Lola Loves Richard

The Whole Truth

2011-12-25T11:01:00.000-08:00

As Richard pulled his limo up to the front of the Santa Monica police station, Lola pantomimed a tiny wave, and seemed simultaneously to float and to trudge down the station’s white steps. Opening the back passenger door, she slipped across the broad back seat, directly behind her chauffeur boyfriend and steeled herself for Richard’s unavoidable questions.

Richard turned down “The Killers,” whose noisy angst blared from the car’s radio, and asked “What are you doing here? Were you arrested, or something?”

Lola replied through the limousine’s half-lowered dividing glass, “They discovered that the permit to my handgun expired, and picked me up to ask a few silly questions.”

To avoid Richards puzzled gaze, Lola immediately turned her head to look down Olympic. It wasn’t a lie exactly, it just wasn’t a court would say was “the whole truth.”

Tasteless

2011-12-03T08:33:00.001-08:00

Lola’s emotions tore at her, as if they were switchblades wrested from her by an unknown gang of assailants, then used to flay her. Empty as a ghost's tongue, she was at a total loss for words.

Maybe I’m not feeling anything?

Overhead, the sky’s blue gray haze floated like cigarette smoke exhaled in a daytime cocktail lounge.

Tell the truth Lola, she chided herself.

I want an ice cream...........ANY flavor at all, will do.

Texting: a Vow of Silence

2011-11-05T04:23:00.000-07:00

As the breeze shuffled in from the Pacific, Lola paused for a moment on the precinct station’s white stone, front steps. Her altercation with Buck, and the ensuing encounter with the police, left her feeling vacant as a lost glove.

Feeling now like she never wanted to speak to anyone ever again—Buck, Jackie, even Richard---Lola wondered if she could actually endure a self-imposed vow of silence? She reached into her hand bag, and gingerly removed her cell phone.

I’ll just text Richard to ask him to pick me up and drive me home.Texting, she reassured herself, MUST be exempt from a vow of silence.

Brand New Refrigerator

2011-10-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

Lola often had difficulty distinguishing the inside from the outside. Where did her self “end” and others—in this case, Buck--- “begin”? Had she been hitting him, or had he been hitting her? She looked down at her blouse and it was white and clean as a bleached cumulus cloud—no blood, no grass stains. She didn’t feel any pain. Buck, on the other hand, looked like he had been attacked with a red paint ball gun—his shirt splashed and speckled with blood---maybe his own?

Released in her own custody, and now standing outside the Santa Monica Police station, Lola suddenly felt cold and vacant as a brand new refrigerator—all its shelves and drawers stark white and completely empty. The persistent low-pitched electrical hum in her head iced her scattered thoughts to a glacial standstill.

Superman: Suicide or Murder?

2011-09-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

After Lola left Jackie’s home office, Jackie realized she didn’t have another client until 3:00 PM, so she sauntered from her office into her kitchen, fixed herself a cup of mint tea, and wandered into her surprisingly dark, mid-day living room. Her mind, surprisingly blank—she often “went blank” after a therapy session with Lola--Jackie sipped her tea and stared out of her living room’s large picture window, where she expected to see nothing pictured, but the warm, lazy stillness of her quiet Melrose neighborhood. Instead, she was startled by the sight of two hulking LA cops standing like rooted oaks on her front lawn, Buck barely on his feet as he teetered in a state of beaten dishevelment, and a furious Lola, animatedly pleading with the two, stone-faced officers.

Although Jackie could see that her client and her boyfriend were both in the custody of the Police, she reflexively refrained from running out of her front door to confront the two cops. Instead, she took a deep, calming breath (just as she so often implored her clients to do in moments of distress), and told herself to simply watch, simply observe, the bizarre scene that was unfolding in her front yard. As she did, a peculiar thought popped into Jackie’s mind: Hadn’t George Reeves, the actor who, in the 1950s, played Superman on TV, committed suicide after his career ended? Or had he been murdered?

Harvest Moon

2011-06-15T08:13:00.000-07:00

Why do things that seem so far away, sometimes look so near?

A few minutes ago, Buck had been a figure who occupied a space "light years" in her past, now he was here, right here, in front of her--well lying on the ground in front of her, after she'd punched him, again and again.

What's gotten into me?

Lola's noisy thoughts turned to recollections of the golden harvest moon.

It can seem so large and looming, as it perches above the San Gabriel mountains on the late October horizon. No matter how close it looks, she reminded herself, it's merely an optical illusion.

Lola's Beautiful Day

2011-05-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

She begins to make a list—not the kind of list you scribble down and take the supermarket—but a mental list of impossible things that are nearly possible: laughing fish, blue lemons, birthday cakes with dynamite candles, her skeleton, fresh out of bones, the man she almost married, a dark hole aimed at a bullet.

My thoughts are radio waves, with geometric messages, no one, but I, can hear. Whatever I do, I must not let anyone know how to find me-- not here, not now, not ever.

It’s not that far to the coast, only a half-hour drive. The sun’s setting into the vague afternoon fog, that hunches around the Santa Monica pier this time of year. It’s a beautiful day.

For a drowning.

Slo-Mo Lipstick

2011-04-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

Time slowed down for Buck.

As Lola punched him again and again, he observed her perfectly applied lipstick---how the tiny vertical lines in the skin of her quivering upper lip looked like cherry-red ink spikes on a Richter scale. And Lola’s paper-white blouse—as she’d wrestled him to the ground—it had remained perfectly clean and starched, as if it had been freshly retrieved from the dry cleaner’s.

When the cop finally pulled the pummeling Lola off Buck’s supine body, Buck couldn’t help but notice that one of Lola’s open-toed pumps had come to rest about 30 feet from where she had assaulted him, in the dry, un-watered grass of Jackie’s front yard. It looked like a miniature scene of an overturned farm implement, abandoned in an open field, which had gone to seed.

As the cop helped Buck rise to his feet, Buck’s punch-dirty body felt like he’d been stripped nude, dipped in honey, and left to endure a million slow-motion stings of the buzzing occupants of an angry apiary.

Why does Lola feel that she needs to wear lipstick, anyway?

Left Hook

2011-03-03T19:35:00.000-08:00

From a distance, it appeared that two bodies were writhing in tangled lovemaking. But why would two people make love in broad daylight on the brown, un-watered lawn of this Melrose home? Even in LA, you didn’t often see this kind of spectacle.

As the police approached, it was clear that a woman and man were doing something on the lawn, but as the two officers cautiously drew closer to the lump of human conflict that thrashed about in front of them, it became clear that it was far from love that was being made.

The first cop jumped in and pulled the dainty blond combatant off the punch-pummeled body of the man that lie underneath her. Lola threw one last punch at Buck, who now all too viscerally understood that nothing hurts so much as the searing sting of a fuming ex-girlfriend’s well-placed left hook.

Hoped You Were Dead.

2011-02-20T10:48:00.001-08:00

Lola’s mind filled with a kind of black mental grease that covered and clouded everything; her thoughts, her memory, even the pathways of the sensations that futilely tired to run from her spider-like fingers and reed-thin arms, to her brain. “Buck?” she stammered, as she desperately clutched her driver’s license. She looked up into Buck’s similarly stunned, yet surprisingly expressionless face. Everything escaped from her—--every thought of control, of location, of who she was now. “Buck? Buck. I hoped you were dead.”

Bridge-Building

2010-10-16T13:28:00.000-07:00

Hadn’t he met her half-way, in fact, more than half-way? Richard pictured love as an expansive river over which two lovers, typically, built a bridge toward one another. Aren’t we supposed to meet in the middle? he thought. A current of fear ran through him now, as he imagined that he was building the entire bridge himself. At first, he pictured Lola, innocently standing on the other side, her dainty hands seemingly beckoning him, but as he approached her, he could see she was really waving him away, as if she had decided bridge-building was not for her. Richard feared he was about to fall now, into the deepest, darkest flow of the speeding torrent.

Backing-up into the Future?

2010-10-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

Following the unmistakable thud of the collision, Lola grabbed her purse and jumped out of her little car. She skittered around the back, and immediately bent over the right rear fender to see how much damage she’d done. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bad—after all, she’d only been going a few miles an hour, as she tried, unsuccessfully, to maneuver out the tight parking space in front of Jackie's house. As she examined the damage to her car, the driver of the car she’d bumped, a man who appeared to be in his early thirties, approached her with his drivers license in one hand, and his sunglasses in the other. Lola didn't immediately look up, but if she had, she would have seen that the man who approached her walked towards her with an oddly familiar gait. She would have seen that he was wearing blue jeans, a white shirt, and cowboy boots.

Electra Uninsured

2010-09-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

Even though Lola had started therapy with Jackie, months ago, as a way to find out if Richard had been cheating on her, she was surprised now to discover that she was actually learning things—seemingly important things-- about herself, despite her original ulterior motives.

Know thyself, isn’t that what Socrates had said, or had it been the oracle at Delphi? Lola couldn’t recall now, she was preoccupied with today’s session.

Emerging from Jackie’s office, she crossed the burnt grass of Jackie’s front lawn, and slid behind the steering wheel of her little smudge of a beige compact car. She was lost in thought about today’s session: did she really choose men who, on the one hand, reminded her of all the things her father was unable to be for her, but on the other hand, were just like her father in some imperceptible way? Heedlessly, she shifted the transmission into reverse, and immediately backed into the car parked behind her. The smash of collapsing metal instantly jarred Lola from thoughts of her ‘Electra complex,’ to fears that she hadn’t paid her auto insurance bill in more than two years.

She Wears His Cologne

2010-08-14T11:02:00.000-07:00

Lola gently daubed a bit of Richard’s cologne behind each of her ears and then sneaked just an ever-so tiny splash onto her chest. It didn’t bother her at all that she was wearing a man’s cologne. How many women, she wondered, were confident enough—or just didn’t know better than---to wear a man’s cologne? The sweet, earthy fragrance mingled with her natural sent, and the resulting admixture smelled simultaneously woodsy and oceanic, like the scent of a stand of California Redwoods towering next to the Big Sur coast. She immediately imagined the roots of huge trees anchoring her lithe body to the earth, as early morning striated sunlight combed through her being, like streamers of light cutting through the forest’s foggy canopy.

Unmarked Border

2010-07-18T09:26:00.001-07:00

An imperceptible line runs between love and not love, and it is a gray, ambiguous territory on either side. Sometimes we tread one side, sometimes the other, as if unknowingly crossing and re-crossing an unmarked border.

As Richard pulled his car up to the front of the restaurant to pick her up, Lola opened the car door and gracefully slipped into the passenger seat. Surprisingly, tonight, she felt a kind of gratuitous glow for this plain, yet unusual man, who worked so hard to make her happy, and about whom she often wondered if she really were in love.

Now, as Richard gently smiled at her, and pointed the car toward 4th Street, Lola discovered she didn’t care if she couldn’t quite tell which side of that blurred border she now stood.

Richard calmly eased the car into the right lane, careful as he did so—or so it seemed to her—to stay within the neat white lines of his narrow lane.

Crawlin' Dragin

2010-07-13T19:01:00.001-07:00

Immediately following her session with Jackie, Lola met Richard at their favorite Chinese restaurant, in Santa Monica. It was more than both of them could afford, but Lola promised herself at least one good meal, "out" per month. So maybe the Crawlin' Dragon, wasn't the greatest Chinese food, in LA, but it was really good, and the waiters remembered her name whenever she appeared there.

After dinner, their waiter left Lola and Richard with two fortune cookies, one for each. While Richard was fumbling with the check, rooting around in his pocket for his wallet, Lola leaned across the table and surreptitiously switched her fortune with his. She opened the cookie, read the words "The Love of your life will appear in front of you unexpectedly," and immediately swallowed the tiny white paper--downed it, before Richard could see--in one quick and skittish gulp.

Looked Like He Just Shot His Horse

2010-07-11T18:10:00.000-07:00

Lola looked at Jackie, “I was so young, and it was so long ago…back in Boston, when I was still a ‘girl’, still in college. During the first few years of school, I must have dated 35 boys, but all of them were idiots, emptier than a bucket with a big hole in it. By my junior year, I’d stopped dating, completely, because it was a totally futile exercise—a little like Sisyphus pushing a giant bolder up a hill, only to be run over, again and again. Believe me, I’d given up any hope of meeting anyone I could really love, anyone really worth loving.

Then, one day, while I was sitting in Harvard yard, it was a bright spring day, and this boy—I still remember that he wore dark blue jeans,a white button-down shirt, and scuffed up cowboy boots—approached me and asked if I knew anything about ‘heroic couplets.’ I immediately thought either this had to be the worst come-on line I’d ever heard, that this guy was completely joking,or that here, at last, in the middle of Cambridge Massachusetts, had finally arrived the man of my dreams---even if he was wearing beat up cowboy boots and looked like he had just shot his horse, to put it out of its misery.”

Stock Feint

2010-07-11T11:18:00.000-07:00

In Jackie's office today, Lola settled back into her 'analysand's' chair, which, as she imagined it, felt like a recliner on the first class deck of the Titanic. Lola relished the undivided attention she received in therapy, and she liked the way it made her feel when she talked about her struggles--her doubts and fears---with an intelligent woman peer, even though she knew she couldn't tell Jackie quite EVERYTHING--that would be disastrous.

"I keep dreaming about this man...well, a boy, really when I knew him, back in college," Lola nostalgically confessed. "It's been fifteen years since I've seen him, but he keeps periodically showing up in my dreams like an old ghost. What do you think it means when I have recurrent dreams about a man I haven't seen in such a long, long time?"

Jackie gently smiled, as she deployed a stock feint, "What do YOU think it means, Lola?"

Home Office?

2010-07-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

Buck turned off his car’s engine, and gazed for a moment at the red tile roofs that seemed to predominate the bungalows in Jackie’s Melrose neighborhood. A strange uneasiness began to cast a shadow over his previously chipper mood---at least his father would have called it ‘chipper.’ He found himself wondering if Jackie felt entirely safe conducting her therapy practice out of her home? What kind of woman would regularly invite the emotionally troubled, the psychologically disturbed, to spend an hour each week, under her roof? He puzzled over whether it was a kind of brazen foolishness that allowed Jackie to see ‘clients’ in the place where she lived, or if it was a sign of a kind of laissez-faire bravery. Unable to follow this thought any further down what felt like a too-dark mental path, Buck preferred to think it was the latter.

Stripes

2010-07-02T08:50:00.001-07:00

Lola angrily tugged the sheets off her bed and crumpled them in the corner, as if they were trash to be discarded, rather than merely laundry to be washed. She fleetingly thought of Richard, and then, momentarily, about her column at LA 29.

Lola then unfurled a set of new, clean sheets, which, like a topsail, gently descended over the naked bed that lay before her, quiet as an empty hull. She loved the tidy pattern of these sheets, their vertical lines smartly running from head to toe. Neatly striped, in a narrow, pencil-width blue and white pattern, they recalled from long ago, her father’s striped dress shirts: neat, clean, and crisply parallel.

Why, Lola mused, can’t love be like that?

Advice to Strangers

2010-06-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

A 'disaster' of a boyfriend, a mother who had committed suicide when Lola was just a girl, a father who, back in Boston, defended corporate criminals, and who believed money was love, in fact better than love---how could Lola ever hope to give advice to others about love, life and relationships? She tugged at the Wal-Mart, faux diamond bracelet that Richard had given her, as she worried herself into a mood as empty and abandoned as a junkyard refrigerator. Who did she think she was, writing an advice column at LA 29? She felt like an impostor.

Of course, Lola's failures, her 'train wrecks' and imperfections were not really the professional liabilities that she feared they were. On the contrary, these were the very things that perfectly prepared Lola to give advice to strangers, the very qualities that made her an actress that could reach the emotional depths that, sadly, Hollywood rarely needed.

Out of Left Field

2010-06-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

"Left field, left field!" he shouted. Richard then bolted upright from his dream, a feeling of terror splashing over him like a bath of icy Gatorade. He'd dreamed that he'd been playing baseball with Lola, just popping up some hits, so she could catch them. He kept on hitting them, but Lola failed to catch a single one. He realized now that in his dream, he'd been so intent on hitting flies that could be caught by Lola---a woman who hated baseball, and who said that she hated any game that required donning gloves--that he hadn't noticed that no one was in left field. In fact, Richard had been so intent on trying to get a game going with Lola, that he failed to notice she had abandoned the field entirely, while he remained struggling at home plate, futilely hitting hundreds of shiny white balls into a baseball-littered empty field.

Gradual Cooling

2010-06-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

Richard suddenly awakened. He hadn’t been dreaming, just a blank sleep, from which he abruptly arose, as if he had been electrocuted. He looked at the clock—3:00AM-- and after his initial shock began to subside, settled into a resigned bout of half-wakefulness, which he knew would last at least an hour, before he would submerge again into the dark blankness of a full sleep.

His mind turned to thoughts of Lola, but not as you might imagine a man might think in the early morning hours about his lover, but rather, he began to worry, to brood, about how Lola never called him. Then he thought ‘She never invites me over to her house anymore; I have to invite myself.” His anxiousness deepened as he further agonized, ‘She rarely kisses me anymore, either.’

Richard began to fear if, in fact, there wasn’t something “wrong” between he and Lola, or if he was just irrationally imagining some change in the ‘temperature’ of their relationship, a gradual cooling which he feared was really more than a mere cooling, more like an un-recognized chilling in their formerly searing love?

Lola’s Poison Pill

2010-06-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

Richard was speeding his way to the emergency room to visit Lola. He hoped it wasn't too late. Lola had ingested a handful of M&Ms, which she had earlier mistaken for sleeping pills. Richard knew that she wasn't in any real danger---after all there aren't many medically documented cases of M&M overdoses, except perhaps for a few cases among 6th graders in the San Fernando Valley, where everything is just a little twisted. But Richard also knew Lola's was not entirely a medical case. 'It's the thought that counts,' he thought to himself---Lola really intends to take her life, even if it is only death by very little low-dose chocolate PIXIES---the kinds all the really big stars ingest with impunity.

Read the Last Page, First

2010-06-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

Lola read novels, backwards---not upside down, of course— but backwards, from front-to-back. This fact drove Richard crazy.

“Why do you read the ending first? ” Richard inquired, as if he was pleading a case for the preservation of Western civilization.

“So I know, of course, how things turn out in the end,” she explained in a tone that revealed her impatience at Richard’s failure to understand the self-evident benefits of her reading technique.

“But doesn’t that take all the mystery out of reading, all the pleasure?”

“Honey,” Lola explained,” reading is like our relationship: the only reason I’ve stuck around this long--which, by the way, is a lot longer than I have with others--- is because I’m curious to see how it all turns out in the end.”

All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp

2010-05-19T06:14:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, Richard felt, Lola was just way too hard on him, too demanding. What did she want from him, what did she expect? Didn’t he love her more than the moon and the stars, and didn’t he spend every last dime he had (and a few he didn’t have) taking her places he couldn’t possibly afford?

Occasionally, when she wasn’t aware that he was looking in her direction—when they walked by a storefront window and Lola was busy looking at her reflection in the glass, or when he took her shopping, and she would gaze in the mirror at her image, dressed in a stunning new outfit ----Richard would catch a glimpse of Lola, and on those occasions, he felt as if he were seeing the true Lola, Lola as she really was: not just a beautiful, intelligent, thoughtful woman who had immense sensitivities to the world and a substantial talent for acting, but a hardened, invulnerable character who had learned to protect herself from everything and everyone, even the man she said she loved, by growing an impenetrable ‘exoskeleton’ of emotional defenses and aggressive complaints.

Sometimes, especially after one her infamous “episodes” ---belittling remarks about his undeniable short-comings,---Lola’s criticism made Richard feel as if her were little more than peel-and-eat shrimp, and Lola was happily dining at one of her favorite, all-you-can-eat Restaurants---and the “bill was on him.”

Just a Little More 'Umph'"

2010-05-14T17:10:00.000-07:00

"My battery is always running out of power," Richard complained, as he snapped shut his clam-shell cell phone.

“You can say that, again,” Lola sniggered, unsparingly.

Richard looked wounded as he gazed at Lola’s smirk and wondered why she was always criticizing him?

“I was referring to my cell phone,” Richard continued, as he caught Lola’s jibe.

Lola looked at Richard, her eyes softening now to a merciful concession, “Well you’re pretty good, honey, but sometimes I really wish you DID have a little more energy. You know, Richard, sometimes maybe just a little more “umph?”

Blind Leading the Blind

2010-04-11T07:26:00.000-07:00

Half-way through her next session, Lola confessed to Jackie the obvious irony of the partially ‘sighted’ seeking directional guidance from the totally ‘blind.’ “People are writing ME, sending me comments on my blog, at LA 29! They are asking ME for advice! Can you imagine that? Asking ME for help with their careers, their futures, my god, their relationships!! Can’t you see the joke in that, the ultimate hilarity?” Lola pleaded rhetorically, as Jackie smoothly nodded a neutral, therapeutic “ummm, ” neither revealing her agreement nor disagreement with Lola’s utterly accurate, indeed, un-debatable, self-observation.

Rinse and Repeat

2010-03-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

Matter-of-factly, indeed, blankly, Lola stared into Richard’s eager face and conceded an emotionless “Yes.”

Richard nearly fainted, but in less than a breath’s time, found himself in Lola’s much-too-small bed. They made love.

They made love, again.

Later, as Richard lay exhausted and nearly asleep, at her side, Lola gazed up at the ceiling hovering above her bed, and wondered about the directions on the shampoo bottle: rinse and repeat.

“Is it really necessary?” she wondered.

Writing Hero

2010-03-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

Lola was getting more---not completely---but ‘more,’ comfortable with giving advice to the total strangers who read her column. “Lola Sez,” her column at LA 29, had received a lot of hits during the last few months, and this made her feel affirmed, even if the advice she gave sometimes sounded like it was coming from a quaint Ann Landers. "Better Ann Landers, than Miss Lonleyhearts," Lola thought.

She ended this week’s “Lola Sez” with, “If you start something, you must not be afraid to finish it. You must have the courage to love, and the courage NOT to love.”

She shut her computer and thought, In writing, at least, every coward, and most fools, can be just as brave as an action hero.

Burning at Both Ends

2010-03-11T18:21:00.000-08:00

Lola sat at her keyboard, no lights on in her bedroom, her face glowing a blue-white tint as it reflected the cool glimmer of her laptop computer’s screen. Her worried fingers began to peck out the first lines of her new advice column for LA 29, her friend Beth’s e-zine. She began typing, then paused for a moment, as she thought about the advice she would give her new, predominately West LA and San Fernando Valley, female “readership.” She wanted to type, “DON’T EVER FALL IN LOVE,” in bold capitals at the top of the page, but instead typed, “For the post-modern woman, it is sometimes hard to know if falling in love signals either the beginning, or the end, of romance.” She had no idea what this meant, but she knew from experience, that love was like a candle that burned at both ends, toward an inescapable, defenseless, and ultimately, near-fatal, center.

She sat motionless now, her hands hovering above the keyboard, as if she were trapped in a reminiscent trance, picturing not Richard, but a lover from long, long ago.

Wanting it All

2010-03-05T08:27:00.000-08:00

“I wanted it all---then entire ‘world’ and everything in it. At least, I thought I wanted it all…all the pleasure anyway, but I realized, of course, the world is filled with pain, too. But I wanted everything…everything. So I started writing, because by writing, I imagined I could have everything, I could possess the world.”

Jackie listened attentively as Buck, dressed in his perennial jeans, striped shirt, and cowboy boots, sat before her with the recognition of his own original innocence washing over his increasingly astonished face. Buck spent the next hour or so, confessing his original sin—the sin of desire for the world---and imagining for Jackie, all the lesser sins he had, yet, to commit.

Furniture Doesn't Cry

2010-02-23T09:36:00.000-08:00

"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.

You Don’t Sleep in the View

2010-02-21T12:11:00.000-08:00

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.

Miss Lonely Hearts?

2010-02-17T14:47:00.000-08:00

“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.’

Just Don’t Say ‘No’

2010-02-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

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.”

Birthday Girl

2010-02-12T06:47:00.000-08:00

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.

Interpretation of Dreams

2010-02-09T13:10:00.000-08:00

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?

One Woman Per Day?

2010-02-05T14:16:00.000-08:00

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?

Sunnyside Up

2010-01-31T14:27:00.000-08:00

How could language, any human language, capture the overwhelming complexity of reality, especially inner subjective reality? How could a writer ever hope to describe what it feels like to be a human being, any human being? Buck snapped two eggs against the frying pan’s side, lifted their damaged domes above the skillet and watched as the yokes and albumin dripped to the sizzling surface, below. It was impossible for a writer, even the very best, to accurately describe experience, to ‘get at’ all its messy, sticky, slimy, prickly detail.

Just then, when Buck accidentally brushed his left hand against the side of the burning skillet, he bellowed an injured, ear-splitting expletive, and felt the burn, like a rising flood of mind-numbing stupidity, radiate outward from his red, fried knuckle. He immediately abandoned all thoughts of language’s inadequacy, settling instead, for the pure ineffable burn of raw experience…sunny side up.

A Penguin's World is Black and White

2010-01-30T11:39:00.000-08:00

“Do penguins see the world in black and white?” Richard wondered.

He reflected now, about how he viewed the world, and although he hated to admit it, he had to confess --to himself , at least--that he saw the world pretty much in “black and white,” in “either/or,” categories. Maybe that’s why he had encountered such a difficult time with his college major, philosophy? In philosophy, everything seemed to be plagued with “slippery slopes” and colored in “gray,” ambiguous, hues—even the easy questions were hard.

He had graduated with only a ‘C+’ average in his major, an undistinguished record that made him feel envious of the others who seemed to instinctively understand that the world was more complex and that it was not just “black and white” --- not even for penguins.

Driving home from work, Richard recalled that Lola had graduated at the top of her class, summa cum laude—straight ‘A’s in philosophy. The gray areas, the “slippery slopes,” Richard, now realized, apparently hadn’t posed an obstacle for Lola, at all, although Richard wondered if it didn't make Lola just a little bit chilly.

Two Timer?

2010-01-30T08:21:00.000-08:00

“I want to tell you about a dream I had last night."

In mock protest, Buck objected, “But you’re the therapist—aren’t I supposed to tell YOU about MY dreams?

Jackie smiled as she yielded, “OK, you go first.”

“Hell, I can’t remember any of my dreams…maybe I don’t have any?” Buck confessed.

“I’ll bet you dream all the time, you just don’t remember your dreams. I could help you with that Buck, if you’d like.”

Just then, Buck half-consciously noticed that on both Jackie’s left and right wrists, mixed in with her delicate, dangling silver bracelets, which jangled like wind chimes in a breeze, Jackie wore a tiny, silver wristwatch, as if she needed to multiply by two, the time she spent with Buck.

Porcupine Teddy Bear

2010-01-23T12:23:00.000-08:00

What kind of stuffed animal? What kind would she be?

Richard mentally reviewed the stuffed animals with which he was familiar. Let’s see, there are fierce tigers and cheetahs, their soft fabric teeth only intimating danger, cute basset hounds, with the droopy little silky ears, Bennington bears, blue cookie monsters, shocking orange day-glo Elmos, cuddly bunnies with pink noses, even huggable gray elephants, with Dumbo ears and long gray trunks. No, Lola is definitely not any of these. He paused for a moment as a silent question formed in his mind like a cartoon bubble above a cartoon character's head, Uhhh, do they make porcupine teddy bears?

Denial Ain't Just a River in Egypt

2010-01-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

“Have you actually READ all these books?” Jackie, genuinely astonished, asked Buck, as she surveyed the walls of Buck’s living room, three of four of which were entirely “bricked,” from floor to ceiling, with what appeared to be thousands of books.

“Nah, just one or two of them. They’re mostly eye candy, for my intellectual friends,” Buck falsely demurred.

“It looks like some pretty heady stuff.” Jackie slipped a book entitled, The Phenomenology of Mind, off one eye-level shelf.

“I never did let my reading get in the way of my education,” Buck punned, as he wondered if Jackie might be familiar with the inimitable Mr. Twain.

God, Exhausted, in Los Angeles

2010-01-21T08:08:00.000-08:00

Buck was gazing at Jackie, as she seemed to float about the crowded, over-lit gallery, whose bright white length gave the long rectangular room the appearance of a luminescent tunnel, filled with black clad bodies milling about sharp, brightly colored paintings.

Although he was watching Jackie, Buck was—inexplicably---thinking about, of all things, ‘God.’ He was thinking that God must know every individual human’s experience—that was the price of omniscience—to follow the lives of all 7 billion humans knocking about this earth. Not only must God know each person’s past, present, and future, Buck mused, he must know the lives of all the earth’s past and future inhabitants, the dead, as well as the lives of the not-yet-born.

Overwhelmed at these thoughts, Buck paused for a moment, as Jackie suddenly turned to smile at him—as if she had suddenly become aware that Buck’s gaze had been tracking her movement about the gallery.

God, Buck imagined, must be very, very fatigued from all his watching, from all his knowing.

Parked

2010-01-20T06:11:00.000-08:00

Richard wasn’t as deep as a well, he knew that, but he wasn’t shallow as a teaspoon either. He sat at home, tonight, in the near darkness at his blue computer screen and wrote one of his little poems, one of those that Lola frequently complained were not about love or about her.

It was a fall day.
A man sat weeping,
behind the steering wheel of a parked automobile.

Outside, the wind surrounded a lone maple,
lifted up its leaves, and threw them, red confetti,
into the blue pool of the sky.

What good is love?
When it’s gone, it's gone.
Even the dead can steer a parked car.

Movie Star Haircut

2010-01-18T11:26:00.000-08:00

It was a plain little barber shop. Not one of those shi shi Brentwood salons, all high modern, black and white, in which the women stylists each appeared as if they, themselves, not their patrons, were the movie stars, but a plain red, white, and blue barber-poled, store-front shop, right out of the 1950s, with just two old-fashioned cracked leather barber chairs, and only one gray headed barber still working.

Max had been cutting hair in Santa Monica since 1970, which meant that he had seen quite a bit of history in men’s hair fashion and had cut some pretty important “heads”. Richard liked Max’s shop because it felt safe and secure and because Max didn’t expect a tip the size of the national debt each time Richard came in for a trim, which took about 8 minutes to complete, because Richard liked to come in every two weeks, so that his hair always looked perfectly neat.

“Hey ‘George Clooney,’ ” Max jested in Richard’s direction, as Richard walked through the small store-front door, and the little metal bell tinkled to announce his arrival. “Made any good movies lately?”

Baseball Tattoo?

2010-01-16T07:58:00.000-08:00

It wasn’t in an easily viewable location. In fact, it was in such an intimate spot, that they had been dating one another for more than a year, before Richard had noticed it. Of course, the conditions were seldom right for unobstructed observation, so Richard could hardly be expected to detect the tiny etching, but when he finally did, he thought it looked like just the insignia of the Boston Red Sox: a tiny crimson colored “B”.

“You really ARE a New Englander,” Richard declared from beneath the white sheets of Lola’s bed, as he attempted to jest about the design of Lola’s tiny tattoo.

Lola smiled, although Richard couldn’t see it, “You know how I love the Red Sox.”

The sheets spilling about him as if he were emerging from frothing whitewater, Richard pulled himself up to kiss Lola, but as he did he, he thought, But Lola hates baseball?

Violin

2010-01-14T10:57:00.000-08:00

Lola had given up playing the violin, even though she loved the instrument's taut strings and the drunken, scratchy timbre of her childhood notes. Why, she now wondered, 20 years later, did I ever listen to HIM?

Her father had said, "Girls don't play the violin." He then stiffly walked out of the room, as if departing a failed business meeting.

What did he know about 'girls'? What did he know about music?

Trinity

2010-01-10T14:11:00.000-08:00

“You mean Johnny Carson isn’t hosting the Tonight show?” Richard inquired sheepishly, after Lola had screamed at him, accusing him of cultural inadequacy because he didn’t know his late-night TV lineup.

“No,” Lola snapped, “he hasn’t hosted it for nearly 1000 years,” exasperated, she exaggerated the figure.

“OK, so I haven’t watched late night TV since I was 14,” Richard meekly confessed. “You know I have trouble staying up late at night… except for certain nights when we…you know…” Richard’s voice trailed off, as if he realized he was about to enter taboo territory, a move that would be sure to result in his immediate skewering.

Lola looked at Richard as if she were looking at a pathetic child who was confessing his indiscretions to his mother, Why DO I love this man, she asker herself?

Despite the pummeling he was taking from Lola, Richard’s mind raced elsewhere, as he thought, not about late night TV hosts, but about the young girl from catering he had slept with two weeks ago, following the company party, the girl, "Trinity", whose name he was just now able to recall for the first time since he woke up in her pastel-wallpapered bedroom from where he had, without a word, immediately escaped without even saying goodbye.

Tonight Show

2010-01-10T09:12:00.000-08:00

“If we could just get you on the Tonight show…that would jump-start your career, for sure. You, know, just get Johnny to interview you, maybe ask a few questions so you could talk about how you’re waiting for the ‘just right’ part, so you could explain how you don't want to rush into things, and how you don’t want to make the wrong script? I’d bet you get a hundred offers the very next day. Once they saw you, Lola, I know you’d get a part, instantly. Maybe Johnny could interview you right after Raymond, you know, that guy from Everybody Loves Raymond?”

Dumbfounded by Richard’s archaism, his out-of-touch naiveté, Lola’s expression rapidly washed from incredulity, to fury, as she yelled at Richard—a man who evidently hadn’t watched late-night television since 1992-- “Who the hell is ‘Johnny’?”

Treadmill

2010-01-06T18:22:00.000-08:00

Love is NOT like this. Love is NOT like this. Love is NOT like this. She repeated today’s nearly involuntary, looping mantra.

Each time Lola padded along in her daily 40 minute exercise routine on the treadmill, at the LA Sports Club, she found it almost impossible to think more than one sentence’s worth of thought.

Stopping suddenly, Lola had a moment of horrifying realization as the thought shot through her, Love IS like this!

Passion is No Ordinary Word

2010-01-03T14:12:00.000-08:00

Buck’s father, Joshua, a history professor at UCLA, taught early modern European history, with a specialization in what was charmingly called the “the transition from feudalism to capitalism.” Despite his seemingly stodgy area of specialization, Joshua was no nerd. He had grown up in late 1960s London where it was possible for future academics and factory workers to find themselves sharing the same picket lines and the same street battles, as they confronted the forces of her majesty’s police.

Joshua had acquired the period’s tastes in music---English rock and American inspired blues-- which he shared with his son, while Buck was later growing up in suburban LA. That music loomed large in Buck’s consciousness—sometimes, too large, Buck thought,---serving as a soundtrack to a life that could on occasion seem like a movie he watched from the last row of an empty matinee theater.

Buck looked at Jackie as she strode among the art crowd this evening—her long brunette hair falling across her shoulders, her confident stride, her shape evident beneath appropriately conservative attire--- and he couldn’t help debating which song from long-ago London she most elicited for him now, The Faces’ “Stay with Me” or Graham Parker’s “Passion is No Ordinary Word.”

Nowhere is Home

2010-01-03T12:13:00.000-08:00

The chic, if starkly white, store-front art gallery looked out over a run-down, decaying section of town. Although the real estate community said this neighborhood was “on the upswing,” and others called it “gentrifying,” most people agreed it was not a part of town that one would feel comfortable strolling in, after dark.

As Buck and Jackie approached the bright gallery, which seemed to glitter amidst the urban desolation, Jackie bent low to offer a 20 dollar bill to a homeless woman who sat huddled in a red blanket on the sidewalk, a few feet from the gallery’s entrance. She said nothing to the woman, as she handed her the bill, but smiled a respectful smile that Buck observed was simultaneously empathetic and detached.

Later in the evening, Buck couldn’t help reflecting that Jackie seemed as comfortable on the streets of Skid Row as she did rubbing elbows with the white wine-sipping “Art-ourgeoisie,” the dress designers, the daughters of British rock stars, the lipstick laden Beverly Hills matrons and their tanned and unfaithful husbands, who filled the Gallery’s shimmering space. Jackie, he mused, seemed at home almost anywhere--- a lovely contrast to his own naggingly persistent sense of feeling at home almost nowhere he had ever been.

The Morning After

2010-01-01T20:04:00.000-08:00

Richard woke up in a bedroom that was neither his nor Lola’s. Lying on his back in the morning light, he rolled over and saw before him a young woman, no older than 20, sound asleep, her bare, rice-white shoulders, exposed to the room’s cool air by a deep blue sheet that lie tucked under her arms. He thought he recognized his bedmate---hadn’t she been one of the caterer’s staff who he had chatted up last night at the office party, the one who had said that she liked men in uniform?

Richard immediately rolled to his right and could see from the side of the bed that his chauffer’s jacket and trousers were neatly folded and laid over the side of a chair, behind which a wall of striped pastel wallpaper rose toward a blank ceiling. Although he had drunk a substantial amount and ended up in this unfamiliar bed, oddly, now he was not the least bit hung over, but rather, crystal clear. If Lola ever found out about his indiscretion, she would first shoot him, and then, while he lie there bleeding, leave him.

Already Too Late

2009-12-31T19:25:00.000-08:00

Buck arrived one minute early for his second date with Jackie. He did so because he was almost certain that Jackie was a stickler for punctuality. There wasn’t anything in particular about Jackie’s behavior, nor anything that she had said on their first date, that would have suggested this to Buck, but he just had a gut feeling that despite her apparent devil-may-care attitude toward the world and everything in it, that Jackie was nevertheless a woman who was intolerant of tardiness.

As he rang Jackie’s front door bell and she opened the door, Jackie matter-of-factly greeted her date with, “Buck…I like men who are on time. It’s a sign that they have an appreciation of the important things in life.”

Buck leaned into the doorway, as if to enter, but as he did, Jackie interrupted, “Shouldn’t we be on our way?”

As he responded, “Yes, of course, we wouldn’t want to be late,” Buck couldn’t help thinking, especially in regard to Jackie, But I have a feeling that we already are.

Clothes Make the Man

2009-12-24T18:58:00.001-08:00

It was the annual Holiday party at Beautiful Nightmare studios. The entire staff attended, including both of the company’s chauffeurs. Richard hadn’t seen so many beautiful women assembled in one place, since he’d last received the Victoria’s Secret catalog, which was addressed, not to him, but to “Resident” care of his address.

Tonight, one of the beautiful young women who floated about the room, was eying him from afar, or so he thought. At first he imagined it was because she was attracted to his rugged good looks, but it turned out that when he finally got up enough nerve to ask her if she would like a drink from the open bar, she had said, “I just love men in uniform.” Sadly, he had left his chauffeur’s cap on Lola’s couch the previous evening, when Lola had informed him that the last thing she wanted to do on earth was to attend a major studio party with a man who wore a chauffeur’s uniform, even if the man looked like George Clooney--which, she quickly added, "Richard you do not."

Diamonds and Snow

2009-12-19T06:58:00.000-08:00

On the day of Christmas eve, Lola walked alone, along the empty beach in Santa Monica. It was 78 degrees, and the bright warmth made her feel like she was living in unreal world, where the temperature was completely incongruous with the winter season. As much as she liked LA—its exotic sprawl and its indistinct, cement ugliness—Lola missed Boston and the paper-white snow that she knew today would be blanketing her hometown.

As her bare feet tread along the warm sand, she recalled Boston’s sharply cold winters, and how as a child, she loved wearing layers upon layers of clothes---not just to keep her warm, but to protect her from something… something vague and undefined in the world. She recalled how her layers of childhood coats and sweaters and mufflers made her feel like she was wearing the protective armor of a Medieval knight---how she felt metal plated and impenetrable.

Turning now, to look at the sparkling gray green-waves as they charged toward shore, Lola found that she missed the sight of freshly fallen Christmas snow, which, as she remembered it, would shine more brilliantly than the diamonds in the crown of any fairytale queen.

This Must be the Place

2009-12-17T16:06:00.000-08:00

Richard drove the drunken, well dressed, man home. His passenger appeared so drunk that he couldn’t tell Richard which city he lived in. He kept repeating “San Vicente, San Vicente, San Vicente,…I’ll tell you the house when I see it.”

Nonetheless, Richard pointed the Lincoln Town Car down San Vicente Blvd, in Santa Monica, and eventually passed a huge mansion that looked more like a Modern Art museum than a home, as the man yelled, “Stop, Stop, that’s it.”

As he pulled the limousine to an abrupt halt, the man, a movie producer Richard had never before chauffeured home, threw open the door, stumbled out of the back seat, and began to make his way up the long driveway toward the house. But not before he had turned around, reached into his suit coat pocket and extracted a wad of thousand dollar bills which he happily tossed toward Richard, who, with the front passenger-side window rolled down, leaned over and yelled to his inebriated benefactor, “Are you sure this is the place?”

Keep Your Hands to Yourself

2009-12-13T15:40:00.000-08:00

Lola was not feeling sexy, she was feeling like cement in a cement mixer. Gray and rigidly indifferent to the world. She was certain Richard would call.

At home, Richard was only half-aware that as he picked up the phone, he was mentally humming an old song by the Georgia Satellites,

“I got a little change in my pocket going jingle lingle ling want to call you on the telephone baby I give you a ring, but each time we talk I get the same old thing, always no huggin no kissin until I get a wedding ring. My honey my baby don't put my love upon no shelf. She said don't give me no lines and keep your hands to yourself .”

Lola didn’t answer the ringing phone.

Anyone in Their Right Mind

2009-12-12T20:10:00.000-08:00

Lola wanted to just come out and ask Jackie why she was sleeping with Richard? What did a successful therapist need from a failed comedian and former chicken rancher, anyway? What could Richard possibly do for her?

Instead, during her session, Lola restrained herself and started talking about her relationship with her father, but all the time she did so, she was picturing Richard and Jackie making love in Richard's limousine.

"My father didn’t like my mother that much, not in any romantic way. Anyone in their right mind could plainly see that.”

Father's Ghost

2009-12-12T14:57:00.000-08:00

“Tell me,” Jackie probed, “what did you feel like when your mother committed suicide?”

“I don’t know, it was more than 20 years ago, I don’t remember, I was 12. I guess I felt awful… I mean I know I felt awful. Lola paused, and then abstractly observed, “I remember how dead the atmosphere of the house felt, and the way that my father walked through the rooms for years afterward, like he was a vacant ghost. He pretended that he was strong and stoic, and I know that he didn’t really love my mother, but he still felt like a shadow of something---like all the music of his life was over.”

“Yes Lola, but how did YOU feel?” Jackie insisted.

Tiffany’s

2009-12-12T12:34:00.001-08:00

She had a lot of experience behind the counter. She knew diamonds, real and fake. She could tell instantly, by the way the customer walked, if they had money—real money--- or not. She didn’t even need to see their clothes or their shoes or the neatly arrayed piles of credit cards, they so often unfurled from leather wallets drawn from Prada purses. She could tell simply by the shopper’s carriage, their gait.

The moment Richard approached her to ask to see the diamonds in the less-than–five-thousand dollar range, the observant saleswoman smiled, because she knew Richard walked like a man who had more money, a lot more money, than five thousand dollars on him, in cash.

Nightmare Wedding

2009-12-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

I do, Lola murmured in a dream voice that sounded as if she were mouthing the words of a military surrender. Then, as if jolted by 50,000 watts, she bolted upright, wide awake, in her bed. She felt sick to her stomach. Had it been the fish dinner, or was it the recurrent wedding nightmare?

She ran to the bathroom, and immediately vomited into the toilet.

Afterwards, with her terrycloth bathrobe wrapped around her like a life-jacket, she lay shivering on the cold, blue tile floor, and thought, Maybe I AM in love with Richard?

Piranha

2009-12-06T12:41:00.000-08:00

It was eat or be eaten, Richard thought. It was time to act, not to think.

He carried Lola’s Christmas gift in a small, plastic bag, which was half-filled with clear water. She’s going to love this. I just love these little fish--- they’re so cute.

As he left the tropical fish store, Richard mused, Damn it, I should just go ahead and ask her to marry me. I would, in a heartbeat, if she wasn’t so damn snappy.

I Am the Eggman

2009-12-04T17:33:00.000-08:00

It was a routine check-up, and thank goodness, Richard’s doctor gave him a clean bill of health. “You’re in excellent shape, Richard. The only concern I have is that your cholesterol is a little high, about 280mg/dl. What’s your diet like, these days?”

“Eggs for breakfast, eggs for lunch, eggs for dinner,” Richard proclaimed proudly, as if his egg diet were a sign of bravery.

“My God, Richard, why do you eat eggs three times a day?”

With his right index finger pointing to the three fingers on his left hand, which he held up in front of him, Richard tallied the reasons as he methodically recited, “I’m a bachelor, their easy to cook, and I really like eggs, goo goo, g’joob.”

The Queen's English

2009-12-02T18:14:00.000-08:00

Because of his English parentage—his father was an English-born professor who taught history at UCLA and his mother a West-end Londoner who had scraped her way into the journalism profession and had written for the Guardian, before marrying Buck’s father and moving to LA---Buck had the faint accent of someone who sounded like they grew up in California, but who occasionally let slip a phrase in “the received pronunciation,” the Queen’s English.

Occasionally, while traveling, Buck had been mistaken for a Brit or in some cases, a Canadian. The latter mistake, on one occasion, had saved his life, when he had been on assignment in a region of the world where American journalists were universally thought to be agents of the CIA.

From time to time, Buck unconsciously let slip a word or a phrase that made him sound as if he were an announcer on the BBC. And oddly, he occasionally heard others speak, as if they too, were speaking to him with an English accent, when in fact they weren’t--he listened with an "English ear”

This would explain why, when he called Jackie to ask her for a second date—preferably one not involving auto theft----he wasn’t sure if Jackie had said, “I warned you” or if she had said, “I want you.”

Nearly in the Chips

2009-11-30T19:55:00.000-08:00

Lola was standing at her kitchen sink, staring vacantly out the window, and eating chocolate chip cookies from a large bag. At first, Richard barely noticed as she dipped into the bag and pulled a cookie out, but then, as he watched her successive movements, he gradually became aware that she was separating the chips from the host cookie, and only eating the chips.

“Lola, you’re just eating the chips. Why aren’t you eating the cookie?”

Lola looked at Richard, and gave him a look that nearly shouted, You dunce, if you separate the chips from the cookie, they have no calories?

Instead, Lola said, “Richard honey, can you please pass me the milk?”

Gambling Man?

2009-11-29T17:30:00.000-08:00

With the calculator on her I-phone, Jackie did a quick computation. Let’s see, the average life expectancy in the U.S, is 77.7 years. That equals 28,360.5 days of life--average life. I am 38 years old, and some change. So I’ve lived 13, 870 days, already—almost half a life. Of course, no matter how long I live, each day represents a larger percentage of the time I have left on earth. And like the doctor said, ‘We’re all going to die sometime…most of us just don’t know when or where.”

Jackie shivered just a tiny flutter, as she wondered if her new friend, Buck, might just happen to be a gambling man?

Not Quite A Drowning

2009-11-29T07:13:00.000-08:00

The approaching five-foot wave had initially looked as if it would pass by and break safely behind him, but unexpectedly, as if it had been hit by a sudden surge of backwash or riptide, had peaked, and broken directly in front of Buck. To avoid being caught inside the break zone, where he knew he would be pushed violently back toward shore, Buck immediately thrust the sharp nose of his surfboard down beneath the on-coming avalanche of roiling whitewater, as he frantically attempted to press the board down into the safer depths, toward the sandy bottom.

With his eyes closed and the rush of gritty sea water sounding like a strangled roar, he felt the resistant buoyancy of the surfboard push him back up toward the bubbling surface. For a fleeting moment, Buck's surfboard had become a writhing body on which he lay, one that violently resisted his downward intention, and refused to be 'drowned.'

A few seconds later, gasping for air, Buck surfaced on the backside of the breaker and felt a moment of relief, as he turned his board around to face the smooth backs of the successive waves rolling toward shore. With much effort, Buck had managed to paddle out beyond the breaking waves, and now sat upright on the glassy, gently rolling surface, where the undulating groundswell of the early forming combers offered an illusory sense of peace and tranquility.

Second Thoughts, First

2009-11-28T20:48:00.000-08:00

“I think you’ve had some challenges with men,” Jackie clinically observed to Lola, who sat staring, wide-eyed and incredulous at the pedestrian understatement of her therapist. “The stories you’ve told me since our first meeting, a few months ago, the stories about your father and about being a young woman in Hollywood, make me wonder if this is the best place for you, especially given your history?”

Is this, Lola wondered, what I am paying her 150 dollars an hour to tell me?

Lola then made a metal note of how much of her father’s monthly “stipend” she’d spent so far, just to learn about her ‘struggles’ with men. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair, as she wondered if she would have learned something much more useful if she had just come out and accused Jackie of sleeping with Richard?

On the other hand, Lola thought, maybe she’s right, maybe I’m not cut out to make it in Hollywood?

An Undiscovered Country

2009-11-27T11:55:00.000-08:00

Buck finished-up writing his 2000 world article for Travel and Leisure. He despised the fact that he needed to write for these upscale "glamor" mags, the ones who targeted the well-heeled, the affluent. He hated to write chatty little stories that made the “underdeveloped world” “come alive” in a way that would entice the moneyed reader to visit the often impoverished and destitute landscape that appeared so quaint and beautiful in the magazine’s full color spreads. But Buck had to make a living, and these articles made it possible for him to do so.

As he proofed his text, and prepared to send the file off to his publisher, his mind drifted to visions of Jackie, who felt to him like a complete and as yet, 'undiscovered country.'

Hadn’t Hamlet called death an 'undiscovered country?' Buck ruminated.

Fish Dreaming

2009-11-27T08:12:00.000-08:00

The small aquarium in Lola’s living room shone like a dazzling TV screen that inadvertently had been left on in the middle of the otherwise unlit night. The Yellow Damsels and Emperor Angel Fish darted about, like colorful bolts of lightning under the uninterrupted light. The air filter hummed unerringly.

Lola, shuffled through the midnight on the way to the kitchen to get one spoonful of Hagan Daz. She had a craving.

“Go to bed Olie, go to sleep Diablo,” she whispered as she headed back to her empty bed, where she would drift back to sleep again, and dream of fish who would speak to her about the feel of the deep against the smooth plates of their scaly, silver skin.

Her Little Secret

2009-11-26T16:41:00.000-08:00

It had been a year since Jackie had received the diagnosis.

Thinking now, about the scene that had occurred in her doctor’s office, she felt simultaneously despairing and angry.

She recalled that when she had responded to the disastrous news by saying to her doctor, “So we don’t know when or where it will happen, but basically you’re handing me a death sentence,” her doctor had retorted, “We’re all going to die sometime, Jackie, and most us don’t know when or where.”

Jackie remembered the moment well; it had seemed amazingly callous, yet it was the truth.

She resolved from that moment on, two things: she would live in whatever way she wanted to, and she would never tell, anyone—not a soul—about her death sentence.

It would be her “little secret,” hers alone.

She Loves L.A.

2009-11-26T16:36:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles is an immense city, sprawling over hundreds of square miles, a seemingly endless urban blanket of “built environment,” where automobiles are the de facto native population, and people seem like an added afterthought, a slapdash attempt to humanize an otherwise non-human landscape. Except in occasional incongruous patches of nearly treeless parks, which appear to be placed haphazardly about the city, L.A. is unrelieved by any connection to what could be construed as the ‘natural environment’ Here, even the rivers are concrete-lined.

On some days, when the winds refuse to blow the smog into the burnt brown foothills and further up into the San Gabriel Mountains, the low hovering sky becomes the color of gray-white cement, and appears as impenetrable as concrete.

It was now 2 PM, as Lola sat in traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway, where, with 73,000 other commuters, she was stopped dead in her car, unable to move. Today, her immobilized Toyota felt more like a casket, than a means of transportation: How can anyone live under the weight of this unrelenting sky?

Get to the Bottom of This

2009-11-26T16:34:00.000-08:00

It wasn’t that she was naturally a criminal; she wasn’t. It’s just that ever since she had received the results of the genetic test, her knowledge about her future sometimes became too much for her to bear. It sometimes drove her to do things she wouldn’t otherwise do.

The car theft, picking up a handsome stranger after drinking all morning in a bar—what had these meant to her?

Jackie was an excellent therapist. She knew that sooner or later she would get to the bottom of her own issues—-whether she wanted to or not.

Shrink

2009-11-26T16:33:00.000-08:00

Buck was eager to see Jackie again. He was a little surprised at this desire, because he never expected to be so attracted to a woman who was a car thief, and one who began drinking in downtown bars well before noon. He certainly never expected to be attracted to a woman whose profession was “getting inside” the heads of others.

Buck knew therapy was a strange practice, even stranger than auto theft. But that didn’t matter now; he wanted to see Jackie one more time. Even if she were a “shrink.”

First Lie

2009-11-26T16:31:00.000-08:00

Lola, of course, didn’t want to confess that the reason she was here meeting with Jackie was to ferret out information, any information, about this attractive woman who now sat across from her, the woman whom she thought may be having an affair with her boyfriend. No, the last thing Lola wanted to mention today, was anything having to do with Richard. Tempted as she was to confront Jackie, she knew she couldn’t just come out and say, “So you’re the one who Richard is sleeping with!”

“So what brings you here to talk with me, today?” Jackie inquired as she initiated their first session together.

Lola responded with a generic and astonishingly unimaginative, “Oh, I guess you could say it’s my troubles with men.”

“Ummm….”Jackie responded, neutrally, in the inimitable way that therapists do, revealing nothing more than an acknowledgment that her new client had uttered what was probably the first of many yet-to-come lies.

Lying to the Police

2009-11-26T16:28:00.000-08:00

The police were astonishingly polite. They knocked at Richard’s front door, waited patiently for Richard to answer their knock, and when he answered, explained that they were conducting a routine investigation of an auto theft, and wanted ask him “just a few questions.” They even called him “sir.”

As one officer, a lumbering man who looked as if he had killed many criminals in his career, began to ask Richard if he had any knowledge of a couple that he may have seen walking along Mulholland on June 30th--a thin brunette in her mid-to-late 30s dressed in a print dress and a man wearing dark blue jeans and a striped businessman’s shirt--Richard couldn’t help but lie, “No, I didn't see anyone by that description.”

How did they ever find me? Richard worried, almost audibly, as he smiled a big, charming smile, as he lied to the two police officers.

The policemen, seemingly satisfied by Richard’s denial of having seen Jackie and Buck, departed from Richard's doorstep, but not before one of the officer’s, the quiet one who had let his partner do all the questioning, turned to Richard and said, “By the way, we may need to call on you in the future…I hope you don’t mind.”

Cold Handshake

2009-11-26T16:25:00.000-08:00

Lola parked her car outside Jackie’s small, Spanish style home, just south of Melrose. She had found the address with no trouble, and after she got out of the car, she walked along a small cement path that led to the back of the house, where she entered Jackie’s small, but quite comfortably furnished office.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Jackie said, as she extended her hand and looked Lola directly in the eye for a second longer than was entirely comfortable for Lola.

Jackie was warm, but not overly so, and she seemed to size-up her new client with a slow head-to-toe glance that made Lola feel that she was being surveyed for something more than a professional, therapeutic relationship.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, too,” Lola replied, as she took a seat in what appeared to be a leather recliner that was draped in rich-hued , red and tan, Persian tapestry.

Jackie noted that her new client was very blond and very beautiful, but that her handshake had been weak and that her hand was notably cold for a mid-July day.

Lights Out

2009-11-26T16:23:00.000-08:00

On the way to her first therapy appointment with Jackie Weston, Lola found that, for some inexplicable reason, scenes from her childhood were now popping into her head. Although the day was sunny and the Santa Monica freeway was crowded with traffic, in her mind’s eye, she had been transported to her parents’ house in Boston, years ago, when she was about 13.

Letting herself drift, now, Lola recalled the times when, to escape the mid-summer heat and humidity, she would descend the house’s stairs, and enter the cool, musty, catacomb of the basement. Even though it had felt a little eerie, she liked the stillness and the feeling of total aloneness she experienced as she explored what felt like a “secret territory” that belonged only to her. She recalled now, a particular instance, when she had been exploring the shadowy nooks and crannies, and the basement lights had suddenly gone out, leaving her in total jet black darkness. She literally felt her way across the basement’s lightless wilderness, toward the stairway, and then on hands and knees, she ascended the stairs toward the dull and normal ‘everydayness’ of her well lit home, which, despite its seeming luminosity, sometimes felt to her far more like death and oblivion, than any pitch-black basement ever could.

Winter in July

2009-11-26T16:21:00.000-08:00

Lola opened the package she’d received that morning by UPS, from her father in Boston, unwrapping it carefully, and taking extra care not to break its contents. She discovered however, that rather than something delicate and breakable, the package contained a set of ultra soft, flannel sheets. She loved flannel sheets, but the weather in Los Angles hardly called for such cozy bed linens.

She knew her father was well-intentioned and that he really loved her, even if his gifts were sometimes a little “off.” In many ways, she mused, Richard and father are quite similar.

Even though it was only 7 PM, she made her bed with the new sheets, turned the air conditioner up all the way to high, and snuggled, like a tightly swaddled child, under the sheets’ warm reassuring fabric.

Cash Back?

2009-11-26T16:19:00.000-08:00

On her way back from what she feared to be another failed audition, Lola stopped into a little boutique on 4th St. to buy a little “consolation gift” for herself, something to make her feel better. She was a good actress, not yet great, but good, and she had immense acting potential, if she could just get some parts with which to practice her art. She intended to buy just a blouse or an inexpensive new dress, but she ended up buying a tiny little designer purse for $700.

“Seven hindered dollars!” Richard exploded, when she later told him about her shopping diversion .

“Yes $700 dollars.”

“My God, Lola, did it come equipped with $600 cash-back refund, stuffed into the inner pocket?”

Audition

2009-11-26T16:11:00.000-08:00

No one understands who I am, or the pain of what it is to be me, just plain me. No one “gets” how hard it is to just hold on to who I am. It’s just so difficult, so incredibly difficult, to hold out against what the world is so desperately trying to make me be. I won’t be that person, that puppet, that imitation of myself. I’m not that person. I’m someone else.

With that, Lola finished reading the lines from the page, laid the script down on the chair next to her, and in front of an astonished director and hushed room, began to sob uncontrollably at her realization of how perfectly one’s life can imitate art.

Drive, She Said.

2009-11-26T16:09:00.000-08:00

Jackie slid a large hoop earring into each of her earlobes, and threw back her long, wavy brunette hair, as if she were readying herself for a job interview. She wasn’t of course. In fact, she was only headed out to do the week’s grocery shopping, a mundane task that she disliked as much as she disliked some of her clients. Jackie knew that shopping was a necessity--especially if one is to eat--- just as she knew that some clients would inevitably be unlikable.

Even though she was not a Freudian--- in fact she was far from it---Jackie nonetheless liked and had long-remembered that one of her favorite quotes was by Dr. Freud, “A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.”

Lola Makes the Call

2009-11-26T16:05:00.000-08:00

Lola looked at the business card which contained on the back, Richard’s neat handwriting.

So, Richard’s seeing a female shrink, is he? she erroneously surmised. I guess I should have suspected it. He has seemed a little depressed these last few weeks—ever since he had to admit his comedy routine wasn’t funny and his stand-up career was going nowhere. It’s too bad that he’s had to take a job as a chauffeur, but it can’t be such a bad job driving studio executives around and meeting famous celebrities, not really?

Lola picked up her phone and began to dial the number on the front of the business card. She was eager to make an appointment to meet this “Dr. Jackie Weston,” even if Lola imagined she would have to fabricate a range of psychological “issues,” in order to get her first appointment.

The Morning After (Halloween)

2009-11-26T11:44:00.000-08:00

Why are all the things that taste good, fattening?

Lola looked at the bowl of leftover Halloween candy on her kitchen table: Snickers, Baby Ruth, Three Musketeers, M&Ms, KitKats, and Whoppers.

Everything is fattening.

She unwrapped a mini-package of Whoppers and thought about Richard.

Three malted milk balls per package.

And why do you learn the most from the things you’re not supposed to do?

She Loves L.A.

2009-11-25T10:24:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles is an immense city, sprawling over hundreds of square miles, a seemingly endless urban blanket of “built environment,” where automobiles are the de facto native population, and people seem like an added afterthought, a slapdash attempt to humanize an otherwise non-human landscape. Except in occasional incongruous patches of nearly treeless parks, which seemingly have been placed haphazardly about the city, L.A. is unrelieved by any connection to what could be construed as the ‘natural environment’ Here, even the rivers are concrete-lined.

On some days, when the winds refuse to blow the smog into the burnt brown foothills and further up into the San Gabriel Mountains, the low hovering sky becomes the color of gray-white cement, and appears as impenetrable as concrete.

It was now 2 PM, as Lola sat in traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway, where along with 73,000 other commuters, she was stopped dead in her car, unable to move. Today, her immobilized Toyota felt more like a casket, than a means of transportation: How can anyone live under the weight of this unrelenting sky?

Occam’s Razor

2009-11-25T10:21:00.000-08:00

Lola wondered why Richard hadn’t said anything to her about him seeing a therapist. Maybe he was embarrassed, or maybe he forgot? Then she remembered: ‘Occam’s razor,” “Of two equivalent theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred.” She paused for a moment. Was Richard depressed or was he “seeing” another woman? Lola preferred the simplest explanation, and cautiously opened the medicine cabinet, peering in to see if she had any double edged razors on hand.

Not Even a Wedding Ring to Protect Him

2009-11-25T10:18:00.000-08:00

Buck was a moderately observant person; it was a requirement of his profession. As Jackie drove him home, he noticed that she wasn’t now wearing those gloves, those dainty little lace gloves, she had worn when she had driven the stolen Mercedes.

Fingerprints! Why didn’t I think of this sooner. Of course, she was wearing those to protect her from leaving any trace in the stolen Mercedes.

Richard immediately looked down at his bare hands…naked, not even a wedding ring to protect him.

Long-Horn Steer and Six AM Budweisers

2009-11-25T10:17:00.000-08:00

Buck was dressed in his customary dark blue, 505 Levis and a white button down long sleeve dress shirt, although the sleeves of the latter were rolled up to just below the elbows, giving him the appearance—at least from the waist up---of a business man, hard at work.

Buck had long worn what he’d come to think of as his “uniform”: jeans, cowboy boots, and a dress shirt—white or striped. He wore the same sartorial arrangement today, as he did 15 years ago, when he had been a student in Boston. Back in his college days, his friends used to call him “Cowboy” because he was from California, and in their jaundiced view, everyone who came from west of the Mississippi to attend college in the East was considered a rustic ‘cowboy,’ certainly anyone who came from California and was named “Buck”. In fact, most of his college classmates thought he’d never make anything of himself, but much to Buck’s pleasure---they had been wrong.

In the years after college, Buck had become a pretty successful writer—mostly travel writing and short stories for magazines--even if, to most, he still looked like someone who should be roping long-horn steer and pounding down multiple Budweisers, long before high noon.

Home Therapy

2009-11-25T10:15:00.000-08:00

“Don’t you find it a little frightening to see clients in your home?” Buck asked Jackie.“It must be weird for you to have crazy people in your house?”

Jackie smiled as she corrected Buck’s mis-impression, “I don’t see them right here in my living room, Buck. I have a separate office, with a separate entrance. My clients don’t parade through the front door, and saunter through my private living space. Besides, they aren’t exactly ‘crazy’…well at least most of them aren’t, anyway.”

Rosary

2009-11-25T10:13:00.001-08:00

Had Richard been seeing a therapist? Lola wondered. She loved Richard, and she knew he was intelligent, but he was also so up-beat and optimistic and well, Pollyanna-ish. He didn’t seem the “type” to be in therapy. On the other hand, maybe she was underestimating Richard’s complexity---she detected that he had a deeper, maybe even darker, side? Just because he was good looking, didn’t necessarily mean he had to be a vacuous “airhead,” like all the other Hollywood pretty boys Lola met at her auditions.

As Lola pondered Richard’s hidden complexity, his hidden mystery, she absentmindedly unbuttoned the top button on her blouse, and slowly worked the pearlized white button between her left hand’s thumb and slender forefinger, as if the shiny white button were a well-worn bead in an imaginary rosary.

Not a Thing Out of Place

2009-11-25T10:11:00.000-08:00

Wait a minute. What am I worrying about? Richard reminded himself. She doesn’t know that I entered her apartment—how could she? She’ll never discover that I read her journal. I left everything exactly as I found it. Not a thing out of place.

Mortal Sin

2009-11-25T10:09:00.000-08:00

Richard paced around his apartment. He was distraught. He had disappointed himself and he violated a sacred trust, he knew it. It was absolutely taboo for him to read Lola’s journal, even if it was only a few pages. He felt like he had sinned and this was a “mortal sin,” from which he knew he would never recover.” Not as long as Lola was alive.

The Unworried Psychotic

2009-11-25T10:07:00.000-08:00

Jackie spent a good deal of her time listening to people talk about their troubles, their challenges, their childhood’s of abuse and neglect and violence. Consequently, she welcomed the occasion when she would encounter a client who had enjoyed a happy childhood and, despite what they thought, a pretty decent adult life. She welcomed a chance—too rare for her tastes--- to treat the “worried well,” the client who only thought she had problems, but didn’t really. These clients were the ones that gave Jackie a moment of rest, amid a clinical day otherwise filled with mental ice picks and the engulfed psyches of her more disturbed clients. Paradoxically, Jackie sometimes found that her most disturbed clients, the ones who were most troubled, were those who most felt that they lived pretty “normal’ lives--the “unworried psychotic.”

Bad Jigsaw

2009-11-25T10:05:00.000-08:00

Why would a woman who was beautiful and a successful psychotherapist steal a Mercedes and take it on a joyride across LA? And why, Buck wondered, would such a woman spend the morning drinking in a downtown bar with her brother, his friend, and an assortment of daytime drunks? The pieces of the puzzle just didn’t fit. At least not to Buck’s immediate satisfaction. But Buck knew that the world was not a neat jigsaw. He’d learned from experience that the pieces seldom neatly fit, no matter how much we insist that they do.

Anatomically Incorrect?

2009-11-25T10:02:00.000-08:00

While Richard drove home, he reflected on his life. What good was it, he wondered, having a girlfriend who loved him, if she hated him? I don’t think Lola ever really forgave me for that rooster suit I wore on our first date. She’s such a complex person. I should have been more cautions. I wonder if she would have preferred it if I wore a different costume, say the Ken doll costume, even if it is anatomically incorrect?

Blue Ink

2009-11-25T10:01:00.000-08:00

In her white, New Balance running shoes, Lola strode across the living room floor toward her tiny kitchen.

Suddenly, she stopped for a moment, as if arrested by something she’d detected that was out of place in the living room.

She recalled…or at least thought she did… that when she’d departed her apartment for her walk, earlier in the day, she’d left her journal opened to her latest entry. Yes, she remembered now, that the pen she used for today’s entry—a long one, about her qualms about being in love with Richard--- had rested in the spine of the book, like a bookmark. Now however, the journal was closed shut, tighter than a safe deposit box, and the blue gel pen, her favorite for journal writing, was nowhere in the vicinity.

She glanced at the business card with Richard’s message and thought, Maybe I’m just imaging things, but Richard’s message is written in blue, gel pen ink.

Better Safe Than Sorry

2009-11-25T10:00:00.001-08:00

Lola returned to her apartment to find a small, white business card wedged in the gap between the front door and the door frame. She pulled it out and read its neatly lettered, almost architectural, handwriting on the back, “Dropped by to say hello, but you weren’t home.” She turned the card over and noticed that Richard’s note had been written on the back of a business card for a psychotherapist, named Jackie Weston. Lola mused for a moment, before turning the door’s unlocked doorknob and opening the front door. I really should start locking my door whenever I go out. This is a nice neighborhood, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.