The Tiger Catcher

You want to drive into the mountains, Josephine? You offer her the hills, the canyons, Zuma Beach, and all the music other men have made if she will love you.

All she wants is your body.

Sometimes you act as if that’s all you’ve come for, you say in jest.

How do you know it’s not all I’ve come for, she says.

In jest?

She whispers she’s been starved for tenderness. There’s no time to waste.

You recall to her Ben Johnson’s lament over the brevity of human life. “O for an engine to keep back all clocks.”

She disagrees. There is nothing brief about you, she says, as she stands before you naked, her bouncy breasts to seduce you, her lips to relieve you, her hips to receive you and maybe one day to give you children (her joke, not yours, and you’re less terrified by it than you should be). She wants tenderness from you? You’re as gentle as your brute nature will allow. She wants the beast in you? Her wish is your command.

Julian, I barely know you and yet I feel like I’ve known you forever. How can that be?

You have no answers. You were blinded from the start. A comet has crashed to earth.

You forget to go to Whole Foods, forget your friends, the newsletters, the bills, the store, the lock-ups to scour, the trucks to rent. You forget everything. It’s like you left your past behind when you met her.

She is hungry? You feed her. She is thirsty? You give her wine. She wants music from you? You sing to her about Alfred’s coffee and sweet corn ravioli at Georgio Baldi. You kiss her throat. You’ve wanted to kiss her for so long, you say. She laughs. Yes, Jules, it must’ve felt like the longest twenty-four hours of your life.

You offer to take her to Raven’s Cry at Whisky a Go Go, but not before you buy her the best steak burrito on Vine, and she says how do you know so much about food and love and how to make a girl happy, and you reply, not a girl—you. You two stay in for love, you go out for food. So how about that Whisky a Go Go, Josephine? Ninth Plague and Kings of Jade are playing. Tino and the Tarantulas are going to rock the house. But she wants love from you, and she’d like it to the rhythm of the mad beat music. Are you going to make me feel it, she cries.

Yes. You’re going to make her feel it.

Oh, Jules, she says, her arms wrapped around you, pressing you to her heart. Beware the magician, we say in the sideshows, he’s here only as a diversion. Do not let him into your circle. Boy, you did some magic trick on me. You drew me in with your irresistible indifference, and now you’re like flypaper.

Who is indifferent? he says. She must mean a different Jules.

When did you first want to kiss me? she asks. You tell her it was when she revealed herself to you in the crimson footlights at The Invention of Love. You have not let the first day, the first hour, the first moment of meeting her come and go. You knew. You knew it from the start. Your soul lay open to her as she now lies open to you.

You’re inventing some crazy love yourself so she doesn’t become bored of you.

Fat chance of that, the divine creature coos.

Rejoice, Josephine, you whisper, your head lowered, kneeling between her legs, for your name is written in heaven.

And for some reason, this makes her cry.

No, no, don’t stop, she says, wiping her face. Nothing’s wrong. But let’s put on some Tom Waits while you love me. He’s my favorite. Let’s listen to him sing time time time, but you don’t finish until he is finished, okay, Jules?

As long as it’s not the fifteen-minute live version, you’re fine with it, you say, always the joker, even then.

Afterward she sings to you about your endless numbered day for nights. Sometimes it sounds like she’s saying our endless day for nights are numbered.

At Whisky a Go Go, a drunk fool crawls into your empty bar stool, and as you come back from the men’s, you drop your shoulder and knock him to the ground and pretend it was an accident. Sorry, man, so crowded, didn’t see you, do you mind, this one’s mine. Julian! your girl croons, did you just knock that guy off the chair? I don’t know what you mean, you say. He fell.

Later, after she rushed you home because she had urgent need of you, in her dizzying voice she purrs that you have surpassed her expectations. You demur, you do the humblebrag. You’re pleased she’s pleased, you say with a faux shrug. You have a knack for selling without selling. You have nothing to prove. First you sell, then you deliver.

She says she thought you might be the Nightcrawler who has the appearance of a demon and the heart of a preacher. But that isn’t you. You have the appearance of a preacher and the heart of a demon.

And not just the heart of a demon, Julian.

Sometimes she stays with Z. And sometimes you haul your ass up and choke out a cheat sheet of advice even though you have no wisdom for anyone anymore, all your sayings swooshed into the trashcan icon on your laptop. Make a list of the things you thought you wanted and burn it—that’s your advice. Because where you are, there’s nothing but glory.

She makes you wish for a different car: a convertible, a dazzling two-seater with a chrome grille and suicide doors. You both love the beach at Zuma. You leave before sundown because the rings of hell are waiting for her at the Greek. But sometimes, if you are lucky, she makes love to you in the Zuma lot, her bikini thrown to the side. She straddles you in the backseat of your old man Volvo like you’re sixteen years old and just learned to drive.

Like you just learned to do everything.

The taste of her is always in your mouth.

The rehearsals for Paradise in the Park are at night. At the Greek, you wait for her in the sea of ghostly seats that look soaked in blood and watch her glide across the stage as the sun sets and it grows dark. Julian, she breathes, I may speak Dante, but I dream of you.

Everywhere you go, you stroll hand in hand. The beaches of Venice and Hermosa are worn out with your lovers’ walks. The flowers bloom. The nights are warm. The desert days are long.

This is the realest dream you’ve ever lived.

The Scurvy Kids and Slurry Kids play by the local hotel pool while the chairs are being cleaned for the guests to suntan in. There’s a pounding soundtrack of hip hop and jazz, of indie rock and big bands, of grunge and electric blues, of Buffalo Springfield and Wasted Youth in Los Feliz and Hollywood. L.A. has never sparkled like it does these summer nights when Voodoo Kung Fu and the Destroyer Deceivers squeeze out every last beat of joy down by Luna Park, the city has never been a more shimmering blinding work of art.

At Scarpetta on Sunday nights, you sit outside in the verdant courtyard overlooking Canon Gardens lit up like Christmastime. You drink Fortuna cocktails—pear Absolut, St. Germain, and peach puree—and make wishes to the stars, you wish for this, you wish for that. You order steak tartare, and ravioli, and foie gras. Have you told each other everything? There doesn’t seem to be much left to say, yet you talk and joke and argue, you never stop. You spend until three in the morning at the Laugh Factory on Sunset being singled out by some stand-up talent. “Look at you two, you got yourselves some white people love,” the comic mocks you in his high-pitched falsetto. “Oh, baby, am I hurting your arm?” “What you talkin’ ‘bout, honeycakes, you are my arm!”

You sleep and eat and live and love and lie entwined. Your souls are without borders because your bodies are without borders.

Or is it the other way around?

Oh, Jules, she whispers. There is nothing better than you.

In the book that is my life, you say, in the chapter when I first met you are the words and so begins my life anew.

I want my own book, she says, not just a measly chapter.

From Zuma to Agoura it’s easy to fall in love in Southern California.

You know what’s not easy to do?

Find the ideal spot to ask her to marry you.

Sure, she’s happy to be adored by you—for now—but does she understand that this thing between you isn’t something that begins and ends.

Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.

12 (#ulink_8d4330c2-0270-5842-8b0c-5cc70658f397)

The Four of Them (#ulink_8d4330c2-0270-5842-8b0c-5cc70658f397)

JULIAN KEPT SUGGESTING THE FOUR OF THEM GO OUT. HE STILL had not met Zakiyyah. And Josephine met Ashton only once, if you didn’t count that other time (and who wanted to count it) at two in the morning when Ashton banged on his door like the KGB, and when Julian opened it—with Josephine half-naked behind him—he said, “Oh, so you are alive,” and stormed back down the stairs.