Beep beep beep, pardon us!
I turn to her and ask, “Do you think it’s weird that we’re making all these people move so we can ride to our gate in this cart? Shouldn’t we walk? Don’t you feel bad?”
She looks up from her phone, turns to me with a wry smile cracking the sides of her mouth. “Not that bad.”
SPRING
Hey, Siri, we’re in Joshua Tree, on an ill-advised adventure shopping for antiques—which don’t exist here, not to Kathi’s liking anyway. We’re both hot and exhausted, and Kathi wants to check into a motel to have a nap to let traffic die down before we drive back to Los Angeles. We stop at a place called Pioneertown and get a room, plus a heaping amount of side-eye from the motel clerk, sizing up Kathi, then me, then her, then me. “You think he’s my prostitute?” Kathi asks the sassy teenage attendant.
“That’s your business, ma’am,” the clerk spits.
Kathi puffs her chest. “Well, he’s my…” Kathi begins, pausing, considering which phrase will play out the best with a young woman who may be simply a minimum-wage local trying to get by—a sheltered citizen of Pioneertown who doesn’t exactly recognize or care she’s in the presence of the Kathi Kannon. “He’s my…” Kathi starts again. “He’s my … stepson,” she says, snatching the keys from the clerk. “But if you must know, yes, we are having sex!”
I knew I was family.
“Acting,” Kathi whispers to me as she marches us out, off the office’s front porch, past the “saloon,” past the “bank,” and to our bungalow.
“That escalated,” I say.
“I couldn’t tell that poor woman you’re my assistant. How pretentious.”
“It hasn’t stopped you before.”
Kathi smiles. “What are you complaining about? You’ve now received a promotion to the coveted position of my stepson. And whore.”
“I’m honored. Is there a pay raise?” I ask, tugging on my shirt—a bright-orange button-down Kathi bought me at Maxwell’s—a smirk on my face, knowing full well that with all the gifts she gives me, I’m wearing my pay raise.
“I pay you in Shine,” Kathi says, entering our desert hideaway, dropping her glasses on the floor, tossing her purse on the bed, artfully removing her bra through her shirt sleeve.
“Shine? You mean your cheery disposition?” I ask, picking up behind her—the glasses, the bra, the existentialism.
“No. I mean my famous disposition. That’s fame. It’s a shine, a glow. And the people around me get addicted to it.”
I stand there facing her, still and stoic. “You think I’m addicted to this?” I ask, waving her bra in the air a little.
“You, Cockring? You don’t seem addicted to the Shine. Yet. But I’ve been at this a long time. The glow always rubs off a little. I used to have an entourage, you know. You could tell the ones who loved it, who loved the Shine. You could almost see it smeared on them, like people arrested on Cops who deny huffing spray paint but they have a huge circle of silver smeared around their mouths.”
Kathi claims the bed closest to the bathroom, and per usual whenever we reach our destination (women’s clothing section of Barneys, corner table at La Scala, American Airlines VIP lounge), Kathi immediately empties the contents of her purse, searching for whatever tool she needs in the moment—a hairbrush, a piece of candy, her pill case. Today she’s looking for a ring she took off in an antique shop so the owners wouldn’t think she had too much money. As her hand shifts and scatters the contents, she finds her ring, slides it onto her finger, and smiles adoringly at it as she puffs on an e-cigarette. She grabs her daily pale-blue pill case and stands to go to the bathroom. The pills rattle inside and stir me like they’re an alarm.
“You didn’t take your meds today?” I ask.
“Oops. Will remedy that right now.”
“Please be on top of that, Stepmom.”
“I am on top of it, mostly, Stepson. You haven’t seen a manic episode in a while, have you?”
They’re very rare.
They’re very fun.
I give her a cool thumbs-up as she closes the bathroom door, my cue to put everything back into her purse, including her keys, my mom’s locket still suffering on Kathi’s key chain, having been tossed and tattered and scratched and stained the last year with her but still here. It’s my reminder that I’m committed to Kathi, that we’re intertwined in a strange way, and if Mom’s spirit could be anywhere, certainly she’d prefer being tossed around in Priestess Talara’s purse—beside me—a guardian angel to my Hollywood mother, or I guess now, stepmother.
* * *
I’m worrying about Kathi while I’m meeting Superman, or Superman adjacent. He’s the latest in new assistants who’ve entered the fold in the last year. They’re all piled in the Village Scribe again, rehydrating with drinks like Power, Superiority, Privilege.
Superman’s boss is an actor who’s a failed superhero, though his chiseled face still gets him work. I’m watching this new assistant, who’s wearing what looks like an outfit from Target—don’t worry, he’ll get the hang of it—mix and mingle with the other assistants: Jasmine, West, Titanic, Crooner. There are also some new bloodsuckers here to see what they can squeeze from our ranks. Catwoman and Catwoman’s second showed up. Speed is here. Sparrow just arrived. Bruce is here on a date with, of course, a guy who has the exact same high-fade haircut and perfect cheekbones as Bruce. Bruce, ugh, is dating himself.
We’re at the bar when Bruce acknowledges me, only for the express purpose of me acknowledging his date.
“Hey, baby. Isn’t my date handsome?” Bruce asks me, his arm around his twin.
I look to Bruce’s date. “Do you really need me to validate you?” I ask coldly.
“Yes, please,” the date says, scoring snickers from Bruce.
“You’re both gorgeous.”
“Thank you,” they say in horrific unison.
“Now, do you have any compliments for me?” I ask.
The two of them are gut-punched silent. I roll my eyes and turn back to Jasmine and West.
West is nursing a second voraciously bubbling champagne and going on about how her boss stacked new responsibilities upon her, forcing her recently to go to the grocery store at nine P.M. “How nice it must be,” West says, “to see someone eating sautéed mushroom soufflé in a movie and then call your assistant to call the studio to call the director to call the writer to get the exact recipe from the screenplay and then have me go to the grocery and buy the supplies and then cook it!”
“Wait,” Crooner says, flipping his hot-pink hair behind his shoulder. “You cook for your boss?”
“She’s a singing icon! What am I supposed to do? She wants soufflé and the chef is off, so guess who’s fucking mixing large brown eggs and chopping shiitake mushrooms at ten at night. It’s so stressful!” West takes a gulp of champagne from her flute. “Ah, this helps.”
“This is our life,” Jasmine says, sipping her martini, looking out at the crowd—the assistants we like, those we don’t, the ones who are executive and the ones who are personal, the lifers who will be here for years and the new ones, like Superman, fresh and innocent, like I used to be. “Isn’t it amazing?”