by R.C. Savoie.
I was watching the cult’s traffic boy sweating his ass off in the street. He was stuffed in a tuxedo like my own but with a reflective orange bib that comically failed to reach his cummerbund. His job was to direct a growing line of limousines up LesJardin Castle’s driveway arc one at a time, holding each one up long enough for the celebrities to disembark at the carpet and make their way to the doors. I’d seen him around the compound a few times over the last couple days. His indomitable size assaulted the memory, a booming six foot five with at least three hundred pounds of pure babyflesh and a playdoh face that was all jowls and dumb joy and as antagonistic to the Californian sun as an albino strapped to a tanning bed. He waved the first limo up with a bright red flag, wiping the sweat off his brow. What was his name again? It was something appropriately simple and good natured, a John or Bob, except those weren’t it.
The first limo halted at the carpet, pausing as if to collect itself before disgorging its cargo. Across the street the black & white face of a homeless man scooted up to see who was inside. Hollywood is full of the homeless. I scratched my shaved head and wondered how long it would take for all the celebs to enter this way, looking at my wrist to time the first one’s entrance so I could calculate a total entry time for all the limos. I wasn’t wearing a watch.
The limo door opened and out emerged actress/singer/model Jennifer Lopez in a flowery sundress of her own brand, labeled JLO. The sun was a halo above as she stepped out confused at the dim lack of cameras, her perfect bleached smile retreating behind a wall of waxed bronze. As she proceeded up the velvet roped way her runway face turned here and there in search of something familiar: a flash, a microphone, a pitched voice screeching her name, a paunchy unkempt man with a video camera bazooka-aimed at teeth waiting to gleam, the buzz of fandom murmurs. Nothing. There was only me watching from above, and she didn’t look up. Instead she approached with the same practiced stroll she’d use if the runway were lined with photographers and journalists and autograph seekers, paced by the carpet’s color and sleek velvet roping. A prim JLOed aide followed close behind with a leather planner pressed to her chest. Habit (or habitat) molded J Lo’s composure but her aide felt no such culture as she openly stared at the peopleless red ropes funneling them toward me. For a moment I thought the aide might be a problem. Her eyes were all paranoia and when one is walking toward a trap (of sorts) paranoia is a legitimate flight response. But she soon settled down, eyes dropping to J Lo’s heels in submission to her employer’s greater instincts. J Lo’s shoes were sunflower yellow and three inches high, open at the toe, probably also labeled JLO.
They were here to see me. They just didn’t know it yet.
As they entered below I exercised my privilege as unseen voyeur to squat down and really examine J Lo’s face, taking in the bone structure, skin tone, eye shape and positioning, lip size, mouth size, hair color and texture, all the minute physical details whose sum aura might explain why the media persists in identifying her as a latina even though she’s claimed New York City as her core identity. I don’t understand this. I mean I understand, but I don’t. I tend to agree with my friend Humberto Jimenez that J Lo has transcended all these vulgar associations to a higher plane of being. Humberto, otherwise known as ‘Hollywood Humberto’ to Southern Cal law enforcement and ‘HH’ to the region’s vagrants and mumbling homeless. HH is the type of gritty patchwork street sage once valued in pulp novels and late night noir, a man who despite his rancid stench and slurred accent can keep your attention rapt for at least thirty minutes with grimy anecdotes from the gutter. He does well as a pan handler when properly fueled. He recently disappeared for a few weeks in Venice Beach. As I heard it he was breakdancing on the boardwalk in comic slow motion for vodka, cigarette, and pizza money, and doing well until he got carried away with the centipede and vomited on a tourist’s wingtips. The police promptly removed him to who knows here, and that’s the last anyone saw of HH for awhile. Though the company files have nothing on him, HH dropped his life’s story on me one night on the beach while the sun was rising. We were exhausted after a vigorous all-nighter, rapidly quicksanding into dream, and we’d made a bench out of some driftwood to smoke a parting blunt. HH waited until half the blunt was gone before dropping his piece. Then he did it with the type of haunted honestly that was true in the way his face rooted itself to the clouds and sand instead of anything capable of judgment (i.e. me), beginning with a couple quick hits off the blunt. He said he was once a member of the glowing middle class, a true American dreamweaver with his naturalized ID, UCLA bachelor of arts, suburban circuit split-level, twin Japanese compacts, and a little senorita pure and boring in her plank position Catholic production of two children, aye, Santa Maria, and more forever on the way.
His masturbating became religious in fervor. “Fucking jerking off, man,” he confessed. “Like all the time.”
I shifted on the log and wanted to be somewhere else, thinking be careful what you ask for and all that.
HH continued. He said the onanist progression was diabolical. It began with imagined forays into the familiar: co-workers’ shrinkwrapped skirts, his wife’s’ agreeably plump friends, the resistant heft of teenage breasts as they bounced off the school bus steps. Though a man of commendable imagination, these petty fantasies were soon exhausted and in desperation he ran to the unholy arena of cyberspace. “Santa Maria!” What followed was a marathon progression through the Law of Declining Kicks, starting with the soft ethical fantasies of feminized softcore to a midpoint crest of German bukkake and then quickly down the twisted sewers of cyber hell where dwell such damnable delights as the infamous Zootroops’ belle prima donna, TrampXXXX (Tramp Quadruple X), who made a name for herself filming a daylong endurance test of eight canine lovers, the fifth of which was a great dane named “Thor” (as I sat there shivering in the morning air, I thought it disturbingly impressive that HH’s alcohol-sodden memory could recall the name of the actress, but the dog? He remembered the name of the dog? The fifth dog?). HH said that it was during Thor’s run of things that Mrs. HH walked into the den behind him. After coming home on lunch break for a forgotten xanex prescription, she heard these odd grunting noises in the rear of the house. Expecting a burglar, and never one to back down from a fight, the missus snuck around back wielding HH’s prized bowling trophy, a second place finish in the Jerry Lanes Xmas All County, consisting of a little bronze man swinging a sixteen pound ball. “It couldn’t have been a fucking broom, eh? No, the bitch grabs a chunk of metal. Story of my life, ese.” You can imagine what the little lady did with this when she saw what HH was up to. All the xanex in the world couldn’t smother that trauma. After forcing the family padre to perform an exorcism on the computer (while a swollen faced HH watched from the corner), Mrs. HH proceeded to kick our hero down the staircase of the American dream. The first step was public humiliation. Then he hit divorce (ouch). Zero child custody (oof). Depression (groan). Various numbing pills (what?). Unemployment (meh). And when he finally lost healthcare and its lifeline of antidepressants: alcohol (who?). This led to his present state of affairs and maverick performances of the centipede in Venice Beach. This is what he told me as we sat on our driftwood log silhouetted by a wounded sun. I felt a little queasy. Absent any conceivable response (how can you respond to a friend confessing that bestiality ruined his life?), I quietly slipped him an extra blunt, tapped his shoulder with a loose fist, then quickly exited Stage Right. Ten minutes later I didn’t exactly throw up as much as hovered over a garbage can coughing up my desire to.
It was HH who said something pertinent about J Lo. “She’s like that, man,” he said as we sat on the corner of Sunset and Vine a week after that day at LesJardin Castle. We were staring up at an enormous billboard for the film Bordertown, featuring a ten foot tall closeup of J Lo’s décolletage. “She ain’t no more latina than I am.”
I looked over at him, but said nothing.
“I’m a piece of the scenery, man, you know like the coke machine or bus stop over there. When they walk by,” he waved a limp hand at the streaming pedestrians, “you think they see a latino wrapped up in their dirty old clothes? Fuck no, ese. These gringos see nada. They see fear. They see themselves shitting with me in alleys behind dumpsters. I’m not the homeless latino guy, I’m just the homeless guy. Fucking garbage, eh. You don’t care nada if the shit you see is brown, green, black or red: you just don’t want to smell it. It’s like that with her too,” he pointed up at J Lo’s creamy neckline, “only like the opposite eh. She up there on the billboards. I’m down here on the street. Nobody but crazy eses like you care about us. But with chica up there, people always want to be around her, they want it too much eh. That’s why she stays up there in the clouds, smelling sweet with all the other billboard people. Even got her own perfume eh. Fucking JLO. Saw it in the Macy’s window. Named it after herself.” HH lifted his filthy wing and pointed his armpit at me. “Think I can bottle this? Eau de HH?”
This was sort of what I was thinking as J Lo and her aide passed beneath me at LesJardins Castle that day. I hadn’t met HH yet, but I was thinking along similar lines. The race of billboard people. Because that’s when it hit me: the JLO.
It wafted up sweet and flowery and formed the word pretty in my mind like cartoon smoke begging a quarter chub. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, feeling Desire pull me softly by the chin down toward J Lo’s creamy body with a sexy little voice whispering closer, closer, closer…
I already had my doubts about the cult’s plans for the celebrities that day, but for whatever reason the moment I smelled the JLO was the moment I knew I couldn’t go through with it.
I needed to get out of there.
[excerpted from the novel Lost Trademark]