Ken O’Steen                                                                                                      

Ground Control to Major Tom

I hadn’t left my apartment building in four years. Before that, I’d stayed out in that muck as long as I had only in order to serve the requirements of my multifarious addictions, ingested respectively with needles, straws, pipes, and auto parts if necessary. I’d gone sober. But it was not a world out there fit for vermin or crocodiles, much less a bookish ex-doper with raw nerves, and refreshed perception.

Furthermore, it was too hot. I cocooned inside with my memories of air temperatures fit for humans. After proper baking, LA’s erstwhile paradisical Mediterranean climate had transformed into thirsty desert, the air sizzling enough to boil pigeons.

The tenth floor, where I lived, remained literally above the fray, half the apartments uninhabited, the hallway as quiet and placid as the Pacific Ocean. I had never set foot on the bottom nine, using the elevator for trips to the lobby in order to get the mail. The solitariness of the few of us who dwelled on the tenth floor caused us to be designated as the hideaways. We were an apartment floor of Boo Radleys.

Before burrowing in, I had lived my life as a hyphenate: user-dealer. Daily business affairs included meetings in parking lots, packets exchanged through the windows of cars, storing cash in lockboxes, precision work with scales, and moving bundles from the trunk of one car to that of another on the sides of freeways, or cul-de-sacs on canyon roads. My golden parachute when I cashed out was formidable, and supported my later insularity, as did investments in stocks and mutual funds. The markets remained dear to the prevailing plutocrats, and the dividends were as safe as milk.

Then it happened. The one thing that could force me to leave the building. My ex, Cindy-Rose, needed me.

It had been more than a year since I’d seen her face-to-face. She was every bit her usual self then: hair still platinum blonde, black spider-web eye paint, silver lamé jacket, and skyscraper red pumps. But now Cindy-Rose had her troubles. Her kidneys were on their last leg. She needed a new one to stay among the living, and the waiting list was longer than the Nile. Because there was no one else she turned to me.

First, the nephrologist would have to test my blood and tissue for compatibility. Thus, I’d need to venture beyond the sanctuary of my building.

The morning of departure I wore an old pair of shoes that I could prodigiously vomit on without concern if anything I encountered induced revulsion. When I reached the elevator, there was a cardboard sign affixed to the doors bearing a huge question mark in magic-maker indicating the elevator was out of order. The only way down was to take the stairs.

I entered the stairwell with its oriole yellow plaster, and started down, pausing momentarily on the landing. Coming up the steps was the building’s super, Dr. Olaru. A sexologist back home in Romania, in America he lacked the credentials required to continue working in his chosen profession. And so, rather than the mysteries of arousal and bodily fluids, Dr. Olaru dealt now with home plumbing, and the penetration of locks with keys. Olaru was a substantial man with a shrub of bushy brown hair on his head, and a pencil mustache that resembled a stripe across his upper lip. I explained Cindy Rose’s medical crisis, and my need to venture out in order to have my blood siphoned. “I’ll walk down with you,’ he offered.  

As we walked, he said, “I see your lady friends coming and going every once in a while.”

“I’m a hermit, not a monk,” I told him.

I inquired as we descended the stairs, how the job was going, and about the current state of the building. “In the last few years,” he began, “tenants have seemed to congregate geographically according to their cultural and political predilections. For instance, on the sixth there’s a bunch of Southerners, or Southerner wannabees. I call them goober peas. A couple of them have Confederate flags on their door, and the hall is always full of biscuit crumbs. I’d swear I heard a rooster in one of those apartments once.”

When we got to the seventh-floor landing, he stopped, and took a small bottle out of his jacket pocket. “Little popper,” he said, referring to the amyl nitrite. “Takes all my strength and a little more these days to stay alert.”

When we arrived on the sixth-floor landing, we had to squeeze around a mini-bike that was parked there. Olaru said, “the entire hallway down the sixth floor is congested. There are Segways, rascals, skateboards, shopping carts, kid’s pedal cars. These damn rollers.” Olaru had a somewhat exhaustive taxonomy for residents of the building. It was he who had originated the label hideaways for residents of the tenth.

When we stepped on to the second-floor landing, Dr. Olaru said, “I refer to the second-floor as the Second Amendment floor because a bunch of these dementos are packing. Hopefully mayhem can be contained on the second floor if the weaponry comes out during neighbor disputes.”

When we reached the ground floor, I thanked Olaru for his service, and he headed for his apartment in back.

The lab was in a medical building several blocks away. When I stepped out onto the sidewalk, I cringed like an old vampire shoved onto the Venice boardwalk at high noon. The outside was rather more pungent than I recalled. It smelled like a stale gas station and rotting fruit. The sun felt like a power saw lacing into my retinas. I was an indoors human only now, a reader of books, a watcher of Netflix, and had no place in such racket and sprawl. I walked at a pace just short of a trot, breathing hard, as much from the storming anxiety as from the respiratory and muscle atrophy resulting from lack of exercise.

The medical building was the generic sort, the elevator carriage as shiny as a stainless-steel surgical sink. I went into the small waiting room and gave my name at the desk. When I was called inside, I was directed to a chair where the blood was drawn. The woman in the white coat had to notice looking at my outstretched arm that I had been a naughty boy once. The damage around the veins was extremely subtle now, but I was certain it was evident to a medical person. Once the blood had been collected in tubes I hurried back to my building, no less discombobulated than earlier by the amplitude of the outdoors.

It was the following morning when the call from the lab came: I couldn’t donate a kidney to Cindy-Rose. My blood type was incompatible. So, I made the call to Cindy Rose, giving her the shitty news.

*

I had met Cindy-Rose while we were students together at USC, for me an unremarkable run of mediocrity. She was a major in communications, before dropping out to perform in the adult film business, for which she was physically, temperamentally, and libidinally suited.  After several years, she used the money she’d earned publicly fornicating to buy a house, benefitting from the freewheeling home loan promiscuity of the early aughts. She eventually set herself up as a one-person talent agency, especially keen to represent former adult performers hoping to make the leap into mainstream acting.

A year after my rejection as a kidney donor, I was still ensconced with the hideaways, Cindy-Rose was still without a kidney, and growing ill. Her creatine levels were ominous, her stamina all but kaput. Her doctor had prescribed oxygen to improve her dwindling saturation levels, and tanks of it were delivered to her house. She called, and asked if I would do her a favor. “What?” I asked.

“Kill me,” she demanded. And she was serious.

By then it was woefully apparent no kidney would be forthcoming from the stingy donor list soon enough. She was adamant in her intent to preempt the final stages of suffering and debilitation. She was forty-five, and doomed.

The plan was for me to stay for a period of days at her house, allowing us to spend time together before the final sayonara. It wasn’t going to be an execution, rather a collaboration that would send her off smoothly.

When the time came, I walked downstairs and knocked on Dr. Olaru’s apartment door. He’d agreed to drive me to Cindy-Rose’s house in the San Fernando Valley. Olaru drove a bisque-colored Mustang convertible that looked like a crouching animal. As we crawled along Wilshire Boulevard with the top down, our lungs gulping helpings of carbon particulates, and wildfire soot, I could see that little had changed. It was still a blur of apartment buildings and strip malls chocked with nail salons, fitness centers, and franchise sandwich shops.

Cindy-Rose’s house, which I knew well enough from before, was a medium-size stucco with an arched portico. The small front yard was bare, the front room of the house sunny and open. The back however was leafy, the rooms decidedly cooler and darker. Cindy-Rose’s bedroom, and a den were there. She answered the door clad head-to-toe in glitter-drizzled black spandex, with an oxygen mask hanging off her ears. Her personal style was still a cross between Ziggy Stardust and ‘La Dolce Vita’.

The first thing I did was learn how to change the oxygen tanks, so she wouldn’t tire herself any longer with that chore. I brought each new one in as needed from the back porch. Cindy-Rose dozed on the couch a lot. She still had a good appetite, and I cooked up clam linguini, and chicken marsala, both specialties of mine. Dinner time was when we talked the most.

On the third day Cindy-Rose finalized her date of departure: two days hence, in the early evening. I had the feeling it was customary to say something of a philosophical or spiritual nature at such times, and that I should appear open to theological discourse. With that in mind, I asked, “I wonder what happens after death?”

“Fuckall is what happens,” Cindy-Rose said. “Nada.”  So, I could check that one off the list.

That night at diner she told me something truly shocking: she was leaving me the house. In response to my amazement, she said, “Why not? It would only go to the state of California otherwise.”

“I don’t know if I’m the suburban type.”

“Get over it. If you keep paying rent, you’re a schmuck. In any case, you can turn this place into just as ironclad a hermitage as your apartment, if that’s what you want to do. Honestly though, I’m hoping you don’t. Either way, the papers already have been signed, sealed and notarized.”

I thanked her sincerely, told her I wanted to live in the house, and assured her I would “do right by the place” with no clear idea what I was saying, or what I would do.

Each night we sat on the navy sofa in front of the television streaming movies, almost all of them favorites from our preferred era, the Seventies. We went through ‘Shampoo,” “Brewster McCloud,” “Barry Lyndon,” “All the President’s Men,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Nashville,” “Mean Streets.” “A Clockwork Orange,” and “The Long Goodbye.”

On her final day, Cindy-Rose puttered around with what little strength she could manage, and blasted Bowie. I had called in a delivery from Vendome’s Liquors, which arrived a little after noon. It was a couple of packs of Blackened Voodoo, a beer made in Louisiana that allegedly inflicted a hex. Now was the time.

I stood staring out the window, as Bowie’s “Golden Years” thumped away in the background. It was the season of June Gloom, when banks of clouds in for the night from the Pacific Ocean remained lodged in the sky well into the following day. When the sun began burning them away, it brought a sulfuric quality, as if by dispatching the clouds the sky was seared with chemical burns.  “Who loves the sun? Not everyone,” Velvet Underground had intoned, incisively.

During the cocktail hour, Cindy-Rose told me, “I’m getting out at a good time. The grass is dried up and brown almost year ‘round now, and the sky is orange half the time from fires. These days, when you watch the news, up is down, and down is up.” 

“Yeah, objective reality is a futile argument at this point.”

Cindy-Rose’s self-delivery plan was simple. She would die from ingesting a heavy portion of Nembutal. We would load it into a helping of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, which she was crazy about. If people could indulge themselves with comfort food, why not a comfort suicide?

We decided to put on the Altman classic MASH for the big finale. We sat on the sofa, me sipping on Blackened Voodoo, Cindy-Rose eating her mac n’ cheese. The MASH theme song “Suicide is Painless” was melodically pleasing, and lyrically on point. There was the Last Supper scene, when following the meal, the dentist, Painless Pole Waldowski, climbed into his coffin, and swallowed his “black capsule.”

When Cindy-Rose finished eating, she sat close, and rested her head against my shoulder. She looked up at me and said, “I don’t know why, but I love you.”

“Same to you,” I said. And then she closed her eyes.

*

I mowed the grass regularly, and it returned with an insolence I found infuriating. Other things came out of the ground, like weeds, that I was forced to contend with, lest the yard resemble a Cambodian jungle. If you didn’t spruce up things on the outside of the place, it would look like a haunted house. I was trying though, loath to look Cindy-Rose’s gift-house in the mouth

I leased a Chevrolet Spark, with an option to buy, and occasionally ventured out to buy provisions. I’d engaged in several conversations with the neighbors. As Cindy-Rose had suggested I was feeling the world out again, if warily. I had forgotten what a tribulation small-talk could be.

After a couple of months, Dr. Olaru came to the house one evening and we barbecued in the back yard. He showed up wearing paisley Bermuda shorts, and a pair of Ray-Bans, even though it was getting dark. He was toting a thirty-pack of Stella Artois.

We stood near the grill chatting, the Steely Dan album from the Seventies, “The Royal Scam” playing in the background. Olaru would intermittently inhale one of his amyl nitrate poppers. I asked him how the job was going, and he told me he’d spent time earlier in the afternoon on the fourth floor, pestered by a pair of tenants while he was trying to work. “A lot of tenants on that floor, obviously bitten by the fame bug, have an inordinate desire to be seen,” he said. “These two were trying to record themselves watching me snake a sink pipe, and put it on their Instagram or something. I call the inhabitants of that floor the locusts after ‘Day of the Locusts’.”

Olaru asked me if during the time I had been going out and about again I’d bumped into people I’d know from before, or had seen regularly in my pre-seclusion past.

“Twice,” I told him. “One person said they were shocked to see me, assuming I had died from an overdose, or rotted to death from physical neglect. The other one said they suspected I had got married, and vanished into a connubial black hole. I expect the next person will tell me they assumed I had gone to prison. I mean, none of these are wild guesses. I was expecting to encounter a funk stew of the micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions I’ve been reading about while cloistered. All I’ve seen is the same old garden variety assholia.”

“There is,” Dr. Olaru said, waxing philosophical, “something to be said for observing the trainwreck of humanity up close. It’s a shame to be a part of producing so much tragic failure, and then miss out on the opportunity to gawk directly at its manifestations.”

“One good thing about being outdoors again,” I said, “is the California sunsets.” I didn’t mention that the air sometimes smelled like a crawlspace of decomposing rats. And going out into the heat could make you feel as though a double layer of North Face parkas had been forcibly stitched around your torso.

We both looked up to see another infernal helicopter strafing the rooftops, either the LAPD or a local news channel, a reminder the world remained an annoying place. At that point, Dr. Olaru took out a cigar the length of a Subway footlong, and the girth of the Goodyear Blimp, and fired it up.

*

I was returning home one afternoon from the grocery store in the Chevrolet, listening to the radio, when I heard for the first time about a new disease spreading like Beatlemania throughout China. I was prepared, and when the Great Sequester came, my phone already was chocked with the numbers for deliveries from my earlier Howard Hughes days. Cindy-Rose had been right: holing up in a house wasn’t all that different from stashing yourself in an apartment.

I felt somewhat vindicated in my previous aversions to the world at large. The virus hopping from person to person seemed to exemplify the general menace of the species, and the rebuffing by so many of medical science the declining rationality of my fellow citizens. The Church of Sobriety had opened my senses and my intellect to the acuteness of the decomposition around me. I might well have continued orbiting without interruption in the remote outer space of my apartment on the tenth floor, had I not been called down by my Cindy-Rose in need.

So, during a time of widespread trauma and stark upheaval, for me it was in many ways, same as it ever was.

Ken O’Steen’s fiction has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Fjords Review, Eclectica, Blue Lake Review, Litro, The Westchester Review, Crack the Spine, Sleet, Whistling Shade, Fiction Week Literary Review, and other fine publications. Ken is from Los Angeles, California, and currently lives in Proctor, Vermont.