These Dreams of You

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Two nights later at Union Station, Jasmine waits at the end of the long amber tunnel beneath the tracks that funnel from the trains to the lobby. Disgorged passengers flood the exits. Only when everyone else is gone do two men appear, one small and wiry, cropped dark hair with a cap, the other emaciated in a black overcoat. The ends of his flaming crimson hair stick out from under a wide-brimmed black fedora; the last time Jasmine felt a man’s handshake so weak, he changed her life. At first he calls her Anna, then stops with a slight start. “You’re not Anna,” he mutters.

“Anna’s at home,” she answers.

“Home?” he says, perplexed.

“The house. I’m Jasmine.”

“From the record company?” and then, “This is Jim,” introducing the other man. “Charmed,” says Jim, kissing her hand, not exactly elegant but courtly. On the way back to Doheny the singer with the red hair announces sweepingly that Jim is “the greatest rock and roll singer in the world,” but the only Jim that Jasmine has heard of flashed his willy at a concert years ago and is now dead. “Sings back-up,” Anna snorts dismissively at the house after the two travelers have collapsed, one in the mysterious backroom and the other on the same couch where Jasmine sat a couple of days before. “I seem to remember that was my job before I started sleeping with the star. Jim made a couple of albums with his own band a few years back — lunatics. . I won’t even go into the fucked up shit that man did on stage. His raggedy junkie ass,” she confirms, “is crazier than the other one,” nodding at the room down the hall. “Was locked up in a mental ward over at UCLA before we sprang him.”

“You,” Jim announces from the couch without twitching a finger, startling Jasmine who thought he was unconscious, “didn’t spring anyone. He did.”