Fiction by RONNA DRAGON
I pick Lionel up in my red Honda Civic. The sunroof is missing and replaced by an ill-fitting and unfinished piece of plywood that I have jammed in its place. The factory-installed sunroof that came with the car, for no clear reason, just went flying off one day as I drove north on the Hollywood freeway. In true bohemian fashion, I used the insurance money to pay the rent.
Lionel is waiting on the curb. He’s smoking a cigarette and carrying a large faux leather briefcase engorged with sheet music, power bars and a stack of various actor’s eight by tens. He has been wearing the same rumpled dark blue button-down all week now with a brush of something white and crusty, (read donut glaze) on the left pocket.
“Ruby don’t take your love to town!” he sings as I roll down the window.
“That’s original,” I say as he hoists his ever-expanding body into the strangely narrowing passenger seat.
“You are not representing your tribe well,” I say scraping the dried gunk off his shirt with my fingernail.
“Let them deduct points,” he says. “I’m lousy with ‘em.”
“Lousy with ‘em,” I repeat. I’m practicing. That line only works if you throw it away. “Just lousy with ‘em,” I say again.
“Can’t do my laundry, water heater all fritzed out.” He fumbles with the seat belt and kicks the briefcase deep into the floor area to make more room for himself. “Problems in the real world, just lousy with ‘em,” he sighs.
“Your life is unmanageable, and that is all I will say.”
“If only that were true,” he says as a stage whisper, and then proclaims, “Bonus Round! And if that were true, would someone truly unmanageable manage this?” He pulls a cartoon of Marlborough Lights and sets it on the dashboard and then what looks like a used crinkled plastic baggie.
“Precious little darlings!” he says now waving the coveted treasure of four joints rolled thick while singing the last chorus of Happy Days Are Here Again, playing both Judy and Barbra’s iconic version. I feel the joy rising from the center of by soul.
We crest Laurel Canyon where it empties out onto Hollywood Blvd. The iconic tree-lined streets hold real magic. And say what you want about LA, the sunlight is hazy, but the air itself is so lite and weightless. It carries only the intoxicating fragrance of night blooming jasmine mixed and tart sweet lemon blossom.
“Everything here comes from somewhere else. Even the palm trees are imported,” he says breezily, trying on the Polish accent of the character in The Way We Were that uttered it first.
We turn down Sweetzer, passing Irv’s Burgers, where the boys are still out from the night before. Their biceps are as tight as their jeans. They look a seedier street version of a Clavin Klein ad.
“Unmanageable,” he says ruefully.
“And I thought you’d abandoned that idea back in the Valley”
He stays silent.
“It’s not an indictment. It could be a jumping-off point.” I’m twenty-six years old and just getting sober at a little clubhouse on Robertson. Lionel has “no addiction issues” but comes for the entertainment value. Last Monday, we saw one of the Monkees take a 90-day chip. I have opinions about Lionel’s habits and try as I don’t, they leak out.
“Well, as we all know,” he says, “it’s never polite to point, point.”
The conversation is sidelined by the flurry of fagdom before us. Santa Monica Boulevard is the mecca of gay life in 1984. I wonder what the boy from Boise, ostracized for wearing short-short cut-offs and a pink cowl neck sweater to the town basketball game, feels like getting off the bus in West Hollywood. Proof again, it really is location location location. It’s like a city for guys that go to the gym, hook up, change outfits and go to the gym again.
We find parking in front of the expensive Vons, now called Pavillions. I pull the plywood over the gaping hole that is the roof of my car.
“You can pick out your meat,” I say.
“While you pick out your meat,” we say together.
“That should be on the sign – ‘Hot guys! Just lousy with ‘em!’”
No one has more fun than we do. I don’t care that we will never have sex, because I just want to be with Lionel all the time. We don’t yet use the phrase ‘my person’, but he is mine, even with his sloppiness, weight gain, and jaw thing. Plus, the main focus of our relating is on me and my impending career. And Barbra. We talk about Barbra. Her ridiculous way of running, her early song choices and the people that were around her before she became legendary. We discuss it, dissect it. Lionel indulges me. It is our personal academy, our School of Famousness. Lionel is the professor and I’m the bobbysoxer.
We lean over to look at the cover of People Magazine left on a bench outside the cleaners. Madonna has bought a house in the Hollywood Hills. The neighborhood is checkered with lovely, understated Mediterranean-style homes that look over the big reservoir. Madonna has painted her house red with humongous bright yellow slanted stripes. It’s disturbing. I’ve seen it myself walking around Lake Hollywood. “What kind of person has to make you think about them twenty-four hours a day, even when they’re not home?!”
“And there you have it,” he says.
I nod my head gravely. It’s all coming together. We flip to the back pages where there is a photo of Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Neilsen. They look like two robots dressed as two humans. I look to Lionel.
“I’ve told you,” he says like a kindly uncle, “it’s not what they have that is extra, but what they have that’s missing. That’s what makes you pay attention, because they need it so much.”
We fancy ourselves, deep thinkers. We talk about ‘The Work.’ I think I might have stolen this phrase from Uta Hagen. We are pretentious but sincere.
Video Active is the premiere video rental in a town in love with showbusiness. Boys quoting Katherine Hepburn and La Taylor. These icons belong to the boys. An industrial size disco ball spins under blue neon lighting. Even at eleven a.m. the town is all go. The guy at the check-out desk is wearing a tank top that exposes his beefcake muscles. He is fake tanned the color of a fuji persimmon. Our arrival sparks a momentary rise of interest, only to quickly drift to disappointment. Neither Lionel, who sports a dick, nor I, without one, are very exciting prospects. He points his attention back to the doorway like a dog waiting for his owner.
Lionel goes to a bargain bin in the back and holds up two boxes. In one hand it’s the musical ‘Fame,’ and in the other a film called ‘Witches, Faggots, Dykes, and Poofters.’ I point to the Poofters box.
We duck into Basics. It’s a trendy coffee shop with a lot of hardwood. “Hard wood,” I start.
“Lousy with it,” he finishes.
“I have to get back by two,” he says.
“Why?” I ask.
“My mom and Andy are calling.”
“That’s every Sunday, right?”
“Yeah, but we’ve missed a few, and they are getting a little pushy about it.”
Lionel always mentions his mother and Andy in the same breath. We place our order at the counter and take a tall table by the window while we wait. “Andy is your stepdad, right?” I ask.
“Yeah, but for a long time,” says Lionel.
“And is he always on the call with your mom?”
“Yep.”
“Do you ever just speak directly with your mom?”
“Without Andy? Nope.”
“How long has he been in your life?” I ask.
“Murky story,” says Lionel.
“What? How old were you?”
“Six or so, but Andy was in our lives before that. He was my father’s best friend.”
“Really? So, what happened to your dad?”
“He died.”
I’m not sure how I don’t have more backstory, Lionel and I are such good friends. Oh yeah, I think, we mostly talk about me. “How did he die?” I ask
“There is a rumor he was murdered. Brian said he would tell me about it one day.”
“Dolly Levi!” the barista calls out, then rolls his eyes.
A few chuckles in the room. Lionel curtseys and sashays up to the bar as if he’s rearranging his pretend petticoats.
Back in the car, Lionel is doing that thing with his jaw, rotating it around and around. He does it unconsciously, and it’s starting to get on my nerves. “You gonna see someone about that,” I ask.
He fidgets through the briefcase and pulls out the baggie. “Yeah, right now.” He lights the joint and takes a deep toke. “His name is Dr. Thank-You-Very-Much,” he says as he exhales.
“Yeah. I used to see that same guy,” I say. I feel the nostalgia of easy relief as I breath in the second-hand smoke.
A Mazda Miata, the color of a blue M&M, is stopped at the light. Two older guys are riding in the white leather front seats. They have preppy sweaters tied around their polo-collared necks. A younger guy no older than twenty launches himself out of the little cargo area in the back and into the crosswalk.
“Ciao Bella!” they wave, and kisses are blown.
Lionel pulls out the extra chocolate chip muffin he bought “for later”. He swallows it in four bites and then brushes the crumbs off his lap and onto the floor mats. I pull back the plywood. The sky is a delft blue.
“Who would murder your father?” I ask trying not to pry if it’s difficult for him to answer.
“Maybe Andy,” he says.
We come to a stop. I check to make sure my mouth is not hanging open and we sit quietly until the light changes. We head east on Fountain Avenue. Lionel relights his joint. “Brian says that Andy had designs on my mother all along. But I think he came for me,” he exhales.
“What?”
Lionel stares ahead and rolls his jaw. We are on Crescent Heights as you head up towards Sunset. There are the old ornate apartment buildings where actors and writers of Hollywood in its day hung out. Spanish-style duplexes covered in overhanging Bougainvillea. Bougainvillea is the perfect flower for Hollywood, vibrant and beautiful while alarmingly painful if it pricks you. I want to tell Lionel my observation, but his mind is elsewhere.
We turn onto a stretch of Hollywood Blvd. that is residential. Lionel is staring out his window. On the sidewalk, an older, queer looking gentleman is eyeballing the young boys sitting and laughing on a bus bench.
“Did something happen with you and Andy?” I ask.
“Whaddaya gonna do, shoot the shvans? he says quietly.
We turn onto Laurel Canyon to make our way to the top of the hill and descend into the valley. “How old were you?”
“Just about six. Then nine. twelve.” He rolls his jaw, “Twelve.”
“For all the years?” I ask.
Trying to make himself comfortable, if that’s even possible, he pushes the leaver by his feet and jams the seat backward. “Yup,” he says.
“I guess you didn’t want to let anyone in on that secret.” I mean, what do you say?
“Well, it’s not like there weren’t clues,” he says, and then softly, “We were absolutely lousy with ’em”.
Outside his apartment off Riverside and Whitsett, Lionel starts to open the car door and stops. “The worst part,” Lionel reaches for his briefcase and holds it on his lap.
“There’s a worse part?” I am straddling the line of giving what he is saying the gravity it deserves while pretending that this is something I’ve heard a million times. I am so out of my depth; I pity my self!
“I felt bad about my mother,” he says. Lionel is now talking to himself, working it out. “Her husband was cheating with me which made me my own mother’s rival.” He flicks his cigarette butt out the window, takes a beat and then in true stoner fashion exclaims, “I’m making popcorn!”
He feigns wrapping a large scarf around his neck and gathers his trash. “Well, I’m off!” He takes his hand and brushes the bangs off my forehead. “Your girl is lovely, Hubbell!” he says looking me square in the face.
Lionel grabs his briefcase and pulls himself out the still-shrinking space of the car door and walks resolutely on.
But we begin here.
The Beverly Hills Diet 1980
Day One: Pineapple
Day Two: Papaya
Day Three: Pineapple/Papaya
Day Four: Watermelon
The gist of this diet was the idea that calories or portions were irrelevant. What made a food fattening was its enzymes in combination with other enzymes. This was food-combining. The first day on the diet, you ate pineapple all day long, until the inside of your mouth hurt. But the crazy thing was, you lost at least three pounds in just one day. Gluttony was the ticket. You were encouraged to pig out as long as you ate only the prescribed foods of the diet. If you were prone to obsession, it was an eating disorder waiting to happen.
We all showed up to work with our Tupperware containers. Day 9, Apples and Popcorn. Day 21, Chicken!!! This was a big day. I ate three whole birds, burning my wrist on the broiler, standing there in front of the oven pulling the meat out with my fingers. If you fell off the diet, you had to start all over again with the dreaded pineapple.
Lionel comes into the office with his stack of plastic boxes. “If there was an all-waffle day, I’d be all over this thing.”
“You could own this town,” I smile.
Lionel is wearing a baby blue and white stripe shirt under his yellow coveralls. Self-conscious about his body, he’s a never-nude, before I ever hear about anyone else who lives like that. A t-shirt in the pool kind of guy. We work together in my brother’s singing telegram company. Neither Lionel nor I tap dance, so we work in the office and sing songs over the phone. I give a rollicking rendition of Happy Birthday to the 1812 Overture. Lionel sits back in his chair trying to pull a piece of pineapple out from his back teeth with his tongue. His face uncomfortably contorted, embarrassed that he is in public after all, and then breaks into a grin at my last stanza. I hang up the phone as he stomps and claps at my ridiculous performance.
“You, Ruby, are a diamond in the rough,” he says, adjusting the lid on his Tupperware. Time stops just a little as no one has ever said that to me. It’s like hearing I love you for the first time.
Lionel is twenty-two and I am nineteen. His older brother Brian is a in the music business. He produces a one-man musical revue starring Lionel at a small 99-seater on Cahuenga Blvd, which is Hollywood Adjacent in every way. Lionel has a five-piece band, and two backup singers dressed like street walkers, they wear black Capezio leotards, feather boas, and have sassy swagger. Lionel calls out to them, “Right girls?!” and the back-ups dully answer, “uh huh”. He struts like a young Peter Allen. He wears a blue sequined shirt and does musical theater type jazz moves. It’s all very Eighties which is fine because it actually is the Eighties.
I have never had a friend like Lionel. And I have never had anyone put their focus on me. It’s like quiet sunlight in a storm. It is like having my own personal spotlight. It is the new addiction. Somehow Lionel is no longer pursuing his own dream, we are working on mine. We get a great piano player for Lionel to fantasize about and we scheme away putting on a series of One Woman Shows. There is ‘Ruby at the Moment’,” ‘Ruby 80% Original’,” and finally, “The Ruby Show,” I wear a rubber skirt and cone bra like Madonna. I have costume changes like Cher. In one show, on the stage, there is a life size dummy lying on a bed and I recite a quote by Proust. The LA Weekly gives me a great review and calls me “pithy.”
My life is expanding, and so is Lionel’s. There are new players. He brings a series of women to see my shows, actress types, all aspiring like me. There is now a rotation of rough diamonds who are looking to Lionel. They beg the question—if he can do this for her . . . ..
I get a gig at a new nightclub on Wilshire. There is status here, but Lionel is not interested. He is off and onto something else, someone else. There is a lot of low hanging fruit in Hollywood looking for someone to paint a still life. I feel like a jilted lover, and little but swiftly, I start to doubt myself. I stop pushing to make things happen and wouldn’t you know, things stop happening. I let time go by and then some more. I start to pay attention to other things, like paying my rent on time and having a sex life.
I get a job in a production company doing accounting. I get married. I have a baby. I move to the valley. And I keep an ear out for gossip about Lionel. I notice the succession of women who adore him are often left in the lurch just as they come to depend on him the most.
Lionel throws himself a big birthday party every year. I am still invited as I am prominent in his origin story. I’m like wife number one to a polygamist. We are at The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in a swank room filled with black-and-white George Hurrell-style photos of the glamourous stars of the past. Lionel has just directed a famous television actress in a one-woman show, and her kiss on his cheek becomes his Facebook cover photo. He has achieved some notoriety but still sucks with money. There’s a funny queer guy who does a one-man show called “Tray Tables Up! My Life in the Skies” about his time as a Southwest flight attendant. I sit with him, and then I find myself at the end of the party, seated next to Lionel when the waiter brings the bill over. Lionel looks at the seventeen-hundred dollar total and without the slightest upset, mentions a story of someone who was supposed to pay him, but due to some fuck-up he will have the money the following Tuesday. It is his own version of the classic “I would gladly pay you Tuesday” for a ridiculous birthday party I can’t afford today. And like a total untreated, you-name-it, I say, “I can put it on my credit card, and you can pay me on Tuesday.”
Tuesday comes, and Tuesday after that, and then months and years. It has really pissed me off that Lionel has not paid me back. I finally take him to small claims court. A week later, I am contacted by the producers of Judge Judy. I kid you not. They think we might make an entertaining segment for the show, and so I contact Lionel. “They will pay the balance you owe me plus we each get five hundred dollars.”
“I won’t go on Judge Judy,” he says.
“Why the fuck not? I demand. “It’s not like anyone we know watches Judge Judy!”
“My friends watch Judge Judy,” he proclaims.
I pull the lawsuit, and I never speak to him again.
Until Now, We Are Here
When I look at my life, everyone can be forgiven, except Lionel. Streisand writes an 800-page memoir, and it’s a Christmas miracle! I think about him because I know he is loving it. There is so much to natter about! And I start to think, what was the big thing? Why don’t/won’t I let it go?
I have made a shit ton of amends through the years. The process is simple. You take a resentment. You chart the offense, and then you ask yourself what your own part in the experience was. It’s this crazy alchemy process where invariably, the person you think owes you an apology suddenly deserves a bigger one from you.
What was my part? I am asking myself and hoping for an honest answer. It couldn’t be just the money. Not for thirty years. He let me down, but that was totally his pathology with women, not even personal. Why can’t I just forgive him, and let it go?
I run it through my mind. He left me when I needed him – Okay.
I had a shot at it. And he took off – Yes, that’s right.
It was my big dream, but I needed him to build it—starting to get a little sticky.
And then, I see it, my part in the great upset. I could feel it. It was nauseating and embarrassing. So hard to look at, that of course I would hide it from myself. What was the fricking infraction? My dream was lost. But he didn’t lose it, I did. The truth now looming larger than the Hollywood sign. I never believed in myself, but I loved the way he did. And when he moved on, there was just a pumpkin and some mice scurrying about.
Ah the ‘ah ha’ moment, where everything changes, day is night and night is day. The players swap their roles. Lionel is not the great big asshole, I am. Selfish as the day is long and deluded to the core.
I am lightning quick to message him on Facebook. The sentiment is simple and true. Hey. I was thinking about you, and how much fun we had, and how much I loved you.
He instantly sent back a long message. He took a photo of a wall of his Hollywood apartment that he had tacked up show posters, and old Polaroids. There was me, and there was me. He told me how he looked at my face every day. He thanked me because the work we did together gave him a career.
Then we talked about the Barbra book, which he had renamed “Barbra’s Fifth Step” and the audio version “Pillow Talk with Barbra.”
Lionel’s birthday rolled around and I saw that he was posting from a hospital. And then the call came from “Tray Tables Up! My Life in the Skies.” Lionel had stomach pains. Lionel went to the hospital. Lionel died from complications from a routine colonoscopy. Lionel, who had never attended to his health and certainly never was going to let anybody look up that old wazoo. He had been compromised so early. Might as well have slapped down yellow tape in an outline. There is no doubt, this was a crime scene.
I’m watching a YouTube video from that long ago show on Cahuenga. He is lean and sinew, so handsome with dark curly hair, satiny blue eyes. He is singing a Carly Simon ballad. About the father smoking in the dark room, the mother oblivious in the master bedroom where she reads her magazines. The lyric goes: I hear her call sweet dreams / But I forget how to dream.
It was all right there. Lionel indulged the aspirations of many but rarely stepped out with his own talent. He was self-conscious about his weight, but always funny, ‘That fried chicken is not going to eat itself!’ He told me years before that it was sexual suicide to be a fat queer unless you wanted to be a teddy bear, which was something he didn’t relate to.
He used to say that ‘having a relationship gets you out of the chorus’ but he lived like a sexual hermit, finding men to crush out on but never be intimate. And for all the hours he spent listening to others process their issues, the closest he got to therapy was watching Prince of Tides.
He was, though, one of the great loves of my life. I am grateful I had the last-gasp chance to tell him how much I loved him. I was just lousy with it.
* * *