Terminal Velocity, page 15
Electroshock, stunning drowsiness. Can’t remember. Ellen Larraine. Ellen Larraine. More shock. Raise your arm to eat. Not worth it. Stand up. Not worth it. More shock. Long empty reddish landscape. Not awful, just empty. Peace.
I stayed in the psychiatric ward at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas for almost six weeks, more than twice as long as my endurance as a fugitive. I can’t remember most of the hospitalization, and patches of my childhood are missing too. There were four shock treatments, and periods of a lassitude that was diagnosed as depression.
One day I woke up. There is no other way to describe it. I had been asleep in a long dream with tepees and saunas and a Mercedes convertible and a group of women who thought of themselves as outlaws. I had fallen in love with one of these women and then another, and the one I slept with, the one named Jordan, I had followed over an edge into a landscape of desire where I had lost my job, my husband, and my judgment. I had visited an invented world where nothing was familiar, my name and hair were different, and I was never safe. I had been un-molded by this experience, and now I was recovering.
“Want to hear a joke?” I said to Dr. Hardy the first time I was conscious of talking to her after my mother’s visit. Dr. Hardy’s office, I now noticed, was richly lined with dark wainscoting, deep bookcases, leather chairs. Her massive desk was mahogany.
I said, “This guy was dying of thirst. He was crawling across the desert, and he thought he saw a soda fountain on the horizon. So he struggled across the sand and dragged himself through the door, and he managed to pull himself up to a stool at the counter. ‘Make me a malt!’ he gasps. ‘Make me a malt!’ So the guy behind the counter says, ‘Poof, poof, you’re a malt!’ ”
She smiled slowly. “So who was the mirage?”
“It was all a mirage.”
“Even Artemis Foote?”
“Even Artemis Foote. Even Nancy Jordan, a.k.a. Jordan Wallace.”
“And what were you so thirsty for?”
“If you’re this smart, why aren’t you running a free clinic somewhere? Don’t you know about injustice and oppression? Don’t you know about the war in Vietnam?”
“Maybe I’m not that smart.” She had no discernible accent, that frizzy hair, no makeup except lipstick.
“I didn’t know psychiatrists were allowed to be witty.”
“Are you going to answer my question?”
“Are you gay?”
“Did I miss something? Am I the patient?”
She held my gaze pleasantly, and I realized how awful I must look. Though I remembered having my hair washed when I was first released from the locked room, that could’ve been weeks ago. I looked down at my hospital gown. “This is attractive. How long have I been here?”
“A little more than a month.”
“I’m beginning to realize how much trouble I’m in.”
“So you’re getting better.”
“Not gay, huh?”
“Why does it matter?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve been married for eight years. I have a three-year-old son. Why does that information make you feel bad?”
“The weirdness, I guess. The isolation. And I can tell you care about me.”
“Well, you’re an easy person to care about.”
“Do you think I’m actually a lesbian?”
“I can’t answer that, and you can’t either. Anyway, it’s just a word.”
“That’s what Jordan said.”
“You need to remember that these are difficult years for everyone. You aren’t alone in your confusion about identity.”
I didn’t say anything for several minutes, but she let the silence stay. “I don’t know what I was thirsty for. Am thirsty for. But something sure happened to me.”
“Yes, it certainly did.”
“I’ve decided to keep the name Rain. I’ve earned it.”
“All right, then,” she said. “Rain.”
“Is this really the hospital where President Kennedy died?”
“It is.”
“And did I see a red neon horse on top of a building the night I came into town?”
“You did.”
“And did the horse have wings?”
“Yes. They’re big on horses in Dallas.”
Before I was released from Parkland Memorial Hospital, I signed a contract with Dr. Hardy. I wouldn’t see any of the women from Red Moon Rising, I wouldn’t drink alcohol or take drugs, and if I had trouble keeping this commitment, I would attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. The last promise was the only one I kept.
CHAPTER 24
I moved to Los Angeles because the real world seemed too bizarre, and within three weeks I was working for a man named Frank Shakespeare on a late-night soap opera about the Confederacy called “Rise Again.”
Jordan had plea-bargained and was spending eight months in the women’s prison in Niantic, Connecticut. The charges against me had been dropped. I didn’t know where Artemis or the others were, and I didn’t want to know. Someone at Red Moon Rising had shipped my clothes to my mother, who in turn had shipped them to the residential hotel in West Hollywood that provided me temporary refuge.
The FBI arrived at my door before I even unpacked. Rick was wearing his purple overalls and carrying a bottle of cognac. “Nothing official,” he said, flashing his fraternity grin.
“You just happened to be in L.A. and knew my address?”
“You look great in that outfit,” he said.
I was wearing an army medic’s shirt with the name Rizotto on the pocket, used men’s jeans, and black paratrooper boots.
His arms and shoulders and chest were bare beneath the jumpsuit. He had that nice butt and the cognac.
I’d been on my way to a meeting because not drinking had proven more difficult than I’d imagined. AA seemed seriously stupid, a lot of sick people whining about how damaged they were, mumbling about powerlessness, and talking about God as “He.” Dr. Hardy had asked me to keep an open mind, but I doubted she meant I should sit through a reading of a chapter from the AA Big Book entitled “To the Wives.”
“I brought this for you,” Rick said. “A housewarming present.”
I kissed him quickly on the mouth and went directly to the kitchenette for two water glasses. “Nothing official? To your overalls, then.” The alcohol burned my throat clean, and a familiar warmth spread through my center.
“Well,” Rick said, “we got the one we were looking for.”
“Oh, yes, you nailed the dangerous one.”
He glanced around the room, which was drab in a way that made me feel secure. “I’m supposed to tell you to stay out of trouble.”
“I’ll try not to bomb any buildings.”
He sipped speculatively. “Seriously, how come you’re dressed like that? Are you still into this radical stuff?”
“How come you say ‘how come’? Won’t the Yankee feds think you’re dumb?”
Despite the overalls and his familiar attractiveness, he was appraising my surroundings carefully. “Not that they don’t look good,” he said. “They look good on you.”
“The last time you saw me I was a playing card.”
Satisfied that we were alone, he said, “Yeah, that was hot.”
“It was?”
“All those angry women. It was sexy.”
My hand fondled the back of the sofa. I was so happy to have a sexual impulse toward a man that I said, “Wow!”
“Wow?”
“This is the first time I’ve had hard liquor in months.”
“Want to dance?”
“Sure.” There was no music in my apartment, but we began a slow Southern version of the waltz. I could feel his erection. “What a relief,” I said.
Sex with Rick was like an adventure movie. I liked the sensations, the large images, and the pace. “You’re so hot,” he said afterwards.
“Yes, it’s been a problem.” We were lying on the musty carpet, which wasn’t performing any visual tricks.
“You’re a nice person, Ellen. You just got mixed up with the wrong crowd.”
His penis was curled over on itself like a fat worm. I poked it gently and it stirred. “You’re only the second man I’ve done this with.”
“You’re kidding. You were the black hand girl.”
“That was all a misunderstanding.”
He wanted to talk about patriotism, to tell me about his views on the war and draft dodgers and feminists.
I said, “Do you know what Zen Frisbee is?”
“I know what Frisbee is.”
“Zen Frisbee is when someone tells you provocative things that float right up like Frisbees, and you just let them sail on by.”
I met Mercy Phillips the next day, at an AA meeting in Venice Beach. We were both sitting in the back row trying not to listen. She was slowly eating a Pepperidge Farm cookie that was pale and oblong and had a narrow dark line of chocolate around its edge. Her long fingernails were painted pink, which I found oddly touching, and she was breaking off tiny pieces of the cookie and putting them into her lipsticked mouth. I could smell her perfume. “You smell like roses,” I whispered into the blond hair covering her ear. She was wearing a low-cut blouse, and I could see the lush tops of her breasts.
There was a break in the middle of the meeting, so we left after Mercy got her card signed by the chairman. “I was sentenced by this judge to go to the damn meetings,” she said as we got into the old Karmann-Ghia convertible I’d just bought. “Every time I have to get the chairman to sign this card. I’m too honest. I guess I could just sign it myself.”
A green vine with grapes was tattooed above her left breast and disappeared down into her shirt. She saw me looking at it. “My garden,” she said.
“I just got out of a mental ward in Dallas,” I said. “I promised this nice doctor I’d try AA. This was my seventh meeting since I got here. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve tried it.”
“I have to do four a week for six weeks.” The wind was blowing her blond hair, exposing the dark roots.
“I’ll sign your card all you want.”
She handed me her card while I drove too fast down Wilshire Boulevard. I didn’t like driving fast, but because of her I couldn’t help it. When I glanced at the card and saw her name I said, “Mercy. I don’t believe it.”
“My sisters’ names are Honor and Charity.”
“I used to be Evelyn Roach,” I said.
“Well, names aren’t destiny.”
“I guess they aren’t.”
First we went to see her tattoo artist, who did a rain cloud on my upper left arm with rain written in lowercase beneath it. Getting tattooed hurt, especially the thin lines of rain falling.
The tattoo artist was a heavyset woman whose arms and legs were intricately decorated with lush vines like those that peeked out of Mercy’s blouse. She talked in a low voice through the whine of the electric needle. “Tattoos are spiritual … but dangerous … like Ouija boards … You have to be very careful with Ouija boards … because you can call up an inferior class of spirits … lower-order spooks who can’t get into any of the better places … That’s why you have to be careful who tattoos you … that they’re evolved, you know?”
“I’m very careful who tattoos me,” I said.
The insistent burn of the needle and the haze of sexual energy surrounding Mercy made me feel drunk. “You want to get high with me?” I said to her.
“Just waiting for you to get your name drawn on.” She had a sad, wicked smile, blue eyes with too much gold-flecked shadow, and freckles that hurt my heart.
The tattooist covered my drawing with antibiotic ointment and a light bandage. I was supposed to medicate the tattoo twice a day and stay out of water for a week.
In the car, we pulled off the bandage. My upper arm was puffy and shiny. “I’m living in a sublet in West Hollywood,” I said. “You want to go there?”
“Let’s go to my place.”
We stopped for a case of cheap champagne, and, at her apartment, I sat on a gold brocade chaise lounge and watched while she cooked heroin. “No thanks. I do like weed, though.”
From her stash I rolled a joint and smoked it while she ran the dope. She tied her upper arm with my leather belt, thumped the inside of her elbow till a fat vein popped up, then slid in the needle. “I don’t seem to care what happens to me,” I said, watching her pump a little blood into the syringe, then shoot it back. Surprised by what I’d said, I pulled out the bottle of champagne I’d stuck in the freezer and popped the cork.
She removed the needle and pressed the crook of her arm. Her eyes were dark and hooded with pleasure.
“That’s about the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Within an hour Mercy was naked and tied to her bed. So much for loyalty, grief, and incipient heterosexuality. I liked her bed, a mahogany four-poster with rose-colored satin sheets and, hanging above it, an old stained-glass church window where Jesus ministered to the little children. “Suffer those little children,” I said.
Mercy owned sex-shop restraints, sheepskin wrist and ankle cuffs that I fastened gently. “I never met a woman who didn’t want to be tied up.” Actually I’d never had this thought, but my sorrow about Jordan had honed an edge that Mercy seemed to recognize. “You’re really kind of crazy,” she said.
“Takes one to know one, and all that.”
She kept a kit of dildos under her bed, half a dozen rubber penises of various sizes and detailing, along with a black leather harness. There was also a small whip. “I guess you’re not political.”
She laughed. Her face and chest were flushed.
“I don’t think I can do this, Mercy. It’s kind of incorrect.” I picked up one of the rubber cocks, which was springily erect, with ropy veins. It was even circumcised.
Mercy knew about the revolutionary prostitutes in San Francisco but thought the notion of organizing was silly. “They want to get a group insurance plan,” she said.
“Don’t you know that sexism is the primary contradiction?”
She laughed again. I unhooked the ankle restraints, rolled her sideways onto her hip, and slapped her butt hard. “Good,” she said.
Her body was curvy and luxurious, with large pale-nippled breasts covered with vines. She smelled like roses. She smelled like lust. I hit her again. My hand stung, and her buttock turned bright red. “Those things remind me of flip-flops. Those cheap rubber shoes that have a thong between the toes? You think I need a toy to make you come?” Afterwards, she cried. “I understand,” I said, and I did.
From Mercy I learned to shoot cocaine. I snorted heroin with her a couple of times while primly refusing to run it. Cocaine took me to a place of great well-being and clarity, a region of stamina where with or without Mercy’s instruments I could provide her with weeping relief.
“I only like penises that aren’t attached to men,” she once said, and thought this view made perfect sense.
Mercy worked for a woman in Beverly Hills named Beverly. “It’s mostly these young movie types who want to order sex like take-out food. They’re clean and some of them are nice-looking, and the money’s good.” Mercy believed that her tattoos kept her from getting the top-level clients, who were Oriental businessmen.
She was a consummate party-crasher, and the party where we met Shakespeare was in the Malibu Colony, given by an independent producer who’d scored big and was holding a housewarming. The catered food was picturesque, but we’d snorted coke in a public parking lot before walking into the party by the beach access, and all I wanted was wine and seltzer.
“Johnny’s a client,” Mercy said, “so he’ll just think I’m here with someone, working.”
“Have I told you how much I like your freckles?”
“Come meet Frank Shakespeare.” We crossed the white carpet to the doors to the deck. “Frank, this is my good friend Rain.”
He was a suave, hearty man with a thick chest and big, square hands. “Hi,” I said. “Of course I have to ask if Shakespeare is your real name.”
“Couldn’t get away with it otherwise.”
“Here we are. Rain, Mercy, and Shakespeare. I bet we’re all lying. How do you know Mercy, Frank?”
“She’s worked for some friends.”
“Nice vines,” I said.
“Nice vines, Rain.”
I decided he was an asshole, so I smiled. He’d probably taken some kind of training that emphasized eye contact. “I love your show about the Confederacy,” I said. “I think it takes a certain kind of mind to find that rich vein of humor in the Civil War.”
He raised his brushy eyebrows. “I didn’t notice your accent before.”
“Charleston, where the first shots were fired. My uncle has a cannon that he sets off three times a year: on the anniversary of the opening salvos, on the date of the surrender at Gettysburg, and, of course, to commemorate the death of General Lee. He named his car Traveler.”
“Are you making this up?” Frank Shakespeare said.
“Nobody in my family has to make anything up, especially about Uncle Royce. For Christmas day, he carries around an electric cattle prod and celebrates by zapping his dogs and any kids who get too close to him. When he gets drunk, he plays songs about the Civil War and actually cries.”
He took a sip of his drink, exposing his gold Rolex. “You aren’t in Mercy’s line of work?”
“Nope. I was, until recently, an editor at Mercer’s in Boston. I edited The Raisin Book, which is now on the best-seller list. Also Black Black Black and The Gourmet Woodstove. I bet you haven’t read that one.”
“I’m not much of a reader,” he said, with just enough spin to make me realize he was smart.
CHAPTER 25
The first letter from Jordan was handwritten on yellow legal-pad paper. It had no greeting and began in midthought, like a journal entry.
Lesbians are the priests of women, not unnatural but meta-natural. Lesbianism is the arena of wholeness, and we are the mirrors in which maleness and femaleness are made one. Some choose this path, while others are born to it. You, Rain or Ellen, will have to decide whether you are one or the other, or neither.
