WITH A ZZZZ...

When my phone rings at two in the morning, it can only be one person. Liza.

“Hughie,” she drooled over the phone, “He’s gone! Finally!”

“He”, of course, refers to her recent husband David Gest or as L’s close friends called him, David Guess Again.

“I know Liza, I heard on the news.” Guide the conversation somewhere else. Anywhere. “What are you doing?” I lamely ask before reaching to turn on a bedside light, Polly looking at me as if I was crazy. Uh... hello! We’re sleeping! On the other end of the phone, Liza sounded like she was inhaling a huge amount of snot so I did what anyone would have, I lit a cigarette. I flicked the lighter several times near the mouthpiece in hopes she’d take a hint and light one herself - Sally Bowles, Divine Decadence and all that. Part of the secret to talking to Liza on the phone is picturing her eternally straddling a cafe chair, a lit fag dangling from her lips. One she doesn’t marry.

“I just got in!” she gleefully screamed into the phone. It was the kind of thing she announced to talk show hosts when she walked onstage. “I want you to know I’ve never felt better!” I then heard a loud thud followed by a hissing sound. Maybe she was alone in her apartment at five in the morning igniting sparklers - chain-lighting them one by one and sticking the bases in circles of Reeses candy lined on the kitchen counter.

“Oops! I dropped the bottle of Pepsi! My slippers are getting, well, soaked!”

I thought of her pink marabou slippers soaking up the Pepsi from the floor, the feathers turning dark and matting like small drowned squirrels. For a woman her height, she has big feet. When she was younger (i.e. thinner) they made her legs appear larger than life. She was a human sparkler stuck into clumps of spike heeled pumps. Now their large size gives her a slightly gnome-like appearance, as if you could picture them curling to a point from the hem of her thirty-year-old Halston pantsuit.

“Are you, uh, drunk?” I asked. Drunk was just an option, a polite way of allowing her to save face. Frankly, I was rooting for Drunk as it greatly reduced my time on the phone. “Coked up” or “gulping pills” could mean hours of rambling on and on about Momma interlaced with snippets of “New York, New York”. Drunk was also legal, not something to be ignored.

“No, darling, I’m high on Life now! New life, big comeback! Out with the old! Oh it was dreadful, Hughie. Dreadful!” The hissing had stopped and was replaced by a thunk-thunk-thunk which was most likely her kicking the empty plastic bottle into the dining room.

“What is Life called on the bottle, Liza?”

There’s a brief pause then I hear the sound of pills scattering across tile like thousands of tiny tap dancers.

“FUCKING TIC-TACS!”

Polly sits upright and raises her ears, curious as to why there’s a hamster being disemboweled in the phone. The sobbing begins and reminds me I have to pee. “What did he say?” I quickly ask before setting the phone next to Polly and taking a whiz.

On the way back to bed, I notice one of those long eyebrow hairs that seems to have a life of it’s own. The other eyebrows work as a team, slowly growing into place while one throws caution to the wind and just Goes For It. It sticks out from the rest to curl upward and if I take it in my fingers, it reaches somewhere near my forehead. Finally I pull it out and hold it stretched to it’s full length for the other hairs to see. This, I tell them, is what the Wild Life will get you. Yes, you can grow long and wooly but in the end...

In bed, Polly is enthusiastically licking the phone. I hold the wet earpiece to my head and Liza is still talking. “It was something about his face...” I picture Guess Again’s face, taut as the plastic of a Pepsi bottle. Perhaps what she saw was her own reflection, the spiky dark hair and long lashes, longer than the wild eyebrow I’d killed before. Polly had fallen back asleep and I mutter an “uh-huh” to Liza’s monologue. I set the phone next to my ear on the pillow and decide to just listen. Quietly. Perhaps if I close my eyes I can absorb her drama with more clarity. I relax, just a little, and as she talks I see her mother sitting on the edge of the stage and opening herself to the audience of queens and glitteratti breathlessly awaiting every word.

By now, she’s slowly reciting the lyrics to “Cabaret”. “What good,” she drawls, “is sitting alone in your room?” I look around the room at the life I have now, Polly, the friends I’ve made. I fall asleep to her muddled words and take myself somewhere over the rainbow.


7:08:30 PM    sro home /