“You don’t love your father?” Kathi asks.
“Do you love yours?”
“Very much. I keep his dentures in a ‘World’s Best Dad’ mug in the guest room refrigerator. You didn’t throw out Dad’s teeth, did you?”
I say, “Not yet. Should I?”
“Nah. I like him there. It’s nice to love someone when they’re just dentures, when the rest of them only exists in your mind. You can just curate the parts you like.”
She hands me back the postcard she altered, with chunks looking like they’ve been redacted by the government. She says, “Loving your parents when they’re flawed and flesh and blood, that’s harder to do.”
I say, “I get it.”
I’m thinking, I could never leave all this for Diane Keaton.
Kathi fishes a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and turns to walk out to our balcony. “Wanna come outside and party?”
Kathi steps out and I follow. She looks at the landscape before us, framed in tall bamboo shoots, little carefully planted flowers and tiny mindfully placed rocks lit by moonlight.
“Am I not justified in detesting my dad?” I ask. “What if he’s an asshole? And hates that I’m gay? And thinks I should unbank?”
She drags on her cigarette, blows the smoke into the thin night. “Sounds like that’s his business. Where’s the problem? My mom is always telling me what to do and all that. I just say, ‘Maybe so.’ Because, maybe so! Maybe she’s right. I don’t know. It’s better than being at war with her. I follow the weather, Cockring. Know what I mean?”
“I assume I’ll always be cold. So I just wear layers,” I say.
“No. I mean, I follow the emotional weather. Sun is sun, dark is dark, warm is warm, always a fifty percent chance of rain. It’s like ‘go with the flow’ but the celebrity version. It’s how I like to live my life. It’s not always how I actually do live my life—I’ve had plenty of screaming matches and epic fights with my parents—but when my mind is calm, everything can be okay. No war.”
Kathi, like a reflex, like an exclamation point, tosses her cigarette over the balcony. It spins in the air, in slow motion. The oxygen causes the butt to glow bright orange, and you can hear the thud it makes in the sand garden. It’s a scene right out of a movie.
“JESUS!” I yell. “You’re gonna start a fire!”
Kathi cringes, rare self-awareness taking hold of her for a moment, and she throws her legs over the decorative wood fencing and marches out and grabs the butt, leaving her footprints in the raked white sand, turning and knocking driftwood and stacked rocks, breaking thick old bamboo. “Wanna scratch our names in the garden rocks?” she asks.
I’m thinking, She’s going to destroy what’s left of an ancient, historic site. But then instead I wonder: Can it be both? Can it be vandalism and art? Can we love and hate at the same time?
Kathi comes back toward the room, leaving a second set of her footprints in the sand, crawling back onto our balcony, hurling her leg over the barrier.
“Look out!” I yell, too late, of course.
Kathi breaks a little pottery vase holding a tiny shoot of bamboo growing in the shape of a heart, a thistle that’s perhaps been growing for hundreds of years.
Kathi shrugs it off. As she walks back into the room she says, “I’m bored.”
I look back out at the trampled scene outside of our room.
Her life. So much fun. So much destruction.
ME: Hey! Stopped in NYC. Almost home. Thinking of you.
DREW: Sorry been out of touch, Oak! When are you home?
ME: On my way soon. Excited to see you.;)
No response.
* * *
There’s pee everywhere.
I’m thinking, I hope we survive New York. We’re here, back at the Greenwich Hotel so Kathi can destress from her vacation and return to her hard life in Beverly Hills.
“Isn’t he cute,” Kathi says from her hotel-suite bed, holding up a brown-fur puppy with a white patch on his chest and two lower fangs awkwardly poking out of his mouth.
“Whose dog is this?”
“He came with the hotel room,” Kathi lies. The dog curls farther into Kathi’s breasts, glares at me, judging my face, my clothes, my inner worth.
Now the only one stressed is me, seeing this new puppy and calculating the number of tasks I should add to my usual duties: feeding, training, neutering.
The dog looks at me with spite, like he can read my mind.
“Look how his teeth extend out like weapons,” Kathi says, touching the dog’s two white projectiles.
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask.
“Nothing. This is how he was made. He’s a chug.”
“A what?”
“A chihuahua-pug mix. His name is Roy. Roy, meet Cockring.”
Assistant Bible Verse 135: Pack pee pads, chew toys, dog food.
“Are we keeping him?” I ask.
“Yup,” she says.
“Ugh,” I say, turning to leave the room, worried that my job just got a lot busier. “I’ll go to the pet store and get supplies.”
“He doesn’t need much, Cockring.”
“I’ll start with food. He’s probably starving.”
“No, we just ate,” Kathi says, motioning into the room. I step farther into her suite and see a room-service table with nothing on it. I walk around her bed and find all the plates on the floor, a mess of food chewed and licked over and left discarded for housekeeping—or me—to handle.
Kathi lowers Roy to the floor and he rushes up to me. He looks up and stares—God, he’s so judgmental. Then he pokes me with his underbite. Dammit; I’m enraged, and in love.
“How are we going to get him home?” I ask.
Snap: Now I have a second soul to brag about.
Snap: Now I have a second soul to keep alive.
12
A Google Alert can change your life. Several Google Alerts can be catastrophic.
I jump from Kathi’s dining table—my phone is buzzing! A series of emails have come through.
My phone is dutifully set up to get alerts anytime Kathi Kannon is mentioned on the Internet. Most of the time, the alerts are absurd.
The headline says: KATHI KANNON SEX ORGY.
The headline says: KATHI KANNON NUDES FOR SALE.
The headline says: KATHI KANNON BANKRUPT.
We’ve had false alarms, false Google Alerts, like the headline that read KATHI KANNON ATTENDS LAKERS GAME LOOKING ROUGH. I knew the night before she was supposed to hang with a friend with Lakers connections, and I thought, Oh, no. Almost as the alert arrived, TMZ called the house and I answered, coy and cool. I said I couldn’t help; “I don’t know anything, Kathi isn’t here,” I said—with Kathi sleeping soundly a few feet away. I pull up the article on my phone. It wasn’t Kathi in the picture. It was just some unfortunate woman who now has to live the rest of her days knowing she looks like what people think is a trashed, tragic, worst version of Kathi Kannon.
But this newest Google Alert, this is not a mistake.
My job responsibilities include: organize her life, dispense her meds, break bad news. It’s time to get her up anyway.