snapped a polaroid. I would be informed, she said, if I was considered ugly enough to be accepted as a member.
Well now, that was something to look forward to.
In the hallway, I flopped into an armchair. Hercules loomed out of the gloom. He waddled over and thrust me a menu. I smiled wanly and ordered an ‘All-American Salad’. When he returned with my plate, he sat down, grabbed my hand and sent a fetid blast of breath into my face. ‘Hey baby, how wouldja like to hear the pitter patter pat of little tiny feet in thuh mornin’, huh?’
Just to top off my day, it was then I found a small brown cockroach lying on a lima bean. They only knocked a buck off the bill: ‘Foreign Object in Salad’ it read.
I decided to wait for Tash in the car.
‘Got some downers,’ she reported, climbing inside, as blasé as I was bamboozled. Who needed a chemical downer after that? I felt pretty depressed naturally all of a sudden.
Tash needed uppers to counteract the downers and downers to counteract the uppers and inbetweeners to make her feel like uppers again. The search for drugs is a hobby in Los Angeles. Everybody does it, day in, night out. Tash dragged me around to endless clubs with the same decibel-defying, seamless, acid rock music. She seemed to kiss and ‘oh-dah-ling’ everybody in the entire town, always concluding with ‘and what’s ya poison?’
‘I need gluein’ together,’ she informed me at about midnight. We were sitting in the pimpmobile at the lights, surrounded by a maze of glass skyscrapers. ‘What we need are some high-class drugs.’ Her black hat had slipped down over one eye. She looked like a pirate. ‘Vertigo,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
‘What’s that?’ she mimicked, ‘Only THE hottest nightclub in town, that’s what. Where do ya live – in a box?’
‘You know, actually I’ve still got jet lag and …’
But Tash was already swerving out into the traffic and heading downtown. At the club car park, she strode around checking out numberplates. ‘God! Spielberg’s here.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh God! And so is Schwarzenegger’s agent. Shit! And thuh heavies from Columbia. Oh Chrrrrist.’ Her voice suddenly lowered. ‘Check the line.’
Even though it was late, a queue of fashionably dressed hopefuls wound down the club steps and across the car park. The women wore Mao collars and flatties, topped with bleached crops of hair. The men all looked like paler versions of Pierce: regulation ponytailettes; loud, designer-esque, baggy suits; topped off with studiously bored expressions. With any luck it would take about a fortnight to get inside, by which time ‘Vertigo’ would be out of fashion.
‘Okay,’ Tash grabbed my arm and took a deep breath. ‘Think French.’
‘What?’
Gesticulating and pointing, she ploughed to the front of the line with me in tow, and tried to push past the bouncer. His leg shot out across our path and a great hairy paw seized my upper arm. The bouncer’s head looked too small for his enormous body. Pink rolls of neck fat bulged out of his suit: he was like a simmering sausage about to burst its skin. ‘Whadd-thuh-fuck?’ he inquired.
In fake, fractured French, Tash tried to persuade the Killer Sausage that we were in the Columbia party. It was about the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do. And I was no help. My French was limited to three words, ‘lingerie’, ‘toupee’, and ‘secateurs’. Tash ‘moinserr-ed’ and ‘merci-ed’ all over the place as the bouncer looked on – unmoved.
‘S’pose your friend here, s’pose she’s French too, huh?’
‘Oui, oui.’ Tash glared at me.
‘Secateurs,’ I said.
The bouncer folded his massive arms across his barrel chest.
Tash, defeated, lapsed back into her Chicago twang. ‘Well, if I were French, honeybun, ya’d be right up my boulevard,’ she told the bouncer and, leaning forward, playfully tweaked his penis.
‘Yeah?’ The fleshy portcullis of his leg lifted. ‘Catch ya later, babe,’ he winked as she sashayed through. This girl had more survival skills than a jungle commando, no kidding.
Tash pulled me in among the percussion of people on the dance floor. Everyone wore black and had perfect bone structure. They were like finely crafted shoes – sleek, soft, perfectly fitted. Next to them, I felt positively orthopaedic. The back of the head next to me looked a lot like Jack Nicholson. He turned around. The front of his head looked a lot like Jack Nicholson. He spoke. It was Jack Nicholson. I swirled around a lot, and stuck my leg out now and then so that he tripped over a bit and had to face me occasionally. Now I could write home and honestly say I’d danced with the most famous movie star in the Western world.
I was making a beeline for Warren Beatty, to try the same avant-garde dance technique, when Abe Epstein emerged from the dark groin of the disco. He was like a squat submarine surfacing. ‘Vell, Good-day,’ he boomed, his check-shirted belly bulging over straining denims. ‘Hey babe. Don’t I know ya from a past life?’
One of my major hates in life, is blokes who use ‘pick-up’ lines. They’re always so stale. This one had definitely passed its amuse-by date.
‘Yeah,’ I screamed above the music, ‘and you owe me a thousand dollars.’
As he threw his head back to guffaw, his huge hands grasped a belt buckle the size of a satellite dish. I decided to get out of the range of his transmission. ‘Veal do lunch,’ I heard him call after me.
I found Tash in the toilets, hustling a miniskirted woman for drugs. I recognised her face from the covers of fashion magazines.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I bleated.
Tash maintained she was too ‘out of it’ to move an inch. It was impossible. A no-go idea … that is until I told her I’d seen her Arab bloke by the bar. Then she moved like a sprinter on steroids.
Things got blurry from then on, especially after ordering more and more drinks with bizarre names like ‘Earth-Shattering Cosmic Orgasms on Ice’ and ‘Knee Trembler Screw Sideways with Milk’. I think it was me who wore Tash’s black hat to stand on a table to sing the Talking Heads song, ‘Stop Making Sense’. First in English. And then in Arabic.
At about dawn, Tash waved a triumphant fist in my face. ‘Blow,’ she announced.
We drove back to her place in Hollywood. The cool morning air must have sobered us up a bit ’cause we only hit the curb about ten times. Not that it made much difference when we did: the pimpmobile had no suspension. It was more like trampolining than driving.
‘Shit, I’m burned out.’ Tash threw her shoes through the door first, like a soldier checking for mines, before hurling herself after them. The weird thing was, her place was the opposite of what I’d expected it to be. Instead of an orgy of grot and grime she led me into a spotlessly clean room, done out in pastels and florals. As Tash made coffee, I examined the shelves of glass and ceramic knick-knacks. A United Nations of dolls dressed in national costumes jostled for space beside an entire zoo of miniature creatures, prancing across tiny, made-in-Korea, teak fields. Sprouting up from the corner of the room was a silver music stand supporting two slim volumes entitled Vocal Exercises for Tone Placing and Enunciation and Twenty-four Italian Arias of the 17th and 18th Centuries. The spice rack was arranged alphabetically, from basil to turmeric. As were the pills and vitamins in the bathroom cabinet. This girl even got healthy in alphabetical order.
‘Do you live here alone?’ I asked, retracing my steps to the kitchen.
I watched her inhale the cocaine she’d trowelled across a piece of silver foil on the table. She shook with pleasure as the raw voltage hit her blood stream. ‘Ya wanna?’
I shook my head. ‘Do you?’
‘What?’
‘Live here alone?’
‘Sort of. Like I had this room mate, Karin Oppenheim. But the stoo-pid bitch has moved to New York.’ Her exhaustion now evaporated, she moved at high speed towards the bedroom. ‘She went an’ like fell in yuppy-love with a tone-poemist-acupuncturist-crystal-channeller.’ I watched her strip off her cocktail dress. ‘Another sucker for thuh romance shit.’
‘Oh, come on. Haven’t you ever been in love?’
‘I’d rather be in a train smash,’ she groaned, squirming into a pair of suspenders. ‘I’d rather be in a supermarket line.’ She threaded her pencil-thin legs into a pair of laddered black stockings. ‘A high risk AIDS category. Mind you,’ she paused to examine herself in the mirror, then slid me a sly slice of a grin, ‘I’m probably already in that.’ Her voice was momentarily muffled, as she tugged a school tunic over her head. ‘Whyja wanna be “in love” for Chrissake?’ she snapped, as her head emerged through the gingham neck hole.
I shrugged. ‘There must be something in it. I mean, poets have been saying so for centuries. Don’t you want to experience the whatsamacallit … intensity of passion. You know, the old emotional thrill.’
‘I get more thrill changin’ a tampon.’
As she finished getting dressed, I dozed in her double bed. After a few minutes I woke, panic-stricken. For a moment I thought I was at the bottom of Abe Epstein’s jacuzzi. Gasping for air, I struggled to the surface, the sheets entwined around me like seaweed. A sliver of sun streamed in under the pastel curtain. Through the gloom and the thumping beginnings of a hangover, I saw someone stir in the corner of the room. The figure turned to face the mirror. It was Tash, except she looked about thirteen. Her skin was extraordinarily pale, her face fragile. ‘What time is it?’
‘Time I got goin’.’
I watched her position a pigtailed wig on her head, snap a garter on to her thigh and hitch her school uniform up, until it puffed and pouted over her belt. She took another snort of her precious cocaine.
‘I see this guy now and then, who likes schoolgirls,’ she said in answer to my quizzical look. ‘Chrrrist. A girl needs a lotta experience to fuck like a virgin, lemme tell ya.’ She threw herself down on the edge of the bed. ‘Hey listen. It just hit me. Now that Karin’s like, become a walkin’, talkin’, two-legged love-slave … why don’tcha move in? That is, as long as ya rinse ya plates before puttin’ ’em in the dishwasher. I hate people who just like, put ’em in all gungy, don’t you?’ She paused to inhale the last blast of white powder. We’d spent the entire night scouring the city for what was gone in about two seconds. ‘We ain’t havin’ ya goin’ back down under thinkin’ we’re all weirdos or some-thin’, right? I mean,’ she sneezed, ‘get real.’
I looked at her wig, sitting a little askew on her head, at her wild eyes, and at the strategic tears in her stockings. ‘Hey thanks a lot Tash, but, you know, I’m sure the studio will keep putting me up at the hotel.’
She looked at me sceptically. ‘Ah-huh.’
‘See ya round,’ she called, pulling the pimpmobile out of the Beverly Hills Hotel car park, hooting a percussion on the horn so loud that it drew both the doorman and the reception staff out under the entrance awning.
‘And who are you?’ interrogated the Doberman Pinscher behind the reception desk, before handing over my key.
I caught my reflection in the pink marbled walls of the foyer. A cockatoo-comb of hair framed a ruffled, red-eyed, drowned-corpse countenance. Who was I? I thought. Kat Kennedy. A foreign object in a crazy American salad.