I want to tell Kathi that I hear her in my head, the things she taught me. Life is meant to be lived. It’s not meant for the safe choice all the time. It’s not meant to be stubbornly shielded. Not meant to be like the magazines in her bathroom, with their Amazon protective covers.
I want to tell her—confess to her—that sometimes I google her name to see paparazzi photos of us, she and I forever online, some of the images painful, regretful (did I let her wear that?). I examine her clothes in the pictures to trigger memories of the things she loved or lost. To try to place a date: Are those glasses from our years together? Is that the jacket I had repaired for her? Is that the brooch I said looked like a uterus?
I want to tell her I’ve signed up for weather alerts. I get notified of each aurora borealis, each alert like a little “hello” from my famous friend. The aurora borealis will always remind me of her, will always be her. The messy, beautiful colors take me to her side, become her, the way the lights look foggy in real life but complete perfection in photos, the way their electrons and neutrons and chaos swirl around to make something pointed, marking some memory, something you can only really appreciate while standing on a frozen lake in Yellowknife, with the warm body of a friend at your side, in a coat she bought for you, in a world she illuminated.
I want to tell her I’m still looking for my passion. And maybe that’s my passion. Thinking, seeking. Seeking teachers, seeking answers, seeking people who need help, seeking my tribe. But what if it’s just a tribe of seekers? Dogs chasing our tails. Followers following followers following followers. Therapista says seeking actually takes you away from what you’re looking for, which is peace, peace in the right now. I haven’t found peace yet. I hope Kathi has. Kathi and I, both extremes in our own way.
I want to tell her thank you for being a mother figure. I have two now. One I hardly remember, and one I’ll never forget.
In front of 1245 Beverly Canyon Drive for the first time since I left more than a year ago, and it’s all so different. Everything has changed.
The code to her front gate has changed—I have to use the buzzer again, push that difficult little call button, give my name, get approval from icy security guards.
“Are you family?” they ask.
“No,” I say. I’m thinking, Not really. Not anymore, if ever.
They ask my name; they ask for my ID. Don’t they know I used to be her right hand?
Past security and the valet, Reid and I are holding hands as we wander up that magical hill—the dangling porpoise, the hologram hand flipping me the bird, the colorful bricks. The landscaping is new, fresh, more flowers, more color—as if that’s even possible.
We walk through the front door with the ball-sac door knocker. The light switches I had installed. The picture that hangs beside the piano to hide the stain on the Sheetrock where I had an old thermostat removed. Walls now have fresh paint; there are new holograms and works of art everywhere—all signs of her new money, her new life, the one without me.
The crowd here to celebrate her birthday is strange, a group of people who seem out of place standing on her brick porch, on her endangered floors, in my old office. I recognize some of the faces from television and movies, smiling and laughing, drunk on her magical ambiance. There’s a joyousness to the event, a fog of celebration wafting around in the air-conditioning from the living room to the red room to her bedroom. I slip into some old thought patterns—noting drinks without coasters sweating on the furniture, noticing trash cans that are too full, noticing pictures hung askew, knickknacks not in their exact places. And then the other thought pattern, the new one, the reminder to myself: I don’t work here anymore. And as a sentimental longing fights for voice, Reid squeezes my hand. I’m not here alone.
I almost turn and leave Kathi Kannon’s party right away, fleeing the people who think they know her. I feel confused, angry. In my time with Kathi, I never saw them in her life. I have to remind myself that I was only with her for part of her life. I’m doing the math in my head in her crowded living room, standing beneath Mateo the Moose. I’m calculating: How many hours were all these people with her? Is it possible that in my three years, eight hours a day, I was actually with her longer, with her more, that I have more claim to her than they? So selfish of me, and yet I humor the ill thoughts. I never heard her talk about some of these people. Some of them, I know she doesn’t even like. I want to run out of there. I want to never come back. I want to only remember this place the way it was. The way it was when I was alone in this giant living room—tap, tap, tap—loading pills into her containers. The way it was while she was sleeping—still and dreamy, a beautiful lump in the covers. The way it was when she was awake, the smell of her baking cookies in the kitchen. Just her and me watching deer in her backyard, eating peanut butter from the jar.
“Where do you think she is?” Reid asks, snapping me out of my trance.
“I know where she is,” I say.
The party is filled with people in every room, every square foot occupied. With Reid at my side, I walk past Mateo. I walk through the red room—fireplace still raging the same flames from my last day, even more boats now piled, teetering on that mantel; it’s going to be a spectacular crash one day. I walk past the bar and the bathroom and through the second living room and down a hallway back to her bedroom, my feet retracing the same steps we once took while dancing down this corridor. Sure enough, in her room, in a ball gown, lying in her bed, Roy appropriately at her side, is Kathi Kannon, film icon. At a party filled with Hollywood elites, Kathi Kannon sits isolated from the crowd, surrounded by people I don’t recognize, protected in her cocoon of quiet and not quiet.
Kathi and I spot each other at the same time, like a strange sort of telepathy. She stops mid-conversation with John Mayer and hops out of bed and marches directly toward me.
“Cockring, your hair looks so great,” she says, reaching up and feeling it.
“So good to see you, Stepmom,” I say.
“Is that him beside you?” Kathi asks, not breaking eye contact with me. “Is that the boyfriend? I’m ignoring him intentionally for a moment until I can gather my sense of humor.”
“That’s him,” I say.
Kathi Kannon turns and looks at Reid. She grabs both of his hands. “Jesus,” she says, “you’re taller than I imagined. Your dick must be huge.”
Reid leans toward her. “Massive,” he says, not missing a beat, maybe, at last, an equal sparring partner for Kathi Kannon, wordsmith, conversationalist, auteur.
“Now it all makes sense,” she says kindly, sweetly, her hands touching his, a sign that she means it. The jewelry on her fingers, the bracelet around her wrist, the earrings dangling under her hair, I recognize all of them, the various items she would forget on airplane seats and under hotel beds and in restaurant parking lots, the items I used to follow behind her and collect, locking them in the jewelry drawer in her closet, until I realized, What good is protecting all of her favorite things if she never gets to use them? Her fine jewelry, like her life, like my life, should be worn, used, lived. I wonder how much I held back her spirit versus maybe how much I held back her demons.
Reid nods, now up to speed. A devilish grin appears on his face. He blushes, putting his hands in front of his face as if he’s holding a bowl, opens his mouth, and gives an air blowjob to a huge imaginary dick, enormous imaginary balls resting in his cupped hands, a perfect mirror to Kathi’s earlier advice to me about relationships.