Never My Love
It was too ferocious to be sustainable, although when we asked him if there'd come a time when he'd grow tired of us, he replied, merely, 'never'. As different as we all were, we all came together for a reason. We were in this because we lived a life that was fierce and unrelenting, passionate and farcical, tragic and clownish, and in that second when we replied 'Never my love', we meant it, experiencing in that moment a purity and truthfulness that was curiously sustained by the illusions and deceit which fueled us. We lived each moment in its entirety, to completion, beyond that even - to the point where we were stretching liminality, eliminating boundaries, literally gorging ourselves on life until we burst into flames, and what was left was not a phoenix, but merely charred, bitter embers.
The Godfather worried me that week, dabbling on the dark side with Lola and Princess Stephanie. The girls had moved into his West Hollywood house and their supine bodies gently sizzling in the afternoon sun had become permanent poolside fixtures, while he had called in sick far too often, given that he had at least four big-budget movies with demanding A-list stars about to roll into production. I watched it all unfold over emails and photographs popping up online, only to be swiftly deleted by the Godfather, fearing his facebook-phobic partner's suspicions might overcome his aversion to social networking sites. The Godfather had fallen hard for Lola, was still intrigued by this little creature permanently doused in alcohol and a comedown.
He called me up one sultry, cool, Los Angeles evening, and I could imagine him standing there staring across the city from poolside, a drink in hand, worry etched into his face, raw, slapped skin basking in the emollient of a tranquil evening. Lola, he said, was cooking him dinner - Chicken Stew and Dumplings, a traditional Texan dish. She was from Texas. Everyone in Los Angeles is from somewhere else, particularly the most fucked up. That American Dream all over again. His voice sounded tired.
"She's the strangest mixture of sweet and adorable and tough and abrasive and abused and abusive...and she doesn't sleep until during the day, so she is exhausting to have around, late at night - but its so nice to come back to what feels like a "home", with someone so affectionate and loving there...."
I hung up, turned to accept another glass of rose from Declan, and we watched the waves break onto the shore of Malibu, and talked in low, calm voices about what to do if The Godfather didn't break out of his obsession soon. "You coming on Friday?" asked Declan hopefully as he walked me out to the Merc after we'd dined on octopus and shrimp. "I can't deal with them alone."
I was coming on Friday. I drove up to the hills as the sun was setting and found Lola and Princess Stephanie looking spent and exhausted with smudges of kohl around their haunted, beautiful eyes. Their skin was ashen and white, and they sighed an unenthusiastic hello, embraced me laconically. They both smelt slightly stale, as if they'd just woken up, which, it turned out, they had. The Godfather stepped out of the house in a blast of a/c looking unusually perky, given the excesses of the week (X and shrooms on Tuesday, five girls in the hot tub on Wednesday, the arrival of the Prince on Thursday). He greeted me with a kiss and MDMA, a glass of Veuve to wash it down, and I left the girls swooning, and we sat in the back and talked, staring blankly at the movie screen, our words starting to flow a little faster, a little easier, until with a delicious rush I said, surprised, "Oh, I think I just came up."
The night and the talking, the dancing and the hugging, the sweet caress of a touch and the gentle, delectable high of the drug smudged us messily into one mismatched psychedelic shared dream, and the Prince arrived with some paintings he hung outside for us to see, and the sun set quickly and it was night and we boiled in the hot tub like lobsters, eyes rolling in the back of our heads and mouths gurning, and Princess Stephanie squealed; "How can you not dance? You guys don't wanna dance? I have to dance on this!" Lola had been quiet and affectionate on the drug, as if all the darkness in her had leaked out, or been suppressed and tamed and squished into some deeper, darker place. She took Stephanie's hand and flitted down the hills to a club, and The Godfather and I talked some garbage, blinking and sighing as if we couldn't quite take the serotonin overload, but of course we could, and it seemed as good a time as any to do more, and we wandered into the movie theater to watch a Korean movie and curled into a labyrinthine innocent hug, and the pitter-patter of wet feet broke our stupor and who should turn up but Lola, fierce and insane, demanding love from us both. We lay on the cushions wrapped in blankets until 7am and some lines of coke broke the dream sufficiently for me to be able to move, and when The Godfather made hints that I join them in bed I slipped out, drove home with my jaw meshing frantically up and down, staring grimly at the road ahead for fear it might suddenly slip out from under me. When I got back to Silverlake I felt like the bottom was falling out of my world and the colors of everything looked too intense in the morning sun, and I sat and smoked alone at 7am, unwilling to commit to sleep, unwilling to let the night go, unwilling.
It was too ferocious to be sustainable. The next day I bailed as everyone else drove to Malibu on shrooms. Instead I sat on the stoop with C and Dustin and played poker and drank PBR and felt almost normal again, although when I thought of Lola and Princess Stephanie I shivered and gave in to an overwhelming tide of sadness. I drove to Malibu the following afternoon. The Godfather had texted me in a panic saying he couldn't control Lola, she had gone crazy. They had spent the evening staring at the log fire on shrooms, she snapping at him, growling like a small vicious dog, by turns morose, then violent, abusive and witchlike. She was sitting gazing blankly at the sea in an oversize sweatshirt when I arrived, and The Godfather handed me some tea and said, "That's it. I can't take anymore. I told her to leave."
We played on the beach with Declan's children and a labrador and Lola seemed happy, seemed... normal. Almost as if the horrors the Godfather had whispered of to me were merely the product of a psilocybin induced nightmare, insubstantial will o' the wisps, driven away, shrieking, when the sun rose. Prince and Princess Stephanie arrived, distant and noble like two sphinxes, and The Godfather said, "D'you know one of my neighbors told me Lola moved in with his friend for two and a half months a while back?"
I drove her to Venice. She said she was going to see Radiohead with her boyfriend, the rehab kid who was son of the famous sixties folk singer. Apparently the kid and his dad used to do acid and coke together growing up. She smiled wanely when I dropped her off, kissed the tips of her fingers and blew them to me as if the kiss might float through tinted glass and touch my skin, as if that casual gesture would say more aptly than she could, never my love. Never my love. She didn't seem upset by the Godfather's firm request for her to leave, and perhaps she wasn't. Perhaps she knew, like me, there's no such thing as never, and once we had healed sufficiently, we would tumble right back into that rabbit hole again, start tearing shreds in our smooth skin, as if the scars and the accompanying ache were the only things that made us feel properly alive.
The Godfather worried me that week, dabbling on the dark side with Lola and Princess Stephanie. The girls had moved into his West Hollywood house and their supine bodies gently sizzling in the afternoon sun had become permanent poolside fixtures, while he had called in sick far too often, given that he had at least four big-budget movies with demanding A-list stars about to roll into production. I watched it all unfold over emails and photographs popping up online, only to be swiftly deleted by the Godfather, fearing his facebook-phobic partner's suspicions might overcome his aversion to social networking sites. The Godfather had fallen hard for Lola, was still intrigued by this little creature permanently doused in alcohol and a comedown.
He called me up one sultry, cool, Los Angeles evening, and I could imagine him standing there staring across the city from poolside, a drink in hand, worry etched into his face, raw, slapped skin basking in the emollient of a tranquil evening. Lola, he said, was cooking him dinner - Chicken Stew and Dumplings, a traditional Texan dish. She was from Texas. Everyone in Los Angeles is from somewhere else, particularly the most fucked up. That American Dream all over again. His voice sounded tired.
"She's the strangest mixture of sweet and adorable and tough and abrasive and abused and abusive...and she doesn't sleep until during the day, so she is exhausting to have around, late at night - but its so nice to come back to what feels like a "home", with someone so affectionate and loving there...."
I hung up, turned to accept another glass of rose from Declan, and we watched the waves break onto the shore of Malibu, and talked in low, calm voices about what to do if The Godfather didn't break out of his obsession soon. "You coming on Friday?" asked Declan hopefully as he walked me out to the Merc after we'd dined on octopus and shrimp. "I can't deal with them alone."
I was coming on Friday. I drove up to the hills as the sun was setting and found Lola and Princess Stephanie looking spent and exhausted with smudges of kohl around their haunted, beautiful eyes. Their skin was ashen and white, and they sighed an unenthusiastic hello, embraced me laconically. They both smelt slightly stale, as if they'd just woken up, which, it turned out, they had. The Godfather stepped out of the house in a blast of a/c looking unusually perky, given the excesses of the week (X and shrooms on Tuesday, five girls in the hot tub on Wednesday, the arrival of the Prince on Thursday). He greeted me with a kiss and MDMA, a glass of Veuve to wash it down, and I left the girls swooning, and we sat in the back and talked, staring blankly at the movie screen, our words starting to flow a little faster, a little easier, until with a delicious rush I said, surprised, "Oh, I think I just came up."
The night and the talking, the dancing and the hugging, the sweet caress of a touch and the gentle, delectable high of the drug smudged us messily into one mismatched psychedelic shared dream, and the Prince arrived with some paintings he hung outside for us to see, and the sun set quickly and it was night and we boiled in the hot tub like lobsters, eyes rolling in the back of our heads and mouths gurning, and Princess Stephanie squealed; "How can you not dance? You guys don't wanna dance? I have to dance on this!" Lola had been quiet and affectionate on the drug, as if all the darkness in her had leaked out, or been suppressed and tamed and squished into some deeper, darker place. She took Stephanie's hand and flitted down the hills to a club, and The Godfather and I talked some garbage, blinking and sighing as if we couldn't quite take the serotonin overload, but of course we could, and it seemed as good a time as any to do more, and we wandered into the movie theater to watch a Korean movie and curled into a labyrinthine innocent hug, and the pitter-patter of wet feet broke our stupor and who should turn up but Lola, fierce and insane, demanding love from us both. We lay on the cushions wrapped in blankets until 7am and some lines of coke broke the dream sufficiently for me to be able to move, and when The Godfather made hints that I join them in bed I slipped out, drove home with my jaw meshing frantically up and down, staring grimly at the road ahead for fear it might suddenly slip out from under me. When I got back to Silverlake I felt like the bottom was falling out of my world and the colors of everything looked too intense in the morning sun, and I sat and smoked alone at 7am, unwilling to commit to sleep, unwilling to let the night go, unwilling.
It was too ferocious to be sustainable. The next day I bailed as everyone else drove to Malibu on shrooms. Instead I sat on the stoop with C and Dustin and played poker and drank PBR and felt almost normal again, although when I thought of Lola and Princess Stephanie I shivered and gave in to an overwhelming tide of sadness. I drove to Malibu the following afternoon. The Godfather had texted me in a panic saying he couldn't control Lola, she had gone crazy. They had spent the evening staring at the log fire on shrooms, she snapping at him, growling like a small vicious dog, by turns morose, then violent, abusive and witchlike. She was sitting gazing blankly at the sea in an oversize sweatshirt when I arrived, and The Godfather handed me some tea and said, "That's it. I can't take anymore. I told her to leave."
We played on the beach with Declan's children and a labrador and Lola seemed happy, seemed... normal. Almost as if the horrors the Godfather had whispered of to me were merely the product of a psilocybin induced nightmare, insubstantial will o' the wisps, driven away, shrieking, when the sun rose. Prince and Princess Stephanie arrived, distant and noble like two sphinxes, and The Godfather said, "D'you know one of my neighbors told me Lola moved in with his friend for two and a half months a while back?"
I drove her to Venice. She said she was going to see Radiohead with her boyfriend, the rehab kid who was son of the famous sixties folk singer. Apparently the kid and his dad used to do acid and coke together growing up. She smiled wanely when I dropped her off, kissed the tips of her fingers and blew them to me as if the kiss might float through tinted glass and touch my skin, as if that casual gesture would say more aptly than she could, never my love. Never my love. She didn't seem upset by the Godfather's firm request for her to leave, and perhaps she wasn't. Perhaps she knew, like me, there's no such thing as never, and once we had healed sufficiently, we would tumble right back into that rabbit hole again, start tearing shreds in our smooth skin, as if the scars and the accompanying ache were the only things that made us feel properly alive.
MIMI IN NY | 11:29 PM |
