The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 7: (The) Particle Zoo (Part Two)
Previous Chapter: Chapter Seven (Part One)
The French Martinis fought the sunlight as best they could when we stepped outside to the valet stand, but I began to sober up anyway as Humphrey was talking animatedly about something and the VPs were looking on jealously huddling with each for warmth because they weren’t getting any heat from Humphrey.
The fucking valets are taking forever, I thought to myself in my sobering up in the afternoon extremely irritated state as a hangover was in the process of instantly blooming above my right eyebrow. I stared into the sun in an attempt to reclaim my buzz. Not the best of ideas, I know, and now my pupils hurt in addition to my forehead and I heard the words “Malibu place” coming from somewhere in front of me, probably Humphrey, and I desperately desperately desperately wanted a cigarette.
“What?”
“You should come by my Malibu place this weekend. We’ll have dinner by the ocean.”
“That sounds nice,” I squinted, thinking about laying down and resting on the Malibu beach in my current state.
I wanted to shout at the unemployed actor who was valeting our limo, the power of the contact high from our lunch and the angry throbbing of my temples, both going to my head, as I tried not to think of the absurdity of the need to valet a chauffeur driven automobile. (The chauffeur was standing next to Humphrey and myself and the 5 VPs waiting for the valet like everyone else.)
Humphrey must have noticed the annoyed look on my face because he shifted into concern mode.
“Is there anything wrong? You look tense.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said through clenched teeth.
“No. You look tense. Take the rest of the day off. Mike can handle the mail.”
Humphrey reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a laminated card. “Here’s the address of my masseuse, go see her this afternoon. I’ll have Polly let her know you’re coming.”
“No, seriously, I’m fine,” my teeth clenched harder, “I don’t need a…”
“I insist.”
The card somehow ended up in my hand like a magic trick where the magician puts strange coins, playing cards, little bunnies into your pockets without you realizing.
The limo showed up and the chauffeur and the gang of five piled in the front and Humphrey moved towards the back. “I’ll have them send the other car for you.” Humphrey said to me as he sat down and the valet closed the door for him. Humphrey methodically lowered the tinted automatic window the way old rich guys do in films about oil tycoons and Wall Street titans and looked up at me as I stood next to the hustling valets on the sidewalk outside of (The) Particle Zoo.
“You need to relax and enjoy life.” Humphrey told me and I nodded or something, I don’t know, it was all a French Martini blur. “Just wait, a car will be here in less than 2 minutes,” was the last thing he said before the glare of the tinted back window of his limousine got into my eyes, reminding me of my growing soon to be cantaloupe-sized headache.
I didn’t have to wait 2 minutes, the other car, a Town Car not a limousine, pulled up to the valet stand in less than 90 seconds and a chauffeur, a mild-mannered sort named Pete, ambled out and opened the back door for me.
“Can I sit in front?”
“Whatever you want,” Pete said and ambled back around to the driver’s seat as I got in the passenger’s side.
I gave him Humphrey’s laminated card because it had the address on it. Pete looked at it, and then looked at me and smiled and handed it back to me. “I know where this is.”
We were off to an anonymous office building one block off a major thoroughfare in West L.A. that was filled with doctor’s offices, dentist’s offices, chiropractor’s offices and an office for M. Rose situated on the top floor, the 4th floor.
Pete dropped me off at the front steps, telling me he would be back in a half an hour but I convinced him his services were no longer needed for the day and I could get back to the Landmark building myself. This was important because I felt strongly that behind his placid dopey Dodger-loving demeanor, Pete was silently judging my trip to the “masseuse” and I didn’t need someone waiting for me and morally evaluating me and giving me a deadline I needed to finish by as I tried to relax by having a stranger rub their hands all over my body because the mere fact I was aware of Pete and his waiting Town Car would suck all of the relaxation out of my body like a jet turbine sucking a pigeon into its engine. Normally I wouldn’t have said anything out of a misplaced sense of politeness and just toughed it out and not enjoyed my massage at all, but my lingering ¼ buzz ¾ soberness and 4/4 hangover didn’t have time for politeness so Pete would have to be sacrificed.
I made my way up the 1970s era elevator to the 4th floor of the 1970s era building that had never bothered to change its 1970s era yellowish brownish orangish carpet and walls. The dentists and doctors and chiropractors must have occupied the lower floors or the directory in the lobby was shamelessly out of date because all but two of the offices on the 4th floor were empty. 401 housed an accountant by the name of Halfpenny; Steve Halfpenny, C.S.A. is what it said on the name placard affixed to the wall next to the door.
Number 402 had a more temporary thin piece of transparency someone had obviously printed out on their home computer and cut themselves using a scissors and shaky hands and then slid into the nameplate holder; M. Rose, Massage Therapist. The doors were made of solid oak or some kind of solid dark brown wood with no windows so I wasn’t able to see inside as I buzzed the little buzzer underneath the transparency and waited. And waited.
Mr. Halfpenny, or who I can only assume was Mr. Halfpenny, emerged from behind his solid oak door with a giant plastic mug in his hand that bore the Landmark logo on the front and jauntily passed me in the hallway humming an old Lionel Richie song on his way towards a door at the end of the hallway he punched a three-button code into and I assumed was the bathroom. As I watched the closed bathroom door at the end of the hallway waiting for Mr. Halfpenny to return, there was noise and movement behind 402 and the door opened revealing a young woman in a canary yellow t-shirt (also with the Landmark logo on it) and blue fairly short shorts and white tennis shoes with short fluffy white socks sticking out of them. She was staring at me unenthusiastically. “You must be rabbit.”
“Yes,” I answered hesitantly, my brain slowly working out that she probably said Abbott instead of rabbit.
“David told me you were coming. Take off your clothes and get on the table.”
It was a small dark room with a massage table in the middle and little else. There was no way the original 1970s architects of this building designed 402 to be its own suite, it must have been annexed from a conference room or storage closet of 401 long ago.
“I’ll be back in a sec.” M. Rose said to me, as the oak door shut behind me and she went for an identical door on the other side of the massage table that probably went into another of 401’s old conference rooms or closets. I was standing and looking down at the massage table, eye’s readjusting to the darkness of the room from the fluorescentness of the hallway and heard the metallic click of the second door shutting, leaving me alone.
My buzz was now 0/5 and my hangover was 10/5 as I briefly contemplated escaping and playing hooky for the rest of the day by finding a West L.A. movie theater and passing out in the pleasant darkness of the back row of a hopefully unpopular and sparsely attended film.
There was a fluffy white towel that reminded me of M. Rose’s fluffy white socks on the massage table folded in the way they do at the finer hotels. The towel I suppose was for me and I suddenly felt bad that M. Rose had gone to so much trouble of neatly folding it and putting it on the massage table I realized I had no choice and began to undress.
I haven’t had many professional massages in my life. Most of my massages have been more of the reciprocal kind given in relationships. I’m not exactly prudish but I’m not one to walk around nude or semi-nude either. I was never a beach person, I don’t do well in the sun, I don’t tan and my physique is average I suppose which means I’ve always generally thought of it as inadequate. I’m not fat, I’m quite skinny by modern standards, but when I take off my shirt I can still detect the beginnings of a middle-aged man’s gut that one tends to see when you leave your late twenties and enter your early thirties. I definitely do not have a six-pack. Sometimes it seems every male in Los Angeles has a six-pack. At that moment as I looked at the fluffy towel thinking of fluffy socks and my naked body prone on a table that many other naked bodies (including Humphrey’s?) had laid on before, I wished I had a six-pack.
I was thinking all of this, clothes still on, still waiting for M. Rose, still desperately wanting a cigarette or at least a couple of Advil. There were dark wood cabinets (that matched the oak door) on the far side of the room and I went foraging for some medicine. I figured a masseuse is in the medical field, is kind of in the medical field, so I started opening cabinets expecting to find nothing but hoping against hope there would be something for my headache.
The first cabinet didn’t contain anything except for a few pellets that may have been mouse droppings. Time to quickly close the cabinet door without thinking about the pellets, moving on to door number 2.
Door number 2 had a stack of the fluffy white towels all folded neatly like the one on the massage table, a box of powder-free latex gloves (unopened) and some gauze. I was getting closer to actual medicine, so I was hopeful as my right hand moved to door number 3, but I heard a metal click of the opening of the back oak door that M. Rose had earlier disappeared into before my hand could reach the U-shaped handle.
“Shit.” I don’t think she heard me as the click was followed by the sound of the bottom of the door brushing over carpet. “Just a second,” I said panicked like she was opening a bathroom door on me as a I sat on the toilet. “One more minute.” The brushing stopped and then retreated and I began to throw off my clothes with abandon.
A few seconds earlier I had been worried about all of my inadequacies but now the sweet imprisonment of a deadline cleared my mental hard drive and I found myself standing naked next to a massage table clutching a fluffy white towel and thinking of the Statue of David for comfort and reassurance. There was a full length mirror at the head of the massage table and this started to bring back insecurities, so I leapt face down on the table, trying to reach behind me to strategically place the fluffy white towel on my ass (with limited success, covering only one and a half cheeks) in the way I thought it is supposed to be placed during professional massages and shouted, “I’m ready!” to the dark brown door that M. Rose was hiding behind.
I rested my chin on the edge of the massage table and watched through the mirror as she came back in wearing a different, now white, t-shirt that also had the Landmark logo on it, and carrying an open can of Diet Coke.
“My name is Melrose,” she said not looking at me and then took a sip of the Coke, setting it down on the counter near the cabinets and began doing some massage preparatory business. She opened a cabinet, I hoped she didn’t notice I had slightly disturbed the stack of fluffy white towels, and took a bottle out from behind those towels I hadn’t discovered in my earlier inspection. Something glooped into her hands and I heard rubbing. More rubbing. There was a second gloop and she turned around and met my eyes in the mirror. I smiled. She did not. She whipped the towel off my ass and went to work with her gloopy hands.
“Do you work with David?” She was doing something with my left ass cheek that was somewhere between mildly irritating like a persistent itch and downright painful like torture.
“Kind of.” We were moving up the pain scale when she decided to stop and move to the other cheek, bringing me temporary relief.
“He doesn’t usually send coworkers here, you must be special.” Now my right cheek was under interrogation.
“He wants to buy something from me.”
“Do you own a company or something?”
“No. A screenplay. He wants to buy a screenplay I wrote.” The rubbing stopped. And I heard and felt and saw hopping as Melrose made her way to the front of the massage table. What had been a terse, bored, slightly put-out young woman moments earlier was now bright-eyed and hopeful.
“Can I do a speech for you?”
“Excuse me.”
“Can I do a speech for you?” Maybe the buzz was coming back because the words didn’t make complete sense to me, I had never had anyone offer to do a speech for me before, or maybe I didn’t understand the question because a large percentage of my gray matter was still focused on the painful burning of my ass cheeks. (And the rest of my gray matter was overtaken by my near debilitating headache.)
“Aaaaah.” I opened my mouth and let air escape not even forming intelligible syllables.
“It’s from Ibsen.” Melrose offered hopefully, which didn’t help because I couldn’t think of any politicians from history with the last name Ibsen. Maybe it was the first name. Nope, still no famous politicians.
“It’s from A Doll’s House.” Oh, that Ibsen. My mental hard drive was rebooted as I now desperately tried to find the folder labeled “excuses.”
“I was kidding about the screenplay. It was a joke. I’m not really on the talent side of the company. I work in the mailroom.” I smiled weakly. Melrose put out her bottom lip and looked like an adorable (and now sad) puppy.
“I’m sure it’s great. You can still do it if you want. It’s just there’s nothing I can do for you.” I’ve always had a soft spot for puppies. (I’m not a fucking monster. Who doesn’t like puppies?) I couldn’t stand to see that look of disappointment. I was ready to listen to her do a one woman show of Ibsen’s entire oeuvre if it would get her to cheer up, or at least return her to the terse, business-like Melrose who was torturing me a minute earlier. This whole experience had quickly turned from the awkwardness of a stranger vigorously rubbing my ass to the awkwardness of a blind date that our mothers had set up for us and I was failing at. “I want to see it. Please.” I was now begging and she looked kind of pissed off and I hadn’t even done anything wrong. (So exactly like a blind date.) Her left hand made a fist and went to her hip, her elbow at a 90 degree angle. She let out a sigh.
“So are we going to have sex or not?”
“What?”
“That’s why you came here, isn’t it?”
“No, I’m sorry. I think there’s been a misunderstanding. Humphrey, I mean David, I mean, Dave, sent me here for a massage.”
“Hah!” she laughed dramatically, a mocking false laugh one usually gives when a lover is lying to you and you both know it. Just as rapidly as we had moved to a blind date, our relationship now progressed to the breakdown of our engagement stage. I sat up on the table looking around for my towel, feeling a little exposed, hoping Melrose wouldn’t let out another dramatic laugh. I found my towel and covered myself and smiled weakly again. “I’m kind of seeing somebody right now, so…”
“David’s married and he comes here all the time.”
“I don’t think I would feel right about it?” The question mark at the end of that sentence is not a mistake because it was a question. But it was a question Melrose didn’t want to answer for me, I was going to have to answer it for myself. I could hear game show music in my head counting down the seconds as I jumped down from the table still holding on to the now slightly less fluffy white towel.
“I should probably get back to work?” (Question mark still not a mistake.)
Our relationship now went from the angry breakup stage to the regretful sad stage. She looked at me with her puppy dog eyes again, disappointed, like she had failed at the task Humphrey had given her and he was going to scold her the next time he saw her like he scolds one of his vice-presidents after their division has a particularly bad quarter.
“Don’t you at least want a handjob?”