Damned Read online

  My mom is adamant on the subject. At the moment, "We're surrounded by various political and economic refugees as they crowd forward to scrape and wax and pluck at °Ur imperfections.

  After all the herbal high colonics I've endured, not to Mention the electrolysis, the tortures of Hell hold little terror. It never fails to impress me how so many of the huddled masses and wretched refuse can flee the political oppression and torture of a foreign government, then arrive in America ready and eager to inflict largely the same tortures on the ruling classes here.

  As my mom sees it, her dry, flaky skin is some immigrant's vocational opportunity. Plus, hurting her offers immigrants a nifty cathartic therapy for venting their rage. Her chapped lips and split ends constitute someone's rungs up the socioeconomic ladder to escape poverty. Sliding into her middle age complete with cellulite and scaly elbows, my mother has become an economic engine, generating millions of dollars which will be wired to feed families and purchase cholera medicine in Ecuador. Should she ever decide to "let herself go," no doubt tens of thousands would perish.

  And no, I haven't overlooked the steadfast way in which my parents blame Goran's failure to adore them on everyone except themselves. To them, if Goran doesn't love them, that clearly indicates that Goran is damaged and incapable of loving anyone.

  In the spa, the stylists and artists hover around us, those minions as dense as the worst Harpies of Hell, circling and offering the information—always credited to a way-inside source—that while Dakota makes a lovely girl, she was in fact born with superfluous male genitalia. My mom's personal assistant: Cherry or Nadine or Ulrike or whoever, she brays that Cameron is so dense that she bought the morning-after abortion pill and, instead of swallowing, stuck one up inside her woo-woo.

  According to my mom, national boundaries must be adequately porous, and incomes must be redistributed to allow all people, regardless of race and religion and circumstances of birth, to be able to purchase her films. Her noble egalitarian philosophy holds that all human beings should be allowed to buy tickets to her movies AND to vacuum her pores. She insists neither Africa nor the Indian subcontinent will ever achieve technological and cultural parity with the Western world until their density of DVD players makes them a major consumer of her body of filmic work. And by that, she means her REAL work, marketed in its actual studio-designed packaging, not merely some crappy pirated, black-market unit which pays royalties to nobody except drug lords and child sex slaves.

  Lecturing the assembled publicists and stylists, my mom says that if any aboriginal peoples or primitive tribe still does not celebrate her acting, that's only because those subjugated native cultures find themselves oppressed by an evil, fundamentalist form of religion. Their budding appreciation of her films is obviously being quashed by some devilish imam or patriarchal ayatollah or witch doctor.

  Rallying the pedicurists and aestheticians around the white terry-cloth hem of her robe, my mother speechifies that they're not just grooming an actor in order to pimp a motion picture. In actuality, the team of us, my mom and her stylists and masseuses and manicurists, we're engaged in raising awareness around bold, cinematic narratives which model the possibility of truly equal standards of blah, blah, blah...Instead of spending their lives as pregnant, dirt-eating, genitally mutilated victims of some crushing theocracy... now, third-world ladies can aspire to become cosmo-swilling, Jimmy Choo-wearing sexual predators. By our deft use of acrylic fingernails and bleached-blond hair extensions—here she flutters her outflung arms in an all-inclusive gesture—we're empowering the downtrodden, exploited peoples of the world.

  Yes, my mom lacks even the remotest sense of irony, but she's certain that in a perfect world, any miserable little boy or girl should be able to grow up and become nothing less than... her. Best left unsaid was the fact that she and my dad were already brandishing glossy, gate-folded brochures for all-boys boarding schools in Nova Scotia. Military schools in Iceland. It was clear: Goran wasn't a success, and some impending dawn I'd find him packed up and gone, replaced by a four-year-old Bhutanese leper.

  If I wanted to practice my feminine wiles on Goran, my time was running out.

  As my mother would say, "You've got to strike while the flatiron is hot." Meaning: I needed to get pretty and make my move soon. Ideally, tomorrow night. Ideally, while my folks were onstage, doling out the Oscars.

  The final straw that broke the camel's back was, this week, when Goran sold five of my mom's Emmys over the Internet for ten dollars apiece. Before that, apparently, he'd collected a bunch of her Palme d'Or awards from our house in Cannes and sold them all for five bucks a pop. After a decade of my parents insisting that movie-industry awards meant nothing, and amounted to little more than a crass gold-plated embarrassment, my mom and dad went ape shit.

  The way my mom saw it, Goran's every transgression, his every misanthropic misbehavior was simply a result of his not receiving adequate love and cuddling.

  "You must promise me, Maddy," my mom said, "that you'll show your poor brother an extra-special amount of patience and affection."

  His deprived infancy is how come, when my parents rented out a Six Flags amusement park for his birthday, and trotted out a purebred Shetland pony as his gift, Goran assumed the animal was lunch. For Halloween, they'd dressed him up as Jean-Paul Sartre, with me as Simone de Beauvoir, trick-or-treating up and down the hallways of the Ritz in Paris with copies of La Nausee and The Second Sex, and Goran didn't get the joke. More recently, Goran had hacked into my mother's bathroom security camera and sold Web subscriptions.

  Of course, my dad wanted to introduce the concept of discipline and consequences into Goran s life, but a boy who's no doubt been tortured with electroshocks and waterboarding and intravenous injections of liquid drain cleaner, he's not going to be easily cowed by the threat of a spanking and a one-hour time-out.

  By now my pink blouse had arrived from Barcelona. I planned to wear it with a skort and my cardigan sweater embroidered with the crest which represented my boarding school in Switzerland. That, and basic low-heeled Bass Weejun penny loafers. Soon enough Goran and I would settle ourselves in front of the television in our hotel suite. Alone, just him and me, we'd watch my parents arrive at the red carpet in the Prius arranged by the publicist. Frigid, reclusive Goran would be mine alone as we watched my mom and dad preen for the paparazzi. Once they were safely away, I planned to phone room service and request dinner pour deux, lobster and oysters and onion rings. For dessert, I'd procured five ounces of my parents' genetically enhanced Mexican sinsemilla. No, it's not especially logical: My parents constantly railed in opposition to irradiated, genetically spliced and engineered corn, but where marijuana was concerned plant scientists could never monkey with it too much. No matter how hybrid a Frankenstein skunkweed, they would pack the sticky resinous mess into a pipe and torch it.

  In case you have yet to notice, my parents do nothing in moderation. On one hand, they mourn the fact that Goran spent his babyhood alone and untouched. While on the other hand they never cease touching me, hugging and kissing me, especially when the paparazzi are around. My mother limits my wardrobe to pink and yellow. My shoes are either cute Capezio ballet flats or Mary Janes. The only makeup I own is forty different shades of pink lipstick. You see, neither of my parents wants me to appear any older than seven or eight. Officially, I've been in the second grade for years.

  When my baby teeth began to fall out, they went so far as to suggest I wear a set of the painful primary-teeth dentures that Twentieth Century Fox forced into little Shirley Temple's adolescent mouth. In times like these, being kneaded, probed, and polished by a team of beauty experts, I wished I had also been raised, untouched, in an Iron Curtain orphanage.

  This year, the Academy Awards fell smack-dab on my thirteenth birthday. With stylists swarming around her, dressing and undressing her like a giant doll, makeup artists experimenting to decide which eye shadow worked best with what designer gown, hairdressers curling and straigh
tening her hair, my mother suggests I get a small tattoo to mark the occasion. A little Hello Kitty or Holly Hobbie, she says, or a piercing in my navel.

  My dad has a penchant for buying me stuffed animals. And, yes, I know the word penchant, although I'm still not certain what constitutes French-kissing.

  God only knew what a cute Holly Hobbie or Hello Kitty tramp stamp would stretch and fade to become over the next sixty years. In the same way my parents imagined all the little boys and girls of the third world wanted to become them... my folks thought my childhood should be the childhood they'd wanted to have, resplendent with meaningless sex, recreational drugs, and rock music. Tattoos and body jewelry. All their peers feel pretty much the same, and it leads to children whom the public believes to be nine years old becoming pregnant. Thus the paradox of teaching nursery rhymes along with contraception skills. Birthday presents such as Hello Kitty diaphragms and Holly Hobbie spermicidal foam and Peter Rabbit crotchless panties.

  Please don't imagine it's fun being me. My mom tells the stylist, "Maddy's not ready for bangs." She tells the wardrobe person, "Maddy's a little sensitive about her big bottom."

  Don't imagine I even get to speak. On top of that, my mom complains that I never talk. My father would tell you that life is a game, and you need to roll up your sleeves and build something: Write a book. Dance a dance. To both my parents, the world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard. Perhaps that's what I admire about Goran: his distinct lack of hustle. Goran's the only person I know who's not negotiating a six-picture deal with Paramount. He's not staging a show of his paintings at the Musee d'Orsay. Nor is he having his teeth chemically bleached. Goran simply is. He's not secretly lobbying for the stupid Academy of stupid Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give him a shiny statue while a zillion people stand and applaud. He's not campaigning to build his market share. Wherever Goran is at this moment—sitting or standing, laughing or crying—he's doing it with the clarity of an infant who knows that no one will ever come to his rescue.

  While technicians blast her upper lip with lasers, my mom says, "Isn't this fun, Maddy? Just us two, together..." Whenever fewer than fourteen people are clutching at us, my mother considers that to be private mother-daughter "alone time."

  No, whether he's alone or observed by millions, whether he's loved or loathed, Goran would be the same person. Maybe that's what I love most about him—that he's so much NOT like my parents. Or like anyone I know.

  Goran absolutely, positively does NOT need love.

  A manicurist with a Gypsy accent, something leftover from some country where brokers analyze the stock market by reading pigeon entrails, this woman buffs my nails, holding my hand cradled in her own. After a moment, she turns my hand palm up and looks at the new, red skin where I'd left my frozen skin stuck to the door handle in Switzerland. She doesn't say anything, this bug-eyed Gypsy manicurist, but she's clearly marveling at how my wrinkles have been erased. How both my lifeline and love line have not merely stopped—but vanished. Still cupping my red hand in her own coarse, rough fingers, the manicurist looks from my palm to my face, and with the fingers of her other hand, she touches her forehead, her chest, her shoulders, making a fast sign of the cross.

  XVI.

  Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Over the phone today, I made a new friend. She's not dead, not yet, but I can tell we're going to be way-total best friends.

  According to my wristwatch I've been dead for three months, two weeks, five days, and seventeen hours. Subtract that from infinity and you get some idea why loads of doomed souls abandon all their hope. Not to boast, but I've managed to stay reasonably presentable despite the overall grimy local conditions. Lately I've taken to scrubbing my telephone headset and giving my chair a good dusting before I make any calls. At the moment I'm talking with an elderly shut-in who lives, alone, in the Memphis, Tennessee, area code. The unfortunate lady is trapped at home for days at a time, debating whether to suffer through yet another round of chemotherapy despite the lessening quality of her life.

  The poor infirm woman has answered nearly every question I've thrown at her about chewing gum preferences, about paper-clip buying habits, about her consumption of cotton swabs. I've long ago come out to her about being thirteen years old and dead and relegated to Hell. For my part, I'm pitching her that death is a breeze, and if she has any question about whether she'd go to Heaven or Hell, this lady needs to run out immediately and commit some heinous crime. Hell, I tell her, is the happening place.

  "Jackie Kennedy Onassis is here," I tell her over the phone. " You know you want to meet her... ."

  Really, all the Kennedys are hereabouts, but that larger fact might not be such a great selling tool.

  Still, despite the pain from her cancer and the sickening side effects of her treatments, the Memphis lady has her reservations about abandoning her life.

  I warn her that in no way do people simply arrive in Hell and achieve some instantaneous type of enlightenment. Nobody finds themselves locked within a grimy cell, then slaps a palm to their forehead and says, "No duh! I've been a total asshole"

  No one's histrionics are magically resolved. If anything, people's character flaws spin out of control. In Hell, bullies remain bullies. Angry people are still angry. People in Hell pretty much keep doing the negative behavior which earned them a one-way ticket.

  And, I warn the cancer lady, don't expect any guidance or mentoring from the demons. Not unless you're palming them a constant supply of Chick-O-Sticks and Heath bars. The demonic bureaucracy, they might pretend to shuffle some papers in an officious manner, then promise to review your file, but their attitude is: Well, you're in Hell, so you must've done something. In that way, Hell is awfully passive-aggressive. As is earth. As is my mother.

  If you believe Leonard, this is how Hell breaks people down—by permitting them to act out to greater and greater extremes, becoming vicious caricatures of themselves, earning fewer and fewer rewards, until they finally realize their folly. Perhaps, I muse over the telephone, that is the one effective lesson which one learns in Hell.

  Depending on her mood, Judy Garland can still be more frightening than any demon or devil you might run across.

  Sorry. I have not actually seen Judy Garland. Or Jackie O. Forgive me my small lie. After all, I am in Hell.

  In a worst-case scenario, I tell the woman, if the Big C does kill her and she ends up in the Pit, she needs to look me up. I'm Maddy Spencer, phone bank number 3,717,021, position twelve. I'm four-foot-nine, wear eyeglasses, and sport the way-coolest new silver, ankle-strap high heels anyone has ever seen.

  The phone bank where I work is located at Hell headquarters, I instruct the dying woman. You just go past the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm. Hang a left at the gushing River of Steaming-hot Vomit.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Babette headed my way. In closing, I wish the cancer lady good luck with her chemo, and warn her not to smoke too much spliff for the nausea, since reefer is no doubt what got me express-mailed to my personal forever in the fiery pit. Before ending the call I say, "Now remember, ask for Madison Spencer. Everybody knows me and vice versa. I'll show you the ropes."

  Just as Babette steps up beside me, I say, "Bye," and end the phone call.

  Already the autodialer has another telephone ringing within my headset. On the filthy little screen reads a number with a Sioux Falls area code, where the window of dinnertime must just now be opening. In this fashion, we begin our shift by annoying people in Great Britain, then the Eastern United States, then the Midwest, the West Coast, etc.

  Standing beside me, Babette says, "Hey."

  Covering the mouthpiece of my headset, cupping one hand over it, I say, "Hey," in return. I mouth the words, Thanks for the shoes... .

  Babette winks, saying, "No biggie." She folds her arms across her chest, leans back a smidgen, peering at me, and says, "I'm thinking maybe we should change your hair." Squinting, Babette says, "I'm thinking, maybe—bangs."
r />   At merely the idea—bangs!—my butt's already bouncing little bounces in the seat of my chair. Within my earpiece, a voice answers the call, "Hello?" The voice sounds muffled and garbled with a mouthful of partially masticated dinner food.

  To Babette, I nod my head enthusiastically. Into the phone, I say, "We're conducting a consumer survey to track purchase patterns for common household items... ."

  Babette lifts her hand, taps the wrist with the index finger of her opposite hand, and mouths, What's the time?

  In response, I mouth, August.

  And Babette shrugs and walks away.

  Over the next few hours, I run across an elderly man dying of kidney failure. A middle-aged woman apparently losing her battle against lupus. We talk for an hour, easy. I meet another man who's alone, trapped in a cheap apartment, dying of congestive heart failure. I meet a girl about my same age, thirteen, who's dying from AIDS. This last one, her name is Emily. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

  All of these dying folks, I pitch them on relaxing, not being too attached to their lives, and not ruling out the possibility of relocating to Hell. No, it's not fair, but only the late-stage folks will allow me to harass them with thirty or forty questions, they're so strung-out from their treatments or they're so alone and frightened.