The Comedy Writer (23 page)

I told the lie because all avenues of conversation had been exhausted and I'd been wearing the hamburg flipper uniform just long enough that I was deluded into thinking that a good woman could see past it. I had visions of more stopovers, maybe I'd even get a few
free flights out of it, not that I had any plans to fly soon. The lie was this: I said that my sister was also a flight attendant for American. What I expected to achieve by this, I have no idea. Time maybe. An in. A vague connection. Actually, there was a smidgen of truth. My sister Suzy had been trying to become a flight attendant a few years back, but at the time there'd been a hiring freeze in the Boston market. If I'd been a good liar, I wouldVe said she worked out of Miami or Dallas, I would have said United, I would have said she was an air traffic controller, but it was impulsive and I said Boston and American, figuring there had to be a thousand flight attendants out of Beantown.

“What's her name?” she asked.

“Suzy Halloran.”

“There's no Suzy Halloran flying out of Boston.”

A definite shift in tone. More eye contact, not the kind I wanted. How could she be so sure? It's a big city, a big company. I stuck to my story.

“Yes, there is.”

“No, there's not”
Down n y fucking throat.

I straightened my paper cap, she mentioned something about a Boston chapter of American flight attendants, something about her being prez.

“Maybe she goes by her married name,” I said.

Quickly, she asked for it.

“Johnson.”

“That's bullshit!”

Her parents grew uncomfortable. “Let it go, honey,” her father said, delicately. “It's just a misunderstanding.”

“Maybe she's not
technically
out of Boston,” I said. “I know she does a lot of flying out of the Big Apple.”

“The Big Apple.”

“New York,” I said.

“I know what the fucking Big Apple is.”

At this point I was thinking this wasn't a woman I wanted to get involved with anyway. Nice mouth. I hemmed and hawed a little more, then finally shrugged and wandered over to the fryolater. It took a great act of courage to drop the check off twenty minutes later, which is why I had Gerald do it.

I first heard the moans when I was getting out of my car in front of the apartment, but I had other things on my mind and disregarded it. After the embarrassment at Johnny Rockets, I'd dropped by Rancho, hit two buckets of balls in the rain. Now I was taking my sticks out of the hatchback, thinking about the aggressive stewardess. When the moans became groans, they got my attention. I assumed Tiff was going at it again, and when they became more plaintive, I was certain of it. I started into the building but stopped when I heard the shriek. It occurred to me that someone could be in trouble. I dropped my golf bag on the front steps, followed the sound down an alley and around to the back of the building. It seemed to be emanating from one of the rear apartments on the upper floor. A combination yelping and crying now, then a wail again, and finally a gurgling sound. I didn't know who lived back there, but I was concerned for them, so I called out: “You okay up there?”

The noise ceased momentarily and I thought perhaps someone had indeed been getting reamed, but then it resumed—louder even—and I knew no one could be getting it
that
good. I called up again, but this time there wasn't the slightest cessation and I really
became nervous. By the time I got to the upstairs apartment door with a sand wedge in my hand, I realized it wasn't coming from an apartment at all, but from the roof. I noticed a ladder heading up to an open skylight. I threw up a few Yoo-hoos with no response, then tentatively climbed the ladder and peeked up top.

Someone was sitting on the tarpaper, legs crossed Indian-style, head hung low, arms wrapped around, as if in an invisible strait-jacket. I had a fleeting hope that this was some kind of yoga pose and the tortured sounds a wacky mantra, but why out in the drizzle? I said hello, whistled and yoo-hooed again, and when I still got no response, I stood on the speckled tar and wondered what to do. The person, a woman apparently, was about three feet from the edge and obviously in some sort of state. I moved forward until she could see me in her peripheral vision, and when she glanced up, Colleen jumped back like a wet cat and I sprung back a couple feet the other way.

It looked as if she'd died, been revived, and someone had thrown clothes on her. Everything about her was different. She'd shrunk. She was slumped, thin, smaller, like a cooked shrimp. Her hair had lost its shine; it was browner, tangled. It would've been easier to pull a comb through a cone of cotton candy. Her skin was mushy and goose-pimpled, like the skin of a boiled chicken. Her eyes were redder than Michelle Pfeiffer's and her fingers looked as if they could use a vigorous scrubbing.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

She didn't answer, just bellowed louder, and I could see a couple neighbors looking up from the street.

“Okay, take it easy,” I said. “Everything's cool.”

Again with the lies, but this one I could live with, as she was now a foot from the edge, and although we were only two stories up,
I had visions of her going headfirst, which would do the trick. Each overture sent her wriggling ever closer to the precipice. I wondered of course if it were all a ruse, she was an actress after all. I crouched and again tried to calm Colleen's fears, but I couldn't connect, and part of me wanted to call her bluff and just leave, and that's the part that won.

I called 911 from my apartment, then went out front and looked up with the neighbors. Within two minutes three Beverly Hills police cruisers had arrived, which is why you pay the extra C-note, and they were followed by a fire truck, an ambulance, and a couple dozen of the curious. I told the cops what I knew and they retraced my steps up the ladder on the second floor and for twenty minutes we could see a couple officers crouched near Colleen and could hear her sobs, and a rumor began to circulate that she was suffering from some sort of diabetic shock. I wanted to escape to my apartment, but an officer asked me to hang around, and finally two paramedics accompanied a sheepish Colleen Driscoll out the front of the building, and they helped her into a police cruiser where she ate a banana. I could see that Colleen was suddenly lucid, so I started to leave, but an officer in his late thirties with an orange tan cut me off.

In 1990 the Beverly Hills Police force was the Chippendales of law enforcement. Every one of them looked as if he were hand-picked by Herb Ritts. They were all about six-foot-two or above, with tremendous physiques, chiseled good looks, and strong, silent-type mentalities. Most also had overly trimmed mustaches, which lent them a vaguely gay aura in a Rock Hudson kind of way, but the point is they were imposing as hell, and for that matter, even the women cops were studs.

The Orange Cop, who looked like the local Channel 2 weatherman
Johnny Mountain on steroids, explained that Colleen was going to be fine, she'd simply had a world-class hypoglycemic attack. They'd given her potassium and fluids and she'd rebounded quite nicely. I told him I was happy for her, but it really didn't concern me, as I hardly knew her.

“You're not her boyfriend?”

“Nooo.”

He held his gaze.

“I'm not her boyfriend. I just met her a few weeks ago.”

“She says you're her boyfriend.”

“Well, she must still have a touch of the hypoglycemia.”

“So what do you want us to do with her?”

“I don't know. You tell me.”

The Orange Cop conferred with a silver-haired one and they both approached me. “She says she wants to stay here for the night,” Orange said.

“No, no. Absolutely not.”

The silver-haired cop sneered. He annoyed me. His hair was too perfect, like frosting on a cake.

“I told you, I hardly know her.”

The glare again from Orange guy.

“I don't get this,” I said. “She's obviously got big problems. Why would you want her to stay with me?”

“There aren't many options,” from Cakehead.

“She just threatened to kill herself. Aren't there procedures to follow? Shouldn't she be getting observed somewhere?”

Orange said, “As I explained, she's fine now. And she never threatened to kill herself.”

“How can you say that?”

“She never threatened to kill herself.”

“Excuse me, Officer, did you show up late? Because if I recall, she was up on a building wailing like a hyena.”

“She never
verbally
threatened to kill herself,” Cakehead piped in.

A few neighbors made their way into our huddle and this support heartened me.

“She was at the edge of the damn building. What more do you need?”

“Quite a bit more actually,” Orange said.

“Well, how about this? If you do a little research, you're going to find out that her sister jumped off a building about three months ago. Notice a trend there?”

“I'd be violating her civil rights if I remanded her to a mental health institution without her permission.”

“Even with what I just told you? I'm not making that up.”

“I thought you didn't know her.”

“I said I've known her a few weeks.”

“What her sister did or didn't do has no bearing on the situation.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “Fine, then bring her to a regular hospital, take her to jail, send her back to New Jersey … Do
something
with her.”

“I can't arrest her. She didn't break any laws.”

“Isn't suicide illegal?”

“We don't know that she was attempting to kill herself,” Cakehead said again.

“Oh, come on, guys. Use your better judgment on this one. She's out of her mind.”

“So you're saying you won't let her stay here?” Orange asked.

“That's right, she can't stay here. You're reading me loud and clear. I don't want her here. Me stay, she go.”

Orange flexed his jaw muscles and for a moment I thought he was going to smack me. There was a palpable shift in my neighbors' allegiances. All anyone saw was a distraught woman in a country western dress with nowhere to go and a piece of shit unemployed writer with no heart.

I said, “Don't turn this around on me, man. I made the 911 call, I did my duty. I barely even know this woman. She's not my responsibility.”

“Right,” Orange said. “She's not your responsibility.”

He shot me a Joe Friday smirk, and Cakehead gave me the Joe Friday sidekick look, and they went to confer with a couple other officers. When they all looked my way and the neighbors shuffled off mumbling among themselves, I started feeling itchy, so I slinked back toward the apartment. I didn't get far, however, before Colleen saw me leaving and bolted out of the police cruiser. A woman officer managed to tackle her to the ground, thank God, and I yelled to the officers, “See?! She's tapioca!”, and I skipped quickly into the building. From up in my apartment I could still hear her bellowing: “HENRY, NO!!! BABY, PLEASE!!!! PLEASE, HENRY! PLEASE, HENRY! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, HENRY!
DOOONT LEEEEEEEAVE MEEEEE
ALOOONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

when it rains in L.A. is that during the long dry periods an unseen layer of smog settles on the pavement, and when the rain does come, that dust becomes slick as ice. This was explained to me by an officer during a lull in the Colleen saga and I was thinking about it as I lay in bed that night listening to
freedom Rock.
I was also thinking about Colleen up there in the rain. That fucker. I supposed that my neighborhood was ruined for me. Every time I'd go down to the store for a soda or newspaper, someone would point out the guy who turned the hypo-glycemic urchin away. Maybe some grandstander would try to sucker-punch me. And the worst part was: Something inside was telling me that maybe they were right.

I thought about how nice it would be to be twelve again, when these songs were new, sleeping in my old backyard, a sheet pulled
over my mother's clothesline, my buddies telling Juan Corona stories, bullshitting each other about getting tit. When the tape ended, I tried to concentrate on the soft rattle of my window screen and the occasional siren that momentarily quickened the city's sleeping pulse. Colleen's dead sister Bonnie came to mind. A telephone rang in somebody's apartment, reminding me of what a ballbuster God is. That afternoon, after the commotion, I'd noticed my answering machine blinking: Margo Jones of Big Brothers looking for my “girlfriend” Colleen.

Surely she would return. They would let her go and she'd sprint right back. I started hearing odd sounds in the apartment below—a bang, a faucet, a high-pitched whir. I imagined my neighbor covering his tracks, his murdered wife in pieces in the bathtub. I got up, checked my lock. A couple moths fluttered around a light, sending bat-size shadows across my wall. I wondered how moths could fly while it was still misting out. The place suddenly seemed haunted. Maybe digestion would put me to sleep. At 4 A.M. I boiled a couple eggs for an egg salad sandwich, then realized I didn't have any mayo, so I crumbled the eggs on a piece of bread, slammed another piece on top, and ate it dry. I heard the downstairs door open, footsteps, and finally, unbelievably, a meek knock at my door. A shock of adrenaline. I threw down the sandwich, flew out of bed, landing on my toenails, practically soundless. My breath came through my nose; I could hear the blood gushing through my veins.