Hidden Bodies (10 page)

Pissant one: “Is your makeup in there?”

Pissant two: “No, his dick is in there.”

Pissant three: “I heard about those retractable dicks. You get a lot more done every day.”

Calvin: “Guys. If you give JoeBro any more shit about his retractable dick, he’s not gonna tell you where you can get one.”

These guys are pale and puffy with ostentatious T-shirts under wrinkled flannel button-downs and they hate Woody Allen and they love Wes Anderson. They dismiss
Crimes and Misdemeanors
as wordy and I think they never even watched the whole thing. I wish it were socially acceptable to brandish a knife. But the driver is an innocent bystander and I wouldn’t subject him to any
additional torture. We are close, and I still don’t know how I’m going to kill Amy.

Pissant one: “Americans aren’t funny enough to get
Parks and
Rec.
”

Pissant two: “
Parks and Rec
isn’t American enough to get Americans.”

Pissant three: “I’d fuck Amy Poehler.”

Pissant one: “I’d Poehler Amy Fuck.”

Calvin: “Is that because she’s your Poehler opposite?”

Calvin nudges me; he did too much coke. “JoeBro, come on,” he says. “You’re the one who wanted to go so bad. Get into it. People would fucking kill to be going to this
party right now.”

We continue up into the hills and this country needs a draft; these assholes should be challenged, beaten down. The Uber driver is unassuming and blank and I wouldn’t be surprised if he
kills us all. People disappear in Los Angeles; this is a sad place, haunted. We are still driving, up, up, up, and I am not a pissant in Pumas and these idiots won’t shut up.

They brand Chelsea Handler a slut and Jimmy Kimmel a sell-out and Jimmy Fallon a lucky motherfucker and they are wrong about so much in the world and
are we there yet?
I don’t
aspire to slave away and live up here. These hills are glum and neutral, even as we climb, and my ears pop and I should have come alone. I don’t have a plan and these hills aren’t even
the right hills, the glamorous sparkling mounds that hover above Chateau Marmont. These are the hipster hills, where lazy people in cool clothes pretend they never wanted to be
gross rich
but only wanted to be
comfortable, you know, chill.

My phone alarm goes off because it’s ten thirty. I text Delilah:
Some shit going down, hang on, maybe late night drink instead of dinner.

She writes back:
That’s cool. Let me know! I can bring booze!

The world is too extreme with Delilah and her lack of self-respect and Amy with her big fat ego. I will deal with one girl at a time and I put my phone in Airplane mode. We slow down. We are
here. The driver says he is
not
available to shuttle us home later and he gets to leave, the lucky bastard—and my throat is tight and my underwear shrunk—the dryers at
Hollywood Lawns are no good—and my teeth chatter. I was starting to think I’d never get here and now this is it.

I follow the pissants into the house where Bobcat Goldthwait lived for a few weeks in the late ’90s (like I give a fuck). There is a security camera by the
open gate
and a sign
over it that reads
STICK YOUR TONGUE OUT AT ME I
’
M FAKE
. The thing about Californians is they think fearlessness is cool; there isn’t a
single security measure intact, which is great news for me.

We cross the overgrown lawn where hipsters idle taking selfies and talking about making it to
Mecca.
We give the password and enter through the oversized mahogany
door—motherfucker—and I smell eucalyptus and cucumbers and money. I don’t see Amy. I grip my bag.

“Calm down,” Calvin says. “Look around. Lord Henderson is the freaking honey pot.”

I let him go find the guac and then slump onto a couch and I’m annoyed that I
like
the couch. I haven’t been anywhere nice in so long. If I had money I would have a house
just like this, and I can’t believe Amy is Henderson’s girlfriend. She lives here, with all the fine things and I was deluded to think that she would be holed up in a shithole with a
sisterhood of competing aspirational climbers. My head spins and I get up. I will not sit on this couch, knowing that she has
sucked Henderson off
on this couch.

I walk toward the kitchen and Calvin joins me. He still doesn’t have any guac; he ran into some buds. He took something. I can feel it. He’s morphing. He’s pushy. He reaches
for my bag. I flinch. “I got it.”

“It’s cool,” he says. “Everyone is putting the booze they brought in the kitchen. Henderson has a whole bar set up.”

“I got it,” I insist.

And then I realize it all might begin now, before I even have a drink or a snack, because here comes Henderson. He’s shinier and leaner in person and the smile on his face would be more at
home on an action figure. Amy’s not with him, but she probably approved of his fucking shirt, a yearbook picture of Louis C.K. The quote underneath reads “Van Halen Sucks” and
schmuck after schmuck slobbers—
best T-shirt ever, dude that is bad ass, dude that is it, dude Van Halen
does
suck
—and Henderson says
you’re welcome
,
like he made the joke, like he made the T-shirt, like he has a tenth of Louis C.K.’s talent. There is nothing genuine about Amy’s boyfriend with his gleaming skin. It’s true; when
you make it in show business, you make a deal with the devil. The more pictures they take of you, the less there is inside of you (unless you’re Meryl Streep) and Henderson is a ghost, all
muscle, no fat, all outside, no inside.

“Get it, boy,” Calvin says. “Get at this guac before it’s all gone.”

“Dope guac,” says some asshole, and I pick up a Dorito and shove it into the guac. There is nothing remarkable about this
guac
, about any
guac
, and California needs
to calm the fuck down. They’re just avocados. Guac is guac and while sometimes it’s slimy and disgusting, it’s never
delicious.

I look for Amy and I don’t see her and where is she? Don’t hanger-on girlfriends have to hang on to their boyfriends at times like this, when random girls are pouring into the house?
A fan asks him about his girlfriend. I stop moving.

“She’s up north tonight with my mom,” he says
.

Girlfriend. Up north.
No. No. I didn’t consider that she wouldn’t be here. I try to calm down but it’s loud and Cards Against Humanity isn’t
that
fucking funny and droll girls wear bold, old clothes with deliberately ’50s hairdos.
Dear Women of New York: You are superior.
I go room to room looking for Amy even though
she’s
up north
. I pour wine into a glass and Calvin raves about Henderson.

“Steve Martin retweets him every time he tweets,” Calvin exalts. “Like no matter what he says. How cool is that?”

Henderson swoops in, scooping Skittles into his mouth full of veneers. “Pretty fucking cool, bro.”

“That’s dope,” says Calvin. “Mad dope. Hey, this is Joe, he works for me over at Counterpoint.”

Henderson nods and a girl with a microphone warbles and Henderson asks if Calvin still lives in
The Village.

“I’m up on Beachwood,” Calvin answers, fawning like a girl at a New Kids on the Block concert. “Joe’s in Hollywood Lawns.”

Henderson looks at me. He doesn’t have any pores and his eyelashes are too long. “Birds,” he says. “I fucking
love
that place. All those ripe, drunk girls. Oh
man, I used to go there the way you go to Mickey D’s.
Feast
.”

Henderson
feels it
and he climbs onto a chair and then onto his marble island and he whistles and the room goes silent. “You guys mind if I grab this here mic and maybe work out
this bit I’ve been hashing out on my own?”

Cheer.
Yes. We love you, Henderson.
And then the chanting:
Set! Set! Set!

Henderson tells us that he’s seeing someone. (Cheers.) He says it’s going well. (Cheers.) He says her name is Amy. (Cheers.) He says Amy is out of town. (Biggest cheers yet, offers
to fuck, suck, etc.) Every woman in this place yells something along the lines of
I-will-fuck-you
and if you want to see the opposite of feminism, go to a comedian’s house.

He goes on. “When the cat’s away, the mouse will masturbate on the sofa and RSVP no to dinner party invitations.” The
hooting
, and I don’t think a New York crowd
would laugh this hard. “But the thing is, I’m happy. I’m in this. When Kate Hudson texts to meet in the CVS parking lot for a quickie, I’m like, no, dude. Go get new
tits.”

Again the women are laughing and this is not right.

“I’m so fucking happy that I can drive by an elementary school without feeling profoundly bitter that I never got laid once the entire time I was in elementary school.”

It’s not funny, making fun of child molestation. Henderson doesn’t understand how good he’s had it.

“Earlier today, I had these Japanese hookers, and I was like, ‘I’m so happy in my relationship that you don’t need to suck my dick, just fuck each
other.’”

More laughter.

“My girlfriend would
hate
me if I admitted this so you all have to hold hands across America and promise me that you are not going to tell on me.”

Calvin pledges his allegiance along with all the other followers.

“I think my balls are uneven.”

Girls scream out. “Your balls are
sweet
.”

“I think my dick is too big. For a Jew.” Again there is laughter, as if a Jewish man analyzing the size of his anatomy is funny at this late stage in humanity.

“So you can imagine how good it feels for me that this girl I’m dating now, God, wow, saying that,
dating.
Like I can’t believe that? Can you guys believe
that?”

He shakes his head.
F@#k Narcissism.

“Well okay, my girlfriend, when we’re fucking, she gets
really
into it and I mean like—you guys, you gotta
swear
this is just between us—where’s
the camera? Who’s got a camera?”

Everyone has a fucking camera and he knew that, the arrogance of the man who gets onstage and thinks he doesn’t need a punch line. He’s gyrating. Mocking Amy, the way she yelps. He
pretends to finish and he grins. That fuck-face grin and he takes a bow.

“So afterward I’m like, no offense, but I’ve been fucking for a while now and I know that I’m not very good at it. So I ask her if she’s faking it.” The crowd
goes
ooh
and Henderson raises his eyebrows. “And you know what she says to me?”

He smiles. How awful it must be to be him, to be brimming with viciousness. “‘You have to understand. I have this ex—and, well, let’s just say I never loved him and he
was bad at sex.’”

The Spanish tile floor collapses into the basement and
This is the End
and my insides go quiet as Henderson shares with the world what Amy said about me.

I back out of the living room and go upstairs and I barge into his bedroom, where Amy fucks him and whispers vicious things about me. Well, fuck
you
, Amy. She used me and then she used
us
to entertain her new
boyfriend
. He knows about me so I deserve to know about
him
and I search for his box of secrets—everyone has one and people with no
imagination keep theirs under their beds—and sure enough, he has a box of shit about his ex-wife: journal entries, newspaper clippings, pictures, ticket stubs.

Her name was
Margie
and she went to Birds with him, sat on his lap, laughed at his bad jokes, and took naked selfies on their shitty futon. They saw Billy Joel and had terrible seats.
He was puffier and once upon a time he had a heart
.
He got divorced when he started to get famous, when he was on the way
up
. Margie lives in Lake Kissimmee now and has three kids
with a
salesman.
She doesn’t look bitter.
Never loved him, bad at sex.
He can’t be happy without her, clearly, and I will put him out of his misery. Downstairs, the
laughing only gets louder. Someone needs to stop him from poisoning the world.

I grind up four of the Percocets and empty them into the reusable metal water bottle by his bed, right next to his bottles of Xanax and prescription sleeping pills. I take his box into his
walk-in, live-in, fuck-in
closet and I text Calvin that I’m Lyfting with the Tinder girl. I text Delilah:
Sorry to do this at the last minute, but I have to bail.

I get why Calvin likes improv. There is something kind of exciting about having so little control. I didn’t plan to kill Henderson, but then, when you go on TV and whine about your
girlfriend’s
bush
and stand up in your home and say mean things about Kate Hudson and brag about your masturbatory habits and open up your home to strangers—the password was
all over Twitter ten minutes after we got here—well, Henderson is gonna learn the hard way that you can’t go around making fun of people you’ve never met before.

IT
takes a long time for the party to end because most of the guests are dirt-poor fan boys who need this night to stay juiced about their own
flailing careers. I listen to their American Apparel conversations and the way they analyze their expressions—
even your teeth look stoked
—and I wonder what will become of them
all. There aren’t enough mansions and jobs to go around.

Hiding behind Henderson’s suits is uncomfortable and my neck hurts and it occurs to me that I could walk out on all of this, everything, and go back to New York. But I need closure.
Henderson’s fucking act changed everything and now I have to know why Amy said those terrible things about me. I can’t leave this house and go on with the rest of my life wondering if
I’m bad at sex. And I can’t lose the chance to talk to the one person who actually knows where Amy is.

There is a loud
boom
downstairs and that was the remote-controlled blinds going down all over the house. There is an emptiness in the house now, the sound of Henderson pouring cereal
into a bowl, watching a little recorded
Seth Meyers
before turning it off and locking the doors—that’s a good boy—and heading upstairs. All lonely men are the same and
he’s no different from Mr. Mooney as he plods up the stairs. My heart beats. I stand at attention, listening as he gets ready for bed.