“Oh my God, totally not! Jeremy is amazing. You’ve seen him, you’ve met!”
Though there didn’t seem much point in keeping it from her — she’d already given away so much — Allegra decided not to share that he was her dead little girl’s donor-dad.
“It’s beyond small world,” said Larissa. “How old is he?”
“I wanna say, like, fifty? Fifty-two?”
“Oy vey! Well, as long he’s ‘amazing.’” They shook their heads in wonderment like a couple of stoners. “I think that probably… you shouldn’t tell him,” said Larissa, “that you know his boyfriend’s mom—oh my God, that sounds so weird—‘his boyfriend’s mom.’ I guess what I mean is, everything’s kind of messy enough, right?” The stand-in had reasons of her own, beyond those of discretion. “What’s that great line from No Country for Old Men? ‘If it ain’t the mess, it’ll do ’til the real mess gets here’—”
“Love that motion picture,” said Allegra.
“I don’t know,” said Larissa, moving another chess piece. “I guess it doesn’t really matter. Fuck it, I guess you could tell him, if you wanted to—”
“Of course I’m not going to tell him! I don’t want anyone knowing about us.”
About us—Larissa took that as her cue.
It was three hours before they were done.
—
Tristen’s father had been home only a few days. His girlfriend said she had to go to Portland to see her parents but Derek knew she’d burned out on the caregiving, minimal as it was. What did he expect? She was twenty-three and he was a sixty-two-year-old loser who had to be put in a coma when his 02 dipped into the 80s. They replaced him on the craphouse reality show he and Beth were cutting and fired her too. Good riddance to all.
The “medics” (how Derek annoyingly referred to them) had trouble figuring out the problem. They thought it was some kind of leukemia, which bummed him to no end, but when an MRI caught a stroke caused by a clot, they shoved a camera down his throat and found staph growing on the valves like mold on a pipe.
Tristen sort of took over for Beth, cleaning house, running errands, and — miracle of miracles — just hanging with the old man. A ceasefire was declared. Derek (miracle upon miracles) seemed grateful.
They grooved on watching Snapped and Forensic Files marathons. The half hours were crazy dark. In one episode, a serial killer was arrested after his dental impressions were matched to bite marks on the chin of a dead woman. The pathologist said he’d never seen a bite mark there, usually they were on breasts and stomach — the theory being that the killer became aroused by looking into her eyes as he bit down on the chin while mutilating her genitals with a knife.
“I don’t really see a problem with that,” said Derek. “Ya gotta take it on the chinny chin chin some time.”
“Bite me,” said Tristen.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
It was heaven to just sit around eating popcorn and Red Vines and shoot the shit over a bit of the old ultraviolence. Then out of the blue, Derek pushed pause on the remote.
“They say I need a heart transplant.”
“For real?”
“Can you fucking believe it?”
“Uhm, whoa. Not really.”
“Some kind of infection. They can’t even nuke it with antibiotics. It’s, like, done.”
“Jesus. Shit! Fuck.”
“The medics say I’ve got an abscess in my heart. A fuckin’ pus pocket.”
“Whoa—!”
“I’m about to go on the list. Heart transplant list. Motherfuckers. And here’s the best part. Are you ready? My fuckin’ IATSE’s about to expire — next month. How ’bout that?”
“Your insurance?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you, uhm, get you, like, COBRA?”
“Can’t fuckin’ afford it. And what’s the point, paisan? How the fuck am I going to survive a heart transplant? ’Cause I’m not. It’s, like, a joke.”
“It’s no big thing anymore, Derek. I mean, they have it down, they’ve had it down for twenty years. I just read about a guy in prison who got one, some bank robber. Cost a million taxpayer dollars.”
“Great! Then that’s what I’ll do — go rob a fucking bank. That’ll probably get me bumped to the top of the list. Maybe they’ll throw in a hair transplant and a penile enlargement. Widen the girth.”
“I read that when they execute prisoners in China, they use their organs for transplants. You could get one of those.”
“Chinese take-out. No ticker, no washee.”
Tristen over-laughed… good times. Sometimes all it took was a crisis to get back to where you once belonged. Derek unpaused, and they fast-forwarded to the next Forensic.
—
“Slow down, Twist!” said Jeremy (what he occasionally called the boy; Tristen now and then called him “Nobodaddy,” after Blake).
Tonight, in the driver’s seat, coolly navigating the wavy road, the kid lived up to the sobriquet. Jeremy was starting to think they should maybe have taken the freeway instead of Sunset.
“Y’know, a lotta people have died along this boulevard of broken dreams, Twisterella. Jan Berry, Ernie Kovacs …”
“Who’s Jan Berry?”
Jeremy vaped his weed and coughed. “Jan and Dean—‘Little Old Lady from Pasadena.’ ‘Dead Man’s Curve.’ Ernie Kovacs died over by Whittier. Me thinks. Know who Ernie Kovacs is?”
“‘The Nairobi Trio.’”
“Jesus, you fucking do know! Of course you do, you fucking brainiac. Ernie Kovacs makes Louis CK and all these so-called geniuses look like Jay Leno. All these Apatow genius cunts with their oh so amazing series and specials and Madison Square Garden bullshit.” He was in a merry mood. “Tina’s the only genius. And Lena. Maybe Lena — no, just Tina. Maybe Lena’ll get there but she ain’t there yet. Though I do like Amy, gotta say. Parts of her. (Schumer, not Poehler.) If she can make it intact through the canonization. People even got shot watching her bullshit romcom—hotties too! How lucky is that? You’re nuthin’ till kids and hotties are killed at your movie. That’s the big time. And who’s that friend of yours? What’s-her-name? Your friend who died right here, on this very stretch of road.”
“What friend? What are you talking about?”
“You know — what’s-her-name, Dead Internet Girl. The one who lost her head over a handsome Porsche. Right here on Funset Boulevard.”