Diamond Girl

Part 5



LONELY GIRL





Chapter 43



When I was a very little girl, Daddy took me with him to Herbert’s father’s funeral at St. Patrick’s. I wasn’t bored by the service, I was too busy admiring the vast grand space we were in.

I can still remember how happy I was to be there alone with Daddy. Daddy had called me his date and promised to take me to lunch at Serendipity afterwards. The priest had been droning on for awhile but there must have been some defect in his microphone because suddenly his voice boomed out loudly, echoing through the cathedral, startling people.

“In my father’s house there are many mansions.”

I giggled and said as loudly as a five year old child can, “That sounds nice!”

Daddy was more amused than mortified and, after the service, outside he held me in his arms while people came to offer him their condolences at the loss of his attorney. That they all ignored Herbert, the bereaved son, didn’t seem unnatural. After all, Daddy was the richest man on Fifth Avenue and it was only right that all remarks be directed towards him.

Amongst the respectful murmurs of, “Damn shame, he was a fine man, a fine lawyer, only ninety seems sudden,” there were more jocular comments directed towards me. “That’s a fine little beauty you’ve got yourself there, Kells, and vocal too.”

Daddy would either incline his head or smile, depending on the various comments. Later, though, when we were alone at Serendipity, he looked across the table at me and laughed. “So, Carey K, you thought many mansions sounded nice, hmm?”

I nodded seriously, and speaking around my mouthful of forbidden chocolate, replied. “I do, Daddy … more is better, right? That’s what Mommy always says.”

He roared with laughter and, in an uncharacteristic show of public affection, he snatched me up out of my chair and twirled me around in front of the delighted patrons.

“Your father’s house has many mansions too, little girl, and you’re the princess in every one of them, and don’t you forget it.”

I get confused remembering that sort of thing now. I haven’t really changed much from the silly, greedy little girl that I was then. I don’t know why or when I stopped being Daddy’s princess and became his shame.

As to the many mansions, well I guess 'mansion' is a relative term. To a family living in a third world country, my four hundred square foot, ice cold, dark guest house might be a mansion.



* * *



I’ve never been religious and God, if he exists, probably hates people who try to go quid pro quo with him as much as I do, but there is another saying in the bible. I don’t know why I remember it except that it’s a hobby of rich people to remember things that have to do with them. Anyway, it says it’s harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. I think that means that, given my present situation, I might have a fifty-fifty chance now.

I was arrested and put in jail two months ago.

At the time, I thought I had finally hit the bottom of my slide, but see, you can be wrong about something every day, right up until the last day, because jails have heat and water, and I think even medical care, so, once again, in making judgments, I was letting my rich girl past color my viewpoint.

It was a stupid, stupid thing I did, I know that. In the last conversation I ever had with my wonderful Milan, she asked me what was I thinking? She hung up before I could try to explain.

A week after I was released from my seventy-two hour psych hold for attempted suicide at Cedars, I felt crazy enough to ask them to let me go back in.

I was totally alone in a way I had never been before, no beautiful little girl who wanted my company, not even semi-criminal Maria and her gangsta pals. They had disappeared along with Diana. I was so desperate for company that I called Maria and begged her and Ramon to come back. I said they could just live in the main house for free, but she told me no thanks. She said that she didn’t like living at my place because she couldn’t use the pool and Ramon’s apartment in Van Nuys had a great pool. I couldn’t argue with her about that. My pool had turned into a smelly, slime-covered swamp. I even had frogs.

Pool maintenance, like gardening and a hundred other details of daily life that used to be covered by my money, automatically had just disappeared. There was something worse too. Beverly Hills is a Mecca for rats. They live in the alleyways and they nest up high in the palm trees. It’s so bad that sometimes a tourist driving down Rodeo Drive in their rented convertible will get the surprise of his or her life when one drops down into the car.

This usually causes a lot of screaming and driving into the sides of overpriced buildings. It has become so common that the rental companies at L.A.X. issue a warning along with the car keys. Because I had no gardener, I had no one to tell me that the rats were taking over my lot and to tell me that I needed to call in an emergency extermination crew, not that I would have had the money anyway.

I found out about the rats from Petal. We were sitting in the squalor of my graffiti-covered living room early one morning when she began yipping frantically and dashing around the room. I stared at her, surprised. She was always so mellow. Then she let out the equivalent of a doggie scream and came rushing back towards me, the pursued not the pursuer. I saw a dark blur behind her as she cleared the floor in a high jump and landed on my lap. Instinctively I pulled up my feet, and she and I both watched in primal horror as a huge brown rat scuttled underneath the couch beneath us. After that we stayed in the guest house almost all the time. The rats were one more thing I began to blame Honeysuckle for. If she hadn’t called my mother, I would still have had Diana and my allowance, small as it was.

Because of her, I had lost my child and Herbert had, at my parents' behest, stopped my money cold, “Pending your voluntary check in to long-term rehab.”

I blamed her too for Karmen not taking my calls.

One night, while I was huddled up with Petal in our hovel watching American Idol, the TV suddenly went black and I understood that meant the cable was gone too. I guess I snapped because, much as I might wish to, I can’t write this off to drugs or alcohol.

I had a key to Honeysuckle’s condo. The three of us, Karmen, Honeysuckle and I, had all given each other keys to our places once upon a drunken bonding night. I grabbed Petal, who I never left alone anymore because of my fear that rats would eat her, and took off towards Century City on my last tank of gas. It was after ten, so I knew Honeysuckle would be out and her building has no doorman, so I just walked into the lobby like I owned the place and rode up the elevator, even flashing a smile at the cute guy in her hallway as I unlocked her door.

Once inside, I turned on all the lights and wandered around aimlessly. I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a clue what, if anything, I was going to do once I got inside. I was thirsty, so I went to her fridge and opened it. The inside of a party girl’s fridge is always good for a laugh. Honeysuckle’s was typical: a couple yogurts past their sell-by date, twenty or so bags with the logos of L.A.’s best restaurants stuffed in, and a bottle of Roederer Cristal, which I decided to drink some of and leave the opened bottle out where it would confuse her.

I ended up drinking too much and, while high, I got what seemed like a great plan to pay her back.

Honeysuckle loved her trashy clothes, so I went into her bedroom closet and carried armfuls of them into her shower and turned on the water. Then I went back into her bedroom and looked around. She had an oversized round bed. I thought it was hideous and the kind of tacky thing that someone like her would have bought thinking it was glamorous.

Idly, more out of curiosity than intent to do more destruction, I opened up the top drawer beside her bed. She had a serious collection of dildos and I noted, with drunken glee, two small glassine packages of cocaine. I snorted the coke, threw the dildos onto the center of her bed and poured all the perfumes I could find on her dresser over them. Then, not wanting to flood her apartment, I turned off the shower and picked up one of the soaking wet dresses from the floor on my way out.

Obviously in that condition I shouldn’t have been driving, but in that condition I was too much of a loaded a*shole to consider a little thing like being under a lot of influences so, Petal on my lap, I turned my Mercedes towards Karmen’s place a mile away.

Sadly for me, she was home. I staggered up to her door with Honeysuckle’s sopping wet dress in my arms and knocked until she opened the door. She didn’t invite me in. She just stood in the doorway, staring at me quizzically.

I tried to smile. “Hey K, I’ve missed you. I just wanted to … uhm, I just wanted to see you.”

I licked my cracked coke-dry lips, trying to smile. She shook her head. “Sorry, Carey, not tonight. What’s the old saying, I’ve got a headache and you’re a mess like usual? Do you want me to call you a cab or do you want to drive yourself out of here and maybe get lucky and die on the way home?”

I stared at her stupidly. My mind was both sluggish and racing with the combination of coke and alcohol. Desperate for her attention I held out the wet dress. “Look, I brought you a present.”

When she didn’t reach for it, I dropped it at her feet and she stared down at it, confused. Finally she said. “Is that Honeysuckle’s dress? What the hell, Carey? Where did you get that?”

I grinned slyly, not answering. Karmen bent down and grabbed the dress with one hand and shoved me in the chest with the other, slamming the door in my face. I heard her deadbolt click from where I had fallen into the shrubbery. I laid there in the dark for a long time, not wanting to move away because I had nowhere to go. After an hour or so. I started to sober up and became really sickened by my night’s activities.

Anxious a little late about drawing attention to myself, I made my way back to the car and drove Petal and me home slowly and carefully. Karmen had been right about how it would have been lucky for me to get into an accident and die, but I didn’t want anything to happen to Petal, or anyone else either.

The cops were waiting for me outside my ‘Sorrow Not’ gates when I pulled up. Karmen had called Honeysuckle, and Honeysuckle had called them, and I was arrested on charges of breaking and entering, destruction of property and theft - the dress I had taken to Karmen.

I didn’t resist arrest. I did beg them to keep Petal at the station with them until I could call for someone to come and get her. At first they said no, that she had to stay at the house, but I cried so hard and I told them about the rats, and Petal is so little and sweet, that finally they agreed.

I was fingerprinted, I was strip-searched and I was photographed in all my disgusting glory before I was finally allowed to make one call.

There was no one else and Milan answered her cell on the first ring. It was hard for her to understand me through my sobs, but when she did, she said in a distant voice, the voice of someone going away, “Carey, I don’t know what you were thinking. No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Listen to me, I am going to send someone, a lawyer, I guess, if I can find one in the middle of the night to get you out of there. They’ll take you home and ...”

“Mills, Mills, thank you, oh God … I … Mills, I’m so sorry, can they … I mean the lawyer, can he bring me to you? I’m afraid to be alone. I’m afraid of that house, I need ...”

“No, you can’t come here, Carey. That stinking bitch little friend of yours that got you arrested has already called Radar Online and TMZ so she could have her fifteen minutes. I can’t be a part of this. I’m sorry, I wish …” Her sweet voice trailed off. I had made Milan Marin, the girl with an answer for everything, speechless.

“Sure, Mills, I understand, I’m … I’m a piece of shit. I’m sorry. I love you and ...”

“I love you too, Carey. I have to go. We’ll … we’ll talk … or I don’t know, maybe you could just email me for a while.” She was gone before I could thank her, before I could tell her that I was still here somewhere, lost inside actions I didn’t understand and a world I understood less.

An hour later a young guy showed up and said he was the lawyer Milan had called. He escorted me out the back, telling me she had posted my twenty thousand dollar bail, and he tried to shield me with his coat from the fifty or so photographers that were gathered outside shouting questions at me.

“Carey, over here.”

“Carey, hey smile.”

“Carey, why’d you do it? Was it a love triangle?”

“Carey, hey, come on give us a smile so your folks can see how pretty you look.”

The lawyer, whose name I never asked, handed me a shaking Petal when we got into the car and, without asking, ordered the driver of the limo which Milan had also sent to drive me home.

The next morning I tried to boot up my laptop to write Milan and that was when I noticed the power had been turned off. There was no gas in my car and, anyway, I had received a notice a week before that the leasing company was repossessing it, so Petal and I walked six blocks up the street to the corner Kinko’s, and I wrote Milan.

“Dear Mills, please forgive me for last night. Please forgive me for everything, if you can. It doesn’t matter, I just wanted to tell you that I have never had a friend like you and you are the only good thing left in my life, besides my Petal.”

She was online and I received this back instantly. “Carey, I hope you are all right, and I’m glad I could help you, but for now I need some space.”

I squeezed my eyes shut against tears and I looked outside the window at my Petal tied up in the heat, and wrote Milan again. “I understand, I do, and I’m sorrier than you will ever know. I know it’s not the time to ask any more favors, but I have to ask this. Can I bring Petal to your house and leave her there for a while? I can’t take care of her, and she is too old to have to live like I do right now.”

Her return message was brief but kind; she was always so kind to me. “Yes, Carey, Petal is always welcome. I will take good care of her. I’m going out of town for a week or so, but I’ll let my housekeeper know you are bringing her. Good luck, Carebears, love, Milan.”

I had sixty dollars in my purse so, before I found a cab, Petal and I went into Fifi and Romeo’s for a last shopping trip. I bought her a new little pink sunhat so she would be pretty for Milan and I rode over with her in the cab.

I didn’t tell her I wouldn’t be seeing her for a long time because I didn’t want her to be sad. My crying in the cab on the way back to my ‘Sorrow Not’ house was so severe that the poor cabdriver waved away my last twenty and watched me with his compassionate eyes as I walked in through the gates.