The Memoirs of An Invisible Man

I’ve left her bedroom, although there was no need to. She had no idea I was even there. Neither did Jasper. What a name, I’ve always thought. It reminds me of someone sneezing, at least if you pronounce it right. Or wrong.

I’d stripped and left my clothes on her doorstep once again, just moments earlier. No, not because I’m some damned pervert, or ever was, but because without them not even a spider or a mouse can see me. I wanted to talk to her, that’s all, but that’s impossible. As if my life weren’t screwed up enough already, many other disturbing things have happened to me...

All right, I just wanted to see her one last time, unobserved, and so I walked right into her house on Carroll Canal in Venice shortly after sunset tonight. You see, I figured I’d write her a note and leave it on the kitchen counter. Maybe that’s what I thought. Maybe that’s what I’m thinking. Maybe that’s all that’s left.

I hate being what I am.

I’m frightened and in despair beyond words.

They’re together.

*

Jasper Cohen is…no…was my best friend. We met the first time in my gallery, Los Tres Gatos. Yeah, I know it’s a campy name, but it attracted lots of wealthy women patrons of cutting-edge art. Art like mine.

“Ooh! You handle Picassa?”

“No, mi amor, my work…”

Who the hell is Picassa?

I sold a ton of pieces to those kinds of knowledgeable patronesses way back when, as much for my Dali-esque moustache and phony accent as for my exclusive use of black in every shade under the sun. My canvases dripped with desperate angst.

But Jasper was different. He saw through my artistic charade immediately once he sauntered through the door a year ago. With the unexcited look of one of my Las Composiciones en Negro masterpieces painted on his face, he walked in a counterclockwise direction, hesitating only briefly at each piece. It had been a quiet afternoon. I approached him, not bothering to twist the ends of my moustache.

“Like them?” I asked in un-accented, Southern California English.

“No, not particularly.” He turned to me. “You the artist?”

“I am.” The next few seconds dragged by like a slug crossing a driveway. I ushered it onward. “Tell me, what is it about them you don’t like?”

He took his time, bending slightly to read the price tag. “$3,000.00, huh? You sell a lot of these things?”

I did, and I told him so. He turned, then, and I saw his lips moving as he counted the paintings on the stark-white walls. He calculated quickly, then looked me hard in the eyes.

“There’s $75,000.00 worth of work here. Christ, that’s a fucking sin. How long did it take you to throw this show together?”

Suddenly I found I was defending myself instead of beating off an attack by one of the liver-brained women who saw fifteen shades of black as a metaphor for their shallow existences. I wanted to show him to the door, but I stuck it out.

“Four months. The creation of…”

“Four months? I’ll be goddamned. I could do this in four days! You want a real job?”

Thus our friendship began.

*

“Cut! Move that rock! Jesus, are you all fucking STUPID?

“Grip! Where the hell are you? Get over here!”

I stood off set behind a young woman dressed in little more than a furry postage stamp, waiting for her cue to go out and perform her part of the scene once Jasper had his grips rearrange the entire mountainside. She bled “Have your way with me!” but it was my opinion she’d regret it after she saw the mutants who were waiting for her to amble by. So would the other nine bit-part actresses in the Jasper Cohen Production who had little more covering their privates than the doll beside me. I don’t remember any of their names. I do remember most everything else about them, though.

Jasper had intrigued me with an offer, you see. Design the sets for his latest brilliant production, “One Million-One Years A.D.” The title was a million-one times better than the script—neither of which was worth the shot and powder to blow it to hell. Still, his low budget C movies (he’d been demoted from the dubious honor of staying in B) made handsome profits. The market was out there, and it was strong. A dumbing down of the already dumb. But then, who was I to judge?

Jasper lived in Beverly Hills on the strength of the revenues from his atrocious movies and flagrant sex scenes, all toned down just enough to keep them out of X-rating. His offer to me to do a simple series of stage sets appealed to my artistic temperament, especially in view of the fact that my latest show was not all I’d hoped it would be, nor claimed to potential clients that it was. As payment for my services, he offered me a cut in the film’s proceeds. How could I resist?

“How much of a cut?” I’d asked him.

“We can talk about that.”

We never did.

He was known throughout town for the lavish and slightly greater than X-rated bashes he threw every other week, and I fell right in, being unattached and having a freewheeling artistic temperament, and being used to models posing in my studio without a stitch on. We got on well, and true to his word, I miraculously received a fat check after One Million Years was released and gobbled up by horny fans. He threw a party to end all parties, complete with the furry clad actresses (whose careers were now in the toilet, thanks to Jasper), catered everything-under-the-sun, Steampunk rock music; you name it. If it was crude, vulgar, spurious, over-the-top, it was there.

I met Andrea at the party.

Andrea had all her clothes on. Five-five, double-jointed—but that was okay by me—eyes that penetrated my soul, and brilliant ebony hair. I think that’s what drew me to her immediately. I was still enamored with, and stuck in, my black period. Besides, the presence of a hundred bouncing breasts and all the incessant, inane giggling had begun to numb me by then.

She stood quite alone holding a glass of Chablis near Jasper’s cabana, decorated to mimic one of the sets I’d designed for his movie. Terribly depressing. I walked over to her (wishing I had chopped the moustache) and introduced myself.

“Hi. My name is Rex. I’m an Aries.” I knew immediately that telling her my real name had been a mistake. She glared up at me, as though I’d told her I was Julius Caesar. But Rex isn’t that bad. It hit me that maybe it was the moustache. I decided to whack it off, first chance I got.

Finally. “You’re a what?”

I fell in love with her voice instantly; soft, satiny, with a hard edge at the end of the question. The glass in my hand shook a little as I mentally processed the question and formulated what I thought should be the most impressive answer.

“I’m an artist. I’m working on…”

“Now I’ve heard them all. Adios…whatever you are.” Andrea set her glass on a faux boulder I’d designed, next to a skeleton with two heads and four arms draped across it. Someone else’s desecration. She left without another word. I went as quickly as I could into Jasper’s Cabana bath, cut the moustache, and then hurried off to find her. Of course she was long gone by that time, and so I searched out my dear friend Jasper to ask if he knew who this ebony-haired beauty was. He had one on his lap. Smiling, he asked, “Which one? Look around, buddy. That describes half the women here. Be a little more specific?”

I learned later—days later, because a Jasper party often ran lengthy—that the woman’s name was Andrea Fontissiere, heiress to the Italian “Conglomerato di Oliva” fortune. She was a performer by vocation; a member of the Los Angeles Ballet. Not one of the principal dancers, though, because, as Jasper explained, her command of the English language was poor. So poor that she was unable at times to understand the commands of the director. I found this hard to believe, however. Her reply to my statement concerning my line of work had been clear and concise enough. I still believe the entire misunderstanding was due to my preoccupation with the moustache issue, complicated by my having instantly fallen in love with her.

Andrea Fontissiere had purchased a home five years ago on one of the canals of Venice.

California.

U.S.A.

It was complete with palm trees, ducks—their crap, their constant noise—and a rear yard leading to her private dock. Every morning she walked onto it with broom and dustpan in hand to clean up after the noisy tenants, who scattered flapping and screeching into the water whenever she approached.

She danced. She entertained Literati. She spoke perfect English, having been educated at Hampton Court Private Academy and Warwick University at Coventry…and I had to go and introduce myself as an Aries. I would have done better to have simply said my name was Barak Obama, and that my sign was the bald eagle.

We met again by chance, three months later, at the Starbucks on Hill Street and Main in Santa Monica. It was mid-January, wet and cold, and I’d walked the two blocks from my home to get a Venti Mocha, whole milk, with whip. Why is that important, you ask? It isn’t. But had I said I was going to get an iced green tea, you would have judged me nuts, and you’d be right. What sane man runs around naked, even for the best of reasons, or orders iced tea in the middle of winter?

That afternoon, still wholly visible, I was dressed in my painter’s jeans, spotted with globs of Mars black oil, my sleeveless white shirt, complimentary. There was a spot of Ivory black on my cheek, near the left nostril, although I didn’t realize it until the barista reached across the counter with her cleaning rag and wiped the smudge away.

“How are your paintings coming along?” she asked, smiling.

“Not worth a damn, Maureen. I’m sick of black, and I think my patrons are too.”

She placed the rag on the counter, worked the machine a little, and then quipped. “Why don’t you do something in white, then? Or green?”

To my surprise, a familiar voice rose from the background. “Why not try something that disappears, Aries?”

I turned. Sitting at a table for two on a raised stool was Andrea. She was dressed similarly to me, except that her slacks were white and her blouse was black. It occurred to me that there was something oddly spiritual in this. Cosmic. My first impulse was to mention it to her as a way of re-introduction, but I held my tongue.

“Hello again,” I squeaked. She nodded and then sipped her…

“May I sit with you?” I saw from the markings on her cup that her drink was a Grande Mocha, whole milk, with whip. So, so close to mine. There was something providential about all of this.

“Sure, why not?”

Outside, the weather took a turn for the worse. The drizzle I’d walked through moments ago had suddenly turned into a hard rain, splashing loudly onto the sidewalk, street, and passing cars, very much with the same intensity as the jangled thoughts banging in my brain. I realized it would be prudent to let Andrea guide the coming conversation, and also that it would be wise if I asked her to allow me to digest what she said for a moment or two before responding. I waited.

“So, Mr. Aries, you are an artist if I remember correctly. Performance?”

Perfect British diction.

I considered my answer very carefully.

“No, actually. I’m a fine artist. A painter. Jasper didn’t tell you?” So far so good.

“Ah yes, he did make mention of…how did he put it? ‘Imbecilic studies of the color black.’ I see you’re still investigating the color,” she said pointing at my shirt with a delightfully sculpted finger. I focused momentarily on her hand, her wrist, her arm…up, up until I landed on her dark almond eyes.

“I beg your pardon,” I finally managed, “What did you say?”

“Black. The color black. You paint it?”

I awakened.

“Oh no. Black isn’t a color, and you can’t ‘paint it’. It’s the absence of color. White is…I do use them both, you know.” I explained to Andrea the entire theory of color; my well-rehearsed line of bull, automatically. She listened with a look of bemusement on her face. For all I know I might have been telling her how the depth of her eyes, the enigmatic curve of her lips, the fall of her hair across her cheek had captured me. This portrait sitting not two feet away dispelled all previous notion of beauty in the downpour within my head.

Whatever it was I said, it seemed to fascinate her—she seemed delighted. She smiled and a spike of wonderful, devastating courage and hope began to pin me to the stars. We spoke further as the storm outside worsened. I recall very little else about our conversation except for one curious, last question she put to me a moment before she rose and left.

“Why don’t you envision the most lovely thing in the universe and do a series of paintings about it? Light! Capture the essence of it over and over in all its magnificent manifestations? How it has no substance; comes and goes like a ghost, yet without it we see nothing? Everything disappears.”

How simple!

Oh wait. There was a slight problem with doing that. How do you paint light without using an object it reflects off of, or penetrates through? This became a problem of Physics suddenly—a subject I failed miserably at in high school; forgot about entirely in college. For two weeks afterward I stood before the blank canvas, staring, thinking, not having a clue where to even begin, seeing only her face floating in and out across the white linen. Finally I despaired, threw the brushes and palette aside, stomped on a tube of Licorice black lying on the floor, and left the studio.

It was raining again. I walked to The Library Alehouse downtown, soaked to the skin, and got stinking drunk. At last call I ordered a double shot of Wild Turkey.

“We don’t serve hard liquor, Rex,” the bartender reminded me for the tenth time that night.

“Bring me one anyway. No, two. I’m a failure.”

“You’ve done pretty good on wine. Time to go, buddy. You want a cab?”

I think I stumbled out the door into the rain. I think I told him I was just fine. I must have made it home.

*

I loaded up on groceries the next day, and then locked myself inside the studio, determined to break my case of painter’s block, and paint something utterly marvelous in the manner Andrea had suggested. Downstairs in the gallery the phone rang itself off the hook. Every now and then someone banged on the door, but I paid no attention.

I situated a brand new four by six foot canvas on the easel, and then moved it closer to the window overlooking the street and the commercial buildings across the way. The north light streaming through the glass was soft; perfect, I thought, to work by, and so I began again.

Painting is thinking.

Any hack can stand at the beach at sunset or turn and study the crowds ambling up and down the boardwalk, and then slap colors onto a tiny canvas. It takes real genius to look at that white no-man’s land in the studio, though, and create a real world, be it in shades of black or…or what?

During those sessions, when I could think no more, I dropped the brushes onto the trolley next to the easel, went to the refrigerator and peered inside at the food I had no interest in eating. Made coffee. Let it sit and grabbed a beer instead. Turned the volume of the CD player up louder. Paced.

Why was milk white and beer amber? Should I leave and go buy more paint? Often enough I let my gaze fall onto the splatters and globs of paint on the floor, wondering if I could cut part of it up, frame it, and foist it off as something I’d created in a fit of Pollock-like passion. I examined my brushes, glanced every now and then at the blank canvas; picked up a number 24 Filbert and a house painter’s brush. I became Gene Krupa and Ginger Baker, slamming out a beat on the easel, with some British group’s song blaring in the background. I did anything except paint.

Back to the refrigerator.

It was three in the afternoon. I stood in front of the canvas again, bottle of half-empty beer in my right hand. It was then my muse struck in the most peculiar and enlightening way via a three or four second flash of light that came through the window. The iridescent slash landed on the canvas; a soft green glow. Before it disappeared, the edges of light appeared to move in waves, as though it was smoke, or a viridian fog. Then as suddenly as the light appeared, it was gone, but the canvas maintained a ghostly afterimage for several minutes until it, too, slid away.

Oddly, my first impulse was to grab my cell phone and call Andrea. As though she would be interested in a shaft of smoky light or any breakthrough I’d had in redefining the theory of color.

I tossed the bottle onto the floor behind me, blinked again and again as I stood there trying to make sense of what had happened. Not only did the flash of light brighten the canvas for those few short seconds, it also made the material disappear entirely at the conclusion of its visit! I reached forward and tentatively touched the spot, beyond which my eyes could see the wall standing behind it. My fingertips stopped at the material. The canvas was whole, but…it made no sense.

You’re drunk!

But I was not. I blinked again and again, that action being necessary for me whenever I needed to sober up my eyes. Yet, my eyes did not deceive me, as they say. I endeavored to discover exactly what had happened in the ensuing minutes as I moved left, right, forward and backward. The same result, no matter where I viewed the strange phenomenon from, or how often I touched the material of the canvas.

As I stood there scratching my head with one hand, the canvas with the other, my nose only inches from the material, another shaft of greenish light burst into the room through the window. This time very intense and more encompassing, and with it a strong odor akin to burning flesh. I felt an electric-like shock course the length of my body, head to toe, when it hit. Glancing down, emptying my nostrils of the foul odor, I saw the swirl of smoky light—the viridian snake of it—enveloping my feet, spilling onto the floorboards, floating away like a ghost before it dissipated. It seems the entire half of the studio that I inhabited had lit up this time, as though a battalion of photons had been dispatched into the room instead of a mere company.

So on the surface the mystery of what had occurred the first time was solved; the strange light entering through the window was the culprit, or the benefactor if you wish. Whichever the case, the cause and effect were the same. The remainder of the canvas, the floor surrounding it, the very window itself…my entire body disappeared. I found myself staring down into the gallery below through a jagged line of floorboards, joists, and dusty ceiling edges. My knees gave way at the impossibility of it, my head spun wildly, and then I passed out.

Hours—days?—later I awakened, sprawled out like Christ on the cross, lying there at Golgotha’s summit waiting for the spikes. My vision was blurry; every muscle in my body ached. A new round of music blared out of the speakers making my brain pound along with the frantic backbeat. I was confused. Awakening from a wonderful dream into the depression of reality. The reality was, though, I had disappeared, along with half my studio. And yet, I felt a certain excitement, given the disturbing fact that anyone and everyone I’d ever known would never see me again. That was oddly enough the first thought I experienced after I’d forced my eyes around the studio, bathed as it was in shadows. I must confess, the sensation of lying in thin air fifteen feet above the gallery was more than just disturbing. Should Andrea or Jasper somehow gain entry into the space beneath me, what would they see? A normal but deserted showroom? The fan dangling from the ceiling, spinning slowly? Or would they look up in shock to see the flat of my back suspended, as though I’d torn the place to pieces and then somehow hooked piano wires from the second floor rafters to my arms and legs? Performance art. I wondered, finally, if what had occurred hours or days ago was a permanent displacement of myself and my immediate surroundings, or more hopefully only a temporary exodus from the physical world?

I sat up at length; discovered that I was more than hungry. I was the emaciated soul who’d wandered out of the desert after forty days and forty nights of fasting—altogether against my will I must add. But I wasn’t hungry for beef or bread or cheese. I craved lemons. Bushels of them, and as I was to learn in the days ahead, they would become my personal crown of thorns.

The music was killing me, and so I managed to raise my ghostly self, stagger to the cabinet and shut it down. Better, I thought.

Food, again. Figure out later who, or I should say what I was. Why I was whatever it was I’d become. The refrigerator held plenty of beer, some wine, cheese and sundry items that held no interest for me. Bananas lay on the counter nearby. I turned up my nose at them and turned to leave. The local market would still be open, I hoped, and as I drew near the door leading out of the studio into the narrow hallway, I passed the coat tree with its nearly full-length mirror, a scarf dangling from a hook on one side, and an image of nothing in the dusty glass. There I stopped, re-positioned myself directly in front of it, and waved my hands. No one waved back. Christ have mercy. There was nothing of me!

Lemons.

That craving led to my first act of larceny. But honestly, how could I possibly load up a shopping basket with them, and then try to pay for the fruit? I had to steal them!

“Excuse me, Ma’am. I know you can’t see me, but I’ve brought my wallet, which you can see…” If you were the checker, how would you react?

So, I simply loaded as many as I could carry into my arms and sauntered as inconspicuously as possible back out the doors. It was 8:45, I noted from the clock hanging above the doorway. A young woman was hurrying in as I was leaving, and froze in astonishment when she saw the dozen or two lemons whisking by her three feet off the worn linoleum floor.

“Evening, miss,” I said.

I don’t recall her replying, but I do recall the look on her face. A look lying somewhere between Armageddon has finally arrived, aliens have landed with wheelbarrows loaded with gold, a shotgun blast has caught me right in the face. She froze. I stepped forward (I was suddenly feeling better about myself, although I was more famished than ever), and I kissed her cheek—something I’d always wanted to do to a pretty stranger. That wrenched her out of her mesmerized state, at which instant she screamed loudly.

Me and my lemons turned again and walked away grinning. Me anyway. I can do anything I like!

Not entirely true. I knew instinctively that I must begin wearing clothes again at the earliest convenient moment. I was freezing my butt off. Still, there is a wild, almost erotic feeling when it comes to prancing around the neighborhood naked.

I gorged myself with six lemons outside in the parking lot as the manager, a group of mystified shoppers, and the sheet-white woman watched in horror as my fruit bounced up and down twenty feet away. It occurred to me that among all those people bearing cell phones, one at least would soon enough be punching in 911. The cops would arrive, equally mystified, but I would lose the lemons when one of them pulled up the courage to approach me and retrieve the stolen merchandise floating in the air. Worse, one of L.A.’s finest might actually take a shot at whatever it was levitating the lemons, and the lead would probably care less whether I was invisible or not. So, I ran, inadvertently dropping a piece of deliciously tart fruit every so often, like a trail marker.

“He went this-a-way!”

Ten minutes and fifteen detours later I’d nearly made it back to the gallery. Hill Street was deserted. The air was frigid, surprisingly so for mid-December, and ahead of me at the end of the block I could make out a portion of the gallery’s entry canopy, the automatic lights on and glowing around it. Across the street another glow of light rose and fell in quick, metronomic pulsations. The same green light hue that had somehow caused the change in me. I’d never paid much attention to those industrial/commercial structures; not really. They were just there. They were soot-stained brick, sat behind dilapidated fences, leftovers from seventy-five years ago, whose owners most likely lived in mansions in Beverly Hills and had forgotten the properties even belonged to them.

I laid the remaining lemons on the sidewalk and peered up the avenue at the pulsar regularity. In the split seconds of its brightness, Los Gatos Tres’ lights disappeared in the intensity of green, then reappeared, then disappeared, again and again and again.

Without warning, a further split second before I stooped to retrieve my dinner and breakfast off the cracked concrete, the green light seemed to grow nova-like. I closed my eyes at the sudden, intense brightness, witnessed a nuclear brightening inside my eyelids, and then heard and felt the tremendous explosion that followed in its wake. The force of the blast catapulted me backward into a chain link fence and sucked the breath out of my lungs as it roared westward on its way to the ocean a few blocks away.

There is, in the brief instant following a mighty blast, the feeling of numbness and absolute confusion. Incomprehension. Mental sterilization.

What…happened?

You shake your head, peer out at devastation, feel to find what parts of you are missing. Very quickly your brain miraculously forces its way back to the immediate present. The real aftermath is what finally materializes. What I saw not only shocked me by virtue of its violence, but strangely gave me pause to think about what I might wear, should I choose to don clothing this evening or tomorrow. The fate of my lemons. I find it interesting, in a way; how the mind works during chaos.

Both the building from which the light emerged, and the adjacent buildings on either side of it were gone, as was Los Gatos Tres across the street. I had no home any longer, but then again, neither would there be any evidence of what inconceivable change had taken place inside it. Pulling myself up to my feet, I wondered how many, and what kind of people had perished in the explosion, and whether I would be numbered among the atomized victims?

I’d truly been ripped from the face of the earth. Maybe Jasper would throw a week-long, nearly X-rated memorial bash/service for me, and then my existence would be defined only in an epitaph written at his hand; “The worst artist on the face of the earth. Long may he stay dead, and may he be soon forgotten.”

I gathered up the fruit scattered about, and then gravitated up the street to stand as close to the inferno as I could for warmth before the damn firefighters arrived to extinguished it.

*

In the days following my exodus from this earth I solved the problem of homelessness, taking up residence at Jasper’s mansion in Beverly Hills. I’d stolen a very nice Rolls Royce—a Silver Cloud—and driven it from the valet parking lot behind the chic restaurant up to Jasper’s. He was having a party, of course, but my only objectives were, A) warmth, and B), gorging myself on the lemons I’d managed to save. I found an empty bedroom on the third floor, and that became my new home. During this time many thoughts ran through my head. Chief among them was, Is this disease, this scourge, permanent? Is there anyone I can go to that might know of a remedy? NASA or JPL? No.

General Electric? They make light bulbs. Maybe someone there will understand my predicament in practical terms…and then begin experimenting on me, poking and prodding…No.

Industrial Light and Magic? Lucas would have a field day with me, but in the end I’d be no better off than I am now.

Television. A diversion from the long, boring hours there in my room. I watched dull and vacuous women’s talk shows in the mornings; re-runs of NCIS in the afternoons. By week’s end, not only was I beginning to lose weight, my hearing was going south as well. I was forced to turn the volume up in order to drown out the ringing in my ears.

Simply because the room was unoccupied didn’t mean one of Jasper’s maids wouldn’t visit it, and each time she did, the woman picked up the remote and clicked the TV off. She did this absently at first, but soon enough it became a game to me. I’d click it back on before she left the bedroom. She would turn, then come back to the nightstand and turn it off again. I would wait, then click it back on. Again and again we did this. Finally I said, “Boo!” which sounded demonic and fractured coming out of my mouth.

Consuela—that was her name—left screaming, and didn’t return. Jasper arrived a bit of time later to investigate, though. I performed the same routine with him, sans the “Boo!”, and his solution was simply to remove the remote. Hours later the locksmith arrived to bolt the bedroom door shut from the outside. The ghost was secured. So they might have thought.

I used the window for egress, going along the portico walkway outside to the next bedroom window. In, across the room, and out into the palatial hallway. Inconvenient, but then I had nothing else to do until I could figure out how to regain my wasting body.

I hated lemons. I loved lemons. I loathed them, and craved beef or bread, or milk and cookies. But after suffering immediate indigestion on a stellar scale the few times I stole such desirable staples from the refrigerator on the main floor and ate them, I settled into eating the only thing that I could keep down. My hunger was a constant malady. The ringing in my ears grew to cathedral bell proportions. I was skin and bones and going mad.

I hated the maid for no good reason and haunted her for the fun of it. I hated Jasper for no good reason, and began to visit him as well, interrupting his sexual forays with young women by jumping into bed with them. The household, if I was to suffer, would suffer right along with me.

The parties ended abruptly. Priests and psychics—every manner of witchdoctor arrived soon afterward to chase me away. They all thought, and communicated as much to Jasper, that I was either a demon, or else the ghost of dead and gone Olivia DeHaviland. I laughed at the fools.

The mansion went onto the market, but I wondered who in their right mind would buy a haunted house at any price? Would the real estate broker have to disclose the fact?

I didn’t care. I left along with freaked out Jasper, and went unseen with him to Andrea’s home on the canal, a destination that shouldn’t have surprised me, although it did.

During those weeks and months that I’d been under contract with my old buddy designing sets, I still lived in my home on Hill Street. I struggled with my art, taxing my brain to discover new directions for my paintings. I devoted an inordinate amount of time in trying to discover another way to paint the color black I should say. Fruitless. Little did I know that Jasper had developed a romantic connection to beautiful Andrea during that period, and mysteriously, she to him. Perhaps it had all begun long before I met either of them, despite the fact that he was sleeping with someone else night after night? Did she know this? Inconsequential at any rate. Cupid’s arrow had somehow hit its mark.

Jasper told Andrea the entire story of the ghost in Beverly Hills, sitting there in her living room in front of a warm fire, me standing in front of it gazing across the room at them. It rankled me when she responded that despite the fact he was probably crazy, he was welcome to stay with her for as long as he liked. And then that coy wink she offered him.

Later, after they’d shared a bottle of wine and disgusting words of foreplay, they went upstairs to her bedroom hand in hand. Naturally my first impulse was to follow them. Bang jewelry about on the nightstand; open and close the window overlooking the sleeping ducks and the canal outside, but I couldn’t bring myself to enter behind them and watch. I was furious, and struck down in agony at the very thought of that slob making love to my Andrea. I stopped dead at the doorway.

The thought occurred to me to return to the living room, snatch a burning log from the untended fireplace, and burn Andrea’s cursed home clear to the ground, both her and that sonofabitch trapped upstairs. When the fire trucks arrived to douse the inferno, I’d slash their hoses, tip over their ladders… I’d, I’d…I couldn’t bring myself to do that, either. I loved Andrea, hated Jasper, and my mind was suddenly a wheel spinning, a kaleidoscope out of control, insane and rational images whirling in contradiction at light speed. Around and around and around.

Instead, in a fit of despair, I went back down the stairs, grabbed Jasper’s trench coat from the arm of the sofa, threw it over me, and stumbled out into the frigid night.

*

Two weeks have passed. I have taken up lodging next door to Andrea’s house, consumed hundreds of pounds of the fruit I hate. I have the driving impulse to invade UCLA Medical Center or Cedars-Sinai and find someone who can help me. I’ve lost eighty pounds. The very thought of another lemon makes me vomit. The ringing in my ears is now an entire city’s bells peeling non-stop. There aren’t enough blankets or overcoats in the world to take the chill out of my bones.

I’m dying.

I’m insane.

Here I stand at Andrea’s kitchen table, not only invisible, but a skeleton. Certainly within days I will collapse, and that will be the end of me. Pen in shaking hand I want to begin writing a goodbye note. An explanation. A confession, I suppose. Something to quench the raging fire in my heart and mind.

My darling Andrea,

It’s me, Rex, and you probably won’t believe this…

 

Imprint

Text: Patrick Sean Lee, (c) 2012
Editing: Patrick Sean Lee
Publication Date: 12-22-2012

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
Firstly to H.G. Wells, who gave birth to the miraculous creature. Next, to Dali, Picasso, and Pollock who redefined the visual arts. Lastly, to my readers :)