“Hey that’s in your vision, not mine. I ain’t goin to no rehab.”
“———all like ‘Rikki knew he had to do something about it.’ You’ll like go to Promises right near our Malibu beach house but it’s like a one-time thing. You get day passes anyway because you’ll have one of those sober companions. If I went to rehab, it’d have to be like for something that wasn’t drugs, like for bipolar or maybe outing myself for bulimia. And when I got out I’d go on all the talkshows, like Ellen & Anderson Cooper & maybe even become a spokesperson for raising awareness in teens.”
“Where did you say we were living again?”
“Well, we have a beach house in Malibu, like next to all our celebrity friends. But we’d have a house up here too, on Mulholland. And on weekends we’d go to the beach & barbecue with friends, like Scarlett & Naya & Minka & all the Kardashians, whoever’s in town. And Katniss Everdeen! We’d be tight with Matthew McConaughey and his wife, our kids are gunna play with their kids. (Their kids are Levi & Vida, I so love those names.) Matthew would teach our son to surf. And Laird Hamilton, he lives in Malibu with Gabrielle. We’ll probably have a house in Hawaii & also a big apt in NY, maybe in the same building as Carrie Bradshaw.”
“I want to be friends with some rappers, girl. Are we tight with the youngmoney crew? I want to be all partying with Drizzy and shit.”
Reeyonna froze, putting her palm flat on her pant pocket. Rikki said,
“Cause we need to be down with Weezy & Ye.” He saw the blood run out of her face. “What’s the matter girl?”
“My wallet——————”
“Your purse — in the pouch?”
“No, I don’t think,” she said, trancelike. “I’ve been carrying it with me. It has all the money. . . . . ”
“Hold on. Hold on. We’ll find it. You had it at the restaurant cause that’s how we paid, right? With the money.”
Reeyonna didn’t answer.
She got up and ran to the pouch — nothing. Shocky, she walked to where they 1st stood, where the hill begins to slope down. “Where’s your phone?” she said.
They crouched down as he shined the phone here & there.
“We need to go back———OMG. O M G!”
“Don’t lose your wig, Ree. We’ll find it. We’re gunna find it. Cmon, let’s go back. To the restaurant.”
As they climbed on the bike he asked her why she was carrying all cashmoney anyway. She said because she thought Tom-Tom might go thru her shit & steal it.
“Rikki, if I lost that money I’m going to fucking kill myself.”
“No you’re not.”
“I am. I’m serious.”
This time it’s lively at Sur.
6 or 7 paparrazzi out front. . . . . . . …
Rikki waits for the hostess while ReeRee goes to look in the bathroom. There is zero chance the wallet would be in there but in her dreamlike moment of desperation, she wouldn’t be surprised to find herself checking her socks to see if the money found its way to the bottom of her foot or on the way home maybe searching the high branches of tall dark faraway trees.
The hostess is kind, but there’s only a sad solitary set of keys in the makeshift lost & found drawer. Have you asked the valet? Rikki says, we didn’t valet park. Oh, uhm, OK. Well give me your name & your number & we’ll call if it turns up. Sometimes things just turn up.
Reeyonna tells him she’s going back to where they 1st parked for dinner. She walks then runs. Two 
s pounding, hers & the little one’s. . she actually starts getting hopeful because she’s already visualizing the wallet in the gutter, she can see it fortuitously hidden in shadow from potential thieves. She has these strong visions. . sees herself grabbing it with joyful expulsion of breath & preg-sprinting back to Sur screaming I found it! Rikki, I found it! Can hear herself saying that — both laughing at the averted horror then going to celebrate at Millions of Milkshakes which for some reason they’d fatefully forgotten to before…
Rikki decided he might as well take a piss. The hostess kind of eyed him as he came in again and walked past, that trespassy look subtly informing that a courtesy was being bestowed because his right to pee had expired.
He stood at the urinal. Someone flushed then opened the stall door, no stench. The man went to the sink to wash. Rikki stole a glance — Laurence Fishburne.
And the actor was gone.
CLEAN [Jacquie]
Toiling, Spinning
The
family loved the hospital portraits. The experience of going to their Northridge home with proofsheets — watching Ginger bend like a scholar to look through the loupe — was something Jacquie would never forget. The husband was at work, & Jacquie was glad. For a man, the death of his infant was a cold, finite event; for two moms, a chance to commune with a firefly soul that seemed just then to be as present as it was incorporeal. Yet for all Jacquie’s supernal rationalizations — the baby’s quicksilver, inextinguishable life force must be grieved over yet not mourned, a specious riddle reinforced by the mom’s truly spiritual equanimity, born, reasoned Jacquie, by the knowledge of the Great Mother that we are wont to finally seek that plot of infinite lilies of the field — for all Jacquie’s tiny, supernatural theories, each calculated to minimize and repress, to expunge & make palatable the horror of what happened, on the way to her car she felt the unbearable, queasy sorrow of living-mother/dead-child aloneness like a gust of hot propeller wind at her back & feared with each step she might turn to stone.
. .
She was still searching for a way to reclaim her own firefly soul; that of the artist she’d begun to fear was no more. Her life had capsized, trapping her beneath.
Then she read something that yanked her back with some hilarity to HelmutWorld & the boomboom years of his mentorship, her artful schooling in the theory & practice of all things photoshock. According to DailyMailOnline, there’d been a great to-do down under. A peer of Jacquie’s who’d shown at the Guggenheim and the Venice Biennale was in hot water. A major show in Sydney had been cancelled due to complaints over pics of a nude 13-year-old girl; a clear case (for Jacquie) of déjà nu. Child protection advocates were incensed; the exhibit was shut down; images seized by police under the Crimes Act. Naturally, the Newtonian Laws of Negative Press prevailed and held true — a censorship hurlyburly ensued on a national level and the revolted Prime Minister leapt dutifully into the fray. But the artist needn’t fear, as celebrity help was on its way (Newton’s 2nd Law) in nothing less than the form of Cate Blanchett captaining her team in pursuit of Australia’s prestigious A Cup. Newton’s Third wrapped things up nicely in the end with a press release: The New South Wales Dept of Public Prosecutions announced that no charges would be filed.
Jacquie had a wild, mad laugh about it, the kind of huge, careless, orgiastic, toxin-busting guffaws that borderline personalities are known to indulge in the privacy of their homes. She sorely missed the man, his dry wit and wry level-headedness, his kinks & lighthearted gravitas, the charm and wisdom of his cynically uncynical counsel too. Now that she was having another non-career crisis, where the fuck was Helmut when you really needed him? She had the great good fortune of supping with him the night before he died. Jacquie had been oeuvre-hustling in LA, she was a bit rusty and out of her league but Helmut graciously insisted she join them for dinner at Il Sole: he & his wife June, Uma Thurman & Andre Balazs, Benedikt/Angelika Taschen, plus Jacquie & her date Pieter Wogg, a specialist at Christie’s who was a fan of way more than Jacquie’s pictures. (She used to say, “You only love me for my body of work.”) Helmut told everyone at the table how excited he was because “tomorrow, Cadillac is giving me an Escalade!” The next day, pulling out of the Chateau garage presumably to take the car for a trial spin, he dropped dead behind the wheel and crashed into a retaining wall.