The detective stayed about an hour, watching The Twilight Zone on and off, before going his way. Ray asked if he’d like to have a meal one day soon and Ghulpa seemed fine with that — it was the right thing to have said. He apologized for the Friar’s uncivil behavior and again, the detective shrugged it off.
Ghulpa and Ray watched a Larry King rerun. He was interviewing the model who lost her fiancé in the tsunami, a beautiful girl who clung to a palm tree for hours before being rescued. She spent 3 weeks in the hospital with a broken pelvis.
Ghulpa shuffled in from the kitchen with food, staring spitefully at the screen.
“I will never return,” she said, as if suffering a fresh insult.
“But that’s Thailand, not India,” said the old man.
“My child will never see that terrible place. I don’t care.”
“Suit yourself.”
LI.Chester
THE kiss at the zoo surprised him.
It had stopped there, aside from a little groping, which was fine and dandy, because Chess didn’t think he was up for anything else. Too heavy. But it was obvious they were becoming more than just friends and he worried about getting too dependent. He didn’t need another drug in his life. Still, winding up as the neutered companion, like on some TV sitcom — standing on the sidelines while Ganesha Girl got involved with another Maurie-type — would be rough. (Though he knew he’d probably settle for anything; she was definitely nice to have around.) He was super-attracted. The idea of Laxmi even sitting on his toilet was a turn-on — just thinking about it gave Chess half a hard-on, which was all he seemed capable of lately. But for the life of him he couldn’t see her side of it.
Why would she be interested?
He got paranoid, occasionally wondering if it was a new setup involving Maurie, some meta—Friday Night Frights mindfuck. (Maybe his old pal was doing another reality show that even Remar was in on.) Chess started TiVo-ing FNF because Laxmi had become a semiregular. Apart from the thrill of watching her — she was usually scantily clad, as they say — he enjoyed it. One episode featured a clever show-within-a-show. They recruited a Vic, telling him he was going to “do some stunts” on a Punk’d-style series called The Fright Club. A real stuntman pretended to be fatally injured during the filming and the police came; the kid who’d been hired completely freaked. It was pretty sophisticated, kind of like the Michel Gondry version. Whenever Chess felt particularly vulnerable, usually after smoking weed, he thought Laxmi’s attentions might be part of an elaborate hoax. He knew it was crazy, and was usually able to talk himself down fairly quick.
Chess was convinced that his fears were only a function of all the physical bullshit he’d been experiencing: bouts of room-twirling vertigo in the morning being the latest. His doc ascribed it to the voodoo of various meds but Chess made an appointment to come in anyway because there was evidently some sort of “non-invasive procedure” they could do right in the office to equalize the fluids in the ear. From everything he’d gathered off blogs and chatrooms, dizziness was a bitch to get rid of. (People usually got the cookie-cutter diagnosis of BPPV — Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo.) There was a widely accepted fix-it called the Epley Maneuver; like everything else, how-to diagrams were all over the Net. It seemed kind of hillbilly. The nurses took hold of Chess, yanking him this way and that until his eyes jumped and jittered in their sockets (“nystagmus,” said the regal RN), thus dislodging debris or “ear rocks”—literally what they were called. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. You had to sleep semi-recumbent for a few days after the mad teacup ride or risk undoing any salutary effects. If the vertigo didn’t go away after 2 or 3 Epleys, they left you twisting in the wind, in a thunderstorm of vomit.
Like lots of things — chronic pain being Numero Uno — no one really took it seriously, not even putative professionals. MDs just kept writing scripts for antihistamines and Dramamine, generally categorizing repeat offenders as fags, drags, and whiners. If the problem persisted, they were legally compelled to rule out MS, Parkinson’s, compression of vertebral arteries (that’s what was worrying Chess), or Ménière’s. People with vestibular disorders were called “wobblers”—sometimes you could be sent to permanent vertigo jail from the side effects of a virus or something as routine as a run-of-the-mill antibiotic. There were surgical treatments for BPPV but Chess didn’t even want to go there. The idea of someone cutting into his spine was bad enough but plumbing into notoriously delicate aural canals and fluid reservoirs or tinkering with weensy ear bones sounded like an invitation to suffer the consequences of illustrating Mohammed. So for a while, he took to propping himself up while he slept, which wasn’t easy. He spent $400 on special formfitting bolsters at Relax Your Back. Sometimes, on top of the painkillers, he needed 4 Klonopin (1 mg) and 3 Ambien CRs (12.5 mg) just to get him through the night.
He dutifully passed on his recent Job-like travails to Remar De Concini LLD, AKA the Gay Pit Bull.
AFTER the make-out session in Griffith Park, Chess shared some memories of his dad. Laxmi enthusiastically echoed how The Jungle Book was a favorite of hers too, from girlhood. (She meant the version with John Cleese.) A few days later, she brought over a Netflix of the original Disney. They did hash brownies and Baileys Irish Cream: a killer combo. Laxmi said she used to watch the one from 1994 with her mom when they relocated to a rental on Tigertail Road in Brentwood Hills. From the commune.
The odd couple sat on the couch munching magicsnacks, and got all snuggly and captivated. They wrapped themselves up in each other’s arms, grooving on the night’s activity. (Chess didn’t become aroused and as usual found that both worrisome and copacetic.) When it came to the innocuously clever, charming scat song of the old hipster orangutans, Laxmi exclaimed it was “totally racist.” “I mean, all they’re really saying is, they just want to be white.” Chess wouldn’t give an endorsement; he didn’t relate to the politics of it. She must have realized she sounded over-the-top, adding that “The Bare Necessities” was “amazingly perfect and Zen.”
Chess remembered more of the movie than he cared to. He used to call Daddy Ray “Baloo.” They got to the part where Baloo wanted to adopt Mowgli as his son but the panther said it wasn’t right because Baloo was a bear. That was always a downer. Still was. The panther said the “man cub” had to be returned to the “man village” and Baloo got all sad and Chess, under a goodbye hashish-Baileys moon, grew teary-eyed as well. Baloo told Mowgli he couldn’t stay in the forest and it broke the bear’s heart. The boy ran off. When Baloo the bear said, “If anything happens to that little guy, I’ll never forgive myself,” Chess thought of Raymond. What a shitheel. A remark like that would never occur to that old fuck.