Memorial

XLVII.Chester

CHESS and Laxmi went to the zoo. Though she didn’t like the idea of them being caged, she wanted to show him “the Ganeshas.” They smoked weed before driving over, and he dropped 2 Inderals and 4 vikes. They took her car.

He read aloud from the newspaper as they wended their way through Griffith Park. They were laughing so hard it was tough for Laxmi to steer. Chess had the full-page ad in his hand and declaimed from it, telling Laxmi she should use it for a monologue in her acting class:

What does Mc^® mean to me? Everything that I love…to me, Mc means McDonald’s^®. So I’m cool with Mc and Mc is cool with me.

Mc is cool with me!

Underneath the Golden Arches, it said, “I’m lovin it.”

“Oh my God!” said Laxmi. “McDonald’s is selling fruit salad with yogurt now! I’m so sure the fruit is cloned!”

“Look at this chick,” said Chess, staring at the graphics. “Here’s what she’s saying: ‘I don’t know who loves this salad more. Me? Or my fork.’ Fork this.”

“It’s so creepy. And the drawings. They’re like from chick-lit novels! Anorexic girls in stilettos with chihuahuas — the chihuahua accessory is so over—they’re just staring at you, and, like, sitting in Eames chairs.”

“Are we spending too much time thinking about MickeyD’s?”

“Yes! Yes! They’ve won! They’ve totally won!”

Laxmi laughed in that abandoned, guttural way she saw Cameron Diaz laugh on reruns of Trippin’.

Chess did some more dramatizing.

“ ‘Having one makes even a bad hair day feel good.’ That’s what it says! I’m serious! Having one makes even a bad hair day feel good!”

“ ‘I’m lovin it’!”

“What the fuck do they mean, ‘I’m lovin it’?”

“They are lovin it!”

“Love this,” said Chess, grabbing his crotch. Theme of the day.

Laxmi whooped then Chess winced and ouched from a shooting pain. She was laughing so hard she almost swerved off the road into a girl on horseback, which seemed totally surreal.

“Oops,” said Laxmi. Then: “Bad hair day!”

“Do you see these people?” said Chess, holding up the ad so Laxmi could cop another look. “They’re like in some loft, a hip loft with Levelor blinds and red brick—”

“The Pacific Electric Building!”

“—some marketing fool’s idea of a hip loft! It looks like a bad comedy-club set. Check out the shag carpeting! It’s lime. And, what is that, a turntable?”

“They don’t even sell those at Restoration anymore. I went in. I really wanted one. But you know who still has LPs? Amoeba, in Hollywood. They even sell 8-tracks.”

“This fucking ad looks like it was production designed by UNICEF! See the kids on the couch? One’s a spade, right?”

“Kate Spade! And her brother!”

“A cuddly-assed African-American. And there’s a Latino on the end who looks like she’s ready to have her burrito McMunched. Munch munch, munch-a-bunch o’ Fritos…a TJ donkey’s gonna give her oral — a McBurro! Waiter! Bring me a McBurrito, smothered in underwear! And special sauce! Bring me the head of Alfredo McDonald! Laxmi, look at this! It’s the fucking Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition munch-a-Latino-for-lunch bunch!” The driver split a gut, futilely waving her hand that she could take no more. “And the guy in the middle? Check out his hair! It’s long. A Filipino mix who thinks he’s hot! Like a reject from Project: Runway!”

Laxmi peered over at the page.

“Wilmer Valderrama, look out!”

“Wilma who?”

“He’s, like, everybody’s boyfriend—”

“Fred and Wilma?”

“—from That 70s Show?”

“Hey, Laxmi…you better be glad you’re doing FNF and not print ads for Ron McDon. This shit is low.”

“But their Dollar Menu is hot.”

They were already near the end of Zoo Drive. Their high-frequency stoner jag petered out but Chess still scanned the paper, looking for residual laughs. He read aloud a small item about how some pharmaceutical company admitted harvesting pituitary glands from dead kids in Ireland without their parents’ consent. There’s a horror film for ya. Used em to make human growth hormone; the hospitals got “just a few dollars for each.”

“The luck o’ the Irish!” he said, with a demented leprechaun accent. Laxmi lost it again. “Gland of the free! Johnny, we hardly knew ye—or ye pituitaries.”

Some of the cadavers had been “hollowed out”—any and every organ that was market-redeemable had been removed.

Laxmi shook her head. “That is so totally surreal.”

“I just saw a movie on Sundance,” said Chess. “What a fucked-up channel — they’ll, like, put anything on. I mean, this fuckin car ride would be better than Tarnation. Anyway, it’s about this Jewish guy from New York — Maurie Levin! — who flies to Austria after hearing about some old doctor on trial for experimenting with disabled kids back in the 40s. Killed em and took out their brains. His name was Dr Gross.”

“Of course.”

“The guy gets there—”

“Dr Levin!”

“Right. Dr Levin the documentarymaker gets there just in time for this public ceremony called the Burial of the Brains…”

“Of course.”

“Laxmi, I shit you not. It was so lame. I thought it was a Chris Guest movie — you know, the guy who did Best in Show?”

“I loved that! Isn’t he married to—”

“The chick from Psycho’s daughter.”

“She died, right?”

“The mother. The one from the shower.”

“So creepy. I heard that guy Hitchcock really hated women.”

“He’s like a duke or a lord or something.”

“Hitchcock.”

“No, the guy who’s married to — the Guest guy.”

“Sir Maurie! Lord Levin!”

“I think he’s a duke. Duke Guest. Guest Host. Patty Duke. Whatever. I read it in People.”

“People…people who read People…are the loneliest people in the—”

They passed the kiddie train you could ride on, and it triggered a meditation on his dad. Maybe my father is rich — a rich man. Maybe my father is a public figure and knows who and where I am but is hesitant to contact me. Maybe my father has been in touch with Joan and Marj all along. Maybe it was actually my father who loaned me the 10K through her auspices. Maybe my father is a CEO or COO or CFO of a major media corp. Maybe my father is the key shareholder of the parent company that produces Friday Night Frights…she saw him zone out and let him be. According to Laxmi her father was rich but Chess wondered if she had some fantasy-exaggeration element goin on. Maybe my father is her father, he thought. Seeing it for the still-stoned musing that it was, he shook his head and laughed. He’d keep that one to himself.

LAXMI said they should rent go-carts because they had a lot of ground to cover before getting to the elephants, some of it uphill, and she didn’t want Chess to be uncomfortable. Much better than the tram. He was surprised at how easy it was; for 20 bucks, anyone could trip around on a handicapper scooter. Even a fucking terrorist. There wasn’t paperwork to deal with (all they needed was your John Hancock) because evidently the San Diego Zoo had already been sued by some pioneering class-action gimps who said it was demeaning for them to sit there signing full-on legal disclaimers before being allowed to ride. That’s what the person who gave them the single-page form said, anyway. Still, it was refreshing that you didn’t need a doctor’s note. They could only go so fast but were actually pretty smooth and efficient. And Laxmi was right — no way would he have made it walking.

Once they got going, Chess looked at her as if to telepath, This shit is getting weird. She vanished in a puff of hippiegiggle.

Laxmi zigged and zagged and had a grand ol time but Chester was self-conscious as he steered, feeling a touch of the paraplegic, wishing he had a military outfit so it would at least look like he’d survived some roadside blast in Fuckistan, but the hiking pedestrians that they slowly overtook didn’t seem to give a shit. The pair was invisible as they navigated sundry paths and This Way To The Reptile House tributaries. He took more pills. He wanted to make sure to have a little something in his stomach so they stopped at one of the multicultural shacks for some Mex (triggering another series of McBurro riffs). The nascent panicky mindset that the pain might never end was almost as bad as the pain itself, that he was now one of those people—or at least in the process of getting his membership approved — on the torture rack till the end of their days.

The Inderal lasted 24 hours and was used primarily to quell the fear of public speaking; another shriven skull the witch doctors said to throw in the cauldron. One of the brainiac medicos Chess saw at UCLA told him there were lots of new “management stratagems.” He rattled off a bunch of meds and the eager patient went home and did his search engine thing. Scared the shit out of him. There was something called Pamidronate, for sucky bone cancers like Paget’s disease, but you had to inject it. That really freaked him — that the guy’d even mention it, unless he was showboating. Is that where he saw Chess heading? Shooting up some exotic cancer drug in the bathroom at JAR (for brunch)? Who knew: maybe these types of injuries did eventually lead to the Big C — what used to be laughable, myth and folk wisdom, had hardened with Sweeps Week logic into unassailable doctrine in the clinics’ hallowed halls. Made perfect sense. People weren’t enrolling in medical school because of DeBakey or Albert Schweitzer — they were being recruited by House, Grey’s Anatomy, and CSI. There were antiseizure drugs for stumpers and something called gabapentin for the neuropathy that went with renal failure or diabetes. The whitecoated putz looked at Chess like he was a fool for not having already gotten his epidurals; the needles they used were Tommy Lee — gauge. The “epi” delivered morphine or bupivaicaine directly to the spinal cord, so you didn’t have to do that zombified painsoaked stiffwalk anymore, but all Chess thought about was a 1st-year student hitting a nerve and infecting him, botching the very procedure little old ladies sailed through. He saw himself on a zoo scooter 10 years hence, his own motorized pushcart, covered with KEEP IT GREEN stickers and cannabis logos, diapered, wheeling through Whole Foods for fish oil and Centrum—

Not gonna happen…

THEY found their way to the enclosure. He used to come with Joan and his mom. Laxmi thought it so cool that Marjorie was “into Ganesha.” She said there was no way elephants should not be in the wild, and Chess concurred, after mulling over the double negative (his brain wasn’t working too well), realizing she meant they shouldn’t be caged. They stared in silence at a family of pachyderms (that Fleetwood Mac song “Tusk” went idiotically through his head), cute and anciently weird and even spooky to apprehend, before disgust at their voyeurism washed over. The couple was still high, seized by intense reefer outrage re captivity that quickly segued to melancholia.

Laxmi said there were a thousand myths about how Ganesha was created. While her husband Siva was away, Parvati created a boy from her “scurf”—the flakes and scales of her skin — so he’d keep away nettlesome visitors and guard her bedroom door. When Siva came home, Ganesha didn’t know who he was and wouldn’t let him in. Siva cut off his head. Those gods don’t fuck around, huh. When he realized it was his own son he had decapitated, Siva freaked and restored the kid to life by giving him the head of the creature closest by: a white elephant.

Soon my body will be a white elephant — scurf’s up!

They stared at the hairy beasts, tripping from the vantage of their go-carts. Laxmi giggled that Ganesha was the guardian of the anus—she actually read that in some Bodhi Tree book — and a man’s cock represented his trunk. Jesus, thought Chess, the motherfucker guards everything. Was Laxmi trying to tell him something? He flashed on his Viagra stash. She said the reason she loved Ganesha more than any other god was because he’d transcribed a famous poem by breaking off a tusk (fuckin Fleetwood Mac again and those dumb drums and horny USC cheerleaders; Jesus, that was 30 years ago) and dipping it in ink. Chess told her he thought that was far out. I’m really starting to talk like her. Soon I’ll be a vegetarian. A Viagratarian. That’s why she kept a statue of the elephant on her desk or in her purse, wherever she did her journaling. She said Ganesha gave her “writing ch’i.”

THEY turned in their scooters and smoked more weed in the car. Poor little Dumbos. Ratty, dusty, and dry. On display. They were gods and people didn’t have a clue.

“Did you know,” said Laxmi, “that elephants communicate? I mean, they talk, but it’s subsonic. They can die of heartbreak. And they go crazy in captivity, they always say it’s this thing called ‘musth’? You know, this male hormone thing? And that’s true, but it’s triggered. Musth is like this testosterone secretion that makes them very aggressive. It’s stinky and drips into their eyes and mouth.”

“I can relate.”

“It has something to do with ketones? My dad used to tell me about all this. He’s really very knowledgeable about certain things — I mean, he’s not a complete pig. Like if you blow into their trunks, they’ll remember your scent for life. Did you know that when they die, the whole herd lingers over the carcass? My dad didn’t tell me that, I already knew it. Chester, it is so sad and so sweet. They mourn. And the heads of the tribe are female. It’s a matriarchy! There’s like this 70 year old female who’s running the show! I love that! That’s why it’s so sad to see them in cages…and they mate for life? You knew that, right? They are so special. They can feel the whole world through the bottom of their feet — that’s how they wound up saving all those people in the tsunami. They could feel the waves coming—”

Chess felt a wave, and leaned over to kiss her.

She kissed back.