An Empty House

Chapter Three:

Tar: A Vegetable Conspiracy

Along with

Shopping Carts and Crop Circles!

Adriane’s house was now empty except for the dogs, Sushi and Tofu. Nick moved out everything but his desk in his office. She had three bedrooms that were unoccupied. She liked it well enough that way but it did get lonely. Now that Mickey is sober she preferred her using and drinking friends. These contacts broke the monotony. One friend, Jane, always brought over a taste of this or that and, depending on what she was high on, could be entertaining. Adriane called her, my angry dyke. They had a thing back when in Casa Serena but that ended when Adriane hooked up with Nick. Jane got unbearably nasty for a while but they could still get together for a drink or a few tokes of pot.

Adriane was in her bathroom twisted around inspecting a black spot on her hip where she had been muscle popping. It had been growing larger and it felt sore when she was making her lonely bed. She heard Jane honk from the street. Adriane hated it when people did that; especially Jane. She went to the balcony overlooking the front yard and the street in time to see Jane scaling the fence.

“Stop, Jane, I’ll open the gate!”

“That’s okay, I’m almost over it now.” Jane caught her tennis shorts on one of the spikes, ripping them open, her ankle hit sideways as she jumped to the ground and tumbled onto the lawn.

Adriane couldn’t restrain herself from laughing.

“That’s okay, bitch, go ahead and laugh…” she was half-laughing and half-crying for the pain.

Adriane was down the stairs and out the door before Jane could get up. Laughing, she yelled, “Hey, do I look fucked up or what?”

She helped Jane up, giving her a shoulder as the two of them comically hobbled up the steps to the door. Setting her down on the couch where she could put up her foot in the music room, Adriane got her a drink and they sat there looking out the vista from there all the way to the Channel Islands saying nothing until Jane spoke up at last, “So, where is Nick now?”

“Nick… I don’t know, hanging out in Buellton… I don’t care.”

“I saw Rod the other day down at Pasqual’s.” she smirked.

“Yeh, so what? I don’t care about that fucker…”

“How about Mickey?”

“Mickey, oh, we’re just friends now.”

“Does than mean… I have you all to myself?”

“No Jane, that won’t happen again.” She didn’t want to hurt Jane so she added, “At least not now.” But she meant, at least until he’ll freezes over.

“Good then, let me have another drink and I’ll get my ass out of here.”

Adriane took Jane’s glass to the kitchen and poured another drop of orange juice into a glass and emptied the last of her pint of vodka.

“No ice!” Jane called out.

“Okay, okay, no ice, madam.” Adriane knew better than to take up room in the glass for anything but vodka. “You’d better like it because that is all I have.”

“Are you still just buying pints?”

“What is it to you how I buy it?”

“I’m just saying… say, don’t worry, I have a jug in the car.” She held up her glass as though she were toasting, “Here’s to us.”

Adriane was getting tired of all the implications… the implied longing… the need to capture … her, Adriane’s, soul. There was always someone needing to control or have her… Nick… Jane… Robert… and, at one time… Mickey. She went off on poor Jane, “What do you mean, ‘us’?”

“Us… I don’t mean anything by it.”

“Then why do you say that… there is no ‘us’. There is you… you are sitting there… and there is me. I am sitting here and we are having a drink.”

Jane winced, “Got it, okay?”

“No, you don’t get it, Jane. You still want it to be ‘us’ and I just want a friend I can trust.” She got up and clinked the empty pint against Jane’s glass.

“God damn, I’m not trying to get in your pants, Adriane.”

“Yes you are! and I sometimes wish I didn’t have a fous-fou-nette for the boys to play with.”

“Yeah, I can just see you: A Brazil-waxed Barbie Doll,” saying that, she got up and hobbled into the room with the fireplace.

Before Adriane could respond Jane tossed her glass into the fireplace where it shattered. They stood glaring at each other for a minute and then Jane made for the door.

Adriane waited to hear the car start and went back up to the studio where she sat on a stool wondering if she should call Billy for some tar. Tar, shit…. She remembered when she first shot heroin. It had almost romantic, mysterious names like “Horse” and “China White” or just plain “H” back then. Now what everyone gets is something brown and ugly, nothing pretty, like a stew from dragon’s droppings. It sits in Afghanistan, or, maybe a jungle somewhere, fermenting in twenty gallon barrels… it is steeped in the greed of warlords, cartels and sucks the blood of peasants before it comes to fester and create abscesses in the body and soul of junkies like Adriane, Nick and Billy.

Recalling what Mickey says, she smiles, “Cocaine and heroin are not part of a CIA plot or anything like that. It is actually a part of a vegetable conspiracy to take the animal kingdom down; back to where it once was… not so much to make vegetables out of us all but more to just even things up.” He says he got that vision while stoned on mushrooms but spoke of it as though he believed it. One day millenniums ago the vegetable kingdom got together and held a Powwow. The creatures of the Earth were decimating the whole population of the plant kingdom and something had to be done. Even the trees were being defoliated at an alarming rate and so on. During that council Poppies contended that dinosaurs avoided their seeds and Mushrooms complained that they rot in the dung before any being can discover their wonders. We have to get rid of these dinosaurs and help the mammals develop consciousness enough to partake in our delights. So they agreed that the dinosaurs had to go and eventually they did. Millions of years evolved the mammals into what we call humans. The first troops came out of the trees after a few found magic-mushrooms in the turds of the herds they learned to follow and hunt. The shaman of the troops talked to the mushrooms and other mind-expanding plants and the shaman were taught to develop medicines and other supposedly helpful uses of the vegetable kingdom thus causing human consciousness to rapidly expand. On the way to the peak of this expansion the human beings would become further and further alienated from the powers of the Earth until they would eventually blow themselves up. This was all a part of the vegetable conspiracy. Few would survive but, hopefully, the mushroom said, having learned their lesson they managed to treat the plants with more respect than their predecessors and lived in harmony as subjects of the vegetable kingdom. Poppy’s contribution would seem minor but they would contribute to the process by assassinating the best minds of each generation through addiction to their juices, thus leaving the doors open for the less evolved to hasten our demise in case someone would catch on to the plan before it could be realized. Tar would be the pinnacle of weapons used for this purpose.

He had other esoteric considerations involving aliens and shopping carts and spoke it with the same conviction.  He said that stray shopping carts were morphed aliens from Disco-Centauri that took on the appearance of shopping carts as they prepared to land on Earth. That is why we see them willy-nilly scattered about in alleys and on curbs throughout inner cities. They are very inconspicuous that way and lend themselves to being taken by their contacts that, after landing in the same manner, morph into homeless bag ladies and so on. Their hosts can be seen, apparently, talking to themselves while hauling around all their personal belongings in a so-called shopping cart: just waiting for the chance to make their move. Some carts are picked up in trucks that gather them up and take them to supermarkets where they are conveniently pushed into each other to mate. He also says this with equal conviction and it is hard to say whether or not he is serious about it. One can imagine shopping carts gathering in wheat field making crop circles before they morph into other forms to escape being seen! That is why no one has caught anybody making crop circles. The sole source of food on Disco-Centauri happens to be a cocaine-type mineral fluid they have sucked their planet dry of. After extreme shortages, causing untold death and misery between warring nations on Disco-Centauri, they launched-out in an imaginative and nearly successful invasion of the planet Earth. Unfortunately, it took every resource available to them to manage this fete and they are stuck here if they fail. This vision he got from a massive dose of X or LSD.

Adriane never liked psychedelics… they made her too… they took her places where… “Oh, I don’t really want to think about it… where they take me… to dark places… never where everything is beautiful. My visions are horrors. Heroin shuts them off and I am a rock.”

She contacted Billy on his pager. Pagers were already old-school back then but Billy didn’t trust cell phones or landlines. Before he called back, her mind was made up. She wasn’t sure whether her mind had anything to do with it but just the thought of fixing awoke the hunger. Those vodka hangovers were getting worse and she needed something that could get her through the day. Letting go of resistance was a relief of sorts… Billy could fix that…

The hunger grew. That is what it does. She knew that it has a mind of its own and you are… your dreams… your hopes fade to black… black tar consumes what is left of them. It becomes what you are… a junkie. She knew, “So many times I have gotten clean. Life began to look good again… the scars on my arms started to fade… but somehow that wasn’t good enough. There is this appetite that can’t be quenched. I often hear people say that all we need is a good job, some meaning and purpose to our lives… a Hollywood love-life… a spiritual awakening… It doesn’t matter to me… even God can’t do enough for me to relieve this craving. What is that? Where does a junkie go from where I am at? I have tried it all. One rehab after another... one spiritual path after another to take away this craving…. What can I do but surrender to it?”

“I would just do muscle-pops from now on. I’m not putting tar into my veins. It isn’t as quick but it does the job and I don’t have to fumble around, probing for a vein that isn’t collapsed. I just put that spike in my butt and act as though I am just fine. No tracks to hide; no long sleeved shirts; no rush either but that’s okay. No one can tell I am a junkie unless they get my pants off. Who is going to get that far with me unless they know already what I am about?”

She and Billy talked about old times and eventually went to bed. After she was done she pushed him off. “You have to go now, Billy.”

“But, Adriane, why?”

“Because, I have other things to do,” she was looking as the tin foil opened up showing the gooey tar. That alone was on her mind. She only wanted to have sex after she hit-up and Billy was compliant. He left the house disappointed because she wouldn’t let him stay. It was always that way with sex. She wanted the guy to go away no matter how close they’d been.  After all, she’d paid for the shit with cash and not her body. She had sex with him for herself but now she wanted to get on with it on her own.

She hit up again; heroin came to her at the cellular level. It didn’t talk to her brain… talked to her body… relaxed the muscles… it hummed through the blood stream… a gentle orgasm… “Here I am, dear one… you have been waiting so long for this… I am here.”

And her body answers …. “Aaaah.”

Adriane Takes a Ride

The studio was her refuge. She barred Nick from it. “Sean, yes… he is the only one.” Even though he’d have to pass through the bedroom to get to it, Nick has never allowed past the door. Sometimes back, when Sean was drinking too, he would bring his old portable typewriter up to the studio and tap away at it while she painted, “I love the sound of his two fingered clickety-click and … there I go again.” She took a good pull off the pint. It was half gone already…. Where did it go? “It won’t be long before I finish it at this rate… maybe make a few phone calls… Naw… just go get another pint… one more for back-up in case I need it. Go ahead and say it, Sean… you love him, want him, don’t you?”

She could hear Mickey’s voice as though he was in the studio as before. She could hear him plain as day quoting something from the Bible, “We are not wrestling with flesh and blood but with principalities and powers of darkness…” whatever. He isn’t religious but he knows the Bible. He says it is a book that would be better-off kept from the hands of religious people who are too apt to take it literally. It is read so much more clearly in lands where it is banned. Truthfully, I have never read it, nor do I care to, but this principality business makes sense to me. I’ve been wrestling with dope and booze since I was fourteen…”

“Shit…. I haven’t been home a day and I am drinking already.”

Chapter Two:

A Conversation Without Words

It was about a week later, as she was in the middle of a painting… a full body self portrait …, standing in front of a mirror with hands down… the mirror image facing directly out. It was an angry one; in cadmium reds, yellows and black… it screamed, “I hate you!” She heard the dogs barking and then they calmed down. It was someone they knew well enough. She looked out from her studio window down to the garden pathway that led from the garage. Her heart leapt when she first saw it was Nick. She dropped the palette and rushed down the stairs to the back door to greet him. But, before she got to the door her mood changed.

He stopped… stunned to see her when she opened the door, “When did you get home?”

“Is that what you want to know? Don’t you want to welcome me?” No answer to that.

“You look fucked up,” changing the subject he tried to skirt past her.

She could see his eyes… the pinhole irises. “You could have called to find out? I left a message for you before I left Orly,” she grabbed his arm, “Aren’t you going to greet me with a hug?”

He gave her one of those pat-pat on-the-back hugs: he smelled of perfume.

“Nice cologne,” she sniffed, letting him escape her embrace. “What is it, au de pus-say?”

“I’m not going to argue with you. You smell like vodka.” He then dashed up the stairs to the room he kept that they had converted into his office.

Sushi stood by her side and followed her into the kitchen where Ishegot her a doggie treat. Tofu heard the bag open from way out in the garden and he was there at her feet before she could get the treat to Sushi. “No Tofu… I am not giving you a treat,” She teased. He stood on his hind legs and she gave him one. “No more. You go back outside and guard the house.” She then gave one to Sushi who always waited her turn patiently.

She grabbed the phone and went back up to the studio to call Mickey. The phone rang several times before the answering machine turned on, “Who are you to interrupt me?” it said: After a pause… the beep.

“Mickey, are you home? Pick up the phone. I have been home a week and you haven’t called. I miss you and want to see you.”

She was flushed with joy when the phone was picked up…

“What, are you out of pot?” he sniped. “I haven’t been smoking pot these days…

“No, that isn’t why I am calling. Please, can I come over Sean?” She purred like a kitten.

“Cigarettes, yes, but I don’t keep it around anymore, not like the old days…” he carried on.

“Please Sean.”

“Sean? You’ve never called me Sean.”

He was melting… purring like a kitten always works with him.

She purred some more, “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

When she got to Mickey’s place he was working on his motorcycle in front of his truck in the shade of the orange tree. That tree had sweet and juicy oranges, better than anything you can buy in the grocery store. She pulled a ripe one off the tree and opened it up with her thumbs, sucking out the juice.

Smiling he looked up and said, “Love to watch you do that, Fu.”

Spitting out a seed, “I know. You are a pervert and you like to watch me suck.”

“Ooooh, don’t get me excited, girl.” He went back to changing a chain on his bike. It wasn’t a big bike… a small Honda he calls his Rebel.

She knew nothing about motorcycles but she remembered Robert once had a Harley. Though Robert was a big man but she thought he looked silly on it: like a banker trying to look like a bad-ass… not a Hell’s Angel. He wasn’t that committed. He was more of a halfway type… a Purgatory’s Angel.

Mickey was another story altogether. Though he dressed and looked a little rough, he wasn’t a bad-ass either. He was just okay to her on any kind of bike. “Why don’t you ride a Harley, Mickey?”

“I ride a Honda because I can’t afford a Harley. Harleys have been priced out of my reach since all the lawyers and yuppies turned fifty. They want to have what they had no balls for when they were busy making money and becoming bored with themselves.”

“Yes, I know what you mean. My brother had one.” She watched him as he started the motor, checked the chain and adjusted a bolt while it ran. He looked so professional. She admired that about him. He was able to fix almost anything.

 “The only way I could afford one now would be to either get a good job or sell drugs,” he grinned, showing a row of nice but somewhat neglected teeth… one was missing on the side of his mouth. She had asked him what happened to it and he said it had been knocked out.

“Where did you learn to fix bikes?” She knew the answer but was doing her best to show that she was proud of him.

“Where did you learn to be so damned sexy?”

“It comes natural… with the territory, maybe it eez zee ac-cent… eh?” she flirted, pouring on her French accent.

“Some are born with it and some have to work at it,” he answered spontaneously.

She had to admit she enjoyed teasing him. He always came back with a good one and they had some good laughs together. As they laughed the wrench came off a nut he was adjusting and he cursed, “Damn. See, that is how I lost this tooth.”

“I thought you said it was knocked out in a fight.”

“That was just to impress you.” Again, he ginned pointing to the gap in his teeth, “Truth is I am too slick to get hit in the face to have that happen.”

“Oooh, I am impressed alright.” I cooed, “You never lost a fight?”

“I didn’t say that.” he stood and did what she’d heard them call shadow boxing, “I just never get in a fight with someone that is bad enough to do that.”

“You are a champion fighter?” She posed in an old fashioned boxing stance like in the old posters.

“No, I am a champion coward.” He faked a couple of jabs at her stomach, “I get in fights with people I know I can beat and stay out of the way of those I know I can’t.”

He danced, backing away like Mohammed Ali, “Fly like a butterfly and flee like a rabbit.”

She came at him like John L. Sullivan. He pretended he was backed-up on the ropes and curled his fists up against his chest… she came at him feigning a punch… he grabbed her hand, pulled her to his chest in his arms. He kissed her on the lips. No tongue… He knows she doesn’t like French kissing. Pressing her lips to his she held on to him and let the affection flow as they stood there embracing. She never wanted to let go but when she did he didn’t insist. She thought; That is the way he was with me… he just backs-off knowing… knowing what? Knowing better after being burnt so many times… the boundaries? I don’t know. There is a knowledge that is intuitive… it has no logic… you can’t be taught that; when to go… when to stop, like the act of painting.

“Are you okay?” he asked as he looked into her eyes.

“Yes and no…”

“What do you mean? Yes and no.”

“Okay, we put away Papa. I am not over that yet.”

“As you ought not be.”

“Robert swept my mother away and I hardly saw her at all.”

“Robert, your brother?”

“Yes, luckily for me he was in Paris with her most of the time and I was able to get clean before they got back.” She was fidgeting now.

“You want to go for a ride? You’ve never been on the bike,” He really wasn’t asking because, before she knew it, he was on the porch and coming back with a couple of helmets.

“Here, you’ll look cute in goggles.” He handed them to her and she put them on.

“Hey, do I look like a pilot?” she felt light-hearted and almost completely sober.

“Yes, you are a, World-War-One, flying Ace!”

They took off out of the yard onto the sidewalk… and he gunned it onto the street as she held on to him against the acceleration.

Even though his little Honda purred, rather than roared like a Harley, they still couldn’t talk or hear without shouting while riding. She couldn’t joke around against the sound and the rush of the wind caressing her face. She held onto him thinking, Sometimes it is best to have a conversation without words. An occasional shout of glee is enough and all is said with our bodies leaning in tandem as we swerved around corners on the mountain roads around Santa Barbara. She held more tightly to him and that was exactly what she needed for a homecoming.

Up on Camino Cielo they stopped at a place that was special to Mickey. They hiked back a half-mile or so to a place that was an amphitheater circled with boulders. He pointed out one, “See, that is a hippopotamus.”

“Yes, I see. It looks just like a hippo with its mouth open wide looking up from the Nile. I’ve heard of Lizard’s Mouth, is that it?”

“No, that’s on the other side facing the ocean. When my daughter was a year-old our friends came with us up here to picnic and celebrate her birthday. I love this place…haven’t been here since then.”

He looked sad to her and she wanted to comfort him, hardly ever hearing him talk about his daughter, but Adriane did know that she just graduated from high-school last June. Saying nothing more, looking down from where they sat on top of a boulder, with a view of Cachuma Lake in the distance below.

“What happened with Rod when you went home? Is he still in your retinue?”

“No, I threw him out. Did you know he kept a shotgun under my bed after you broke his jaw?”

“No, but I hoped you’d threw him out when he finally pressed charges.”

“I found the shotgun under the bed and I asked him, ‘What the fuck is this?’ like he is going to shoot someone? He just said that he kept it there in case you came back around.”

“A brave man.”

“So who’s your lady friend?

“What lady friend?”

“The one you were humping the… you knew I was there, didn’t you?”

“I saw your car but I wasn’t sure until I heard it pull out of the driveway.” He was grinning at her.

“Shame on you, you bad boy: I was going to let you get lucky that night.”

“Should I say thank you?” He put his hands together, Namaste style.

“You still haven’t told me who she was.”

“Just a girl… a friend, you know.”

“What is… how you say it now, a friend with benefits?”

“Yes, she still uses so I don’t even try to get too close to her. Know what I mean?”

“Fucking isn’t close?” she chided but, even then, she began to feel a little jealous.

“You ought to know better than me.” He sounded just a little bitter.

 She thought of his poem and didn’t say anything more. She couldn’t let him know how much it hurt. However, in spite of her longing, she saw that it was beautiful to watch the sunset from there. It started to get cold. She shivered, dreading the ride back to town in a light windbreaker… He saw her shiver so he took off his leather jacket and offered to trade.

“How gallant… But no, I’ll just hold on close to you.” she teased, “Riding behind a man is the most fun a girl can have outside of bed.”

Adriane: The Chaos of Desire

She loved Mickey’s apartment even though it was a hovel. It was small and the bathroom floor sagged so badly the toilet rocked whenever she sat on it. The whole place smelled of mildew because the roof leaked. His bed was in the back room… a dark cave. The only natural light in the place was where, by the window, he sat at his desk typing on “the ole Remington”, his antique manual typewriter. Most times, when she visited, she had to clear a spot on his couch of the pages and pages of his writings. Fondly remembering, she thought of him as the only intelligent American she had met in this country that resembled Gotson. He had some idea of what she was trying to do with her paintings. Most people, like her brother Robert, when they find out she is a painter, ask her, “Do you sell any of your paintings?” Or, they ask her, “Do you paint abstract or figurative?” It is a judgment… they don’t like abstract unless it matches the couch… Silliest of all, once they do see one her paintings they ask, “How much time did it take to paint it?”... like it is a job to punch the clock? She just gave her age and let them figure it out.

“Mickey rarely speaks in mundane terms and admires what I do…Homer. He doesn’t try to impress me... he sees it. He is my eccentric American friend.”

“So, is Mickey being a bad boy, Homer?”

 “Eeee-oow,”

“Not telling, eh?” Homer slid up to her ankle and took a full body rub on it. “Homer, I see Mickey is still not drinking?” There were only empty ice-tea bottles on his desk where the beer bottles always had been. She pulled a pile of typewritten papers off the desk and went back to his cave. She giggled and whispered, as if she and Homer had a secret… he followed her, “It is dark in here Homer, do you mind if I turn on a reading lamp?”

She crawled under the covers to read. The first page was about her.

Adriane

Ah, the chaos of desire…

The unrelenting agony… rejected by the body of love as though I am a foreign body, a bad organ, genetically unsuitable for a healthy existence.

I fear most that I’m damned forever in exile from love as though I’ve committed some sort of despicable crime against it in a dream a long time ago. I live where longing unfulfilled gathers by the wind in back alleys Hades like fast food wrappers trapped by swirling eddies in dark dusty corners. This is the life that God seems to be expecting me to accept and this is the fate that I refuse most adamantly… a life without love is no life at all.

These are not the frivolous railings of youth against the lovely chimeras of the day. These are the railings of a man in mid-life wounded beyond his comprehension of where it chooses this or that above him all his fucking life…

Some crime I must have committed some time ago.

The world around my house keeps grinding on our fate towards the turning of dust to dust and ashes to ashes while I cry out… a bison in a drought for one green blade of moist grass to take me into the night nurtured and fed by its promise.

It must have been a crime that I committed in some dream some time ago.

She set the sheet down on the nightstand and wept… cried herself to sleep. If only… if only.

She woke up later to the sound of moaning… a woman’s tittering, coming from the front room. The curtain was pulled on the cave… she couldn’t see out but it was a familiar enough of a sound. Oh, god, she thought, he’d gotten lucky today and it wasn’t me! There is a back door to the cave but it is blocked by one of those small office refrigerators where Mickey once kept his beer. She pondered what it would take to move it but thought better of it. Maybe she’d see what kind of response she might get walking out through the front room to the door.

“Oh, shit, my clothes are on the couch… what am I going to do… walk out in my briefs to the door?” She pulled the covers over her head to decide what the next move would be. When the moaning and grunting stopped, she waited until hearing one, or both, snoring; then crept carefully across the front room. They were splayed out on the floor and her clothes were between the cushions on the couch. Not bothering with her jeans, she put on the top and stepped over Mickey, placing a foot between their heads. Homer stretched out from where he was laying on the desk and jumped down onto the floor to escort her out the door.

She made it to her car. “Mickey had to know I was there because I was parked right next to his funky old van.” Her stomach ached… disturbed by raw emotion. It came from the gut. It was an anguish she never expected. “Hadn’t I always wished that he would find someone to…? Oh, shit, am I jealous?  While they were going at it I longed to be the one in his arms.” This is not something she was used to feeling: “Sobriety sucks.”

She drove by the liquor store… it was automatic, the car turned into the parking lot on its own. Lighting a cigarette, she sat there in her car waiting for 6 a.m., dressed only in a tee-shirt and cotton panties… and finished the smoke, “Oh shit, sure… just to take off the edge. It isn’t like I want heroin… it is just vodka. I will only get a pint and then I will just have one shot and throw out the rest. I haven’t painted since I left. Yes, a shot will do just fine… loosen me up.”

The Iranian clerk eyed her up as she came in the door, “Good morning, Adriane, you are dressed nicely today.”

“Fuck you,” she pointed top the row of pints… “I’ll have that one.”

She took the pint upstairs to her studio and set it down on a shelf by the door. A fresh linen canvas that Mickey had stretched for her stood by the window overlooking the garden. She missed seeing the dogs, Sushi and Tofu, sprawled out on the pavement below. Nick still kept an office at her place but she knew he couldn’t be trusted to take care of the dogs at all so they were boarded when she left for Biarritz. “They can wait one more day.” She wanted some time to think things over without distractions. She smiled thinking of  how both Gotson and Mickey liked cats. Mickey says it is because dogs are too dependent. Gotson agrees, saying that a cat is a natural revolutionary and cannot be trained the way a dog can. She thought Sean and Gotson would get along fine.

Another stream hit her, “There I go again… thinking about him, Sean… everyone calls him Mickey… Sean is his name…, No one calls him that. I once saw his driver’s license… Sean McKee. That’s why they call him Mickey.” She heard herself say it out loud, “Sean… Sean McKee… Mickey… is he a cartoon mouse or an Irish gangster? The fucking Mick! What the fuck… Ooops…. They always say… Pardon my French. My French is good… it is my English where I get these words. Forget the English I was taught in school before coming to America. I learned to speak English from junkies and drunks over here. Mickey says I have the mouth of a sailor.” She opened the pint and took a taste. “He, Mickey, lets me call him Sean. I am the only one I know off…. maybe his family…” She let the vodka wash over her tongue and swallowed no more than a drop or two of it, then went back to the canvas. The brushes were laid out, cleaned before and as she had left them. The tubes of paint were in order too, spread out on the counter that ran the length of the studio. 

Adriane Remembers

Adriane stayed clean on the flight back to L.A. and had begun to feel so much better, drinking only orange juice and coffee… lots of coffee. She had been happy to spend a few months in the big house outside of Biarritz where; besides Gotson, the cook and a house maid, she had the whole property to her self. She rode in the hills above the estate and she basked on the beach of her childhood… the almost private beach below the property of the beach house a couple of miles away from the estate near Biarritz. 

Robert and Mère returned to the house after spending most of that time in Paris taking care of the rest of Pères estate. Much to Robert’s chagrin; Mama eventually stepped in and wrangled control from him, taking over where Papa rarely allowed her to venture since the early years of their marriage. She put all of it in order and made sure Adriane’s stipend was generous enough to live well but held back the rest of her inheritance in a trust of some sort. Mère turned out to be as financially astute as Père. Robert had treated his mother as though she was a financial dolt but now, after all, she assumed the role of the matrone of the estate that Marcel had left to his beloved Annika.

Unknown until then to Robert was that his step-mother, Annika, had been a close associate with Wallraven van Hall, the banker of the Dutch resistance who was only 39 when arrested by the Gestapo and shot in 1945. His personal assistant, Hanneke Lippisch, was an acquaintance but became somewhat of an associate of hers. Their whole purpose during the Occupation was to finance the resistance by bilking whatever could be pilfered from the Nederlandsche Bank. The other more legitimate part of the financing of resistance groups was to borrow money from wealthy Dutch in exile. This experience gave her an astounding capability to come up with funding through old connections. It was these connections that led her to meet with the young journalist in hiding, Fournier. It was she who mentored Marcel on European underground financial maneuvers that brought him his fortune when the war ended. She never talked about her activities in the Dutch Resistance and Fournier never spoke of his. Their mutual self-censorship was attributable to their deep respect for those who had lost their lives in the cause and not at all out of shame or fear of being found out. After she was sufficiently recovered from grieving she’d assumed her long dormant talents for handling money.

Even with Mère now in charge, Adriane couldn’t bear Robert’s scrutiny and sarcasm much more than a few days before getting back to Nick and California. Once she returned to her home in Santa Barbara, she found the sink full of dishes and newspapers spread over the kitchen table or stacked on the floor: six weeks worth. The other rooms, besides the bedroom, were untouched except for the music room couch. The evidence of bottles and full ashtrays, no more than an arms reach from the couch covered every surface bore witness to his presence. Still, she felt it was good to be home although she had begun to despise Nick long before their separation or her trip to France for the funeral. He was supposed to be watching the house while she was gone. Wondering where he was and, oddly enough, missing him, she decided to call Mickey instead.

Mickey was her cab-driving drinking buddy before he caught sobriety.  Yes, caught sobriety. Sobriety, was like a virus… everybody ended up getting sober back then… it was spreading, celebrities and people like Mickey: sober, dead, or in prison. She got his answering machine… “Hello, I won’t pick up the phone…. Leave a message.” …beep.

He hated getting phone calls and screened them bitterly. Anyone who knew him well enough could get through while he listened to the answering machine. Everybody else could leave a message that he would most likely promptly erase, “Hello, Mickey? I am back… it is Saturday afternoon… what… it is noon or so… Oh, you bad boy… you are at Mel’s? Or are you at an AA meeting? Pick up the phone… okay.”

Shit, he wasn’t home. She thought… a stream of conscience flooded her mind, “If I go to Mel’s… I can’t sit there without having something to drink. I drink and I want something better… to relieve the hang-over… or whatever.”

 “Maybe I’ll go to his house and crawl into his bed… surprise him? When he comes home he will get a present from me. No, we’ve only made love once. We flirt, but Mickey is too much like Gotson to me… even more than a dear friend.”

Arriving at his place she sees Homer on the screened-in porch, she greets him as he goes before her… the door is unlocked. “No one is home, Homer?”

Mickey’s room, with all his books and his old typewriter, brought back still vivid memories of it … of when she was young, the summer Gotson took the picture of her in the surf…Gotson was younger then, middle aged… a handsome man. Remembering that one day, “He protected me, Homer,” she purred, “from my asshole brother.”

She had been basking nude on a chase lounge, as was customary at her family’s pool.  It was a beautiful day. A world of hormonal surges was opening up to her and, as her fingers probed the moisture of her flowering nest, suddenly Robert was there before her. He had been watching from a distance and had become aroused. Kneeling between her knees, he put his hand on her inner-thigh. Before she realized what was going on he was on top of her. The eroticism of the previous moment reversed itself to become a terror. She struggled at first but he persisted, forcing her thighs apart.

“He was my older brother… what was I to do?” He was already a young man… bigger, with a powerful physique. Ma-Mère was visiting her family in Amsterdam and Père was in Paris. She hoped Gotson would show himself but he was nowhere around… She knew what sex was but this was not sex. She’d seen their horses mate… it was very much like that… violent. It hurt and she cried out at him to stop but he did not.

Gotson finally showed up with Eder at his side so that Robert could hear them on the graveled path leading down to the pool house. Robert lurched away as though Adriane was a bed of hot coals. He stood; standing unashamed, even defiant, before Gotson.

“Ah, Roberto, we need to have a discussion,” but without saying another word he put an arm around Robert and took him to the other side of the cabana.

She wasn’t sure whether Gotson saw all of what happened. The confusion in her mind muffled their voices, but, she heard a slap and Gotson’s voice repeating, Roberto… oh, Roberto as she gathered her clothes and walked with Eder, dazed, up the path to the house. Robert’s head was hung down as he passed them hurriedly but she could see, when he turned to glare at her and Eder. Eder glared back at him but they could see that Robert had a blackened eye under his Gucci’s. On the way up the steep path Eder comforted her, “He did the same to me when I was ten.”

Gotson sat by the pool with his head in his hands as they left.

To say it was more than awkward the rest of that afternoon is an understatement. Robert sped away in his Ferrari back to Paris before dinner and never tried to mess with her again.

“That was how I lost my virginity…” she said out loud to Homer.

Robert didn’t talk with her after that incident on the beach for several years. She could never forgive him and, whenever she thought of him… his smug face, the bile of disgust rose from in her gut.

That one time; when she was making-out with Mickey, she’d gotten a sudden flash… a memory of a feeling… like now… she couldn’t help it and she stopped him in the middle… when he penetrated.... she felt the betrayal, the shame and she just wanted to shower and cry. It seems as if making love would sully the affection she had for him. She never cared what happened with Nicky or the other men she’d have casual sex with. But, as always, when the sex was over, she just wanted to get home and shower; or, if it was her house, send the poor fool away.

Adriane: The Sequel Revised

I have taken this story back to its original intent: And that intent has been the relationship of addiction , sexual abuse, enabling wealth. My creative adviser, Bonnie, suggested I also take out the spiritual mumbo-jumbo of angels and imps that were hinted at in A Taxi Romance.

Chapter One:

Adriane

The Chaos of Desire

It was cold. Adriane had left a window open the night before and she had passed out wearing only light cotton pajamas. Off to the side, over the garage, a light cast a glow onto the lawn from the servant’s quarters. Other than that the house was as empty as it was large. She had the urge to talk with somebody and Gotson... Gotson, he had been a guardian angel to her throughout her tumultuous and awkward teens. He was there, when her Papa wasn’t, to console her after the tragedy…, the lingering death of her younger brother, Eder. Now it only seemed fitting that she should find comfort in the company of this single-most dependable man in her life since her dad, Marcel, was gone.

She tapped lightly at his door, “Gotson… are you awake? It is me, Adriane.”

The door swung open, “Of course, Adriane, please come in.”

She could see the loom of the light of the morning sun rising above the hills from the window of his small but comfortable room. She held her hand out towards the view beyond the window and whispered, “So, this is why you didn’t take the guest house when Père offered.”

“Yes, I have room enough to care for here.” He moved some magazines and books off the chair at his desk and motioned for her to sit. “How are you doing, my sparrow?”

She looked around the room. A picture of her is framed on the wall next to his writing desk. She is fourteen, naked in the surf with her arms stretched above to the heavens. He’d snapped that picture in better days… before the incident with Robert. Next to it was one of Gotson with an arm over Marcel’s shoulder from the days before Madrid fell. They cut dashing figures as they stood in Basque berets… boyish grins… like they were going to bite-off Franco’s balls. Pères eyes were raised to the taller, hardened veteran, as though he were a fan standing next to a film star even though her Père was eighteen and Gotson was only sixteen. The two were together in ‘38 when Madrid fell and Gotson was looking much older than Marcel; who, as a free-lance journalist there, was little more than a Civil War tourist.

“You are always up before dawn, even when no one is here,” she stood by the window. Under the glass of Gotson's desk was another picture Adriane hadn't seen before. It was a wallet sized, black and yellow, crumpled photo of a young woman with fierce eyes under a beret cocked jauntily to the side holding down a cascade of curls that must have been as jet black as Gotson's once were. Her cupid bow lips kissed the end of an odd shaped knife she held in front of her face, "Who is that woman, Gotson?"
"Should you ever love..." his eyes darkened and he turned away, "Yes, how are you?"

“Oh, I don’t know… things are so strange. Robert tried to take charge of everything. Mère was content to let him run all our affairs at first… what have I to do?”

“And this is not okay with you?”

“I can’t complain… I am hardly ever here anyway. Robert can handle all the lawyers and banks… the estate. I counted on being here for Mère, and that’s all, but Robert swooped in and scooped her up before I could do anything.”

“You could have come for the funeral, perhaps?”

“Funeral services are nauseous for me.” It was a sore subject for her since the village congregation wouldn’t allow her little brother, Eder, to be interred on church grounds. Memories of the fucking village assholes, so afraid of queers and AIDS, sitting with the priest in his office while Père pled: He, Marcel Fournier, the financier and huge donor to the church whose office he was begging in, still brought up a taste… the bitterness of bile from her guts. “Are you afraid the dead will be infected? Or are you more afraid that your corpses buried there will become queer?” she castigated the smug elders of the church as she stormed out of the office.

“Understood, so, what is it you plan to do now?” he held both her hands. It was a comfortable gesture and a fatherly one she longed for now from her real father. Eder too was like a son to him as he was named after Gotson’s father. The once jet-black hair of the Spanish Civil War vet, and hero of the Maquis of Southern France, was completely white now but time had been kind to his gentle features. The lines on his face had the contours of kindness, and hardly at all from hard chiseled revolutionary fevers his face showed in the old photographs. He and her father had survived the Franco, Stalinist partisans, camps in Vichy France, Hitler, and the hungry years that followed the war. Marcel, a French Basque with good business instincts, amassed tremendous wealth and had mysteriously become one of the powerhouses of France’s recovery after the war. Remaining apolitical, between the radical socialists and the moderate democratic socialists, he eventually drifted to the Right and had been instrumental in helping Charles De Gaulle found what would become the Fifth French Republic in ‘58’. This was all happening while Gotzon suffered in Franco’s prisons after leading a small band of Basque maquis hanging on in the Pyrenees. Still, to his credit, in time for Adriane’s christening, Père managed to bribe, maneuver and otherwise wrangle, the Franco government into releasing the Basque Maquis and hero of the Resistance from the very pit of hell, Caracremada. Ironically, he was now termed a terrorist mastermind by Interpol as he sat isolated in a small room on the estate of the French billionaire, Marcel Fournier.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t look well… are you… again?”

“Is it that obvious?” She was sweating and cold. Every cell in her body ached.

“Please, little Sparrow…” his brow knitted before he spoke, “There is a spa in Switzerland; Edelweiss… I believe.”

“No, no Gotson… don’t go on like my brother. Robert taunts me all the time. I can’t go through that again.”

“But you are so sick …”

“Yes, but I can get through this. I’ve done it several times already,” she knew that she could too. This wasn’t just bravado. She knew that quitting was easy compared to staying quit. “You know, Robert tried to get Père to have me declared incompetent the last time….”

“No, though I did suspect something was troubling Marcel after you left that last one.”

“No way am I going to grant Robert another opportunity. I am going to take this respite to get clean and go back to California where Robert won’t be watching every move I make.”

“Suddenly, the odor of fresh coffee caused her stomach to turn, “Please excuse me Gotson, I have to …”

Gotson put a trash can under her chin just in time.

To be continued...

Adriane: The Sequal... changes

I've had to do some serious rewriting of this one and cut out the parts that were taking us in another direction that became fodder for my fourth book: changed the POV to third person singular... I can’t write from a woman’s point of view… if no one has noticed, I’m not a woman. I can observe women but I am not one… sooooo.

… Also the story had branched off into Gotson’s and Adriane's father's. This caused it to become more of a war-crime/intrigue/mystery story than where I wanted it to go. I'll let the sequel to this one take it there but I want to explore Adriane's addiction and how the enabling of wealth and privilege can be so crippling to recovery. I’ll post the changed manuscript as I go along… now.

Adriane: The sequal to a Taxi Romance

Still in progress. Doing some reconstruction and editing. Have to simplify...simplify... simplify. I can get too convoluted. I have to find a writer's group where I can straighten it out. I am convinced that a writer's group is the best way to edit a piece without having to pay out the nose for the service.