Nothing Left To Want (42 page)

Once inside, I turned on all the lights and wandered around aimlessly. I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a clue what, if anything, I was going to do once I got inside. I was thirsty, so I went to her fridge and opened it. The inside of a party girl’s fridge is always good for a laugh. Honeysuckle’s was typical: a couple yogurts past their sell-by date, twenty or so bags with the logo’s of L.A.’s best restaurants stuffed in, and a bottle of Roederer Cristal, which I decided to drink some of and leave the opened bottle out where it would confuse her.

I ended up drinking too much and, while high, I got what seemed like a great plan to pay her back.

Honeysuckle loved her trashy clothes, so I went into her bedroom closet and carried armfuls of them into her shower and turned on the water. Then I went back into her bedroom and looked around. She had an oversized round bed. I thought it was hideous and the kind of tacky thing that someone like her would have bought thinking it was glamorous.

Idly, more out of curiosity than intent to do more destruction, I opened up the top drawer beside her bed. She had a serious collection of dildos and I noted, with drunken glee, two small glassine packages of cocaine. I snorted the coke, threw the dildos onto the center of her bed and poured all the perfumes I could find on her dresser over them. Then, not wanting to flood her apartment, I turned off the shower and picked up one of the soaking wet dresses from the floor on my way out.

Obviously in that condition I shouldn’t have been driving, but in that condition I was too much of a loaded asshole to consider a little thing like being under a lot of influences so, Petal on my lap, I turned my Mercedes towards Karmen’s place a mile away.

Sadly for me, she was home. I staggered up to her door with Honeysuckle’s sopping wet dress in my arms and knocked until she opened the door. She didn’t invite me in. She just stood in the doorway, staring at me quizzically.

I tried to smile. “Hey K, I’ve missed you. I just wanted to … uhm, I just wanted to see you.”

I licked my cracked coke-dry lips, trying to smile. She shook her head. “Sorry, Carey, not tonight. What’s the old saying, I’ve got a headache and you’re a mess like usual? Do you want me to call you a cab or do you want to drive yourself out of here and maybe get lucky and die on the way home?”

I stared at her stupidly. My mind was both sluggish and racing with the combination of coke and alcohol. Desperate for her attention I held out the wet dress. “Look, I brought you a present.”

When she didn’t reach for it, I dropped it at her feet and she stared down at it, confused. Finally she said. “Is that Honeysuckle’s dress? What the hell, Carey? Where did you get that?”

I grinned slyly, not answering. Karmen bent down and grabbed the dress with one hand and shoved me in the chest with the other, slamming the door in my face. I heard her deadbolt click from where I had fallen into the shrubbery. I laid there in the dark for a long time, not wanting to move away because I had nowhere to go. After an hour or so. I started to sober up and became really sickened by my night’s activities.

Anxious a little late about drawing attention to myself, I made my way back to the car and drove Petal and me home slowly and carefully. Karmen had been right about how it would have been lucky for me to get into an accident and die, but I didn’t want anything to happen to Petal, or anyone else either.

The cops were waiting for me outside my ‘Sorrow Not’ gates when I pulled up. Karmen had called Honeysuckle, and Honeysuckle had called them, and I was arrested on charges of breaking and entering, destruction of property and theft - the dress I had taken to Karmen.

I didn’t resist arrest. I did beg them to keep Petal at the station with them until I could call for someone to come and get her. At first they said no, that she had to stay at the house, but I cried so hard and I told them about the rats, and Petal is so little and sweet, that finally they agreed.

I was fingerprinted, I was strip-searched and I was photographed in all my disgusting glory before I was finally allowed to make one call.

There was no one else and Milan answered her cell on the first ring. It was hard for her to understand me through my sobs, but when she did, she said in a distant voice, the voice of someone going away, “Carey, I don’t know what you were thinking. No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Listen to me, I am going to send someone, a lawyer, I guess, if I can find one in the middle of the night to get you out of there. They’ll take you home and ... ”

“
Mills, Mills, thank you, oh God … I … Mills, I’m so sorry, can they … I mean the lawyer, can he bring me to you? I’m afraid to be alone. I’m afraid of that house, I need ... ”

“
No, you can’t come here, Carey. That stinking bitch little friend of yours that got you arrested has already called Radar Online and TMZ so she could have her fifteen minutes. I can’t be a part of this. I’m sorry, I wish … ” Her sweet voice trailed off. I had made Milan Marin, the girl with an answer for everything, speechless.

“
Sure, Mills, I understand, I’m … I’m a piece of shit. I’m sorry. I love you and ... ”

“
I love you too, Carey. I have to go. We’ll … we’ll talk … or I don’t know, maybe you could just email me for a while.” She was gone before I could thank her, before I could tell her that I was still here somewhere, lost inside actions I didn’t understand and a world I understood less.

An hour later a young guy showed up and said he was the lawyer Milan had called. He escorted me out the back, telling me she had posted my twenty thousand dollar bail, and he tried to shield me with his coat from the fifty or so photographers that were gathered outside shouting questions at me.

“
Carey, over here.”

“
Carey, hey smile.”

“
Carey, why’d you do it? Was it a love triangle?”

“
Carey, hey, come on give us a smile so your folks can see how pretty you look.”

The lawyer, whose name I never asked, handed me a shaking Petal when we got into the car and, without asking, ordered the driver of the limo which Milan had also sent to drive me home.

The next morning I tried to boot up my laptop to write Milan and that was when I noticed the power had been turned off. There was no gas in my car and, anyway, I had received a notice a week before that the leasing company was repossessing it, so Petal and I walked six blocks up the street to the corner Kinko’s, and I wrote Milan.

“
Dear Mills, please forgive me for last night. Please forgive me for everything, if you can. It doesn’t matter, I just wanted to tell you that I have never had a friend like you and you are the only good thing left in my life, besides my Petal.”

She was online and I received this back instantly. “Carey, I hope you are all right, and I’m glad I could help you, but for now I need some space.”

I squeezed my eyes shut against tears and I looked outside the window at my Petal tied up in the heat, and wrote Milan again. “I understand, I do, and I’m sorrier than you will ever know. I know it’s not the time to ask any more favors, but I have to ask this. Can I bring Petal to your house and leave her there for a while? I can’t take care of her, and she is too old to have to live like I do right now.”

Her return message was brief but kind; she was always so kind to me. “Yes, Carey, Petal is always welcome. I will take good care of her. I’m going out of town for a week or so, but I’ll let my housekeeper know you are bringing her. Good luck, Carebears, love, Milan.”

I had sixty dollars in my purse so, before I found a cab, Petal and I went into Fifi and Romeo’s for a last shopping trip. I bought her a new little pink sunhat so she would be pretty for Milan and I rode over with her in the cab.

I didn’t tell her I wouldn’t be seeing her for a long time because I didn’t want her to be sad. My crying in the cab on the way back to my ‘Sorrow Not’ house was so severe that the poor cabdriver waved away my last twenty and watched me with his compassionate eyes as I walked in through the gates.

Chapter 44

I was sick enough after that to retreat to my bed and hope that someone would come looking for me – sick, but despite people’s thoughts to the contrary, not crazy.

I knew if I went to bed and waited for help to come I would die there, case in point, so I tried to save myself.

It’s always been so confusing to me what people, especially my family, wanted from me. Sometimes its best just to ask straight out. After being left with no money in a dirty rodent-infested house, and losing my child and my little Petal, and after being arrested for fuck's sake, I didn’t much care if people thought I was too much of an idiot to save myself. I obviously was too much of an idiot.

Since I couldn’t drive my car as I was not only out of money but keeping it hidden in the garage so that the repo people couldn’t take it, I made myself walk every day to the corner Kinko’s. Six blocks probably sounds like a cake walk. Well maybe it is but I can’t eat cake and I wasn’t used to walking anywhere anymore, and I was sick by then. When my doctor had told me my diabetes had become brittle, I had laughed, mainly because I didn’t have a clue what it meant.

My whole life I had been getting dire warnings about my disease, and as near as I could tell, I was pretty much always the same, somewhere between mildly sick and about to go into a coma. But I had noticed some new stuff going on with me. I was dizzy all the time and so thirsty that I could drink two half-gallon Gatorades from the Seven Eleven beside the Kinko’s and still be dying of thirst a minute later. The worst, though, was that I was starting to be confused a lot. There were times I would be going to the Kinko’s or coming back, and I would forget where I was at.

A couple of times my nice neighbor would find me outside my own gates, just standing there staring at the odd words on them. His name is Richard, I think. He’s told me a few times but I have trouble remembering things. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that’s his name. He would ask me if I was okay and he would guide me into my overgrown garden and help me to sit down at the old rusted iron table someone had left there.

I could tell he wanted me to ask him inside my house, but I never did because he seemed to like me and that would have changed things. Sometimes, if I sat out there for a long time not wanting to be inside my little horror McHouse, he would bring me a pitcher of iced tea. I always gulped it down and thanked him, hoping for more, and he started to look more and more worried each time he saw me. Finally, tentatively, Richard asked me if there was anyone he could call for me. I told him the truth. No, there was no one.

I was trying to change that, though. That was what my daily pilgrimages to Kinko’s were for.

Every day I sent an email to Daddy. “Good morning, Daddy, Carey K here, Daddy. I know you are still mad but I want to be better, I want you to be proud of me again. Please write me and tell me what I can do to make that happen. I don’t feel very good these days but I know if I could talk to you that would change. Love, Carey K.”

He never answered. Maybe he hasn’t even discovered email yet, though, if he hasn’t, it's funny that he has an account. Sarah gave me his address and I kept reasoning that he was on vacation or busy with the Lions. I had read on the AOL news site that they might make the play-offs for the first time ever. I was glad for him and planned to talk football with him to lighten things up as soon as he wrote me back.

My emails to my mother were less pathetic. “Good morning, Mother, just a note to let you know I’m still alive. Ahh, poor Mumsy, well keep hoping, maybe you’ll get lucky. Anyway, please kiss my daughter for me and tell her I love her. The cable and the lights are off, and I have no gas and no money, and they want to repossess my car. I’m down to my last few vials of insulin and I feel like holy hell. Other than that, everything is great. Oh, I have rats, so that’s been nice for me because you know how much I love pets! If you are reading this, if you have an ounce of love for me, please tell me what to do so that I can please you enough not to die out here. Please write and tell me. Carolyn.”

I wrote Milan every day too, bright hopeful little emails. “Hey, Mills, just thinking of you and my Petal dog. Hoping you two are doing good. I’m fine, just getting my head together. Love Carey.”

Each day my inbox had a return note from her. “Hey, Carebears, glad you are better. Petal and I are fabu, love M.”

I would sometimes spy on her through Twitter. That’s how I kept up with the parties and openings she was attending. I didn’t bother to write Christy. I knew she would see me only if and when Milan did.

My parents didn’t acknowledge my emails but they must have been reading them because Herbert wrote me with his usual warm style. “Dear Carolyn, your parents have apprised me of your desire to communicate with them and our (hopefully sincere) desire to rehabilitate your life. To that end, they have instructed me to let you know that they have prepaid ten appointments with a Dr. Abrams in Beverly Hills. In an effort to assist you making the appointments, I have included the number of a car service that will remain at your disposal for transportation to the doctor, and to any other places you might wish to travel, in order to effect your self-improvement. After Dr. Abrams has reviewed your situation, your parents may be willing to reinstate your allowance on a month-by-month basis. Yours sincerely, Herbert Raymond Esq.”