Amputation, p.4
Amputation, page 4
‘‘Finchie’—ugh. I’m gonna throw up in my mouth.’
‘She wouldn’t be the one writing it, anyway, okay? I’m thinking Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the anti-biopic geniuses. They did Larry Flynt and Ed Wood. And there’s actually been some very cool interest. I talked to Coralie Fargeat’s rep today—’
‘Who?’
‘Coralie directed The Substance. And the producers of Anora want to meet. They said it’d be great for Sean, but I think a woman should helm.’
‘Should helm? Are you fucking retarded?’
They met in 2018, at her quirky, beloved boutique Palisades bakery. He came in for a job interview—Esther needed a driver for the catering 33van. He was scruffy and virginal and there was instant attraction. From her, anyway. Rocky didn’t know a thing about the Altschuler family’s vast fortune until he was clued in by the savage waifs that worked the counter. He was Diane Keaton’s daughter’s good friend; Dexter and Rocky met at veterinary college. (Diane loved Esthergen.) When he decided to drop out—he couldn’t bring himself to give injections to the animals— he wound up staying in Diane’s guesthouse for a month while she was in Europe doing a lame satire about the making of a fictional White Lotus. Rocky was never a film buff but watched all of the actress’s movies before going on to discover TCM, the Criterion Channel, Mubi, Sky Arts, blah—until then, he’d been a picture show virgin—and the rest, as Esther snarkily liked to say, was cinematic history.
To everyone’s surprise, the odd couple married in 2022, a year after Dex exchanged her own vows.
Dexter finally said hey, maybe you should follow your passion and actually learn how to make movies instead of setting off on the berserkly outré, quixotic road trip you’ve been boring everyone to tears about. The most selective film school in the country was the Altschuler Center of Moving Images at USC; after a short, amiable chat with the dean, Rocky was welcomed to the fold. For a semester, he tried a shaky hand at writing and directing then decided what he really wanted to do was produce. His wife seeded the development money for a joint venture that Rocky named Unsafe and Effective Flikworx. Currying to Esther’s predilections, one of the projects in development was a spin on Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones—a soapy, Fifties melodrama about two escaped chain-gang convicts (one black, one white, handcuffed together) who ultimately gained each other’s respect, and even love, while eluding capture. Rocky’s updated version would star two Jews arrested during a riot, a Pro-Palestine celeb—think Susan Sarandon—and an American Zionist—think Natalie Portman. (It was his idea that Portman would have relatives that were hostages.) When he pitched it to Esther, she was little cool and said it was ‘too corny/on-the-nose.’ But he was pretty sure that once he had 34a script, he could persuade her. Esther had her own projects. She was all about doing an adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coate’s The Message—‘something world-building and world-changing’—for directors like Steve McQueen or Spike Lee or Ryan Coogler or even the Wachowskis. Ta-Nehisi had already written an amazing Black Superman script for JJ Abrams and told Esther that he wanted to do the adaptation. When Rocky floated the idea of JJ producing, she said, ‘No fucking way. He’s a Zionist.’ Whatever. As long as she was excited about Unsafe and Effective, he was happy.
‘Look, I am not sleeping with Elisabeth Finch. And I really want to come home, Esther.’
‘We’ll see,’ she said, her mood softening.
‘I miss you.’
After a long pause, she got fired up again and said, ‘Just don’t drag me into anything with that woman, Rocky! She’s dangerous. You know that, right?’
‘She publicly admitted what she did was wrong.’
As the words came out, he knew he’d made a mistake.
‘She said Anna Paquin gave her a kidney!’ she shrieked. ‘She told everyone her brother killed himself but he’s alive, Rocky! He’s a fucking medical doctor and she destroyed his career!’
‘Esther, if we do it right, we’ll be at Cannes. And Netflix or whomever will give us twice what Neon paid for Anora. Three times! Why are you so judgmental? Don’t you hate the people who judge you for wearing those bring-’em-home black ribbons?’
‘Those men have reasons for whatever they did or didn’t do—those men have real and righteous reasons, not made-up ones! Her only cause is herself!’
‘Finchie was bat mitzvahed, just like you.’ Idiot! he thought. He didn’t have a death wish but was starting to feel like he did. ‘She even went to Camp Harlam.’
35 ‘Camp Auschwitz would have been a better fit. Okay, Rocky, I’m done. Okay? Happy now? Tell you what: If you use my Black card on that bitch just once, you can kiss Unsafe and Effective and coming home g’bye.’
She hung up.
That night, he and Finchie had a drink by the hotel pool. For the first time, she slyly acknowledged knowing who he was married to.
‘Good job,’ she said. ‘Wifey’s fam has more money than the fecking Pritzkers.’ He winced. ‘Oops. Didn’t mean to upset you.’ After a long pause, she deadpanned, ‘Today’s my cancerversary! And guess what—it’s baaaaack.’
‘You’re not serious,’ he glared.
Her laughter was so loud that it caught the annoyed attention of an older couple having a glass of wine on their third-floor balcony. She hopscotched, asking if Rocky had ever thought about what epitaph he wanted on his headstone.
‘It’s a kicky party game—we used to play that at Shonda’s. Mine’s gonna be Writers Room.’ She laughed again but this time wasn’t out of control. Finchie segued to some mischief she’d been up to in the last few days. ‘I’ve been DMing these pathetic so-called influencers—Kaia Gerber wannabes—just to gauge their interest in what will be the very well-paid position of Official Willis Family Spokesperson. I tell ’em all they have to do is look pretty while giving weekly media updates on the condition of poor ol Uncle Brucie’s wet brain. ‘I always say, ‘But first, you gotta meet Demi.’’ They get all excited and nervous. ‘Demi has the final say, I’m just a go-between. Demi is the last house on the block.’ I also say it’s a fast track to being a Golden Globe Ambassador.’ She giggled, ‘Then I ghost ’em.’
Her act was getting tiresome. ‘Oh? And what’s the get-off.’
She looked toward the elderly couple, now making their way back inside and said, ‘It just … makes me smile.’
36
* * *
Marjorie
The old woman, ninety-five come July, had lived a life of fires.
She used to hear stories about the one in 1903 that ate the ranch nestled in the hills of the 13,000-acre Spanish Land Grant that her grandparents bought—Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit. Grandpa Freddy said that before anyone could blink, thirty miles of Malibu were burning. He said the embers took their beach house too. It sat right on Roosevelt Highway; that was what they called the road before thieving legislators decided PCH was more poetic. The name change happened a few months after her grandmother died and was no coincidence. Teddy Roosevelt was a close friend of Grammie May’s, so that was a final slap to the face.
Cowards! They wouldn’t have dared when Grammie was still alive …
Marjorie Rindge Adamson-Huxtable never left Malibu for any real length of time. (To this day, she remains sole executor of the shrunken dynasty.) In the late sixties, she moved to the gated hamlet of Serra Retreat—land once owned by the family—into a home that would be her last. Soon after, she donated 140 acres overlooking the Pacific to a wonderful Christian university in South Los Angeles that was named after its founder, the tire magnate George Pepperdine. The college quickly became renowned for having the most beautiful campus on God’s green earth, more fitting for a cathedral. The house in the Retreat was on Mariposa de Oro, not far from the magnificent beach hacienda, rebuilt after the fire, where she spent her girlhood summers. The beach house was to the south and to the north, just a ten-minute stroll up the hill, was what remained of Grammie May’s forever ‘dream castle.’ She never got the chance to live there. The place was boarded up when the old woman ran out of money in her decades-long war against land-grabbing lawyers and politicians. A true showcase, the unfinished citadel was studded with tiles from Malibu Potteries, the famous company her grandmother owned. (The factory 37was destroyed by a kiln fire in ’31.) A year after her death, it suspiciously burned to the ground. The remnants were sold to Franciscan monks, who built a seminary on the land with the proviso that lay persons seeking solitude and contemplation could rent rooms there. Marjorie was convinced that her daily walk to pay respects was her own private fountain of youth. With the fountain and the friars and the dream castle, what did she have to fear of fire?
She hated her children. The few that were still alive were good for nothing, especially her son Louis—he of the fraidy-cat demeanor and buffoonish brain. For years, he begged her for money. He sent simpering messages from that rip-off memory palace in the Highlands that she was paying for, when a lean-to would have been more than sufficient shelter for whatever mentality he had left. What he had, in abundance, were bogus complaints—those would barely have fit in the Taj Mahal! Marjorie winced at the idea, the truth, that she was underwriting slaves to make his bed, cook his food, and wipe his imbecilic ass. The only sweet memory she had was fleeting: a little boy clutching a toy fire engine while he slept, a replica of the Ahrens-Fox truck Grandpa Freddy imported for the ranch’s private brigade that he later bestowed upon Pacific Palisades’ first fire station. Her grandfather was a devout Methodist and the Palisades was started by all those folk in the 1920s. Even the famous Alphabet Streets were named after Methodist bishops and missionaries.
The single person left alive whom she enjoyed talking to (by phone because they hadn’t seen each other in forty years) was Betty O’Meara, a four-foot-ten firecracker who used to run the old movie house in the Malibu Country Mart. Betty still lived in an OG double-wide with nonworking tires and taillights at the mobile home park above Temescal called Tahitian Terrace. Since her husband died, she was a proud, sarcastic shut-in, which was another thing Marjorie admired about her. The old women were about the same age and Betty got a kick out of hearing Marjorie go on about her eccentric Grammie May, the woman who conceived Malibu—and owned just about everything in it, including the 38birds and the bees—loved listening to those tallish tales of the matriarch warding off trespassers with barbed wire, feral pigs, and buckshot. Loved that her grandma built the Malibu Movie Colony ‘so she could have a little walkaround money,’ with the caveat that tenants could never own the land—after ten years, the ornery Queen retained the right to tear down any houses built on it! Oh, Betty laughed nonstop when she heard that. ‘Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin could go fuck themselves. Your grandma was just like Barbara Stanwyck! Barbara Stanwyck shoulda played Grammie May!’
‘Miss Executor’ (Betty called her that sometimes) got a kick too from the tales told by ‘Double-Wide’ (Marjorie called her that sometimes). As a teenager in Japan, Betty was assigned to accompany General Douglas MacArthur when the country surrendered. She had two qualities Marjorie thought were essential ‘if you ate, fucked, and breathed’: spunk and ingenuity. Betty worked at the Pentagon too—hell, she was maybe even a spy, but Marjorie never pressed. Then she and a war vet tied the knot, moved to Malibu, and started a movie house of all things! Betty’s husband doled out popcorn under the warden-like, watchful eye of a cinematic, real-life cockatoo.
There was one other person Marjorie tolerated, even loved—sweet Alejandra, her housekeeper of half a century, who lived downstairs. She wasn’t as spry as her boss. At seventy-three, she could barely make it up the hill to wave a monk hello. ‘Molasses’ moved through the house with a duster at a sloth-like pace, pausing now and then to take a breath while her gossipy employer took over the vacuuming chores. Marjorie would say, ‘You’re the only maid I ever had who needed a maid.’ ‘Well,’ laughed Alejandra. ‘That means pretty soon you can hire your son’s ass-wiper to help me out.’ The old woman laughed so hard her sides split.
But these days, fountain or no, she spent more and more time dangling her feet in the waters of the past. She chewed on all the marvelous houses she’d lived in as a girl—Muirfield Street in Hancock Park, and the hacienda next to the Malibu lagoon—and the schools too … Marlborough, 39and Santa Barbara College, where she met her husband. And the people she’d known … her thoughts always drifted—embers!—to her beloved horses. She rode before she could walk. In puberty, she would greet the dawn atop her cherished palomino on the beach, and at eventide, charge breathlessly up the windy, winding Chumash mystery trails. Mother only allowed that on a full moon but she and her friend, a fearless horseman, managed to get around that.
The colorful gymkhanas and silly parades in the middle of empty Roosevelt Highway! The wild scent of watercress and sage and smoke, horse and sumac!
And after sunset, hands around the waist of her first and only love, she galloped on ridgelines and painted chaparrals through the incense of wettened sage, manure, and the hidden smells of her own sex—cloaked in windy, winding, moonflower mystery.
* * *
Lil J
‘Oh shit. This ain’t Reese’s house.’
‘Why you say.’
‘Oh mama, Sissy got her spiel wrong. Google-earth’d some outdated shit.’
‘Wutch you mean.’
Rebar wandered over to look at the catering van then peered through the dark-tinted window of the Bentley. He tried opening the car but it was locked.
‘Ironman, looka here,’ said Lil J, standing by the front door. ‘See this?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘But do you see it.’
‘I told you I did. I’m lookin at it.’
40 ‘That there … that there is a fucking mezzuz.’
‘Say more.’
‘That’s a holy Jewish thing. Reese ain no Jew! She legally blonde!’ He laughed but Ironman didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘A mezzuz. They kiss it oh mama Jews kiss their fingers then touch it and shit on their way in, and on their way out. Like, a blessing. Like oh mama they protect themselves like that. There’s a little piece of paper inside—see it through the little window?’ He pulled Ironman in for a look. ‘A little scroll or whatever with Hebrew lettering.’
‘That’s fucked up. How you know all that, Lil J?’
‘Saw a documentary. I retain that shit.’
‘Oh! Cause you want to impress one! So you can marry one.’
‘I wanna marry a Mossad.’
‘Lil J stands for Lil Jew!’
Rebar pounded on the Bentley with a brick until the window broke.
‘See,’ said Lil J, ignoring the ruckus. ‘One thing you never want to fuck is a motherfucker that peoples been tryin to kill oh mama for however many millennials. Peoples comin after you oh mama that shit leak into your DNA. Add to that the Jews being the smartest most venge-filled peoples on the planet and oh mama! you got the answer to your question right there. Am I gonna fuck with the Jewish peoples? Hale no! Oh mama, see, Jews not just lookin over their shoulders, they lookin over your shoulder to see what other motherfuckers are comin. They cookin up imaginarium ways to kill your motherfuckin ass. These motherfuckers got 5,000 millennials of practice! You gon lose that fight. Someone should tell those sandniggers, ‘You gon lose all day long’! But the sandniggers harda hearing. They got sand in their ears hawhawhaw.’
An outraged Esther Altschuler yanked open the heavy front door.
‘Who are you people? What are you doing?’ Ironman pushed her back in. ‘Get your fucking hands off me!’ she shouted, but never screamed.
Lil J said to Ironman, ‘Girl got some heart,’ then followed them in.
Rebar looked to the street—no one was there—and joined them.
41
* * *
Karen
Two weeks after the fires, she still couldn’t sleep. Something was going on with her memory but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It was like recent events had knocked her head off and she was having trouble properly screwing it back on.
Her step-kids were a great comfort. She had spoken to Kamala, who’d been wonderfully supportive, but when Karen suggested a visit, the former VP was elusive. She thought maybe Kamala was being strategic about her political future and might not have felt it was an opportune moment for a photo op with a rope-a-dope Mayor. (Welcome to sisterhood! Karen thought darkly.)
The bad dreams didn’t help. She had a recurring one where she was given a tour of all those cars that were abandoned in the Palisades. The guide was a wraith with a blurry yet frustratingly familiar face—a farrago of President Obama and the Ghanian king, Mahama. The mishmash ghost was telling her that keyless cars made it impossible to access the vibrant Kumasi Market. It floated her to a charred Prius and when they ducked through the passenger window, pointed to the head of her daughter Emilia. The head laid upon the dashboard with a resigned, sorrowful look. In real life, Emilia and her husband died in 2006 after slamming into a concrete pillar on the southbound 405. (The accident happened a few days after Karen took them to dinner at her daughter’s favorite Googie-style coffeeshop, Pann’s—eerily, just a few blocks from where they were killed.) Emilia’s head spoke in calm, measured tones. Hello, Mama, it said. I’m okay! I’m really in a good place now, so please don’t worry. Her guide said in earnest that ‘Emilia has expressed quite a keen interest in Ghana. We would have a parade in her honor.’
42 ‘Mama,’ interrupted the head. ‘Is it cold or warm in Africa this time of year? Can you have an aide check the weather app?’
Karen usually woke up at 3 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. She hate-scrolled in a quiet frenzy—a mild, diabolical ictus containing the seeds of both inoculation and contrition—
kastrated karen bass castroated bulldyke marxist bAss had a kid who died in a Very sketchy car wreck and No One knows Anything about the babydaddy not even Grok has One Single Thing to say about Senor ‘Jesus Lechuga’ (!!!!) – come to jesus!!! – oh, cept he be Dead. translation: Bio Totally Scrubbed by Cia/Biden Crime Family
