5:08 p.m. - 2002-01-10
bud girl
It's a few days before Christmas and I'm seated next to a tiny stage in some swanky West LA nightclub. One side of the stage is crowded with session musicians, easily identified by the uniform of their guild (black slacks, pattern baldness), the rest of the stage is dominated by a velvet chaise on which a woman in a blue dress writhes and coos her way through a set of holiday standards and torchy originals. Because the stage riser is low and I'm sitting at the table closest, a spotlight aimed at the singer intersects squarely the right side of my head. Thus my silhouette is cast across her sequined bosom, and I am blinded to all that lies beyond the spotlight's brilliance. During most of the show I see only dust motes swimming in and out of this luminous tunnel and the tragic figure with microphone poised at its end. Did I say tragic? I should probably mention that she is wasted: slipping as she tries to mount the chaise in heels, writhing on the floor w/unexpected violence during an otherwise innocuous rendition of "Let It Snow". Maybe I should also mention that the club, out there beyond this illuminated pipe down which our eyes occasionally meet, is virtually empty. There's the bored girlfriend of one of the session players, there's a gentleman who (I'm embarrassed to admit) I recognize as a porn actor conferring with a member of his reptilian fellowship at a table in the back, and there's a wasted young couple to my left, casually dressed and yelling unintelligible requests between songs. That's it.

Oh, and there's the old man seated four tables behind me. I can't really see him too well on account of the spotlight, but I can feel his stare fixing the back of my head with the implicit heat of ten such lights, or maybe that's just my paranoid imagination. Maybe he's just trying to watch the show and I'm blocking his view...and if anyone has a right to see the show, it's this man. Because he paid for it. This club, these musicians- this is his Christmas gift to the girl on stage. For she is his lover.

So...

Rewind to the previous evening. To the tiny Hollywood apt. of the woman we just saw on stage. That's me seated at her computer, laying out CD labels for a demo that she plans to distribute at tomorrow's performance. I am her computer tutor; and tonight I was supposed to be giving her a crash tutorial in Photoshop. But she was distracted, more interested in trying on wigs and pulling out gowns in anticipation of the show than learning the difference between print size and resolution size, creating transparent layers etc. So for the sake of completing the task on schedule I've taken over and she has been dispatched to retrieve refreshments- an assignment she completes with honors. A six pack of tallboys for Ernst, a fat bottle of champagne for herself, and a pizza for both of us. She pops the cork and upends the champagne like a veteran, and by the time the pizza's gone and we're splitting the last beer, I've learned a little more about this particular Hollywood neighbor of mine.

She's what they call a bikini model. She's been in Playboy, she's been a Bud Girl, she's worked the calendars and the car shows. She's done a few soft-core films and she's stripped, but not for a few years now. Now she has a benefactor- the man who's footing the bill for tomorrow night's show...and her Mercedes convertible. And, come to think of it, my fee. He is a powerful attorney, well connected throughout the entertainment industry and possessing what sound to me like some old-school "family ties". Vegas types who always need good lawyers, dig? This is the man whose stare will singe my skull the following evening. Whose hoary presence will hammer home to me the sordid reality of her economic arrangement; a rich old man whom loneliness has turned into vampire. This is the man on the other end of the phone, which rings now every ten minutes, angry. Ringing the home phone until the machine picks up, hanging up and immediately ringing the cell till it hits voice mail...ringing, ringing. For this is Saturday night and, as per their agreement, she's on the clock. But right now she's high and the stereo is up so loud it's hard to hear the phone and she's, umm, dancing. I'm sitting back on her bed (it's a studio apt.), sipping my beer and watching her dance while the printer spills CD labels out onto the floor.

She's had breast augmentation, an occupational hazard I guess, but a form of self-mutilation that (despite spending five years in the plastic circus that is LA) I haven't come to appreciate. And her's is substantial, "cartoony" even. So when she does climb on the bed and embrace me, her phony rack comes 'between us'. Not repulsive really, just kinda tragic. Tragic like this whole little mise en scene, I guess. Her holding me because she feels alienated by the life she's made for herself, because I represent to her some simpler reality, maybe. A non-rich, non-powerful, non-glamorous escape from the complexities and compromises of her "kept" existence?

Or maybe she was just drunk on champagne and was putting off driving out to Beverly Hills to suck some leathery old lawyer-cock. I dunno. But that innocent embrace struck a lonely chord w/me that resonated well into the following evening. As I watched those dust motes drifting in and out of her spotlight, I thought about her fans. The men who think her name during the silent course of their workdays and sit alone in the blue glow of her videos at night. These devotees of soft-core, these guys who write to bikini models- they ain't like the rest of us deviants. They covet not flesh but an ethereal ideal, flesh-covered...and when I held one of their tragic avatars, drunk on champagne in her little Hollywood apt., I felt the sad burden of their letters and their longings. As heavy and tragic as her plastic breasts.

LA is a strange and lonely town full of strange and lonely people.

So let's rewind again: eight hours earlier and a few blocks east. I'm seated at The Drawing Room. Yes, it is a little early to be having a drink, thank you; but I've had a rough morning. A girl had been crying on the other end of my phone who should never have been made to cry. A charming young social worker (no, not assigned to me) from the Midwest with whom I have nothing in common, but with whom I had somehow found myself sleeping. (I remember the first time I walked into her apt. she had these plates on the wall, plates like you eat off, right? But hung on the wall in some sort of um, country style or something. Oh, and lace doilies everywhere. Every chair back and tabletop had one, they'd been slipped under lamps and ashtrays and draped atop the television. I joked that I was afraid to sit still for fear of being "doilied" but what I was actually thinking was "for the love of God man, run!") Anyway, I had stood her up the night before. What I had construed as a tentative date was apparently an official date and she had gotten all dressed up w/the fancy underwear, decorated the Christmas tree, prepped some dinner...

Y'know, I think I'm gonna tell this story later actually. Along with a heap of other feel-good holiday anecdotes; but right now it's happy hour little diary, and I've been working for days on end...

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