Kamikaze Lust Page 17

  “He called me a bitch!”

  “Okay, okay, I heard all I want to hear from both of you right now.” The cop held out his hand in front of me, then turned to Santa. “Are you all right?”

  “Barely, man,” he said. “She should be locked up.”

  The cop nodded, yeah, yeah, then told me stay put while he walked Santa a few steps, whispering. I watched the cars speed to make the green light at Seventy-second, some zipping like luge racers through the park’s curved entrance. Two girls dressed in little Eskimo coats ran past. “Mommy!” one said, “Tiffany killed one of God’s creatures!” “Did not!” “Did too, I saw you smush it.” The mother seemed oblivious, took each child by the hand, and dragged them across the street as they screamed: did not, did too, did not, did too….

  I was suddenly embarrassed by what the cop must have seen, this diminutive mortal picking a fight with the season. She of the bugged-out sunglasses, and head wrapped in a babushka—by Armani, okay, but the shtetl connotations obvious nonetheless. I ripped the scarf from my head, setting my hair free. My ears burned, would soon be pink and pulsating like the rest of me. I was out of control, as if anything could happen; maybe this was what it felt like to be my mother.

  The cop returned, said Santa wasn’t going to press charges. “He’s not! Oh, that’s really great.” Again, I felt the blood rush to my face. “He’s a disgrace to that suit, the creep.”

  “Listen, lady, you got a problem with Santa Claus, call the North Pole. My advice to you is just go home.”

  I was too angry, the scene too absurd. So I tramped off, almost stomping on a framed picture of the Statue of Liberty, which kicked off a line of enlarged color snapshots lining the scarred cobblestones. A sign above them read: “Makes perfect holiday gifts.” I wanted to take my platform boots and smash each picture. Like the Eskimo girl with a thing for smiting bugs, I would pulverize the World Trade Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chrysler Building, the Museum of Fucking Modern Art. I hated this city sometimes, its slick skyscrapers and shiny streets; its tired, humble, poor, and weak all trying to keep up with the Joneses and Smiths and Slivowitzes, our voices blending a dirge despicably modern, like the big-bang of a holiday blockbuster, a virtual mushroom cloud over the all-new, brilliantly digitized Times Square. So modern, so now, twilight’s last gleaming. New York was falling apart with progress, going down on me, and all I wanted was to go home and masturbate. Use my fingers, the pop-gun, anything to silence the raving lunatic who’d pitched a tent in my cunt. But I was not crazy, not like my mother, not crazy, not like my mother.

  I clenched my fists deep inside the pockets of my wool overcoat, and fought the mournful winds all the way home, where opening the door for me in his tight, synthetic-fiber, stripe-down-the-side doorman pants was Yossi the Israeli. Not to be confused with Yuri the Ukrainian who had a terrible acne problem, nor Max the gaunt Bronx native who could tell you where every celebrity in the area had lived or died. Yossi was my favorite. He smelled nice and had good teeth. But before today I’d never thought about dragging him by the balls down to the laundry room and screwing him in a Sensurround sort of way: hard, bloody, and foreboding. My desire these days took two genres: X-posure and Sensurround. Call it a yin-yang thing. A battle of milk and meat.

  Yossi pressed the elevator button for me and I noticed his fingers, thick and probing. Those fingers could ravage me… Silver Ray is Ravaged! A bing and the elevator doors opened. “Have a good day,” he smiled, the moment gone.

  Upstairs: the mail. Solicitations, magazines, bills, which seemed to arrive more frequently than they did before the strike, and one mailing envelope with Shade’s handwriting still reeking of indelible magic marker. I felt inexplicably happy, silly as a showtune. It had been a week since our conversation, and part of me was afraid it was all a dream, the sex-talk, the coming, her oh, baby, I want you so much!

  Not fast enough did I cut the envelope and amid the newspaper shavings remove a Ziploc bag full of green M&Ms. My body swelled as if my internal organs were being pumped. I stripped down to my tank and underpants, sat cross-legged on my bed, and pulled open the bag. I rolled a smiling green M&M between my thumb and forefinger. Popped it in my mouth, sucking until the coating melted and I tasted the sweet chocolate inside. A tear escaped the corner of my eye: you little sapster. I stuck my entire hand in the bag and with my fist squeezed and released.

  Green fingers sticking to the phone, I called Shade in Atlanta, never so excited about talking to anyone in my life. The way she said my name when she picked up, as if I were the only person in the world, made me feel drippy again. She told me to hold on, there was someone on the other line. I sucked another M&M, fearing the day I might be on the other end, dissed for caller number two. She clicked back. “So is it true?”

  “True?”

  “About the green ones.”

  I laughed. “I wouldn’t know, I’m completely premenstrual. I had a fight with Santa Claus in Central Park.”

  “How Scrooge.”

  “He started it.”

  I told her about the fight, and she teased me. But before we could go any further she said she was on her way to the mall. Shopping with mother. “Seems we can only talk around the spirits of Donna and Calvin and Christian.”

  “I like mine when she’s on Demerol.”

  “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice so present I thought I might start sobbing. Instead, I took off my tank.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Are you okay?”

  “I think so. Is it cold there yet?”

  “Freezing.”

  “Then you’d better stay inside. I’ll call you later.”

  “Goodbye, Shade.”

  “Merry Christmas, baby.”

  Her words left me stroking my pussy with an M&M, enough to taste myself on the candy. Freddy scratched at my toes. I nudged her away with my foot, touching myself with one hand and eating the M&Ms off of my stomach with the other.

  The phone rang: I was screening. Mom’s voice came, faintly, something about borrowing my jeep. I reached for the toy pop-gun she’d given me and imagined she’d put a spy camera inside. She was watching me masturbate. Her voice fragmented—you said you’d be here over the holidays.

  …oh, yes.

  —Lorraine’s gotta be by her doctor.

  I saw Aunt Lorraine’s face and wanted to scream…no! The gun moved faster, fucked me deeper, stomping and smashing Mom’s voice, breaking the whole damn world…ouch!…my toe…I kicked the cat and was coming and scared and coming and sad and coming and utterly humiliated. I smelled myself on the clammy sheets. That’s it. I was through with this business. I reached for Freddy, but she mewed angrily, threw her tail up in my face. “I’m sorry,” I said, talking to my cat, again. Each day took me one step closer to cat-lady land. I knew I had to get out of solitary, yet everywhere I went I dragged my smelly bed along with me, wearing a sign that marked me worse than a scab. I was a daughter of Onan.

  “Go ahead, try them on,” RR said, a dare of course.

  We were behind the shoji screens sectioning off Mistress Wanda Lynne’s dressing table, perusing her wares—the standard handcuffs, whips, nipple clamps, masks, paddles, etc. What had caught my interest was the pair of thigh-high patent leather stilettos. About twenty-four inches high.

  “Come on, they’re not ready yet,” he goaded, and in his voice lay my claim to ambivalence. As much as I wanted to try on the boots, I didn’t trust him. But the way he smiled at me, nothing short of provocation, inspired my Silver Ray recalcitrance. I sat down on a folding chair next to him and removed my own platform boots. Fortuitous, I hadn’t done laundry in weeks and had to dig up a pleated, black mini-skirt I hadn’t worn in years. You are not honest, Slivowitz; you knew he was back from Vegas when you dressed this morning.

  Shade ghosting me, I removed my platforms and lifted one of the shiny thigh-highs. It felt smooth against my fingers and smelled of shoe polish. “It’s like a heel upgrade,” I said, conscious of RR’s e
yes on my feet as I slid them one after the other into Wanda Lynne’s boots, pulling up at the thighs so the leather gripped tightly. His staring aroused me, for despite his pleas to the contrary, I couldn’t separate him from his porn star identity. He was all sex. The frivolous and seedy kind. The kind they advertised in the back of magazines and on cable TV.

  “You gonna walk or what?” he said.

  “Hold your horses.” I balanced myself on the back of a chair, took a few steps. It was as if I were walking on stilts. Awkward and defiantly nonerotic. I kept thinking, please don’t fall, please don’t fall. But I’d always been a fast learner. A few more steps and I sailed with the curve of Sliver Ray’s hips, the swagger of her triple-X ass.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  Not bad? I was pacing in front of him like a Madison Avenue hooker, and he says not bad. Bastard. I handed over the reins to Silver Ray. She took a step toward him, then another. Close enough to touch, she teased, pivoted, the back of her thighs in his face. She leaned forward, keeping all of the weight on her legs, and felt him move closer, his breath on her ass.

  A quick second, the shift of my eyes, and there was Mistress Wanda Lynne, yellow-blond hair glimmering against her black satin cape, the chunky soles of her white combat boots lifting her almost six feet in the air.

  “Excuse me, but what the fuck is this?” Her eyebrows swept up her forehead. I slipped forward, would have fallen on my face were it not for the dressing table. As it was, I knocked a riding crop to the floor.

  “I…uh…I was just—”

  “You’re wearing my boots!”

  My mouth opened, but no words came out. I was counting on RR to speak, but he just sat there. Smiling, I think.

  “Jesus Christ…Alexis!” she screamed, then ranted. “These are my things, this is my work. I don’t go to your job and go through your things! You wouldn’t catch me trying to do your job!” Alexis pulled back the screen, took a quick survey. A few of her minions came running behind her.

  “Wanda?” she said, and I knew I was in trouble. Alexis Calyx frightened me more than some tatty dominatrix, more than a belligerent Santa Claus or the entire NYPD for that matter. It wasn’t that she was my employer, but that her opinions had started to count.

  “Who the fuck is she? She’s wearing my boots!” Wanda Lynne shouted.

  “I was just trying them on,” I protested.

  “You can’t do that, who said you could do that?”

  “Okay, look, she’s not going anywhere with them,” Alexis said. “Rachel, take off the boots.”

  I sat down and yanked the left boot by its five-inch heel. “No!” Wanda said, hands on hips, cape flying out at the sides. She looked like a superhero. “Don’t pull from the heel! It doesn’t matter, they’re ruined.”

  “What are you talking about?” Alexis said.

  “I can’t wear them if someone else’s feet were in them. It’s a bad omen, ask anybody. This is so unprofessional.”

  “They’re just shoes,” RR said.

  “Shut up, Robbie,” Alexis said. “But, you know, Wanda, this is a little extreme.”

  “Oh you think this is extreme? Watch.”

  She turned and started packing her equipment, the back of her cape flailing left and right with each aggravated movement. By this time, what seemed like the entire cast and crew of One in the Hand, Two in the Bush had descended upon Mistress Wanda Lynne’s dressing table. Nobody uttered a word. A few chains clinked and zippers locked, every sound amplified as if the set had been miked. Wanda’s stilettos bound my feet in day-glow cuffs.

  As with yesterday’s run-in with Santa Claus, I had difficulty placing myself in this scene. I hated being the center of attention and, usually, did whatever I could to blend into the background. This wasn’t so odd for a journalist. I was great with people one-on-one, could lure confessions out of the most stoic of subjects, and I had no trouble walking into a room full of lawyers, cops, or junkies as long as I knew I wouldn’t have to participate. On the other hand, editorial meetings were torture, dinner parties a nightmare. The one time I’d mistakenly accepted an invitation to speak in front of a group of journalism students, I spent a couple of weeks vomiting, my body reaching unprecedented levels of dehydration, before I had to cancel the engagement. Sam suggested hypnosis. I think I told him to piss off, or words to that effect. Funny, I wasn’t nauseous now, though all eyes led inevitably toward my feet. I was more nervous about Alexis.

  Finished with her packing, Wanda stomped off the set. Then, as if a pause button had been released, confusion ensued. It was the only scene left to shoot, and they needed a dominatrix, Alexis said she wouldn’t compromise. Call Wanda and apologize, someone said. Offer her more money, new boots, anything. “Get another mistress,” said Alia the directorial ingenue.

  Alexis looked apoplectic, as if the suggestion had been for her to walk across burning coals. “On Christmas Eve?” she said. “Where am I going to find a dominatrix on Christmas Eve?”

  “This is New York,” said a young man I didn’t remember and would have remembered because he had a row of about twenty metal rings in each ear.

  “Fine, okay. Fine.” Alexis swung her arms overhead. “You think you can get someone, by all means, go right ahead, whatever you have to do, go for it.”

  They walked off. Others paced, making frustrated faces, offering the same suggestions over and over again. Listening to them, I felt guilty and feared being banished from the magical kingdom. Another casualty of the Alexis Calyx ghostwriting wars: Rachel the porn star wanna-be. She was fourth, fifth if you included the sister. I bent down to remove the offending thigh-highs.

  “Hey, why don’t you use Silver here,” RR said, forcing me to look up at him. “She’s wearing the shoes.”

  “What?” Alexis snarled, and I wanted to smack the sanctimonious smile from his face. I couldn’t believe he said that after he’d made me try on the boots, the traitor.

  “Of course, sure, she could be,” said Claire Blue. It was the first time she’d addressed me other than a quick bonjour and slight slip of the lip, so much like her take-me mouth in X-posure it always made me blush. I could barely even look at her, let alone think about acting in a movie with her. As if I could act in any kind of movie, with anyone. I fidgeted when Rowdy pointed his video camera in my direction, and Silver Ray, too, was a behind-the-scenes kind of gal. It was part of her shtick, the camera-shy porn star. But silence had fallen on the set, everyone staring at me as if the suggestion that I stand in for Mistress Wanda Lynne were not the height of absurdity.

  “Oh, no,” I nodded fiercely. “I can’t do it, no way.”

  “Yes, but, why not?” Claire Blue looked at me, and I made myself hold her gaze. Her ink-black hair framed her face; her eyes were perfectly blue, depressed but regal like the weather, like blue M&Ms. Stage fright or not, I might do the scene if I got to kiss her afterwards. “You see yourself with the shoes, that’s all,” she said. “I am the one really who is doing everything. You just say the words, hold the whip, tie me around.”

  “The shoes do fit,” said Bob Florida, a blond military type also in the scene.

  “Yes, they are good,” Claire Blue said. “She looks beautiful too, eh? A little fear makes a woman more, I don’t know, sensual I think.”

  “Absolutely,” RR said.

  “Um…thanks,” I stammered. “But, I don’t think so.”

  “Hello, over here, objection!” Alexis shouted. All eyes turned to her. “Can we get back to the planet earth now?”

  While I was thankful for her clarity, I was also insulted. She didn’t want me in her movie. I wasn’t good enough, pretty enough, sexy enough.

  “You should listen to Claire,” RR said. “She’s French, she knows about these things. Haven’t you read Story of O?”

  “Get out, okay? Just get out!” Alexis pointed her cell phone at RR’s face. He rolled his eyes.

  “You’re overreacting, Alexis,” he said.

  “Don’t patr
onize me, just get off my fucking set. You’ve done what you wanted, so get out.”

  “You serious?” he glared at Alexis, his prune face meaner than I’d ever seen, taunting and belligerent. A look of panic seized her, the olive tones draining from her skin as if someone had drawn them from her cheeks with a hypodermic. But only for a few seconds. She managed to shake it off and walk toward RR. The rest of us were immobile, a captive audience. “You bet I’m serious,” she said. “I’m sick of you trying to sabotage me, and I’m really sick of feeling guilty about your career.”

  “You’re forgetting whose movie this is.”

  “No, I won’t let you do this anymore!” She swung her phone like an epileptic conductor. I was afraid she might hit him with it. “I want you out of here and I don’t give a shit if you pull your goddamn money. I shouldn’t have taken it in the first place.”

  “You can’t do this without me,” he said.

  “I’m serious, get the fuck off my set, Robbie. Just leave me alone!”

  He pursed his lips dismissively and laughed. Then he did something so audacious, so vulgar, so fucked-up and aggressive….

  He winked at me. As if we’d been in collusion! Mortified, I wanted to disappear inside of Wanda Lynne’s boots. But I felt gigantic, awkward, and inflated with anger. I could have pummeled him the way I’d taken out Santa Claus. He was such an asshole. I took a deep, calming breath, trying to convince myself nobody had seen him wink or that maybe I’d imagined it. RR turned back to Alexis, and they stared, the set so quiet I could hear Claire Blue fidgeting next to me. I held my breath until finally, like my mother leaving the Thanksgiving dinner table, RR strutted out of there as if he were the innocent victim of a witch hunt and the rest of us the condemning masses. The worst part was I wanted to storm out with him.

  When he was gone, Alexis turned to me. “Meet me out front, I need some air. And get rid of those boots, please.”

  “What should I do with them?”

  “I don’t care, just get them away from me, I never want to see them again.”