Stabs at Happiness (8 page)

There is an SUV parked in an almost empty, blacktop parking lot. No one innocent will suffer, the men are assured.

Clouds. Cars. Colors. Brick wall. Trapezoid.

Wooden palettes, weather-beaten and gray. Broken windows. Suspended wires. Some shards of broken glass.

Coca-Cola's beach ads repeat the image of beautiful women in horizontal positions as men move in and out of the picture. The word “fun” is mentioned as a blonde woman, lying on her stomach in a scant bikini, lifts up her head to look between the legs of a man as he hands her a vertical bottle of Coke.

The face is completely different, yet its expression is the same. The change has come too swiftly to see.

Rrrrrr
of a motor.

And then, before the customers have time to move, the next dancer appears. “Hey, let's have a big hand for Stormy!
Stormy
!” She rolls her pelvis as she moves on spiked heels, breasts wobbling while she smiles. She seeks eye-contact with those in front. The music pulsates. Her labia are dry.

Someone is throwing garbage out of the fifth floor window down to the street below. The brown paper bags explode on the gray cement: egg shells, coffee grounds, cat-food cans, banana peels, empty milk cartons, melon rinds, chicken bones and limp brown lettuce bounce up in the air before coming to rest.

In older men, full erection is often not attained until immediately prior to ejaculation. Nipple erection, muscular tension, rectal sphincter contractions are all diminished.

There could be no present tense, no present, without forgetfulness. A veil must fall over reality – in order to eradicate the poisonous past. And yet the past never really dies, nor can it be killed. Reality wears a mask, and behind the mask is but a mirrored face: the mirror always lies.

CODE 3:1

NATURE OF CARE:
Assault — multiple head contusions/lacerations

TIME OUT:
0300
AT SCENE
: 0305
DEPART SCENE:
0313
ARRIVE DESTINATION:
0319

SUBJECTIVE FINDINGS/HISTORY OF CURRENT ILLNESS:
Patient was assaulted with fists approximately ½ hour prior to our arrival by male acquaintance. Negative loss of consciousness. Complains of pain facial/skull area, generalized pain (L) rib cage and (R) lateral leg. Denies neck pain or shortness of breath. During assault, patient was dragged across floor, occasionally kicked.

OBJECTIVE FINDINGS:

26 year old white female, ambulatory to ambulance with assistance. Oriented X 3. Swelling ecchymosis about the eyes and face — eyes swollen shut, with bleeding from beneath the eyelids. Broken teeth, blood from mouth/lip lacerations. Ears clear. Multiple hematomas about the skull. Thorax symmetrical, lungs clear.

ASSESSMENT/IMPRESSION:
Multiple facial/skull contusions, lacerations.

PLAN/TREATMENT:
Transport without incident.

The creation of the universe is very painful: the separation into air, water, fire and earth causes loneliness and pain. Everyone suffers. Please, the elements cry, we want to be together again; we want to crawl up onto the bed and hide under the covers and go back into our mom. We don't want to be alone.

Unable to see each other's face in the dark. Breathing. The flow of blood through bodies made warm through contact flesh to flesh. Some… sounds.

And then the lights.

J
EAN HARLOW
bought a ticket for the train. She was in disguise. She had cut her hair short, darkened her lashes and brows, put on a brunette wig. She was wearing a cheap pink flowered dress, a cloth coat, a demure hat with a veil. Carrying a small suitcase and a beaded purse.

As the train clickety-clacked north, she looked through a
Photoplay
, almost against her will looking for something there about her late, ill-begotten marriage to Paul Bern and his suicide, but the issue was already stale. The words he had written, “You understand last night was only a comedy” had been widely circulated, leaked by MGM hand-in-hand with the LAPD, interpreted by almost everyone to mean Bern was impotent and so had killed himself in shame. Well, it was all old news by now. This was December, 1932.

A salesman, perhaps noticing the bad memory passing through her eyes, was talking to her about his product. “I know times are tough,” he said, “but wouldn't you think that people would always have a need for soap? Myself, I think you can't beat keeping clean.” And he held out his hands as though she might like to inspect his nails.

“That what you sell?” she said, falling into her flirtatious screen voice, “Soap?”

“Handsoap and bathsoap, shampoo, tooth-powder, hair oil, all that kind of stuff.”

He was down on his luck, he said, but he didn't seem depressed. He told Jean (who was calling herself, for the moment, Jane) that he was an incurable optimist.

She said, “Oh, I think it's always curable.”

Hank the salesman laughed and said, well, she might be right.

When they got off the train in San Francisco, Harlow bought him a T-bone steak with all the trimmings, and then (a little nervous, since she'd never, despite her reputation, done this sort of thing before) she paid for their room at the Broadman Hotel. The drinks she'd had at dinner helped with the fear.

She said that she had had typhoid fever as a child and it had left her bald: she would appreciate it if he wouldn't try to remove her wig. He promised her he'd leave it alone.

They took off their clothes and went to bed. She'd planned this adventure for awhile, and thus had had the foresight to dye her pubic hair chestnut brown. All the same, she would have preferred to be in the dark. Hank wanted the lights on, he wanted to “feast his eyes.” Now that he was naked, he wasn't so clean after all.

“Honey, you just relax,” he said, and she sighed, steeling herself.

Sometimes, at home, she used her finger to help get to sleep, listening to her mother wail in the night, down the hall in the big house that Jean had bought for them all. Crying out wildly with ecstasy, driven crazy by her Latin lover, the somewhat worse-for-wear but dapper bigmouth, Marino Bello. There was something in those wild cries she knew was real and moreover knew she herself had never known.

The salesman rearranged the mirror and adjusted the shade.

“I don't mean no offense,” he said, “but, you know, being bald could make you a lot of money. I know some houses back east would give a girl with your kind of body and no hair a pretty damn good job. A lot of guys would go for something like that.”

“Back east?”

“Well, hell… here too I suppose.” He came back for some more. Before he left he gave her some perfumed soap and a bottle of cologne. She wanted to know how she'd been, but when he said something she didn't pay attention, smoking a cigarette and looking in the mirror to see her breasts. She liked to touch herself, she was always caressing herself, drawing attention to her breasts, they weren't that big but they were perfectly shaped, the nipples sensitive and alert. She liked having people look at her, feeling the reflected heat (from the sun? solar flares?) in their eyes.

They must be looking at something, she supposed.

Outside, the theater down the street was playing
Red Dust,
her most recent film, Clark Gable as her leading man. Beneath the marquee, as the audience came out, Jean met some guy. He had some patter and style. They walked over to his battered automobile to have a drink of hooch. He had a silver flask.

She felt frivolous and aroused. There was a full moon. Her sensitive “button” was still engorged from the touch of the salesman, faintly throbbing at her nerves. She felt an enormous sense of adventure as the car pulled away from the curb into the night. Although she'd played the slut in all of her films (only twenty-one, she had already been a star for three-and-a-half years), and had learned to talk tough while fending off all of the pimps who'd been after her since she was an extra, promising her the world if she would set up a bed on one of the scene docks, there was so much traffic… some part of her was curious what such total abandon would be like. Who would you be afterwards?

She'd been married twice: the first at sixteen, an elopement from boarding school that lasted little more than one night; the second time to forty-year-old producer Paul Bern… who then turned out to be so strange, with such complicated problems. Neither of these forays seemed really to count.

“Enjoy the movie?”

“Yeah,” she said. “What about you?”

“It was okay.” They each had a drink. “What's your name, anyway?”

“Jane Johnson. What's yours?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Sure.”

“You positive?”

“Yeah. Sure.” She looked at him in the darkness as he drove.

“Well, I'm Dillinger.”

“No you're not.”

“I might be. You don't know.”

“You don't even look like him.”

“I'm not very photogenic, that's all. In my business, it's an advantage. Lots of those movie stars don't look much like their pictures either; if you met them on the street they might as well be Joe Blow.”

“So where are you taking me, tough guy?”

“To a speak. And call me Rex. That's my name while I'm here in California.”

“Okay, Rex.”

The place was filled with smoke. A Negro jazz band, high on reefer, was playing wide-eyed, like mad. Rex took Jane Johnson around to meet his friends. He still didn't look like Dillinger. They danced and drank more gin, until Rex seemed to have had maybe a little too much to be entertaining. Rex the Wonder-Dog. He was staggering, and his words were all slurred. Harlow wasn't nearly as affected, and she wasn't unhappy when he went away (to look for the bathroom) and another guy, a little older, tougher and slicker, with a malicious grin, asked her to dance. He lit up a funny-smelling cigarette, took a puff and passed it to her, sly smile stuck fast on his mug.

“What is this?” she asked, inhaling. “Dope?”

“If it's good enough for the niggers,” he said, “it's sure good enough for me.”

“Yeah, sure. And I bet you like to pick cotton and shine shoes.”

“That's me,” he grinned. “Eddie the Shade.”

“Gee, you can almost pass.”

“No fooling you, though, is there? Can't get one past a Southern belle. Let me guess: southern Iowa, right?”

“How'd you know?” she said (a Kansas blonde).

“I grow corn up in my room,” he said. “I work for the government; I'm some kind of an agricultural wizard or something. I could feed the city of New York from my backyard.” He was high.

“Yeah,” Jean said, “but how many ways can you eat corn?”

Rex returned from oblivion, pale as a ghost, his hair all combed down wet, and he didn't like Eddie dancing with his girl. He jostled Eddie and Eddie just laughed, saying Wait until they're done with this song. Jean said Take your hand off my arm, and then Rex got mad. He picked up a stranger's iced drink and threw it at Jean, who saw it coming and jerked away so that she only got a little wet on one arm.

Eddie hit Rex in the stomach, on the shoulder, then on the nose and in the eye. He pulled Rex's jacket up over his head inside out and gave him the bum's rush into the hall. Nobody stopped dancing or paid too much attention. The bouncers took Rex outside to get some exercise and fresh air. It gave them something to do.

Jean kissed Eddie on his smile and he took her with him into the back room, a cardroom in disuse. He didn't even want her to undress; he pulled the dress up over her hips and tore off her lacy panties—leaving in place her garter belt and tan stockings. He tested her temperature with a finger, found her sufficiently wet, then spread her thighs and moved in, leaning against her, guiding himself into her with an intelligent hand.

“Come on,” he said. “Move it. Move it around.”

She liked him less all the time but felt powerless to resist. She thought: “Maybe this is how it is, how it has to be for it to work.” She rocked her pelvis, feeling clumsy and uncomfortable. Eddie was pinching her with his fingers, squeezing her buttocks when they relaxed. His face was glazed and cruel. It crossed her mind that he might bite her or beat her up. He was in a hurry, sticking her with jerky little movements like a dog. Bright, hot tears rolled down her rouged and blushing cheeks. She was starting to feel something though.

Gunfire broke out, immensely loud, in the club beyond the door. The noise scorched them. Eddie withdrew his penis abruptly and Harlow yelped. Eddie moved away from her.

Blam blam blam!

Jean adjusted her clothing, the sex-sweat still on her, and sought to escape. There were more explosions, shouts, and breaking glass. She wasn't even that curious about what was really going on. It just seemed like a lot of noise on a nearby sound-stage.

She was in an alley in the gray-blue moonlight. It seemed like she was on the other side of the building, away from the commotion, but she didn't know which way to go now. She watched the band members disperse into the night. They knew how to disappear.

A skinny, limping young colored musician emerged from the back door. He was hanging on to his cornet, so scared he didn't even want to talk with her, he wouldn't answer any of her questions as she followed him down the alley in the dark.

“Wait,” she cried, “You've got to show me where to go.”

The cornet-player turned, regarding her with mistrust, his eyes still big – and then he seemed to change his mind. “Come on then, girl, we ain't got no time to lose.”

He was the one who was slow. Jean didn't know if he had twisted an ankle or if he was just naturally lame, but he did most of his running on one foot, throwing out the arm with the cornet to keep his balance.