She tried to hear his voice in her head, telling her what to do next, propping her up like he used to with trilingual pep talks, propounding that she still had it, if only she could step out of her own way, promising her that inspiration would come as long as she cultivated that certain je ne sais quoi shtick-to-it-iveness. But it was an old CD. Jacquie had never really been able to escape Phase One of Newton’s Master Plan. She’d never even made it from hairless to bush leagues… something happened, she’d lost her faith & self-confidence, & began to spend her days trying to figure out how not to die instead of how she might live. Whatever artistry left in her was stunted, remedial, irrelevant. She failed miserably at the 2.0 thing, failed to transform herself from Mann manqué cartographer of flat tit mysteries/pretween genito-urinary landscapes into a swan that knew exactly what it was — a mature artist, take her or leave her.
Lately, she’d come close to feeling the breath & hand of her wily mentor, in that she alit on a few things she thought he’d have heartily approved. Jacquie saw something on the CNN site about a 76-year-old Tokyo man, a former travel agent with a wife & children now making his living as an actor in the booming genre they called “elder porn.” She seriously considered flying to Japan to take his portrait—& tracking down other salami men—but it took lots of money to travel around like that. Unless she had a really strong feeling about it, which she didn’t, there wasn’t much point. She couldn’t afford to be lukewarm quixotic.
Another thing that got her attention was an article in People that came out in the weeks after Gabrielle Giffords got shot called I SURVIVED A BULLET TO THE HEAD. Among the gallery of unfortunates was a 21-year-old cheerleader turned dental assistant whose injury necessitated the removal of a bizarrely visible chunk of skull and brain; her head looked like a clock missing that slice of 9-to-midnight pie — nothing but airspace. She was fully functional, arriving at her own homecoming queen ceremony in wheelchair & helmet. Another fine specimen was a young man who miraculously recovered from a bullet fired into his cerebellum when he was 5 years-old — the shooter was his dad, who killed his brother, strangled his mom then shot himself to death. Far be it from me to suggest psychotherapy. Jacquie thought maybe she could hit the road with the goal of taking 25 portraits of Americans who survived those kind of head wounds. She clipped something the cheerleader had said, “This is my new normal,” which Jacquie thought would make a helluva title for a book: The New Normal.
Um, well, I have a new normal too: career death & poverty, and severely damaged children who hate & rob me.
Ain’t that a kick in the head?
. .
She couldn’t believe it: Pieter was friend requesting. They’d been out of touch for a few years. He was living in London now, coming to L.A. next week. Hey let’s just pick up where we left off, he wrote, in a light & funny way, so he wouldn’t feel so rejected if Jacquie was in a relationship or whatever.
He took her to a wonderful Moroccan restaurant called Tagine that he’d been “obsessing about.” (A typically gay Pieter phrase.) He told her that James Franco recommended it to him — the actor recently collaborated with Gus Van Sant & Michael Stipe on a mixed media installation at the gallery Pieter worked for in the UK — as a place where the odds were good for running into cast members of Glee, the show he said he was unfortunately “still fucking obsessed with & it’s so over.” O boy, he’d gotten so much gayer than she remembered. “James said the glee club gather at three distinct watering holes: Tagine, Sur or The Little Door. So before I blow this town, I’m going to take you to each one.”
They jogged/ambled down a rather short & narrow Memory Lane — they’d only had a six-month thing. Oddly, the cork in the affair had been the dinner party at Il Sole; they spent the night together, & that was that. They’d only seen each other a handful of times since Helmut died, in ’04.
Pieter did most of the talking. He left Christie’s a while ago & for the last three years worked at Gagosian. He said he had “important, ongoing relationships” with major collectors, but the real perks were impulsive road trips with Damien Hirst, pubcrawl/clubbing with Tracey Emin, and late night suppers with “the Richards,” Serra & Prince.
“I have never been so fulfilled professionally.” He raised a ridiculous eyebrow & ahem’d. “On the personal, umhem, romantic front. . well, it’s been a bit of a bloody trainwreck. Tho the phrase living hell also comes to mind. Yes, I think living hell is a bit closer to the mark. Not closer to, really, but perhaps the mark itself.” She loved it when he lapsed into his Steve Coogan doing Hugh Grant/Hugh Laurie routine. “Wait a moment, wait a moment — somehow living hell doesn’t quite capture the full… catta-strofe. So let’s just call it a natural disaster. Let’s then — no! an unnatural disaster. That’s much better. A calamity, a major calamity, a major colostomy. . a fucking eschatological colostomy of fucking Biblical proportions i.e. I believe that I can safely say that on a personal level the last few years have been what historians of this sort of thing will call the tsunamification of hope, of any hopes or dreams that Pieter Wogg might have had that he would find love, and the marriage & requisite children that often follow. Yes. This is that volume — I am living that volume — Volume 4, of the massive biography — this is that volume entitled Dreams Deferred. I continue to prowl the night, of course. Hope springs nocturnal. As do many other. . things.”
He was more adorable than handsome, which went a long way, with a capacious bag of immensely personable tricks. Pieter always made her laugh; Jacquie & Albie agreed the cliché was true—“funny” got laid first. It felt good being out in the world with an old lover. To feel like a woman again.
She’d almost forgotten.