Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (2 page)

“I loved it. I love it.” I wring the enthusiasm out like the last drop of water from a damp washcloth.

“I told you he would,” she says to Willa. “Come on you guys, dinner’s ready.”

The forced smile on my face twitches as Ellen heaps my plate with slices of meticulously prepared chicken paillard. She looks at me expectantly. This should be easy. I know what she wants this time, how to fill in the blank. But my hands are clumsy. I manage to slice off a corner of the chicken and lift it to my mouth. I think it is the best thing I have ever tasted and suddenly feel guilty that I am leaving on a good dinner night. Afterwards, I go outside to clean up the dog shit.

Then I leave.

If I’d waited until Ellen and Willa were asleep, I could have had a genuine Hollywood moment. I could have sat on the edge of my daughter’s bed and stroked her hair. Tucked her in one last time. Or kissed my wife and had second thoughts and perhaps even gotten misty-eyed. It could have been classic.

Then maybe I wouldn’t come off as such an unmitigated asshole. I might even appear sympathetic. Troubled. Conflicted yet caring. Someone the audience could identify with. I could have been box-office-friendly. But I don’t do any of those things. I just leave.

On the way out of town, I stop by Hillside to see my mom.

Auburn hair. Green eyes through cat-eye glasses. Early death. Hated men like me. Then again, I do too. I wonder if we all feel that way. Men like me.

Al Jolson’s enormous memorial is both the cemetery’s mascot and its billboard. Climbing forty feet into the air with white Roman columns and a perpetually running waterfall, it rises high over the 405 Freeway. Ostentatious Hollywood wealth meets the looming specter of death.

Business hours are long over but there is always somebody on duty. I intend to make sure someone will be checking up on her. Frequently. I want the grass covering her grave to be lush and green, soft and well tended at all times. Fuck the water shortage. And she should have fresh flowers. None of that carnation crap.

I can tell right away the guy behind the reception desk is a hyphenate. A Hollywood hyphenate. As in actor-producer or writer-director. Or in this case, funeral director-actor. He is in his late thirties with an artificial orange tan he misguidedly thinks is going to get him in to read for late twenties.

“I’m sorry, sir. The grounds are closed.”

I slide my business card and a hundred-dollar bill across the marble counter.

He slides me a flashlight and a headshot.

I hike up Abraham’s Path to the top of the hill in the Mount Sinai section. My mother died before I could buy her a nice house. Being buried at Hillside is the next best thing.

There is a plot next to her reserved for Pop. If it were up to me, I’d have let my old man spend eternity in the cheap seats. Located in the shadow of the massive mausoleum walls with names like “Courtyard of Eternal Rest” and “Sanctuary of Isaac,” those soggy little plots never see a ray of unobstructed sunlight. And still they fill up like seats at the opera on opening night. In this town, Hillside is the only place to be interred. To spend eternity anywhere else is proof your life meant nothing.

I look at my mother’s grave and wish, as I have every time I’ve come here for nearly 20 years, that hers was the one still vacant. I hate that her headstone has a year on it for when she was born and another for when she died but only a dash for the life she lived in between.

But now he’s here, too. My father’s dash was meaningless. But for some reason, which after all these years I still don’t fully understand, my mother wanted him beside her. I made her a promise. So the man who spent his life putting her in the ground will spend eternity next to her on the top of the highest hill in the cemetery with a view of the green gold of the Santa Monica Mountains and the deep aquamarine of the Pacific Ocean.

I sit down beside my mother and decide to stay and watch the sunrise. And when the light begins to fight its way through the fog over the ocean, I get back in my car, merge onto the 405 and watch Jolson disappear in my rearview mirror.

It takes me awhile to realize I’m not headed out of town. Instead, I’m driving the other way, back through Culver City. I turn right on Pico, drive past Twentieth Century Fox, and keep heading east. I am only half interested in where my car will go next. My muscles go slack. It’s kind of pleasant giving myself over to the care of a luxury German driving machine. The only thing missing is music.

I am up to my neck in the glove compartment looking for a Harry Nilsson tape when I hear the sound of tires squealing and metal meeting glass. I have run a red light. While I slipped through the intersection unscathed, the cars trying to avoid me slammed into each other. The hood of the smaller car, a little silver Alfa Romeo, has folded back like a piece of crumpled origami and its whole front end is nestled cozily into the collapsed passenger side of an old Ford pickup.

I pull over to the curb and watch the two cars pinwheel lazily together across two lanes, scattering shards of headlight glass before finally coming to a stop in front of a Der Wienerschnitzel. I appreciate the geometry their union has created. It seems to me they complete one another now. Like a set of vehicular Siamese twins.

And then it occurs to me that there are people in those cars. I know I should go check on them. As soon as I find the tape. I rummage around in the glove compartment, throwing one thing after another onto the floor under the passenger seat.

Then I pull up the armrest. It’s been right here next to me the whole time. Well I’ll be damned.

I’m taking Nilsson out of his case when someone starts knocking—loudly. Three someones actually, bent over looking into my window. Clearly this is going to take some negotiating. To begin with, it’s important to know what one has to work with. Fortunately, it appears that no one is seriously injured. That could’ve fucked everything up for me. The first guy is Mexican. He has dirt under his fingernails and clearly belongs to the truck. There are gardening supplies scattered across the intersection—rakes, a leafblower, and something I think might be a Weedwacker. With any luck he’ll turn out to be an illegal. There’s a woman, early forties—small cut on her forehead, wearing a diamond wedding band. A big one. The guy with her is a good ten, maybe fifteen years younger, ringless, and has a supporting role on a new ABC pilot. This is my lucky day.

“Out of the fucking car this minute, you asshole!”

And suddenly the actor’s hands are around my throat. I hadn’t even realized the window was open. He has me by the neck and I’m fumbling with the door handle so when I finally get it open I fall into the street. They are
all
yelling at me. Growling and snarling and staring like a bunch of angry Rottweilers.

“Christ, I don’t know what happened.” Trembling, I stand. “One minute I’m fine and the next I’m dizzy and lightheaded, and then I think I blacked out.”

The gardener starts shouting at me in Spanish. I nod. “Sir, I don’t speak Spanish but I’m sure you’re completely justified.”

The actor is gearing up for his big scene. “I almost went through the fucking windshield,” he says with feeling.

The woman puts a protective hand on his arm. “It’s a miracle Dale and I aren’t strewn all over the street in tiny pieces.”

“I know, I know and mea culpa absolutely, but thank God you’re alright. I guess we better call the police, huh?”

Silence falls over the group. They mumble incoherently. The woman shoots Dale a piercing look.

“I’m willing to take full responsibility. We’ll just have to fill out the standard police report stuff: circumstances of the accident, names of drivers, passengers, where we were going, address, phone, employment information, social security …” I’m fairly sure I hear an audible gasp.

“Or … I can compensate you in cash right now and we can skip the paperwork.”

“Bullshit,” Dale says. “You don’t have that kind of cash on you.”

“Shut up, Dale,” the woman says. Then she puts her hand on his. “Why don’t you find a phone and call us a tow truck.” Dale slinks off toward a strip mall across the street.

The woman turns to the gardener and begins speaking in rapid-fire Spanish. He nods. So I open up my trunk, unzip my special bag—false bottom, crisp bills in tidy, bound stacks, as if I just robbed a bank—and pay them off. Considering they have no leverage, I am very generous. Everyone leaves the scene happy.

No harm, no foul, no fault. Not in LA.

Back in my car, I pop
Nilsson Schmilsson
into the tape deck and pull into traffic. “I am driving this car, I am driving this car, I am driving,” I whisper to myself and the beat of my pumping, pounding heart. But instead of heading toward the airport, I continue driving east. Toward the past. Into the past. Not my plan. But I sit back and watch. Suspended. To see what will happen next.

Yesterday, when I left, it was September, but here, in this now, it is April. I pull up to the curb and see that sticky purple jacaranda blossoms cover nearly every car windshield on the block. They hitch rides on rubber-soled shoes, bicycle wheels, and roller skates
.

Suddenly everything old seems old again. Tinged with the sepia of fading Kodak photos. But I am in them. Where I was. Who I was. Yet I am fully conscious of my full-body flashback. I am was. How would I tell that story? There is no tense to describe it. Telling, though, is not my job. I am the audience—always watching, always suspended, always waiting for what comes next—burdened with both hindsight and self-awareness. Always present in my past
.

Beverly Hills, 1957
. I was twelve the first time I heard my father having sex.

Muffled laughter. Heads bumping against the wall.
Oh Oh Yes Oh Yes
. Unfamiliar voice. Sharp intake of breath.
YesyesyesNoDon’t!
And groaning. Like a dying animal.

If he’d stopped to think about it, my father might have remembered that I was home sick that day; home alone with the chicken pox because my mother couldn’t miss another day of work. She couldn’t risk losing her job—not with four kids. I was the oldest; my sister, Hannah, was ten. We were closest in age so it fell to us to look after my brothers—Ben, six, who had a talent for getting into trouble, and Jake, two, who could get away with anything. Four kids was a lot of mouths to feed. It wasn’t that my father was unemployed. Actually, he’d had more jobs than I could count. He just couldn’t hold on to any of them for long.

His latest job was as a regional salesman for Tootsie’s, a cheap line of children’s clothing. He drove around to low-end stores in Los Angeles trying to interest buyers, managers, and owners in the newest line of stylish-but-affordable Tootsie attire. The back of our eleven-year-old brown Pontiac was home to a rack of Tootsie samples that completely obscured my father’s view out the back window.

He hadn’t stayed at one job for more than a year in as long as I could remember. Sometimes he quit, but more often than not he was fired. He’d come home ranting about how he’d been screwed or underappreciated or was overqualified for their shit job and fuck-them-he-could-do-better-anyway. Sometimes he just stopped going in. He had worked for Tootsie’s for nine months. We all knew his days were numbered.

I found the woman in our kitchen bent over with her head stuck in our refrigerator. She was wearing a pink, fuzzy robe that didn’t belong to her.

“That’s my mother’s robe,” I said. It was the first thing that popped into my head.

She started at the sound of my voice, hit her head on the shelf, and finally emerged clutching a jar of pickles, a bottle of milk, and a jar of strawberry jam to her impressive chest. She hadn’t bothered to tie the robe closed and now her hands were too full to do anything about it. She looked at me with panic in her eyes, but when she spoke her voice was as calm and sweet as Miss Lipsky, my second-grade teacher.

“Hi,” she said, trying to sound like someone who wasn’t using condiments to cover her virtually naked body. “I’m Lucille. I’m a colleague of your father’s.”

“I’m Greyson. I have the chicken pox. Why are you wearing my mother’s robe?”

“Oh, the robe, well … 
Ray?
” Lucille glanced over her shoulder trying to gauge the distance between her and the nearest countertop. “The chicken pox, huh? That’s just awful. I had the chicken pox once.”

Lucille’s hands must have started sweating. She seemed to be having more and more trouble hanging onto her snack. Each time she lifted a knee to slide the milk bottle back into place or jiggled the pickles back into position, I saw more of Lucille—the outer curve of a breast, a flash of pink nipple, black hair between her thighs.

Now it was my hands that were sweating. I stood there gawking at her, both of us at a loss for words. Little by little, she was losing her battle with the pickle jar. She’d had it wedged between her forearm and the exposed part of her stomach. Now everything but the lid had slipped below her arm. She slid her right leg forward, trying to rest the jar on her bare upper thigh.

“How exactly do you know my father?”

“I told you, we—I—Ray and I are just—”

In midsentence her eyes dropped from my face to the tent in my pajama pants. She gasped. My eyes followed hers. The blood that rushed to my face did nothing to reduce the size of my erection. Seconds later, broken glass, pickle juice, kosher dills, globs of jam, and our milk for the week covered the floor and the front of my mother’s robe. She turned away and started to cry.

“
Raaaayyyy?
… Raymond god
dammit
 … 
Ray-hay-hay
 …”

“Coming, Doll,” my father called from my parents’ bedroom.

He dashed into the kitchen, looking lithe and graceful like one of those dancers on
The Lawrence Welk Show
and then turned two shades paler when he saw me, the mess, and Lucille crying.

“Greyson, what are you doing home from—”

“He has the chicken pox, you idiot. What kind of a father are you?”

Lucille was still hanging onto the counter facing away from us.