I’m in a mobile home with Dana Plato, a couple of days into a speed binge, and it’s hot. Curtains are drawn across all of the windows, but the sunlight and the heat are pouring in just the same. The air-conditioning unit is chugging away valiantly. The calendar on the vertically grooved faux-wood wall paneling says it’s 1990. We’ve been in there for days, talking and fucking and smoking cigarettes and drinking Gatorade to stay hydrated.
I feel as though Dana is my soul mate. In the hours upon hours of conversation,
punctuated with sex, we seem to have become boundlessly, inextricably
intimate. We’ve plotted crimes
together, sworn secrets, and expounded on art, ethics, class, gender, race,
family, God, globalism, humanism, liberalism, and pretty much everything
else. I feel as though I know
every crevice of her psyche as well as I know the contours of her body, and I
love everything that I’m seeing.
Dana is my world; she is everything to me. And she seems totally into me, too.
She’s in the bathroom, peeing. I’m naked, on my stomach, lying breadthwise on the bed. She comes out of the bathroom, naked,
and she jumps onto the bed. Then she settles into the bed, lengthwise on her back, atop a crumpled sheet, with
her calves resting on my back and buttocks.
“I wanna try umami,” I tell her. “You ever tasted umami?”
“What’s that?” asks Dana.
“It’s some new flavor.
Scientists in Japan discovered it.
It’s the fifth flavor, I guess.
It’s supposed to be delicious,” I explain.
“The ‘fifth flavor’?” she asks. “Aren’t there, like, a billion flavors already?”
“Supposedly there are basic flavors – elementary flavors,
like how blue and red and yellow are primary colors. There were four basics: sweet and salty and sour
and…something else. But now
they’ve discovered a fifth basic flavor: umami. They say it’s the tastiest flavor. I think umami means 'deliciousness' in Japanese."
“That sounds like bullshit,” protests Dana. “Deliciousness isn’t a flavor. At least, it’s not a particular
flavor. It’s any flavor that’s
found extremely pleasing. It’s not
even the flavor, really; it’s the pleasingness, the pleasingousity.”
“Yeah,” I agree, “it does sound like bullshit. I still want to try it, though.”
I roll out from underneath Dana’s legs, and I rest my head
on her belly and I stare up at the broken ceiling fan. My gaze is broken when Dana flops her hand and
arm down past my face and onto my chest. On her inner forearm, near the wrist, are two bright red bug bites, about an inch and a half apart: the mark of the bedbug. With my left pinky finger, I trace
figure eights (figures eight?) around her bug bites. My figure eight is an infinity symbol – two zeros, one
slightly bigger than the other, joined together in an eternal embrace.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” Dana asks.
“Hell, yeah.”
“No, I mean really pretty.”
“Hellz-ya, baby.
You Playboy-bunny pretty.”
“Featured model,” she concedes.
“How could you not know you’re pretty?” I ask. “You were Diff'rent Strokes’ cheesecake.
You must be in the top one percent of people on the planet who are known
for being good-looking. Remember
that one episode when you were in leotards and leg warmers? Who wasn’t jerking off to that
episode?”
“I never felt pretty on Diff'rent Strokes. I
wanted to look like Farah Fawcett, but my cheeks were too full and I was too
freckly and pale. I looked more
like Melissa Gilbert.”
“Who’s that?”
“The daughter on Little House On The Prairie.”
“The blind one?”
“No, the other one.
Half-pint.”
“Oh. But she’s
hot, though. I mean, she got hot, later, when she got older. She’s
hot now, not when she was Half-pint.
I saw her recently on a magazine cover…she’s super attractive.”
I think about how good-looking the actress who played
Half-pint is. The blind sister was
really hot, too. Even the mom on
that show was sexy.
“Listen, Dana,” I say, “I’ve only known you for a few days, but
I’m perfectly qualified to verify that you are absolutely gorgeous. You're exquisite. If Lanny couldn’t see that then he was
an idiot.”
“Todd always used to tell me that I was the cutest girl on
TV,” Dana tells me. “I wonder what
might have been, what could have been, had I fallen in love with Todd instead
of with Lanny?” she asks, sighing wistfully.
Dana’s sigh for Todd Bridges unleashes a monstrous ghost, a
ghost from Dana’s past who knows her as I have never known her and whom she
understands as she will never understand me, a ghost who will vanquish me and
reclaim its place by her side.
Everything – the walls, the bed, the floor, the ceiling, everything –
shatters and crumbles and swirls up in great waves of soot that crash down upon me,
propelling me downward into the abyss that’s below me, a black oblivion as
vague and as vast as Hades. When I
land I will die, and as I fall I am dying.
And then I wake up, palpitating and disoriented and a little
bit sweatier and more traumatized than I was when I fell asleep. I lie there, growing ever colder and more
brokenhearted, and I ponder my aloneness and the bitter taste that life has
left in my mouth. And then I
remember: bitterness. The fourth
flavor is bitterness! There is no
umami, and the fourth flavor is bitterness.
I don’t know what this dream means. It doesn’t mean that I’m a racist, if
that’s what you’re thinking. True,
there is some black imagery in my dream, but the fact that Todd Bridges happens
to be African American has nothing to do with it. Bridges and his ghost could be Eskimos, Swedes, Aborigines,
Basques, whatever the fuck…I don’t care.
I just don’t want Dana thinking about them while we’re all naked in bed
together, that’s all. The dude’s
ghost’s race is totally irrelevant.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
Nothing’s really haunting me anyway.
I don’t even think Todd Bridges is dead yet.