"Oh fuck," I
gasp.
"It's all your
fault!" Loretta hisses. "And now you're going to pay."
A part of me always
knew this day might come. I've been an assistant cruise director for
Empress Cruise Lines for nearly five years and, as such, part of my job
is to hand a loaded trapshooting shotgun to passengers who can't even
control their own bladders. An accident seemed inevitable. But this is
no accident. This woman wants me dead. I catch the eye of my fellow assistant cruise director, Mitch, who gives me an I'm-going- for-help look, then disappears inside.
"What's my
fault?" I stammer, trying to stall for time.
"Don't play dumb
with me," Loretta growls, as she circles the gun around, causing
everyone here on the Aloha Deck to do what might best be described as
the opposite of the Wave. When she finishes, she returns the business
end of the shotgun back to me. I watch in frozen horror as her
wrinkled trigger finger starts to contract and I entertain my last hope:
that after I'm gone, Valerie Bertinelli might be willing to cut her hair
and play me in the TV movie.
"Prepare to
die," Loretta says.
"No... no... no...
" I cry.
"Well, then we
also have nice tortellini."
I slam open my eyes to
see the perplexed face of a redheaded woman, but this one's young and
not nearly so unfoxy. And she's not wielding a gun.
"That's
fine," I say.
The flight attendant
slides over my pasta dinner and moves on to the next row.
"Are you
okay?" asks the blonde house-wife type sitting next to me. "I
think you were having a nightmare."
"Yeah, I
was," I respond, in regards to what, in the last four months, has
become my version of a recurring Vietnam flashback. "But I'm
fine."
"Are you from
Phoenix?" she says, referring to our destination.
"No, but I went to
college at Arizona State," I say between bites. I'm actually from a
small town in northern Arizona called Holbrook. Though geographically
qualified, Holbrook was left out of the song "Route 66," a
fact that I've always resented. Perhaps there were just no kicks to be
gotten there.
"Wow! I work at
ASU," says the woman excitedly. "My name's Rhonda
Whiting."
"Craig Clybourn,"
I say with a smile so forced that I might just as well be back on the
Lido Deck emceeing a limbo contest to Buster Poindexter's "Hot Hot
Hot."
After our dinner trays
are cleared Rhonda decides she wants to show me pictures of her adorable
spawn. I ooh and aah politely, then start digging in the seat pocket in
front of me hoping to find something to read or inject.
"What did you
study at ASU?" she asks.
"Broadcasting,"
I say as unenthusiastically as whenever someone asked me that question
at the time. It wasn't that I didn't have any interest in broadcasting.
Quite the contrary. But at the time, planning for my future took a
backseat to going to movies, hanging around with my friends from the
theater department and playing bass in my roommate Ulysses' garage band.
"Where do you
live?" Rhonda asks as I thumb through a left-behind copy of Star
magazine I was lucky enough to find behind the barf bag.
"Phoenix now, I
guess, but I'm moving to L.A.," I say before glancing down to the
tabloid and noticing a familiar face. With this woman here, I
nearly add.
There, under the
headline "Would You Be Caught Dead In this Outfit?" is my best
friend since college, Dandy Rio. Sporting plaid bell-bottoms, a crochet
top that even on the page reeks of thrift store, and a big fuck-you
smile, Dandy seems to be replying, "You're damn right I
would."
I smile when I recall
the day Dandy and I met back at ASU. It was at the first rehearsal for
the theater department's spring '88 production of that old toe-tapper Anything
Goes, in which Dandy and I were partnered together in the chorus.
Looking like a brunette Ann-Margret circa Viva Las Vegas in black
tights and a clingy fuchsia sweater, Dandy burst into the room with such
panache that I could practically see the cartoon thought bubble that
appeared over the threatened lead actress's head, which read, "Who
does this bitch think she is?"
"Do you want them
to?" I replied.
"Of course,"
she answered.
After rehearsal, we
went to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee and while we were checking out, Dandy
picked up the Star, opened it to the "Would You Be Caught
Dead" spread and said, without a trace of irony, "Someday,
Craig, that's going to be me."
Since then, Dandy's
been caught dead more times than I can count.
"She's on my
show," Rhonda says, imbedding a Lee Press-On nail into Dandy's
forehead. "I can't stand her."
"Rhonda's
show" must be Lifestream, the daytime drama that Dandy's
been on for nearly six years doing double duty as twins Nola and Manohla
Hughes. Dandy's break came via Milt Greene, a smarmy New York agent whom
Dandy endeared herself to on one of his annual talent scouting visits to
ASU. Perhaps endeared is the wrong word. A better word might be,
um, blackmailed, since Milt had nothing but malice for the
would-be starlet until the moment when, in a last ditch attempt to get
him to give Dandy's monologue a listen, we caught the Star Searcher
banging some blond business major in the bathroom at Sky Harbor Airport.
Dandy agreed that she wouldn't tell Milt's actress wife about the
indiscretion if Milt would represent her in New York for six months.
Five and half months later, Dandy landed the gig on Lifestream.
The day after that, she changed agents.
The last time I saw
Dandy was nearly four months ago. She and a handful of her photogenic
cast mates had come on board the Regal Empress to shoot a few scenes and
sign a few autographs as part of a special Lifestream Takes to the
Ocean cruise. It was on the day she arrived, while strolling down a
cobblestone street in Old San Juan, that Dandy announced she was leaving
Lifestream to move to L.A. and star in her own sitcom.
"The network guys
like it when I do funny stuff on the show," she chirped. "They
want the sitcom to be ready in time to be a midseason replacement. You
have to come out there with me, Craig." Dandy flashed me a
mischievous smile, then shouted, "Cocksucker!" before
disappearing into a gift shop.
It wasn't until a few
seconds later that I realized Dandy wasn't calling into question my
murky sexuality, but giving the appalled tourist couple videotaping a
few feet away a nice audio souvenir. It was a pastime we'd indulge in
repeatedly over the next ten days.
"Do you have a
girlfriend?" wonders Rhonda. "Not anymore," I shrug, as though the only girlfriend I ever had didn't dump me my sophomore year at ASU.
After two semesters of
cohabitative bliss, would-be ballerina Michelle Lee (not the one from Knots
Landing, the one from hell), ran off with the hirsute hoofer who
played Rum Tum Tugger in the touring company of Cats . Hence
Dandy's nickname for her, "The Catfucker."
"Single,
huh?" says Rhonda. "I should introduce you to some of the gals
I work with."
I beat a hasty retreat
to the can and when I return, Rhonda's fast asleep and drooling onto the
Star. She doesn't come to again until we're on the ground. As we
file off the plane, she offers to give me a ride to my aunt's house in
Tempe, in lieu of the Supershuttle I had originally planned to take.
"I may not need a
ride after all," I say delightedly, as we clear the gate and I
notice a sign poking up from the awaiting crowd that reads Vanilla
Ice.
"What are you
doing here?" I say to the bearer of the sign.
"I wanted to make
sure you didn't chicken out about coming to L.A.," says Dandy,
before slapping me on the forehead with the sign and giving me a hug.
We're about to make our
way to baggage claim when I notice Rhonda shuffling by with her brood.
Recalling my row partner's distaste for the two-dimensional Dandy, I'm
curious to see how she'll react to her in 3-D.
"Rhonda," I
call. "I want you to meet my best friend."
"Oh my God,"
she says, dumping her two-year-old onto the ground. "I watch your
show every day."
I smile as Dandy
scrawls Rhonda an autograph, knowing that she's recently taken to
writing, "If you don't love me, I'm sorry,"—a salutation she ripped off from the porn
star Savannah, confident (perhaps erroneously) that the pair have no
fans in common.
While we wait for my
bags to tumble out, Dandy grabs the Star from my carry-on and
regards the cover photo of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee walking through
an airport and grimacing.
"It looks like she
just farted and he's smelling it," I observe.
"Smelt it,"
Dandy says flicking her middle finger at Tommy. "Dealt it,"
she adds, flicking Pam.
On the way to Dandy's
hotel, we stop at the Dairy Queen on Mill Avenue.
"Look who's
here," says a voice from behind us.
Dandy and I turn around
to discover Troy Mendell. Troy was the director's kiss-ass assistant
when Dandy and I were in Anything Goes. He wore T-shirts with
slogans like Triple Threat and Gotta Dance on them and had
the major hots for Dandy. When she failed to return his affections, Troy
proceeded to boss us around like we were some kind of troublemakers or
something.
"How's the Big
Apple treating you?" Troy asks.
"Actually, I'm
moving to L.A.," says Dandy. "I'm going to be starring on my
own sitcom."
"And I'm going to
be starring on my own couch," I say before excusing myself to go
phone my aunt to tell her I won't be staying there tonight after all.
When I return and report that the pay phone is broken, Troy invites me
to use the one at his computer showroom across the street.
"You can't bring
that in here," he says as we approach the door to Mendell's
Megabytes. "It'll drip all over the place."
"Okay, Dandy, I
guess I'll call you later," I say.
"I meant the ice
cream," Troy clarifies, as unamused as I've ever seen him, and
I've seen him plenty unamused.
Later, Dandy and I are sprawled on her hotel bed watching
scrambled soft-porn movies and making fun of Troy, when Dandy pulls a
photo out of my organizer and says, "Who's this cute stuff?"
"His name is
Sergio," I say of the curly-headed Italian posing with me in front
of a waterfall in Martinique. "He's from Italy and he worked in the
galley. He joined the ship the cruise after you got off. Nice guy.
Greenest eyes you've ever seen."
"Is he seeing
anybody?"
"Sort of," I
say before steeling myself for the big bomb. "Me."
I don't know how I
expect Dandy to react to this news—tears, a high five followed by a declaration
of "It's about time," the vapors—all of the above seem possible.
"Can I watch
sometime?" she asks.
Though that wasn't on
my list of predictions I think I like it best of all.
"Well, I doubt
I'll ever see him again," I say. "But if I do, you're welcome
to hide in the closet."
"Somebody's
got to, apparently," she laughs.
I spend the next three
and a half hours giving Dandy every juicy detail of my first consummated
crush since the Catfucker.
"So you're
officially into men now?" Dandy asks with as much
matter-of-factness as she can muster.
"I
guess," I say, before killing the light. "Should I send out a
press release or something?"
"Nah," she
mutters into her pillow. "Just get a few T-shirts printed."
"Homo,"
I say as though I'm reading it off a marquee.
"And an I'm
With Homo
for me."
The next morning, we hop in our rented Blazer and drive to my
aunt's house to retrieve the few belongings she's been nice enough to
store for the last five years. A half hour later, we're on our way to
Los Angeles, with me behind the wheel and Dandy fingering my bass guitar
in the passenger seat.
"So how's the
screenplay going?" she asks.
"It's going,"
I say before letting out a yawn.
"It better
be."
I hand the driving
duties off to Dandy after we pass the state line, then lean back and
close my eyes. "What's my fault?" I scream as Loretta waves the shotgun in front of me in a devil-may-care figure eight. "Manohla's leaving Willow Springs," she screams, "and it's all your fault."
Manohla is Dandy's
good-girl character on Lifestream, which Loretta apparently has a
problem differentiating from reality. Though Dandy's exodus from the
show hasn't been officially announced, rumors of it have been
circulating on the ship for days. Granted, most die-hard fans would hate
to see Nola and Manohla get written out, but Loretta's the only one who
thinks pulling a gun on Dandy's best friend might keep it from
happening.
"No... no... you
don't want to do this," I say.
"Oh, yes I
do," she says caressing the trigger.
I'm sweating through my
polo shirt and preparing to meet my maker, when suddenly I hear the
voice of my best friend booming over the ship's loudspeaker.
"This is Nola
Hughes," Dandy says firmly. "Put down the gun... ."
Loretta gasps as though
she's seen a ghost. Without lowering the gun, the she tilts her face up
to the speaker like an X-Files extra being beckoned by her mother
ship. Dandy, in what could be the best acting of her life, conjures the
kittenish Southern drawl she employs as Nola, the baddest girl in Willow
Springs, and says, "Put down the gun or I'll come to your house and
poison you in your sleep, just like I did to Sonny... ."
As Dandy continues to
threaten her, Loretta becomes more and more confused and distracted. I
can see the gun lowering one centimeter at a time. Just as it bows
enough to avoid hitting me, should it go off, a blur in a white tank top
tackles the polyester-clad terrorist from the back, sending the gun
hurling into the air and over the side of the ship.
With Dandy still going
for the daytime Emmy, I look down and see her cute but nerdy costar,
Andrew Ormiston, untangling himself from the deranged redhead.
"What a wacko,"
I say to no one in particular.
"What are you
talking about?" says Dandy.
I open my eyes and
discover that Dandy's voice is coming not from a ship intercom but from
the driver's seat across from me.
"I had that dream
again about your crazy fan," I sigh.
"Forget it,"
Dandy says. "You'll be having lots of exciting new dreams soon
enough."
I look outside and
notice that it's evening. Our vehicle is one of a gazillion parked in
rows of four and winding like polka-dot serpentines into the distance.
The skyscrapers from L.A. Law loom on the horizon.
"We're not
moving," I say.
"Welcome to Los
Angeles," says Dandy.
|
My
biggest fear has always been that if my life were to pass before my eyes
during a moment of life-threatening duress, it would be rated PG.
Now that it's happening