Rinse and Repeat

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

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

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

“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

"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

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?

“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.’