There was a strange, orange mold growing in spots on my bathroom ceiling. I tried loosening it with water and scraping it away with a metal edge, but the spores wouldn't budge. Eventually, I attacked the problem with a bottle of bleach. The spores screamed when I sprayed them. They cursed and ran as I followed them from room to room. Some scurried beneath the carpet while others sped across the living room wall and scrambled for cover behind the tapestry hanging over my couch. Only the ringing and pounding at my front door was enough to save them.
I looked through the peephole and saw a skinny Mexican kid standing in the rain with a package and an ipod.
"Can I help you," I asked as I opened the door.
"Are you Judd Trichter?"
I admitted I was.
"You've been served."
According to the documents, the law firm of Wolfowitz and Abramoff was suing me for $12,000 on a credit card debt that was three years past due.
I called my lawyer and old friend, Kenny Gutstein.
"You're bothering me with this shit in the middle of pilot season?"
I told him I didn't know what to do.
"Get a bankruptcy attorney."
"Obviously I can't afford one."
He sighed with contempt. "Fax the papers over, and I'll take a look."
"I love you, bubby."
He hung up.
The debt was something that had begun more than ten years ago, back when I was in college. I had given my father a credit card in my name because he couldn't have one in his own. Sidonia had been vociferous about not allowing my parents anywhere near my finances, but what could I do? He was my father.
Gutstein emailed me the address of a legal aid office in Inglewood:
go down there, get the forms, then file a response with the court in Bev Hills. admit nothing.
I had promised Tracy we would hang out after her shift so I picked her up from the internet cafe on my way to Inglewood. She read a dog-eared copy of Title I by Manuel Gurabo as we sat in the waiting room.
"How is it," I asked.
"You never read it?"
"Nope."
There was a sign on the wall that said what forms were required for A) child custody, B) domestic violence, or C) credit card debt. Three other victims of the court system were waiting in line before me. Judging by the state of their clothes, the color of their skin, and the number of small children they had in tow, I figured none of them would fair well from whatever process was being administered against them.
"Did Manuel Gurabo really used to come to your house," she asked. Tracy had read the rough draft of the first chapter of my Fischman blog, and this led her to begin educating herself about the great New Yorican playwright.
"He was friends with my mother," I said.
"And you remember him?"
"I'm not sure if I remember him, or if I remember the stories about his coming 'round."
We were helped by a bearded law school student doing a bit of pro bono work to fulfill his requirements at USC. He asked me if the credit card claim was legitimate, and I confessed that it was. He suggested I make a counter offer of $2,000 and hope for a settlement in the $7,000 to $9,000 range. Remembering Kenny's advice, I opted instead to deny the allegations and make a settlement offer of zero. The law school student advised me that I didn't have a case. He mentioned something about perjury. I told him he needn't worry because little Jewish attorney angels from New York would eventually come and save me.
"How's the writing coming," Tracy asked, as I drove to the Beverly Hills Courthouse where I was due to file my response.
I told her it was coming slow. "It's like there are these islands of memory, but I can't place them in any context or time."
She asked for an example.
"When I wrote about the first song I remember hearing on the radio..."
"Mr. Tambourine Man?"
"Actually," I was sorry to admit, "the first song I remember hearing on the radio was One Way or Another by Blondie. I distinctly remember hearing it in our cabin at Kafar Masada."
"Okay."
"But I checked online, and One Way or Another wasn't released until 1979. And Kafar Masada was closed by then. Bought up by developers and turned into condominiums."
"So your memory is impossible?"
"I guess."
Tracy seemed concerned.
"Why are you wearing a rain coat," she asked.
"Because it's raining."
"It hasn't rained in weeks."
"It's raining now," I said, gesturing to the grey sky and the drizzle on my windshield.
This seemed to confirm whatever was bothering her. She asked if I had, by any chance, seen a screaming, orange mold on my ceiling. I hadn't told her about the mold.
According to Tracy, the rain and mold were symptoms of a virus that had been floating around on the internet. Probably something I caught during my meeting with Fish.
"Could I have gotten it from you," I asked.
She agreed it was possible she was a carrier and promised to download some contraceptive software before we had sex again. According to Tracy, the particular virus I contracted, if left untreated, could completely erase my memory.
"Do you think Fish gave it to me, to us, on purpose?"
"Probably on accident," she claimed, messing up the idiom in a way that annoyed me to no end. "He needs your memory intact to provide his childhood. He wouldn't want it compromised."
Tracy recommended a specialist with an office in the Mid-Wilshire district and offered to pay. She said he'd give us a discount on account of their past relationship.
The doctor's name was Prokurov, and the sign on his door identified him as an oral surgeon. He was a stocky, balding man with the slow manner and sly smile of a career criminal. His thick Russian accent combined with an inability to pronounce the letter "r" brought to mind a Cossack Elmer Fudd.
"How is Twacy," he asked.
I told him she was well.
He mused out loud about the small size and subtle curvature of her bottom. "As I wecall," the doctor offered, "it is a poyfect specimen."
"One of the best," I agreed.
I described to Prokurov the symptoms of my ailment. He said he knew the virus I was referring to and confessed that it wasn't easy to tweat.
"The islands of memowy you have now will be saved, but what connected them before cannot be wecovered. You will have to cweate new bwidges to link the events of your life into a cohewent nawwative."
I asked him what he meant by "new bwidges."
"In order to wecover the timeline of your existence, the mind itself will cweate new memowies of past, linking events."
"Events that never happened," I asked.
"Iwwelevant," he exclaimed, as he examined the interior of my mouth. "You will not be able to distinguish the contwived memowies from the ones cweated by expewience."
I asked if there would be any other side effects to the procedure.
"Vewy likely," he said, "but the only other option is to have your bwain surged into emptiness by an aggwessive wirus."
Clearly this was a case that warranted a second opinion, but I had lost my insurance after not booking enough acting work to qualify for benefits through the union.
"I can give you the gas or put you to sleep."
Not trusting enough to lose consciousness in Prokurov's presence, I opted for the gas.
"Might I warn you that the pwocedure will be painful."
I told him I liked pain.
"You awe man aftwer my own heawt."
The doctor exited the room and called for his assistant to prep me for the operation. Her name was Svetlana. She was a tall, lusty Muscovite, who entered the room wearing the bothered expression native to employees of the health care profession eager to equate each patient with the corresponding pile of paper that needs to be sorted, filed, and misplaced as quickly as possible in order to make room for the next.
Svetlana slapped a gas mask over my face and explained the function of the dials while I ignored her every word in my failed attempt to avoid staring at her breasts. They were magnificent breasts, fatty and soft like a cut of buttered chicken. How different she was from my Tracy! Blonde and meaty, everything about Svetlana was too: too tall; too loud; with too much perfume and make-up; with hips too wide; and breasts - did I mention her breasts? -- twice you say - well there were two of them - precariously supported by a too-small bra ready to snap and give at any moment. Goddamn it, these tits wanted to be free, and as the gas filled my lungs, I imagined myself as their Che Guevara, their vanguard Marxist, born to release them from the oppressive bourgeoisie of her brassiere. When I could no longer stand the cruel injustice of this fascist lingerie, I made a lunge for it, a clumsy grab that missed her tits by a mile as Svetlana fended off my hand with an easy flick of her wrist. I feigned passivity to prepare for my next assault, but the woman knew my kind. Her goal-tending prowess surpassed my slapshot, and I accepted defeat, at least for now, yielding back into the chair with the tacit knowledge that someday, at some appointed time, by virtue of my preferred standing in America and by right of my forefathers and their early presence in this land, those tits and everything around them would be mine.
Svetlana left the room and returned minutes later with the doctor.
"I hear you like Wussian women," he smiled.
I agreed I did.
"We will negotiate pwice for her after pwocedure." He sharpened his instruments as he spoke. "If you like, I can give you lots Novocain, or little."
"I want to feel it," I said, the gas making me cocky. "There's nothing you can dish out that I can't take."
Prokurov nodded, impressed and ready for the challenge.
Whether the procedure performed on me that day was learned in a medical school or in the interrogation chamber of some Cold War-era gulag, I'll never know, but after the first six of my teeth were pulled, yanked, or wrestled from my mouth, I would have confessed to any crime I was accused of whether I had committed it or not. Prokurov was wrist-deep in my mouth with a radial saw while Svetlana twisted wires into the exposed area of my gums. Shivers of vertigo shot through my legs as peculiar fantasies and hallucinations raced across the molten putty of my mind.
I imagined myself staring over a dark abyss, a flickering bulb strapped to my forehead, strobing a single beam, piercing down to the tiny island of Manhattan flattened out below me like a circuit board. I focused the strobe toward Park West Village, the housing development I grew up in, a series of giant, red-brick monstrosities arranged like memory cards between Harlem and the Upper West Side. I watched as spots of current shot around the board, streaming in and out of the subway holes, gathering among transistors and LCD's until suddenly, a small fire caught my eye. It happened on the corner near the building I grew up in, too much juice, a blown fuse perhaps, faulty wiring. Or maybe it was arson. The flame flickered out quickly leaving the blackened remnant of a ruined chip, split copper, and collapsed circuits all around it. The spot lay black and bare for several seconds, spreading decay to the chips around it until new currents flooded the area, carrying away the ashes and sand, carrying forward new configurations, a refurbished card, tall and red, coming to life with a new glow, assembled by itself, of itself, rising from the sparks of where the fire had been.
A loud knock disrupted my vision. I could see Svetlana holding the door for two small, chubby men wearing leather jackets and black berets. They argued with the doctor back in forth in Russian until Prokurov yielded whatever position he was defending. He walked to the corner of the room, took a stack of boxes, what appeared to be DVD players, and handed them over. The men left.
The next phase of the procedure is less clear in my memory. As best I can recall, the mad dentist sewed up my gums with false teeth made from an amalgam of metal and white enamel while Svetlana prodded my mouth with an electric current that sent shocks down my neck. She leaned over me as she worked, allowing me to peek into her blouse and inhale the day worn stench of her sweat.
When it was all over, Svetlana walked me in circles around the hallway before letting me rest on the floor. She used my cell phone to call Tracy and tell her to pick me up. She handed over a prescription for Vicodin and returned to the office, leaving me alone in the hallway like some discarded heap of clothes.
"Remind me," I asked, as Tracy drove my car through rush hour traffic, "how it is you know that psychopath?"
"We did some business together," she said without looking at me. "Years ago."
"What kind of business?"
"Chips and stuff. Black market electrics."
I don't think I ever entered Tracy's apartment the same way twice. Sometimes we came in through an alley, sometimes a fire escape, sometimes the front lobby. Sometimes we went over the roof and came downstairs while other times the elevator took us right to her floor. I rarely, if ever, saw other people in the hallways, and when I did, they were scurrying quickly out one door, rushing by without letting me see their faces, then jumping into other doors, stairwells, or elevators that seemed to arrive the moment they approached. The layout of Tracy's flat also seemed to change. If it weren't for the giant TV screen outside her window, projecting its constantly repeating OS Beer commercial, I would think that she was switching apartments every time I left.
Tracy futzed around in the kitchen while I laid on her bed, my face alternating between numbness and extreme throbs of pain. I stared up at the webcam on the ceiling, waiting for the Vicodin to kick in.
"Don't you ever get sick of being watched," I mumbled as she returned from the kitchen with a steaming cup of tea.
"I like it," she said. "Makes me feel less alone."
She crawled into bed and began to cuddle. I stopped her.
"Not only am I in pain," I groaned, "but putting on a show for an audience of masturbating computer geeks isn't what I'm looking for in an intimate experience."
Tracy recoiled, hurt, to the other side of the bed. "That's a rude thing to say about my fans."
I didn't apologize.
"Is that what you think of the people who watch you on TV?"
I told her that was different.
"How," she asked. "How is it any different?"
I told her that, for one thing, when I'm acting, I don't usually take my clothes off.
"Neither do I," she insisted. "Except for those moments when it would be disingenuous for me not to."
"And for another thing," I added, "what I do is a craft that requires talent, study, and years of experience to excel at. There's a skill to it. I don't just walk into a room and exist."
I had started an argument.
"Nor do you have to create your own script," she said. "What you do is all paint-by-numbers, everything laid out in careful instructions with a director making sure you stick to the plan."
I hated the webcams. They were my least favorite thing about Tracy. I thought they cheapened her, brought a
certain Paris Hilton quality to her persona that she didn't otherwise deserve. It would be one thing if she made money at it, but she didn't. She spent hours and hours every day fine-tuning the layout, answering emails, promoting herself online, and yet she kept the site free and refused all advertising. It seemed she just wanted to be looked at, to be watched, to court fame for its own sake, as if existence depended on other people's attention and had no substance of its own.
"No doubt the actor's role is but a small, interchangeable contribution to a larger product assembled by many hands," it hurt to speak, "but it also involves a process, learned through practice, and governed by the aesthetic values of an artist."
Tracy laughed into the pillow. "Process being the rote memorization of words written by someone who actually works for a living?"
She could get nasty when her battery was low.
"If acting is so easy," I asked, "why doesn't everyone do it? After all, everyone seems to want to."
"Everyone can do it," she insisted, springing up onto her knees and pulling the pillow to her lap. "But the politics of the industry decide who gets to work and who doesn't."
"Politics," I argued, "doesn't move an audience. Performance moves an audience. Performance that is the result of the choices made in process."
"What process," she asked. "What is this process you keep referring to? Sounds like some esoteric jargon used to create a sense of mystery where there is none."
I considered for a moment explaining the process of an actor to Tracy, the breaking down of a script, the research and preparation, determining what drives the character, choosing objectives, finding obstacles to those objectives, figuring out how the character relates to the other characters in the script, how he relates to the world of the script, how he relates to himself in the script, while allowing secondary characteristics like gait or accent to develop through rehearsal and memorization, through the ritual of relaxation and concentration, creating the level of comfort necessary for letting one's self cry, laugh, or scream, on cue, take after take when the situation calls for it, night after night in the theater and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays, while remembering to listen to the other actors, to respond to their choices, to react to the changing conditions on the stage and the feedback from the audience without thinking, without blinking one's eyes, without moving one's head if it means losing a light coming from the rafters, while keeping in mind where the character's through-line will be in the next scene and where it was in the scene before, while maintaining honesty and confidence in delivery no matter how insipid the material is and avoiding the temptation to push, to show off, to audition for one's next role or steal attention away from what's important in the telling of the story.
And yet it was a job a child could do.
I thought about explaining all this to Tracy but decided against it. It was far easier to say the following:
"Excuse me if I resent the implication that what I do for a living is the equivalent of traipsing around my apartment, eating, cleaning, and flashing my pussy for all to see."
I had declared war.
"Oh, is that what I do," she asked.
"Unless I'm missing something."
"You think this isn't a process as well," she asked, gesturing to the webcam above us. "That no thought or design has gone into the product? Your television shows and movies with their hackneyed formulas and plot points planned out on precise pages stuck between commercial breaks and ending before the next show begins; with their magazine models and movie stars pretending to be doctors, lawyers, and cops; with their manipulative soundtracks and cheesy special effects; with their hero aggrandizement preaching morality while pushing some corporate message that material things will bring happiness, that we should trust our government and its institutions, that good will triumph over evil, that crime doesn't pay, that God exists and His mercy is infinite! What a joke! What a tired and outdated format! What an archaic view of drama!"
"Based in a theater that has survived for thousands of years..."
"My process creates a theater so real the participants don't even realize the roles in which they've been cast. They're so rooted in the drama they cannot even fathom its depth. This," she argued, sweeping her arm dangerously close to my face, "transcends theater. The stage is set but the events never planned. And maybe they never happen at all. That's the risk the masturbating geeks take when they click in. So yes, I eat, clean, and flash my pussy before a lens, and while I do, anything can occur, and no one, not the audience, not the actors, not even the author, if one exists, knows where the performance will go."
"Or to what purpose," I responded. "After all, nothing is ever interpreted or examined. Nothing is ever said and no point is ever made."
"How about the point that the world has changed and art needs to reflect that? That it needs to be taken back by the individual? That a life, as is, has value and holds interest and can be exhibited to the public without catering to the demands of some corporate provider?"
"Oh please," I said. "This isn't art. This is the absence of art. This is the raw material without the artist providing form and detail. This is what happens when people are too lazy and unskilled to make art, and when their audience is numbed to the point where they cease to hold standards and expecatations."
"Well, I'm sorry you don't see it, but lucky for me, there are tens of thousands of people who do." She grabbed an extension chord and stood up from the bed. "And maybe if you'd open your mind a little and stop being such a fucking snob..."
"You're a stripper without the music and the pole."
That did it. Stage three of romantic altercations: the level that allows for physical violence. Tracy punched me in the face, her metal bones crashing against the soft tissue of my jaw. It was a straight right I would've seen coming from a mile away if not for the Vicodin. The moment her fist connected, I could feel the fluid flood my mouth as the sutures gave way and the cuts re-opened along my gums. The blood poured over my lip, cascading down my chin, onto the bleached white covers of her bed.
"You cross boundaries," she added on her way to the door.
I could hear her footfalls as she stormed across the living room and flopped down on the couch where she'd plug into the wall, recharging her batteries after her outburst, laying there for hours, eyes fluttering between wakefulness and sleep as the watts flowed through her circuits and gathered in her cells. I'd witnessed her recharging before, and it always depressed me to see it. It reminded me of my mother sitting alone in the living room late at night, sprinkling nuts over her ice cream with a sad and distant look on her face as she polished off the carton and worried about her weight.
Meanwhile, I was bleeding all over the room. Pain so dull I could barely keep from vomiting. I crawled, holding my face in my hand, leaving a trail of red across the white carpet all the way to the bathroom door. In a half-hearted attempt to staunch the swelling, I shimmied beneath the toilet bowl and pressed my injured cheek against the porcelain cold.
I noticed a webcam on the ceiling staring down at me.
Posted by Judd Trichter at 5:00 PM