It’s time to go inside. I don’t sit with actress Love. She’s in the Important People Section directly across from me with the James Franco people, between Milo and Forty. Milo is wearing the Four Seas Ice Cream T-shirt he was wearing the first night at Chateau. I bet they went there after he popped Love’s cherry. Everyone around me is going on Insta and Twitter and Vine to share snapshots of the people across from us, the celebs.
Monica elbows me. “Grab and pass,” she says.
I grab and pass and it’s a single sheet of paper with the lyrics to “Coming Up Easy” by Paolo Nutini, a hipster Scotsman who fucks models and makes cool music. I look at Monica. “It was Henderson’s favorite song,” she says. “We’re all gonna sing along. He made a joke about it once, like he wanted a singing thing. Amazing, right?”
It’s bullshit and Henderson’s favorite song was either “Oh What a Night” or “Sherry” and I want to tell them they’re all wrong. I knew him best because I killed him. His tastes were more in line with middle-aged Americans who drive Buicks and buy Disney vacation packages on Expedia and I am so sick of this city, everyone pretending to be cool, even in death.
The lights go down and the “tribute” begins with Milo jogging onto the fucking stage. Monica finds Calvin on Facebook and Love claps for Milo onstage. He waves for more applause instead of telling everyone to stop and Love hoots and everything is ending. I don’t know her anymore and we don’t need to talk. I’m not dead or blind. I see her cheering for him, choosing him. This black box cage is real and I barely recognize her anyway with her hair. It’s ending, our relationship, the applause.
“Welcome, friends and fans,” Milo begins. I hate the word fan. It’s almost as bad as follower. He raises the sheet of paper with the lyrics. “We’re gonna start this night out the right way,” he says. “The way Henderson would want it, in song.”
The screaming. I think my ears are broken. Love laughs at Milo’s bad jokes and Monica whispers that Twitter is blowing up and Love is going to dump me after the show. She’s lost interest in me. She became an actress. Or maybe she was always an actress, like Amy was. Maybe I got stupid the second I got aspirations. I cringe to think of the movies I wrote, the way I jumped into business with Forty. Fuck it. Fuck all of it.
The house lights flicker, the show’s about to start, and Love licks her little lips, the ones that never met my cock. I clench my program. In that book A General Theory of Love, the good relationships are defined by two chairs, side by side. Love and I are facing each other and yet she is not looking at me. Instead she’s leaning into Milo. Her shoulders are relaxed and she was probably dying for this moment. She’s got her movie. She’s got her director. She doesn’t need me now. Milo elbows her to look at something in his phone and she laughs at it, whatever it is. I don’t know. I’m too far away.
We need to talk. No, we don’t, Love. You want to ice me out and make me sit on the other fucking side of the room while you look in Milo’s phone and let him put his hand on your thigh? Fine. Have it your way. Love takes Milo’s hand as she sings along to “Coming Up Easy” and I bury my face in my hands. Monica asks what’s wrong.
“Nosebleed,” I say.
“Yikes,” she says. “I told Forty his coke is not as good as he thinks it is. Calvin says you guys have a pretty good hookup here.”
I’m too depressed to discuss Dez’s talent as a drug supplier and I tell Monica I have to go and she says cool and the Villagers are irritated as I squeeze by. It’s tight as an airplane and my dick is in all their faces and when I get outside onto the street, I send Love a text message: I got a nosebleed. I’m gonna go to the Pantry and get a coffee. I miss you. I don’t know what happened.
iMessage relays that the message has been read but Love doesn’t write back. Silence received. That’s it. The end. I don’t know what I did wrong, but I know what she did wrong; it all goes to hell when they want to be actresses.
29
I yank the door to La Poubelle. It’s cool and dark and fairly empty—everyone is worshipping Henderson or waiting for the after party at Birds, in honor of his old stomping ground—but at the bar, there is one girl in a Band-Aid dress nursing a glass of vodka and trying to flirt with the disinterested bartender. I’ve never wanted a blowjob so bad in my life.
“Delilah,” I call out. She turns. She smiles.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in.” She pats the empty seat beside her. I order a vodka double. No mixers. No time for that.
Delilah introduces me to the new bartender as her old friend, Joe. And this means that Delilah still wants me. I refresh the Google search on Dr. Nicky when she goes to the bathroom. A feminist blogger has picked up the story. She’s calling for Change.org to remove his petition and GO FEMINISTS GO! They are all horrified at the idea that this murderer who was in a position to help people is trying to use a patient as a scapegoat. They think it is misogynistic to speak ill of Guinevere Beck, who was a thriving and intelligent woman, a writer, an MFA candidate, a happy, well-adjusted New York woman. They want Dr. Nicky to shut up. They want his wife to seek counseling. They want the police department to accept that desperate men like Dr. Nicky do things like invent patients named Danny Fox. Thank you, feminists, and fuck you, Love, and hello, Delilah, sidling up to the bar, patting my leg, telling me I look good, tan, smacking her blowjob lips together, unabashedly hungry. I am hard. I smile. “You look good too.”
If all my suffering has a purpose, and I don’t yet know that it does, then the purpose can be boiled down to this: Delilah’s vacuum cleaner mouth inhaling my cock on the loading dock in back of the Pantry. She said I was weird for wanting it here. It’s dirty, it smells like trash, it’s a grocery store parking lot ewww. But I know what she likes and I told her to get on her knees and suck it and the miracle of life, the sperm reaches the egg, the tennis ball teeters and falls to one side, not the other, Delilah did it. She sucked me the way I like, the way I want. I missed that. I needed that. Love is not all you need.
Fuck Love. Fuck love.
Don’t Fuck Delilah and I are walking back to my place and she’s grateful to be with me and I like this better, the way she clings. As we fall in step together, it becomes possible that this could be my life, that it could be one of those classic love—fuck that word—stories where the right girl was upstairs all along. In this quarter-mile trek, Delilah holds on tight to my hand and describes an argument she had at Oaks Gourmet with a guy who was rude to her about asking for ketchup. She is funny, all worked up, and this could be us together. We reach my building, her building, our building.
There is a brand-new door at Hollywood Lawns. “Yeah,” Delilah says. “Someone got fucked up and fell into the door.”
Home trash home and I unlock the door and Delilah takes charge and throws me against the wall of mailboxes. She feels my dick underneath my pants. She licks my neck. “Now,” she says. “I want you inside of me now.”
I unlock the door to my apartment and she tears off my shirt and I shred her Band-Aid dress and this is fucking. Rage mixed with sex and I wonder what set her off and at the same time I don’t care. It works. She wants me and I want her and I need to fuck the love out of my system. I pull on Delilah’s hair and I bite her nipples and smack her ass hard and she scratches my back and this is Hollywood fucking. You can’t get mad in Malibu, not really.