“I’m too old for hope,” Miss Gracie says, clinging to Roger and walking out the front door. Agnes is gone, too. So is Benny. Even little Roy, his butt shaking with the excitement of the moment, dashes away toward Kathi’s bedroom, no doubt to snuggle in bed, leaving the room empty except for Kathi and me.
Kathi approaches me slowly, skillfully, fiery determination in her eyes. I feel flames of hell at my feet, rising as she approaches, heat from my toes to my knees—she’s getting closer—fire burning my stomach, my chest, my face, as Kathi stops in her tracks in front of me and says calmly, flippantly, “This was the worst intervention I’ve ever seen.”
“Thanks,” I say, my arms waving up and flopping back to my sides.
“I mean, this was the worst, and I’ve been in, like, a thousand of them.”
“I’m trying because I love you,” I say.
“I love you, too, Cockring. But you have to stop with this.”
Standing in that empty living room, I’m thinking, I’m alone here.
I’m thinking, Her sobriety is up to me.
I’m thinking, Better luck next time.
Exasperated, I ask, “So, like, do you have any tips for the next intervention? In case I have to ever do this again?”
“First, I’ve noticed snacks always help,” she says, turning her back on me and walking to the bar in the red room. I follow.
“Okay, so catering. What else?”
Kathi fixes herself a Coke Zero. She doesn’t offer me one. “Sometimes people write letters ahead of time and read those, so that’s really fun and painful. Mostly I would say get more people in here and make it more dramatic, but the truth is, these haven’t really worked well for me. I prefer rehab or psychiatric lockdown.”
Hey, Siri, make a note of these preferences.
Kathi turns and heads to her bedroom. “Or a sober coach.”
“What’s that? Is that what I think it is?”
“Yeah. Someone who comes here and lives here with me and stays with me twenty-four/seven, even in the bathroom, to make sure I don’t … stray.”
I trot behind her, just like Roy. Just like a follower. Just like I nurse at her tit, just like my fellow assistants accused. But I push the thought aside. “Great,” I say. “Do you have someone you’d like to work with again?”
“There was a guy once named like Rick Sommers or something, and he was so helpful and he had the biggest cock—”
“Okay. Very funny.”
“It’s not a joke! We made so much love I didn’t need drugs. Then we both relapsed and I gained a ton of weight and he’s brain-dead in a nursing home in Dayton.”
Therapista says you can’t help someone unless they want to help themselves.
Kathi enters her room and walks into her bathroom and closes the door.
“I just want to know how I can help you, Kathi,” I shout through the door.
“I don’t need your help, Nesbit Twelp.”
I look at Roy on Kathi’s bed, sleeping soundly, not a care in the world, reveling in the unknown of what’s going to happen next, faithful that whatever it is will be a gift from a kind universe. If only we all lived with such optimism.
I sit on the bed beside Roy, my back against Kathi’s headboard, my feet stretched in front of me. I’m looking at her bedroom door. I’m looking out into that hallway where it seems like just a sunrise ago I was younger and more innocent, standing there, about to enter her life for the first time, my first morning as her assistant. Everything was so new and interesting and shocking—I’m here with a childhood icon! There’s her bathroom, her clothes, her bad habits! I’m thinking maybe if I called Diane Keaton, maybe if she was hiring, I could have that rush of feelings again.
Kathi walks out of the bathroom, Tom Ford Amber Absolute electrifying the air behind her, fresh glitter sparkling on her eyelids, an e-cigarette in her mouth. She paces, typing on her phone.
“I’ll never drive you there again,” I say.
“Where?” Kathi says.
“To Vegas.”
“Oh, God, of course not,” Kathi says, taking a deep breath, too deep. “You can’t anyway. If we went there again, it would look really bad.”
I throw my hands up. “Not the point.”
“Look,” Kathi says, her steely exterior starting to crack. “Do you really think I enjoy going to fucking Vegas? That I enjoy all this?!” She takes the e-cigarette out of her mouth. She lets her hands drop to her sides, her cell phone falling until the lanyard catches it, the lanyard breaking the fall, the lanyard I made her, to prevent the phone, at least, from bottoming out.
Kathi’s head drops; she sits. She starts to cry, where tears just fall off of your face, where you gasp for breath and don’t even care that you can’t breathe through the heaving, don’t even care that you can’t see through the tears. “I’m trying, okay? I just don’t want you … I don’t want anyone to think badly of me.”
Kathi Kannon doesn’t always look like her action figure. In certain light, I see the star, I see the priestess, I see her royalty in both this world and the imaginary one. But here, now, in the dim light of her bedroom, I just see a woman struggling, crushed under the weight of her body, her age, her feeling that options are limited, fearing that her fantastic life is suddenly a fraudulent one. She’s tired. I’m tired. Maybe I’ve been struggling under the weight of her, too.
A million griefs bubble up in the room, in her, in me. My feelings want to spill out of me like the bleeding red clay of my dad’s driveway in Perris, helpless in my father’s house, helpless in Kathi Kannon’s. EVERYONE WILL DISAPPOINT YOU! I fear Dad may be right. What have I gotten myself into? Have I put my friend, my movie star, my action figure, in danger? Have I contributed to the unspeakable?
I take a deep breath, trying to keep it together.
Assistant Bible Verse 137: Maintain a professional demeanor at all times.
I suck it up, like tugging at my sweatpants to hide my pink socks.
Therapista says everything comes to light eventually.
Therapista says all things have ups and, most notably, all things have downs.
Therapista says the moment you attach to something or someone outside of yourself is the moment suffering begins.
“I don’t think badly of you,” I say, my voice quivering.
Kathi looks up at me slowly, notices my emotion, and almost angrily asks, “Now why are you crying?”
“Are you getting too close to the sun?” I ask, my own sobbing beginning.
“What?”
I take deep breaths. I’m thinking, This is just a job. I’m thinking, This is not my life on the line here. I’m thinking, Why do I care so much?
I say, “Miss Gracie told me this thing about a guy with wax feet or something and he flew too close to the sun and his feet melted or something and he crashed.”
“That’s one of her Bible stories,” Kathi says.
“It’s not from the Bible.”
“From wherever!” Kathi yells.
“Maybe from her life. Her story, from her experience. From her experience of you. From my experience of you.”
“What the fuck are you rambling about?”