• • •
ON THE WAY TO Elaine’s, Becca pondered Rusty’s innocence — the one thing no one seemed to have considered. Her attempts to visit him in jail had been rebuffed. A sign of guilt? Not necessarily. Becca knew her man; he was prideful. He probably just didn’t want her to see him that way, encaged like an animal.
The door to the Look-Alike Shoppe was ajar. Everything was in boxes. Only some banged-up furniture remained.
“This has been the day from hell,” said Elaine, as if she and Becca were in midconversation. “The LA Weekly’s doing an ‘investigatory’ piece — I don’t even want to be in the fucking country when that comes out. I heard they might put me on the cover. Can you believe it? Why! Why! I called them up and said no—but they don’t need my fucking permission. I am not Heidi Fleiss. Read all about it! Elaine Jordache, the Low-Life Look-Alike Queen!”
“But isn’t that good? I mean, for business?”
“You must be kidding.”
She went back to her packing.
“What about that guy?” asked Becca. “The Kit look-alike?”
“What about him?”
“Well, you hired him for stuff. Do you know what happened?”
“What’s there to know? Kit Lightfoot dissed him in front of his girlfriend so he went off. When they split up, she turned him in for the award — end of story.” She spoke with the noir affect of a court stenographer, indifferently reading back notes. “Haven’t you talked to the police?”
“All week long,” said Becca.
“Didn’t they tell you what Rusty’s accused of?”
“That he killed some rich lady’s husband?”
“In Albemarle County,” she said, again with hard-boiled nonchalance. “Didn’t they tell you who he killed? Daddy. That’s right: his fucking father. And guess who the rich lady was — they didn’t say, huh. Well, I’ll give you a clue. Little Rusty slid out of her pussy. Need more than three guesses?”
Contact
THE ARREST AND pending extradition of Herke Lamar Goodson a.k.a. “Rusty” Crowe took media center stage, ratcheting up the hullabaloo over all things look-alike. The frenzy escalated, if that were possible, upon the revelation that the defendant had a “starring role” in the celebrated director Spike Jonze’s latest offering. The auteur’s reps smartly underplayed their hand. A press release stated that Mr. Goodson had indeed participated in the film, “along with a dozen other look-alike actors,” but his screen time had been substantially reduced, for reasons which — so they claimed — had nothing to do with current controversies.
• • •
WHEREAS KIT RESPONDED to the capture of his double with a cryptic half smile, Burke Lightfoot, who at least publicly, had limned the part of selfless caregiver to such perfection, vehemently demanded assurance from the lawyers that all measures would be taken to guarantee that his son be spared a circus-like courtroom confrontation with the man who had so grievously injured him. He even said as much on Fox News — after cannily alerting Barbara Walters beforehand so as not to subvert the chance of father and son making a future appearance on one of her specials.
The Buddhists were allowed back in. Burke hadn’t heard from what’s-her-name and found himself ruminating on her fat ass. Ought to hang a sign on it: WIDE LOAD. He smiled to himself — he sure did like ‘em crazy. Maybe he’d put her off with the cuntalini shtick. Who knew? Still, all that talk about how no one should be there when she brought over the Super Tampon Tit-Wheel… hmmm. Made ya wonder. Might just make a late-night bootie call yet. Buddha call. Whatever. Ask me if I care.
• • •
RAM DASS WANTED Burke’s permission to bring someone special to the house, a holy man that Kit had met shortly before his injury. He said that H.H. Penor Rinpoche was a reincarnated lama; it was from him that Kit’s root guru, Gil Weiskopf Roshi, had received “the transmissions and secret sealed protector empowerments.” Burke didn’t know what the hell Ram Dass was talking about. He thought Mr. Dass was just fine so long as the conversation didn’t get too out there — aside from the Moses beard and the electric Kool-Aid bug eyes, he was kind of a regular guy. But the idea of a quasi-royal visit from a Tibetan big enchilada tickled Burke’s fancy.
A few days later, Ram Dass, a fellow called Robert Thurman, and the yellow-robed guest of honor arrived with an entourage of orange-swathed monks and khenpos, the sight of which impressed even the neighbors, who by now were more or less inured to the unusual if not the outlandish. Thurman was a bearish, convivial man around Burke’s age, the first Westerner to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk by none other than the Dalai Lama himself. He was a professor at Columbia and a prolific author who had translated scores of sacred texts. More important for Burke, he was Uma Thurman’s dad (father-in-law of Ethan Hawke), making them comrades-in-arms of the rarefied Movie Star Parents Club.
While his son communed in the backyard with the holy man, Bob — the others called him Tenzin — put Burke at ease. He said that he could relate to what had happened to Kit because he had sustained a life-altering injury when still in college. Bob had lost his left eye in an accident; forced to confront his mortality “head-on,” he dropped out of school and embarked on a journey whose road inexorably led to Tibet.
“That was more than forty years ago.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Burke, humbly nodding. “A heroic thing. Wish something like that had happened to me—minus the pain, of course,” he said, winking. He was genuinely impressed and thought the doctors had done a helluva job with that glass eye. “Though it’ll probably’ll take dick cancer to get Burke Lightfoot to straighten up and fly spiritually right.”
Bob laughed. He was unpretentious that way — a heavyweight who wasn’t about to proselytize. A mensch, and Burke appreciated that.
“Who exactly is His Holiness?” he asked.
“Extraordinary man. Left Tibet in ‘fifty-six, a huge group. Only thirty or so made it. Built a monastery, practically with his own hands — Namdroling, in Mysore. I’m pretty sure your son was there, maybe ten, twelve years ago.”
“Did you know Kit?”
“We did meet but unfortunately never got the chance to spend much time together. I think we were introduced at a benefit in New York, at Tibet House. He was very sober, very centered. Not at all interested in the ‘movie star thing.’”
“Guess he and Uma must have hung out.”
“You know, I spoke with her and said I was coming out to see you. They never worked on a film but she said they spent some social time.”
“Did she get teased a lot? About her name?”
“Oh, I think when she was younger! But not too much anymore.”
“It’s a beautiful name.”