Outro: The Serial Novel

Twenty-Four

Stalling for Time

"Dearest kind gentlemen: Please lower the toilet seat in consideration of our lady patrons."


Life is filled with seemingly arcane items that keep popping into your thoughts, and one of mine is the notice in the bathroom at the Java and Clay. In a world where so many are happy to hammer you over the head with rules and regulations, this little ceramic sign is an oasis of civility. It invites men to be courteous, and offers them the chance to feel like Arthurian knights for the simple act of lowering a ring of porcelain. And I would bet that it actually works. It’s a chilly Friday in late January, a week after our blessed ski trip, and I’m meeting Ruby for another session. The Java and Clay is a particular favorite. The back forty is a full-blown workshop where patrons glaze pre-made vases and platters and pick them up the next day, fully kilned. The front is more like someone’s living room, including a large gas fireplace with stone facing. When I come here solo, I end up on a stool before the front window, which affords a vista of Harborview Drive and the Jerisich Dock. The bonus is an occasional bald eagle sighting – once, a mere thirty feet above the sidewalk, as if he were headed to The Tides for a sandwich.

My everything bagel goes off in the toaster just as Ruby pops through the door, looking all Debbie Reynolds in a white jacket and sienna scarf. She’s also had her hair bobbed, which multiplies her cuteness sevenfold.

“Girlfriend!” she cries, and we go for a greeting with all the trimmings: wraparound hug, continental cheek-kissing, everything short of high-fives. She fetches a cappuccino, then joins me in matching armchairs before the fire.

“God! I just want to live here. It’s so much nicer than my place.”

“Tish-tosh!” I try to say with a straight face. “I’ve been to your place.”

“Yes,” she rebuts. “But this place is in Gig Harbor.”

“Point and… match! The hair is darling. I just want to adopt you.”

“Thanks! I wanted it real short for my Mexican cruise.”

“Excuse me? I mean, excuse me?”

Ruby bats her lashes, all Betty Boop. “Yay-ess! Harry got a nice fat bonus, so next week our ports of call are Vallarta, Mazatlan and Cabo.”

“San Lucas?”

“Yes. We’re on a first-name basis.”

“Extraordinary! I’m jealous already. Does the ship have karaoke?”

“You have such a one-track mind. And yes, they do. It’s the first thing I checked.” She rubs her hands together, all Cruella DeVille. “A whole new crowd of victims for my siren call!”

I laugh, in a perfectly normal manner, but then I’m drifting, my gaze fixed on the rust-colored hands of the mantelpiece clock. And then Ruby is saying something that fades in and out of my frequency.

“Channy? Are you somewhere in the 253 area code?”

I shake my head around, all Rin-Tin-Tin.

“Um… um… sorry. I’m a little wary of these stories today. Well. Mine, mostly. This might sound silly, but, as we got further and further into our little meetings, I began to believe that, if I told the story exactly right, maybe this time it would turn out… differently.”

Ruby takes in my anxiety, folding her hands over her knee. “Would it help if I went first?”

“Would you? Oh! I forgot my bagel. Hold on.”

Ruby laughs, all Fran Dreischer. “Jewish food for a Jewish tragedy. Oy gevalt! I’ll go visit the restroom.”

“Be sure and put the seat down,” I say. Disappearing around the corner, Ruby flashes one half of a puzzled expression.


Next: Scootie Surprise

Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Image by MJV

Outro: The Serial Novel

Twenty-three

Skiing with Kai

Kai is already family, so there’s no need for the usual filters. He even joins me for dinner with the Craigs – the closest thing I’ve got to meeting the parents – and passes with flying colors. (For John, a deployment in Iraq buys instant acceptance.)

For New Year’s, he takes me to a slick restaurant in Seattle’s Queen Anne district: candlelight dinner followed by a jazz combo. I took just enough lessons during the retro-swing thing that I manage to keep up with him. I recall what he said about those high school musicals, and it shows – he’s a seriously good lead, with a sense of panache and rhythm that you just can’t teach.

But then there’s sex. I am most definitely ready to end my forced celibacy, but Kai seems hesitant. I can’t rush him and I can’t blame him; I was, after all, his best friend’s wife.

My odds, however, are getting much better. Our sporting goods Fezziwig is rather fond of lending his ski cabin to employees – in fact, sees it as an investment, since it allows his workers to try out the products that they’re selling. We are, in fact, completely decked out with demo models from three of Scott’s stores, tooling along the Columbian River Gorge in an SUV, headed for Mt. Hood, Oregon.

Our pilot is Conrad, assistant manager at the Olympia store, and a former member of Kai’s Guard unit. He’s a hybrid of superhero and fratboy – tall, blond, broad-shouldered, square-jawed and boisterous of expression. His girlfriend is Becky, a software engineer bearing no trace of yuppiedom. She seems extraordinarily genuine – which is, I think, a vastly underrated quality. She also projects that rare duality of quiet-but-friendly, which makes you want to tell her things that you wouldn’t tell anyone else. She’d make a great psychiatrist.

Our other passengers are Shari and Ruby, and though I’m feeling guilty for hogging the guest list, I’ve been hoping for just such a chance to bring my two confidantes together. (The original idea was to bring Harry, too, but with the nasty winter weather he’s booked up with work.) Shari’s a veteran skier who will undoubtedly leave us all in her powder, whereas Ruby’s only been twice. I can’t imagine her being truly bad at anything, however, so I’m sure she’ll find a way to keep up.

We park at a large complex, and find that Scott’s cabin is more like an apartment. Given his passion for elegance, I guess this is a little surprising. The place is nice, though, and reaches for that cabinesque feel with an upstairs loft, replete with loggy furniture and stacks of board games. The living room sports a lovely stone fireplace (fueled by actual wooden logs, stacked on the balcony) and a round, radiant blondewood table.

But the real priority, for yours truly, is to track down some privacy, so I duck downstairs and head for the end of the hallway. There I find a master bedroom with a king-size bed. Lest there be claim-jumpers, I flop my suitcase on the center of the bed and hang my ballcap on the outside doorknob. Conrad, toting baggage into the front bedroom, catches me in the act and flashes a knowing grin.

Trying to force the blood back from my face, I return to the living room, which is echoing with sorority chatter. I find Kai coming my way with two glasses of wine, which just about wipes out all of my remaining wishes. After making his delivery, he smiles at something over my head. I turn to find Ruby and Shari leaning over the loft railing like Southern debutantes. Ruby barks like a drill sergeant: “Kai! About face, soldier!”

“Ma’am yes ma’am!” says Kai, and executes a precise military spin.

When I turn back, I find four knockers resting on the railing like flesh-colored water balloons. I respond with a suitably girlish scream.

Ruby and Shari return their shirts to standard civilian position and are about to fill the room with more giggling when they’re drowned out by Kai, who has collapsed on the table, crippled by laughter. I scale his body till I’m riding him like a cowgirl, slapping him on the back.

“What? You loony Sherpa – what!?”

Kai has lost the power of speech, but manages to gesture at a mirror on the back wall, which currently holds a portrait of Ruby and Shari’s puzzled faces.


We’re both pretty knocked out from the drive, so the question of sex isn’t really a question. But this is beginning to worry me, because I don’t want this thing to grow into some intimidating obstacle. So I play the good girl, put on the Presbyterian flannels, but I indulge in as many snuggles as the law will allow, and I certainly like the feel of the parts against which I am rubbing.

The next day is a slow start, thanks mostly to the srawberry pancakes served up by Shari, which have about the same effect as tranquilizer darts. Still, we rouse ourselves in time for six hours of near-perfect skiing, and turn out to be quite a cohesive unit, despite our differing levels of expertise. Shari’s being cautious with her trick knee, so she’s slumming in the intermediates – and treating them like her own private NASCAR tracks. On the fifth run, I fire off the chairlift, duck my head, tuck my knees and hit the straightaways like a one-woman bullet train, then shuss into the lift line to find Shari, not even breathing hard, looking like she could have ordered and consumed a caffe borgia during her wait. On the other hand, with her height and her lime green jester’s hat, she makes a dandy gathering spot.

Conrad surprises no one by being our usual runner-up, with Becky working hard to keep him in her sights. Ruby’s a consistent last, as expected, but her dancer’s grace keeps her from falling, even once, so our waits are not long.

Kai and I are the middle children, and an interesting study in contrast. Either one of us could probably reach the bottom more quickly, but we’ve got other items on our agendas. Kai had lots of lessons as a kid, so he’s after style points, carving lovely esses down the flats, navigating the moguls like a schoolboy coloring inside the lines, knees relaxed, legs neatly parallel. I, meanwhile, am after as much low-level air as I can gather, searching the edges for those little ramp-trails and running the tops of the moguls, trusting that I’ll find a landing spot on the other side. My legs shoot out every which way, like a dog on ice, as I battle for balance, and I add three festive crash-and-burns to my life list. I’m relating one of these over Conrad’s hearty steak dinner as we decompress at the cabin.

“Okay. So I found the snowboarding ramps at the end of the Glen Ridge run?”

“Oh Channy!” says Becky. “You didn’t.”

“You kiddin’ me? I had to. So the first ramp, it felt like I was heading straight up a freakin’ wall. But once I cleared the edge, the momentum pulled me forward and I landed smooth as can be, almost as if I knew what I was doing! The next… object… was a deep drop into a fairly innocent-looking scoop-ramp. My takeoff was fine, but sometime in mid-flight I realized that I was going to land in the middle of a second scoop-ramp, and I freaked. My body went into a flying fetal position, I sluffed the second ramp, flew through the air fully sideways, and managed to land on my ass. Then I caught an edge, which sent me into a spin, like one of those whirling sparklers that you nail to a fencepost. The landing area was about twenty yards long, iced up from traffic, so I slid and slid and slid until I came to a stop right in front of the lift line, where fifty skiers gave me a rousing ovation.”

“Oh!” says Ruby. “That is harsh.”

“Hey, sistah. Any applause is good applause, right?”

“No. This is not what they mean when they say, ‘Break a leg.’”

“However,” says Kai. “The next time, she got it perfect.”

“You went back?” says Shari.

“Oh yeah,” says Conrad. “Look who’s talking, Dale Earnhardt.”

Shari lets out a big whiskey-laugh. “I’m a big girl, honey. You just ain’t gonna beat certain combinations of mass and gravity.”

I take the opening to lift my beer in salute. “To gravity!”

“Without it,” says Kai, “skiing would really suck!”


We wrap up the evening with a board game that requires entirely too much mental acumen. I discover that 1) I am quite good at backwards spelling, and 2) I cannot identify a hummed song to save my life (which, given my profession, is downright shameful). Come the last round, as Ruby and I stand on the brink of victory, I mistake “Battle Hymn of the Republic” for “Swanee.” I also take this to indicate that I have had enough wine for the evening. Conrad wins the game by properly identifying a dachsund that Becky has fashioned from modeling clay.

The evening is a caravan of laughter, and it floats Kai to my cave of seduction, where I intend to get on with the gettin’ on. For a first session, it’s remarkably natural. I spend most of my time on top, as I imagined I would, arranging things as I like them. The sense of control is a potent aphrodisiac, and reminds me of my high school passions with the geek boys. Perhaps Kai is a geek boy – I’d lay money on it – but he has most definitely graduated. It’s this subdermal strata of strength and curiosity, the power you must have in order to accede power. To let the lady be on top. If I’m not careful, I’m going to fall in love with this boy. I feel the surges as he works up to orgasm and stiffens, and I collapse over him, my hair falling to his chest.

“That was beautiful, Kai.”

“Yes, it was.”


The next morning, things are different. Or perhaps it’s just that Kai is in charge of breakfast: omelets with linguisa and caramelized onions. But the feeling of separation is more than culinary. He’s not reacting as a lover should. He’s expending all his energy on the others, playing the host. I’m thinking, No! Come inside with me. Let’s make a separate room, all to ourselves.

On the slopes, he doesn’t seem all that concerned with keeping me in his sights, more apt to drift his own way and meet me at the jester’s hat. Then he starts taking the lift up with others. Two, three months from now, this would be normal – but not the first morning-after. I want to take last night’s warmth and hoard it, drown in it. I catch a lift with Shari, and watch the square of Kai’s jacketed shoulder thirty feet in front of us.

“Were you being active last night, young lady?”

“Yes.”

Shari chides me with a laugh. “That’s all I get?”

“It was our first.”

She turns sharply, causing one of her jester tentacles to slap me across the forehead.

“Goddamn, sister. I figured you two were full-blown rabbits by now.”

“Such are the assumptions in a horndog karaoke bar.”

“Amen, sister. Although I guess you do have some serious stuff to work around.”

I’m chewing on the finger of my glove. “Ruby’s told you?”

“Um, yeah. Is that all right?”

“Yeah. It’s fine. I am just about to the end of my sad, sad story.”

“Good.”

“So. Do I ask him why he’s pulling away already?”

She takes a strand of hair and twirls it around a finger. Everybody’s got a thinking device.

“The day-after retreat is common enough – so hunter-gatherer – but this matter of boinking your best friend’s wife is quite the complication. You can apply all the logic you want, but there’s still going to be some guilt. You, however, are the best diplomat I know – Lord knows how you balance all those singerly egos. I’m sure you’ll find a subtle, non-threatening way to bring it up. You need to find out if he’ll trust you enough to talk about these things.”

“Damn!” I say. “You’re thorough.”

“Those who can’t do, give advice. You going left?”

“Yep.”

“Groovy. I’m right.”

“Have a nice sprint, Jean-Claude.”

Shari grins. “Hey, some people get laid, others get to be first down the hill.”

“Deal!”

We slide off the chair, and I swoop around the lift tower, looking for Sherpas. Alas, he’s already a hundred feet down the hill.

“I don’t think so,” I mutter, pretending I’m Deniro. I shoot down the hill, recalling the field of shallow moguls around the first bend. Kai is going to carve them in loving snake tracks. I’m going straight over the top. And that’s how I’ll catch him.

I’m flying my third mogul, splendidly out of control, when I spot a dark figure, taking a hairpin turn straight into my path. I pivot sideways, hoping to grind my landing, but I catch an edge and topple sideways, taking out Kai with an NHL-level body check. We explode into the next tier of moguls, our skis locked up, and tumble five-and-a-half more times before we come to a frosty stop. I scrape the powder from my face to find a booted foot inches from my nose, and pray to God it’s not mine. Kai groans, and pushes to an elbow to ID his assailant.

“Channy? What the hell?!”

I give a repentant look. “I was trying to catch up, and I got a little… exuberant.”

“Exuberant? More like homicidal!”

He sees that I’m not laughing, and he pats my cheek.

“Hey Channy. I’m kidding.”

“Oh.” I tuck my skis so I can sit up. “I sorta… felt like you were avoiding me.”

“Ah, geez!” he says. “I am so bad at this. I’m not used to being part of a couple. I guess I was hanging back, waiting for instructions.”

I give him a meaningful look. “Why don’t you start by helping me up?”

He grabs both my hands and pulls me to my feet.

“And now you can kiss me, in a sweet, schoolboy fashion.”

Which he does.

“And the rest of the day, you can pretty much worship my every move.”

“Gotcha.”

“Well, not really. But just… stay connected with me. If you’re off in a corner, playing backgammon with Becky, just look my way once in a while, make eye contact. This is sweet, valuable stuff, these beginnings of things. Spend them wisely. Plus, the first day-after makes us chicks very jumpy and vulnerable. Now – wanna ski?”

“Yeah,” he says. But why don’t you go first?”

“Smart boy,” I say, and I’m off.


Next: Story Stall

Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Image by MJV

Outro: The Serial Novel

Twenty-two

Ruby

Scootie’s building had one of those old-style freight elevators, and one side of the shaft had windows looking out toward Central Park. When the inside window met up with a shaft window, it created a strobe effect, like a silent-era film. The feature that day was a maple at the edge of the park, going absolutely berserk with scarlets, pumpkins, siennas and mustards. (Scootie was having a distinct effect on my color-vocabulary.)

When I got out, I heard a sound like a reverse heartbeat, like trochaic verse: thump-thump, thump-thump, On the shores of Gitchigoomy. Making my way down the hall, I realized it was coming from Scootie’s loft, and opened the door to find him tossing a violet spheroid against the wall.

“Wednesday Thursday Friday!” I shouted.

“Hi,” he said, barely missing a beat. “What did you say?”

“WTF!”

Blank stare.

“What the fuck!”

“Right! Here: I demonstrate.”

He took a tube of pink acrylic, squeezed a teaspoon onto the tennis ball and fired away. The ball struck the canvas with a splat and bounced on the dropclothed floor. Scootie scooped it up nicely and fired again, then caught it and set it in a dogbowl at his feet. He rose from his stool and stalked my way with gloppy rainbow hands. “Give me a hug!”

“Not on your life, Van Gogh!”

“You love me, you love my art, bebe.” He held his hands behind his back and gave me a schoolboy kiss.

“It’s like dating a fucking paint monster.” I retreated to a clean-looking table, ten feet away. “Okay, mojo man. Give me the game plan.”

He stood and made a game-show sweep toward the canvas. “First, I covered the surface with black gesso. Then I took one of my coaster creatures and lined it out in masking tape. Now I’m playing paintball until I get a nice thick coating of rainbow splats and circles. Once it dries, I remove the masking tape, with some assistance from my X-Acto knife, and ba-boom! An eerie black figure, staring out from a Jackson Pollock-Bjorn Borg carnaval.”

I followed the tape-strip drowning in tennis strokes and clucked my tongue. “You’re a marvel. I don’t know five people combined who have as much creative juice as you.”

Scootie surveyed his cloud of splats, and I knew exactly what was going on behind those obsidian irises. He was forecasting that perfect moment, that split second when the work took its form, and it was time to set the creature free. But I didn’t want him drifting too far, because I intended to steal him away from Mother Art, at least for the evening.

“Hey, boybee – snap to it. Ruby needs a feedin’.”

The battle was almost too easy. He took a final snapshot and smiled. “I’ll go wash up. Try some of that wine.”

He headed for the bathroom as I located the uncorked bottle atop his cabinet. His wines were all obscure and eccentric – I never saw any of them in the stores, and in New York that’s saying something. The same quality applied to his curios, books and glassware – all of them looking much more indigenous than anything you would find in an import shop. The wine was an Argentinean Shiraz that fired my tastebuds in a pleasing fashion.

Of course, Scootie was rather exotic and inexplicable himself. I was so pleased with the way that our puzzle pieces fit together (and the way his eternal creativity extended to the bedroom) that I didn’t want to spoil it by probing the vagaries. After a year, we still met only once or twice a week, and had never discussed the exact nature of our relationship. He had also talked me into some adventurous moves regarding my career, and I was feeling a little hung out to dry.

The image of him returning from the bathroom, newly domesticated, slipping into a leather jacket, dashed all of this aside like so many violet tennis balls, and soon we were strolling through chilly twilight to a Malaysian restaurant on Broadway. I dipped my hand over the collar of his jacket to grab a hank of his thick, still-damp hair.

“Yes. The Malaysian iced coffee, some roti canai and the mango chicken. Thanks.”

The waiter walked away, and Scootie scoped me with those ebony searchlights, the same way he looked at his paintings. Did I, too, contain a moment of release?

“So what’s the matter?” he said.

I rolled my fingers on the table, four beats, pinkie to index.

“Auditions. Mother fucking auditions.”

“Oedipus Rex?”

“Hilarious! No – Sweet Charity. A revival with Molly Ringwald. Big-time stuff.”

“Good.”

“But I didn’t even feel like I existed. That brutally cordial ‘Thank you’ from some guy you can’t see. Imagine someone slapping duct tape all over your person, and then ripping it off, all at once. God, Scootie! What is it about me that doesn’t fit? Am I completely delusional? I mean, I’m good, right?”

“Are you nuts?” he said. “You’re fucking incredible.”

“Not just saying that? Not just the penis talking?”

“No way. Not when it’s art.”

“So when it’s not art, you might lie to me.”

“Don’t be silly. Of course I would lie to you.”

He was being all cute and funny again, but I was determined to plow on.

“I’m not putting this on you, Scootie…”

“Put it on me if you like. I was only telling you what you really wanted for yourself.”

“I know. Now shut up a second, wouldja?”

“Yes ma’am.” I enjoyed this about Scootie. I could be a little rough with him, and he with me. It wasn’t personal.

“Okay. So I’m just looking at what I had before at Greenstreet, and I know it was big fish, small pond, but the pond was in Manhattan. Am I overplaying my hand? Am I screwing myself?”

Our waiter returned with the roti. Scootie tore off a piece, dipped it in peanut sauce and aimed it at me like an instructional pointer.

“Let’s get back to the basic question. Where’s the heat? What do you really want?”

I sighed. “To sing and dance in a musical. Broadway or something close.”

“And at Greenstreet?”

“Edgy, fringe-theater drama. No singing, no dancing. Ironically, a gay director named Giuseppe Verdi hates musicals.”

“Any realistic career footbridge from one to the other?”

“Not… really.”

He took a bite out of his pointer. “So the auditions are bad, and you’re suffering. But you’re suffering in the right direction. You’re suffering for the right reasons.”

I tore off a piece and chewed like a recalcitrant cow. “God. You make it sound like childbirth.”

“It is.”

He didn’t give me much choice. Scootie was one big raging package of artistic integrity. He had taken this wacky idiosyncratic work of his and broken into an art world more full of shit than the stables at Churchhill Downs. And once he landed on the other side, the collectors loved him for his personality, his willingness to actually say something on the canvas. And his fearless sense of humor. Still, it wasn’t easy. I could hear the hiss of my deflating ego, the leak that got louder with each anonymous Thank you.

When we got back, I couldn’t help myself. I took off my clothes, set them at a safe distance, then moussed a tennis ball with kelly green and gave it a toss. It smacked the canvas with a gooey Medusa’s head and came back fast, crawling up my arms and leaving a green circle on my abdomen. I caught a grip and fired it back.

Never one to be surprised, Scootie returned from the kitchen, saw what I was doing and immediately stripped off. Then he unrolled a large canvas, squished out a manicolored delta of acrylics and invited me to lie down.

Just before entry, I told him, “If this sells, I expect forty percent.”



Next: Skiing with Kai


Image by MJV

Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Outro: The Serial Novel

Twenty-one

Sending the Troops

Channy

I was covering a Sunday shift at the Red Apple, so I wasn’t there when Harvey returned from his Guard weekend. Not that I minded. When people asked me, I said he was “having one of his weekends,” which was not necessarily a term of affection. Since 9/11, my signpost prince had become increasingly “butch,” and it ran strongest on Sundays, when I could still smell the camo makeup on his face.

I had my theories. The Zero Squadron video battles centered on an enemy that was incontrovertibly evil, and drilled the point home with their military liturgies. For a man of Harvey’s generation, raised in the murky shadows of Vietnam, the clear-cut moral crusade of WWII must have held a tremendous appeal (and don’t think Star Wars didn’t play right into this).

The modern, educated human is expected to process a thousand gradations of good and evil, but the brain carries a strong survival instinct regarding its own capacity, so it streamlines matters by shuffling some of these issues into the black-and-white, one-or-zero auxiliary drive.

Thus, when a bona fide monster invaded our country and took out a few thousand civilians, Harvey was hard-wired to become a patriot. Osama bin Laden removed all the shadows from Harvey’s life, made his joining of the Guard a matter of prescient destiny, and afforded a military mission more justified than anything since Pearl Harbor.

And suddenly, this talk of Saddam Hussein. The Guard was no longer a corps of professional bystanders. If we went to Baghdad – with so many of our career soldiers still in Afghanistan – there was a good chance that Harvey would be among them. I spent a lot of time feeling absolutely terrified. To Harvey, I’m sure it all looked like a big mother lode of glory, the Luke Skywalker fantasy come to life. But he didn’t seem to understand that the bullets were real, that their express purpose was to penetrate human flesh.

On Sunday evenings, he spoke to me in blunt, government-issue sentences, and moved around on stiff, graceless limbs. He gave no response to humor or affection. I was afraid to hug him, for fear of cutting myself on his sharp edges. But I knew if I was patient, and held out till Monday, things would be okay.

I turned off the freeway and realized I was pressing my left foot against the floorboards, so much that my calf was twitching. When I got to our street, I found a strange, beautiful car in my driveway – gleaming white, with gold trim and sexy, long-torsoed lines, like something from an art-deco mural. A dark-skinned man peered over the roof and smiled at me. Harvey, standing near a headlight, followed his friend’s gaze and released a puff of smoke from his mouth.

I parked at the curb and crossed the yard. “Harvey? What are you doing?”

Harvey, still in his desert fatigues, held out a small cigar with a wooden tip.

“Sort of a Clint Eastwood thing. The guys in the Guard are crazy about ‘em. Gets you in the proper frame of mind for blowin’ up shit.”

“And gives you terrible breath,” said the dark man.

“This is Kai,” said Harvey. “He’s a Sherpa.”

Kai put his hands on his hips like a disgruntled housewife. “Would you stop introducing me like that?”

“Why? I think it’s damn interesting. And you can introduce me as Harvey the Cajun. Two of the world’s more interesting ethnic groups, y’ask me.”

“Hi Kai,” I said, wincing at the rhyme.

“Hi Channy. I know plenty about you. In between blowin’ up stuff, Harvey talks about nothing but.”

I allowed myself a smile. “I’m glad to hear that.”

“Oh and sorry for blocking your driveway. I thought I was just doing a drop-off, but my Cajun friend forced a beer on me.”

“The post-Guard beer is the sweetest you will ever drink,” said Harvey. He punctuated his point with a long drag on his cigar.

I couldn’t help noticing the way that Kai’s presence had softened up my boyfriend, and I decided that this was a friendship I needed to encourage.

“Would you like to join us for dinner, Kai? I made off with some lovely pork chops from work.”

Kai glanced at Harvey. “Long as I’m not… infringing?”

Harvey shook his head. “You kiddin’ me? Come on in.”


After the meal, Harvey stood from the table. “I don’t want to go into details, but I need to go sit for a while. Can you two maintain the high level of discourse?”

I gave him a sideways squint. “I never should have gotten you that thesaurus.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, and disappeared down the hall. I immediately went for the beverage option.

“Can I get you another beer?”

“How ‘bout a coffee? I’ve got a bit of a drive ahead of me.”

I went to the kitchen and spoke to Kai over the counter. “Where do you live?”

“Fife,” he said. “The flatlands of industry. And cheap apartments.”

“Wow! You mean people actually live down there?”

He laughed. “I get that a lot.”

“You wouldn’t know from that car you’re driving.”

“My parents promised me a new car if I graduated college. I’m guessing they didn’t think I’d actually do it. The day before commencement, I’m sitting in front of a place in Ballard that sells coffee and cupcakes when a snow-white retro Thunderbird pulls to the curb right in front of me. Then this impossibly tall and gorgeous blonde gets out, and she’s wearing a white sun dress. And I tell her, ‘That is the most beautiful car I have ever seen.’ And she says, ‘Thanks. I just bought it.’ And I say ‘Oh! How long have you had it?’ And she says ‘Ten minutes.’ So you see I had no choice. I had to have a car just like that one.”

I punched the button on the coffeemaker and returned to the table. “You know? Everything in life should happen exactly like that.”

“Yes!” said Kai, with surprising enthusiasm. “Life should be one long fairy tale. Was that how it was when you met Harvey?”

“Yeah. A Dickensian waif wandering in a signpost forest. Somewhere between a ragamuffin and a studamuffin.”

“More of the latter, probably. He’s an amazing soldier.”

I glanced down the hallway. “Maybe that’s why he’s such a butthead when he gets home.”

Kai smiled and folded his hands behind his head. “Forty-eight hours of stuff exploding and men freely farting can have its effect.”

“Well,” I said. “I think you’re a good influence, and I’d like you to join us for dinner every Guard Sunday.”

“I’d love to. As long as Harvey…”

“Oh the hell with Harvey. This is my invitation. You’re coming.”

We indulged in quiet laughter, which drifted into a silence packed with thoughts.

“Are you going to Iraq?”

Kai blinked his dark eyes. “I think so. We’ve been told to be ready. Adjusted our training to desert and urban warfare. Learning phrases of Arabic. I don’t see any way around it. 9/11 changed all the rules, and we’re going to need the manpower.”

“It’s a scary, scary world,” I said. “Let me get you that coffee.”


Six months later, at one of those very Guard dinners, Harvey told me about his orders – and then proposed to me. The kneeling, the diamond ring – everything. Kai being there made it all the sweeter.

We were married a week later, at Kerby’s. It turned out that J.B. was an ordained minister – and, in fact, that we were his first wedding ceremony. That quiet man always had a way of surprising me. Harvey wore his full dress uniform, as did Kai, acting as best man. After the ceremony, we conducted an elevated rendition of the usual karaoke night. Debbie sang “True Companion” for our first dance, and the regulars sang every sappy love song they could think of. On the hundred-yard walk home, the sky over the ridge turning a robin’s-egg blue, I tried once more to feed the bison, but even the formal clothing couldn’t charm them.

For the rest of the weekend, we stayed home and made love as if we’d just met. On Monday morning, I drove him to SeaTac airport. I always pictured soldiers flying off together in some huge olive-drab transport, but it seems the modern Army made plentiful use of commercial airlines.

All the way there, we were very quiet, and I began to understand just how tough this was going to be. With the new approach to security, I could ostensibly hang around forever, waving at Harvey every five feet of the inspection line. One goodbye was torturous – seventy-five would kill me.

The Seattle airport has large enclosed walkways from the parking garage to the terminal. Halfway across, watching the streams of traffic below, I stopped.

“Harvey? I can’t do this.”

He turned and chuckled. “It’s too late, honey. We’re already married.”

“I mean… can I leave you right here? Can we say goodbye here?”

He set down his duffel bag and smiled. “So you only have to do it once?”

Women often have the unreasonable expectation that men should read their minds. But maybe that’s because once in a while they actually do, and it’s glorious. I attacked Harvey with a kiss.

“Wow,” he said. “I’m guessing I was right?”

“Oui, Monsieur Lebeque. Omigod! Do you realize my name is Chanson Lebeque?”

“You sound like one of Pepe LePew’s girlfriends.”

I should have laughed, but I cried instead. “Harvey, you’re going to duck, right? You’re going to come back to me, aren’t you?”

He placed a hand on my cheek and thumbed away a tear. “It’s not really a matter of ducking, but yes, I’m coming back. But I’m also going to do my job, and serve my country. But you know I won’t do anything stupid, because God damn, look at what I’ve got to come home to.”

He held me at arm’s length, as if he were memorizing my face. “We’re going to be all right, Mrs. Lebeque.”

I held him for a long time, my face pressed into the rough khaki of his jacket, then I slipped a black box out of my pocket and handed it to him. He flipped it open and pulled out a silver lighter.

“A fleur de lis! Now that’s French. So ma’amselle has decided to support my filthy habit?”

“Everyone’s allowed one filthy habit. Especially if they’re saving the world for democracy.”

“I will hand out Swisher Sweets in the streets of Baghdad, to win hearts and minds.”

“That should finish them off.”

We shared a relieved laugh, and then we were out of things to say.

“Time for goodbye?” asked Harvey.

I nodded.

“I love you very much, Channy.”

“I love you, Harvey. And I want you back.”

“Goodbye.”

He gave me a kiss, lifted his duffel and left, stopping at the door to give me a last wave. I fought off the urge to shout something, and waved back. Then I turned for the garage, a single married woman, and began the work of passing the months without him.


Next: Orders from Scootie

Image by MJV


Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Outro: The Serial Novel

Twenty

The Christmas Surprise

The holiday party is a bigger deal than I expected. The company is a small chain of sporting goods stores, and the boss is much like Scrooge’s Fezziwig, willing to open up the pocketbook come Christmastime. Only this boss is much better-looking.

I’m all set up at the Tacoma Museum of Glass, inside the “hot shop,” where the artisans conduct demonstrations of glassmaking. The furnaces are on a sort of staging area, readily viewable from a bank of stadium-style seats. In between are sturdy metal tables where the hot-shoppers perform their hazardous tricks. Every item in sight is shiny and metallic; it’s like being on the inside of a giant industrial refrigerator. The ceiling is remarkably high and conical, designed to funnel nasty vapors toward the ventilators at the top. I was expecting the height to suck out all my sound as well, but the Museum allowed me to plug into their beautiful PA, and the results are astounding.

Our Fezziwig – Scott Jenalyn – has also procured access to the museum galleries. The main gallery is filled with brightly colored forms resembling sea creatures – a style inspired by the hometown hero, Dale Chihuly. The smaller exhibit gallery features the work of a young Russian woman who concocts statues of clear, colorless glass. The figures are dressed in everyday clothing – waitresses, cops, even a group of girls playing basketball – and the verisimilitude is downright unsettling. You feel like you could sit down and have a conversation with one of them, if not for the fear that they might answer back.

The capper to the evening is the mode of transport. After a sumptuous dinner in Gig Harbor, the workers are boarding Uncle Scottie’s yacht, crossing the sound and arriving at a dock a hundred yards from the museum entrance. (I’m now considering a career in sporting goods.)

From my DJ table, I can see Ruby, returning from a nervous stroll around the galleries. This seems like such a small gig, but it’s been a while since she’s had a real audience. I have utter faith that she will be a knockout. And if anything preposterous happens, I’m sure the outfit will more than make up for it. Were it an exhibit, I would title it No One Says No to Mrs. Claus: a red fur miniskirt trimmed in leather, a red sequin top that leaves as little to the imagination as possible, and black knee-high boots with stiletto heels. If ever there were an incentive to be on the Naughty List… I might even be worried about her, but I’m sure it’s all for show; underneath the brass, Ruby is just another boring monogamist.

“The acoustics in this place really suck,” she says. She’s descending the wide steps next to the seats, being very careful with her boots. “And I mean that literally.”

“Not to worry. I have tapped into the magic forces of the Museum. You just unleash that rapturous voice of yours, and Mama will take care of the rest.”

Ruby smiles, like she’s putting up a brave front. “It’s been a while.”

“Oh save it, sister. You know and I know that the music will start and you will click in like you always do. If you freeze up, just flash ‘em your tits. You’re already halfway there.”

“Ha! Use ‘em if you got ‘em, I always say. Maybe I’ll feel better if I go outside and look for the ship. Or not.”

She’s looking over my shoulder at a strapping middle-aged man, wearing a Santa suit that looks like it was tailored by Armani. Instead of the bushy white beard, his is a well-trimmed silver, to go with a moussed head of same, crow’s feet to die for, and eyes of the most oceanic blue. This is our Fezziwig.

“Scott! Hi.”

“Ho-ho-how are ya?” he declares, trotting the steps.

“How was the crossing?”

“Brrr! Froze off my mistletoes.”

“Some Santa you are. And aren’t you supposed to be fat?”

“Not sporting-goods Santa! Sporting-goods Santa likes to work out.” He gives Ruby an appreciative look. “And who is this? My fourth wife?”

“Well!” I say. “You certainly dress alike. This is your holiday chanteuse, Ruby.”

“Joyeux Noel,” says Ruby, and reaches for Scott’s hand.

“Ah!” says he. “All the best Mrs. Clauses are Jewish.”

“Oy!” says Ruby. “And here I thought I was fully assimilated.”

“A Christian icon should never admit this, but I’ve always had a profound weakness for the Hebrew goddesses.” His eyes are threatening to twinkle. “In fact, I married three of them. And sent most of my… income to… three of them.”

“Hmm,” says Ruby. “This could be the the Reverse-Shiksa Syndrome.”

Scott lets out a Santa-like roar. “And that is why I love them: that rapid-fire wit. Channy promises me great things from you.”

“Oh God – more pressure. Where’s the rest of your crew?”

“I thought it best that they view the galleries first. I’m thinking egg nog and expensive glass art is a bad combination.”

“That’s why you’re the boss,” I say.


I’ve never done a DJ gig before, and it does present some interesting adjustments. In karaoke, the relationship is automatic: they order the song, I play it. DJ’ing involves much more judgement, gauging the mood of a party and picking the music to match.

The employees drift in from the galleries, looking a little imprisoned by their suits and dresses. I’m keeping things on the down-low, a mix of mellow jazz and Christmas tunes. Then I look up to find seven young adults gathered at my table. Their ringleader is a tall, lean white guy with a military haircut.

“You got any Black-Eyed Peas?”

“Oh! Um, sure. I didn’t know you were ready to dance.”

“We was born ready, f’shizzle!”

The white kids shore talk funny these days, I think, and slap on “My Humps.” I notice, also, that they are apostles of the latest dancing trend, which focuses all movement on the region of the buttocks. I throw on some Outkast, the Gorillaz, Eminem. A half-hour later, I look up to find an older manager type, looking forlorn.

“Could you play something slow? I’d like to dance with my wife.”

“Oh! Um, sure. Very next song.”

“Thanks.”

I play “Lady in Red,” a sneaky reference to Ruby’s outfit. And I play slow songs until someone asks for “The Cha-Cha Slide,” “The Hustle” and “YMCA,” complete with spelling-through-extremities dance moves. Then I insist on “White Christmas” (Bing Crosby being a Tacoma boy), and everybody looks at me like I’m insane.

So with this crowd, at least, DJ’ing is just as much servitude as KJ’ing – but servitude with no clear instructions. It’s a relief when we arrive at Ruby’s portion of the evening. Scott gives a holiday greeting that’s marvelously light on ego and oratorio (I’m beginning to consider the advantages of a May-December relationship), then Ruby takes a crowd of feuding dancers and zaps them into a classroom of teacher’s pets. Her “Christmas Song” is a velvet dream, as pitch-perfect as Nat King. She takes a moment to explain how “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is actually a sad song – that Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis is actually singing about being forced to leave her beloved Missouri immediately after the holidays. What’s amazing is that no one’s even singing along. Even through a fog of nog, our sporting-goods employees seem to understand that what they’re watching is theater.

During the applause, I hear the past whispering in my ear. It says, “That is one fine damn singer.” When I turn to face the past, it’s Kai, wearing a grin as white as the snow in Bing Crosby’s dreams. So I stand, and give him a huge hug.

“Kai! It’s so good to see you! And the question would be, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I work for Scott. He’s a great boss. Shouldn’t you have some music on?”

“Oh. Duh!” I slip on a filler disc of Christmas tunes. Fortunately, the next item on the agenda is a hot-shop demonstration. Two burly men in aprons have extracted long rods from the furnace, capped with honey-like gobs of molten glass. We head upstairs to the lobby, gravitating to a glass Christmas tree that looks more like a bristlecone pine – barren, gnarled limbs hung with figurines in various military uniforms.

“So how are you?” I say. “What’s the new job?”

He looks at me and just laughs.

“What? What’d I say?”

“I’m working in the mountaineering department.”

So I look at him and laugh. “Do you even have any experience?”

“I’ll tell you what I told Scott during my interview. Wouldn’t you want to buy your climbing gear from a genuine Sherpa?”

“Rascal!”

“Your pizza from a guy named Luigi? Your Guinness from a guy named O’Reilly? So yea, I played the race card. But I do have a sincere interest. First chance I get, I’m scaling Rainier. Take a picture at the top, send it to Mom and Dad. So you’re DJ’ing now?”

“First time. I like it, though. And I like the money.”

Kai dons a calculating expression. “How did you get here tonight?”

“Ruby. She lives up the hill from here, but she was so amped up, she insisted on being my driver.

“How much gear do you have?”

“Just the stuff on the table – and a couple CD cases. What’s up?”

He just smiles, takes my hand and says, “Let’s dance.”

When we enter, the hot-shop guys are still at it, clamping and bending the glass into something resembling an agave cactus. On the remaining half of the stage, a handful of dancers are waltzing to “Silver Bells,” including Scott and Ruby (I imagine red paint on her shoes). Kai strikes a posture of invitation, and I notice that he is not imprisoned by his suit at all. I take his raised hand, feel his other hand at my waist, and we’re off into the crowd. And he can waltz. Of course he can waltz.


As a suitabley ironic finale, I play “Get Ths Party Started,” then proceed directly to my packing, slotting my CDs into their plastic pockets. I’m joined by Kai and a couple of young cohorts.

“Channy, this is Jeremy and Sasha. They will be loading your stuff on the company van and meeting us in Gig Harbor. You, meanwhile, will be joining us for a cruise – that is, if you’d like to.”

“Of course!” I say. I direct them to all the proper equipment, then track down Ruby to tell her she can leave without me. Soon I’m descending the wide steps of the museum to the dock, where the Designated Clipper is motoring up. Soon enough, we’re pulling into Commencement Bay and past the Brown’s Point Lighthouse. Though it’s absolutely freezing, I can’t resist standing on deck, connecting the Seuratian dots of Tacoma’s skyline as they fall and shimmy on the dark Puget water. Kai joins me and uses the cold (as I hoped he would) as an excuse to stand close and wrap me with an arm. The moment seems about right.

“Kai, I wanted to thank you for the Purple Heart. It means so much to me. It would have meant so much to Harvey.”

“It’s not for Harvey,” he says, rather abruptly. “The victim of suicide is not the one who commits it, it’s the ones he leaves behind. I will miss him, Channy, but I will never forgive him – not for what he did to me, not for what he did to you.”

There’s something about this statement that seems rehearsed. As if he has had these thoughts many times, and has chiseled them down to these exact words. He must have known that we would eventually run into one another, that I would thank him for the medal. But his tone is unexpectedly intense. It reminds me that Kai, despite his seeming innocence, has witnessed events that I could not possibly imagine.

“Are you all right, Channy?”

I’m not sure if he means at this moment, or generally speaking.

“Yes. I’m fine. And you’re very sweet.”

The dots of Tacoma disappear into his dark eyes, and his lips – the ones I have thought about more times than I would care to admit – are alighting upon mine. A chamber in the doorlock of my mind clicks in like the lift of a lyric set carefully into the pocket of a song.


Next: Wartime Harvey

Image by MJVPurchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Outro: The Serial Novel

Nineteen

Meeting Scootie

Ruby

Three years later, I was still with Joe’s troupe, Greenstreet Productions, alternating between big roles and small, fending off anything that smacked of administrative duties. I displayed my kryptonite competence only when it came to knowing my lines, arriving punctually and performing with every cell in my body. I did, however, have an intriguing proposition in my pocket: Joe had invited me to direct one of the shows for the upcoming season. It was tempting but scary, because I knew I’d be good at it and I didn’t want anything to come between me and the audience.

It was late summer, down-time before the fall opening. I found a flyer for an artists’ collective at a bar around the corner – a place called Savvy’s. When I walked in, the mood was positively Beatnik. The garret from Puccini’s Boheme. Andy Hardy putting on a show in the barn.

I swam through the bar crowd until I reached a wide pit where a funk band was wrapping up “Sex Machine,” a skinny black guy in a British cap spazzing a James Brown shuffle across the floor. Then the DJ called up a slam poet, a short, squat guy with a Fiddler-on-the-Roof beard. He jumped into a piece about trying to eliminate the excess food from his pantry, and instead winding up in an eating competition with Death. The rhythm of his words accelerated with a Bolero graduality until they caught fire and burst into a Ginsbergian inventory of comestibles. People were falling out of their chairs, probably on purpose.

By the time he was done, a reggae band had finished setting up, and rolled into a Jimmy Cliff tune. I took the opportunity to saunter up to the balcony, where a trio of painters were doing “live works.” A large black woman was pressing broad swipes of acrylic across a canvas, setting up the strata for a seascape. A baby-faced Puerto Rican kid scratched at a charcoal portrait: an old drunk leaning against a bar, wearing a look of utter dejection.

The third guy was older, mid-thirties, tall, a head of thick black hair with apostrophes of gray. He looked like he had never made an awkward movement in his life. He was working on a cartoonish, beatific creature with fan-shaped wings – or petals, I couldn’t tell. It stood upon a pedestal-like body, wide as a tree trunk. The background was an intricate network of lines, but looking closely I could see that it was actually composed of faces, their features melting into the mass: an Aztec warrior in profile, an amoeba with misplaced Picasso eyes, a robot alien with a saucer-shaped head.

The man was dipping a terry-cloth rag into a bowl of raw sienna paint, then scrubbing it into one of the petals – or wings. He gave me a quick glance, but kept steadily at his work. For a moment, I felt guilty for distracting him, but of course that’s what he was there for. And, to answer stupid questions.

“Whatcha doin’?”

He looked up with eyes so black you could fall right in. “You want the short version or the encyclopedic?”

“Um… I’m gonna go for the short.”

“We begin with a central figure: the ruby-throated angelflower. A profoundly positive presence, I filled in the background with a coterie of beer-coaster creatures, then sort of macramed them together in order to, in order to… Actually, I have no idea.”

“To make them look like a crowd?”

He snapped his fingers very loudly, then stared at them in surprise. “Wow – what’s that about? But yes! A crowd. Out of which rises the angelflower, like the rare and sudden blossoming of the century plant, erupting from the desert of the hoi polloi.

“I have this thing about complicated backgrounds. I get so attached to a project that I hate to see it end – so all this meticulous stuff helps to extend the work. Right now you’ve caught me at the final step, which is frankly like a three-year-old with a coloring book. I like to water down my acrylics, then scrub them in. Gives a nice solid block of color – but transparent, so it reveals the flaws in the canvas.”

“Why do you want to reveal flaws?”

“I like a surface that’s seen some livin’. This one was a dropcloth. Note the little splatters of black at the top of the stem. That was an oil change.”

He took another swab at his bowl and worked a corner of the petal, drawing the paint right up to the thick black line at its periphery.

“I can’t stand art that’s too smooth. If you’re not going to reveal the process at all, then why bother? This notion of creating perfect, untouched forms is riven with hubris. What are you doing after the show?”

He said all of this at a shot, and I wasn’t entirely certain that I’d been asked a question.

“Um, I don’t really know.”

“I have to show you something.”

I laughed. “Don’t think I’ve never heard that one before.”

He took my hand and held on tight, as if we were about to shake on a deal.

“What’s your name?”

“Ruby.”

He smiled. Large, dazzling teeth. “You see?”

“Ruby-throated,” I said. “As in fate?”

“As in coincidence – which is better, and tastier. You are one of the special ones. You do something creative?”

“So now you’re a psychic?”

He laughed. “Ask the right question in the right milieu, and your odds are pretty good.”

“Yes,” I said. “Actress.”

“Ah – of course. Lots of personalities swimming around in there. When you first came up, I thought there was a whole mob watching me. I’ll be done at midnight. Can I meet you at the bar?”

“What? I can’t watch you?”

“Actually, no. I’d be too distracted. Along with being one of the special ones, you’re enormously attractive.”

Picture me as an LP on a turntable; my needle has just been yanked away. I tried and failed to fight down a goofy smile.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Scootie.” He shook the hand I’d forgotten he was holding. “And yes, there’s a story behind that, too. But I need to get back to my painting.”

He let go, and I drifted downstairs. I gave some serious thought to leaving – he was entirely too smooth. But this cool punk band was playing, dressed in big chunks of black and white fabric, and a beer sounded really good.

Two bands and a standup comic later, Scootie appeared over my left shoulder, continuing our previous conversation as if we’d never stopped.

“When I was a baby, I had a middle ear infection. It messed up my sense of balance, and I took to crawling sideways, like a crab. So I got my nickname: ‘Scootie’. Have you done any Beckett?”

I fixed him with a look, and attempted to restart the conversation in a more normal fashion. “Hi, Scootie. How ya doin’?”

He blinked. “I’m fine. How are you?”

“Good! Waiting for Godot.”

You could see that little tidbit striking a speed-bump in his head – which was exactly my intention.

“Isn’t that…?”

“All-female cast,” I said. “We thought of calling it Waiting for Goddess, but we figured we were pushing our luck as it was.”

The bartender raced by, planted a Heinekin in front of Scootie, spoke the words “Jacks and Queens” and kept going.

Scootie eyed the label, said “Ah, Jacks and Queens,” and took a drink. “What did you think of it?” he asked.

“Jacks and Queens?”

“Beckett.”

I did my best to look thoughtful (I’m sure I did – I had practiced my “thoughtful” look in a mirror many times). “Irrational. Maddening. Plotless. Ridiculous. I loved it.”

“You ought to love me then.”

“Umm… maybe?” Keep it moving, keep it moving. “So where do your figures come from?”

“John Cage.”

“Oh. I thought Cage was a musician.”

“You thought Da Vinci was a painter. Music was Cage’s day job. When the moon came out, he was a philosopher. And the master cartographer of chance operations.”

Scootie took a pen from behind his ear and flipped over a beer coaster. Then he drew a long line, vaguely ess-shaped.

“I can’t illustrate worth shit. Any time I attempt to pull in something from the real world, it goes through some kind of crippling filter and ends up looking like the work of an unimaginative three-year-old. So I go backwards.”

He drew a straight line through the ess at a slant.

“I keep drawing lines until something makes itself known.”

A question mark with no period. Three sides of a square, facing down.

“When I arrive at the point of identity, I finish the job with the universal signifiers: eyes, nose, mouth – sometimes ears, or hair.”

He gave the question-mark head a pair of almond-shaped eyes, then angled a mouth-line with a small notch for a smirk. The nose was already there, a product of the first two lines. The upside-down square offered a torso; he added long, thin rectangles to imply arms.

“Sometimes they turn out, sometimes not. Sometimes they become ruby-throated angelflowers.”

“This one looks French,” I said. “That smirk might actually be a cigarette.”

Scootie smiled, initialed the coaster SJ and handed it to me.

“Here. Might be worth a dollar someday.”



He had a loft (of course he had a loft). It was pretty bare of furniture, and instead of a rug he had a canvas dropcloth, ten foot square, nailed to the floor. Affixed to the far wall was a canvas, five feet tall, three wide. It appeared to contain a swarm of mosquitoes, but closer inspection revealed words, hundreds of them, written with a black marker. I saw libretto, 1967, and Sutherland.

“What the hell is going on here?”

“Chance operations,” he said. “The human mind craves organization – and that’s the problem. I was in a choir once, singing a piece that called for white noise, within a certain range of pitches. Inevitably, we would gravitate toward consonance – toward chords. So we had to spend a half-hour assigning individual pitches to individual singers. There were some who hated that piece, but I thought it was the most beautifully constructed chaos I’d ever heard.

“The thing is, in order to achieve true randomness, you have to set up some ground rules beforehand. In this case, I determined to take the New Grove Book of Opera – all 687 pages of it – and extract the first word from each page. On the canvas, I depended on my natural ability to shuffle, beginning with any available white space and not caring if it ran roughshod over other words. I wanted a virtual windstorm of verbiage. Unbeknownst to you, I have already pencilled in the central figure, and will now bring him into being. Please – sit.”

He handed me a cushion, and I sat on the floor, cross-legged. He produced a small housepainting brush, dipped it into a jar of black paint and drew a rough line over the canvas. He began with two lines that started at the top center and extended outward. He drew a vee from one shoulder to another, trailing into a shape that resembled a tie. At either side of the X, he affixed the same almond eyes as his coaster creature, then a wide, flat oval for a mouth, vaguely merry. He stood back for a moment, then dipped the brush, took the tips of the X and extended them to the upper corners. He took a last look, notched a pocket on either side of the tie, then tossed the brush over his shoulder. It landed on the dropcloth with a splat. Then he knelt behind me, gripped my shoulders and said, “So. What is he?”

I took a few moments to study.

“The Creature from the Black Lagoon in a business suit.”

“Or a suit for the opera,” said Scootie.

“But those antennae…?”

“Yes! That popped in just now.”

“Like a cockroach. A giant impresario cockroach, off to the opera.”

“Luciano Cucaracchi,” he said.

I let out a burst of laughter, like a sneeze. “Okay.”

“Hey, I don’t make up the names. They just come in on the satellite dish. Now, take off your shoes.”

There was my decision point. A girl doesn’t take off her shoes just for anyone.

So I did. Scootie disappeared and came back with a pair of square plastic tubs. In one he poured red paint, in the other black.

“It’s just like roullette. Pick a color.”

I stood up and gave them a study. “Dare I ask why?”

“Ask yourself this question: what color do I want my feet to be for the next week?”

“You’re nuts.”

“We’ve established that. Now pick.”

“Red. Of course.”

“Communist!”

“Vampire!”

“Go ahead. Do the Hokey-Pokey.”

I knew if I thought about it, I wouldn’t, so I didn’t think about it. I don’t need to tell you how it felt, because you know how it felt. Scootie pushed a button on his stereo and conjured a waltz – that soprano from Boheme, in the café. He rolled his trousers to his knees, planted himself in the black, then left a trail of dance-instruction footprints on his way to the center of the dropcloth. He raised his hands; I stepped forward and took them.

And he could waltz (of course he could waltz). And of course I could waltz – I was a performer. We stopped at regular intervals to reload our feet. After that came Sinatra, “Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week,” and we switched to swing. Scootie’s lead was perfect, all the signals there in his big hands, twirling me one way, wrapping me the other. At the ending, he dipped me so deeply that, the next morning, I found streaks of red and black in my hair.

Scootie pulled me to my feet, kissed my hands and said, “We’re done.”

I stood on red tip-toes, kissed him on the neck and said, “Not hardly.”


Next: A Glassy Christmas


Image by MJV

Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Eighteen

Army Karaoke

Channy

Moving to a new state, meeting a boy, shacking up. Lots of people do these things, they’re downright ordinary – but I couldn’t believe they had happened to me, and in such a short time. I was also lost in the particulars of the boy – the boy who gloried in slaying imaginary beings, who obsessed over military equipment, who brought me flowers at the least-expected moments and made love more tenderly than I knew a boy could. I pictured myself driving a tractor through the long valley of Harvey – this field with soy beans, that with weeds, tulips followed by brambles, wheat, hard-baked pan. Were all men such checkerboards?

His first weekend away came at the end of August. I woke to a soldier in my doorway, dressed in jungle fatigues. It repelled me; it excited me. I wanted to run in claustrophobic terror. I wanted to adopt a foreign accent and proceed directly to role-playing. Oh, American soldier boy. Save me from the Cossacks!

He grinned rather loopily. “I’m off to the front, baby. Tonight we take Tacoma.”

“You look handsome.”

“I feel like I’m going to a freakin’ costume party.”

“You’ll be fine.” I rolled out of bed and slipped my arms around his waist. “One thing, though. That smartass sense of humor that I so absolutely adore?”

“Yes?”

“You might want to suppress that.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He gave me a kiss, his breath strong with mouthwash. I would have preferred more Harvey, less Listerine.

“Well! I’m running late. Have a good weekend, darlin’. I’ve instructed the third division to keep an eye on the place.”

He was off before I could ask. I flopped back to bed for a much-deserved sleep-in. At noon, I drifted into the living room to find two hundred green plastic army men lined up on the mantelpiece.



It was a beautiful, beautiful day. The cap of Rainier poked over the ridge like a monster bicuspid. I felt small and lonely – and what was that about? Had I not left Alaska precisely to be alone? Independent? Reckless? I employed this thought to whip myself into action, scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom till they shone, mopping the hardwood floors, beating the rugs, and generally enjoying the free space left by the absence of one sprawling male anatomy.

Still, it was a small house, and I didn’t kill half the time that I needed to, so I crossed the street to the bison field, trying for the twenty-third time to tempt them with wads of freshly picked grass. Not that grass was hard to come by, but I was hoping that presentation would count for something. Bessie and Ben moved not an inch from the exact geographical center of the field, and considering the sad history of American-bison relations, I could not blame them.

I was wandering in the direction of the strip mall when I noticed a man shuttling between Kerby’s Café and a burgundy SUV, toting various large black objects. He had a thick shank of white hair, and wore large, thick glasses that reminded me of Dr. Steinwitz, my pediatrician in Anchorage.

I had a rather dim view of Kerby’s. The patrons were a rough bunch, and they often kept Harvey and me awake, yelling to their buddies across the parking lot. At closing time, a parade of headlights flashed across our windows.

But I was bored, so I crossed the parking lot to investigate.

“Hi! Whatcha loadin’ up for?”

He gave me a studied look, absolutely nonplussed.

“Karaoke.”

“Oh! Cool.”

“Ever try it?”

“Once. At a birthday party. They only had thirty songs, though.”

“Ha! We’ve got seventeen thousand. All on a computer.”

“God! Are there seventeen thousand songs in the world?”

“I still get complaints about the ones we don’t have. You should sing tonight. We start at nine.”

“Oh, well… I’m only eighteen.”

“No problem. If you bring those mic stands in, I’ll make you my official roadie.”

“Wow! Thanks.”

“Strictly Coca-Cola, mind you.”

His name was J.B., which I later found out stood for James Brown. He was about the whitest-looking man I’d ever seen, so I didn’t really see the need for the initials. (One day he met Bobby Vinton at a party and said, “Wow! You’re Bobby Vinton.” Vinton said, “Well what’s it like, meeting Bobby Vinton?” And J.B. said, “I don’t know. What’s it like meeting James Brown?”)

By day, J.B. ran a computer shop, and he took great pleasure in showing me his high-tech karaoke system. He could hunt for a song using a keyword, then play it with a mouse-click. A window to the left kept a running roster of singers, along with the songs they had picked that night – and, for the regulars, every song they had ever sung. At the bottom was a list of filler songs that came on whenever a karaoke song was over, and he could also play canned applause – or, for the end of the night, the Warner Brothers’ “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”

“I actually helped design this,” said J.B. “I was in a test group for the software developers, and they used a lot of my suggestions. That’s why I like it so much.”

“Is he boring you with his technobabble?”

This came from a woman behind me, wearing big glasses just like J.B.’s. She was short and squat, a bundle of curves with a round, pleasant face. And, evidently, a wry sense of humor.

“He’s more in love with that program than with me. So who are you?”

“Oh, hi. I’m Channy.”

“She’s my summer intern,” said J.B.

“J.B.! Is she underage? You’re gonna get us into trouble.”

“Oh, nonsense. I checked her in with Laura. Nothing but Shirley Temples and Roy Rogerses.”

“Well, okay. Why don’t you sit up here with me, then? I get bored when Mr. Man’s making out with his computer.”

Her name was Debbie – wife and emcee, which meant she had plenty of time to chat between singer intros. You could tell, also, that she took a lot of pleasure in the characters who populated the bar. There was Diana, the archetypal brassy broad, who sang bawdy country tunes like “You Can Eat Crackers in My Bed.” And Cowboy, who wore an old hat covered in patches and pins, and sang nothing but Lynyrd Skynyrd, curled up in the corner with a cordless mic. A plentifully soused blonde named Jolene took great pleasure in singing “Jolene.” And skinny, bald Rory kept trying to do ‘70s rock anthems that were too high for him.

I was really enjoying this – all of it. The way the songs drew instant connections between people. The way the old guy in the beret showed his approval by yelling “Sing that shit!” The feeling of deep history, friendships that had survived decades, perhaps broken apart by crises and fights, but brought back together by the same gravity that created them. And Debbie, who took her husband’s recklessness as a license to be my foster mother for the evening.

“So what’s the story, Channy? Everybody’s got a story.”

“I came down from Alaska last month, and… I met a boy.”

“Oh! She met a boy. I sure know that story.”

“It’s so… unsettling sometimes. Actually, that’s how I ended up here tonight. He’s in the Army National Guard, and this was his first weekend away. I was feeling pretty isolated.”

“Well! I’m glad you found us. Are you gonna sing something?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done this for real before.”

“Well.” She gave my knee a pat. “Here’s what I tell all my beginners. Pick a song that you know frontwards and back. The song you know best in the world. It’s very important to have a good experience the first time out. Kinda like sex. Omigod! Did I say that?”

The way she put it, my choice was pretty obvious: “Beautiful Day,” my graduation song. The only problem was staying on the melody. I kept wandering to the alto harmonies that James had written (James who just then was headed off to meet his death in Minnesota). But Debbie smiled at me like I’d hit one out of the park.

“That was great!” She spoke into my ear as Rory did battle against Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” “I like those new parts you threw in. Where’d you learn that?”
“Well, it’s a long story.”
She patted my knee again. “I’ve got all the time in the world, honey.”


Sunday evening, I sat at the kitchen table with a plate of cold pork chops and asparagus, watching the sun slanting over the bison-field in tangerine stripes. I was interrupted by my pickup truck, dragging into the driveway with my own soldier-boy at the wheel. He edged up the walk with a limp and gave me a weak smile, his face smudged here and there with camo makeup. I wrapped him in a hug.

“Hi honey.”

“Hi.”

“How was it?”

“You remember what you said about my smartass sense of humor?”
“Yes?”

“A hundred pushups.”

I couldn’t help but giggle.

“Oh! She mocks my injuries.”

“Sorry, darlin’. But I did tell you.”

“You did. But a hundred pushups tends to drill the point home.”
I ran a finger across his dirty, sweaty brow and down his cute nose.

“Poor baby. Take a shower, and I’ll heat up this food.”

“Thanks.”

He slogged off to the bathroom, pausing at the mantelpiece to salute the third division. I felt bad for him, but it felt good to be needed.


Next: The Artist as an Interloper


Image by MJV

Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Outro: The Serial Novel

Chapter Seventeen, Part II

Visiting Hours

The second time around, we decide that a reprise of Xscape is unnecessary, but the subsequent shuffle lands me on Z. I perform a decent rendering of “Tush” by ZZ Top, and am halfway through loading up when I remember something I have to check with Ruby. She’s still at her table, mooning over Harry. They’ve decided to sleep in their own beds tonight, so they’re extending the evening as long as they can.

“Hi guys. That was fun, wasn’t it?”

“Shore was,” says Harry. “Next time, we go numerical!”

“Three Dog Night,” says Ruby.

“Four Non-Blondes,” says Harry.

“10,000 Maniacs,” I say. “Where’s Steve?”

“Smoke break,” says Ruby.

“Your brother’s a chimney,” I say.

“Yes,” says Ruby. “But a functioning chimney.”

I make a mental note to someday figure out what’s going on with that boy.

“So Rubbayat,” I say.

“Omar Khayam?”

“I’ve got a KJ gig for a holiday office party, and I need a soloist to do a couple of the CEO’s favorite tunes.”

“What’re you? Braunschweiger?”

“I don’t need a singer. I need a performer.”

Ruby purses her lips in a way that probably drives Harry crazy with lust. “Name the songs.”

“‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ and ‘Christmas Song.’”

“Sold!” says Ruby, slapping the table. “And I also want to marry the CEO.”

“Hey!” says Harry. “I might have picked the same songs.”

“My ass! You woulda picked that hip-swingin’ lip curlin’ trailer trash you’re so in love with.”

“I’m sorry,” says Harry. “I didn’t hear a word after you mentioned your ass.”

“We’ll discuss my dairy-air tomorrow night, Bubba.” She crawls up his chest for a lingering kiss, then she looks back at me and her face winds down like a clock.

“Um… Channy? Could I talk to you outside? It’s a feminine matter.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure.”

Harry, being Harry, has to throw his two cents at our departure.

“Don’t tell her any of my secrets!”

I have no idea which one of us he’s addressing, but I guess that’s part of the joke. We pass Steve just outside the entrance, puffing away, and Ruby says, “Fifteen minutes, hermano mio.”

“Grassy-ass,” he mumbles.

The rain has passed, leaving the asphalt clean and slick. Ruby takes me to a seawall overlooking the harbor. Our distance from the bar makes me wonder about the radioactivity of her subject matter. She stops and turns, her breath puffing in the cold air.

“Okay. I don’t know if my surging hormones are tripping my gyno-radar, but you are transmitting this aurora borealis of sadness that is deeper than Billie Freakin’ Holiday.”

Little did I know about the hot button lurking beneath my skin, waiting to be pressed in just this fashion.

“Why are guys such dicks? Showing off their catches like they just landed a marlin off the Florida Keys… What the fuck is that?”

Ruby reaches to touch me, and I whack her hand away. I’m poison ivy, I’m cactus – no one should touch me. Then I see a line of blood where I’ve scratched her wrist.

“Oh! Shit, Ruby. My bracelet.”

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s nothing.”

“God, I’m being an idiot. Why am I being an idiot?”

Ruby pulls out a tissue and dabs at her wrist. “I’ve got a theory,” she says.

We stop to watch a small boat chug past, a large gray-bearded man standing at the wheel.

“So,” I say. “What’s your theory?”

“I’ll tell you if you let me touch you.”

“Sure,” I say, but her caring tone is sending me deeper into my funk. I set my elbows on the seawall and prop my weary head on my hands. Ruby rubs the back of my neck. It feels good.

“A guy likes a woman; a woman likes a guy. He asks her out, but she’s too wounded to say yes. Still, she’s kinda hopin’ he’ll be there at the hospital entrance when she finally checks out. But she looks out her window one night and finds him at a restaurant across the street, having dinner with some fucking blonde best-seller.”

I find my face sinking deeper into my hands. The only way to keep from crying is to continue being a smartass.

“Put another bullet through my heart, why dontcha?”

Ruby laughs, and sings a quiet recitative into my ear. “Isn’t that why you gave me the bullets in the first place?”

Next: Welcome to the Army

Image by MJV

Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Outro: The Serial Novel

Chapter Seventeen, Part One

The Alphabet Game

Ruby’s not five minutes done with her story when her brother walks into the coffeehouse – a retro-funky place in Tacoma called the Blackwater. Steve looks like a run-down house that someone has painted over in the hope of hiding all the cracks. Neat, shortcut hair, spiffy indigo-new jeans, tightly tucked button-down shirt and bright white sneakers. His features, however, are all shaky around the margins – as if, at any moment, he could be sucked into a wormhole.

I’m cheating, of course. I know from Ruby’s frequent references that Steve has had trouble, that he’s just now working his way out of it. Even as I’m being introduced, I’m running his face through my interior rap sheet: drugs? petty larceny?

“Hi! It’s great to finally meet you. Ruby talks about you a lot.”

He unlocks a smile, rising in a wave from left to right. “I hope, um… I hope she’s been kind.”

“Oh! Always,” I say.

“I’ve never been to karaoke before. I hear it’s fun.”

“Oh it is!” says Ruby. “Especially with Channy hosting. She’s the best.”

“I will not sit here and be flattered!” I complain.

“Well fine then!” says Ruby. “Let’s go!”

“Fine!” says I.

“Fine!” says Ruby.

We stride out the door, waving to Luna at the counter. Steve trails behind, shaking his shaky head.

“Man! You two are nuts.”

It’s a rainy, brooding night, and stormclouds bear down on the Narrows, buffeting my pickup. This does not bode well for my tip jar. People only need two reasons for skipping karaoke, and on Thursday they’ve already got that Friday morning alarm clock.

I delay our start-time by a half hour, hoping to work up a quorum. To operate at a smooth pace, you need at least three singers. This gives each participant one song to take a breather and one song to pick the next song. Steve’s not going to be much help. Actually singing in front of people would likely give him a heart attack, and he’s already disappeared twice on smoke breaks. (Ruby says this is his first night out in a while, and it seems to be making him very anxious.)

Fortunately, Harry arrives, still in uniform, grabbing armfuls of Ruby as he enters. Five minutes later, we get a trio of newbies – although they’re certainly not new to karaoke. You can tell by the way they scoop up the songbooks and rifle the pages.

Turns out they’re also good. The first is John, a tall fortyish white guy who sings R & B ballads with a sirloin-steak baritone. The second is Paul, a bald black guy who’s interested in things further up, whipping out some falsetto doo-wop from the fifties. The blonde centerpiece is Kim, an attractive thirty-year-old who navigates Annie Lennox and Melissa Etheridge with a consummately pitched voice – almost as good as Ruby’s. She comes up for a little side-bar as Harry works his way through “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”

“It’s a little deal I’ve got with my husband,” she says. “In order to avoid The Horror That is Dancing with Your Wife, he takes the kids once a week while I go for a trot with my dirty old men. Once we’ve worn out our feet, we hunt down a karaoke bar.”

“So are John and Paul gay, or just well-mannered?”

Kim bursts out laughing. “They are my caballeros. I gotta watch it, though. Sometimes they get too comfortable, and start making racy comments about the other chicks in the bar.”

“Well,” I say. “Even when they’re well-trained, they’re still dogs. So what’s with this gorgeous voice of yours?”

Kim looks away, a little knocked aside by my flattery. “Tell you a secret: I actually had a full ride to Julliard. Some scout came to my high school for a choir concert. Like I was a quarterback or something. I was pretty blown away. But they wanted me to sing opera and nothing else. I just wasn’t into it. Then I met a guy, had some babies. Old story.”

“Sounds like you made the right decision. Ruby’s been telling me about life in the performing arts, and it sounds like you’d best be really into it before you enlist.”

“I knew it!” says Kim. “I knew she was a pro. She’s amazing.”

“She’s my hero,” I say, only half-joking.

“So the Mod Squad and I were thinking, if you guys were into it, maybe we could play a little game. First singer does something by an ‘A’ artist, second singer does ‘B,’ and so on.”

“Tonight I’ll try anything. I’ll make an announcement after Harry, um, gets to Phoenix.”

Kim smiles and hands me a song slip: “Fernando” by ABBA.

In actual practice, the alphabet game turns out to be quite fun. Except that yours truly gets all the problematic letters. Q, naturally, which almost always calls for Queen – which, in the world of karaoke, means “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I’m no fool, however – I get Ruby, Kim and John to help out with the goofy opera parts, while Harry throws down some wicked toy guitar.

A half-hour later comes X, and there’s only one choice: some ‘80s R & B group called Xscape. I vaguely vaguely vaguely recall the song, but it’s not like not knowing what the hell I’m doing ever stopped me before, so I claw my way through, tossing out some Whitney Houston embellishments that may or may not be on-key. I’m much relieved to hand the mic to Harry for “Cinnamon Girl” by Neil Young.

Ruby’s working her way through “Lawyers, Guns and Money” by Warren Zevon (how does she know this stuff?) when I hear the door and the familiar high-pitched laugh that belongs to Kevin the Cop. And another that doesn’t.

She is a blonde, in jeans, jacket and a crisp white blouse. She has sly, dreamy eyes that remind me of Lauren Bacall. Something about her entrance has knocked the room off-kilter: troubled brothers, newbie trios, Q’s and X’s sliding around like ping-pong balls in a Bingo basket. Kevin comes up for his usual hug, and I regain my balance long enough to fill him in on the alphabet game.

“So, if my calculations are correct, you’re ‘F.’ Is your, um, friend gonna sing?”

Kevin smiles, glances at the blonde and launches into a completely unrequested explanation: “I went to a reading for this ‘how-to’ dating book. Figured I could use all the help I could get. So now I’m dating the author! Diane. She is so funny! I never knew how sexy that was.”

Kevin finally notices that I’m still waiting for my answer.

“Oh! No – she’s just here to listen. I’ll go find some effin’ song to sing. Ha!”

And then he’s off.



Next: The Hospital Entrance

Image by MJV

Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Outro: The Serial Novel

Chapter 16, Part II

Ruby

Getting the Part


Joe lived nearby, on 8th Street, a block over from St. Mark’s Place. I was early, so I strolled the cheesy gift shops, sorting through mod sunglasses and dominatrix dog collars (I got the latter for Eddy, betting that he would get some use out of it). I walked into a forest of Indian restaurants, the air laced with curry and tabla music. A dozen locals had set up an impromptu sidewalk sale, arranging appliances and clothing on straw mats and old quilts.

Finding Joe’s address, I opened a wrought-iron gate and descended to his basement apartment. But what a basement! Joe greeted me with a kiss on the cheek (which I took as a promising sign) then led me through a modest hallway of bedrooms to a cavernous living room. You could have a basketball game in there! The furniture was shoved to the walls on all sides, leaving the center to a semi-circle of folding chairs.

“Have a stiff, hard seat,” said Joe. “You want a stiff, hard drink with that?”

A thin, attractive man waltzed in (and I mean the waltzing part literally), his blond hair cut so tight to his head that it could have passed for a shower cap.

“Stiff? Hard? Who’s using all my favorite adjectives?”

“Oh!” said Joe. “Marlin, come over and meet Ruby. She’s the non-acting New Yorker I told you about.”

Marlin samba’d over and dropped a hand into mine. His eyes were swimming-pool blue, parasolled by neat platinum brows.

“Frankly, I don’t believe you exist,” he said. “Cause girlfriend, every New Yorker is an actor. It’s just that some parts are Equity, and some are not.”

“Marlin’s my partner,” said Joe. My brain was running down the list - business partner, writing partner, tennis partner – when Marlin kissed Joe on the lips. Joe replied with a half-serious chiding.

“Marlin! Ix-nay on the issing-kay at the office-ay.”

Marlin grinned in my direction. “I never know when it’s a play-space. Or a play-space. You look like a tough chick, Ruby Red. I’m guessin’ a Manhattan, straight up?”

“You’re guessin’ right, Marlin.” I tightened the bolts on my stiff, hard smile.

Seven actors showed up to read. I was one of three commoners, along with Joe’s banker uncle and Sigrid, a German friend of Marlin’s who turned out to be a high-priced call girl. (And that’s not acting?) When it came time for critiques, I drew on the trinity I learned in college: tough, clear, kind.

“It’s a frickin’ hilarious play, Joe. I really like the dark place that so many of the laughs come from – that is a sweet trick if you can pull it off. You’ve also got some amazingly good visual stuff. The thing about the artificial fangs – I’m gonna be giggling about that for months.

“However, I also think you’re missing a major opportunity. This yo-yo thing between Mimi and Kizer is far and away the most compelling relationship in the play – but you’re pulling your punches, and leaving all the conflict backstage. Imagine the juicy battles those two could have; imagine all the juicy sexual tension it would create. And imagine all the meat this would give to your play – which is a comedy, yes, but a comedy with substance. Have at it, man! Take off the gloves.”

I was right, of course. Joe revisited the whole Mim-Kizer thing and came up with three new scenes (including one in which Mimi illustrates Kizer’s screwed-up behavior using stick figures on a coffeehouse chalkboard). I worried, in fact, that I might have gone too far – that my director skills were bleeding through my carefully painted façade.

I got my answer a month later, two weeks before Christmas, when Joe asked us all back to try out his rewrite. One of his readers – Jackie, biggest flake, smallest talent (a popular combination) – called at the last minute with some fib about a sick roommate.

“Ruby?” said Joe. “Could you read Grady? It’s not a big part – you don’t have to be good at all. I just really need to get a full picture of this rewrite before I get obliterated by the holidays.”

“Sure,” I said. And felt completely unsure.

Grady was the manager of a coffeehouse – twice my size, with a shitkicker pickup and a seven-year-old son. I tried to read her as stiffly as possible. I was afraid that my little flubs might prove too transparent. Regardless, I couldn’t help enjoying the play, which had achieved a perfect blend of tension, release and laughter. I felt a certain stepmotherly pride.

Afterward, Marlin rolled out a buffet table of honeybaked ham, sweet potatoes, bread pudding and egg nog. After quite a few drinks and the departure of most of our readers, I met up with Joe at the punch bowl. I had just at that moment decided to begin greeting him with international variations of his name.

“Jose Verde! Jean-Paul Chartreuse! Yusef Spearmintsky!”

He responded by refilling our glasses and raising a toast.

“To you, Ruby,” he said. “You lying little bitch.”

He said it with a smile, so I guessed I wasn’t in too much trouble.

“Hmmm. Zee jig eez up?”

“The second you opened your mouth tonight. You’re not such a good actor that you can hide the fact that you’re a good actor. It was a noble attempt at mediocrity, but you kept getting carried away by the action and turning into Grady – a pretty neat trick, considering. So why all the espionage?”

I gave him my special squint – the one that’s meant to project extreme distaste. “I didn’t want to be another in the buffalo herd of desperate wannabes. I saw enough of that in LA.”

That last part slipped out. Joe’s eyes grew wider. “LA? ‘Daughter of Movie Mogul Goes Undercover to Conquer Broadway’?”

I cringed. “Casting director.”

Joe held the back of his hand to his forehead, very Scarlet O’Hara.

“You are a certifiable grab bag, Ruby. If that’s your real name.”

“Yes it is,” I said, laughing. “I’m sorry. But your play, Joe. It’s fucking beautiful. It’s exactly the kind of thing I came here for.”

“Well good,” said Joe.

There was a secret context to those two words, but before I could ask, Joe fled the room. He returned with two metallic skewers and a candle.

“Good why?” I asked.

“Good because… I wouldn’t want you to get bored if we have an extended run.”

“I… what?”

“We open on Valentine’s Day. And I want you to play Melissa. Do you know why?”

“No?” I think I was starting to cry.

“Because Melissa is also a lying, deceptive little bitch. But wait! Don’t say yes. We have a certain way of doing this. It’s kind of gay, but so am I. Take this.”

He handed me one of the skewers, which was covered with a substance that looked like tile grout. Joe lit the candle, then directed the tips of the skewers into the flame until they began to shoot out sparks. Then he raised his right hand.

“Do you, Ruby Cohen, vow to play the part of Melissa, in sickness and in health, through good reviews and hatchet-jobs, till closing night do you part?”

I raised my right hand and gazed into Joe’s Apollonian features through a film of tears and a shower of golden meteorites.

“I do.”


Next: The Very Nervous Steve

Image by MJV.

Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1