Read The Contortionist's Handbook Page 12


  I met Sudden when she tried to strangle me. We slept together three nights later, but the night I met her she stripped, rubber-band-shot her panties at my face, and dry-humped my work jeans to the rhythmic distortion of Motley Crüe.

  The doorman’s name tag said Jimmy. Jimmy looked like a size forty-eight, but his black suit in the dark light of the club made it hard to tell. He handed me my change, stamped my wrist and said Have a good time in his gravelbox voice.

  If I need to get out but want to be invisible, I go to a strip joint. None of the customers are sizing you up, they’re looking at the talent. The talent isn’t sizing you up if you aren’t loose with your cash, and the doormen ignore you unless you get rowdy.

  Sudden wore a sheath of white gauze from her armpits to just below her hips, weaving through the tables of solitary men or silent, staring groups. She touched shoulders, whispered into ears, moving from one person to the next on her white stilettos, holding a clutch purse the size of a large fist. She caught me staring, gave me a long-distance look with her honed bedroom stare. I ignored her—I knew better than to believe that stare—ordered a coffee.

  She appeared over my shoulder, the warm weight of her bare arm snaking across my chest, and I smelled alcohol-heat mixed with coconut skin lotion.

  “I am so drunk,” she said, then, “You’re coming with me,” pulling me by the wrist to a curtained booth, past another doorman with a tie and a clipboard, marking her down for a dance. Her eyelids sagged, she breathed whiskey fumes from her lips into mine, closer, closer. Five minutes for ten dollars and she was straddling, stretching, writhing and grinding, pulling at my hair, shirt collar, pressing her breasts into my face against every posted rule of every club in Los Angeles.

  Then Sudden was choking me. Her hands around my neck once, twice, a third time, her grip firmer each time then relaxing. Her smile an inch from my face, Just kidding, it said. And then she wasn’t. Opposite sides of my windpipe touched and I stayed—she’ll stop in a second—but she didn’t and the pain in my throat was half from not breathing, half from my neck being twisted out of shape. I peeled her hands away, hoping a bouncer didn’t catch me touching her. She pushed me back onto the couch with her knees pinning my arms, curled her fingers around my throat once more and squeezed. When I reached to take her hands away, I was too weak to move. The room lit up, the lights seeming all at once to flood purple and green, and Sudden looked straight into my eyes. Hers were the green-brown of bayou mud—what the DMV calls hazel—and I was filled with a bursting love for this woman. I mean an absolutely undying love and rush of gratitude for her, enough happiness to split my heart open. And that’s when I first asked her name, or tried to.

  I coughed, heaved and choked for air, realized she was blowing breath back into me, the sharp odors of whiskey, chewing gum and spit pushing into my lungs. A slap, a blast of stings across my left cheek, right cheek, and when I opened my eyes I didn’t see Sudden at all, but a skinny blonde woman who probably got a lot of attention at the club but not a second look in the clear light of day.

  “I’m good,” I said. “Don’t hit me.”

  Then the shock of ice water in my face. Sudden stood next to her, naked, holding her gauze dress in a rumpled ball. The blonde kept telling her Go backstage before Jimmy comes over.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  “Are you okay? Are you sure?” The blonde asked with rehearsed concern while torquing my elbow toward the pay phones, restroom entrances and back door with No In and Out Privileges next to a fire extinguisher. Then I was standing in the gravel lot with my wallet in my hand and all of my money gone. I found Sudden three nights later and we slept together.

  You call a strip joint asking for a dancer, they’ll tell you the girl is working whether she is or not. They know that once you’re there, you’ll spend money anyway. If they think you’re a stalker and they don’t know if you’re out to slash one of their dancers in the parking lot, they’ll still take their chances because you’re going to spend money. Maybe. I figure there’s no way to find out for certain when she’s working. I return two nights in a row and blow sixty bucks each night, four-dollar coffees and singles on the brass rail until the third night, I find Sudden. I didn’t see her for an hour and ten minutes while she was soaking some Japanese millionaire for her condo payment. I knew if she took too long, he was probably dead of asphyxiation and she was sneaking out the back door by the phone booths.

  But that didn’t happen. I flagged her down and she came and sat beside me. Hi, Honey, like she didn’t recognize me. I picked up the tiny lamp from the cocktail table, tilted the shade to throw the light onto my face. Two streaks like red lash marks ran along the left side of my neck, one on my right. She was right-handed. The skin had been chafed raw, and a crust of scabbed welts stippled over yellow-green bruises otherwise invisible in the dull club light. My throat still clicks when I swallow.

  I met her at work again the next night, and the following night met her for a drink after her shift. Three consecutive nights in her Sherman Oaks condo followed. I liked watching her walk naked to her dresser, liked staring at her ass while she did a post-coital line.

  “Try some?” She held the vial to me, brown glass the size of my pinkie tip.

  “Okay…” I knew I had to snort it, but it still didn’t seem right. Things going into my nose usually burned.

  “Take this,” she handed me a metal straw—stainless steel, .20 gauge—cut two lines an inch and half long each. “Sniff hard and follow the line. It won’t burn at all.”

  She was right, it didn’t burn at all. Picture a shattering window, each piece of glass—from the biggest shard to the tiniest sliver—is a thought, a memory, an idea or an impulse, tumbling end over end in every direction at once, every minute of your life, from your first heartbeat to your last. Imagine stopping the film in a split moment, then running it backwards. Imagine the billions of jagged fragments magnetized in an instant, pulled back into an unfractured whole, crystal clear. That’s what it feels like. The perpetual whirlwind of vaporous memories and regrets goes away. Sudden changed everything.

  So, I’m standing in her room, the first waves of that first hit collapsing my thoughts into here and now, eyes fixed on the mirror and razorblade thinking, I like this.

  “This used to be part of my act,” Sudden said. I looked over as she took a pull from a bottle of rum.

  “What did?”

  At the same instant, she spat a ball of bright heat across a candle, daylight flashing into the bedroom for a moment.

  “Where did you learn that?”

  “Didn’t you ever want to join the circus when you were little?” she asked me, laughing at my amazement.

  “Yeah, but not to get my face set on fire.”

  “What would you have done, then?”

  “I wanted to be a contortionist.” In one second it seemed funny and in the next second I forgot why.

  “C’mere,” she said. “Have another line.”

  Sudden’s connection was Jimmy, the doorman at her club. Jimmy took me on as a customer. He had some of the dancers as customers too, as well as some regulars. The owners knew, and they took their cut. And I’m sure their bosses took a cut, guys working with ledgers in card rooms or Vegas bars. I didn’t ask. After a time, Jimmy connected me with Ray, with whom I stayed through every other change, but he never knew about those. Jimmy introduced me as his friend, and Ray only knew me as Jimmy’s friend thereafter. He never saw my left hand, would meet me at his place in Culver City whenever we did a deal. Ray didn’t seem too bright, but I wasn’t falling for that. He wore a black knit cap year-round and a patchy beard. He had hearing aids in both ears, the putty-colored, median pigment of the hard-of-hearing demographic, every race and none.

  The expense added up. I did things for Jimmy when he needed them or when his employers said he needed them. The first time I did what I do for money, I’m thinking, I shouldn’t do this, but I’ll make an exception. Just this once. M
aybe one more time. I procured Social Security numbers or printed birth certificates. I did passports. Mia and Lenka from the Ukraine, Pavel from Budapest. I can feel the brain-rush when I start working. Lay out the pieces, look for what’s missing and seal the gap, brain cylinders firing to reshuffle the puzzle, and it makes my face and fingers warm, feeling my brain work.

  Some people wonder how others go on the run, leave one place for another when they’re being tracked, watched, and they slip away anyhow, wonder how guys get through the Canadian border with opium bricks or up through Mexico with uncut coke. I don’t.

  I made an exception for Jimmy, and now I’ve got Jimmy and his people to worry about, and they’ve got me to worry about. But that exception for Jimmy was the catalyst for the exception I made for Keara. Make me someone. Taught her everything I know. Wanted to learn the ropes. And if I hadn’t trusted her with my real name, then I wouldn’t still have her. And I can’t have that.

  I spent five months with Sudden, through August of 1985. I was living in North Hollywood, some nights staying with her in Sherman Oaks. My last godsplitter had been years prior while I was in jail, before I had moved west. The infirmary had done little more than restrain me to a bed and shoot me with just enough Thorazine to shut me up. That lasted three days and I had almost forgotten about it. I’d written the headaches off as a childhood phenomenon, some anomaly of my growth.

  Sudden was working a day shift, and I stayed at her place that afternoon, reading. In those first few minutes when that unearthly quiet muffled every ambient sound of the city and the blue walls of her bedroom started to glow, I remembered every single second of those first three headaches. The pain started as I was ransacking her bathroom for anything that might help. I found a bottle of Percocet, started taking them and they didn’t do anything. I lost count and took them all, found other pills, took them but shouldn’t have. The godsplitters have been returning ever since.

  ———

  “Can you hear me? Can you say your name for me?” Loud, clear, persistent. Latino Med-Tech with close-cropped hair, cradling my head with rubber gloves. Blue windbreaker, L.A. County Paramedic patch, and shining a light into my eyes. Might as well pry my lids open and scratch his name onto my retina with a coat hanger.

  Again, “Can you say your name for me?”

  “Johnny.” My tongue was a fist of tar clogging my mouth, unable to make the complex twist into the required j. Ellis Island butchered a lot of names that way, lice inspectors armed with rubber stamps and naturalization documents, unable to hear through the blurs of Gaelic or Slavic accents. J’s don’t happen until the tail end of speech development around age four. In my case, seven. Narcotics like Percocet hit the speech and memory regions of the brain first, making my answer moot. Shonnie.

  “His driver’s license says ‘Martin.’” Another voice. “John’s his middle name.”

  I tried to say yes but could only grunt.

  “Do you know what day of the week it is, Martin?”

  Yesterday was payday, so that made it Thursday. But I’d been locked inside and hadn’t been able to pick up my check and I’d have to do it tomorrow if I wasn’t stuck in the hospital. I didn’t have any cash and had spent my last five on two pints at the Dresden Room. Jimmy owed me big and was supposed to come through. But I cut him slack so he’ll cut me slack.

  “Jimmy owes me money,” I tried to say.

  “Martin, I need you to open your eyes. Come on, Martin, open up. Look at me.”

  ———

  After the Emergency Room, I passed the evaluation, the back of my head virtually touching my heels, the psychiatric equivalent of coughing up a half-swallowed hairpin and picking locks with my teeth. I had to forage through my memory for every scrap of reading I’d done in Dr. Gaines’s office, and I kept preparing my answers in my head, just ahead of her line of questioning because I knew the checklist well.

  The Evaluator was a frazzled, female graduate student intern wearing thick-soled running shoes, a rumpled, ankle-length skirt, mismatched sweater and a blast of frizzy hair screaming in every direction against the call of gravity. Spider-thread scratch lines and freckle-puncture scabs covered her wrists, hands and fingers. No jewelry.

  She reveled in the interview process, enjoyed looking through my file, such as it was, and consulted an interview crib sheet that she did a shitty job of keeping from me. In short, she was everything I’ve ever come to hate: the authority of the State with the mind of a child fighting for sandbox territory. I could tell by her hands that her closest companion was her cat, which meant she had no husband, boyfriend or girlfriend. She hated any life more colorful than hers.

  “How are you feeling now?” she asked.

  “I’m exhausted,” I said. “I want to get out of here.”

  “Are you happy or sad right now, Mr. Kelly?” Tense.

  “I’m happy,” I said. This was not going to be easy. I hadn’t spoken with an Evaluator since I was a kid, and back then I hadn’t been lying to them. Back then, I didn’t know just what damage they could do with the stories I told them. But I did now.

  She made a single line of notes, then asked Why? Twice she held up her hand to quiet me—a gross breach of APA protocol—if I embellished my answers. Her three nouns were cat, blanket, and baby. She incorrectly used the word symptom instead of sign. I doubt that she ever finished getting her license.

  “Mr. Kelly, I’m issuing you a conditional discharge. I believe your overdose was accidental, but you’re showing symptoms of a somatoform disorder with these unfounded migraine claims. I’m going to keep you on file, and I need to see you in three weeks. I’d like you to take some tests when you return.”

  Read: She couldn’t tag me with anything then and there, but still wanted me to come back for further evaluation. This, in spite of the fact that her sole charge was to provide a single, written opinion for the attending ER physician. I promised her that I’d return and when I left, made another promise that I’d be prepared for this next time. I never went back, and I knew she’d never find me.

  ———

  Sharon had quit working at the club with Sudden. Sharon needed to turn her life around. Sharon needed money, methadone, urine screening and weekly counseling to stay clean and, if Sharon had all of those things, then the State would let her keep little Paul, born six pounds, two ounces. Daddy had gone AWOL as soon as she said I think I’m pregnant and her arrest for possession followed soon after. Sharon had to work, and work meant carrying trays at Ships or Denny’s, just like Mom used to do. Work meant making ends meet on a minimum-wage graveyard shift with a newborn to support and the State clocking her and her bodily fluids. A hard change after years of making six figures in undeclared cash and spending every bit of it.

  Here’s a thousand bucks, I said. You’re my wife, and that’s our son. We’re getting him a Social Security number. I’ll give you another thousand when we’re finished.

  He’s already got one, she said.

  I know.

  Baptismal Certificate and hospital birth record, fifty-five minutes total. When the County Registrar’s Certified Record of Live Birth arrived in the mail, it was for Paul John Macintyre.

  His middle name is Michael, she said.

  It was Michael. Now it’s John.

  I applied for a passport and Social Security number, awaited the inevitable written denials. Baptismal certificate and hospital record, round two. Four letters of complaint sent back to the County Registrar with the accompanying rejections from the SSA and State Department. I insisted that they’d transposed 1958 with 1985, that they’d made a serious mistake.

  It took time, but that didn’t bother me. They were slow, which meant they were inefficient, which meant they wouldn’t see that the birth certificate’s serial number showed I was lying. And I was right—the rubber stamps, corrections and form letters followed, just to make the problem, me, go away.

  Martin Kelly ended when Sharon took the money, took Paul to live with her par
ents in Virginia so she could start over, and I had a new birth certificate with a new date. I also had a spotless driving record, perfect credit and no psychiatric history. I was Paul MacIntyre.

  I didn’t know what to tell Sudden, didn’t know for certain how I felt about her. Knowing her precarious balance with human relations—she dealt with men at their lowest, and that came out during sex—I doubted she’d miss me. And Jimmy’s needs were getting bigger. Kept saying he wanted to introduce me to some people, that they appreciated what I’d done for them so far, and that they had plans for me.

  I opted to not tell her anything, to not meet Jimmy’s people and see what plans they had for me, to not say good-bye to anyone. I vanished.

  THIRTEEN

  Natalie wrote me fifteen love letters altogether, with the rounded printing of a young girl—circles over her i’s and j’s, sometimes a smiley face or heart. She was twenty-four. She owned her car free and clear (an opulent BMW 320i, oil-slick black), paid a mortgage on a Marina Del Rey condo. And she was gorgeous, likely as attuned to sidelong, surreptitious gawks as I had been as a child. But dating Natalie meant swimming out of my depth. My best clothes, dishrags in contrast to the New York acronyms, baroque Italian and French labels of her social set. I tried, but my wardrobe was based on anonymity, economy and function, in that order.

  We’d made eye contact seven times during a show at the Coconut Teazer, each look compounding the seconds from the previous. I hadn’t seen her with anybody. When the bartender handed her a drink (I guessed rum and Coke), I ordered a bourbon, tipping a twenty in her direction to indicate I’d be paying for both of us. She said something, too many syllables for Thanks, but I couldn’t hear her over the music. I leaned in, ’Scuze me?, still deaf. Whether she said Thanks for the drink or I’ve poisoned yours, I don’t know. She ignored my words, kept her face close to mine. On that thin, anonymous, Sunset Boulevard pretext, we kissed, hard, almost not breathing for three minutes. I was right, rum and Coke. She pulled away, took me by the hand to the patio.