California

HICK

CHAPTER 26

EVERYTHING FROM HIS CALIFORNIA HEGIRA FIT INTO FIVE BOXES, so he was able to pack up his apartment in a few hours. He figured if he left this afternoon, he could be there Friday morning.

Earlier, Liz had called. It had been more than a year since they’d spoken.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Mike could tell she’d been crying. He imagined she and the guy with the goatee had broken up. She wanted Mike back. He felt warm relief rush through his body. Perfect timing. In an instant, he planned his future: he’d head to New York and find a job with a newspaper that needed to bulk up its entertainment reporting. He’d even work for some rag in the suburbs and commute from their apartment. Suddenly life seemed stable again.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

Liz panted and sniffled.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just wanted you to know that. . . that. . .”

“Yes?” He smiled into the phone.

“Mr. Cat died.”

Even though he had assumed Mr. Cat was not long for this world, Mike found himself struggling to catch his breath. Sometimes it seemed as though it was only yesterday that he dropped off Mr. Cat at Liz’s and headed straight across the country until he hit palm trees and ocean.

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“I knew you’d want to know.” She sniffled some more. “I loved that little guy.”

“Yeah, remember when you found him? He was too weak to eat so you fed him with a doll’s bottle.”

Liz laughed. “You said I was crazy, but it worked.”

“I know. I thought he’d be dead by the end of the weekend, but you worked a miracle on him.”

“You think so? I felt so sorry for him. I always have a soft spot in my heart for strays.”

“Yeah, I know.”

There was silence. Liz sniffed. “So, are you seeing anybody?”

“Right now, no. . . How about you? Are you and that guy still. . .”

“No. We broke up a while ago. . . I’m not seeing anybody.”

“Oh.”

“So. . . are you ever coming back to New York? I’m thinking of moving back to Rochester. The city’s so crazy. I feel like there’s nothing here for me.”

He heard Catherine’s voice. Liz was safe. But safe wasn’t so bad, was it? It may not be an electric current charging through his body, but it was a warm rush of relief.

“I don’t know.”

 

HE HUNG UP and continued packing. He called Phil Rossman, the editor in chief in Rochester. After the bullshit small talk, he asked if there were any openings.

“The big city’s too much for you, eh, Mike? Of course, we’d love you back here. Love it. We always thought you’d be back. The staff will be thrilled. I can’t wait to tell them. All the positions are filled, but we’ll invent one for you. Actually, there’s a great story coming up that has Mike Posner all over it. The residents of Pittsford are opposing plans for. . .”

Zoning ordinances. Highway interchanges. Retirement communities. Parking garages. Cow tipping. Stoplights. Drainage ditches. Composting facilities. Disorderly conducts. Mike was bored out of his skull just by the conversation.

He needed a miracle.

 

“SOME OF YOUR sources have been feeding you misinformation,” Vince Reggio said yesterday as Bernie stood behind him, her arms folded, her lips pursed.

“All we need is a Jayson Blair at Personality,” she said.

He wanted to say that sometimes he felt everyone at Personality had a little bit of Jayson Blair in them.

They hadn’t fired him—yet. But he knew it was coming. They were going through every story he’d written since he’d been there. To top it off, James Davenworth from the Daily News had been hired to run the New York bureau. And he had plenty to say about Mike Poseur.

Hick. Hick. Hick.

 

SOMEONE KNOCKED ON the door. Mike opened it hesitantly. Amber stood there holding out a disheveled-looking pink Rolodex. One of the rings had cracked and business cards were awkwardly splayed out.

“You left this in my apartment the other night.”

Mike opened the door wider. “The other night? That was weeks ago.”

“Okay, okay, you caught me. I needed time to Xerox the whole thing. Your friend is connected, big-time. I mean, Ray Young’s home phone number.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, I’m really not a klepto. I swear.”

“Well, thanks for bringing it back.”

“I need to focus on my acting now more than ever. I was just fired from my job.”

“I think that makes two of us. So what happened to you?”

Amber giggled. “This is pretty bad.”

“Worse than stealing a Rolodex?”

“Yeah,” Amber said, stifling another laugh. “I worked as a personal assistant for Franny Blanchard—you know, Lisa the Love Witch. She caught me putting protein powder in her drink.”

“So?”

“She was obsessed with her weight. So I started putting the powder in her drink to fatten her up. She couldn’t figure out why her butt was getting enormous. Pretty evil, huh? But she was a nasty-ass bitch. Root Canal is missing. I’m convinced she had her boyfriend steal poor Rootie. She despised him.” Amber surveyed the apartment. “OhmyGod, you’re moving.”

“You could say things aren’t really working out.”

Amber smirked. “This is Los Angeles; things never work out.” She thought about this. “Well, things work out really fantastically for a handful of people and you have to hear about it every fucking day. Like I need to know how fucking great the fucking Olson twins’ life is? God, I hate them and they’re only like, what, eighteen? But you know what?”

“What?”

“Once you leave, you’ll never be happy anywhere else. Trust me, I’ve tried it. Suddenly, you’ll be living in a place where there’s no chance of running into the fucking Olson twins at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and you’ll suddenly wish you could. This place is addicting.”

Mike was instantly reminded of what Lem had told him more than a year ago. He said the place eventually seeps into your blood and you can never get it out. He said it just happens, like an overnight transfusion, and you wake up one day knowing you can’t imagine anything else. You may have thought it silly or shallow, but now it’s part of you. You see that $10 million sprawling manse and you want it. It is so close; just a fence, a few hedges, and a security system away, and sometimes you forget it can never be yours.

Then you attend their parties and mingle with them—even perambulating along the red carpet to your next event—and again, you forget that you are there as a reporter with a publicist watching and pointing to her watch because you have a time limit; you can speak with the stars for only a few minutes. The publicist tells you that your time is up, you must leave the party and stand with the starstruck herds on the other side of the velvet rope.

Then you walk outside and the strobes flash before the photographers realize that you’re nobody. And though the cameras snap by mistake, you can’t help but feel momentarily important, momentarily blinded by the dazzling lights dancing like savages behind the lids of your closed eyes. So you sneak back in until you are caught. It’s easy to spot you, because when it comes down to it, you don’t fit in. Your pupils have not adjusted to the flashbulbs. You look dazed; you look a little too much in love.

“You’re probably right, Amber,” he said.

She checked him for sarcasm. “You think so?”

“Yeah.” He took the Rolodex from her. “I have something for you.”

“Wait,” she said, pulling a shopping bag from behind her back. “I have something else for you.”

Mike took the bag, surprised by the weight of it. He peered in. It was filled with little bottles. He pulled one out.

Franny Blanchard’s The Cure. Horny Goat Milk.

“What’s this?”

“Well, it’s just. . . I, um, thought this, um, would help you. I swear the woman has some kinda magical powers, just like Lisa the Love Witch. Anyway, she devised this concoction and it really works. She and her disgusting boyfriend are like nonstop. Since she fired me, I figured I’d help myself. My apartment is like a pharmacy.”

Mike felt his face turn red. He coughed nervously.

“You seem a little, well, insecure about some things.” Amber looked down at the floor. “I don’t know why. Maybe this will help you.”

“Help me?”

“Trust me. Take this. It will change everything and then maybe we can get together sometime, okay? You seem like a great guy.”

“I’m a greater guy than you can imagine.” Mike smiled. He jotted something on a piece of paper and handed it to her. “Here.”

“Whose number is this?”

“Root Canal’s.”

“What?”

When she left, after hugging and kissing him a thousand times, Mike knew where he had to go and what he had to do.

 

“IS LOTTIE HERE?” He spoke through a slit in the door to a Goth chick with piercings in her eyebrows, nose, and lips and what looked like a doorknob dangling from her chin.

She grunted at Mike and turned.

Mike wondered how those two ever became roommates. She was hardly Lottie’s type. Had to be some kind of online roommate service. He shook his head sadly. Lottie Love, who’d lived in L.A. all her life, had to rely on a service to find someone to live with.

He stood there peering into the slit, wondering if the grunt had been a yes or a no when suddenly Lottie appeared. Mike was surprised to see her wearing pajamas dotted with smiling, fluffy white sheep. He chuckled silently. He thought her bedroom attire would be strictly black lace.

He handed her the Rolodex.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m an asshole. But I swear I wasn’t always an asshole. This place turned me into one. I can’t believe what an asshole I’ve been.”

She smiled. “I know.” Her eyes studied her red polished toes. “Sorry about Chris Mercer. I’m an even bigger asshole.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so pissed at someone in my life. And what you said about me in that meeting. Jeez. . .”

“I’m just happy to inspire such raw emotion.”

She smiled, waiting for him to say something, but he couldn’t. Her scent wafted through the air. It was the smell of ocean and coconut oil, citrus and night jasmine. California flowed out of her pores like perfume. And he knew Amber was right. He’d never leave. Mike shut his eyes and was swept away by waves tumbling, thundering, and sizzling along a hot sandy shore.

And then it happened.

It was a miracle. Maybe not precisely the miracle he had asked for, but nevertheless a miracle: an aching, throbbing, pulsating erection. The biggest boner of his life. It strained at his pants and begged for air.

Franny Blanchard’s Horny Goat Milk had taken effect.

He grinned goofily. He couldn’t help but look down at it. Lottie followed his gaze and laughed.

“I guess you’re not that angry,” Lottie said. “You know, I could never tell if you liked me or hated me.”

Mike laughed to himself. He could almost hear Lem.

You didn’t listen to me, but I knew, didn’t I? This is what you always wanted.

“It was a little of both. Well, probably a lot of both.”

Then Mike did something he’d never done in his whole life. He ran straight into the Bouncing Betty. He grabbed Lottie’s face with both hands and kissed her on the lips while the world seemed to spin and collapse around him. Mike wasn’t sure how Lottie would react. But he didn’t really care. All she’d have to do was pull away and he’d leave. No big deal. But when she didn’t, he kissed her harder. It was like an electric current stampeding through his veins. The Rolodex fell to the floor.

“Get a fucking room,” the Goth chick said.

They stopped kissing and looked at each other. He knew they were probably thinking the same thing: this is crazy. They were completely wrong for each other. He thought about the day at the beach in Santa Barbara, after Thom Bowman’s funeral. He thought about her rippled back with its little heart tattoo. Her defined calves and ankles, her knees with little bumps of muscle. His heart galloped.

He’d tell Bernie and Vince that he’d taken the key—not Lem, not Lottie. He didn’t care anymore. Then he’d find a rusted Dumpster, grab the handful of newspapers that crammed his passenger seat, and hurl them into the trash. He’d do it again and again until the seat was empty and waiting to be occupied. A passenger seat crammed with newspaper marks a lonely life, Lem had said to him several times. Don’t let the flowers die. Mike was finally going to heed Lem’s advice. He couldn’t wait to tell Lem. He grinned so hard his mouth hurt.

“What are you thinking?” Lottie asked, smiling.

“About how you smell like California,” he sighed.

She scowled flirtatiously. “Oh, great. Like smog and exhaust fumes?”

“No. Like orange blossoms and lemon trees and promise.”

“This couldn’t be the biggest mistake ever,” Lottie said.

“You know, I could never decipher your speech. But I think that means it’s only a little mistake. And a little mistake is much better than the horrible mistakes I’ve been making.”

“You and me both.”

She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the bedroom.