I did not meet Annabelle Gurwitch until we found ourselves on the same stage, or rather the same back porch at Sandra Tsing Loh's house, for the first annual Bad Girls of LA Lit. Annabelle was smart and sly and stylish and adorable, as she had been since I'd first seen her on TV, as co-host of Dinner and a Movie:

Yes, that Annabelle, so hot, so funny. You want to know how hot and how funny? She's managed to make a book on menopause funny and a bestseller, I SEE YOU MADE AN EFFORT: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50, the book has been featured on every station and in every paper, Annabelle has made it a triumph, look at what a triumph on Bill Maher! Seriously, watch that clip ("My bedroom is a minefield of erection killers" - haw!) and try not to fall in love, I dare you. I adore her, that's you, Annabelle.

The Scent of Petty Theft (originally excerpted in Los Angeles Magazine) 

The rich are different than you and me. Fitzgerald’s line repeats in my head as I pull my dusty Prius into the driveway at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It has been years since I have been a guest in such an opulent setting, but I am neither intimidated nor overly impressed, because I am as comfortable at my corner burrito stand as I am in a five-star hotel. I have transcended class. I am an artist.

This is the narrative I have crafted for myself since I was nineteen and flat broke in New York City.  I didn’t see it then, but it was my youth, a certain amount of beauty, style really, and the promise of a big career that allowed me to travel between classes. This combination can give you an all-access pass to the enclaves of the wealthy, but there is a time limit. There’s a grace period you’re allotted when the future is ahead of you, before people in your industry start saying things like, I’m so impressed with all the ways you stay creative, which translates to, It’s astounding that your body hasn’t been found decomposing in a flea-bag motel in the high desert. I am not becoming anything anymore.  That’s the kind of thudding honesty that occurs at fifty and it’s that kind of thing that can lead to petty theft.

I’ve arrived to discuss my duties at a charity event being held at the hotel that evening [NB: This is the same venue where Julia Roberts hooked her way into Richard Gere’s heart in Pretty Woman.]

Monica, the catering manager, who I’m introduced to, is professionally attractive in the way that every woman working here today is. Tall, in good shape, but not so beautiful that she takes up space in your head, We sit down in a cozy alcove on a silk damask settee and I sip what is probably the most expensive latte I have ever ordered. How do I know that? The price is written in Arabic.  We’re discussing the event, but I’m distracted, maybe it’s because I’m shivering. It’s as cold as a meat locker. Glancing around, I see that I am surrounded by expensively maintained skin, capped teeth, and two sure signs of wealth: women with hair so blond and so immovable it can only be described as starched and, though we are nowhere near a body of water, 75% of the gentlemen present wear nautically themed jackets, brass buttons polished to perfection.

And I am gripped by a sense of dread that this might be the last time I will be invited into a place where even the air smells expensive.

It turns out that hotels have started pumping fragrances through their air vents to aromatically enforce their brand.  The Beverly Wilshire’s aroma, Purple Water, has been designed to reach into your reptilian brain and mimic the smell of old money.  It has notes of leather, cigars, and cooked peas.  If an odor had corporeal form, Purple Water would be wearing an ascot. [The W Hotel chain, with its hipster appeal, uses a micromist diffusion system to infuse the atmosphere with a scent that’s uniquely calculated to encourage the spending of lots of dough. W’s scent, named “Bling,” calls up champagne, stainless steel and sex. Perhaps they harvested wrist sweat from Sean “P. Diddy” Combs during a VIP event and worked from there.]

The hotel’s Purple Water works its magic on me and I hear myself announcing that I’m going to be so tired after the event, I will need to need to stay overnight. The event planner actually agrees to this and after lunch I head up to my suite.

 My hotel room is well appointed and maintained in a way that my home, built in 1932, will never be with its corners that don’t meet exactly.

 There are no watermarks on the suite’s tables, no cats have sharpened their claws on the upholstery, and the walls bear no children’s handprints or bicycle skid marks. In fact, the paint looks so fresh I have to touch it to determine it’s not still damp.

 It also has a feature I always think of as the true sign of luxury: a heavy door separating the toilet from the rest of the facilities. It’s like Vegas: what happens there stays in there. 

 I open a bottle of Asprey hair conditioner in the bathroom and inhale deeply. I proceed to stuff every single bath product into my purse and call down for more. I took home rolls of toilet papers from the nightclubs where I worked in the 1980s, yellow legal pads from the offices I worked in the 1990s and there was also that time I was sent to audition for the director John Hughes at a hotel in New York. I sat with another actress, who I assessed as so plain I was genuinely saddened that she’d never work in film or television, though I’d greatly admired her stage work. That actress was Cynthia Nixon.  Afterwards, John candidly admitted to not seeing me in the role, I thanked him and on my way out stopped to use his bathroom.  I stole every amenity in plain sight and a few more from the housekeepers cart in the hallway. I couldn’t stop myself then and I can’t stop myself now.

A card on the marble bathroom vanity reminds me that guests are invited to go to the spa, so I have to take them up on that as well. Who am I to turn down the invitation? 

The spa changing area is paneled in dark mahogany, the lighting indirect and muted and there are no windows. It’s like a tomb, a bomb shelter, or the inside of a bank vault.

There are cut orchids everywhere. There’s even one in the pocket of the spa robe.

And an attendant appears and inquires whether I am experienced. Is he making a Jim Morrison reference? No, he means, have I tried The Experience Shower. It would just be impolite to refuse. I push the first of three buttons in front of me. This one is labeled Atlantic Swell.  Streams of water lash my back; the pressure varies and moves from side to side like I’m being tossed in the middle of the ocean. I startle and turn when I feel someone’s hand tapping me hard on the shoulder, but no one is there. It’s The Experience Shower’s many nozzles ratcheting up the pressure. I must be farther off shore now, as I’m drenched by torrents of hard rain. I begin to feel seasick.  I saw The Perfect Storm. This might not end well! The lights in the shower area move from yellow to green to purple.   Was the person who designed this on acid or in the employ of the C.I.A.?  It was like The Experience Shower was trying to get information from me. I switch to Caribbean Rain. It’s a gentle sprinkle, falling softly, but it soon becomes chilly so I try the mist setting. A slow swirl of cool mist envelopes me. 

When I emerge fully Experienced, I check the full-length mirror to see if I’ve sustained any bruising, but I am intact. Pulling on my robe, I again think of that line—the rich are different than you and me—and then I remember the rest of the sentence-- and we will know them by their showers. No, that can’t be right. I know that, but my brain got jangled during the monsoon and it seems true. In less than five minutes, I’ve been drenched with enough water for several large families to cook and bathe for a week. How, I wonder, will I ever go back to my state mandated low flow shower head with its 2.5 gallon per minute limit?

I know I can’t stay in the spa all evening. I do have a job to do after all, so I head upstairs, change into my clothes and proceed down to the ballroom. It would be too tedious to explain my duties, but they involve two and a half hours of facilitating a panel about the preservation of wetlands that includes an elderly philanthropist, a noted film producer and an American alligator. One of them urinated on my lap during a spirited moment. After the show, I see that mistress of efficiency, blandiful Monica, and ask her to point me in the direction of a bathroom. She says there is one I can use just down the hall. I follow a hallway that narrows until I’m practically brushing past the walls.  The lighting starts to look different, dimmer, and even the paint looks less lustrous. The hallway ends in a stairway lit by a single naked light bulb. Where am I going, Anne Frank’s bathroom? I open the door at the top of the stairs. It’s a restroom. There’s a row of individual stalls separated by dented metal dividers and an industrial soap dispenser with a greasy pinkish film coating the pumping mechanism. Water drips into a rust-stained cracked sink, and rough, brown paper towels are stacked haphazardly in a pile on the windowsill. It’s simply outrageous.  Where’s my bathroom with the heavy door? Where are my products? It doesn’t smell like any kind of money here, old or new. She’s sent me to the bathroom for The Help. I am not The Help. I am a guest. I turn, march down the stairs, run out of that hallway and search until I find a hotel guest bathroom.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I would like to say I was kept awake horrified by my own self-involved, entitled, elitist behavior, but that would not be accurate. After dousing myself with more Asprey Purple Water, I lay awake because the pillow had my initials monogrammed into them. That’s something I am still a little confused about. Do they keep stacks of initialed linens?  Surely there must be an algorithm that predicts the frequency of combinations otherwise the linen closet would be immeasurably vast? Was my head resting on the same pillow used by Alan Greenspan? Do they remove the embroidery after you check out or was I expected to take the pillowcases home? It was truly vexing. Plus, I didn’t want to waste one minute of how pleasurable the bedding felt by sleeping.

In the morning, I head back across town where the air is hotter, the streets are dirtier, where a sticky cough drop and half an Ativan can be found in my bathrobe pockets.

Buy, I SEE YOU MADE AN EFFORT: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival from the Edge of 50, here

Five years ago today, two children were found in the Willamette River. Eldon Smith, age four, had drowned. His seven year-old sister Trinity had screamed for help for 40 minutes and was rescued by a couple living along the river. Their mother, Amanda Stott-Smith, was arrested for forcing her children off the bridge. She was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison before the possibility of parole.

I started writing about Amanda and the children and those impacted by this incident -- the family, the friends, the cops, the lawyers, the cops, the community at large -- the day after it occurred. There were people close to the situation that did not want me to do this; many others, including members of Amanda and her ex-husband's families, felt quite the opposite, wanting to tell me what they knew, of the years of deception and double lives leading up to the crime. Hearing the sentencing judge pronounce, “No one will ever understand how this happened” and reading editorials that espoused some version of, “No one could ever have seen this coming,” had left them troubled, even angry. They troubled me, too, as they did not answer the question of what drove Amanda to the bridge that night, a question I set out to find answers to, and did find.

I have put the book to the side several times to publish other books, or because I could not figure out how to tell the story. The manuscript is currently 300-pages long. I expect To the Bridge to be done within the year. Below is chapter 2. It was May 29, 2009, when we all, or nearly all, knew little to nothing about how what happened, happened, and were looking for answers.

To the Bridge

I went to the Sellwood Bridge three days after the arraignment. I told my husband I was going to buy watermelons, but instead I drove to the bridge. I had to see where Amanda took her children and, so far as we knew, threw them over.

The Willamette River cuts Portland in half, east from west. Ten bridges span the river within city limits, the Sellwood Bridge being the southernmost. To get to this bridge from the east side, you drive east on Tacoma Boulevard, past one-story homes with fenceless front yards and then, lest you wind up going over the bridge, you turn north. The closest cross street is Sixth. I parked on Sixth across from Riverside Corral, an old sailors’ bar-turned-strip club, and wondered if Amanda had, too.

I walked the long block to the bridge’s walkway and saw the sort of memorial that is spontaneously set up for children who have died in public: stuffed bunnies and teddy bears, one Mylar balloon that read, “We’ll miss you,” and a white board onto which people had written their good-byes and God blesses. Some of the writing was in children’s large wobbly script (“To the bravest girl in the world! We are sorry to hear about your brother”). Tucked amongst the wilted bouquets were notes, including one in a little girl’s loopy handwriting that read, “I hope your new birthday life goes well.”

I continued onto the bridge, my goal being the highest point in the span. The walkway was maybe three feet across. Approaching cyclists must and do ring their bells; people cannot easily pass one another. The bridge has one traffic lane in each direction. There is no sidewalk on the south side. If Amanda walked her children onto the Sellwood Bridge, then she walked where I was walking.

As I continued along the bridge that Friday, I thought, maybe Amanda did not park and walk. Maybe she stopped the car on the roadway. This seemed unlikely. Had she stopped the car, she would have caused other cars to jam up behind her, and been seen by cars coming from the other direction. Even on a dark night on the poorly lit bridge, someone would have seen her taking children from the car and thought, what the hell? I did not think she could have taken that chance.

The next time you are out, or perhaps you can do this in your own living room, look at the size of four- and seven-year-old children. They are small. You can lift them from beneath their arms and pass them over a waist-high rail with little trouble. Two would be more trouble, especially if they were kicking and screaming. They would have been dead weight had she taken them warm and sleeping from the car.

But I did not think the children were sleeping, because I did not think Amanda could have parked on the roadway, gotten them out, thrown them over, and sped off without being seen. It was too busy and too tight a roadway. I was not even taking into consideration that she might pause for a moment after dropping one child, then another over the rail and into the river seventy-five feet below.

Did she look down? Did she see them in the water? She would have heard them, not merely because we know the girl, at least the girl, was screaming for help, but because a mother, whether she wants to or not, recognizes her child’s cry. I had this happen in a hospital full of squalling newborns. Under doctor’s orders to walk, I was on the other side of the maternity ward when I heard crying and knew it was my baby and, as fast as the stitches allowed, got to my room to see she had been brought there, where she waited, screaming for me.

I had no idea how long Amanda waited on the bridge after she threw her children, or if she waited at all. If she parked her car on the roadway, she could not have waited. She would have to have gotten back in the car and driven off.

I did not think she parked on the bridge. I think she walked the children onto the bridge. Is it possible she made a game of the walk? This seemed an unlikely scenario; that she had the largeness or smallness of heart to tell her children, we’re going to play a game. One does not want to see the children skipping, at one in the morning, along that narrow walkway. Though one is inclined to think, there would be no skipping. It is scary enough in the daytime, for an adult, to walk here, feeling the velocity of the passing cars, your waist brushing the too-low rail. It is too easy to imagine going over that rail. Even when you know you have no intention of going over. Looking at the water below, I experienced the heat flash you get on the backs of your thighs when you look down from a great height.

It’s unlikely the children experienced this. It was dark. It was late, past most young children’s bedtime. Their adrenaline would have been pumping for other reasons: How mad was mommy? What was happening? They were too small to see over the railing, to see how far down the water was. What could they know of their fate? Being thrown off a bridge in the middle of the night was out of the purview of what seven- and four-year olds need to know.

I was having a difficult time thinking their mother told them what she was going to do. But I had read the following, and it made me unhappy to know it:

“A massive search was launched about 1:20 a.m. when 9-1-1 calls started coming in from people who heard the screams of children and an adult woman coming from the river.”

Where were they when Amanda was yelling? Did she make the children stand with their backs against the concrete railing, with its church window-shaped cutouts? It is possible the boy was small enough to crawl through one of these cutouts. Certainly, neither of the children stood as high as the rail. They may have stood with their backs to the rail, the breeze of passing cars pushing them against it. They must have been extremely frightened: What were they doing here, with cars passing by, perhaps honking? Perhaps their mother had to wave cars on, to say, “We’re okay, we’re fine,” and the children would have thought, are we?

I did not know if Amanda was ranting or silent. I thought the latter would be scarier to a child. Perhaps she was in a mood so bad, a mood the children could not hope to navigate; that all was chaos. Perhaps she told them what she was going to do. Perhaps she made them stand together atop the rail and told them to hold hands. Maybe she told them, they had to do this. While it seems heartless to inflict the information on them, I preferred this to seeing them tossed in their sleep. This way, they knew their fate, impossible as it was, and in the case of Trinity, were somehow able to gird for it.

Eldon had no chance. How, at four years old, in a moving river, in the middle of the night, do you survive? You don’t. You take in some water, and you take in more. I imagine his sister would have been holding on to him. We know she did, at least part of the time, because they were found next to each other in the river.

I imagined everyone who heard about the children wished they could have helped; that we could all line up on the bank of the river in the middle of the night and each offer Eldon one more breath. He had only his sister in the water with him. She did the best she could. She screamed. She yelled.

And where was their mother? Can we imagine her standing on the bridge, watching her children drift north, wondering when they would stop crying? Was she afraid someone would hear her children? Was that what got her back in her car and gone fast, the fear of capture being broadcast with each of her daughter’s screams?

Or did she sleepwalk back to her car? Or did she run? Was she crying? Was she yelling? Was she white and cold? Did she feel victorious? Was her heart pounding? Did she turn around? Did she shout the children’s names? Did she almost call over the railing, “You’ll be okay, swim! Swim!” It was a clear still night, a windless night, the only reason, David Haag said, that he was able to hear the girl’s screams. As I am sure her mother did.

Only two living people knew what happened on the bridge that night: Trinity, who had been released from the hospital in good physical condition and interviewed by detectives, and Amanda. No witnesses had come forward; so far, there was no one to claim they had seen anything, on or off the bridge, until the children were found in the water.

On this Friday on the bridge—the day Trinity was released from the hospital, two days before her brother’s funeral—the weather was glorious. There were barely ripples on the Willamette; the air was soft; the trees on the west bank were in full leaf. The landscape was indifferent to what had happened six days before.

As I stood at mid-span, beside a second smaller memorial of bouquets tied to a lamppost, a motorboat passed underneath. It slowed, the driver turning back to look up at the bridge. He looked up for a long time. Perhaps he was thinking; that’s a long way for two little kids to fall. He was also looking at me, wondering, perhaps, whether I was part of this story. 

Several years ago I was having dinner with a former editor, a man a few years older than I.

"Don't you hate going to dinner parties these days," he said, "where everyone is over 50 and just wants to go to bed early?"

I myself love going to bed early, but anyway, I had to tell him I did not know about these dinner parties, as many of the people I knew and hung out with were in their 20s and 30s, an effect of having a then-21 year-old daughter, and a husband whose business employs mostly young people, young people who sometimes become friends.

Natalie Briggs is one of these people. I adored her when she worked for Ristretto, where we bonded over books and pastry; I know very few people who can simply look at a scone and tell you why it is worth eating, or more often, why it's not, and deconstruct the reasons why. One might apply the same forensics to writing.

Several months ago, I saw Natalie read her poetry and was struck with a thought I would like to have more often, that here was the real thing. 

I Hope They Coming Crashing Down Into Our Bed

Our skylight shattered in the storm, the footsteps of men on the roof, and the downstairs neighbor is singing, his song coming through the floor, inside the bareness of my feet. So one fear defeats another, the moving now knows to never grieve and today I have been speaking from my dreams. A thick tornado has buried me sand. There are few who get to die this way, by storm, but the grey-yellow clouds are the same color as your teeth. It is me who is maybe a little bit insane, but it is your mouth in the sky.

When I moved from LA to Portland in 2004 I knew one journalist who lived here, if only by name. "You should meet Michael Totten," my buddy Matt Welch told me. "He's blogging some cool shit about Iraq."

Michael was, as well as writing an outstanding piece on Libya for the LA Weekly. He did not know any journos in Portland because the market here would not pay him for his work, and so when we met, it was with a clear and mutual thirst for a colleague determined to write serious journalism, to further succeed doing so.

And boy, has he, putting out three nonfiction books in as many years, and now, turning to fiction. As I quoted Michael in a short interview that recently ran in a local magazine, "I've always wanted to write about the end of the world, and now I have."

An Excerpt from Resurrection: A Zombie Novel

Parker had been married once. Met his future wife at a trendy café named Spinoza’s in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. It was the kind of place Parker always hated, not only because he didn’t fit in there but because it attracted the kinds of people he wished never colonized his neighborhood to begin with—the young, the hip, the beautiful, and the moneyed. Ballard used to be an honest and slightly gritty place for men who worked the docks, the ship locks, and who made things with their hands. It was never intended for soft people who lived in undeserved luxury and made boatloads of cash clicking away on their laptops.

The only reason he went into Spinoza’s that day at all was because he needed the bathroom. But when he saw a young woman sitting there by herself with her newspaper and a latte, he couldn’t help himself. He decided to order one too and see if he could gin up the nerve to take the empty table next to her.

There was something about her, though he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Not even after they married could he figure out what it was. She was attractive, sure, but not the most attractive he’d ever seen. She seemed friendly and approachable enough, though he had no idea why he would think that since she was just sitting there reading the paper. There was just something … gravitational about her, like she’d been engineered just for him.

He ordered awkwardly at the counter. He’d never had a latte, a cappuccino, or an Americano. He didn’t even know what they were. But he couldn’t just say “I’ll have a coffee.” They didn’t have regular coffee in those kinds of places.

The pretty woman with the newspaper sat far enough from the counter that she couldn’t hear him fumble his order, and thank heaven for that or he wouldn’t have sat next to her. She looked so peaceful and content, so at ease in the world as she flipped strands of her brown hair over her ear.

He didn’t intend to hit on her or ask her out for a date. He just wanted to enjoy the pleasure of her attention even if it only lasted a couple of seconds.

She sat by herself at a table for two. He sat next to her at another table for two and placed his drink in front of him. It looked like a dessert. He expected it to taste like one too, like a coffee meringue pie or something. Normally he drank plain old coffee, black, but the creamy and bitter whipped goodness in his mug, despite being foofy and gay, was outstanding. Wow, he thought. This exists?

“This coffee is extraordinary,” he said.

“Isn’t it?” the woman next to him said. The corners of her eyes crinkled up when she smiled over her mug.

God, Parker thought. I love this woman. He didn’t know why. He just did.

Her name was Holly and she was a regular at Spinoza’s. She had gone to school with the café owners. He told her he was new to fancy coffee and she seemed delighted to explain all the options.

They were so very different, but they were married in less than a year.

He built cabinets for a living. She worked in an office downtown as a paralegal. His friends were working class. Hers were professional. He loved the outdoors. She enjoyed fancy meals out. He drank beer. She liked red wine. Once in a while he embarrassed her when they went out with her friends, and he knew he seemed a little rough around the edges in mixed company, but she loved him and he couldn’t imagine living without her. She had a soft and gentle soul and seemed to appreciate his brusque masculine qualities—she was genetically hard-wired to do so, after all—until one day he hit her.

He didn’t mean to. Really, he didn’t. It just happened. They were arguing about money, which was a stupid because they both made plenty. He wanted a motorcycle and could afford it. She wanted to spend the money on granite kitchen counters instead.

She might have talked him into it, too, but instead she said she was tired of being a slave to his lower-class lifestyle.

He’d never hit anybody before. He looked like the type of guy who had been in a couple of fights, but he hadn’t.

He didn’t hit her too hard. It was really more like a slap. He didn’t strike her with a closed fist, didn’t break any bones, didn’t make her bleed, didn’t even leave a mark that lasted more than five minutes. But he did strike her cheek, and he’d never forget the sound or the look on her face when he did it.

Her entire life shattered in one instant.

She’d never forgive him, not in her heart, and he knew it.

He could not have been sorrier. That slap hurt him more than it hurt her. It sounded ludicrous when he said so, and she screamed that it was the most outrageous thing she ever heard, but it was true. It changed him as a person. It sentenced him to be a different kind of man for the rest of his life, the kind of man who hit women. A domestic abuser. A wife-beater. He never did it again, nor would he ever—no, really, he wouldn’t—but he would spend the rest of his days as a man who had once smacked a woman.

 Eventually she could look at him again, and a little while later she could talk to him again, and eventually she even had sex with him one last time, but it ended in tears, and at that moment he knew it was over. She never slept with him again. Never even hugged him again. She left a few months later and said she was sorry but she wouldn’t be back. She cried when she left and she even said that she’d miss him, but she was true to her word. She never came back.

That was two years ago. Parker thought about her every day since. After the plague swept the world, he worried about her so hard he vomited.

What happened to her? Was she alive? Did she get bitten? Was a distorted version of her out there somewhere, diseased and warped beyond recognition? What would he do if she came at him on the street baring her teeth? Would he shoot her? Would he smash in her skull with a crowbar?

Would he smash in her face if he had to?

Buy the book, Resurrection: A Zombie Novel

Back in 1997, Buzz magazine contributors attended a monthly luncheon at Maple Drive in Beverly Hills. We may not have been glamorous in our day-to-day lives, but for this we dressed, we chatted, we ate shrimp salad. One afternoon, a young man was seated on my right. His thick Russian accent was surpassed by his very thick black-brown hair, a vertitable plank of hair. I asked him what he did for the magazine.

"Caricaturist," Roman Genn said, to which I said, oh, my stepfather is David Levine, the longtime caricaturist for The New York Review of Books, whereupon Roman -- who denies he did this but I am telling you, he did -- dropped to his knees in front of my chair and said, "What? What did you say? What?" And then there was a burble of how he'd been looking at and studying Levine since he was young, that my stepfather was a master, the best, and I said, yes, yes, you should meet him.

Meet they did, and hang out many times. Roman would call my mom and Dave's apartment in New York, saying, "Hello, hello, it's KGB!" at which my mom would shout, "Dave, it's Roman!"

Roman and I have stayed steadfast friends for more than 15 years. He was at my wedding party; he was one of the first people to take note that David, so very sadly due to macular degeneration, could no longer draw. And still he visited, until Dave died in 2009. Whenever Roman contacts me, he asks, "How's Mom?"

So there's the friendship, but there has also been watching this talented, talented man grow and grow in his talents, the lacerating caricatures he draws for the National Review and other publications, the oil paintings of public figures. I know Dave (who was not easy to  impress) would have admired them, including the one of Churchill below, illustrating the quote, "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

Speaking of knowing: B. Frayn Masters is one of those people in Portland that everybody knows, whether as producer and co-host of the storytelling series Back Fence PDX, her writing in McSweeney's, her general all-about-townness. I know her from when we were both judges of a short story contest sponsored by a local jewelry maker, a cool concept and the winners of which we hashed out over beers. Frayn's story below (which originally ran on Airplane Reading) swirls around in the sweet spot that is excitement + anxiety + booze, and is today's Mayday essay.

Is There Something I Should Know?

On a plane back home from Portland, OR, to Burbank, CA, I flopped into my spacious window seat. A few months earlier, through a humor-driven letter pleading with Alaska Airlines customer service to up my miles, I was, in fact, awarded thousands of miles and awarded VIP status. The latter allowing me to upgrade to first class, at no charge.

Sliding my computer into the ample space in front of me, and then rolling on cherry lip-gloss—I pulled out a book. Feeling a wee bit self-satisfied with my false entitlement in the big seats, I ordered red wine from the menu where everything costs nothing.

After opening my book, I looked up and saw the First Class flight attendant bumbling around all aflutter. Tightly embracing an electric guitar case, she shot a self-aware expression at the passenger approaching her. It was an expression of someone who couldn’t believe what was happening was happening, this was her one chance to reveal the perfect expression she’d rehearsed since she was 9, her skin opened its pores like big mouths to suck in every atom of the moment. Her eyes, now tearing, were locked on this person as she motioned broadly to the seat next to mine. To that person I could not yet see she said, “You’re, you’re, right here. I’ll put your guitar in a very special place.” The skin on her arms had now basically grafted to the case, her cheeks flushing in tandem with her frozen grin, exposing the ghost of braces.

“Right. Good. Thank you.” Then. There he was. Incredibly fine, 40-ish, tall, timeless, bespectacled, angular jaw—looking so, so, so, SO very familiar.

I did a quick Nancy Drew. Guitar = band. His age = popular in the ‘80s. His style = pop band. His melting my panties English accent = English. The bedazzled flight attendant = famous with ladies. Nothing.

He ordered red wine—we are so totally alike! His poster-ready face spoke to me. My fear of take-offs vanished.

Not knowing exactly who he was sort of worked to my advantage. Our conversation flowed like whiskey over ice. We talked about music, though I could never get him to spill anything specific enough to help me out. He asked about my writing! We talked about the books we were reading, and that we shared a soft spot for P.G. Wodehouse.

He excused his lyrical self to the lavatory.

Craning my neck to casually look at his area, I saw something, there on his seat; it was imprinted like a shroud…bent to the shape of his squarely muscled bottom. It was his boarding pass. I craned further, while remaining buckled in. The name on it gave me no help. It was so ordinary in contrast to his brilliant presence.  Who. Is. He.

We read, sipped wine, and laughed.

We landed.

Time slowed, my head angling downward, smile: coy. A dash of bangs covering my eye, gushing like the flight attendant—his hand came toward mine, his fingertips graced my right index knuckle—my skin jolted—“It was very enjoyable flying with you this evening.” I have no clue what I said back.

My roommate Krista picked me up outside the airport. Once we merged into traffic I said, “Hey, who’s John Taylor?” Her eyes widened, “From Duran Duran?!?”

Oh shit, of course. “I just sat next to him!!”

Krista slammed on the brakes and slugged my arm, hard. “I can’t fucking believe you sat next to John Taylor and didn’t know who he was, you dumbass!”

We went home. We got out the record player, the posters, and the records. We turned 13 for the rest of the night.

It's been a fabulous month of essays here on the blog, and I thank all the authors. Go re-read them, and buy their books, and mine, too.

We are going to wrap it up with one of the best. Erika Schickel and I met over the printed word, as contributors on the media website LA Observed. We read each other's work for a few years before we became  part of the Bad Girls of LA Lit (that's a teenage Erika in the photo). Her work rides the edge between humor and anxiety, hide and reveal, love and heartbreak. It's a precarious place to write from, but boy, can this girl smoke it. Here she is xx

Ten Cents a Dance

I was a dreamy, romantic child, growing up in Manhattan.  Our family’s record collection was full of soundtrack albums that my film critic father brought home from work.  These records formed the nexus of fantasy and self-esteem.  I spent endless afternoons memorizing show tunes and choreographing elaborate dance sequences.  All I needed was a twirly skirt, maybe a pair of tights on my head to simulate long, flowing braids, and I was the star of my own personal, MGM musical.   My inner world was one of Technicolor excess where people dressed in improbable colors and fans blew chiffon scarves into infinity.   Our couch was Ziegfield stage, a large teddy bear stood in for Gene Kelly and in this world, I was perfectly myself, beautiful, creative and free. 

When I was about eleven I became fixated on a song from movie I had never seen called “Love Me or Leave Me” starring Doris Day.  The song was full of pathos and mystery, and something almost dirty that I almost understood.  It told the story of a lonely, haunted woman working in a dance hall, living for the amusement of rough men -- something that in my film-addled, horny, pre-pubescence, I devoutly aspired to be. I played this song over and over every day for weeks, memorizing it, choreographing sultry moves to it, trying to sing it just like Doris Day:

I work at the Palace ballroom, but gee that palace is cheap
When I get back to my chilly hallroom, I'm much too tired to sleep
I'm one of those lady teachers, a beautiful hostess you know;
One that the palace features, at exactly a dime a throw.

My parents’ bitter divorce when I was twelve launched me into a life of petty theft and heartbreak and I blossomed into a full-fledged fuckup.  My mother needed an enemy, and with my father out of the house, she logically turned to me.  I was happy to oblige, and engaged in some high-risk behavior that eventually got me shipped off to boarding school, then kicked out of boarding school.  At twenty-four I landed in Los Angeles as the lonely, haunted woman I had once dreamed of being.  

Broke, with a degree in English Literature and no job skills, I was combing the back of the LA Weekly classifieds one day, looking for a fast way to come up with rent that wasn’t prostitution, when I came across an ad that screamed “Earn $400-$600 a night as a hostess at Club Flamingo!” 

The club was downtown on 12^th street.  I walked up the wide, creaking staircase of an ancient building to the second floor and asked for the manager.  The bouncer walked me past the dance area.  A mirrored ball sprayed colored dots across a rough, empty floor.  There was a bar area, and a long banquette, where a few bored girls sat, legs crossed, their pumps dangling off their big toes. 

Marty, sat behind a huge, oak desk in an office cluttered with ashtrays, posters and cracked disco balls.  He explained the rules: “No alcohol or drugs, cigarette smoking only on breaks in the designated area.  Single men are not allowed on the dance floor, no leaving the club with customers, no blowjobs, no hand jobs, no grinding.”   He pointed to a closed circuit TV screen next to his desk.  “Every inch of that dance floor is on camera.  If you break any of these rules, I will fire you.  We run a clean joint here.” 

And with that, I became a Taxi Dancer.

Ten cents a dance, that's what they pay me
Gosh how they weigh me down.
Ten cents a dance, dandies and rough guys, tough guys who tear my gown.

Of course, with inflation, it was more like ten bucks a dance.  The house took half and I got the other half, plus tips.  On my first night I took my place on the red vinyl banquette alongside the other dime-a-dance girls – I was the only Caucasian in the lineup.  The dandies and rough guys looked us over from bar tables.  In heels, I was good a foot taller than just about everyone in the club.  I thought that was going to work against me, but it turned out, I spent very little time on the banquet.

My first customer was a stone-faced Hispanic man who followed me out to the dance floor just as “Hello” by Lionel Richie was starting up.  As in Doris Day’s days, taxi dances were timed by songs.  He put his hands on my waist and drew me close.  It felt strange to be held by a stranger.  We did an awkward shuffle, my forearms resting on his shoulders, my hands dangling in the air behind his back, a gesture that connoted a kind of vintage insousiance and got me out of actually touching the man.  I didn’t quite feel like Doris Day, but the night was young.  We didn’t speak, and he didn’t even really look at me.  I could feel his palms sweating through my thin nylon top.  It made me feel cold and clammy.

“Hello” ended and I took him over to the desk to punch out and pay up.  He didn’t tip me anything.  Already I felt I was failing.  What had I done wrong?  How was I fucking this up?    Back in the days of the twirly skirt I had known who I was: a dreamer, a limerick-lover, a joke-teller, a girl with a dead-on Julia Child impression.  But all that had long ago disappeared, and I had learned to live outside of myself, looking to men to tell me who I was.  I had moved west to be a movie star and find myself, instead I found myself draped over an old man with gold teeth at the Club Flamingo who was telling me about his discount auto parts business.  I was as far away from myself as I could possibly get.

Seven to midnight I hear drums, loudly the saxophone blows,
Trumpets are tearing my ear-drums, customers crush my toes.

By the end of the first week I started to get the hang of it.  I danced with a chatty, chunky fellow in a loveless marriage.  He wanted to tell me his whole sorry story, from his Bahamian honeymoon right up to that very evening when he got in his K car and drove in from Bellflower.  He kept me swaying through four songs, sliding his hands up and down my back, stopping just at the top of the crack of my ass.  He was misunderstood, he said, put-upon, a good provider, a man’s man, married to a cold bitch.   I nodded and cooed my sympathy.  When I clocked him out he tipped me ten bucks. 

Back on the banquet I chatted with a girl named Angela who was the only dancer there who would talk to me, the other girls clearly hated me.  “There are two kinds of girls here,” she said,  “respectable girls and Corner Girls.”  She pointed to the far, dark reaches of the ballroom where couples were nearly motionless, but for the subtle, curved, jungle boogie of the dry hump.  “Those girls think they will make more in tips if they let guys take liberties.  But it’s bullshit.  And watch out for the pillar,” she said, pointing to a large, square pillar in the center of the dance floor.  “Guys will try to get you back there because it’s the one area in the ballroom where Marty doesn’t have a camera.”

I danced with a lot of Japanese businessmen who all asked me to remove my high heel shoes, but I towered over them in stocking feet anyway.  I tried to make conversation, but they didn’t have enough English.  They were as far from home as I was, and their loneliness rolled off of them like Tsunamis.  They were silent and polite, and I felt like a big, tacky neon sign in their arms.  The ancient parquet floor of the Flamingo was ragged from years of wear, and the splinters snagged my nylons and lodged in the soles of my feet as we danced.

Sometimes I think, I've found my hero
But it's a queer romance;
All that you need is a ticket,
Come on big boy, ten cents a dance.

I took a bathroom break.  The ladies room was cavernous, with broken sinks that dripped, and soap dispensers filled with powdery Borax.   I was washing my hands when two girls came in, one of them bee-lined for the sink and began furiously yanking out paper towels, dabbing at the front of her mini-dress.  “The guy fucking came on me!  I’ve got jizz on my fucking dress, Mija!”

“Damn Alicia, that’s what you get for being a Corner Girl.”

“Fuck you Yvette, I got kids to feed.”

I went back out to the banquette and was immediately picked out by a slick trick in a shiny suit and pointy shoes.  He asked me questions about myself.  I told him I was a runaway, that my father beat me, that I had three kids and was trying to put myself through school.  He barely listened as he tried to dance me toward the pillar.  I tried to dance us back out into the open.  He danced me right back to the pillar and slid his hand up my shirt.  I let him linger a moment before I pushed his hand away.  He tipped me twenty bucks.

Fighters and sailors and bow-legged tailors
can pay for their tickets & rent me
Butchers and barbers and rats from the harbor
are sweethearts my good luck has sent me.

The cries of anguished, empty men rebounded off my own, hollow heart.  We were the same, wandering around in a world that didn’t really want us.  We were all in limbo there at the Club Flamingo, dancing to bad Top 40 songs, feeling the meter running as we killed time, waiting to punch out.  Three weeks of my life disappeared into the halflight of the Flamingo like cigarette smoke in a turbine. 

The Foot Doctor was a regular at the club.  He rented girls, bought them Cokes and then rubbed their feet for a paid hour.  It was a solid arrangement.  My feet felt like raw hamburger, so I let him go crazy.  He looked at me with soft, wet eyes as he cracked my toe knuckles.  I purred with pleasure.  He told me he was falling in love with me. 

Though I've a chorus of elderly beaus,
stockings are porous with holes at the toes
I'm here till closing time
Dance and be merry it's only a dime.

I let men take greater and greater liberties.  I became a for real Corner Girl, letting customers dance me behind the pillar and grind into me.   In the outside world I knew what I was doing was wrong, but the Flamingo felt like the arena of my confused soul made manifest.  The rules didn’t apply there.  I was sexually and psychically aroused by the power I had over men.  I never made $600 dollars in a night, but I came close.  I would drive home to my chilly hallroom, my purse crammed with small bills, my clothes rank with sweat and Hai Karate.   I would stand in a scalding hot shower at three AM, trying to wash it all off of me, but I couldn’t because it was inside of me

In my fourth week at the Club Flamingo I danced with a polite black gentleman named Bill.  He held me at a respectful distance, not too far, not too close. He spoke in full sentences and asked me about myself.   Because he was the first intelligent person I had met at the club, and because I liked him, I decided to tell him the truth:  I was new to Los Angeles.  I was from New York.  My father was a film critic, my mother a novelist.  I had graduated from an Ivy League university in June.  His eyes bugged out in disbelief.  “What are you doing here?” he asked me. 

“I don’t know,” I told him.

He put me at arm’s length and looked me in the eye.  “The choices you make today will affect the rest of your life.  Choose carefully, Young Lady.”

I drove home that night through the spooky, deserted streets of downtown Los Angeles, and knew I would never return to the Club Flamingo.  The next time I put on stockings and drove downtown, it was during daylight hours to work as an office temp – which was prostitution of another sort.   

It would take me another two decades to understand what Bill meant, and by that time it would be too late.  I made a lot of bad choices based on the bad notion that I was intrinsically bad.  But now I know I wasn’t really bad, I just got swept up by a song and gave myself away.

Sometimes I think, I've found my hero
But it's a queer romance;
All that you need is a ticket.
Come on, come on big boy, ten cents a dance.

My review of James Nestor's wonderful new book, Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, appears in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal. Mr. Nestor is a very brave guide, indeed. How brave? Here's a clip:

While trying to "crack the ocean's mysteries," Mr. Nestor puts in with a group off Réunion who tag bull sharks in order to track and understand their movements. The ragtag crew blasts the German metal band Rammstein to attract the sharks (who also like AC/DC). And he takes a ride in an unlicensed submarine hand-built by a New Jersey prodigy named Karl Stanley and run off the coast of Honduras. There are no liability waivers to sign. "If something bad happened, all passengers, including Stanley (who pilots every dive), would die," writes Mr. Nestor.

Read the review, and buy the book; I think you will love it. 

photo of Hanli Prinsloo