Sacred Monster

Flashback 22

The lovely white chapel in Santa Monica had been freshly painted for the occasion, and parts of the gleaming green grass had been resodded. Hundreds and hundreds of wedding guests and media people milled about in front of the chapel, held back from the gray cement walk leading from front steps to street by police sawhorses and stern-looking, blue uniformed, white helmeted policemen. A red carpet had been unrolled from the church door down the steps and across the gray cement walk and the sidewalk to the waiting limo. Organ music and the sound of an expensive imported choir rang out from within as the ushers opened the twin front doors.

Jack and Dori came out, he in tux, she in a different white gown from the one she’d worn to the Academy Awards, this one showing a bit less cleavage. Jack and Dori were yelling and screaming at each other, both red-faced, both waving their arms around. Jack shoved Dori when they reached the top step, but instead of falling, Dori swung around and smashed him across the head with her bouquet. He then took a swing at her, but she ducked and kicked him in the shin.

Ushers and friends, paralyzed with shock in the first few seconds, at last hurried forward to break up the newly-weds, both of whom now swung and missed, Jack’s overhand right taking out a flower girl, while Dori’s left uppercut sent an usher flying off the steps and into the crowd below. Jack finally connected with a straight left to Dori’s forehead, driving her back into an off-balance wedding guest, who in his turn fell backward into two photographers, who shoved him unceremoniously out of the way. The wedding guest, not taking kindly to this opening of a second front at his rear, turned around and popped a photographer. So then the second photographer popped the wedding guest. So then another wedding guest popped the second photographer.

Jack and Dori meanwhile, weaving and staggering in the church doorway, had entered upon a hair-and-clothes-ripping contest, their elbows and knees doing much damage among those well-wishers who tried to intervene. And the more people were knocked off the steps into the people below, the more the fight spread.

In no time at all, it had become a general brawl, its turmoil reverberating out from the epicenter of the happy couple. Policemen and police sawhorses alike were trampled into the fresh sod as the fight spilled over onto the lawn, engulfing more and more of the wedding guests and then the media people, and then the fans, extending even into the two TV remote vans parked just down the block. The limo driver, seeing which way the wind was blowing and not expecting his fares to make it to curbside today anyway, decided to get his vehicle out of the danger zone, but in moving it he made both the car and himself moving targets, obvious and irritating to the mob at large. Although he locked himself in, and the crowd never did get at him, the limo itself was never the same again and shortly thereafter was sold for cash to a Columbian who wanted the comforts of air-conditioning and television while overseeing the work of his farm in the uplands.

As the brawl spread to the street, cars and trucks, blocked in their passage, disgorged their drivers and passengers to enter into the fray. A school bus full of bored teenagers on their way back to school from a field trip to the La Brea tarpits added its own dollop of youthful enthusiasm to the developing stew.

Jack and Dori, both off their feet now, clutched in each other’s violent embrace, kicked and bit and scratched and punched and rolled around on the red carpet among the feet of the nearer brawlers. Being down there, intent on their pummeling, each with an earlobe of the other clenched in their teeth, they were among the last to hear the wail of the approaching sirens.

“We were going to honeymoon in Brazil,” I tell O’Connor, “but the marriage didn’t last that long, so I went with Buddy instead.”

So many things startle and perplex this fellow. He goggles at me. “You had the honeymoon anyway?” he demands. “With Buddy?”

“Well,” I explain, “it was never going to be just a honeymoon, anyway. It was always going to be a deductible expense.”

He doesn’t get that part either. “A trip to Brazil? A honeymoon in Brazil? With or without the bride? A deductible expense?”

He is beginning to astonish me as much as I’m astonishing him. For a media maven, he sure as hell doesn’t know much. I say, “Don’t you know what Brazil’s famous for?”

“Coffee,” he says.

“No.”

“Inflation.”

“No.”

“Brazil nuts?”

“Faces,” I tell him.

His face is one of which they would never approve. He gapes at me with it. “Faces?”

“They’ve got a clinic down there,” I tell him. “It’s the most complete plastic-surgery operation in the world.”

“In Brazil?”

“Absolutely. Plastic surgery to the stars; that’s where it’s done. Any operation you can think of and some you probably can’t. Everybody goes there.”

“I didn’t know that,” he says.

Feeling kindly toward him, I explain as gently as I can: “That’s because you’re nobody.”

Not quite gentle enough, perhaps. Looking and sounding snippy, he says, “I’d always thought there were any number of plastic surgeons right here in Los Angeles.”

“Oh, sure,” I say. “Anybody can get hacked away at by those Bev Hills butchers, but if you want to be taken seriously in the industry, your face and body better say MADE IN BRAZIL.”

“I never guessed,” he says.

“I tell you, Michael,” I say, “I’ve had a standing reservation forever. I go down once a year, talk it over with the doctors, see what we want to snip and tuck.”

“You’ve had plastic surgery?” He’s peering at me, looking quite surprised at the idea.

“Are you kidding?” I ask him. “At my age, with the life I’ve led, there’s only two ways I could look the way I do: either a painting in the attic, or a plastic surgeon in Brazil. I go Brazil.”

“Gosh,” he says.

“You bet. Every spring, I arrange it so my time’s free, I fly on down to Rio and take in the carnival, and then go on to the clinic for the overhaul. Then back I come, feeling great, looking great, ready for another year of self-abuse.”

“So that’s where you planned to go with Dori Lunsford for your honeymoon.”

“Right. The doctors could have worked on the both of us at the same time. Dori was getting a little flabby around the edges; she needed tightening up.”

“But when the marriage ended, you went with Buddy instead.”

“The last few years, Buddy’s been coming down with me every time.” I chuckle, thinking of how serious Buddy can be when he puts his mind to it. “He really pays attention down there.” I say. “Takes notes, talks with the doctors, observes the operations. Not me; I don’t want to see what faces look like when they’re open.”

“But Buddy does.”

“I kid him sometimes,” I say. “When he’s around and not mad at me, you know?”

“Buddy gets mad at you?”

“Oh, nothing serious,” I say. “He worries about me, that’s all. You know what I mean.” But this conversation is making me edgy. Some sort of dark cloud is coming up from between the pieces of patio slate, swirling up, enveloping me. But it’s not a bad cloud, not an evil cloud, no; it’s a friendly cloud. It is here to help me, protect me, save me.

“Well, what do you kid Buddy about?” O’Connor is asking me, as the cloud rises between us. “During those times when he isn’t mad at you, what do you kid him about?”

“That he’s gonna know as much about the plastic surgery as the doctors pretty soon,” I say, “and I won’t have to go down there every spring; I can stay here and Buddy can do the nips and the tucks.”

“He’s that interested, is he?”

The cloud is obscuring everything. I try to remember what we’re talking about. Brazil. “I’m about due,” I say, reaching up and patting the back of my hand against the underpart of my chin, feeling the looseness there. “I may have to start going twice a year,” I say. “Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” I say, and I enter the cloud.