My Life Is Calling; continued... (By Stephán Amery McKenzie)
“Since I’m not getting sushi or a free car ride I’m going to grab more drinks,” DOG declares. “Grab—.” “I know Wonder Kid, one with gin and one with tequila both from the top,” DOG barks as he stomps off. “You didn’t even introduce us. So unbecoming.” UT is not happy. The only reason she came to the Chateau was to be seen, so to be ignored took all the whirl out of her. “How can I introduce you if I did not know who he was,” I bargain. “You’re like all men. You drink up, use me up and move on up.” “Project much?” I defend myself. “You’re going to go to dinner, with a stranger, in a car, that he’s going to send to grab you, and you’re going to go get liquored up, and you’re going to do this alone? Do you have a death wish? Are you trying to end up on the redux of “Faces of Death”? I definitely need to be there. I won’t have your rotting corpse on my conscious,” she proclaims, as if she is acting out a scene from “Mommy Dearest”. DOG manages to wobble back to us with three drinks in his hands. He hands me my order. Reaching out her hand, DOG offers her nothing. “Where’s mine?” DOG growls. “Must a woman say everything?” She shakes her finger in DOG’s face. He looks like he is going to bite her finger off, literally. She focuses her devotion on me, “So when are we going?” “I adore you, I do. But if you can go tramping off, having a tryst with a new guy every week without being bound, gagged, and punctured in every orifice or getting dropped in the bottom of a river, I’m pretty sure I can go to one of the most expensive sushi restaurants in all of Los Angeles without ending up hanging from the Hollywood sign with my severed penis in my mouth for the world to see,” I lay out. Cocking her head to the side as if she is trying to determine what just happened, “This ‘Hollywood you’ is so unbecoming.” She bounds off to the bar.
“Riddle me this. Were you always famous and others are starting to realize you are? Or are you starting to realize you are and everyone else has been waiting?” This is the other thing DOG does. We think, he thinks, he is the love child of Buddha and Yoda. “You are the smart one. All I do, is do as I do and hope what I do will do enough to make the ‘do’ unnecessary because the ‘do’ is simply me. Thus I am do-do,” I say, with a seriousness that would cause someone to stop me and ask who died. Locked in eye contact, we suddenly bust up laughing. “I cannot remember the last time I saw you laugh,” I fumble to get my camera phone ready. “Take a picture because the next time will probably be after the next eclipse,” he strikes a pose for his close-up. “I am trying!” I yell, as I finally get the camera ready. “I am over it,” DOG slides right back into his humorless disposition as if the last five minutes never occurred. FLASH! Damn, too late. He meanders off without a sound or glance my way.
From the courtyard I watch UT on one side holding court with several trendsetters who are either amused or taken aback but all are rapt by her unique…there she goes with a high-kick. That was one BIG high-kick! Something must have excited her to the core. She almost beheaded one of her mesmerized onlookers. On the other side of the open-air patio DOG pokes his head in and out of different conversations. Some he growls at and others he poses mind-boggling, thought-provoking questions. The look on these unsuspecting—creatures of the night—faces are priceless as they try to figure out if DOG’s a schizophrenic vagabond or an eccentric virtuoso.
Chuckling to myself, I think about where I was a few weeks ago, at my birth home, and then I reflect where I am now, in a den of hobnob ecstasy. Looking up in the sky at all the stars watching over me and seeing the parade of party-makers around me, I find myself smiling. I am not sure if it is the night, me coming back to my new home, but DOG is affecting the voice in my head, “Riddle me this. Did I go out tonight to distract me from having to make a decision about where my life is going? Or did I go out in hopes my decision would be made for me?” Much like my best friend back home. I was no better, no different than him. I pull out the business card Mister Excitement put in my shirt pocket. I read the tag line on the back.
“Why take what you can get when you can create what you want?”
Yep. My life is calling.