I drive us to Hollywood. Park. Get a table at Fabiolus, this Italian restaurant I like. We sit on the back patio, outside, where you can smoke and where there’s a huge skyscraper right next door and looking up from that low vantage point creates these crazy feels. Like you’re dizzy from the height—but you’re on the ground. The building was closed due to earthquake damage.
I order us a bottle of wine—just a starter.
Fabiolus’ bees buzzing around us—servers in white tops and burgundy pants—bringing me wine to taste and helping Clarity with the menu.
Fabiolus himself comes out and I stand and we hug and kiss. He goes to Clarity and kisses her hand. I ask him for my favorite bottle of wine. Then he buzzes off to take care of another privileged table.
“You know the freaking owner?”
“Yeah, I used to come here a lot when I first moved to Hollywood. Just sit here and drink and write. A few years of that and you tend to be on a first-name basis with the owner. Now we give each other Christmas presents and shit.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
“ ‘Cause I want you to have an excellent lunch. And I want to get you drunk so that at least for the first part of your drive back to Phoenix you won’t have to listen to those girls talk.”
“You got a problem with my sister?”
“Clarity, no. But they’re going to be talking your ear off about improv shit and I gather by the fact that you didn’t go with with Ashley yesterday that you’re not into improv shit.”
“That’s true.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not trying to sweeten you up. I know you have a boyfriend.”
“Fiancée.”
“Oh-ho!! Yesterday he was a boyfriend and now he’s a fucking fiancée??! If he’s a fucking fiancée then what was that kiss for this morning?”
“That..was a kiss..for a sweet man who took me around the park yesterday.”
“Well I accept. The world lacks that kind of kiss, I think.”
“You just spent eighty dollars on two bottles of wine and you’re gonna tell me this isn’t a date?”
“Clarity, it’s a date in the sense of two people who like each other’s company getting together to enjoy that company, not a date in the sense that there are a bunch of complex romantic entanglements that dictate that after this lunch you must do a certain thing or I must do a certain thing. Ashley and Purity are meeting us here, yes? So as far as we know, this is the last time we’ll ever see each other. We like each other—I think I can be so bold as to say that. And, because I like you, I want to spend the next hour or two listening to you say things that surprise me and me saying things that surprise you, eating good food, drinking wine, getting tipsy, all in a place where we can smoke and enjoy southern California weather. I congratulate you and your fiancé. I expect an invitation to the wedding. I hope you make many babies and someday, in pure joy, I get to hold one of them and laugh at the miracle that is life. I am not a jealous person. I am not a desperate person. Anyway I’m talking too much and that’s all I had to say.”
“No, I like what you were saying.”
“I’m not naive. I know you’re not going to leave your fiancé for some guy you spend one day at an amusement park with—”
“Except you’re not just some guy.”
“Then life hurts, maybe hurts us both, but what are you gonna do, move to LA?”
“No. Not with my kid.”
“And I can’t move to Phoenix.”
“No? You don’t want to move in with me and my dad and the cutest little five year old you’ve ever seen?”
“Asha is amazing.”
“So move in.”
“I like my freedom. Though I guess what I do with it is questionable. I like to be able to roam from Hollywood to Calabasas and get into the deepest, most dangerous trouble I can find.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m sick, Clarity. I don’t know when it happened. My mind might have broke when I was homeless. Or..I might have been this way for a time lots longer than that.”
Clarity scoots forward in her seat.
“I see that in you.”
She sips off her wine.
“I actually..love that in you because..I’m the same way.”
“I’ve heard.”
“From Purity? What did she say?”
“She said if she was Sleeping Beauty then you were Amy Winehouse. Some shit like that.”
“Well Sleeping Beauty hasn’t always been Sleeping Beauty, if you want the truth on that one,” Clarity says. “Sleeping Beauty used to be wilder than Amy Winehouse and Sleeping Beauty got herself scared with how far she had gone and that’s why she snapped back into that virginal little act who you know as Purity. Purity is scared shitless about life.”
“What about it.”
“About living it.”
“That’s why the younger sister has a kid and the older sister is still a virgin at—”
“Twenty seven. You know I love Purity—”
“Of course.”
“But I’m afraid if she doesn’t lose it soon that 27 is going to turn into a 30. And that 30 is going to turn into a 35.”
“Well if she and Ashley move out here and Purity works at Improv Olympic, she won’t be a virgin for long. She’ll be like some underwater candy that only jellyfish eat and all these iridescent purple jellyfish’ll just come from every direction up and down Hollywood Boulevard and glom onto her from every side and they’ll eat that bitch alive, sucking onto that bitch and puncturing her virginity from every side and it’ll be like a Hollywood-style Purity deflowering. She’ll be fucking ex-members of The Real World cast, which is all that hang out at the IO anyway—”
“For real?”
“For real. Especially the Hollywood cast. It’s like they imported all these mid-westerners out to Hollywood and they’re still here eeking out their Real World money trying not to go home. You know that one brown-haired girl from The Real World: Hollywood, kind of a mousy face, long straight hair? I can’t say her name here or she’d sue me—”
“Yeah, I know the girl you mean.”
“That girl is always hanging out at IO. I even took her home one night.”
“Really?!”
“Yes!! That girl is a fiend for doggy style up-the-ass then stick it in the puss then back in the ass, then puss, then ass, then puss, then ass. Pull on her hair a couple o’ times and she squirts all over your fucking cock balls and everything.”
“Jesus Christ,” Clarity says, snorting her wine.
“Don’t worry,” I say, “if they move out here, your sister will lose her virginity in like the first five, ten days—I’d place money on that.”
“Thank you. I feel very reassured.”
“Plus, playing Wonder Woman. Fuck. Guys’ll be walking up to her giving her their business cards twenty-four seven. So there’s that angle.”
Clarity says, “Would you fuck my sister?”
I look at her and try to gauge how drunk she is.
“With the Wonder Woman costume, in her bed, no condom, if she shaved her pussy..then maybe. But I’d rather fuck you.”
Clarity almost chokes over her wine.
“Did you just say that?”
I sip my wine.
“I did.”