They drove me through Brentwood and Bel-Air and Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades.
They left me at the hotel where I had two hours before I had to be ready for dinner. There I was, and there was the mini-bar just asking to be violated, and there was a bathroom bigger than where I live. The bathroom was lined with mirror, and everywhere, there I was, all naked with the eruptions on my head finally draining clear liquid. The little hotel gin bottle in my hand. The gigantic bathtub kept filling and filling, but never got more than an inch deep.
All those years you write and write. You sit in the dark and say, someday. A book contract. A jacket photo. A book tour. A Hollywood movie. And someday you get them, and it's not how you planned.
Then you get the screenplay for your book in the mail, and it says: "Fight Club by Jim Uhls." He's the screenwriter. Way underneath that, in parentheses, it says: Based on the novel by you.
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can't control life, at least you can control your version. Because even sitting in my puddle of warm Los Angeles water, I was already thinking what I'd tell my friends when they asked about this trip. I'd tell them all about my infection and Malibu and the bottomless bathtub, and they'd say:
You should write that down.
The Lip Enhancer
It was Ina who first told me about Brad's lips, and what he does with them. We'd met Brad this last summer, near Los Angeles, in San Pedro, on six acres of barren concrete with gang warfare, Crip and Blood territory staked out all around us. It was the set for a movie based on a book I'd written and could barely remember. Just before this, a neighborhood man had been tied to a bus stop bench here. The set crews found him, tied up, shot to death. The crew was building a rotting Victorian mansion for a million dollars.
All this buildup, this scene setting is so I don't look too stupid.
This will only look like it's about Brad Pitt.
It was one or two o'clock in the morning when Ina and I got there. At the production base camp, movie extras slept in dark lumps, curled up inside their cars. Waiting for their call. When we parked, a security guard explained how we'd have to walk unprotected for the last two blocks to the actual movie shooting location.
A pop, then another pop came from the dark neighborhood nearby.
Drive-by shootings, the guard told us. To get to the set, he said, we needed to keep our heads down and run. Just run, he said. Now.
So we ran.
According to Ina, what Brad does is lick his lips. A lot. According to Ina, this is probably not accidental. According to Ina, Brad has great lips.
Somewhere along the line my sister sent me a videotape of Oprah Winfrey, and there was Brad being interviewed, and Ina was pretty much right all over.
The first day we met Brad, he ran up with his shirt open, tanned and smiling, and said, "Thank you for the best fucking part of my whole fucking career!"
That's about all I remember.
That, and I wanted to have lips.
Big lips are everywhere. Fashion models, movie stars. Where I live in Oregon, in a house in the woods, you can ignore a lot of the world, but one day we got a mail-order catalogue and there inside was the Lip Enhancer.
For this movie, Brad had the caps knocked off his front teeth and chipped, snaggle-tooth caps glued on. He shaved his head. Between takes, the wardrobe people rubbed his clothes in the dust on the ground. And he still looked so good Ina couldn't put two words together. Girls from the 'hood stood five deep at the barricades two blocks away and chanted his name.
I had to get me some of those lips.
According to the people at Facial Sculpting, Inc., you can get collagen lip injections, but they don't last. Full collagen lips will run you around $6,880 per year. Plus, collagen tends to move around inside, giving you lumpy lips. Plus, the injection process causes dark bruising and swelling that can last up to a week, with new collagen injections needed every month.
To be fair, I called five local cosmetic surgeons in Oregon, all of whom do lips, all of whom refused to even discuss the Lip Enhancer. Even when I agreed to pay a hundred-dollar consultation fee. Even when I got down and begged.
Oh, Dr. Linda Mueller, you know who you are.
The Lip Enhancer cost me $25, plus a couple bucks for shipping, plus the snide tone of the man who took my order. It's not really marketed to men. We're supposed to be above all that. Still, the Lip Enhancer is similar to a huge number of penis enlargement systems you can buy.
These are systems you can buy, and use, and write funny silly essays about and therefore tax-deduct; needless to say, several of those systems are now in the mail to me.
The key word is "suction." Like those penis systems, the Lip Enhancer uses gentle suction to distend your lips. Basically, it's a two-piece telescoping tube, sealed at one end. You place the open end of the tube against your lips, then pull the sealed end away from you, lengthening the tube. This creates the suction that pulls your lips inside the tube, giving you full, pouty lips in about two minutes.
In the instructions, the lovely young woman has her lips sucked so far into the clear tube that she looks like a kissing gourami fish.
Some people, it gives them a big hickey around their mouth. This is just like when you were a kid and you pressed a plastic glass around your mouth and chin and sucked all the air out until you had a huge dark bruise that looked like the five-o'clock shadow of Fred Flintstone or Homer Simpson.
You should not use the Lip Enhancer if you're a diabetic or have any blood disorder.
According to the catalogue, your new big full pouty lips will last about six hours.
This is how Cinderella must've felt.
There are similar suction systems to give you bigger, more perky nipples.
In the near future, you can imagine, every big evening will begin hours earlier with you getting sucked on by different appliances, each of them making some part of you bigger for a few hours. The whole evening would then be a race to get naked and accomplish some lovin' before your parts snapped back to their original size.
Yes, there's even a system for enlarging your testicles.
I was visitor number 921 to the Lip Enhancer website.
I was visitor number 500,000 to any of the penis enlargement sites.
Your first week with the Lip Enhancer, you have to condition your lips twice a day. This involves short, gentle sessions of getting your lips sucked. This is less exciting than it sounds.
Now, I've kissed thin lips, and I've kissed thick lips. Me, I have what you'd call combination lips, a large lower lip and pretty much no upper lip. Some cultures scar their faces with knives. Some flatten the heads of their babies with special cradle boards. Some distend their necks with wire coils. All these National Geographic images went through my mind as I sat in my car, my head tilted back at the recommended forty-five-degree angle, the Lip Enhancer tight around my mouth and my lips sucked into the tube. Beauty is a construct of the culture. A mutually agreed upon standard. Nobody used to look at George Washington, with his wooden teeth, in his powdered wig, and say, Fashion Victim.
After two minutes-the recommended maximum treatment time-I did not look like Brad. Trying to talk, I pronounced almost all my consonants as B's, the same vaguely racist way the character with the huge lips used to talk in the old Fat Albert cartoons on Saturday morning.
"Hey'b, Fab Alberb," I said to the rearview mirror. "How'b boub dees'b libs?"
My lips felt raw and swollen, as if I'd eaten barrels of salty popcorn.
I could see why none of the lovely models in the Lip Enhancer brochures ever smiled.