Table of Contents
A Piano Player Enters the Room
How I Lost My Mind and Other Adventures
An Unfamiliar Form of Solitaire
This book is for my two favorite people in the world, my mother and father.
Acknowledgments
NATURALLY, I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE GOOGENBERRY Foundation, the Harry Paratestes Trust, and the Ugly French Motorscooter Club, but my real gratitude goes out to the editorial staff of The Sun: Sy Safransky, Andrew Snee, Colleen Donfield, Seth Mirsky, and Julia Burke, who believed in me from the beginning and without whose help I would almost certainly still be lost among the horticultural exhibits at the county fair.
She’s Got Barney Rubble Eyes
I GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN and immediately moved out of my parents’ house into a two-bedroom apartment on Central Avenue in East San Diego with my best friend, Dewy Daldorph, who had recently become a devout Christian. Dewy quickly grew tired of my secular and festive exploits (and my inability to see the light) and moved into a little hut by himself on Redondo Court in Mission Beach, where he could spend more intimate time with his Nazarene girlfriend, though it turned out that she hated the beach. I couldn’t afford the rent, so my two good high school buddies Woodchuck and Goldie moved in with me and shared a room. Woodchuck had a job as a parts delivery driver and Goldie, my second best friend, named for his prominent gold front tooth, was welding iron grillwork in Old Town. We filled the place with bong smoke and beer cans and dreams of beautiful or even passably attractive or even, after seven or eight bongs and a dozen cans of beer, two-legged women, while Dark Side of the Moon played over and over on the little Panasonic stereo by the window.
I was working full time at Pine Manor convalescent hospital downtown, which was packed with attractive young women in short nylon dresses. I joked with them and stared at them and imagined that I could skillfully conceal my erections. Then, one day, I was headed down the hospital corridor about to turn the corner into the break room when I heard what sounded like a donkey being dragged by a tugboat into a river. A new aide in crisp whites sat at a table, her mouth open, the tormented braying sounds emanating thence. Someone, perhaps she, had apparently told a joke. She was laughing all by herself. Her mouth snapped shut when she saw me, and she stared at me as I if were a stuffed duckling dinner with dumplings and buttered baby carrots. No one had ever stared at me like this before. I was a skinny drip with pimples and glasses. Her eyes looked funny and I thought she must be nearsighted. I felt so buffoonishly unnerved and stick-figured and cranberry-faced with sudden prickly rash in my shorts that I moved straight to the snack machine and pretended that she did not exist.
Later that evening she came over to my section, stuck her head in the room where I was working, and smiled at me. “Hi there,” she said.
“Hi.”
“I was wondering if you could help me.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve gotta lift up old Mrs. Fatface, or whatever her name is. In 213.”
“Mrs. Ferris.”
“Yeah, whatever.” She tipped her head and threw back her long, tawny, center-parted, dyed-from-brunette hair. “I need some help.”
“OK,” I said. I followed her down the hall. She moved gracelessly with a mince in her step like an arthritic geisha or a grenade victim from a foreign war.
“My name’s Bonnie Newton,” she said, turning her head and opening her pale masculine mouth at me.
I introduced myself, making sure not to shake her hand because I had recently read a magazine article that stated if you wanted to sleep with a woman, never shake her hand.
“Why don’t we take a break?” said Bonnie, after we had taken care of Mrs. Ferris. “You up for a break?”
She smoked True 100’s, plastic-filtered cigarettes with so little tar and nicotine in them it made you wonder what was the point of smoking them. I smoked Marlboro reds in the box.We were all alone in the break room with the Pepsi machine humming. Her weird, fuzzy eyes were like puddles of shoe polish, and the sharply arched eyebrows above them were darker and more unnatural still, as if she had plucked them completely out, dyed the hairs individually the blackest, most raven black, then replaced each one, inserting the follicles into the pores with a good eyebrow glue. I couldn’t think of anything to say. She leaned over and delivered a chilly scrotum-shrinking whisper in my ear: “I don’t want you to think I’m just a nurse’s aide,” she said.
“What are you?”
“I’m an actress,” she said.
“Oh really. Like movies or what?”
“I’m a member of the Screen Actors Guild,” she said with a haughty jerk of the chin.
“That’s great.”
“I’ve been involved with the Old Globe,” she added. “And I’ve done some movies.”
“Really? Which ones?”
“I had a bit part when I was sixteen in Double Damnation. Did you see that?”
“No.”
“Jason Robards was in that, and Keenan Wynn. I got his autograph.” She nodded rapidly with a sort of squinty electrical wince. “And I’ve had three auditions this year,” she continued hastily. “And I’ll be doing Old Globe Theater and summer stock starting in July, plus this guy’s supposed to call me about some modeling shots.”
“Wow. You’re a model too?”
“Well,” she grated in her dried-out and unmelodic voice, batting her lashes. “It’s like acting. I’d rather act, but you never know. Somebody might see the pictures or recommend me. The money’s good.”
“You’re