of Seconal in the medicine cabinet—you didn’t need to use it to be glad it was there.
Peppy spent a terrible, drunken half hour staring at the unsympathetically pretty landscape and considering the failures of her life. The children, she reasoned, would go to Hal and Lois or Hal and whatever dental assistant he was currently schtupping, or remain with Noreen, and would be better off. After that thought, she dispensed with thinking of her children and focused on her own woes, in the typically selfish way of the suicide. She opened, with some difficulty, the prescription bottle containing the last of Johnny’s muscle relaxants, and reverently dry-swallowed all five.
Life had not turned out the way Peppy had anticipated. All she had wanted was a little show in a nice hotel lobby somewhere like Lake Tahoe, where she could wear a beaded champagne dress, hold a microphone, and ask people Where They Were From before singing “Alone Again (Naturally)” with a sadly ironic smile; then she would break into a little redemptive tap solo while the small horn-section played tight three-part harmonies, and shirtless, smitten dancing boys in cummerbunds and harem pants would lead her around the stage by the hand. She had wanted men to compete against each other for her backstage attentions, offering her turquoise jewelry and trips to Acapulco and leather trench coats, which she would or would not graciously refuse.
Nobody had ever given her the type of attention, or the amount of it, she believed she deserved. For Johnny Budrone to leave was the final insult heaped upon an unscalable shitload of insults, for despite the fact that she loved him with all of the depth, craziness, and thrilling impurity a dysfunctional, narcissistic, codependent, sex, alcohol, and pill-addicted woman could love, she secretly believed he was beneath her, and that he should have been grateful until his dying day that she had nobly condescended to love him.
Johnny’s pills took hold with a woozy surge of blankness, and with a final blast of “Nights in White Satin” on the eight-track, Peppy revved up the sizable engine, floored the gas pedal, and drove in a blast of shameful glory off the cliff, plummeting into the deep green forever of Paradise, CA.
The 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado was the first car on the market equipped with a driver’s-side air bag, an automotive phenomenon Peppy knew nothing about. After taking the nauseating plunge over the side and falling thirty-plus feet down with a sickening crunch onto the pile of other cars, Peppy assumed, as the pillowy plastic embraced her, that her guardian angels had manufactured the illusion of a painless death, and it was in deep and final relief that she nodded into a shock and barbiturate slumber, which was only disturbed forty-three minutes later when the paramedics interrupted her soft and deathful dreams by chainsawing her door open.
Peppy was taken to the hospital. Her stomach was pumped, and she was held for observation, but she was unscratched; her suicide had resulted in nothing more than a broken Lee Press-On nail. The air bag had cushioned her fall, the wig had absorbed the flying glass, the muscle relaxants had made her as pliable as an ink spot during impact. In short, while it had the best intentions of a real suicide and was clearly not a bid for attention, it was, in Peppy’s words, “an ass-out failure.” A legal hassle awaited her when she got out of the hospital; charges having to do with her willful destruction of the car and the potential endangerment of others (“Endangering who?” Peppy shrieked. “All the happy people picnicking in the mashed cars under my car? Shrub elves? Who?!”). After a weepy trip to the courthouse these charges were converted into a $500 fine, pending proof that Peppy was undergoing counseling.
The brush with eternity shook Peppy. For a few weeks she was a gibbering half-person who stared into middle distance and sprang into tears unprovoked. Her children worried about her. They were especially kind, and this was interpreted by Peppy as a confirmation that she was quite mentally ill. The inexpensive counselor Noreen had found in the Reno phone book was an Earth-shoe-and-gauzy-blouse-wearing Jungian-in-training named Gerald, who was sympathetic to Peppy’s weeping tirades but basically ineffectual, and offered her few tools with which to reassemble her psyche.
During the evenings, Noreen, sweet mother that she was, remembering Peppy’s childhood affection for the magical distractions of the big screen, would drive Peppy and the kids to movies, where the kids treated Peppy like a brain-damaged person, holding her hand and shielding her eyes from the violent parts. As a result of this concern, the children, who normally would have opted for nudity or gore when accompanied by an adult, increasingly stood in line for gentler, PG-rated films. Fame seemed appropriate, given Peppy’s emotional fragility.
The children sat on either side of their mother and enjoyed the movie, but were terrified by the fact that Peppy sobbed through the whole thing.
(Most people seem to have nothing but a subconscious idea that movies are as deep a primordial template for living as the original myths were to the Greeks when Zeus was Sky God. Bad movies full of recognizable clichés are particularly influential. They suggest intrinsic, universal laws and patterns of cause and effect; equations that seem mathematically true:
1 1. Goodness = Reward [both earthly and personal]
2 Believing in Yourself = Reward (both earthly and personal]
3 True Love = Possible for Everyone [via perseverance]
4 Proof of True Love = Personal Sacrifice
5 Want-Something-Badly-Enough = You Can Get It [via perseverance]
6 Rich People = Bad [until they learn the Valuable Lesson; see #9]
7 Poor People = Noble [unless tempted to become rich; see #9]
8 Hard Work = Golden Ticket to Fame and Reward [see #1, #2]
9 Money = Not Everything
10 Good-looking = Good
11 Too Good-looking = Bad
12 Too Good-looking + Rich = Outright Evil
13 Quitters = The Worst
Can we say this logic has not affected our lives? Can any of us say we have not been brainwashed to believe that if we adequately perform the prescribed mambo steps laid out on the Hollywood life-template floor mat, we will earn our heavenly reward on earth?)
Though Peppy could not articulate it, Fame (a Coming-of-Age film, but also the Ur-text of several 1980s “Victory Through Uninhibited Dance and/or Music” gems of the screen) represented a world in which talent obliterated every other worldly inconvenience: genetics, poverty, race, even New York traffic. If you were a dancer, why, you tour jeté'ed out the door and pirouetted down the street to the mailbox, and traffic halted to admire you. Musicians spontaneously played the violin while eating chili in the lunch room. Drama kids expressed unctuously tender Personal Truths without fear of ridicule, singing the Body Electric with gusto and pride. Talent was its own planet, free of barriers, free of shame, where there was no color, no language, only oversexed teenagers in thin body stockings, frayed leg warmers, and shredded toe-shoes, dry-humping to joyous disco music on the roofs of taxicabs: the molten core of life. The truth of it bashed Peppy like a gong: each talented child held a thunderbolt which (s)he could hurl at the world and make it fucking pay attention.
As the movie ended, Ned and Liza stared at their tear-drenched mother.
“Mom?” Ned asked cautiously, touching her knee. “Mom? Are you OK?”
Peppy didn’t seem to hear him; she was fixated on the rolling credits, trembling.
“Mom?” asked Liza, trying to look into Peppy’s eyes. “Is something wrong?”
“Nope,” Peppy said, snapping out of her trance. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just happy, because I know what I have to do now.”
Ned and Liza shot each other looks of dread. Peppy gave them a desperately hopeful smile.
“You kids are going to go to the High School of Performing Arts in New York City,” Peppy sobbed happily, her eyes as loose, intense, and toxically shiny as balls of mercury.
This mania did not abate as the children thought it would in the days that followed, when a film usually loses its grip