© 1997 Rich Grzesiak, all rights reserved.
She thought of her BMW as a an airplane, a sleek silver jet which enabled her to thrust her way past the clogged arteries which were the freeways of L.A. There was no greater thrill, no larger meaning to her life, than to floor the accelerator, her ears attuned to the guzzling of fuel, which seemed to be gulped by the BMW's engine greedily, dependably, stylishly. When the passing streets became a multi-colored blur, she knew happiness.
Her real name was Pita, but when she emigrated to L.A. from Brazil, she rendered it into something more American, something more L.A. So she christened herself "Angelique" and started a new life, taking great pains to forget the past, never discuss it, even discarding the colorful Brazilian clothes which were her hallmark in Rio. Gone were the multicolored skirts and blouses; in came the muted jades and taupes and tans which gave her the same coloring as the local trees.
She loved to bolt out of her driveway. In sedate Bel Aire, quick trips by car were de rigueur, but wild rides to the supermarket either earned you traffic citations or made passersby gasp at your speed. The BMW lurched from the driveway pavement to the concrete roadway; she imagined a jet bolting off the last inch of pavement from L-A-X.
Later, in the stillness, back from the supermarket, she sat on her patio, sick of her husband and her life. He was a football coach for the local nationally sponsored team: the team was a herd of animals, barely capable of speech, gathered from the four corners of the earth, some drugged, others dazed by the fame and the wildly high salaries which fueled their semi-cannibalistic lifestyles.
Her husband was Harry and he was playing golf and by now he was at the country club, wondering what-the-hell she was up to and if they would have time to connect for anything more than a few kindly glares while they sat in the restaurant, simulating marriage, and attempting to eat the Nouvelle Cuisine.
So she'd go and eat with him and party down. She hated him; he hated her; they couldn't bare to be with each other or without each other. She didn't want to go back to Brazil, and he couldn't tolerate living alone, no matter how unctuous her company was.
That morning he berated her savagely: "You might have a great body, but you're nothing but a fucking gin bag!" he yelled.
She was terribly hurt. Why I couldn't possibly be a gin bag unless I drank a quart of gin every day, she thought, and besides, I drink the best brand (Boodles) and carefully control it to three quarters of a quart per day.
God he was awful! Her facelifted face suddenly showed the wrinkles she hated. He had the face of a pig, red, swollen, bulbous nose, pores exploding, eyes like a scared bat, jowls hanging from his chin, his fiftyish grey hair looking like a wet mop somebody glued on after cleaning the hallways.
The trouble for Angelique was that, like so many other awful things and substances in her life, she was hooked on his body. Yes, his face was a middle American gargoyle, but somehow he managed to maintain a disciplined exercise program that kept his flesh firm, well rounded and erotically captivating. Whenever they had sex, the strangest sensation would flood her psyche: unending physical pleasure collided with a deeper, less clear feeling of revulsion, nausea, yes, hate. But that's the way it's supposed to be, she mused. Men were supposed to give you pleasure so you could hate them for the pain.
As the gin coursed its way down her throat, somehow that last thought made great sense. Her body beckoned her to sleep, from a creeping fatigue taking hold of her arms, legs, and chest, so she quickly consumed two amphetamines, waiting for that cold electric rush which would rescue her from potential rest. She knew the speed was kicking in when her body started to feel like an electrical appliance. She liked to fantasize she was her BMW when that feeling hit - her body felt like electricity was running it, and the colors she saw tended to bleed, as if a video camera wasn't capable of focusing on the outlines and boundaries and shapes.
Off to The Country Club! She played a tape in the BMW of that wild Brazilian folk music which she'd grown up with. The speed was doing something with her judgment and vision, she knew, but she liked the feeling. She adored the way the sunlight looked bluer than blue as it ripped through the palm trees. She kept saying the word "wild" to herself, first in Portuguese, then in English, till it became a mantra, something the Hari Krishna people might have recognized during one of their serenades at L-A-X or on Venice Beach.
She was so damn clever! She affirmed her thought patterns yet again. A few months ago, realizing the BMW's windshield washer was completely unnecessary (the car got washed at least every 3 days, and it hadn't rained in L.A. for 5 months), she took the BMW to her favorite mechanic (he was also her drug dealer), and instructed him to run the plastic tubing from the washer not to the spray jets which would normally flood the windshield, but to the interior of the vehicle, just below the driver's side of the dashboard.
Angelique took lessons from the stars: she refused to act like Zsa Zsa when she drove through L.A. Having a flask filled with gin in the front seat of her BMW was the height of gauche! She didn't care if the flask was made of silver, gold, or platinum, she wouldn't be a ginbag, and she certainly wouldn't drive through L.A. with a flask in her hip pocket, purse, or front seat beverage holder. (She also would never slap a cop - her husband, occasionally, but she idolized L.A. cops, they were so hot!).
So part of her daily automotive maintenance routine was to ensure the reservoir under the car hood, where window washer fluid was normally stored, would instead be irrigated with a plentiful supply of Boodles Gin. As she warped her way along the freeways, she would take the plastic tube leading from the reservoir, hit the window washer button, and slowly yet ever so elegantly sip warm gin. Ah! What a glowing and velvety edge this gave the hectic drive. After all, she needed her creature comforts, and traffic was always a nightmare in L.A.
She parked trying deliberately to imitate an automotive bolt out of hell. She prided herself on her capacity to zip into a parking space at forty miles per hour. It was exhilarating and original and part of her endless wild ride. A woman sitting in an adjacent car just stared. Why she's admiring me and my driving skill - Angelique just knew it to be true.
Though it was close to eleven P.M., she put her Jackie-O sunglasses on, because the colors of the night sky were starting to bleed again, disturbing her sanity. Then it struck: a terrible pain in her stomach. It rocked her gut and threatened to make her buckle over the steering wheel. She clutched her chest, fearful of a heart attack and swiftly grabbed her purse, desperately fingering through its contents for the bottle of Tagamint which would bring release.
There were so many bottles and it was so dark and trying to look through her purse while wearing her sunglasses enraged Angelique! "Where was the goddamn Tagamint?" , she screamed, grateful the car windows were closed. Finally she found the bottle and gomped three pills down her throat. A fresh sweat was spreading over her body, threatening to wet the cerise dress she wore, making great stains like giant blood marks on its sheer fabric.
Harry was waiting for her in the club's restaurant. Rage permeated him like smog filled Glendale. Rage was a comfortable feeling for Harry, in fact, it was the only feeling he felt comfortable with, or knew.
It'd been a tough day. It'd been hotter than hell drilling the team, and the sun made the Astroturf burn as if it were a diner's hamburger grill. He sweated and panted and felt like shit for most of the afternoon.
Now, nursing a highball (which he normally guzzled), he too sweated interminably, but the sweat just made him obsess about sex, sex with anyone, perhaps even Angelique. Something about two people who were profusely sweating during sex really excited him: while an asexual observer might compare the sight of sweaty sex to hippopotami rutting, Harry found it hot and slimy just the way he liked it.
How had he ever married this wild woman from Brazil? Wasn't there any way he could have known she'd use her sexual wiles to trick him into marriage? Hadn't there been some way he could have discovered she was a cocaine dealer anxious to escape the Brazilian authorities? And my God! The nightmare of having lawyers fight an INS case for five years while they threatened to deport her! The cost!
He thought he could manage it because she reminded him of a particularly unruly, misbehaved young football player he helped to change his ways years ago. But her craziness just made her wilder and wilder, and this behavior had a curious if not ironic effect on him: the crazier she got, the more the wildness appealed to him, the more he hated her, and the more he wanted to get rid of her, till the wildness started to turn him on - again!
It reached a fever pitch of insanity several months ago. She was rooting through the linen closet when a loud bang shook the second floor of the house. She zipped down the stairs, screaming, her left index finger bleeding uncontrollably. He rushed her to the emergency room, where they bandaged her up; it eventually healed pretty well.
Turns out she secreted a gun she brought from Brazil among the bath linens one day; forgot it was there; and accidentally triggered a shot while rifling through the closet.
When they got back from the emergency room the blood had soaked through the linen closet; there was a long line of red on the door and the carpet and even down the stairs.
He tried to think it through, but couldn't. It's better for our marriage if I don't think, thought Harry, it'll help me stay focused on the positive.
Where the hell was she? His highball was gone, absentmindedly drained while he lost himself in crazy memories.
Angelique loved arrivals, especially her own. Observers might compare them to opera (Aida, Strauss' Daphne) but to her Brazilian mind, the best comparison was to a leopard magnificently exiting the jungle.
She turned the air conditioning up in the car to let the stains be cooled away and for the Tagamint to hit her system. She immediately smelled the food in the club restaurant and could feel herself getting ill from the aroma - the last thing she wanted now was something to eat.
She was lucky, too, in that the speed was giving her the illusion of control and sobriety and keeping her system on automatic pilot: she could walk and talk and think, and nothing seemed fucked-up to her addled brain. There was also a flush of blood to her face that gave her a mysterious aura of lifelike death: she looked like a gal who'd been cured of mortal needs like eating and whose only goal was to devour beauty and booze and whatever would constitute excess.
There he was, my Harry scumbag, or so her head told her while she fought the urge to frown instead of smile.
Somehow she glided to his table and, trying to execute a ladylike seating, found herself plopping ungraciously onto the chair, causing an unnatural creaking of its supporting mahogany. Again she forced a smile for Harry-Scumbag, using an old trick someone had taught her years ago: when you're unhappy, thinking of something that brings you joy. So the image in her head was a white moon framed by palm trees in Malibu.
Then it began: she hoped their voices would be muted despite the rage.
"Harry, you are a scumbag"
"Coming from a whore-ginbag like you, that's quite a complement. What'd you do today besides get drunk? Waste more of my money on rags from Rodeo Drive?"
"I am not a ginbag and I am not a drunk."
"But you're certainly a whore. You're a coked out whore from Rio."
"I have sex with you. Does that make you my pimp?"
"Might as well take that job too. God knows if I could prostitute your coked up cunt to part of my football team, I'd retire that obscene mortgage we pay in Bel Aire by tomorrow, no, let's make that tonight."
She ground her high heel into his shoe, its toe part, but he was too quick and far too strong for her - he pulled the shoe away and smiled.
"Besides," he added, "you're a nasty whore, you drive like a space shuttle pilot, and you belong hanging wash somewhere in the slums of Brasilia."
His venomous flow was damned up by the waiter's arrival. He took their orders, taking pains not to notice their discordant state, Harry's drunken appearance, and the Angelique's frozen open eyes, peering out over sunglasses - yes, sunglasses at 11PM!
They ate in silence, the only sound that of other muted table conversations, a fork scraping the china, or a cup tinkling its saucer. Angelique played games with the food, cutting it into a million pieces, merging the vegetables with the meat and the sauces, till her plate resembled a topographical map of L.A.
Harry fumed, the rage splitting his head in pieces, the feeling growing so intense it felt like molten lead was being poured down a tube through his ear. "This cunt-hole bitch I'm married to," he meditated, over and over and over, till it sounded like a prayer in reverse.
They dragged their country club dining experience out for an hour, barely looking at each other, judiciously stealing glimpses of other couples and the room, their images like evil Polaroids percolating through the visual components of their brain.
The clock struck twelve: twelve deep, resonant bongs rippled through the room, now mostly devoid of people, the waiters a phalanx of unused service mulling against the wall, Harry and Angelique trapped with each other at a table towards the middle of the room.
SHE HAD HAD ENOUGH: "Harry, it's time to go."
"I'm staying at the bar; I'll catch a cab. Drive carefully, ginbag." He darted from the table towards the bar. She in turn adjusted her sunglasses and made her way to the car.
But he was seized with a worry that was instant in its pull: "Oh my God, will she make it home in that state?"
Thank God he still jogged every morning. In seconds he was by the car but she just slammed the door in his face, and he could hear the click of the automatic locking mechanism.
She started to pull away and he pounded on her window, begging to be let in. He could see her lips mouthing the words, "Fuck you."
What to do, what to do? Suddenly he jumped onto the hood of the car and began to bang his fist into the windshield. She continued to ease the BMW out of its parking pace and slowly she maneuvered the vehicle towards the highway nearby.
Thank God she was doing only ten miles an hour. Harry stretched his torso across the hood, holding on to the medallion on the front end and the antenna on the right side. They drove that way for what seemed like miles (but actually was barely several hundred yards).
A CHP was waiting on his motorcycle around one of the curves, a favorite snagging place for motorists who insisted on exceeding the speed limit posted there. He revved up his engines and headed toward the BMW, thinking something odd: was that a tree branch or a bag of some kind on the hood?
She could see the motorcycle gaining and rapidly punched the brakes. Harry was almost thrown forward but miraculously held onto the hood.
The car stopped under a street light, its grey paint looking white in the light, blending inharmoniously with a giant bougainvillea growing along the road.
Harry slumped off the edge of the hood, narrowly righting himself to a standing position smack up against the CHP.
"Who's the dame, mister?" barked the CHP.
"Oh, her," Harry answered, "she's my mistress."
Angelique heard him and knew a purple rage. She gave them both the finger and Harry could clearly see the mark from the bullet wound outlined on the edge of her nails.
From L.A. Stories, a novel in the making, by Rich Grzesiak