My point is, unless the meter is running and some photographer is yelling: Give me empathy.
Then the flash of the strobe.
Give me sympathy.
Flash.
Give me brutal honesty.
Flash.
"Don't let me die here on this floor," Brandy says, and her big hands clutch at me. "My hair," she says, "My hair will be flat in the back."
My point is I know Brandy is maybe probably going to die, but I just can't get into it.
Evie sobs even louder. On top of this, the fire sirens from way outside are crowning me queen of Migraine Town.
The rifle is still spinning on the floor, but slower and slower.
Brandy says, "This is not how Brandy Alexander wanted her life to go. She's supposed to be famous, first. You know, she's supposed to be on television during Super Bowl halftime, drinking a diet cola naked in slow motion before she died."
The rifle stops spinning and points at nobody.
At Evie sobbing, Brandy screams, "Shut up!"
" You shut up," Evie screams back. Behind her, the fire is eating its way down the stairway carpet.
The sirens, you can hear them wandering and screaming all over the West Hills. People will just knock each other down to dial 9-1-1 and be the big hero. Nobody looks ready for the big television crew that's due to arrive any minute.
"This is your last chance, honey," Brandy says, and her blood is getting all over the place. She says, "Do you love me?"
It's when folks ask questions like this that you lose the spotlight.
This is how folks trap you into a best-supporting role.
Even bigger than the house being on fire is this huge expectation that I have to say the three most worn-out words you'll find in any script. Just the words make me feel I'm severely fingering myself. They're just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue.
"Tell me," Brandy says. "Do you? Do you really love me?"
This is the big hammy way Brandy has played her whole life.
The Brandy Alexander nonstop continuous live action theater, but less and less live by the moment.
Just for a little stage business, I take Brandy's hand in mine. This is a nice gesture, but then I'm freaked by the whole threat of blood-borne pathogens, and then, boom, the ceiling in the dining room crashes down and sparks and embers rush out at us from the dining room doorway.
"Even if you can't love me, then tell me my life,”
Brandy says. "A girl can't die without her life flashing before her eyes."
Pretty much nobody is getting their emotional needs met.
It's then the fire eats down the stairway carpet to Evie's bare ass, and Evie screams to her feet and pounds down the stairs in her burned-up white high heels. Naked and hairless, wearing wire and ashes, Evie Cottrell runs out the front door to a larger audience, her wedding guests, the silver and crystal and the arriving fire trucks. This is the world we live in. Conditions change and we mutate.
So of course this'll be all about Brandy, hosted by me, with guest appearances by Evelyn Cottrell and the deadly AIDS virus. Brandy, Brandy, Brandy. Poor sad Brandy on her back, Brandy touches the hole pouring her life out onto the marble floor and says, "Please. Tell me my life. Tell me how we got here."
So me, I'm here eating smoke just to document this Brandy Alexander moment.
Give me attention.
Flash.
Give me adoration.
Flash.
Give me a break.
Flash.
CHAPTER T W O
Don't expect this to be the kind of story that goes: and then, and then, and then.
What happens here will have more of that fashion magazine feel, a Vogue or a Glamour magazine chaos with page numbers on every second or fifth or third page. Perfume cards falling out, and full-page naked women coming out of nowhere to sell you make-up.
Don't look for a contents page, buried magazine-style twenty pages back from the front. Don't expect to find anything right off. There isn't a real pattern to anything, either. Stories will start and then, three paragraphs later:
Jump to page whatever.
Then, jump back.
This will be ten thousand fashion separates that mix and match to create maybe five tasteful outfits. A million trendy accessories, scarves and belts, shoes and hats and gloves, and no real clothes to wear them with.
And you really, really need to get used to that feeling, here, on the freeway, at work, in your marriage. This is the world we live in. Just go with the prompts.
Jump back twenty years to the white house where I grew up with my father shooting super-8 movies of my brother and me running around the yard.
Jump to present time with my folks sitting on lawn chairs at night, and watching these same super-8 movies projected on the white side of the same white house, twenty years later. The house the same, the yard the same, the windows projected in the movies lined up just perfect with the real windows, the movie grass aligned with the real grass, and my movie-projected brother and me being toddlers and running around wild for the camera.
Jump to my big brother being all miserable and dead from the big plague of AIDS.
Jump to me being grown up and fallen in love with a police detective and moved away to become a famous supermodel.
Just remember, the same as a spectacular Vogue magazine, remember that no matter how close you follow the jumps:
Continued on page whatever.
No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up.
Jump to here and now, Brandy Alexander bleeding to death on the floor with me kneeling beside her, telling this story before here come the paramedics.
Jump backward just a few days to the living room of a rich house in Vancouver, British Columbia. The room is lined with the rococo hard candy of carved mahogany paneling with marble baseboards and marble flooring and a very sort- of curlicue carved marble fireplace. In rich houses where old rich people live, everything is just what you'd think.
The rubrum lilies in the enameled vases are real, not silk. The cream-colored drapes are silk, not polished cotton. Mahogany is not pine stained to look like mahogany. No pressed-glass chandeliers posing as cut crystal. The leather is not vinyl.
All around us are these cliques of Louis-the-Fourteenth chair-sofa-chair.
In front of us is yet another innocent real estate agent, and Brandy's hand goes out: her wrist thick with bones and veins, the mountain range of her knuckles, her wilted fingers, her rings in their haze of marquise-cut green and red, her porcelain nails painted sparkle pink, she says, "Charmed, I'm sure."
If you have to start with any one detail, it has to be Brandy's hands. Beaded with rings to make them look even bigger, Brandy's hands are enormous. Beaded with rings, as if they could be more obvious, hands are the one part about Brandy Alexander the surgeons couldn't change.
So Brandy doesn't even try and hide her hands.
We've been in too many of this kind of house for me to count, and the realtor we meet is always smiling. This one is wearing the standard uniform, the navy blue suit with the red, white, and blue scarf around the neck. The blue heels are on her feet and the blue bag is hanging at the crook of her elbow.
The realty woman looks from Brandy Alexander's big hand to Signore Alfa Romeo standing at Brandy's side, and the power blue eyes of Alfa attach themselves; those blue eyes you never see close or look away, inside those eyes is the baby or the bouquet of flowers, beautiful or vulnerable, that make a beautiful man someone safe to love.