“Baby,” Jasmine says kindly. “Calm down. Have a seat.”
But I continue, leaning toward Jasmine’s dad. “Kathi Kannon is a fucking human being! Your life is so perfect? Fuck you and fuck you twice again.”
“Charlie!” Jasmine says.
“Sorry, man,” Jasmine’s dad says. “I’m just saying be careful when someone wants to change you. What if you don’t want to change?”
I step slightly toward him. I glance at my two drinks sweating on the bar together, both of them looking so delicious and so detrimental, both of their fates already imagined inside me, both of them going to waste, me calling my own limit, making a sober choice—as sober as possible—to shut up and keep Kathi’s business Kathi’s business.
I’m thinking, Fuck my dad.
But I’m also thinking, Fuck this guy, Jasmine’s dad.
I tuck my long, growing hair behind my ears—making a note to myself that even my hair is a gift from her, something I owe her. “It’s okay if Kathi Kannon is changing me,” I say. “Because I’m changing her.”
* * *
Sitting in my car, alcohol and angst pumping through me, I’m feeling spent and dissected and unable to drive. Just sitting feels good, still and quiet and cool in the California night with the support of the seat of my trusty Nissan Sentra. I run my hand across the dash like it’s a hot guy’s leg. I use my finger to wipe some dust from the radio buttons. I look down at the mats on the floor, covered with dirt.
I’m thinking, I need to vacuum this car. I reach down and try to scoop up some of the mess and leaves, but most of the bits are impossibly tiny.
I scroll through mixed and merged contacts in my phone—there’s the number for Ben Affleck, for Cher, for Toni Collette—and past all those options, all those celebrities I could theoretically call and bullshit with, I land at the most infamous character in my life: Dad.
It’s two A.M. in L.A., so it’s four A.M. in Louisiana.
I’m thinking, DON’T YOU DARE!
I push the call button and close my eyes, imagining the signal bouncing from my phone to some tower to outer space to some satellite, back down and to my father’s phone on his stupid nightstand in his stupid bedroom in Perris.
Ring.
I’m thinking about being naked in that room, forced to wear my dead mother’s panties.
Ring.
I’m thinking of all the creative dreams that died that day, in that room.
Ring.
I’m thinking of all the things that died in my childhood, not the least of which—my mother.
Ring.
“Charlie?” Dad says, answering his phone, groggy and alarmed. “Everything okay?”
“I’m wondering about you,” I say, trying to project an air of adulthood.
“Are you drunk?” Dad asks. “What’s wrong?”
“My therapist says that when you talk to others, you are talking to yourself. So when you said way back, like, when I was a kid and you made me eat Oreos out of the trash and you said, ‘Take responsibility for your life,’ were you really talking to yourself?”
“What Oreos?” Dad asks, growing frustrated. “What are you talking about? Why the fuck are you calling me at four in the morning?”
“Because I think when you said ‘take responsibility for your actions’ to me—you were actually talking about yourself, right? You were saying I should take the blame for wasting those cookies, but that means you believe you should take all the blame for your own flaws in your life, and maybe you think you’re to blame for your bad marriage and your unfinished house and your sad family and your not having money and stuff. I think that you think that it was all your fault, right?”
Dad is quiet on the other end of the line. I wait for his response, watching passersby on the sidewalk, barflies ejected at the two A.M. last call, lonely and horny and still on their hunt for more. Dad never responds.
“I mean, some of it was your fault, but I don’t think it’s all your fault,” I stammer. “I don’t think it’s true that everything was your fault. I think some things happened that were not in your control. Or my control. Your problems were relative? Right? Some things just get dirty. Anyway, this just occurred to me because my car needs to be vacuumed.”
“I’m going back to bed, Charlie.”
“Of course you are,” I say. “It’s four in the morning there? Yeah. You should go back to bed. And sleep soundly, you know. Now that you have this new information.”
“Are you home?”
“Nope.”
I shake my head; I sway to the music of the traffic outside, the booze inside.
Dad asks, “Can you get home safely?”
I say, “Of course, darling.”
I hang up and feel my heart pumping inside me. I open my phone again. I text Jasmine.
ME: Sorry.
15
That old pill bottle Kathi gave me back in Sydney, it’s still on my nightstand in my apartment. A reminder: I can trust her, sometimes, at least. It’s a symbol, though an empty one.
Hey, Siri, I want to trust her.
Also on my nightstand, a brass lamp. It’s the same brand of lamp that was in my room next to Kathi’s at the Greenwich Hotel in New York, its crooked neck and arching shade still looking like a cartoon character, still giving me a little wave: Welcome home. I wanted a piece of NYC, a reminder of this great life, at arm’s reach. I looked under the lamp at the hotel and found the manufacturer website and ordered one—my own treasure, my own bit of luxury, a little out of place in my dumpy dwelling but still proudly lighting my way through the small corners of this apartment, of my life.
They both sit there, the pill bottle and the lamp, both gathering dust, lonely and sad, just like me, my empty bed, my empty calendar.
I turn to my trusty vice: OkCupid.
It’s time to get back in the game. To recharge my relationship batteries. To see what’s out there, who’s out there, who can save me.
Nice to meet you, LA2LA94. He’s too religious.
Nice to meet you, HPOTTERFAN. He’s a Hufflepuff.
Nice to meet you, NYC1980. He hated Nova Quest.
I email CALI-DREAMING, even though I only gave him one star out of five because I didn’t like his clothes in his pictures, including one where he was in a caftan. Not that I have a problem with caftans—I love them—it’s just the pattern was all wrong for his body type. Alas, sitting alone in my apartment I’m thinking, Maybe I shouldn’t be too picky. My email to him was mostly cut-and-pasted from the many others I had sent to potentials. But he wrote back: “Hi, I’m Ben.”
* * *
Ben is tall and so much better-looking than his profile picture, handsome but accessible, quirky but not awkward. This moment with him feels new, and it feels authentic. And I want more, more, more.
We meet at Intelligentsia Coffee in Silver Lake and are having iced coffees together when a film crew walks up to us. They’re doing a survey for a local election and we oblige with our opinions, and the leader gives me her card and they take our picture and they’re gone.
“Was that weird?” I ask him. “That was so random.”