Don't Disappoint (Ch. 10)

by Martin van Cooper

Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next seven weeks, we’ll be serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Jose and Alexa married out of college and got to work. DINKing, he never tired of adding to the end of a sentence relating with false modesty a new professional coup. The union invariably couched in terms of a business partnership: his interests in residential and light commercial real estate and hers in whole body fitness and wellness, her classes taught on the beach near their Manhattan Beach home which they purchased for just north of 3, Jose told Jason, after they had been married for 5 years. Her clientele was 30-50 year old wives of older retired doctors, lawyers and industry types that had bought up the beach front. Their house was one back from the beach front and had a rooftop balcony with an unobstructed view of the ocean, the marina to the north and the pier to the south. He bought his first Maserati in 2012 and she got her augmentation the same year and they hosted parties for their friends in from out of town for the UCLA/USC football game and the Lakers playoffs, plus Cinco de Mayo and Christmas. Jose started convincing several of this friend group to invest in the property business with him around 2016. Several went in for $5-10K with Jose promising 8%, but several went big: Stacie Wang and her Swedish husband (himself a trustafarian of unclear provenance) punted for $150K and Tony and his girlfriend, probably the result of Tony and Jose playing too much golf together, and Pablo being unable to handle his drink, ponied up $200K, basically all of Tony’s inheritance from parents who had died when he was a teenager. When he turned 35, Jose rented out the top floor of the Intercontinental and invited this same group, which had expanded now to include other investors, including some of his wife Alexa’s client’s husbands plus some neighborhood friends they met at sunset walks on the beach, plus some other neighborhood friends from back in the day scattered around LA, plus some family. His mother was there, about 5’ tall and 3’ wide with sackcloth black hair as thick as a Persian rug and who spoke next to no English, and he stood in between her and his wife when he took the mic and announced to the assembled group how proud he was to share all his accomplishments with his friends and family (and he actually at one point used the term partners) and how the party that night was a reflection of his Gatsbian dreams come true. He didn’t actually use the term Gatsbian. In a dipsomaniacal stumble towards the bar later that night he confided to Jason, saying that I need to confide to you that this party cost me $65K, but you can’t tell Alexa. I’m gonna make that in a week but you can’t tell her that either. Double Income No Kids. Six months or so after that it was a party bus to Vegas and the wheels came off. It was for Alexa’s 35th birthday this time and somewhere around Barstow, everyone already knackered to the gills, that Alexa took the mic this time and announced that they had purchased a pot farm in Nor Cal and were adopting two girls from their home in El Salvador to come live with Jose and Alexa in Manhattan Beach.

Ok, back up for a second. Alexa’s mom was pregnant in El Salvador at 14 and escaped her parents and Alexa’s biological father first to Mexico and then through Texas and into southern CA where she met the only father Alexa ever knew, Juan, a Chicano born in Echo Park. Juan was soft spoken, genteel, so totally calm as to seem almost perpetually narcotized. Stable. A provider. He worked at a defense contractor, giving Alexa and her mother (Maria) an upper middle-class decade and a half until Alexa graduated high school and started at USC. Alexa remembered her father, Juan, out of sorts exactly two times: the first time when the photos of the activities of American servicemen and women at Abu Ghraib prison were released on 60 Minutes along with stills of Bush and Cheney having just viewed them, looks of deep consternation and disappointment on their faces and the second time when the Dodgers bombed out before the playoffs in 2007. Both times, Juan had stood up from the TV, placed a hand on the wall and another on his head—as though he might pass out—gave a barely perceptible shake of the head and left the room. By some bargain—tacit or otherwise, Alexa never knew—Juan’s anesthetized personality was a necessary insulator for Alexa’s mother Maria, a woman Alexa found out she barely knew when, at 32, Juan handed her papers and moved in with a white woman named Dorothy McFadden from Simi Valley and she, Alexa’s mother, ostensibly lost her tether and in the parlance of her, Alexa’s, college friends at the time, wilded out, Maria did, buying a whole new wardrobe, clubbing 4-5 nights a week, sleeping with guys Alexa’s age and hoovering up massive amounts of cocaine, while spending her days in the gym and getting a job (she hadn’t worked since taking up with Juan) as a massage therapist, which Alexa didn’t ask about but which furnished rent, clothes money, and the note on a CLK convertible. The SHTF when Alexa’s maternal grandmother died and her mother’s siblings admonished Maria to come back for the funeral and that was all it took. San Salvador had her for two weeks and she turned up pregnant with what turned out to be twin girls and found herself under the thumb, their father’s, of the only type of man that was able to settle her. When the girls were 3, Alexa’s mom retraced nearly identically the trip she took with Alexa in her belly years earlier, through Mexico and Texas to CA, her daughters DACA’d in, and 10 years later worked at a Safeway in Inglewood while Alexa and Jose built their lives across town. The girls—your sisters—are starting middle school next year and they deserve the same shot you had. Are you, reader, still with me? There was no asking Juan (he and McFadden had gone on to have a baby boy, Derek, and had moved to Sylmar) and there would be no second Juan and so Alexa was her mother’s only hope, she said. It turned out that since returning to the US, Alexa’s mother had mostly calmed down, rarely went out with men and in fact became a de facto member of her daughter’s group of friends, but still occasionally supplying her and her friends with bumps time to time and on the sly, and coming to all her parties including the 35th birthday trip to Vegas, to which we will now return in real time narration.

It was the year of the Muslim ban. When they went out for dinner Alexa’s mathematically perfect tits were on display in some MTV Music Awards Red Carpet gown that was strapless with a giant gap in the middle and one breast covered by a tiny piece wrapping around from the back of the dress and apparently glued to her nipple. Jose had taken to calling the twins his empanadas almost immediately. And so Alexa’s mom was with all of us when she, Alexa’s mom, received a text message with a picture of a tumescent gherkin from her daughter, who we’ll call X, followed 3 seconds later by oops, wrong number, and then hope you’re having fun in Vegas and she, Alexa’s mom Maria, may have waited until she got back from Vegas to confront the twins about why X was downloading and texting DPs to her sister, who we’ll call Y, and maybe their friends as well but she, Alexa, just happened to be standing next to her mom at the bar and recognized immediately the kielbasa as belonging to her husband and, snatching her mom’s phone and seeing the message was from her sister X’s phone, grabbed a full bottle of Stolichnaya and nearly crushed Jose’s occipital bone. Did it really matter at that point whether Alexa’s sister X had sent the photo accidentally on purpose to her (Alexa’s) Mom or whether she had meant to send it to Y, and whether Jose had sent it to X or to both X and Y? And did it really matter whether she, X, was just trying to score points with her sister for seeing Jose’s thingy before she, Y, did?

So put yourself, reader, at the bar with Jason and let’s talk about connotations when you hear the word statutory in a nearby conversation after someone’s just been carried away by medics after a bartender had vaulted the bar and pressed a not at all clean looking towel against the wound on Jose’s head, from which blood was not exactly spraying, but flowing nonetheless quite impressively down his neck and onto his back and arm, carried him away like a refugee in a thin foil blanket and Alexa being treated for shock with feet elevated and the crazy dress even more askew and an actual whole breast with tantalizing potential of just falling right out, while you are sitting there watching but not like openly staring, and then not hearing the rest and catching well maybe it was audiophile but probably not and then definitely hearing something-philia and man that means only one thing. It turned out he approached X first, or she discovered him shirtless after a workout and asked to touch his abs, and then told Y about it, details Jose relayed in an initial and hairbrained and highly legally inadvisable attempt to answer the Big Question. But then both Y and X started hanging around the garage when he was lifting and Y asks for his phone number first and then gave it to X and this was even before X and Y moved in with them. With Alexa and Jose. The one that was pushed by the State as indicative of Jose being culpable in the initiation was actually quite banal—to the non-perv, that is—a photo of X’s feet, sent to Jose by Y, to which he replied how pretty, which to a preteen girl translates to what else do you have to show me, and the answer to that was plenty and even though it didn’t progress for another month this was clear indication of manipulation. Grooming. The State argued. A power play by an older authority figure. X and Y were both made to testify. X breaking down and saying she loved Jose and that he said he loved her and Y laughing at this in the courtroom and X calling her a stupid bitch, all of this while Jose stared at his shoes and Alexa cried and Alexa’s mom sat ashen looking at the back of her son-in-law’s head. Everybody getting this so far? It was Y that started it, X said, started the problem and not Jose’s fault, and Y was just being jealous of X’s closeness to Jose, as evinced by the fact that X often got texts from Jose inviting her to come to the garage while he was working out, while Y never received such texts. If not for Y’s interference, X submitted, X and Jose could be happy and it was Y always flashing her stupid boobies which were nothing at all, while Jose was trying to exercise and bending over and putting her coochie in his face, while X was just trying to keep him company and actually bond with him on a deep emotional level, X testified. No, X said, she and Y did not do it with him at the same time but she, Y, did smell her, X, on his thingy one day when X was with him after a workout and this was the last straw and why she sent the picture of his thingy to her mother. No, X said, she didn’t really know whether it was accidental or on purpose that she sent it to her Mom instead of to Y, to which Y blurted out I had that dick way before you did you dumb bitch, to which the judge yelled for order and which elicited no reaction whatsoever from Jose, Alexa or Maria.

And something to think about is the fact that while Alexa was losing her mind, while her entire life was peeling apart in real time in a bar in Vegas as her husband’s head bled and Jason and Jessica all her friends looked on as she screamed and cried and attempted to kick him multiple times and then half-fainted and then actually fainted and then sat up with M. Mason-esque makeup running down her face and hair totally a mess and looking at this point more like a car crash victim, at one point one of her breasts is, finally, momentarily all the way out and everyone either doesn’t notice or pretends not to notice, and then jumps on him again and has to be pulled off and threatened with handcuffs by the police, that while all of this happened, her mom, Alexa’s mom Maria, who received the text, looked at her daughter as though Alexa were executing some act that Maria had paid for lessons for ages ago and she was now forced to watch with equal parts pride, disgust and resignation.