Chicken (8 page)

Row after row of busted-up hovels and barefoot chilluns running with scrawny chickens pecking in dusty front yards next to nasty-looking skinny-ribbed dogs sniffing around for something to eat. When I see footage years later of Shantytown in apartheid-era South Africa, I'm reminded of taking Lulu home to the wrong side of the tracks.

My mom loved Lulu because Lulu was a remarkable woman who was managing to thrive in a hostile environment. It never dawned on my mother to consider what color Lulu was.

Jade wears a red leather micromini and a tiny red T that stops two inches above her belly button. She wears no shoes. Her hair is long and straight and shines like midnight oil. She's little, but she takes up a lot of room dancing in the corner by herself, doing a hybrid Kabuki-geisha-hustle as Jimi Hendrix plays ‘Foxy Lady.' She looks tough, like she doesn't need anything or anyone, but freaky, like you could ask her to blow you on the White House lawn, and if she was in the right mood she'd do it. Turns out this is very close to the truth. She materialized out of the thinnest air. I don't know anything about her, but I've already fallen deeply sweetly madly in love with her.

Kristy can't dance like that.

When Sunny witnesses my Jade swoon, he leans in way close, puts his hand on my chest above my heart, his lips sucking distance from my ear, and whispers like my guardian devil:

‘Don't even think 'boutit, boy!'

‘Who is she?' I'm a man hearing what he wants to hear and disregarding the rest.

‘No, baby. Ah know my lips was movin', but somehow the woids didn't make it to your ears. Ah said, “Don't. Even. Think. “Boutit.”'

He gets his Serious Sunny face on. It's the same face he put on when he told me not to pull anything funny with the Hollywood Employment Agency, cuz they were people who would seriously kill you. Get the money up front.

‘Goil messed up,' Sunny says.

‘We're all messed up, Sunny,' I say.

‘Yeah, but that goil MESSED UP!' Sunny says.

‘Okay, you warned me. Now, who is she?' I am persistent and stupid holding hands.

‘She Jade,' says Sunny.

Jade.

With the money she's probably making and the money I'm making, we could get a bitching apartment, a nasty car, a killer Harley, and we could have crazy freaky sex every day. How cool would that be? I can see the whole thing so clearly.

Jade.

J
ADE'S NOT
her real name. She never tells me her real name, and I never ask. No one knows where she lives. She drives a kooky pink convertible and she never wears shoes, even in restaurants.

I'm tooling up the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down in the pink of Jade's convertible, cool seasalty air breezing our hair, the moon shining on the ocean and ‘Good Vibrations' washing over us from the radio.

She doesn't say anything, hasn't spoken since we left the party. The only reason I know her name's Jade is because Sunny told me so. In fact the only thing she said to me all night was ‘You wanna go for a ride?'

But when she did I was out the door faster than you can say, ‘Heel, boy!'

I caught Sunny giving me his you're-an-idiot-to-walk-out-that-door-with-that-girl look, but all I could do was shrug him a
whattayagonnado?
smile as I was swept like a felled tree down Jade's flume.

One part of me wants her to talk, wants to know how this girl got to be Jade. But another part of me just doesn't want to hear all her weepy stories, doesn't want to tell her mine.

Then I remember reading in a magazine that living the High Life is just a state of mind. If you think you're living the High Life, ipso facto, presto chango, you're living the High Life. I have large cash money in my pocket. I'm roaring up the Pacific Coast Highway with all this Jade. I'm living the High Life.

But Kristy's sitting in the living room of my mind. I should call her. I don't wanna call her. I don't need her.

I have Jade.

When I'm ten my dad pulls me aside after church one Sunday, and there, with Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior nailed to the cross and bleeding for my sins right over my head, he says, ‘Son, one day you'll fall in love with a nice girl, and, well … you'll want to make love to her. You'll know you're in love because your organ will become engorged with blood … Your partner's whatsit will secrete a thick lubricant … you'll mount her, penetrate, and thrust until you ejaculate your spermatozoa. The good news, son, is that if it's done properly, you can get the whole thing over with in less than a minute!'

I'm sure that's not actually what he said, but that's what I remember. I spend the next few years trying to figure out where I'm gonna get a bloody organ, what I'm gonna lubricate it with, and where I'm gonna find something from the spermatazoic era to ejaculate.

Encased in steel and glass, I can see the Pacific Ocean waving at me all the way from Japan. I don't know whose place this is, or why Jade has the key, or even where the hell I am, for that matter, but I am living the High Life.

Jade Asian handmaiden lapdances all around me. She still hasn't spoken a word since we got here, and the more she doesn't say anything, the more normal it seems, and the more I like it. All those words. What's the point?

Jade lays out her equipment with the precision of an alchemist. Lights her candle. Lays her spike on the table. Dumps her white powder into her spoon. Floats her spoon under flame until her white powder melts into a spermy liquid. Draws clear liquid meticulously through the filter of a cigarette into her spike.

Today, kids, Mr. Wizard's gonna teach you how to shoot heroin.

Jade lifts her skirt, finds a nice spot on her bottom, slides the
spike into it, and slowly pumps a river of junk into her hungry ass. Then she unplugs the spike, sets the works down on the table, and slowly the sleepy sweetness sweeps through her. Her head lollygags like a nodding bobbing head doll in the back of an old Chevy, her eyes drift off into the sunset, and she strolls off down Big Easy Street.

She looks over at me. She wants me to come over.

The lady or the tiger.

In a heroin haze Jade pulls on me, so my belt buckle ends up next to her mouth. Looking down at her, I'm struck by how exquisitely absent she is. Part of her allure is physical, certainly, but part of it comes from the fact that she is just so far away. I want to reach down inside and pull her out.

Jade makes me her human pacifier, moaning low in the back of her throat like a big cat purring. Later I'll find out she charges a thousand dollars an hour, and for that you can do whatever you want to Jade. She could work 24/7 if she wanted, but she only calls Sunny when she wants to work. Sometimes she calls ten times in a day, sometimes once in a month.

Somebody tells me later she's from some millionaire family in the Orient. Somebody else says she's the daughter of a Yakuza hired-killer heroin dealer. Somebody tells me she's an orphan from Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.

Jade brings me right to the edge and takes me back over and over, jacked right into my pleasure centers. Everything shuts out except Jade.

We have all our clothes on the whole time. Strange, I think, at this point in my life I work naked and have sex with my clothes on.

Jade reaches in her little bag she always carries with her, and pulls out something I can't see.

OH GOD!

It's a razor blade! I see me walking into the emergency room with my severed member in my hand. I see Sunny shaking his head, going, ‘Ah wahned ya, boy!'

It's not a razor blade. It's some lubey thing that makes me slip right into Jade, and she squeezes me like I'm dough she's kneading.

Jade wants me to bodyslam her. So I am her madman, and I ram her with everything I've got. Her body goes dead limp, and she makes the same animal throat noises she was making before. She's my junky Raggedy Ann and I'm her loverstudguy Andy.

Finally, when I let myself go, I shake like I'm attached to an industrial-strength paint mixer, ten-point-oh on the Richter scale, and leave my mind behind, screaming and wailing.

When I parachute back down, she's kind of whimpering. I'm proud I could rock this girl's world. Then I realize it's not a sex whimper. Jade's crying.

All of a sudden she doesn't seem like some hot mysterious flower of the East. She seems like a sad broken little heroinaddict girl. What am I doing here? What am I doing? I want to go now. I want to be in my own bed. I want to be in my own life.

Jade disengages, collapses, and lapses into a deep sleep before she even hits the pillow, like she was shot by a sniper with a silencer.

In the morning after, Jade's gone. I search the whole house for her, but Jade's gone. I have a little-boy panic, synapses twitching with the memory of searching a vacant house for my mother.

Stop. Breathe. I put together another emergency meeting of the What Am I Gonna Do? Committee and decide to call Sunny, who comes and gets me, bitching and moaning the whole time with a litany of I-told-you-so's and when-will-you-ever-listen-to-me's, essential ingredients in any humble pie.

In the future, when I yearn for her, I remind myself of the long ride back to 3-D, with that cold underneath feeling of being ditched by Jade.

 

L
AUREL
C
ANYON
 is an enchanted eucalyptus oasis in the middle of this Hollywood smogfarm metropolis. As I enter the log cabin house set behind a wildflower jasmine jungle, a solid block of patchouli incense musk nearly knocks me over. With driftwood tie-dye batik beanbags wind chimes macrame´ hanging plants and Mexican day-of-the-dead skeleton art everywhere, it looks like Woodstock exploded in Rainbow's house.

Jams through the room.

Rainbow has long straight gray hair, wears feather earrings and a long tie-dyed dress with a hippie happy Buddha face on it I later realize is supposed to be Jerry Garcia. No makeup. No shoes.

‘Hi, come in. Want some ginseng tea?' wafts out of Rainbow.

The customer's always right. When in Rome, drink ginseng tea. While she fetches me tea, I survey lots of pots of pot plants. And cats. I count four, but I feel the presence of many more, and when I close my eyes I smell cat hanging under that pagan lovechild aroma.

‘Do you dig the Dead?'

Rainbow returns with my tea in a psychedelic homemade mug with a drawing of a face I later realize is supposed to be Jerry Garcia. The tea smells too earthy and dank for drinking, but I bring the Mother Earth medicine scent up to my lips and sip.

It's good. And good for me.

She's looking at me like she expects something. Oh, yeah – do
I dig the dead? I'm confused. Is this some weird necrophilia deal Mr Hartley forgot to tell me about? Do I feel comfortable with that? Not really. No, she means Jerry Garcia's Grateful Dead. I see me digging a grave and putting a dead Jerry Garcia in it.

‘Sure, I dig the Dead …'

I trot out my best hippieboy smile. Actually, I could care less about the Dead. Or the dead. I'm here to get paid. I look around for my envelope. No envelope. I don't like that. I'm looking for a low-maintenance score, get in, get out, badda bing badda boom.

‘They're so … essential, don't you think?' Rainbow says in that earnest way only hippies and Christians have.

Essential? The Dead? Sure, why not? But the really essential thing is: Where the hell's my goddam money?

Relax, cowboy, you're gonna get paid, go with the flow, flowing, in the flow.

‘Absolutely, yeah … sure …' I'm nowhere near the flow.

‘I believe Jerry is the physical embodiment of the Godhead, don't you?' says Rainbow.

Hey, someone wants to pay me to say Jerry Garcia is the physical embodiment of the Godhead, that's Easy Money.

‘Yeah, I can definitely see that …'

‘Give me your hand,' says Rainbow.

I give her the hand. She takes it.

‘You have big hands,' she says.

In my line of work that's a compliment.

‘Thank you,' I say.

She looks at me funny, like it wasn't a compliment at all, just a statement of fact. But she doesn't really seem to care, she's looking into my palm like it holds the key to the sweet mysteries of life.

Only the newest greenhorn in Greenhornville doesn't get the money up front. This is what separates the rank amateur from the hardworking professional. You're not here to have a good time, Charlie, you're here to get paid.

But Rainbow has produced nothing, and I can tell she'd be just the sort who'd get all bent if a guy mentioned something as crass as cash.

So I sit and stew as Rainbow gazes into the crystal ball of my palm.

I'm thirteen, Newbee Newboy again. Since none of these Dallas hayseeds'll give me the time of day, I find myself staring through the window of life at the party where everyone's having a marvelous time.

In English class the teacher announces she wants to do a dramatic reenactment of
The Diary of Anne Frank
, the heart-wrenching tale of one girl's humanity shining in the face of unthinkable evil. Volunteers for acting in Teacher's pet project will get extra credit. Whoever's interested should come when school's over at three to audition.

Anne Frank don't make me no never mind, as they say in Big D. But the idea of acting in this thing sparks me. The whole rest of the day, that voice which is never wrong keeps whispering that I should show up.

At three o'clock, six of the hottiest of hottie thirteen-year-old babies in Lyndon Baines Johnson Junior High School sit in English class arguing about who's best suited to play Anne Frank, our tragic doomed heroine.

My mouth drops open. My tongue plops out. It's all I can do not to bust out laughing as I slide like a fox into the debutante chickadee henhouse.

Rainbow stares still at my palm. At this point I'm thinking she's a
Charlie Manson groupie with a garrote she's gonna use to sacrifice me and the goat in the backyard.

I'm starting to have serious doubts about Rainbow. About this whole line of work. I've got enough money. I could excuse myself like I'm going to the bathroom and walk out and just drive. Where? My mom in Oregon? Dad in Dallas? Nobody wants me. This is where the whole thing breaks down for me again. I don't tell anyone. I can't ask.

‘You're a very old soul …' concludes Rainbow.

You said a mouthful there, sister.

‘… and you've lived many lives … you were an explorer and sailed all over the world … and you were a sultan with many women. You were a mighty warrior in battle, and you were a slave on a plantation …'

Rainbow looks into me like she has periscopes that go through my eyes.

That's when I notice her for the first time. In all the confusion I haven't really seen her. She has deep eyes, steel-colored with flecks of cobalt. A big Scandihoovian Bergman madly suffering but eternally hopeful face. I half expect Death to walk out of her bedroom and challenge me to a game of chess for my soul.

‘You're here to learn a lesson, and I'm here to teach you …' says Rainbow.

Okay, it's a hot-for-hippy-teacher thing. I'm all over it. I breathe easy.

‘Do you know what tantric sex is?' Rainbow asks.

I could dish some semicoherent gobbledygook about ancient mystic Asian sex, but she wants me to be the blissfully ignorant manmoonchild, so naturally I oblige.

‘No, I don't …'

Rainbow hands me a smile, and leads me through a translucent tie-dyed cloth door into a bed with a room around it. It's the biggest bed I've ever seen. Overhead, high in the tall pointed ceiling, is a skylight, where incense curls up thick from fat Buddha bellies; candles toss soft little drops of light everywhere;
elephantheaded Indian gods with massive genitalia copulate with lionheaded goddesses; statue women stare with dozens of breasts; a halfman halfbull is inside a godhead with a doghead; Japanese paintings of Jade-looking beautybabies having intercourse in every position imaginable, one leg up over an ear, the other wrapped around a head; old postcards of cherubenesque honeys Frenched and doggied; a guy goes down (or would that be up?) on himself; and a shrine of rosebudvaginas and phalluspeni smiles. Pillows and cushions plump velvety; blankets, fur, and fat cloth make me feel like a cat, and I want to roll around getting my belly stroked while nubile handmaidens feed me catnip.

A sculpture of a vagina starts talking to me: ‘Hi, David, welcome to the party, come on in.'

And in the center of it all a big picture of a dark man with long black curly hair and brown magnets for eyes keeps staring at me. He's hard and soft at the same time. I've never seen the guy, but he looks familiar, like he's the kind of guy who could set you straight if you're floundering around. And I'm so very full of flounder presently. I make a mental note to find a wise, kind, benevolent guru teacher as soon as I leave Rainbow's. I'm still looking.

‘That's Baba Ram Wammalammadingdong,' says Rainbow.

I'm sure she didn't really say that, but that's what it sounds like to me, all Dr Seussy.

‘He's the master of sensual enlightenment.'

That's what I wanna be when I grow up: master of sensual enlightenment.

‘Sexual transcendence can only happen when the shock absorbers are open and connected to the life force that flows through all living things,' says Rainbow.

Much later I realize it was my chakras that needed opening, not my shock absorbers, but at the time I could care less. I'll open my shock absorbers, my athletic supporters, my cookie jar, whatever she wants. I just need to get paid, and I need to get paid now. I'm seeking enlightenment through cold hard cash.

‘Why don't we start by meditating?'

Rainbow settles into a big comfy-womfy cushy cushion cross-legged, and motions for me to do the same.

I balk. I'm naturally curious by nature, I'm very interested in the whole third-eye transcendent sex thing, and picking up some exotic kinky Eastern sex tips would be grand, but I have
got
to get my money up front.

I sigh quiet. I know for a fact it will not help us achieve harmony with the life force that flows through all living things if I tell Rainbow she needs to pay me now.

I am more than a bit dithered.

But just when things are looking their most dodgy, the gods smile upon me, and Rainbow, God love her, knows what I need and cannot ask for.

‘Oh, shit, you need some bread, don't you?' she says.

I could've cried. I see this as a clear-cut sign that I'm being taken care of by something bigger than myself.

Rainbow gets out of cross-legged, rummages through an old macramé bag, and returns with four skanky twenties, a nasty ten, a funky five, four filthy ones, and a bunch of loose change, then hands me the whole kitandkaboodle.

I'm starting to dig this crazy chick. I can see her scrimping and saving to give herself a treat. Me. I'm the treat for my trick. I vow then and there to be a pot of gold for this Rainbow.

The only role that absolutely must be played by a boy is Mr Frank, Anne's father. So by virtue of the fact that I show up, I become Mr Frank. And in the instant I'm handed that role, I become, for better and for worse, an actor. I have no idea what the teacher's name was, or which of the adorable thirteen-year-old Dallas girls ended up playing Anne Frank, or any other character for that matter. All I know is that I'm Mr Frank.

It's fun being Mr Frank. But being surrounded by all those gorgeous, popular, really nice-smelling beauties is delicious. And much to my amazement, they all seem to like me now.

In the scene, Mr Frank's supposed to celebrate. During rehearsals, Teacher keeps telling me to celebrate more, but I don't know how. We don't do much celebrating where I come from. The night before our performance I'm watching television. Herschel Bernardi does some crazy Greek dance where he throws his hands up in the air and shakes his booty. The lightbulb goes off over my head.

This is how Mr Frank is gonna celebrate.

‘The key to opening the gate that leads to the garden of earthly delights is a woman's pleasure.'

Rainbow pauses to make sure I got all that.

‘The key to opening the gate that leads to the garden of earthly delights is a woman's pleasure.'

She looks at me for a long time, so I understand how serious this is.

So I think about it seriously. It's comforting to have someone telling me what to think about. I don't have to make any decisions, and right now, decisions are just disasters waiting to happen.

Garden of earthly delights. A woman's pleasure. A woman's orgasm. Tumblers click in my head, a lock snaps open, and I see the light. A woman's pleasure is the key to sexual ecstasy. Now that I have my money, I'm keenly interested in this whole thing.

‘A man can have multiple orgasms … most people don't know that, but it's true. And I can show you how to do it,' Rainbow says with absolute conviction.

Multiple
orgasms? Hell, I have
one
and it nearly kills me. But I'm crazy curious to see if I can incorporate some clitoris into my penis.

‘There's a line where your orgasm is, it's kinda like a waterfall. See, it's like you're in a beautiful warm river, and the current is pulling you along, and you're headed toward the waterfall, you're getting closer and closer … until you're hanging right there on the edge of the waterfall, but you're not letting yourself go over. You just get inside your own orgasm, and you can stay there as
long as you want, as long as you don't release. Do you know what “release” means?'

Yeah, I think I got the idea.

‘No, what do you mean?' I ask.

‘Your release is your ejaculation. So you can orgasm without ejaculating,' Rainbow says carefully.

And the weird thing is, I know exactly what she means. River, waterfalls, release, the whole shebang.

‘I know it sounds totally … far out … but if you can wrap your cosmic mind around this, you'll always have lots of groovy lovemaking in your life. You probably won't get it tonight, but it's something you can always practice. By yourself, with a partner, doesn't matter. In the words of Baba Ram Wammalammadingdong, “Practice makes perfect.”'

I'm starting to like this Wammalammadingdong guy.

During our dramatic presentation of
The Diary of Anne Frank
, with all eyes upon me, I do my crazy Greek dance where I throw my hands up in the air and shake my booty. Well, the roof tears off the sucker, and that
Music Man
feeling lights me up like the Fourth of July on Christmas morning.