Undead L.A. 2 (27 page)
The police report suggested the man who killed his father took his own life to avoid being tried for his crimes of passion, but Jeremy always suspected it had more to do with not being able to face his family and friends after being cuckolded by his pretty young wife. The man had been stuck in a rut, trapped in a down cycle, and the undertow had pulled him into darkness.
I know what it feels like to be stuck,
Jeremy thought, remembering how he was sent to live with his grandfather in Florida after the funeral.
For a long time I thought I'd never escape the oppressively white confines of Juno Ridge, the endless chores, and worst of all, the insufferable silence.
His grandfather was a serious man. Laconic and stern, his thrift extended well past money into the full range of human emotions—or lack thereof. He was, Jeremy mused, what others might call a closed book. His code for living was simple and straightforward. In the old man's philosophy, comfort was found in hard work. Austerity was next to godliness, by his estimation. Praise and affection were instruments of the devil intended to weaken the soul's hardy resolve to resist sin and spoil otherwise properly reared Christian children. He wore a dour expression as he went about his day, traveling back and forth between his barbershop and his church meetings. He wrote lists of duties he expected to be accomplished by his return each day, and left them on the kitchen table next to Jeremy's breakfast—a single hardboiled egg.
Jeremy flew the coop on his sixteenth birthday, working kitchen jobs for cash in West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, saving up until he eventually made his way to Miami. It was there he got his start in comedy, working the club scene, networking with other comedians, and being invited to hit the road with a few of them heading to New York City.
My press kit makes it look like it was a straight shot to fame,
Jeremy silently deliberated.
Guess no one cares that I spent years and years eating ramen noodles and drinking myself to sleep alone each night. I know all about being stuck. You'd think by now I'd be used to it, but it makes my skin crawl just to remember those days.
The first time September 21
st
happened, Jeremy hadn't been interested in going anywhere. He'd gotten up and checked the papers for his daily dose of celebrity culture. Since he was no longer obligated to have an opinion on the subject, he'd only briefly kept up with the news story about the celebrity quarterback murdering a porn star in his hotel room. He knew the verdict was supposed to be announced the day before, but with all the commotion and rioting he'd missed it. He could remember thinking that if the guy had managed to wriggle out of the guilty verdict he would probably be back playing before a crowd of cheering fans in a very short time, just like Michael Vick.
The NFL had become a sad, scandal ridden sport full of gang bangers, wife beaters, and child abusers. He laughed at the thought that so many people got upset over whether a gay man would play in the sport, or when Kansas City Chiefs safety, Husain Abdullah, intercepted a ball and ran to a touchdown and thanked Allah instead of Jesus, and the whole world lost their minds.
What was a simple act of religious gratitude in comparison to watching the grainy footage of running back Ray Rice knocking out his then-fiancé with a strong left hook, and dragging her unconscious body out of an elevator, at the Revel Casino Hotel in Atlantic City? Or the fact that Roger Goodell, the goddamn Commissioner of the National Football League himself, knew all about it months in advance of the scandal breaking and did his best to cover it up? What did we have more to fear from as a society?
The idea that our children might grow up with gay sports role models, or that they might instead come to idolize former New England Patriots tight end, Aaron Hernandez, whose highlight reel included being accused of double homicide in the cold blooded execution of one of his own friends, and joining a street gang in prison while awaiting trial?
He'd been surprised to see that all the papers were from the day before, September 20
th
. Why would Jess have gone though the trouble of providing him with identical copies from the previous days news cycle? And why hadn't she left a note, or waited for him to get up? It didn't make sense, but it didn't set off any alarms. He'd become accustomed to strange things happening. It was part of life in
Hollyweird
. He'd taken his time eating breakfast, then spent an hour under the jets of hot water steaming in the shower. He figured it would just be a matter of time before things calmed down again. Whatever was going on out there wouldn't last. It never did. Los Angeles had survived riots twice before.
When nothing seemed to have changed by afternoon he'd decided to tour the city and see for himself just what was causing his world to come apart at the seams. He strolled to his garage, a building ten times larger than the one he grew up in, that held his collection of over five hundred cars and bikes, and slid behind the wheel of his Shelby Cobra 289 Roadster. There was a picture on the passenger seat of Steve McQueen with the car's designer, Carroll Shelby, looking at the car, but Jeremy knew the ‘King of Cool' had never actually owned a Cobra. That didn't stop Jeremy from snatching up one of the few remaining versions the actor had been photographed with the first chance he got, or trying to replicate the hundred dollar bill challenge with any of his celebrity friends brave enough to give ‘grabbing the cash off the dashboard before the Cobra hit 100 mph’ a try. No one ever beat him. The 289 Cobra could do 0-100-0 in 15 seconds flat. It was, according to Motor Trend's Senior Features Editor, Jonny Lieberman, the fastest and coolest muscle car of all time. And if there was one thing Jeremy knew from years of reading Motor Trend, it was that Jonny never got it wrong.
He'd gotten to the end of his driveway before waking up in his bed. The clock again read 8:05 AM. September 21
st
. The second time around, he didn't bother with searching the house for his missing assistant or checking his cellphone for service. He'd jumped into his fire engine red Aston Martin, still wearing silk pajamas, floored it out of his long driveway, whirring past so fast that his well manicured hedges became a soft blur as he shot out of the front gates and onto the empty street like a champagne cork unexpectedly going off in the middle of a wedding toast. The last thing he could recall was the sting of the air as it whipped his face, tears streaming unbidden from the corners of his eyes. He'd awoken once more from a deep, peaceful sleep to find he was back in his frigid mansion, temperature set to sixty-eight, his hologram clock informing him it was 8:05 AM. September 21
st
. Again.
Today was going to be different. Today he was getting a personal visit from the president—the President of the United States. He'd left several voice mails the night of the new L.A. riots before the phone lines went down, but never heard back. He was surprised that it had taken the president this long to respond to him, even with the crisis, since Jeremy had not only donated over a million to his re-election campaign, but also hosted fundraisers with his rich Hollywood friends, made appearances at rallies on his behalf, and even headlined a surprise performance for the troops in Afghanistan in a last ditch attempt to sway members of the armed services to vote for a Democrat.
But how did he contact me?
Jeremy wondered. He picked up his cell phone and tried it again. It was fully charged, but there was no signal. He dialed numbers, but nothing happened.
He called me last night. The phone rang and he said he was coming in the morning. He thanked me for my patience.
At least he thought he'd gotten a call. He couldn't remember precisely when it had come in or what else he had said. When he tried to pull the memory to the front of his mind it became elusive, sliding away into a dull and unfocused image, as if a window being deluged by a persistent patter of spring rain were suddenly shielding it.
Jeremy stumbled out of his bedroom, down the long hall filled with images of himself and celebrities he'd met over the years, and on into the kitchen. His toes felt like they were sliding over the air-conditioned hardwood floors as he padded along. He'd kept his house at a crisp sixty-eight degrees year round since taking residence in the Hills. As in mornings before, he saw that a fresh pot of coffee along with selections of pastries were laid out, but Jess was nowhere in sight. He poured himself a cup of Kona blend, stirred in a tablespoon of raw agave, and savored the steaming aroma before taking his first sip, allowing his senses to fully experience the beverage. Better coffee was just one of the things Jess had brought to the table.
He clicked on the old wooden radio he'd installed on the counter just in time to hear a rush of Rachmaninoff giving off a death rattle before sinking into Chopin's Nocturnes. He meandered over to the kitchen table, passing the fresh row of papers set out from the previous day, his hand running over the Los Angeles Times and down past Bill Murray's face on the cover of People magazine, then stopping to grab the most recent edition of Motor Trend. He fell into the hard metal chair, the air whirring out of him in a thump, his trembling hands still clutching his prize.
The radio gently hissed out soft piano notes that wafted down from the kitchen counter, drifting over cornflower blue tile and down to his heavy legs, curling around his boney ankles like stale barroom smoke. He stared at it, suddenly recognizing how out of place it looked. It was the same old wooden box that had sat in the living room of his childhood, the one his mother had brought home from a church sale, the one he had spent some of the few happy moments in front of with her listening to jazz and American Bandstand. She may have run out on him, but before she did she instilled a love of music in his soul. That radio reminded him of everything he once loved about her. Just looking at it he could almost sense her in the room.
That's not possible,
he realized, a cold feeling of dread bleeding into him.
That radio was left behind when I moved to Florida. I never saw it again. It can't possibly just be sitting on my kitchen counter.
He heard the sound of the helicopter in the distance before he caught sight of it. One moment he was sitting in his kitchen staring out the window at the tall buildings of downtown Los Angeles as they blazed like oversized candles, thick plumes of dark smoke spiraling up like demons escaping the bowels of hell and smudging the piercingly impossible blue of the sky, and the next he was standing in his backyard, near the tennis courts, dressed and watching the president's helicopter land in the vacant lot next door. It was rumored that Rod Stewart had owned the space once. The new owners, reportedly Persians, had torn down the palatial mansion within the first month, dragging it away in pieces. The land had stood empty since then; a vacant brown lot of perfect earth awaiting its next transformation.
How did I go from my kitchen and my silk pajamas to being ready for a game of basketball?
Jeremy felt dizzy thinking about it. He tried to focus on any detail of how he had arrived with his feet wrapped in tight sports socks and heavy sneakers, hundreds of feet from where he last had been, but the more he grabbed for the recollection he knew ought to be there the more it seemed to slip through his fingers like a handful of smoke.
He thought of the line from some old band he used to listen to back when he was in Florida, back when the world was a much simpler place.
This is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago...
I must be losing my mind,
he realized, stifling back a small chuckle that rose up from his chest like an unexpected drunken belch.
And since when does the President of the United States come to my house in a helicopter?
It wasn't unusual for the Commander in Chief to take to the air to cut down time lost to traffic jams, the ones he inevitably made worse, but in all the times it had happened in the past the president had never taken to the skies to drop in on a residential address before, not even one as exclusive as the community Jeremy lived in.
Usually he just gives the city a last minute notice before ass-raping their daily commute, so he can attend fundraisers thrown by people like me at twenty-thousand dollars a plate,
Jeremy thought, the hint of a smile still clinging to his lips like moist residue from his previous erection.
It's a wonder he didn't lose the whole State in the last election, given his fondness for plaguing us all with system wide, soul sucking gridlock.
The side of the flying transport unfolded into a set of stairs and the president came bounding down with the alacrity of a professional ball player half his age. Two tall men in dark suits and ties, with shades and earpieces, scurried after him, flanking the insouciant leader of the free world as he strode confidently in Jeremy's direction. The first thing Jeremy noticed was that the president, a generally dapper dresser who wore custom tailored suits by Hartmarx—a 121-year-old Chicago based company, as well as the largest suit maker in the United States—was dressed instead in plain, old, no-name gym clothes. Despite the lack of designer labels they seemed to fit him perfectly, as if the fabric had been intended for him alone and not mass-produced.
Probably just one more perk of being President of the United States of America.
“You ready for a game of one-on-one, old-timer?” The president put on an affectionate smile like he was visiting a dear old friend he'd known since childhood. Jeremy looked down to see that he was now holding a bright orange basketball in his hands. He didn't remember having it before.
“You'll have to forgive me,” Jeremy said, shaking his head and trying to clear his thoughts. “I haven't been myself lately.” He bounced the ball over to the president who took it in both hands, his head shaking slightly with a friendly smile.
