American Babe (2 page)

The birds flying past me were probably wondering,
What the fuck,
but I spiritually greeted them all with an open heart and thanked them for sharing the sky with me, just a girl with the simple dream of getting high on adrenaline and being more like my role model, Tom.

I leaned my right shoulder to the ground just the slightest bit to set my trajectory westward toward the direction of my house in Bel Air. Well, more specifically my backyard,
which would also function as my landing strip. Side note: Do you have a landing strip of hair above your vagina? If so: Don't. I could begin to see the northeastern border of the neighborhood and followed the streets with my eyes until I saw my house and the yard, waiting for me.

I heard flapping sounds near my left-side ear but couldn't see anything. The sound was loud and scary and so not cute. And it was only getting louder by the second. I couldn't move away from it even though I wanted to because the thing about squirreling is you have to let the wind take you, more or less. A lot like life and anal sex. Then a hard whack slapped down across the top of my head. In a flurry of brown and white feathers and body and legs, I made out the form of a monster-sized turkey/eagle/hawk bird next to me, and it was trying to attach.

“Are you FUCKING JOKING?!” I screamed. My voice reverberated inside my helmet, which all of a sudden felt more like a cage.

Keep your form. Keep your form. KEEP YOUR FUCKING FORM. Tom says if you never lose form, you'll never lose control. What the fuck, though? This is insane. I hate everything about this.

The albatross, or whatever it was, was now fully attached to my neck and no matter the quaking and shimmying I did to get shake it off, this mad bird queen was going nowhere.

I was going down.

I'd lost control.

I'm sorry, Tom.

The city got closer and closer by the second. My vision blurred with the fact that I was already dead. This was it. I guess I've lived enough? I'd done everything I wanted to do in my short, blazing life span besides wear an armadillo McQueen hoof bootie to church in Rome and sleep with Leo DiCaprio. I'd have to come back and do those things in another life, I guess. I found peace in the moment. I had no choice. In my head I could hear Yo-Yo Ma playing Ennio Morricone's
The Mission.
I guess this was my death music.

The ground was like a wave swell, closing in on me. Almost as if it was about to break and crash, falling onto me, and not the other way around. Wait, that's a beautiful image. Then . . .

NO.

NOT TODAY.

NOT! TODAY!

I'M NOT DONE YET.

I'd come so close to dying sooooOOOO many times over the years (heat exhaustion, overshopping, overdieting, over-Pilatesing, stalkers, plane crashes, my failed and sloppy arson attempt), and there was no reason I couldn't pull myself out of this.

“You're fucking Babe Walker. You can fly!” I shouted, sharply twisting my shoulders.

With a deafening squawk, the bird let go!

But nope, that didn't exactly help the cause. The problem was, I was then upside down with my back to the surface of the earth, then belly-down again; I was literally torpedoing. With a quick glance I saw that I was headed toward a one-story building in Westwood that had lots of glass windows.
Oh God, please don't let me die in a donation-based yoga studio
, I thought. Just no.

I opened my mouth wide and from the literal seafloor of my soul released the loudest Mel Gibson as William Wallace battle cry. The next thing I remember is the sound of glass shattering, women screaming, a sea of aggressively bright yoga clothes, and the light aroma of eucalyptus. I figured this was hell.

M
y gaze was stuck on one of those oddly shaped greige spots that form on gridded hospital/office building ceiling material. It looked like a sick pit stain, leaking its way from the corner of the foam ceiling section. I thought this was supposed to be a nice hospital? I barely remember getting here but I do recall the bedsheets being softer than I expected when I was lifted in by the two strong EMTs that brought me here. That yoga studio situation was a mess. I mean, I feel bad for fucking up their entire business probably for a long time—they'll need new windows and mirrors and the people in the class are most likely traumatized
and will never return—but I also didn't feel bad. I was alive, and my face didn't need to be reconstructed, that's what mattered.

“NURSE!!!” I screamed.

Honestly, the service in this hospital . . . it's fucking deplorable. Hospitals should be more like hotels. Make us feel like it's a privilege to be injured or sick, not a punishment. Anyway, I could tell I'd been sleeping for at least fifteen hours because the morning sun was up, and I felt less dead and more Babe. When I'd arrived at the emergency room I'd been diagnosed with a broken rib, but I felt it best to supplement the doctor-prescribed Vicodin with some Babe-prescribed Xanax and Percocet from the emergency stash that I always keep with me. Comas are chic, and comas of the medically induced nature help the body heal.

“Oh, you're awake?” said the rabbit-faced nurse, who I kind of remembered from before I passed out. She had red hair and red scrubs and red Crocs. I could actually get behind her solid-color-blocked look—for her, not for me.

“I'm really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, very thirsty. Can you grab me a San Pellegrino? Room temp, if poss, with one ice cube. Thanks so much. I'm going to give this experience a glowing review on Yelp. It's really been extraspecial. Do you guys do mani/pedis here?”

I started to realize as these words were coming out of my
mouth that I was still pretty high from the drugs. But I was too high to stop talking.

“Well, Barbara,” she said, reading my name off of her clipboard. “We don't have Pellegrino here at the hospital.”

“Please call me Babe. Barbara is a name that was given to me at birth as a sick joke. My dad is a monster for naming me Barbara. Perrier will be fine. And some down pillows if it's not too much to ask.”

“This is a hospital, darling. Not the Ritz.”

“Ew . . . Thank God it's not the Ritz. The Ritz is fucking sick.”

“Well we don't have anything other than apple juice or fruit punch in a can, and the pillow you have under your head at the moment is the only kind of pillow we use.”

I made a face that was 50 percent smiling and 50 percent sad face. Whatever. It made sense in my head at the time. I was high, get off me.

“Is my doctor available to chat?”

“Yes. Dr. Chen will be in with you in a moment.”

“Dr. Chen sounds like he's hot.”

“She is.”

“Even better. Send her in.”

When I sat up a bit and reached for my phone on the bedside table, I realized that my rib was incredibly sore. Side note: When I was younger I fantasized about having
a couple of ribs removed to create a slimmer waist contour, but my dad wouldn't let me do it, and then a friend of mine's mom did it the next year and died, which obviously changed my view on the procedure. But it did occur to me in this moment that maybe my rib had been broken in such a way that it would achieve the aesthetic I'd always hoped for, even if it was just on one side.

So I just tried my best to get comfortable in a seated position. The room was nice, for a hospital, I guess. (It actually reminded me of a W Hotel room from 2005 that I once stayed in in Westwood when I was having my dad's house smudged of spirits and ghosts after a bad breakup with my high school boyfriend.) Someone had sent me a huge bouquet of flowers, but it was on the other side of the room so I couldn't tell who they were from. But they were hydrangeas, so it was probably from my dad and his fiancée, Lizbeth. She's obsessed with hydrangeas, and I told her that I loved them, too, a few years ago when I was buttering her up to convince my dad not buy this house in Cabo from George Clooney. It's just not that cute to buy a house from someone more famous than yourself.

I also noticed a huge box of chocolates on the bedside table and assumed they were from my best friend, Genevieve. If you've ever been to LA, you've seen her dancing or sleeping on a banquette at the Chateau. She's always been there for me, since I met her as a kid, but she'd also probably orchestrate my
assassination if she was jealous enough about a new bag or a recent lay with a guy she liked. That slut thinks of everything.

“Miss Walker?”

I looked up to see a really hot doctor-man standing before me.

“Are you Dr. Chen?” I asked. These drugs were really doing a number on my vision.

“Nope. I'm Dr. James Hunt. I'm the attending on duty. How are you feeling today?”

His energy was exactly Robert's; it was bewildering.

“Do you know Robert?”

“Not sure I do. Who is that?”

“Robert. My ex. He's a doctor, for sports.”

“Don't know him, unfortunately, but how are you feeling right now?”

“He's really a great guy. I think I miss him right now, which is weird because I was the one who ended things. It was just boring, you know?”

“Are you feeling woozy?”

“I'm feeling fine. Robert used to say ‘woozy' all the time. So weird. Anyway, I wanted to get engaged and he wasn't asking and then finally he wanted to go pick out a ring with me, but he should just know what ring I want, so then I was just annoyed at that point so I was like completely over it and then I moved out.”

“I think you should get some more rest, Barbara.”

“Babe. I'm fine, though.”

“Okay, good. How is your abdomen feeling? You had a pretty bad break on your twelfth rib. You really should not be using a squirrel suit within the Los Angeles city limits. It's very dangerous, and I'm pretty sure illegal.”

“Oh, so you're a doctor and a lawyer?”

“I'll have Dr. Chen check back in on you in an hour or so. Good luck with your boyfriend.”

As the doctor-man left, I saw an email from Donna pop up on my phone. Donna Valeo is my real mom, my bio-mom. She left me with my dad when I was born, only to run away and become a supermodel. Her identity was kept from me “in my best interests,” but then in a weird twist of fate, I ended up rooming with her wife, Gina, at rehab a few years back—Donna came to visit Gina, everyone put the pieces together, and the truth was out.

From:
DONNA ([email protected])

To:
Babe Walker ([email protected])

Subject:
Question

Babe,

Sorry this is so last minute but my father (who is your grandfather) is having his 80th bday in Maryland
this Saturday. I'm gonna take the train down from NYC tomorrow. Can you meet me? Would be nice to introduce you to your family. You can stay with me at my sister Veronica's house with us and her kids Cara and Knox, or get a hotel if that's too much.

Anyway let me know if you can make it. Didn't decide I was going until 5 minutes ago.

Love,

Donna

I mean. I didn't even know who she was until I was twenty-five and since then we have literally hung out four times. So the chance of me going to fucking Maryland to be with her and her strange suburban family were negative-1,000 percent.

Maybe I did need more sleep because I was starting to feel extremely uncomfortable. My ribs were vvvv sore, but I was also wearing a hospital gown made of sandpaper and strings and I hadn't washed my hair in about forty-eight hours. SOOOOO, I had a choice: either get my fucking shit together, which would mean showering and having a vintage Lanvin nightgown messengered to the hospital so I could feel comfortable, or I could just take another five Vicodin and pass out for a second full day. Unfortunately, neither of those things was going to happen because, as I
finished that thought, my dad and Lizbeth walked into my hospital room. They had thoughtfully grabbed my huge Goyard tote and filled it with my laptop, iPad, and all of the magazines that must have been sitting on the desk in my room.

A little info on my dad/Liz/me/us: When I decided that I was bored and annoyed in my relationship with Robert, I moved back into my dad's guesthouse. My father, who is an attorney to the A-list celebrities of the world, has always been a serious workaholic. But this past year, he has kind of scaled it back about 10 to 20 percent. He is spending more time and traveling a lot with Lizbeth, who is also a workaholic. She created this kind of chic yet kind of basic fitness-lifestyle brand and has been really successful, and as much as I don't love that she is only eleven years older than me, she is genuinely one of the nicest people in the world. She honestly does not need to be as nice as she is. It's almost rude of her. But alas, they really love each other and she makes my dad happy, and he's working less, and they don't seem to care that I'm twenty-seven and still living at the house, without a job. So it's whatever.

“There she is,” my dad said in his version of a quiet voice, which is a normal-volume voice for everyone else. “How are you feeling, love?”

“Hi, Dad. I'm fine.”

“So? Dear? What in the bloody fuck of all fucks were you thinking jumping off a mountain?”

“Dad, please don't ask me
why
this happened. This obviously happened because God hates me.”

“Oh, stop that. Do you want me to see if there's a case against the flight suit manufacturers?”

“No, Dad. It's fine. I don't have the energy for a lawsuit right now, nor do I feel like investing the time it'll take to research and purchase an entire set of court looks. Just leave it alone.”

“So happy to see you awake,” Lizbeth chimed in. “We came to visit you when we first got the call, but you were asleep by the time we got to the hospital. I cut you those hydrangeas from the cutting garden.”

“Thanks, guys. Really sweet of you, really. But I'm fine. You know me. I can get through anything. Luckily I don't have any work or personal obligations at this point in my life, so this injury won't really cause any problems for anyone but me.”