Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (7 page)

“The way you talk about this guy, I thought he was like your best friend,” Chris said.

“How many best friends you got?” I said. “Scoot.” I shooed him out of the way, sat down, and drafted a quick email to Oliver from my new COLA email account:
Oliver, buddy. It's me. Call me ASAP
. I hit send. Then I wrote a second email:
By “me” I mean Paul McWeeney
, and I included my phone number.

Then I went back to the phone.

I see the first page of this letter is dated June 3, which means I've been writing for over a week now. I didn't anticipate it taking this long. I thought I would belly up to the IBM Wheelwriter 1000, set down what I needed to set down, make my case clear, refute the points Edie makes in her book, send it off to you, and that would be it. I'd be able to get on with my life. Or at least that was Julia's theory—just sit down, get it out, and walk away. Setting aside the fact that her almost scatological description of the writing process probably reveals her true feelings about writers, I knew it wouldn't be that simple. I did not, however, realize the depth and breadth this refutation would necessarily have to take. I have been at this every night for over a week now and have not yet come to the most damning counterevidence, the irrefutable proof that Edie's claim about our father is entirely without merit. To be fair, though, I have been quite busy, not just writing this but trying to figure how exactly to get my hands on that specific piece of counterevidence, which is proving more elusive that I anticipated. I'm speaking, of course, of the autopsy report. As a matter of policy, autopsy reports are public record, but the LAPD never released Betty Short's. Their official stance was that they wanted certain information to be kept secret, information that could be used to identify the killer and weed out the nut-jobs eager to file false confessions. Still, fifty years later, it
has not been made public. I have now read countless tales of reporters trying to uncover this document and they have all failed. The very notion that Edie, an amateur investigator, and one clearly driven by dubious motives, would actually be able to recover this autopsy report—which is, let us not forget, the only real, tangible evidence she uses to validate her version of things—is ludicrous. Whatever report she claims to have is clearly an act of forgery, forgery being something Edie has experience with—not just being gullible and eager to believe the work of frauds (that time she bought a plastic Rolex for me), but on the flip side of naïveté, actually forging documents herself (fake IDs, fake report cards, even fake letters of recommendation). The only thing she writes about the origins of this mysterious document is that it is “a copy made by a former L.A. County Sheriff's Department employee” (245). If I can get my hands on this document, and prove it a fake, then my sister's case will crumble—I'm tempted to say “like a house of cards” but the image that pops into my head is of a gingerbread house, specifically the one Edie brought home from school one hot Los Angeles December, and which I, an excitable and sugar-starved seven-year-old, accidentally crushed when I pounced on its edible everything. So: Her case will crumble like a gingerbread house. But in good time. I'll get to all that, I will. It's just that the more I write, the more I realize there's more to write, since I know what I need to offer here is not simply a dry wrangling of facts: I am also a character witness, after all, someone who can attest to the honorable character of George McWeeney and the mendacious, attention-seeking character of Edie McWeeney. But I'm running out of time. I'm trying to cram this into the two-week break between spring and summer classes. Next week,
I'm back in the classroom, teaching four classes during the compressed and intensive summer session, and I won't have time for anything else. And yet why am I taking the time to write that fact instead of plowing on with my case? It's one in the morning. I should call it a night, go to bed. Tomorrow, I'll have a clearer mind for this. But I can't sleep. I took another Ritalin an hour ago and it's still ticking away in my blood. Julia is in my bed, surely asleep by now. She said she'd wait up for me so we could have sex, but she always conks out early. She's been staying over a lot lately. She says it's because her place has a mold problem but I think she's trying move in. We've been dating long enough, I suppose it's a natural next step, but it's strange that she's going about it in such an oblique way. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of living with her. I'm not doing the typical intimacy-avoidance guy thing. I
like
intimacy; after all, women I date are often impressed by the fact that I enjoy providing oral sex. If I seem hesitant to let Julia move in, it's out of concern for Chris. The last thing he needs is to become attached to another mother figure who will abandon him. He's already been through that. It's been three years since his mother died, and he's still vulnerable. It was a sudden thing, so the grieving process takes longer and is more jagged and chaotic. Had Brenda died of some terrible illness, after months in a hospital bed with tubes stuck in her vital parts, Chris would have had all that time to come to terms with death. But it was a simple car accident that did it, Brenda's little Honda cruising obliviously in the blind spot of an eighteen-wheeler that wanted to change lanes. So, just like that, she was gone, and Chris, whom I'd gotten to know only a little during the seven or eight months Brenda and I dated, had nowhere to go. Brenda had no family to speak of, so
when it looked like Chris was headed for foster care, I stepped in. At first things were great. Women nearly fell over themselves when I told them this story, their genitals swelling up to the size of catcher-mitts, like baboons in estrus. But when I would bring one home, Chris's acting out—especially his refusal to respect the standard necktie-on-the-doorknob code—would drive my date away. Chris was both the biggest lady-bait and cock-blocker a middle-age bachelor could have. Of course, I knew his behavior was simply coming from grief, from his reluctance to get hurt by any of these women. Which is why it bothers me so much—why I feel a pang of fear for Chris—when I see Julia trying to ingratiate herself with him, buying him those concert tickets for his birthday a couple weeks ago, a suspiciously excessive gesture. Sure, he was happy at the time, but, as I tried to explain to Julia later, he doesn't have any friends and when he realizes that he has no one to give the second ticket to he'll resent her. Plus, he still feels abandoned by his mother, I said, so if he attaches himself to you, he'll only get hurt, which is why for his birthday I bought him the far more appropriate (and Pulitzer Prize–winning)
The Denial of Death
by Dr. Ernest Becker. Tomorrow, Julia's taking him to see the new
Mission Impossible
movie and then dinner at Planet Hollywood, and I really need to sit him down and explain how he's only going to get hurt here, how he should really be keeping her at arm's length. It's all there in the book, I'll explain, how he's vulnerable and too eager to latch on to another mother figure.

Oddly enough, Edie also references
The Denial of Death
when she writes about Mom dying. The book was published some thirteen years after the fact, but she claims it helped her “make sense of our orphaning” (230). I'd like to point out, however, that the sense she
makes is more self-aggrandizement than self-awareness. For instance, she uses me—me!—as an example of what Becker identifies as the “anal” personality, trying to distance himself against the reality of death. Of course, she hurls this diagnosis at me only in order to make herself seem like the picture of mental health by comparison, and it's a completely ludicrous accusation. All she has as proof that I refused to acknowledge Mom's death is just one small incident in which I asked Aunt Paige to pose as my mother for a few years whenever friends came around. But I was a teenager then. And besides, Mom's death is not the issue here.

I'm getting off track. I need to stay focused. I thought the Ritalin would help, but I think I made a mistake in crushing it up and snorting it. The guy who sold it to me—a former student of mine whose name I should probably keep out of this, seeing as how it's a legal document of sorts—said it was time-release, which I frankly did not have the patience for, and I thought sending it up my nose would make it work faster—you know, giving it a more direct path. But now I'm not sure it's working faster. It's always hard to tell. Either way, I'm now experiencing what is called the drip, when the snorted substance works its way through your sinuses and can be tasted in the back of your throat, something I haven't felt in many years. Even though it makes you feel mucusy, it's not an altogether unpleasant sensation, if only for the sense-memory it evokes. It's my own personal madeleine.

Since we cannot understate Oliver's culpability in the defamation of my father, what I have to say here will certainly be important background info. You surely know Oliver Kelly as the guy who sold you Edie's book, but the folks in the literary wing down the hall from you
probably have had more experience with him, as he is the guy who dutifully submitted my novels
Season of All Natures
and
Rarer Monsters
to publishers, tried valiantly to sell them in a world that is no longer receptive to literature, an upside-down world that thinks “nonfiction” denotes truth and “fiction” untruth, despite the fact that my sister's book of lies will be shelved as nonfiction while my fiction walked the razor's edge of existence and shone the hard light of truth on the world.

I first met Oliver when I arrived in Iowa in 1974, having fled L.A., the place where everyone knew my résumé, now ready to remake myself as a bona fide man of letters. It was my first time in the Midwest and as I drove along I-80, my car packed with my every belonging, I found the resolute flatness existentially daunting, the silos phallic in a strangely druidic way, the general corn-centric culture (the maize-mazes advertised on the side of the interstate, the corn-on-the-cob-shaped flashlights displayed for impulse buys at gas stations) quasi-religious, but when I got to Iowa City, I was relieved to see that it was a city beset by writers from across the country. You could spot them everywhere, looking as bewildered as I felt. Through my windshield, which was splattered with a sampling of the entire insectoid biosphere that existed between California and Iowa, I saw a man in a leather jacket holding a portable typewriter like a lunchbox; he appeared to be window-shopping for antiques. I figured this must be the place. But the first time I got to see a dense concentration of these displaced persons (there were twenty-five of us in the incoming fiction class) was at an orientation hosted by Henry Winters, our esteemed teacher and prophet of the short story, and despite the domestic setting, it felt like a singles mixer. People had name tags. Everyone, independently, thought it
would be funny to write obscure literary pseudonyms on their name tags, and then all felt slightly stupid when they realized everyone else had done the same thing. I was chatting up a young woman who'd also written
Vivian Darkbloom
on her nametag, when a guy with no visible nametag but with an impressive molding of dark hair came up to me and shouted, “Hey, man, fuckin'
Loose Cannons
, right? I fuckin' love that show!” (I suddenly remembered—perhaps not consciously but emotionally, somewhere in the monkey part of my brain—when I was a kid at summer camp leaving the showers one crisp foggy morn when my thick-necked bunkmate came up behind me and ripped off my towel and pointed at my hairless cluster just as a group of girls walked by, the air redolent of kiwi shampoo, while I just withered in shame.) I looked at the other Vivian Darkbloom, then at all the other literary hopefuls milling about the famous author's living room. Everyone's collective attention turned from the various bric-a-brac that signified all their high-brow aspirations, and in their collective gaze I saw—or at least imagined I saw—the ambivalence of the literati toward everything pop culture: the class-infused loathing mixed with genuine envy of recognition, no matter how egregious and vacuous that recognition might be. But then the other Vivian Darkbloom laughed, and everyone went back to sneaking glances at our host's bookshelf. I'd learn later that no one in that room aside from Oliver had any idea what
Loose Cannons
was, and they were reacting more to Oliver's loud and sudden outburst, but at the time all I could do was stand there and try to cover my suddenly exposed, chill-shriveled genitals. “I'm gonna buy this man a beer,” Oliver said directly to me. There was no beer in the house, just plenty of free wine, and Oliver was suddenly intent on not
just getting a beer for me but actually
buying
it for me, so he announced to the room that we were going to a bar and that anyone interested in the history of television could follow. Our cohort was presented with an option: stay here to meet-and-greet in the living room of a Pulitzer winner, or follow Oliver and me to a nearby watering hole where he would ply me with beers and questions about life in L.A., obscure TV stardom, etc. No one came with us. Oliver in effect befriended me and alienated me from everyone else before the first day of classes had even started, and I'd come to suspect that this was just his MO, that when he decided someone would be his friend he must also assure that no one else could befriend them with the same level of intensity, a freaky way of saying, You're mine and no one else's. At the bar, I was at first put off by him, confused by his aggressive friendliness and questioning, wondering if he was simply fucking with me, but at the same time I couldn't help feeling flattered. This was, after all, attention, approval, even if it was approval for something I no longer approved of. One of the less touristy questions Oliver asked me that day was about my family: Did I have any siblings? Yes, I said, an older sister. He said he had a younger sister; she was in high school. An odd and seemingly pointless point, but looking back on our friendship I think it's an important one. That's when I realized that just about everyone who'd befriended me in my twenty-seven years had been an older sibling. As a younger sibling myself, I'd always sought the friendship and approval of people who had that older-brother mien, just as I'm sure Oliver, despite being my junior (he was twenty-two, had graduated from Princeton at twenty-one, a fact that made me rabidly insecure about my own academic achievements), always sought younger brothers to take under
his wing. And that's exactly what he did. He taught me to appreciate fine scotch and obscure punk, often at the same time, sitting on his couch at three in the morning after the bars had closed and he'd whip out a bottle of Lagavulin sixteen-year (“Smells like a campfire, right?”) and LPs by the Dictators and Double-Sided Dildo (“You can actually hear the feedback from the singer's mike picking up the guitar amp”). At twenty-seven, I suppose it was a little late in life for me to suddenly start appreciating punk, but I latched on to the stuff, missing all the angst and anger I'd had to set aside during my late teen years, which I'd spent on a studio set, seeking the approval of adults rather than rebelling against them. By four in the morning, Oliver would usually start teaching me to appreciate not just refined booze and intentionally unrefined music but fine cocaine as well. Enjoying the irony that I had to leave showbiz before anyone even offered me the stuff, I indulged as a mere dilettante, thrilled just as much by the novelty of it as by the dopamine. In a not-so-subtle nod to Hunter S. Thompson, Oliver kept a couple grams in a saltshaker.