Read The Contortionist's Handbook Page 11


  “How long have you been living together?”

  “Since March.”

  “So, you’ve been living together for most of the time you’ve been seeing each other. Correct?”

  “It was kind of sudden, yeah. Abrupt, I mean. We’d been going out since early January, and then she had to leave her apartment on short notice. Things were going well with us, so we decided to try living together.”

  “Had you known her prior to dating her?”

  “Nope.”

  “So you met, began dating immediately and moved in together soon after that. And that was maybe seven or eight months ago, you said. Correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re as sexually active with Molly now as you were then?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Do you and Molly ever fight?”

  “Rarely.”

  He’s still circling tighter and tighter, every now and again a quick snap of his jaws when he sees a soft spot. Sexual activity questions either immediately precede or follow drug questions, but I think he smells my electric nerve static and will back off, widen his circle and stay within the safe zones until he can find another soft spot.

  The Evaluator flips through his notes, glances at his watch.

  Another moment with Keara comes back to me: eating soup on a rainy night, sharing a blanket. I can smell her, hear her voice.

  “But you do fight, sometimes?”

  “Sometimes, yes. But like I said, rarely.”

  “How would you define rarely?”

  “We’ve had maybe three arguments, total.”

  “About what kinds of things?”

  “Schedules, mostly. Sometimes I get stuck in traffic with a long-distance delivery and get home late. She works at a bar, so she’s gone most weekend nights. We point fingers over whose fault it is that we haven’t seen each other. We get over it. Makes for good make-up sex, but we don’t make it a habit.”

  ———

  Keara threw her bag and address book onto the couch, home from another casting call. The book split open, straining against a hundred rubber bands, adhesive notes, bits of scratch paper and cocktail napkins. Among the debris was a photo of Keara. A five-by-seven studio head shot, smaller than what she normally took to auditions. I looked more closely, and it wasn’t Keara.

  “Who’s this?” I held the photo, looking into Keara’s eyes that weren’t Keara’s.

  “That’s my sister,” she said, filling up the tea kettle. “That shouldn’t even be in there.”

  “She an actress, too?”

  “She gave it up.”

  Her sister looked almost Keara’s age (twenty-three, though “Molly” is twenty-four), shared her eyes, eyebrows and forehead. The shape of their faces was nearly identical. But her sister was blonde, her lips and jaw thinner, more refined. She smiled evenly instead of with Keara’s asymmetrical grin. But Keara had nicer teeth. Her sister had a gap in the center and they weren’t even. But they were definitely related. And beautiful.

  “So that’s Andrea?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s Andrea.”

  “Younger than you—”

  “Older.” She cut me off, her back to me.

  “I see the resemblance,” I said. “What’s her story?”

  “She doesn’t have a story.”

  “You said she lived in San Diego. That’s her, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s her, Eric. She lives in San Diego. What about it?” She stepped out of the kitchen and snatched the picture from me as I was staring into it.

  Andrea called Keara at work, sometimes at home, but I had never spoken to her. My calls were usually work-related. Keara’s were work or casting calls, and we had the periodic late-night hang-up. Welcome to Los Angeles.

  “So, ask her up sometime,” I said.

  “Christ. Not you, too.”

  “What do you mean, not me too?”

  “Go visit her yourself, if you want to so badly.”

  “Jesus, Keara.”

  Her cup weighed ten ounces of kiln-fired ceramic—Beautiful Lake Tahoe—from the Salvation Army, and it missed my face only because I ducked, tripping over a stack of magazines. It exploded against the far wall, leaving a divot that I had to spackle and repaint. Keara slammed the balcony door behind her in a burst of expletives.

  I swept up, took a joint and two beers outside.

  “I don’t want your sister,” I whispered into the forest of her curls. “Nobody but you.” I stroked her knuckles, gentle, gentle. She curled up on a lawn chair, put her face between her knees and squeezed my hand.

  ———

  “Thank you for your honesty, Danny.” This is standard patient stroking to keep the trust intact, then he says “You’re being very helpful,” and he smiles.

  “No problem.”

  “Do you drink, Danny?”

  He replaces his glasses, thinks I don’t notice the shift from Daniel to Danny.

  “Occasionally.”

  “How frequent are these occasions?”

  Alcohol is linked with depression, which is exactly where the Evaluator wants to go. He’s already diagnosed me, he just needs to back it up.

  The trick here is understanding ‘frequent.’ The white, twenty-five- to thirty-year-old American male drinks twelve to fourteen beers a week, or five to seven glasses of wine a week. The average legal limit in most states is .08 BAC, which is about two beers, so two beers means you’re legally drunk. The implicit question is not How much do you drink? but How often do you get legally drunk? or How often do you have more than two beers within a given hour during the course of a week? I’m legally drunk seven nights a week, but he doesn’t need to know that.

  “I go through about a six-pack every couple of weeks.” False.

  “Does that include weekends?”

  “No. Fridays I take it easy. I don’t like to go out after a week of work. I might have three or four beers between getting home and going to sleep around midnight or one.” False.

  “What about Saturdays?”

  “I go out.”

  “And you drink?”

  “Yeah. I drink.” True. I have to wipe my forehead, bad as that might look. Can’t have sweat running into my eyes.

  “How much?”

  “I don’t pay attention. I don’t get blind, vomiting drunk. Usually I go visit Molly at work, hang out until last call and drive her home if she doesn’t have her car.”

  “Have you ever tried to stop drinking for a period of time?”

  A misdirect is when you clear your throat, make a joke, or ask a viewer if they have some article in their pocket, anything to take their eyes away from where you don’t want them looking. In other cases, a force makes them choose a card they believe they’ve picked at random. This question is a mixture of both.

  Ask anyone if they think they drink too much, and they’ll say No. Either they don’t drink too much or they’re going to deny it if they do. You’ll never hear Yes, now that you mention it I can’t get through a single, waking moment without a drink. Why do you ask? Someone wrestling with a drinking problem will sometimes flirt with abstinence for a week, two weeks or a month. Successful with their short-term sobriety and ensconced in their denial, they’ll resume their status as a Binge Drinker, Social Drinker or Functioning Alcoholic.

  “No. Should I consider it?” Why no, doctor, it never crossed my mind. Do you think I have a drinking problem?

  “Not necessarily,” he says.

  He makes a final line of notes, turns to yet another sheet in his yellow pad.

  “Do you use any non-prescription or street drugs, Danny?” He checks at his watch, returns to his notebook.

  I’ve just had my stomach pumped and I know what they found in my blood. THC is fat-soluble and takes thirty days to completely flush from your system. Coke doesn’t take that long, but there’s no point in playing innocent. But addiction is another depression indicator, so I’ve got a juggling act in front of me.
Give him the drugs, tell him part of the truth dressed as a lie.

  “Yeah. The usual. Pot and stuff.”

  “Stuff?” Palm up. Please continue.

  “Coke. I did acid once. Didn’t like it.”

  “You mentioned marijuana in high school, as well. Have you been doing it regularly since then?”

  “Yeah. I partied in high school, then slowed down after that. Didn’t do it for a long time. Now it’s too frequent for my own good. Part of the reason I keep a limit on my drinking.” I’m halfway across the pit, ten thousand feet up without a net and the gentle breeze is getting pushy. I’m doing Guilty, Relieved. I lean forward, give him my Nervous Gesture and a deep sigh, look at the ground. Scale back, way back, my drug intake, but let him know how out of control I think it is. Give him an explanation for the signs the doctors found, make it good. Blend with the scenery, hold very still, and he’ll keep moving.

  “So how long ago did you go from abstinence to regular use?”

  “About four years ago.” Before my “mother” died.

  “And what is ‘too frequent for your own good’?”

  “Four, sometimes five times a month.” False.

  “And how long have you been smoking cigarettes?”

  “Since high school. About a pack a day the past few years.”

  “I noticed you’ve got a very upscale brand there.”

  “I like the wide pack. Helps me hide my fingers. Sleight of hand thing.”

  “What about the cocaine, then?”

  “Same thing, a lot more than I should. First time, I was at a party a couple of years ago. I thought my heart was going to explode and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I had to walk. I couldn’t sit still, must have walked fifteen blocks before I felt better. Someone told me I’d just been given some bad shit, maybe cut with some low-grade speed. I tried it again a few weeks later. Same thing. I thought I was going to die from a heart attack. Tore my nose up pretty bad, like snorting a crushed light bulb. Never been the same.”

  False. False. False. I can’t tell him the truth because it’s so backwards he’d never believe me and I’d never leave here.

  My after-work ritual: Switch on the lights, step over the mail, shut the blinds, and open a beer. I sit down at my kitchen table with the following: paper, white, unlined, 20# cotton bond, one sheet; pen, ballpoint; cocaine, powder, four lines at three point five inches each.

  The first rail is my favorite, like that first sip of coffee in the morning or bourbon in the evening. First line of the day and the whirlwind in my head.

  Stops.

  One thought at a time. Everything is slow and quiet. Snort hard, get it all the way back and count—one thousand, two thousand, three thousand—watch the trembling leave my fingers like fading pond ripples. With the pen and paper, stare at the white space and measure six inches with my eyes. Hold the distance in my head until I can see two dots on the empty page and connect them with a line—a single clear, straight stroke. I’m accurate to the sixteenth of an inch. Do another rail and feel the pond ripples leave my chest and head, hands steady like glasswater. The next line, also six inches, intersecting the first at their mutual three-inch midpoints at a precise ninety degrees. Hit number three, then draw line number three, exactly six inches, at a one-inch parallel to the first. For the fourth and last hit, I turn the paper to the clean side and wait for the dot to appear. I used to mark it by hand, but I don’t need to anymore. When I see it, it stays, and three inches from the dot I start, drawing a perfect circle with a three-inch radius.

  Close my eyes. Deep breath. Lower right bicuspid coke-smeared and numb. Could be a cavity. I should get that looked at. Sweet, syntheto-chemical drip down the back of my throat and the world feels so right.

  The cobwebs and noise in my head are gone, the world is quiet. But with every ounce I cop, I’m forced to tolerate the other clients in Ray’s apartment sucking rails off his mirrored table, chewing their lips, chain-smoking and shoehorning their political conspiracy ramblings into my line of focus. Some people, coke makes a stage for them in their head, makes them think they’re more interesting than they really are.

  Me, a few lines and every stray thought, split-moment flashback and frustrated impulse is magnetized in a quantum instant into a single here and now, and my internal swarm is gone. I’m not watching the world behind glass anymore. Calm enough to sleep, but happy to stay awake.

  The other drugs—the quality stuff that I find in Mexico or scam from a pharmacy—all share the same pseudo-tease of relief before their effects fade out and I need more. They start to work, convince me that I’m going to be okay. Like the girl with the baroque stage handle—Champagne, Christy, Ariel—wearing the sequined T-back and sitting on your lap who might leave with you if you pay for one more dance, buy her one more drink.

  Maybe one more.

  For certain this time.

  Like that, the candle flicker of relief fades out, and I’m still conscious so I take more. Then a gloved hand is slapping me awake, asking me to count fingers or say my name or the day of the week or name the President and I’m here, explaining to an Evaluator that I don’t want to die, but that I want my head to stop hurting. And it does. Like a jig saw through my cortex, it burns for days and then stops, quick as a light switch. I’m in a trauma center, parched, tubes coming out of me and needles going into me, answering the same set of questions. I’m bruised in places from sleeping or cringing in some ungodly position that felt so much more comfortable than the blue sparks behind my eyes. I’m rug-burned from random twitching, spasms where I couldn’t control the nerve signals running for their lives and I’m soaked in my own piss.

  “How often have you done cocaine since then?”

  “Too often. A couple of times a month, Molly and I will get some to party with. I’m careful about where I get it, though. I don’t want anything like those first two times, and I don’t want the legal hassles, either.”

  “Danny, when using cocaine, have you ever seen or heard something that was apparent only to you?”

  I do puzzled, but I know where he’s going. Hallucinations are a clear sign of organic dementia or severe depression. Most people who claim to see ghosts are grieving or in extreme pain. Not to mention what’s known as amphetamine psychosis, which is a result of long-term abuse.

  “Do I hallucinate?”

  “Have you ever?”

  “No.”

  “Do you mean ‘no’ whether you were intoxicated or not?”

  “Right. It’s never happened, whether I’ve been stoned or otherwise.”

  TWELVE

  When you’re in love, your brain secretes endorphins into your blood. Organic morphine leaks out of a gland in your skull, feels like a low-grade opium rush. Some people confuse the two, the head rush and the love. You think you’re in love with a person, but you’re in love with a syringe. Skin like liquid silk, hair, eyes, laugh, smile, impulses, trust, confidence, curves, perfume, sweat, affection, but still a syringe. You’re high and hooked, and soon comes the more, more, more: marriage, career, mortgage, children, school, it’s harder and harder to feel that rush.

  Happens all the time, men and women. Body clocks twenty years out of sync between genders, the rush dries up. You look for new hooks, new fixes, anything for that more, more, more. Some people burn their lives to the ground doing so, fodder for talk radio and daytime television. These same people assail the evils of drugs and urine-test their own children.

  Sudden turned me on to coke. That was her real name, Sudden. Mine was Martin Kelly. I hadn’t had any headaches since I’d left home, but Brian Delvine had worn out his welcome in Los Angeles after three traffic warrants, one eviction and one post-employment random drug screening. I kept changing names, records and histories, getting better and better at it. I finally learned I could afford to live alone, keep the eviction notices at bay with multiple lines of credit under multiple names. It was a game that kept my slate perpetually clean. It wasn’t yet something I h
ad to do to save my life. Then the godsplitters came back. Right after I met Sudden.

  I had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Liam and Fiona Kelly twenty-seven years prior. I found them in the Boston Globe obituaries, Liam Kelly having unstatistically survived his wife for seven years after her death from a stroke. They were survived by seven children, excluding “Martin.”

  It took seven weeks of correspondence with the Massachusetts Bureau of Vital Statistics, insisting they’d made a mistake, that they must have my birth record on file. I used a ream of misprinted (wrong phone number) letterhead for McKinney, Watterson and Ross from a copy shop trash bin—MW&R had an imposing chain of WASP surnames that meant either an accounting firm or legal partnership, which always greases civic wheels. Ultimately, the Bureau was willing to shoulder the blame and right a wronged birth record for the good of the tax coffers.

  My landlord happily accepted an extra twenty bucks a month for one of the surplus mailboxes in our apartment building. I used that for an address, then started building a history. I secured a credit card with a $1,000 cashier’s check, charged things, paid it off. I made a list of defunct business references from a four-year-old phone book and built a résumé.

  Some people say they can read handwriting the way others can read palms or cards. I didn’t believe it, but since some cops did, then some doctors might. I learned the rules and shaped my writing to fit.

  Martin Kelly wrote at a near-vertical ninety-four degrees, with just enough forward slant to indicate positive attitude and looking to the future. He wrote his crossbars two-thirds up from his baseline and perfectly balanced his ascenders and descenders. I was Martin Kelly: cautious, careful to decide, intelligent with a high self-esteem, inclined neither to carelessness nor to depression.

  I’d made a mold of my left thumbprint, pressing it into a lump of firm putty, made a latex cast of its arches and loops that I fixed to a thumb tip from a Hollywood magic shop. The DMV never noticed. Look straight at the camera, please. Smile. Thank you. Now please press your right thumb firmly onto the green light.

  Misdirect: My left hand on the counter gave the clerk something to stare at. Cup and switch: slip the prosthetic sheath over my right thumb, press firmly, back off again. Martin’s right thumb print was Johnny’s left. A fingerprint database search would take them through a dead-end maze. I can count on their officious boredom for each successful change.