Women
Women still must be sexy in order to command attention.
Men continue being completely on the nose. There really is
a famous very rich male artist Painting very large
paintings Of mutilated vaginas And calling them Dead
Mother In the midst of a divorce in which he isn’t allowed
To talk to his little daughter and the paintings
Are priced at a million dollars. He’s just arrived
In Los Angeles with his very young little girlfriend
For his opening. It’s her first trip
to America, she’s an Italian
beauty pageant queen. Her sixty-eight
year-old boyfriend’s ex wife
complained that she would never have any power
with him. “She knew what she was getting into,”
said his gallerist over the phone to someone. His girlfriend
smiles sweetly. She’s definitely going on shopping sprees
which I respect. At the opening she looked lonely,
kept stepping outside, so I said “how are you” in a way to invite her
to conversation if she needed it, but she walked away quickly.
I feel like a servant around her. We’re not that different,
I want to tell her, she just has those Givenchy boots.
About “Dead Mother” none of the press had any questions.
As mute as if they were at a lecture for a required class.
The artist loves to say that women
have a natural access to blood, while men
can only access it through war,
circumcision or hunting. What about doctors?
I want to ask, but I’m only an assistant. I no longer
menstruate. My IUD has finally cut off
my natural access to blood. The artist
talks about his colors, his famous blood red and
electric blue which looks nothing like the sky
but he speaks not on the flat pale Crayola flesh tone
of the body of the mother whose vagina he’s torn apart
to access her blood. Who is she? Kris Jenner, a famous mother
wanted to meet the artist and see his paintings, so on Sunday
morning when the gallery was closed I came to turn
on the lights for her and to offer her water. She was just like she is
on TV! She gave club and restaurant recommendations
to the artist’s girlfriend while the artist took phone
calls and made her wait. She gifted the artist
a SKIMS blanket for his long plane ride back to London
or Venice or Miami. Actually he’s going to the Bahamas
She mentioned her daughters a lot and said Kylie
was building a new house again with walls
big enough for these big bloody paintings. She wore a black
velvet leisure suit and arrived in a black Escalade
her driver kept running for the entirety of the visit.
I talked to her bodyguard Alfonso, who said everything
would work out for me. Then Kris asked for a cappuccino,
and while I was running across Santa Monica Blvd to buy one
from the LGBT center, I got hit by a car and I died
**
Hollywood of the North
Paul Thomas Anderson was filming a movie
in the town in which I was born and raised
far away from hollywood. My dad refers to it
as Hollywood of the North. I knew a scene
from Indiana Jones had been filmed there,
at the university. Fat City is a film
about this town. I’m sure there have been other scenes filmed there
but not in a long time, and never by paul thomas anderson.
I wrote paul thomas anderson a letter.
I gave it to my cousin to pass it along
because my cousin was somehow involved.
my cousin printed the letter and said he would hand it to him
in person. But I never heard back from paul.
My dad kept referring to him as Paul Anderson.
Paul Anderson never got back to me.
My cousin put me in touch with paul’s location manager
whom I kept bothering to give me a job on set.
Finally they said I could come up
and keep pedestrians from walking in the street
during a car chase scene. So I drove north
through wind and rain and tumbleweeds
and I stopped pedestrians from walking into the frame
while three actresses ran from the bank to the getaway car
over and over again. You never know
what the public will do when you tell them to stop walking.
Some people get angry and say you are keeping them
from work or the bus stop
or court. Some people yell “Officer!” and some people
take their phones out and film the scene over
your shoulder. i was grateful for the opportunity
but I realized that to run away with the circus
would be to continue running away from my dream
of being a writer. So I quit hollywood of the north and went back to work
at my full-time job at an art gallery
in actual Hollywood. Much like hollywood of the north
actual Hollywood is a place that doesn’t exist.
Sometimes at work I’m afraid the world will start
ending, and because of all the traffic
I won’t be able to get out of hollywood
I won’t be able to get back to my apartment
to die with my boyfriend. I’m afraid of dying
in a place that doesn’t exist
because it will say of my life: you did not exist.
My cousin who helped PTA, he is my mother’s first cousin
once removed. When I was in high school
he opened a bar, and I gifted him an original painting
of an image I found on Google images.
It was a painting of many martini glasses
in many different colors. My cousin hung it
Inside his bar, and it became a lucky painting
for the owner of the local hockey team.
The hockey team owner wanted to buy my painting
so my cousin sold it to him. i never saw the painting again
and i never knew how much it sold for.
I never saw any money.
My dad used to refer to that painting as my Andy Warhol painting
and to this day he still refers to it as that.
**
Men
At the opening of Patrick Jackson’s show
Liquid Clay at François Ghebaly
sheets of glass balanced atop sheets of glass
on which were arranged multiple
of the same domestic objects
such as pots, towels, dishware, and teddy bears.
The sculpture with the teddy bears
was called “Teddy Bears” and it made me
remember the time I was playing
basketball with my cousins after school
when our parents weren’t home and a man
in a car packed with stuffed animals
pulled up and asked if he could play.
My oldest cousin told my sister
and I to go inside, and my sister
was wearing a red bow. The abundance
of visitors to the opening made the artist
nervous (his sculptures were glass
balancing on glass) and soon the gallery
started to kick people out. By this time
I was on my way to my old college roommate’s
thirtieth birthday party, to which
I brought a book of photographs
of the home of Elizabeth Taylor
whose final husband was from the same town
in which my cousins played basketball
with that man. My friend
introduced me to her new boyfriend’s
roommate and I could tell immediately he was
looking for a girlfriend that night. Something
about a twenty-nine year old mild-mannered man
going above and beyond in conversation
in an apartment courtyard in West Hollywood.
My friend’s mother pulled me aside and said,
“We have to find somebody for Wyatt”
and I nodded though I knew everyone
at that party was taken. Then the party moved
to Saddle Ranch, an Old West-themed bar
and restaurant on Sunset Blvd, which has a
mechanical bull that in the past I had ridden
to completion. I went first and failed to live
up to my reputation. Each
member of the party failed
to hold on as well. Then Wyatt mounted
the mechanical animal. His long
limbs flailed with each sharp pivot
and the longer he clung on, the more interest
he drew from the crowd. Then the bull
gave its three final thrusts
and a little shake before it came
to a stop beneath him.
**
CLAIRE DOUGHERTY can be found in Fence, Iterant, Second Factory, and Wyrm. She is a co-founding editor of RECLINER. Her chapbook The Claire Bitch Project is forthcoming from Theaphora Editions. She is from Stockton, CA and lives and works in Los Angeles.
