Hey, what about the Episode on Friends that never aired? The flashback with Monica, who had a major crush on Springsteen wins a ticket to his concert.  And during his performance of dancing in the dark, he bends down and takes her hand and pulls–or attempt to pull (you remember the portly Monica of the 80s)–before several people manage to hoist her up on stage. Once there,  she begins her iconic dance with The Boss.  

Well, anyway, it would have been a great episode.

Look I know you like fat girls. Or is that Phat Girlz? At any rate you haven’t called me and I’ve gained 20 pounds, in case you didn’t notice my last two instagrams.

And I have a very good reason for my weight gain.

I’m pregnant with your child.

A lot of people showed up for Big Karl’s funeral. It was with some surprise, to Meef, to see so many people–people she’d never seen. Oh sure, a handful of them neighbors. But there was a decorated soldier in full uniform–a Green Beret, who’d flown in from New York. And there were twins, a boy and girl, with golden hair that was painful to stare straight into–well, behaved children who asked if they could sing a duet after the eulogy was–oh and the eulogy! Given by a black woman with a thunderous voice who’s only overshadowing was the wide-brimmed hat that tilted up and down, left and right like a yellow UFO as she recalled Karl’s lustrous life.

   Whew: lots of people. None of them actual mourners. Not even Meef. She was glad her husband was dead. The ungrateful bastard–and still unrecognizable, from the tales she heard from these people. He’d been a totally different person to them. She was utterly confused. But she allowed the eulogy to go on, uninterrupted and then allow the twins to sing a perfect, eunuch-voiced rendition of  “Amazing Grace.”

Alright, so it’s not fair to talk about songs like that–to lump them for the purposes of making a point. And what is my point, exactly? Ah, who knows. I just found out of I have a son. And we are in a coffee shop that isn’t Starbucks.

    “It’s called Java Joe’s,” Kevin tells me. His name is Kevin, my son.

    Milkie didn’t want another child as a client.  Especially one that belonged to that Monstresse.  He was fine with his only child client at the time, 8 year old Lester Grid.  Little carrot- topped Les Grid appeared on many commercials.  His red hair was a great big fat draw to advertisers, a delight to parents, and an oooh-awe thing for other children.  Underneath that mop of maroon peered a freckled face cherub plastered with an overbite, slightly slanted green eyes, and cottony-sounding lisp that hawked things from Rinso to Pepsodent to Wannamaker washing machines. Currently his cute jingles were convincing millions of housewives into buying a certain puffed rice cereal.  And the reason it worked was because  the kid was easy. Obedient, hard-working and eager to please.

    He couldn’t imagine a daughter of Deedree’s being like that. He imagined a little terror of a girl. Just like her mother.

    “Hell no, Deedree,” he said in a voice so coated with cigar phlegm that he sounded like a tuba with tuberculosis.

    Deedree had always found that voice sexy.  It had been so long since she’d heard that voice and…What the hell did he mean hell no?

    Did he really have to explain? Probably.  Which would be required since Deedree had blacked out during most of her own short-lived entertainment career.  Which vividly came to Milkie’s mind as he stood there recalling all her temper tantrums, the refusals to cooperate with television executives and Broadway producers.  The cat fights with co-stars.  The slaps across his face.  

    “You can’t mean to tell me representing that red-headed boy is going to get you anywhere?” Deedree protested with Pimms breath. “He’ll outgrow his cuteness.  Orphans usually do.”

    “He’s not an orphan.”

    “He might as well be.” In a way it was better, Deedree thought.  “It’s better than for the poor boy to think his parents actually want him when its clear they are much more interested in their endless spiritual jaunts to India or snorkeling expeditions off the coast of Galapagos.”

    Milkie couldn’t argue with that.  The Grids had abandoned Les, for lack of a better description. They’d said they be out at Bergdorf’s and wouldn’t be long. But around that same evening, the two year old Lester Grid was discovered loitering in the lobby of the same building where Deedree lived. He’d been left in the temporary and awkward care of one of the doormen.  That was five years ago.  His parents were never arrested.  No one had even pressed charges, and it was unlikely anyone would, given the Grids standing in the Gold Coast community of Manhattan. Yes, back then not only could parents do anything they wanted, but they often did.  

    There was a loud wail from the other end of the line.  

    “Oh God,” Milkie said.

     It was Deedree, wailing at the sight of Windra—on her knees right alongside Suzie—cleaning up the Farina from the wing-back chair. It was a disgusting sight, watching her own daughter stoop to the level of servant.      

     Stars didn’t clean. They shone.

    “Get up from there you idiot!” Deedree screamed at the top of her lungs.  Her voice rang through the bedroom, through Windra, through Suzie. And through Milkie. Each three of those people had heard this shout of selfishness before.  It was toxic.  It cut to the core of one’s own belief in how much a human could hate oneself—and take it out on others during that process.  

     “I’ll be there,” Milkie he said, against his better judgment. “I’ll take the first flight out of Los Angeles.” He hung up before she could say anything.  He grabbed his beat-up brown suitcase and flung it open. Immune to its reek of stale cigar and sweat-soaked clip-on ties, he started packing.  Afterwards, he made  a call to Les’ school, a tiny establishment on the Burbank lot.  “Have him ready for flight by five,” he instructed the tutor.  “Make sure you don’t forget his Lincoln logs.”

    In the next two hours, both man and boy were flying over the United States, heading east.  Milkie shook his head in despair during most of the flight. He couldn’t believe what he’d gone and done. Uprooting Les, without any explanation. And what a good kid, too, for not even asking any questions. “A new assignment,” was all Milkie had offered.  They lunched on the plane ride, Les eating all his vegetables, saying his prayers (some of which were for God to watch over his parents—wherever they were).  Then it was nap time.  Unknown to Milkie, Les only pretended to sleep.  The little boy was worried that he was going to be abandoned yet again.  He was confused too. He thought he’d pleased Milkie by  performing well on the television commercials and in the classroom. He thought Milkie and he were friends. Best friends. Hadn’t Milkie promised they would never have to come to this dark crowded cold city ever again?   Milkie was too wrapped up in his own worries to notice the odd way Les way had leaned into the window of the plane, in order to hide a lone tear that had just begun to roll down his freckled cheek.

    Stop wanting to help out another kid, Milkie. Stop that right this very minute now.  He could always hear some part of him saying how foolish he was to try and help out anyone, much less kids.  This voice was most likely the remnant of an army sergeant reminding him of his inadequacies back on the eve of the Normandy invasion.  Being in World War II hadn’t done much to bolster his view of humanity.  But it had taught him that you have to take stands against injustices.  And if the last six years of taking care of Les had taught him anything it was that a safe haven meant everything to a child.  Their futures were important.  Could he ensure Windra’s? He was crazy to even think he could try.  And yet it was the question that flew with him to New York.

     They were let in by Suzie, the maid.  Milkie smiled at the squat, big-chested maid he’d not seen in years.  

    Her reception was not as friendly.  She recognized him instantly.  He was  grayer and fatter and smellier.  She led them them through the maisonnette, noticing man and boy holding hands.  Suzie swallowed any harsh words, while her mind reeled.  How could any self-respecting court let Milkie Evans take care of a kid?  But then again, as stated earlier: anyone was better than the Grids.  

    A minute or two later, Deedree descended the stairs.

    She planted a kiss on Milkie.  She looked down at the little boy.  “So,” she told Les. “You managed to survive the Milkie Way.  I suppose you’re a regular little Jackie Cooper now because of this curdled curmudgeon.”

    “Yes ma’am,” Les said, although he had no idea who Jackie Cooper was.

    She patted the little boys cheek, a little too hard we might add.  Her eyes slid up to Milkie. Drunk eyes. “I expect you to make my daughter into the next Shirley Temple,” Deedree said. And with a waft of her arm, her daughter descended the stairs.  

    Milkie instantly noticed the girls’ last minute, pressed-upon poise, a gait that made his bulbously red nose crinkle.  “She walks like a drunk,” he said in clear earshot of Deedree.

    Deedree, used to his pokes at her drinking, waved off his comment with a fresh snifter of brandy.  “It’s the maid’s fault. She had her in the kitchen mopping. It’s ruined her posture.”

    “Oh?” Milkie said.  “Still hard at work in this mauseoleum, Suze?”

     She scowled at him.

     His moustache curved.  

    “I can’t seem to get rid of her,” Deedree said, while waving Windra forward.

    Suzie’s the only reason your child is alive, he wanted to tell her.  To Suzie, he wanted to thank her for helping with Les, the way she had years ago. It was she who’d first discovered him all alone in hallway, sucking his thumb, lost and confused.  Hoping his gratitude would get across, he threw her a wink.  She frowned, snapped her dish rag.  In this very brief exchange, Suzie longed to tell this sloppy, hairy man that she was glad for his arrival.  Now perhaps Windra had a shot at survival, because of him. But pride kept her contained, in a corner, pretending to eye a dust mote alighting on a tear drop chandelier.

    “I’m not saying the girl doesn’t need work,” Deedree said, as she watched Windra walk up to Les.  “She’s very cooperative.  Willing to be willing in areas of elocution, deportment, with a possibility at poise. Careful Win,” she said as she realized her daughter, towering a good foot taller than Les, had offered him her hand.   

    Les didn’t seem to mind the greeting. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, putting his hand out, as Milkie had instructed him to.

    “You too,” Windra said, shaking his hand firmly but gently.

    “You see? She’s very cooperative.” Deedree raised her empty snifter, as if in a mock toast.  “I imagine she’ll behave with some two-bit director as well as with this child.” Menacingly she lowered her glass. “Make sure he’s more than two bits, Milkie.”  Her drunken laughter rang through the otherwise hushed gallery.  

     Milkie knew he’d arrived to help this kind, polite tall-little girl, just in time.

     Suzie felt the same way. She didn’t want to. But she did.  

     “Win? Why don’t you show Les here some of your toys? Play nice, both of you, while Milkie and I discuss…business.” Her last word was a hiss.

    Windra and Les ascended the stairs.  Once they were in her bedroom, she found her Barbie doll, a-flared with a pink, corseted, tulle dress.  She found Ken too and handed him to Les.  He took the male doll obediently but found himself more interested in the toy piano in the corner.  She noticed his interest.  “Do you play the piano?”

    “I study it, yes.”

    “But do you play it?”

    He shrugged and walked over to the petite instrument. “Hey,” he said, touching the fake ivory.  “This piano only has 30 keys.” He ran his fingers over it anyway.

    “It’s a toy piano.”

    “Toy?” he said, in a meek but astounded voice.

    “Not a real, adult piano.”

    He wanted to tell her that Milkie let him study on a real, adult piano but somehow he thought that would be rude. Although with his whisper-y, soft delivery it was hardly likely she’d take offense to anything he said or did.  He continued holding the Ken, listing it side to side in his hand.  But his heart wasn’t into playing house.  

    It hit Windra immediately, Les’ pain and fear.  So palpable, the moment they were alone.  She gently took the  Ken from him.

    “Are you mad at me?” he asked, folding his hands together.

    She smiled, although inside she ached at the sound of his quavering voice and droopy green eyes.  “No, of course I’m not. I want us to be friends.”

    “Oh okay,” he said, tilting his red head to the side, with slight caution.   

    “Baderp-baderp,” said Windra.

    Les’ eyes grew large. “Baderp?”

    “That’s what I say when I’m nervous,” she said and put down her Barbie right next to Ken, on a long-ago abandoned Dream-house. “When I don’t know what else to say I just go , ‘buderp, buderp.’ But mostly in my head.” She smirked, wriggled her button nose. “But really, I think this is the first time I’ve said it out loud.”

    “But you shouldn’t have to say that,” Les said. “You speak fine. You’ve been so friendly to me, ever since I’ve got here. You let me play with your toys–.”

   “But it’s not the same,” Windra said. “You miss being in your own home, don’t you?”

   “I really don’t have one,” Les said. “I mean Milkie’s place back in California, sure. I like living with him. But the the home I grew up in is on the floor below this one and….well.” He lowered his head, looking down at Ken.  “It isn’t my home anymore..”

    “Your parents are away,” Windra said. Just a statement of fact that she tried to convey with empathy.

    He wanted to smile at her because of the way she’d said that. She was so pretty, so kind.  He picked up Ken, looked at him with envy. Sometimes I wish I could just be a doll and get put away some place.”
    “Some place safe?”

    He struggled with what to say next. Because he’d really told a fib.  He felt safe with Milkie, of course. He just didn’t feel safe feeling safe.  The man had taken him under his wing and gotten him to learn the piano, made sure he got into commercials, despite his painful shyness.  In front of the camera, he could pretend very well. He could even pretend that it didn’t bother him that he had no parents.  But Windra saw that he was still missing something.  His parents, obviously. But maybe something more than that. Something…

    “Buderp-baderp,” he said, finally.

    She smiled. “Yeah, exactly.”

    This time he had no problem smiling back.  “Please play something for me,” she said, while making a grand sweeping motion toward the tiny piano.

    They became friends that afternoon.  He taught Windra how to play Mary Had A Little Lamb.  When he sang he lost all his inhibitions.  His voice was confidant, strong.  The melody that rang through her bedroom that afternoon made her stand up and want to dance.  She grabbed Barbie and Ken and danced with them.  Les enjoyed the effect his music had on her.  Without even thinking he introduced rhythm into the chorus, a de-dum-dum-de-DUM tribal beat, keeping his fingers busy on the lower scales.  Although she didn’t realize it, Windra was sort of….boogieing.

    Then, without warning, Les broke into chorus section of “Rocket Man” by Elton John.   

    Milkie face peered between in the crack of the playroom door, listening. His moustache curved. He turned to see Suzie eyeing him. “See?” he said. “I told you they’d hit if off.”

    “Humph,” Suzie said.  “Nice song.”

    “They make a good pair.”

    “Are you going to marry them off already?”

    “If we can capture that chemistry on camera, we’re be in business.”

    Suzie’s expression turned into something similar as that of the Statue of Liberty.    

    He could feel that look.  “Oh c’mon,” he shot back in a whisper.  “You remember I’m an agent, don’t you? And those kids have something special.”

    “Yes.  And too much abandonment and abuse in their lives.”

    “Not any more. Not with me. Ahem, us, I mean.” He cracked the door wider to see Windra twirling the Ken and Barbie.”  

   “You are one mistake away from hurting those kids and don’t you forget it,” she told him.

    He drew back sharply from the door to keep his voice a safe distance from them. “I’m trying to save them,” he told her. “And I can do it with my job. The more they stay busy, the less time they are here, under that woman’s dark cloud, and so the better chance they have at happiness.”

   “You make happiness sounds so complicated. Look at them,” she said.  

     And he did. Intently.

     “They’re happy now,” she said. “With just simple things. Like music. And each other.”

     But being an agent, Milkie saw more.  He saw an opportunity.  “They can be happier,” he said.  He raced away to the telephone in the foyer and called Getteltot Inc., a toy company based in New York.  

    And then two weeks later it happened. Windra landed her first television commercial.  Thanks to Milkie, she was going to be the new face for Fredricka, the first fluid-filled doll that moved most life-like. With outfits sold separately.   But even better than that,  Fredericka’s counterpart was a jet-black haired, exotic-looking action figure named Fernando, that put Les in the perfect position for the cross-hairs of a coup.  

     Les required little convincing that he would be the right boy to help showcase fun and adventure of Fernando. He knew it would please Milkie and he would get to spend more time with Windra.  He cinched the audition. Milkie asked and got a two-year contract for both kids.  

    Fredericka and Fernando were an astounding hit.  531,128 of them were sold in the United States the following year.  

    Deedree wasn’t satisfied. It was time to move on, she quipped, between sips of vodka tonics. Time for her prime television, time for films that co-starred opposite Charlton Heston in some Warner Bros. historical epic.

    “No more damn commercials,” she ordered, her hot fuming breath shooting through the blue smoke of Milkie’s Havana imported cigars.  He tried to make her understand that these things took time. Proper pacing. Especially where a child was concerned. Children needed school and rest and hobbies. They needed to play.  And not the sort of rehearsed playtime that took place in front of cameras.  

    “Windra will not be a failure, do you hear me?” she screamed from atop the stairs. “I won’t have it!”

    And then down would crash a crystal vase or a Renoir painting.  He almost felt sorry for her. Because it was during these confrontations that he was reminded of the dreams Deedree had once housed.  Long before Windra, she’d embarked on a Broadway musical career.  A dream that never materialized,  because of her drinking.

    It wasn’t all her fault. She might not even be a drunk had it not been for Lanford Thrope.

    Lanford Thrope.  As unscrupulous as Lanford had been on all fronts of business and friendship,  his treatment of Deedree had been worse. When he left, he took the last dregs of her self-respect. That’s how much of a thief that man was.

    But one could only feel sorry for Deedree for so long, especially when she threw those blood-curdling temper tantrums.  And when Deedree turned on Windra—it was deplorable. And almost unavoidable, even with all the tactics that Milkie and Suzie had employed over the years to protect her.  

   So why not just fucking leave?

   Windra wouldn’t do it. She refused to leave her mother. And Lord knows Milkie had asked her so many times over the year.  “You and me and Les could start a new life in Los Angeles. Think of it. Sunshine, ocean, peace.”

    And she did think about it. But thinking was different than feeling. And what she felt for her mother was stronger than a new life.

    But that never stopped Milkie from hoping that some day his Big Dream would come true. He’d pack up with  the kids and whisk them away to Los Angeles. They would start a new life, the three of them. They could be a real family.

Chapter 1

Tuesday’s Gone With the Windra

    Windra was born beautiful. A rather sexy newborn, you might say. Her eyes blazed a polite but penetrating blue at the doctor and nurses of Cedars Sinai New York  Hospital on July 4th 1958. Her mother Deedree Thrope, drunk at the time of her daughter’s birth, had not needed an anesthetic, a feat she was happy to slur to the medical staff  and to the baby itself (as soon as it began to crown).  It was hard to find too much fault with Deedree for her drunkenness. Her husband Lanford Thrope had recently ran off to Harlem with a black woman who ran the numbers racket there.  

    Little has been said or written of the female ego and let it be stated here and now—or back then, rather—that Deedree’s ego was as fragile as a spider’s dew laden web.  From outward appearances—statuesque frame, long cream legs separated by stirrups, chiseled chin and high forehead creased and crumpled with labor pains, a slender necked veined with the constant burble of obscenities—she looked capable of handling being dumped by a rich Wall Street tycoon.

    More on that later. She was now pushing the baby out of her. And sort of away from her, from then on.

    As soon the baby’s umbilical cord was snipped, Deedree requested a bottle of Pimms.  No bottle was brought, needless to say.  “Is it a girl?” She asked after her first question of “Where’s my Pimms?” went unanswered.  By now she was so drunk she was seeing double and tried to discern the genitalia of the newborn with one eye closed.

    Yes, the nurse confirmed, holding the baby up for inspection. It’s a girl.

    “Bootifoo,” Deedree said, a slurred version of “beautiful,” while relieving the last of her bladderial and rectal contents.  She named her daughter Windralyn. She’d meant to say, “Gwendolyn,” (her  own mother’s name) but she slurred yet again and promptly passed out for two straight days, only to wake up with the shakes, a horrible time when she could say nothing, just moan.  In order to save face, she kept the name “Windralyn” as she’d originally stated, or at least the way the nurses had confirmed it on the baby’s birth certificate.  

    To make things worse, an orderly, for a cool crisp one hundred dollar bill, had slipped in bottle of Pimms to Deedree via her food tray.  A few swigs later, she gave the  child’s middle name as “Metamucil.”

    She’d meant to say “Margaret” but the nurses took her at her audible word and put down “Metamucil” on the birth certificate.  

    So Windralyn it was. Windralyn Metamucil Thrope.  

    An aside: Back then mothers could drink and name their babies whatever the hell they wanted and no one, but nooooo one butted in. Especially if those mothers lived in penthouses on Park Avenue.    The following few years saw her living one big cliché: a rich woman eating bon bons and watching soap operas. While drunk.  

    Windra, however, defied the cliché.  By age 8 she was a self-possessed, respectful, bright, well-behaved girl.   Tomorrow.  

    “Mommy,” she said once, after having presented Deedree with a dish of thick, healthful Farina that she’d prepared under the careful eye of their maid.  “Why do you watch so much television?”

    Deedree was insulted.  “Because I think these actresses are pathetic, whores of daytime television. And for what? When everyone knows prime time is where the prestige is. What’s that?” She asked dipping her slender, pointy nose near the steaming wheat cereal.

    “Breakfast,” Windra said proudly. “I made it. Suzie let me.”

    Deedree was surrounded with pink pillows and blankets smeared with chocolate.  “Well you know…” she began, moving toward the edge of the bed, her satin beige nightgown riding up her long slender pale legs. “Her own daughter is your age but weighs three times what you weigh. It’s probably because she feeds her this!” And with that, Deedree grabbed the bowl and threw it against a leather wing-backed chair.   

    Windra gasped at the mess. Moreover her heart lurched at the chair. This had been her father’s chair.  A man she’d never met. Might never meet. Might was good enough to hang her hope on, even while the farina dripped from its upholstery.

    “I want you eating regular food,” Deedree said, suddenly infused with more passion than her opinion of star-crossed lovers, Alice and Steve on Another World, which she’d happened to be watching before she was rudely interrupted.  “I want you to stay beautiful.  It will save you from misery. It’s what’s going to make you a star.”  Although drunk, she was determined to see her beautiful daughter on screen or at least television. That much she was able to manage, in between plucking her eyebrows and pouring Pimms into her cans of Tab.

    For a brief second, she stared at her daughter with something aking to hope.

    Windra had never seen this look on her mother’s face  It was silent lucidity at best. A pending request for another martini at worst.  

    “Milkie,” Deedree said, and clapped her hands.

    “Milkie?” Windra was confused. Was this a new way she wanted her cocktails presented?

    “He’s just the man who can make you famous.” But would Millikeen Evans Jr. be willing to work with her? After all these years? Maybe by the end of the week he could sign Windra on for a Prell Commercial, before they manufactured the stuff with a shatterproof bottle.

    Milkie the Miracle Worker.  Yes!  Deedree sent Windra away to play. She summoned Suzie in to clean up the spilled Farina.  During the commercial break for the second portion of Young and the Restless, she placed a person to person to Hollywood.  

    Milkie’s stock answer was,  “No fucking way, Dee.”

    It was the worst episode of American Bandstand.

    Thank God it never aired.

    Dick Clark himself was absent for the taping; he never even saw the finished product, never even met the five dancers creating havoc on the set that day.  

    But it had been necessary—this mayhem from the Jivesome Fivesome.  Mayhem motivated by love.  Love for each other.  Maybe even for Dick Clark? He’ll never know.  He’d been sent away, tricked away.  No small miracle, given his penchant for running things.

    But had he been there, leaning over his podium, observing the dancing kids, he would have noticed them immediately. They were new to the show, new to the kind of love they felt for each other too.

    And here they came, into the camera’s view, in no particular order (seriously):

1. Windra Metamucil Thrope
2. Chipper Fleeshay
3. Soyla Mopez  
4. Les Grid
5. Brant Weaver

    On that Saturday morning of September 1, 1975, they converged on Studio 56 at 4151 Prospect Avenue in Los Angeles, California for the sole purpose of saving lives.  Collaterally, however, they flaunted the latest fashions and jolted forth moves elicited by Les Grid’s hit single “Down by The East Side,” a dance ditty which had just that very week catapulted to #1 on the Billboard Magazine music chart.  It was a song that spoke of the potency of love, the poison of it, in a rhythm that proved popular.  (In other words: Had a good beat, was easy to dance to).  The kids tried, as best they could, to enjoy themselves–under the gun, so to speak—with their various clogs and heels and sneakers skidding and scuffling over ABC’s shiny pale linoleum.  Surrounding them more than the music was a deeper thumping that something bad was going to happen.

   Hell had come to these Five even before American Bandstand, in the forms of alcoholism, unwanted pregnancy (but eventually very much wanted), threats of oral sex, threats of anal sex—the latter two instances coming from a very rich woman heavily into S&M.

    However, the nastiest part of their situation had to do with a nasty drug lord and the nasty drug he’d created.     Both of them highly addictive, depending on who one asked.  And they were about to deal with the answers.  Despite what was going to happen next, they were somehow grateful they’d made it this far, to this moment, with pluck and determination, and with the help of adults who attempted to protect and love them. There were adults there too, in the studio. There had to be. No other way.

    Despite the tone of the previous paragraphs it was, believe it or not, a great time to be them. Adults included.

    The mayhem, the murders, that fucking drug—all of it culminating as Les’ song launched into the extended version, the one with the beginning thirty or so seconds of symphonic guitar flutters.  The music ushered the Fivesome into the camera’s master shot. First appearing was Soyla Mopez, whose ample figure arrested the Halston dress before Halston was Halston.  Bigger than that was her determination, which seemed boundless when it came to guiding her best friend Windra Metamucil Thrope forward through the boogieing crowd.  Windra was the angelic, willowy, white girl that, naturally, the camera loved.  And with the special lighting afforded by the production of this episode, the sweat that appeared on her expansive forward glittered like diamonds.  She too was dressed in Halston before Halston was Halston.  She looked like a million bucks, but she felt like shit. Such was the power of the illicit drug now coursing through her velvety veins.  Quickly lets add that they both looked like a millions buck, both of them dressed in Halston before Halston was Halston.

    Swaying behind them in no-name but fabulous polyester were Chipper Fleeshay and Brant Weaver, two boys dealing with the effects of the drug, but not in a way you might expect. Both lucid and free of confusion, they reflected on how they’d gotten here, to this very spot.  Especially Brant Weaver, a farm boy from God’s Country who’d been summarily beaten black and blue by an abusive father.  And guess what? Chipper had been beaten black and blue by his father too!  They were glad to be together,  having more in common than they realized, especially when it came to the kind of love they felt for each other.  They needed each other more than ever, knowing that things were going to get very bad in a few minutes.

    In seconds, actually.  

    With the time remaining, let us not forget Les Grid, the budding rock star, the singer-songwriter of “Down By the East Side” who felt anything but those things that morning.  Had he ever? Performing since he was in diapers, he hadn’t even the heart to pantomime the song, as instructed.  He stood farther from the crowd, at the edge of the dance floor, on the lookout for danger.

    He was now about to find it.  They all would.   

    Right about….

    Now!

    They never saw it coming.

This was about a couple of neighbors, a man and a woman, who lived in a small Florida town, about fifty miles from the Gulf Coast, who’s ranch houses were less than half a mile from each other.

The two of them were suffering terrible insomnia.

The man, in his early 50s, a well-built, a ex-military man who’d served in the Iraq war was still deeply and actively mourning the loss of his beautiful wife who’d died a year ago.  She was one of those women who was perfect. She made love perfectly, kept house immaculately and cooked wonderful meals and took excellent care of their only son–going so far as to leave special snacks in his lunchbox that surprised and delighted not only the son but the father who always peaked in the lunchbox before the son did.

A great woman.

And somehow she managed to die perfectly, if you can imagine such a thing. One of those blood diseases that no chemo can correct, in which her beautiful long black hair didn’t fall out. The kind of disease where you keep conversing with her until the very end, unmarred by fever or nausea or coma. She did it all so well.

And he missed her terribly.

Now the other neighbor. She wasn’t as complicated. Unless you counted her menopause. Which she was not willing to do at that time. She wanted to believe that her sleeplessness was something more substantive. Something supernatural. Not as in ghostly…just, maybe more special than was necessary.

And see, this is what kept her up all hours; trying to explain something that was could not be, quite yet.

She stood on the porch, during one of her sleepless nights, in those wee hours, staring off across hat vacant orange grove that separated her house from the man’s house. Through one of those branch-rows she could see his porch light bleeding through. He was standing there too, like her, sleepless and wondering. His silhouette paced back and forth.

She wanted to call out to him. Or at least phone him.  She could, you know, since they were neighbors and since their two sons were best friends.

But it was so late. It would be inappropriate.

But she knew he was hurting, in that strange, quiet but interesting way that men did. But neither did she call out to him or phone him (of course knowing his number for those carpooling emergencies). Nor did she just walk over to his front porch.

That was something she thought and thought and thought about. She imagined walking very quietly and sometimes she would imagine that he’d expected her all this time. He would turn to her and smile and say something really profound like “I’ve waiting for you.”

She told herself to shut up.

And that’s all that happened that first night. Just two people who couldn’t sleep and thought they were the only ones in that small Florida hick town who were awake.

But there was someone else awake.  Someone watching them.

I hadn’t kissed a girl in twenty years old. I was forty now. Two decades of preoccupation with literature and video games and other guy things. It happens, you know. Life goes by so quickly that you forget the really important things.

   The great reminders come from children.  On April 4th, 2016.I was presented with my twenty year old son. I hadn’t known he’d existed until now. The girl I’d slept with never told me. And with good reason. I would have run screaming for the hills, made a complete mess of everything. She was smart enough to know this.

    So why now? I wondered. Why now? Did he need my bone marrow? Was he dying?

    “No,” he said at the Starbuck we’d decided to meet at. A lot, lot, lot more had happened before this. There was “The Call” and then “The Revelation” and then “DNA testing-Part Duh” until finally we found ourselves meeting for the first time.

    I was thrilled to realize he hadn’t taken after me. He was tall and gorgeous with his mother’s blond hair and gray-ish eyes. He was smart and well-mannered. Flawless personality.

   I felt more like shit than ever.

   “So what happened,” I explained to him, after taking a quick sip of my decaf Grande with Splenda. “Is that I was a fat fourteen year old who was really out at sea.”

   “Out at sea?” He asked. And naturally he would. Who says “out at sea” nowadays anyway? Except popular romance novelists and ne’er-do-well psychics?

   “I was confused,” I amend. “About a lot of things.”

   “You were just a kid,” he says.

   “Exactly!”  I said, appreciating this empathy. Or at least wanting to sense it.

   “We were all kids,” he said. He drinking a more complicated drink than I am. Something iced, with foamy specks of what looks like chocolate. He has a frothy moustache.

    “Gosh, I love you,” I blurt out.

    “I wish I could say the same thing.”

    I’m soaring and I feel the bottom drop out from under me. “I understand,” I force myself the thing to say. I cannot expect to be loved back, after what I’ve done or haven’t done for twenty years.

     “Maybe some day I will,” he says.

     And that feels better. Then comes the bombshell. Of course, why else would he want to see me?

     “It’s nothing bad,” he maintains. “It’s good, actually.”
     “Yeah?” I say, wanting to be hopeful. The whole event fell like a ballad, one of those top ten songs where someone is lamenting someting and–that’s all their doing. There is no solution. There might be an offer of one. But nothing that the singer attempts to accomplish.

Starry Knight used to be called Isabel Sanford by her most-worst nemesis, by a dog named Boo. But when a song came out about him, he retreated into obscurity and Starry’s life sort of went on an even keel from then on.

The courtship between Little Karl and the witch was practically nonexistence. A few hand holdings, precipitated by the application of Ben Gay to a withered hand; the adjoining of lips by sheer accident (one of them had dropped something–a shoe–although most likely it was a toe–for both had diabetes by then–and when they both bent their heads down, their faces were close together and one of them stole a kiss from another.) Very simple. And practical! Government checks to the same address; coupled shopping excursions to to the same pharmacies, clinics and grocery stores. Marriage made sense.  

    Hard to say who proposed to who. Easy to wonder who had the most power. The witch who by now was called Meef (no longer Tarantula, but something more close to her real name–but being a woman who’d lost all her teeth her and could not pronounce her own name very clearly and signed her name with an “X”–she was probably a Margaret or Bethanne, or something of the sort). And her spells had mostly dwindled. Mainly because they were trouble to conjure too Macbethian in nature. But there was one spell that was easy.  That of marriage proposal. And she’d chosen him, Little Karl–Now Big Karl–out of the thousands of men she’d known over the centuries.

    Their honeymoon was horrendous. Harrowing. Pus-filled. Full of aches and pains and many naps in between. By that time, there there was very little age difference between them. Both of them were old and haggard. But she was a bit stronger. “You belong to me forever,” she said. “Or else you die.”

   Nothing that alarmed him. He’d been hearing that from her since kindergarten. He found this mildly amusing. She didn’t like that. She wanted him to take her seriously.

   So she said, in a more ominous voice. “If you ever try to leave me, I’ll garnish your wages with parsley.”

   This made him chuckle. “Garnish my wages?”  he said, shifting in his seat, on that same glider of hers, of yore, now rusty and creaky, further hampering their hearing. “I’ve never had a job in my life” The government has always supported me.” It was true.  Apparently, back then at least, the Deal was that if you were ugly enough you got a check from Uncle Sam, from some obscure government-sponsored program bestowed to the descendants of people from the Pacific West who’d developed deformities because of the Goldrush.  It was a very short-lived program, after it concretely concluded that Gold or any other riches–or the lack or hunt or want or need of them deformities (although they really do, some people will argue) and so it seemed odd that Little/Big Karl was able to get these checks.

  Ah, and as if hit by a lightning bolt, he jolted upright from the glider and and turned with mouth slack with shock. “It was you wasn’t it?” He told his witch-wife on that quiet, cool, November afternoon. “You’ve been sending me money this entire time.”

 She smiled toothlessly. “What are witches for?” She said.

 And if he’d just kept his mouth shut, or maybe just thanked her, he might have lived another few more years. 

“You turned me into this. Into an ugly toad. The opposite of a fairy tale. A kiss that turned me into an ugly toad”

   “But you are my prince.”

   Another aaaah, this one deeper inside, rumbling his chest with its gravity, something unspeakable.  Searing emotions. Unfathomable regret spurting up, bursting forth like a heavy storm cloud. The glider shook. The porch shook. The whole house started to rock.

    People looked out of  their windows in order to make out the commotion coming from the witch’s house. They withdrew their attention from the highly rated television show Dallas on the night it was revealed “Who Shot J.R.?”–in order stare at the rocking sprigs of clematis over at the corner of the street. They thought they heard growls.

   There were growls. The retired witch who’d been a dutiful wife was now pissed.

   But so was Big Karl. Equal pissosity on both sides. No mystery here, who would win this argument.  Winning wasn’t really the issue. Payback was.

   “I don’t want to owe you,” he said.

   “Too late,” she said.

   “There’s one way I can pay you back,” he said.

   “You wouldn’t dare,” she said.

They’d begun to sound like Dallas. Within a shew-fart minutes she decided to kill him. He’d served his purpose, she reasoned. He’d kept her company, gotten old with her.  She shifted in her seat and said. “I hereby garnish your wages with parsley” and she threw a few sprigs on him. Yes, actual parsley she’d carried on her person all this time. Which was now brown and crumbly. But she was still powerful.

   Could such a thing be wrapped up after years of matrimony? Of course. That’s how many, many marriages ended in–death. If not murder. Big Karl shat and peed in his pants and keeled over. And that was all.

     But there’s more.