We hung out together at the house when everyone else went out to the casinos at night. She had brought some heroin with her and we would smoke it and make love. It was like camp for decadent San Franciscans. I had never gotten to go to real camp because of my asthma.
On the third night there I had returned to my own bed to sleep and had a grand mal seizure. It was generally controlled by a drug called Dilantin, but I think the heroin cut right through. I woke up on the floor with a number of people I did not recognize staring down at me. I had wet my pants. I did not know where I was. It was several hours before my memory came back. The girl I had been with held me and stayed with me until I got reoriented. I had never had a seizure in front of strangers before but everyone handled it well.
I think the film was called Snowballing or something like that. I made a couple of hundred dollars a day and it was nice to get out of the city. I never saw the finished product.
Here’s how I ended up with epilepsy:
I was a tremendously emotional, spoiled, asthmatic child who loved horses. I was stick thin and pale, and the floor of my room was stained from the ever-present vaporizer. My parents bought me a horse when I was ten to encourage me to be active, and to shut me up.
We found a totally wild, part-Morgan pinto mare up north in a town near Oroville called Bangor. We managed to tame her to some extent but she was always pretty crazy. She was even going over fences after about a year. I had a British ex-cavalry riding instructor who wasn’t there the day of the accident, but my father was and some visitors from LA. I was jumping a course of fences about four feet high and wearing a helmet that was not appropriate for jumping. The real “brain-bucket” style has a wide leather chin strap. This had elastic. My horse took a bad fence, caught the pole above her knees, crashed on the far side and did a somersault. I was under her at the time.
They say the saddle held her weight off me and that I was probably hit in the head by a stirrup iron. When they took me to the Children’s Hospital I was walking and talking but remembering nothing. The doctors sent me home. My mother was there and being a nurse, saw that my pupils were radically different from one another, a sure sign of a serious head injury. She took me to another hospital where it was determined I had a fractured skull. I didn’t remember anything for three or four days. I returned home after a week in the hospital and this part I remember like a photograph. I was walking to the refrigerator for orange juice when I felt a big pressure on my forehead, then I felt tremendously drunk. I woke up with my face under the water heater, staring at thick dust motes and the pilot light, my legs wet with piss, and my mother saying, “You’ve had a seizure, just relax.”
My body ached for days, as if I’d been bucked off a horse.
5 Highway 1
I came down the stairs with my little dog to answer the door at six in the morning, wearing only a long black and orange bathrobe. I was excited about seeing the man who was waiting there because I didn’t get to see him very often, and then only at his whim.
He had called at 5.30, drug-crazed, belligerent and exciting, demanding that I throw out whoever was in my bed, which I did. His name was Artie Mitchell and I had met him when I worked on my first porno film. He had continued to call after the work was through. Being addicted to bizarre sex, he was the only person I’d ever met who had no fear of the physical or chemical edge.
There was an air of chaos and sleazy glamor that permeated his life, now confirmed by the silver limo at the curb driven by his hunky blonde cousin who smiled as I was pulled without resisting into the back seat littered with children’s toys. I’d heard his wife was fertile.
I complained to him that I hadn’t locked my apartment door and he told me with drunken gallantry that he would replace whatever was stolen. There wasn’t much there anyway.
He had an uncommon ability for calling when I was on my period, but it wasn’t really that hard because I was bleeding more often than not. We did some cocaine and soon were humping like mink on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. Being concerned about the nice gray velour seats I told him I was bleeding heavily. He told me he didn’t care. We had hot, wet, mad menstrual sex on the bridge at sunrise, filling the back seat with orgasms while my little dog slept peacefully on the floor.
We took a break on the road to Mount Tam, where he pulled out a wad of money and wiped the blood off me and himself. He threw the bloody money on the floor with the dog and lit a joint.
Heading north on Highway 1, we picked up a suntanned girl hitchhiker with tangled blonde hair like the morning after. She was happy to be picked up by a limousine but after we’d started up again she saw the puppy and the blood money and got nervous. He teased her for being squeamish, and asked me to recite some poems. After she heard them, she asked to get out. We pulled over and left her by the roadside. We accelerated our intake of drugs.
We drove another hour up the perfect California coastline, then turned off on a dirt road that led to a little trailer with a small group of people standing around and sitting in lawn chairs drinking beer. We got out of the car and he told me they were his relatives. There was a sweet comfortable woman in her fifties who he said was his aunt. I was in my bathrobe with no shoes on. She was nice to me anyway.
The men had just been abalone diving. They were telling extravagant stories with their hands. I was astounded that my friend would ask anyone to meet relatives in my condition, but they took it well. They joked that they thought someone had died when they saw the limo in the driveway.
We stayed too long and he renewed his drunkenness with beer and hot sun well into the afternoon. When we finally left, we stood up in the open sunroof and made bird noises, calling to the crows.
We resumed our passionate fucking as we returned to the city. The tinted windows amplified the darkness, smudging the edges of things. It was late when we arrived and he wanted to eat, so we went to Japantown where they didn’t care that I had no shoes. I ate sushi for the first time, and being so high it seemed to slither down my throat.
A week later I got a card from him: the ace of spades folded in a dollar bill covered with dried blood. I framed it and hung it on the wall.
A CASTLE IN MILTON KEYNES by Sonia Florens
HE HAD PURSUED me relentlessly. I gave up and surrendered. Out of guilt, out of lust, and sheer lassitude.
I had betrayed him a few years before and I felt I had no other choice now but to insist he punish me as he saw fit. Repentance must come, I reckoned. To purge the evil of my cold heart. To wash the past away in one quick swoop.
“The first hint of your infidelity,” he had explained to me, “was when you came to me smelling of cigarette smoke, of dead ash. You put your lips against mine and the damn tobacco was all over your breath. I was breathing in another man as I kissed you.”
I lowered my eyes, fluttered my lashes.
He knew.
We parted ways.
There were other men. Minor, unfulfilling adventures. But none could erase his spell over me, the look of sheer danger in his eyes that kept me feeling ever wet on the inside.
I suppose that in the time we spent apart, he also came to know other women. The female form is his major weakness. But I can forgive that. Because all the while he kept shadowing me, writing, threatening, phoning. Loving me in that crazy way of his.
So, one morning in March, a few days before that damn Trade Fair I just couldn’t face attending once again – year after year of pointless negotiations with Eastern European entrepreneurs who just had no clue and had no subtlety whatsoever trying to get their paws into my underwear and thought taking meaningless options and inviting me for drinks at their hotel bar was the epitome of sophistication and seduction – I walked over to his building early. Half an hour or so before I knew he usually arrived. Stood by the door and waited. Wondering all the time whether I was doing the right thing.