I feel like a child, still, often — what I eat, what makes me laugh, the way I live, as though adulthood is merely an unsupervised and occasionally disagreeable slumber party. Crossing the continent, spending grown-up sums of money, describing my future in a suit I should have had altered to show my legs more, I wait to get caught, found out for an overgrown girl, walking as I do through important parking lots and singing Juliana Hatfield in a low off-key voice loud enough to hear.

And so I go to Los Angeles for the performance of my career. It’s very early, and the airport terminal is nearly deserted, except at the security checkpoint. I shuffle along, unzipping my bags, shucking off my shoes, standing at attention like a Da Vinci drawing as a gym teacher in a clip-on tie passes a wand over me. Speed it up, put “Hey Bulldog” over it, and it’s in Guy Ritchie’s mind. You think you know me but you haven’t got a clue.

It begins. I adopt a rhythm — dress. Smoke. Coffee. Smoke. Drive. Huddle over a compact in the back seat for so long that my eye and its sticky lashes begin to appear utterly alien. Object pretentiously, again, to the locals’ pronunciation of “Sepulveda.” Smoke. Linger around a table in a Starbucks, suck down another iced coffee black, freestyle with jangling nerves and rattling ice cubes. Smoke. Stand in the elevator and groom Wing Chun, baboon-like, for lint and stray hairs. Another round of the Cuffs: Shot Or Not? debate. Sit. Swing leg, tap foot, pick cuticles, scrabble through bag to turn off phone, stare at carpet, stand, smile, sit. Stand. Smile. What’s my name? Think. Think! Remember “quick grip, firm grip, watch the ring” — ready, set, shake hands. Ah, yes: “Sarah Bunting.” Knew it started with an S. Sit. Turn it on, full power. Look at me all waving my hands and pulling my face around like a little red wagon. Listen to me all “it’s my understanding that” and “here’s our initial workaround.” I’ve got a passport, and condoms! I rent cars! Check out my lipstick — goes from day to night with ease, it does! I know things! Can do things! Big-girl things! Now if you’ll please excuse me, I’ve got to run away from these clothes.

It’s exhausting, the road show. We go to bed at eleven almost every night.

But we have our fun, wandering around town in our industrial-toilet-paper-colored Mitsubishi Galant and getting snitty in the direction of the Times crossword. We sing made-up songs about Jamba Juice. We sing made-up songs about salsa. We sing made-up songs about striped socks purchased at the Gap. We sing made-up songs about fabulously well-behaved low-humidity hair. We sing made-up songs about making up songs about Burbank, and about the wormhole required to get there in a timely fashion.

We compose an entire Broadway show entitled Manorexic-utive, a musical extravaganza that contains the stage direction, “[Chenille-turtlenecked assistantbots enter stage left for ‘The Joke, She Thuds’ number.]”

In the morning, I stare at myself in the mirror. I stare at myself, at my hair, at my face, at the little lines that have started hanging out next to my mouth during the week when there’s nothing else going on, and I remember playing dress-up and thinking as I fell out of my mother’s old shoes for the tenth time that I’d never fit into those clothes. Twenty years later, I’ve twitched and smoked and worried so much in the two weeks since I bought “those clothes” that they hang on me like they used to. I look down. My shoes fit right. Time to get into the car.

Note to self: If you know Glark’s headed for a speed bump, put the eyeliner down for a minute. No, really. Write that shit down.

Somewhere off of Wilshire, a giant Fiberglas Spider-Man hangs upside down on a building. He’s way too big, the Spider-Man, and his ass is way too…articulated; the butt cheeks appear almost prehensile.

“I do believe this calls for a song.”
“I heartily concur with that assessment.”
“Spider-Ass, Spider-Ass, does whatever a spider…ass? Some help, here.”
“No, no. Here. ‘Spider-Ass, Spider-Ass, crawl-ing on a skyscraaaaper’s glass.’ See?”
“Nice. ‘Floats a poon, any size…'”
“‘Leads to waaaatering eyes! Look out!'”
“‘Here comes the Spider-Ass!'”

We amuse ourselves, pretend it doesn’t matter, it’s just a vacation, tra-la, drive around and stare into palm readers’ windows at stop lights. We imagine various hells, and who we would send to them. In one of the hells, a condescending executive who wears gacky loafers with little golf-shoe skirts on them must give Robert Stack the same extremely thorough sponge bath over and over again in the dusk of eternity while Jamie Kennedy pokes his ass with a pitchfork and screeches like Robert Plant. “Nice shoes. Ahhh-AHHH-aaaaaaaaaaahhhh AHHHHHH!”

We have a little party for the L.A. contingent of Television Without Pity. Pretending that I know anything about food preparation, I announce that I will Heat The Brie, but the microwave is so old that I have to wind it up in the manner of a Victrola, and I get scared of outdated radiation, so instead of Yummy Warm Brie, we have Premature Brie. Heathen and her roommate nod politely as I suckle on a Sierra Nevada and tell a dumb story about my brother and…a Sedona gift shop? I don’t know. I’ve had a long week. Something involving t-shirts by the pound, I think. It’s not truly a party, though, until the neighbors crab about the noise, so Stee and I oblige them by going out on the balcony and talking loudly about how much we hate spiders. “People? Upstairs? Yeah, you? We have to get up, like, early.” People? Downstairs? It’s, like, Friday night. Reschedule that Botox-pottery-yoga class for eleven and get out of my face.

I spend a lot of time on the balcony, actually, sitting in a plastic patio chair, smoking, watching the pool and the moon. Late-ish one night, I have to go inside, get my cell phone, come outside, dial 911, and hold my thumb over the “call” button as a visibly drunk fifty-something man drowns his impending divorce by “swimming” “laps,” because I genuinely fear that he’s going to sink to the bottom of the pool, leaving only a trail of bourbon-scented bubbles to mark his descent as my thirteen-years-out-of-date CPR certification and I go charging down the stairs to his aid. When he hauls his ass out of the pool alive and schlumps wetly to his apartment, I go back inside to join the E! True Hollywood Story: The Dukes of Hazzard already in progress. Poor Coy and Vance. It’s a tough town.

“Dude. Look at where Coy’s arm is. What’s going on there?”
“Maybe their chairs are just really close toge — whoa. What is going on there?”
“I think they’re going out, dude. With each other.”
“Oh, they’re obviously going out with each other. I wonder if they’ll mention that at the end.”
“How could they not? ‘In the adverse circumstances surrounding Schneider and Wopat’s walk-out, love bloomed.'”
“‘…and Coy and Vance became kissing cousins.'”

“Hee. There’s a Daisy Dukes joke here somewhere.”
“It’s not a joke, dude. Vance has a pair on, I will bet you money. Red gingham. Come on, tell us they’re going out. Teeeelllll us they’re going oooouuuuut. Tell us!”
“Look, they’re practically holding hands! Why would they even show that if — okay, it’s the end. All right, E! True Hollywood Story. Happy ending. Coy, Vance, a couple of little dogs. Hook us up.”
“Aw, man! I can’t believe that! They obviously got married, and E! won’t tell us about it! Jeez.”
“Well, we know the truth. And you know, I’m happy for those two. At least they have each other.”
“And the royalties from the cartoon.”
“They were on the cartoon?”
“They were the cartoon until Bo and Luke came back.”
“Dude. That is harsh. Like it’s not bad enough to have to do a Dukes cartoon in the first place, but then to get kicked off of it?”
“I think they’ve made their peace with it.”

We waste our best material in the car, burning off energy and rad ideas and not remembering any of them for later. Unsolved Mysteries segments about Alyssa Milano’s breasts. ER/Dawson’s Creek crossover events. A one-act play about a samurai who somehow winds up editing the X-Files finale. Pie-chart presentations on the relative comforts of Starbucks bathrooms across the greater Los Angeles area. The baccalaureate speech delivered by a Russian novelist who wrote a modernist fable in which his hero turned into an Altoid. Small-business ideas for the legally-dead hosts of syndicated programs about mysteries which remain unsolved. Edwardian Novelist Deathmatch.

“Henry James is too old.”
“Henry James has a cane. Wharton catches a cane in the teeth, the bitch is going down.”

Won’t you buy our upcoming album, “Please Use An Indoor Voice In The Car, Because When You Scream That You Are A Thirsty Thirsty Glark Who Has A Sunburn, It Hurts My Ears — Thanks. Okay, That’s Still A Little Too Loud”? Wing on trombone, ladies and gents. Best fifteen bucks you’ll ever spend.

The corporate housing complex is in the middle of a fairly elaborate renovation. The construction vehicles pull up through a gate right beneath our windows at 7:30 every morning and gnash their gears, and every morning I yell at them to “shut UP, construction vehicles! God!” I get up to shower, and I tell the fan in the bathroom to shut up. I tell my tights that sprung a hole in the toe yesterday to shut up. I tell CNN to shut up. I come out into the living room. Wing and I beg Leeza Gibbons to shut up. We all pile into the car and drive to Starbucks and tell Starbucks to shut up. I crack my gum, and Wing tells my gum to shut up. We all tell each other to shut up.

“Shut up, Robert Stack.”
“I know, right? Always rambling on about missing girls and ghosts in Pennsylvania and his coffin and can anyone else get a word in edgewise? No.”
“For real. Go open a pet-grooming shop, Robert Stack.”
“And shut up.”

After a week, we’ve told every solid object in L.A., and quite a few ethereal concepts, to shut up. We keep doing it, of course, but it’s losing its luster. We resort to spending out loud scads of money we don’t currently have. I’ll just write down all the items we decided on so that we don’t forget anything on our trip to The We Are Stupidly Rich In Our Minds Store.

Airstream camper with clever fifties furniture
remote-controlled coffeemaker
pool with water slide
entire Ronco product line
bowling shoes with custom-made platform soles and little lightning bolts on the side
Dylan McKay car
Darth Vader phone
under-cabinet television
beanbag couch
on-call tailor
hovercraft
popcorn machine like they have in bars, except it also makes the cheese and caramel kinds
attack cactus (2)
Dr. Phil

Of course, there’s always the possibility that we’ll wind up penniless, selling magnets on the freeway exit ramp, pushing a shopping cart around reeeeally slowly because that beanbag couch is freakin’ heavy. None of us wants to think too deeply on that. We’d rather make up aliases for ourselves, in preparation for a lucrative interstate crime spree that would consist primarily of multiple counts of grand theft snack. The Parade Master, T-Bone, and Legs McBain on the road again, and all over North America, Cheetos quiver in fear.

On the last day, we sing made-up songs about being bored. Then we sing made-up songs about being too bored to make up songs to sing about being bored.

Finally, everything is packed. I feel tired in my bones, and I predict that I’ll catch a cold on the plane — correctly, as it turns out — but for now I content myself with sitting out on the patio, smoking, looking at the moon as it comes up. It seems like I got here a hundred years ago and New York is a dream fragment that I forgot to write down. Below me, a cat lopes around the edge of the pool and hops up onto the scaffolding next to the variety store; then it sits down and hoists a leg over its head. I envy the cat, in a way — bathing when it pleases, running around outside and shrieking in the middle of the night, nothing to do tomorrow but lie in the sun and squint at things. I used to have that life.

During take-off, I put my book down and look out the window. I have to; if I don’t, the plane will fall out of the sky. I’ve always looked out the window during take-off, and the plane has never fallen out of the sky, so I’d better keep doing it, just in case. Might as well. Can’t hurt. The first time I ever flew on a plane, going to my grandmother’s funeral, I had the middle seat between my parents, but my dad let me trade with him so that I could see out. I didn’t understand how planes could get up in the air with all the people and suitcases and trays of food and whatnot weighing them down, but under the circumstances I thought I’d better confine questions to urgent matters only, at least until we got back to New Jersey and Ma stopped looking that way, so I didn’t ask. I still don’t get it, though. It has to do with a certain speed/wind ratio or the shape of the wings or something, I suppose. You can explain it to me if you like. I won’t understand, not really. How do planes get up in the air — and stay there?

May 6, 2002

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