"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves." Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Furniture Doesn't Cry

"I like to take things that don’t belong to me,” Buck confessed.

“Is that why you left?” Lola sneered.

“The story is a little more complex than that, but basically ‘yes.’”

“But I didn’t ‘belong’ to you, Buck, I wasn’t a piece of your ‘property,’ at least not entirely.”

“You were 100 percent mine, and you know it---your mind, your body, and most of all, your story.”

As Lola, like a rag picker, began to rummage around in her purse, she began to weep, but Buck could see that Lola’s tears weren’t tears of sorrow, they were tears of rage.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

You Don’t Sleep in the View

This morning, Lola’s hair looked like she had stood for a week in a north Atlantic gale. Topped by a tangle of blond strands, she looked like a Nordic Medusa, as she squinted out her apartment’s front window. Of course, she couldn’t see the beach, it was too many blocks away. When she had first rented her small apartment a few yeas ago, after she moved from Boston, she had been too worried about whether she could get from Santa Monica to Hollywood, to even think to ask about the distance to the beach.

As she looked out the window now, toward the white stucco apartment with black trim, across the street, she remembered that when she had originally called to inquire about the flat, and asked the cranky, impatient landlord if the apartment had a view, he had sarcastically quipped, “Honey, you don’t sleep in ‘the view’.”

Since moving in, Lola had gained, regrettably, a pretty good appreciation for the distance between Santa Monica and Hollywood.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Miss Lonely Hearts?

“You’d be perfect,” Beth coaxed. “You’re smart and beautiful (with “beautiful,” Lola blushed into the phone, although Beth, of course, couldn’t see her pink flushed face) AND you can write. We really need someone for our e-zine who can write the advice column, you know, relationships, men, women, that sort of thing? Your perspective, as a young woman trying to make it in Hollywood, would be fantastic for our readership. You can do it whenever you’re not going to auditions.”

As Beth paused her sales pitch, Lola froze for a second. The word “relationships” grated on her. She wasn’t sure which would be more intimidating: learning to type well enough to submit her writing to an editor—even if it was just her friend, Beth, or pretending to be an “expert” about two of her most dreaded subjects, ‘men’ and ‘relationships.’

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Just Don’t Say ‘No’

Lola returned home from another audition in Studio City (it wasn’t even in Hollywood), peeled off all her clothes, and laid down in an unconscious, if heavenly, crucifix position, on the living room rug. This is insane, she thought.

She counted the number of auditions her agent had sent her out on this month, and it was not a beautiful number. It was an odd and ugly number, whose two digits seemed to point accusing fingers at one another.

Just then, her phone rang, and as she picked up the receiver, she could hear her friend, Beth, chirp, “Hey Lola, honey, listen. Whatever you do, just don’t say ‘No’ to my brilliant idea.”

Friday, February 12, 2010

Birthday Girl

Richard looked into Lola’s sky blue eyes. Tonight, only a few days before her up-coming birthday, she seemed especially withdrawn and distant. Did he detect the faint shadow of a cloud? Her gaze wasn’t vacant exactly. More like a calendar, with “x”s marked through all the days of the month. Except, perhaps, for one.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Interpretation of Dreams

With his eyes closed, Buck randomly picked a book from his bookshelf. As he blindly opened it, he felt, between the thumb and third finger of his right hand, the talc-dry pages and for a moment, luxuriated in the nearly featureless tactile sensation of the pages’ dry paper, as if each were a small, bendable, desert.

He imagined that each page’s surface was covered in neat, black script, which he imagined would be, before opened eyes, instantly transformed into a welter of ideas and images and concepts... but for the moment, he continued simply to feel the blind sensation of the arid pages.

Just then, the phone rang, and as Buck opened his eyes, he saw that he held before him a small paperback, entitled The Interpretation of Dreams. He hadn’t read it. As he answered the phone--- his heartbeat elevated just a bit---and heard Jackie’s rich, sonorous voice say “What’s up, handsome?” He wondered if she ever had?

Friday, February 5, 2010

One Woman Per Day?

Richard read that during his lifetime, Warren Beatty had slept with 12,775 women—and he wasn’t’ even dead yet. He did a quick calculation on his Blackberry. Could it be that Warren had slept with a different woman a day, every day, for 35 years? Richard breathed a sigh of relief, Thank God, Hollywood isn’t like THAT anymore!

His mind immediately turned to thoughts of his hauntingly beautiful Lola, and what he feared was her deeper vulnerability beneath that studied “hands-off-Mister” veneer. With A gulp of sudden trepidation, Richard flinched, Maybe Hollywood still IS like that?