“What do you want to hear first?” I ran into my little brother Oliver in the plush, bordello-red lobby of the Encore, lugging my roller bag behind me.
“There was no traffic,” I said. “Your sweater looks very festive.”
“How much can you take before a drink?” he said.
I was in a good mood. I’d just purchased a thousand dollars worth of Christmas presents for about two hundred dollars at the Williams-Sonoma discount outlet in Primm. The drive from Los Angeles had been a civilized four hours including a stop for an oniony grilled cheese at In-N-Out. I’d driven a hundred miles per hour and didn’t get caught. When I’d checked into this brand-new, never-been-slept-in hotel, the girl at the counter had said, “Oh, your brother is Bruce Palamede!” I was happy for Bruce and proud of him and glad we could all spend Christmas here, together, in Las Vegas. I hated Las Vegas. I still hate Las Vegas. Las Vegas seems to me like an extreme, city-size example of beside the point. But away from my parents’ house for the holidays, maybe no one would break a window during an argument, maybe no one would call anyone else a fag and mean it, maybe Bruce wouldn’t torment my mother until she broke into uncontrollable sobs. Maybe my little niece, Twink, the most neglected three-year-old I’d ever encountered, wouldn’t piss and shit all over every carpet she could find. Oliver took my backpack, with computer and notebooks and books, everything needed to avoid familial contact over the next two days. He slung it over his shoulder like a lightweight gym bag.
“Your niece has pierced ears,” he said. “And won’t take off her geisha costume, which is completely soaked in urine.”
“A geisha costume?”
“The regular hotel bar is actually pretty good.” Oliver had been here for two days already. He was on his way through the lobby to meet his boyfriend, Alan, at the poker tables. Low-stakes. Oliver and Alan loved Vegas.
“They make toddler geisha dresses?” I said.
Our middle brother, Bruce, had just opened the nightclub at the top of the hotel. It was Christmas Eve. We wandered around the poker area for a while, but couldn’t find Alan in his lucky gold hat. Oliver said, “Your mother has been at the blackjack table for twenty-one hours.”
“Your mother,” I said.
“Your mother,” he said. “Their plan is to order in pizza tonight.”
“It’s Christmas Eve.”
“You really are as bright as they say.”
“Who’s ordering in pizza?”
“Your brother and your sister-in-law. And your parents, I guess, if we can get your mother out of the casino.”
Oliver and I hadn’t yet figured out how to maintain a viable degree of estrangement from the rest of our family. “Where’s your father? Who’s got Twink? Why did they dress Twink as a prostitute?”
“I’m sort of craving booze, like I’m starving for it.”
We had the first round of Manhattans before I had taken my luggage upstairs.
“This is a disaster,” Oliver said. “Where’s Alan?” He took out his mobile phone and began to text.
“Maybe I’ll go find Mom.” The cocktail girls wore dresses so short, you could see their black thongs when they leaned over, like the black thong was part of the outfit. It made me depressed. But they had very nice asses, with no little fat bumps or anything. At the next table was a group of middle-aged Asian couples in sequined Christmas tree sweaters who twice dropped their bowls of nuts on the floor.
“She’s not here.”
“You said she was playing blackjack.”
“She’s at the Red Rock Casino. She thought we wouldn’t find her all the way out there. But we did.” He kept texting. “The women in this family are so predictable.”
“I think it’s rude when you text and I’m right here.”
“Texting helps me drink less.”
“Is she winning?”
“She won. But she never keeps winning.”
“Sometimes she wins. When she wins, she wins big.”
“You act like this is some genius of hers or something.”
“She’s even.” When I was 13, my mother won a half-million dollars playing the California lottery. She won on a scratch-off, when you could win that much on scratch-offs. In Vegas (and in Indian casinos from Encino to northern Michigan), she played small stakes blackjack, and mostly won or lost a couple thousand a night. Gambling keeps her busy. It keeps her from eating and it keeps her from Christmas, two obsessions much more destructive than gambling.
My mother has a Christmas problem. Like some people hoard lamps or broken furniture or twenty-year-old phone bills and magazines, my mother hoards Christmas paraphernalia. There are two rooms stacked with it at the house in Encino. At Christmas, family portraits come off the walls and Currier & Ives prints go up. The bookshelves are evacuated to make room for an entire village of wooden carolers. Regular cookery is replaced by red and green pots and pans. Christmas tree dishes replace everyday china. Half the living room furniture is stored to make space for what must surely be the world’s largest and most varied collection of snowmen.
Christmas in Vegas must have been homesick for my mother. She probably missed her village of carolers, her 7,012 snowmen. Who cared if she needed to escape and play several hundred hands of blackjack?
“Let’s have another drink,” Oliver said.
“Who’s paying for all these drinks, Oliver?”
“Oh look, this one’s for you.”
I have no phone or mobile device, so my boyfriend Glen texted Oliver. “Mom in bedroom, loaded and crying after Jack Welch party. All very Christmassy here in West Palm! Viva Las Christmas!” Glen and I were on the verge of breakup, I knew, because rather than just staying in Los Angeles or Aspen for Christmas together, we’d both chosen to go home to our families. Also I knew this because right before the holidays he had thrown his Blackberry at me during a fight and because he’d called me a “spoiled brat,” which was not true, and “a bitch” which might have been, who knows. Last week, he’d left me alone at a bar at 4 a.m. and I’d had to take a taxi home. I knew things were over between us many months before that because his father hadn’t invited me to his 70th birthday party. I still had a bruise on my shin from where Glen had torpedoed his Blackberry at me.
“Sounds like he’s having as good a time as we are,” Oliver said. Oliver liked Glen. Everyone liked him. Except for my mother, who didn’t like anyone. Glen was gloomy and hostile only when no one else was around, which made me feel like I must be doing something wrong.
Part Two
Of course, I was doing something wrong. I was always doing something wrong, whether in the eyes of my boyfriend, my family or myself. I knew enough to be blithe, in the last instance, especially.
“Have you seen Bruce?”
Oliver shook his head. “He won’t come out of his office.”
“Why not?”
This was rhetorical. Bruce had trouble showing himself whenever there was a transformation at hand.
“Look.” I lobbed Oliver’s phone back to him. He caught it in cupped palms. “Bruce invited us here.”
“Your mother did.”
“He still wants us to see something.”
Oliver shrugged. We were crossing the casino floor. It was half-empty, as you’d expect on Christmas Eve. A pair of Hasidic Jews were over by the slots; the middle-aged Asian cluster babbled amongst themselves in high tones that made it impossible to tell if they were winning or losing. Some wayward Italian-Americans, the sort you would’ve been sure were in on the action — Bruce’s ‘partners’ — if there’d been a film crew nearby, stood over by the blackjack tables, nursing glasses of Cutty Sark. This was Vegas in a nutshell, to me. You couldn’t tell the winners from the losers, anymore. You couldn’t even tell the management from the help.
“We’ve seen too much already.” Oliver sighed. “I can’t imagine Bruce surprising us with anything.”
“You never know.”
“You do know.” He punched the elevator button with his thumb. Incredibly, he kept texting even while he did this; he’d been frantically rattling out an epic message ever since we paid for our drinks and I’d returned his phone to him. “He’s gained weight, lost weight, found a new doctor or a new IP. Those are our options.”
“Are you writing a novel?”
“Glen just sent me a picture of his mother, weeping.”
“So you’re writing a self-help book?”
The elevator doors opened. No one told me anything. My own boyfriend communicated better with my gay brother than he did with me. I stepped into the elevator ahead of Oliver, and almost tripped over something on the floor.
“Twink??”
For a second, I’d been relieved. I like elevators, which give you a feeling of going somewhere without any of the anxiety associated with travel. Usually, I have to take a klonopin just to cross the 405. The air in the casino was heavily oxygenated. It smelled like freesias, and like the song they were playing, ABBA’s “Winner Takes it All,” cheap and cakey. I sucked in the cloud of urine without missing a beat. For a second I was over in the parking structure by the Santa Monica Promenade. Then I looked down and saw my niece.
“Hi Aunt May.”
“Sweetheart!” I couldn’t exactly embrace her, sodden as she was. My voice was glottal, as I’d stopped breathing through my nose. “That is a beautiful dress.”
“Thank you.” I have no idea, who taught her manners. Not Bruce. “Do you think you can fix my necklace?”
I bent down and adjusted the Hello Kitty loop around her neck. The geisha look had its limits, but at least she was hemispherically consistent.
“We need to get you out of that thing. And…what are you doing in here? Where’s your mother?”
She shrugged. She may have been the most feral child on the planet, but she was also the most self-sufficient and relaxed. Even when Bruce opened his club in West Hollywood — the one that got shut down after the IRS audited his books — he could just park her car seat under a table and leave her there for hours. That was two years ago.
“Have you been drinking?” Oliver said.
The doors closed. I took a last look at the Hasids, whose curls bobbed every time they pulled the slot levers. There was something encouraging about this sight, weirdly innocent. After all, it was Christmas.
“Nope. Just cocoa.”
The elevator surged upward. It was unnerving, too, having a niece who could handle herself in a casino, even while you still had to cut up her food for her. Then again, you had to do that for our mother too, when things were bad.
“This elevator’s fast,” I murmured. It’s true: it was one of those you felt in the pit of your stomach when it took off. Twink coughed. No wonder she was in here. I felt something warm go dribbling onto my shoes.
“Oh—
I looked down. My niece had thrown up. You would, too, alternating liftoff and freefall in this thing for close to fifteen minutes. Twink looked dizzy, but then she always did: she had the wall-eyed look of a born paranoid, and the stubby little physique of Bamm-Bamm. Her hair was platinum, even if both of her parents were brunettes. This child could not have been more of a mystery.
“Sorr-ry.” She said it in that teasing way that was almost as if she’d done it on purpose.
“It’s OK, lovey.” I fished in my bag for the Hermes scarf that was now definitely going to be my sister-in-law’s present. “It’s only a little bit.”
I bent down and daubed my ankles. For a second we rode in whooshing silence. Bruce was the one with the problems. In his own way, he carried all the neuroses for the rest of the family: they broke out in his life as violent symptoms, while the rest of us were all more-or-less quietly tormented. Gambling, binge-drinking, binge-eating, binge-spending: all the socially-permissible forms of criminality concentrated themselves in our brother, and we never knew which version we were going to find. My sister-in-law once caught him with three prostitutes, an eight-ball and a UPS truck driver all scattered in strange positions around his office; he’d had his first heart attack at the age of thirty-two. To my mother, it didn’t matter. He had a heterosexual mate and a child, simultaneously. No matter if the child was marinated in her own fluids and was quietly singing Celine Dion under her breath. It was still an offspring.
The elevator slowed. I could feel the blood racing back to my scalp, which prickled. It was like the sudden onset of flu. The elevator stopped and Oliver looked over at me and smiled. This was where it started, with Bruce’s new club. He looked down at Twink and mouthed her a kiss, and then the doors flew open.
Part Three
“There she is!” It was a security guard. His name-tag said HEBBENS. He was a burly, exploding capillaried ex-linebacker type, Dick Butkus with a hair-weave and shiny Chiclet teeth, wrapped with sartorial menace in black suit, white shirt, blue shirt and ear-piece with the little wire running down under his collar. All eyes in the elevator turned on me. And I did, for that fleeting instant, feel that twitch in the liver that says CAUGHT. But caught doing what? Happily (sort of), it wasn’t me Security Chief Hebbens was staring at. It was Twink. She, clearly, was the guilty party. And she knew it. Otherwise, why would she have kicked the man with all the force her wiry little frame could muster, right in the shin? Three feet, four-and-a-half-inches of seething, pee-soaked rage.
“Fuck you and the horse that rode you in!” squealed the child, a variation on the standard epithet that, as per usual with Twinkette, rendered her either a genius or vaguely dyslexic in a way that may have foretold a career in advertising. People always love slogans, I once heard Joe Sacco say in an interview. They’re the closest thing we have to myth! Joe was the legendary ad man who coined “Stronger Than Dirt!” for the Ajax White Knight campaign in the sixties. (I wrote my master’s thesis on Arthurian Imagery in Contemporary Cleanser Ads, a field still, to my knowledge, pretty much wide open.) Whether or not Ajax could have neutered the urine-stench emanating from my niece’s micro-geisha was another question. But before I could give the query much consideration, Twink followed her shin-kick to the security guard with a well-placed fist that caught him dead center in what old-time sports announcers used to refer to as “the scrotal area.”
At that moment, oddly enough, I noticed Twink’s resemblance to my mother. It was uncanny. How could I have never seen it before? They both looked a little like Lucille Ball – though Twink was more of an early mini-Lucy, and my mother, currently miscounting cards in the Red Rock Casino, resembled Lucy in her dotage, after her voice dropped two octaves and she began coloring her hair ever more desperate shades of Bozo.
Security-man Hebbens let out a pained squeal, followed by a strange, high-pitched bark that sounded like he’d inhaled helium and sneezed. This prompted Twink to punch him again, in the same spot.
Shocked out of his professional demeanor, Hebbens managed to screech, “You little bitch!” and grabbed for my niece with cuffs already in hand. I remember thinking, ‘they look a little large.” But then, do they have kiddy cuffs? Or, when it comes to hand restraints, is it a one-size-detains-all situation? Not that it mattered. Twink was gone. Out the elevator, through the sputtering security man’s legs, leaving nothing more than a cloud of urine and a balled-up baby geisha costume in her wake.
All of this took maybe fifteen seconds. But, by the end of it, when we’d all worked back from the shock to the here and now, here was Hebbens with a little girl geisha dress in his hands – and there was Oliver, ever ready for litigation, snapping Blackberry pix of the flustered security man clutching the incriminating little girl party-wear.
“Oh this looks bad,” Oliver said, with the faux-compassion that’s driven me to blind rage since childhood, “this looks very bad.”
“Hey,” said Hebbens, already pleading his case. “You saw what she did!”
“She’s what they call a child,” I chimed in, “I’m sure they’ve had those at the Encore before.”
Not like her, I could imagine the poor muscle-head thinking. I was thinking the same thing. But family was family.
My brother handed me the Blackberry, so I could see the photo, and we both whistled at once.
“Mr. Hebbens, have you ever taken Depo-Provera?” asked Oliver, sounding suddenly like an out-take from a “Law and Order SVU” interrogation scene. “How long have you had these … urges when you’re around children? Did your Mommy and Daddy do bad things to you? Don’t hold back – it could help in court.”
Despite being half the Security Man’s size, Oliver’s tone came so freighted with conviction, it was all the big fellow could do to keep his chin from quivering. I wanted to tell Hebbens “It’s okay, my brother’s one of those dicks who just likes to shame people!” – but what was the point? I’d had to suffer Oliver’s abuse for decades; no doubt Hebbens could survive for five minutes. I just didn’t want to stand there and watch. Oliver’s voice made my hair sweat.
“I think I should duck out and look for Twink,” I announced. Not that anybody noticed.
Two hours later, I came to glued to a stool in some kind of sloth-bar, a half-slurped Manhattan in each hand. Pictures of adorable two-toed and three-toed sloths, hanging upside down from the rain forest canopy, graced every inch of available wall space. For one careening second, I thought that I’d somehow gone into a blackout and wound up in a Costa Rican lounge – with keno. Turns out, it wasn’t Costa Rica, it was still Vegas. And more surprising, Twink was on the stool next to me, sipping a Diet Coke through a straw, and eying me warily.
“Hey there Twink,” I said, “how about those sloths?”
“You’re drunk,” said the child, though not with any particular judgment. She was spookily sophisticated. As the fog cleared I had a dim, mortifying recollection of trying to impress a cocktail waitress with rollickingly (in retrospect) unfunny anecdotes about my celeb bro Bruce’s childhood Tourette’s. “He kept calling our mailman a whore – and he didn’t even know what a mailman was!” That kind of thing. Which made me want to bite my own face. There was nothing left to do but slink out and hope anybody who had overheard my idiocy was too old to tweet.
Grabbing Twink’s hand, I carefully left my stool and headed for the Red Exit sign, now whirling in dizzy triplicate.
“Let’s blow this popstand,” I said to my feral little niece. “How’d you like some ice cream?”
“I hate ice cream.” Then Twink stopped and stared at me, her tiny face screwed up in genuine disgust. “How come your eyes are bleeding? Your hands, too.”
“Stigmata,” I heard someone say, from very far away. And then my face hit the sloth-themed carpet.
Part Four
In the brief, but wonderfully removed moments of unconsciousness I dreamed of love, of lying on a large bed with the man of my dreams — not Glen, oddly enough, but another man, a shorter man, and this dream might have gone on to its logical and possibly orgasmic conclusion had I not, out of the corner of the dream, heard my brother’s voice.
“The redwood stain hadn’t dried?”
I opened my eyes just wide enough to see Oliver, standing beside a tall, muscular man in a snug black turtleneck.
“The hotel, it’s new,” the man was saying, “Still under construction.”
“New hotel or not, someone should be held…” And that’s when he saw my open eyes, or at least the one eye that wasn’t sealed shut. “Maybelene?”
He only calls me Maybelene if something is wrong, so I was pretty sure something was amiss. I sat up, felt my head, which seemed intact, and when I looked down to see what body parts I might have been missing, what happened to be missing were my clothes. Not quite all of them, however. A young girl’s kimono was covering, barely, my chest.
“Who are you?” I said to the man.
“This is Harold,” Oliver said. “He’s from Switzerland.”
“Hallo,” the man said, with a kind of wave-like salute. I saw his eyes momentarily leave my torso and move to my right, and when I followed the direction they had taken I saw, curled up in a tiny pocket of the king-sized bed, my little niece. She was wearing a Catwoman costume, and her hands, like mine, were stained the color or artificial redwood.
“Apparently Harold,” Oliver nodded toward the burly blonde, “found you in a half-finished bar just as security men where about to carry you off. You and Twink. I guess he saved you.”
“From what?” I said, the word stigmata vaguely echoing in my brain. “And how did I get… in this?” The kimono was nice, but several sizes too small. “And why does she still smell?”
“I can answer that.” Harold stepped forward.
“And who are you again,” I said. “Sorry, but I…”
“I am the lover.”
“Oh. Wonderful,” I said, as my hand, as if with a mind of its own, reached for an imaginary drink. I thought I needed a drink to understand what was happening, but then suddenly I did understand, because that’s when I heard, coming from the bathroom end of what apparently was the hotel’s honeymoon suite, my mother’s voice. She was emerging from a fog of shower steam, wearing a kind of reindeer outfit.
“Mom?”
“You’re incapacitated, sweetheart.” My mother’s voice was half Lucy, half Lauren Bacall. From year of smoking when we were kids. “I called Bruce and I told him, in no uncertain terms… Look at you, all lovely in that lovely red… and Twink. I wish I had a camera.”
Harold offered her his cell phone but she waved him off. I turned to Oliver, who was now pretending to be ministering to the sick and infirm and sound asleep Twink.
“Harold, honey, meet my daughter. She speaks German.”
I didn’t speak German, had never even been to Germany, and I had very little interest in meeting this…
“I’m Swiss,” he said.
“I’m decorating,” my mother said. “And I need you all to help.” She reached up and patted her furry, polyester antlers. “Do you like my costume?”
“How did I get in this bed?” I said.
“You can thank Harold for that,” she said and blew him a kiss. “He called me in the middle of a winning streak, said you were wounded and bloody, and so I cashed in my chips and came right over.”
The thought that this large, Germanic man had put me to bed was more that I was willing to grasp at the moment, plus my mother’s presence was unnerving me, plus Oliver had moved from Twink and was now mixing himself a drink from the rations of the hotel mini-bar. “I’d like one too, please,” I said.
“Let’s all have one,” mother said. “And someone call Alan. It’s Christmas Eve for goodness sake. One of you clean up the little one, and Harold…” As she reached up on her tip-toes Harold hoisted her by her hips and the two of them began a disgusting display of Sweitzer-American tongue play.
Oliver was stirring what I hoped was an especially strong drink, and I was imagining the cool, warm, silky liquid coursing down my throat when Bruce, not quite literally, burst into the room. Apparently he had a key. Either that or the door was unlocked.
“God fucking damnit,” he said. “Where’s the whore?”
No telling who he was talking about, but he walked past my mother to the bed, holding out to me what looked like a dress. It wasn’t, however, the one I’d been wearing during the redwood incident, the dress I was desperately hoping I had removed myself and sent, with common sense, to the hotel cleaners. What he was holding belonged to his wife, Lizzie. She’d been a chorine when he’d met her — I think that’s the word —and since they’ve been married she’s been spending time with other hoteliers, of deeper, more expansive pockets. He’s been trying to give away everything that was hers, which was fine by me except instead of a dress it looked like a costume from one of her showgirl routines.
“That’s sweet, Bruce, but really,” I said, “I’m fine in this,” and I got out of bed, covering myself as best I could with my red, size small, kimono.
“Who’s the big guy kissing mom?” He dropped the dress at the foot of the bed, said hello to Oliver, and then muttered to no one in particular, “Goddamn it.”
I love my brothers, Oliver with his perfectly turned Manhattans, and Bruce with his lingering Tourette’s. And my mother.
She broke away from the thick lips of Harold, ran back to the bathroom and came back with a large bag, filled, it turned out, with an assortment of furry, bell-bedecked reindeer-style antler hats. Harold took one and Bruce took one, and Oliver took his and put it on. Then Mother went to Twink, still curled up, placed the antlers on her sleeping head and adjusted the elastic strap. Then she passed one to me. “The red matches your eyes.”
Oliver stepped away from the mini-bar with a silver salver. “I’m calling it Viva Lost Vegas,” he said, walking with his antler head and passing out drinks to everyone but Harold, who said he was in training. Twink was beginning to sit up and, thoughtful as ever, Oliver had made her a non-alcoholic version. Then, as if on cue, the rest of us put our antlers on. We raised our glasses — Harold raised a protein bar — and someone, I’m pretty sure, was about to make a toast when the door opened and Alan, wearing only underwear and a pair of sheer black socks staggered into the room.
Part Five
Alan is the sort of guy who is a an embarrassment in many situations — an investment banker/aspiring poet, he’s been known to bellow, apropos of, say, a Ponzi scheme, Ginsberg’s preamble to “Howl” – “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed starving hysterical naked!” But this was new. He was … well, nearly nude. Could he actually have been having some sort of affair with Lizzie? This would have been an unprecedented low — even for us. But what had happened? Before I could ask, Alan dragged Oliver into one of the five bedrooms (we were in the club-adjacent Glitter & Garbage suite – Bruce had a talent for tossing consumerism on its head – in a very consumerist way, at least when it came to little things like room titles), and the two of them began screaming like banshees.
I looked over at Twink. She had a half-sucked candy cane in her lap and was sitting in a red velvet chair, eyes closed again. A part of me wondered if Oliver had dropped a Valium in her drink (he wasn’t above such things when children annoyed him). When the words, “Love can touch us one time/And last for a lifetime” escaped her valentine mouth, I breathed a sigh of relief; at least she was still alive.
Bruce followed Alan and Oliver and closed the door, and I listened in shock (the truth is, I was also surprised Bruce had appeared at all tonight, what with his family-agoraphobia). Soon, the hubbub died down, but the tension remained — and occasionally words drifted out: “clementine,” “fidelity” and finally, inexplicably, “revenue.” I didn’t know what to think.
“Honey, please put this at the top,” Mother said to me, handing over a ceramic angel, golden and pink. I remembered buying this tchotchke in a gift shop in Inverness, a little town we used to go to as a family back when we were normal — or at least before father left us for his “other family.” By now, we knew he wasn’t coming tonight — again. I’d been fourteen when it happened, Bruce 11, Oliver 9. I still had a hard time accepting it and the truth is, I think of everything he bought as my “parents” to this day. I think of the years before the split sometimes, in dark bars and on late nights on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or in Mayfair after long hours at my day job as a fashion publicist for houses like and Celine and Dior and Galliano. Once… Once upon a time we were people.
“But we still are!” shouted Twink, suddenly awake and giddy. She was talking about celebrating Christmas — mother had said it was too bad we weren’t being festive anymore. I hoisted the Twinkster onto my knee (she’d been cleaned up by Harold, making me almost love him). She jumped off. “Let’s go to the elevator.” She tugged on my leg. “I want to see Heavens.” Her eyes twinkled. “Honey,” I said, “No.” She meant Hebbens. Could she really be into S&M, at least emotionally, at this tender an age? God help us.
“Open a present instead.”
Bruce walked back out, calmer, but went straight to the window and looked out at Vegas like he wanted to eat it. “How are you two?” I asked, jumping down off the stepladder after putting the angel — crookedly — at the tree’s top. I was referring to him and Lizzie. He turned to me, steely. My mother was holding her breath. Things were bad, still – we could both see it.
“I’ll go find her,” I said.
* * *
I wandered the hall. I was still woozy from whatever it was that led me to pass out: Grey Goose mixed with Adderall? Klonopin? I looked down for a moment and saw I was wearing something fabulous – a mink shrug and hot pants. (This, by the way, is an enduring secret of fashion: your best outfits grow out of being cold, or naked and needing something quickly — that is, if you have an eye. Which I, professionally, do.)
The hall was vertigo-inducing, peppered with glitter, seemed like it was melting: Fuck drink and drugs and the horse that rode them in. I found Lizzie and Bruce’s door, and knocked. Sharon Stone opened it. Oops, wrong door. But I stood there, transfixed: Sharon was laughing. She laughed and laughed, head back and loudly. Was it a mirage? To this day, I don’t know. Finally, she closed it.
Lizzie appeared down the hall. She slammed her door shut, and I saw she had Fluffers, her tiny over-serviced Shih Tzu, in one hand, and a giant Hermes suitcase in the other. She wheeled the bag toward me. Then she pointed at my head.
“Antlers,” I said. “You know, mother’s Christmas thing.”
She stopped walking. “No, da red. In your eyes.” Have I mentioned that Lizzie is a hot-blooded Spaniard with a trash-meets-tough accent via Charo, 1978?
“It’s a long story,” I told her.
“Welcome to da club,” she replied, turning on her tiger print Louboutins: Could she really be leaving Bruce? Were we all that lucky?
“Where are you going? Liz.”
“Your brudder’s a whore,” she said with emotion. “I can’t do dis anymore.”
“He’s a whore?” I bellowed. “You… You are a whore.”
She set Fluffers down and lit a cigarillo, surveying me. It was like she wanted one final showdown. “What do you dink happened? Who do you dink I ham?”
Of course, I didn’t know. “I just saw him with one of your showgirl things…And then Alan…”
She told me the story. Alan was in Lizzie’s closet – that much was true. He’d gotten the key to their suite from her when he’d arrived a few hours early and hadn’t been able to track down the rest of the family. She’d left and he’d indulged a secret penchant for dressing up like Ziegfeld girls and Rockettes, Cher at the Grammys and other Bob Mackie wet dreams. But with Bruce and Lizzie’s history, when my brother came in and she was changing out of her clothes for the evening – and there was a naked man there too (Bruce and Alan had never met) there’d been a misunderstanding. Bruce, in other words, thought they were fucking – and Alan wasn’t in the mood to explain that he just had a weakness for sequins. By the time he’d tried to straighten it out, Bruce was gone, running after Lizzie – who was already on the run from her “vackadoodle” husband. At least that’s how I think it went.
“Just tell Bruce,” I said, softening. “You’re in the right. Listen, I’m sure Alan already has told him. He still seems upset — but that’s just him.”
Fluffers was jumping up on a 100-year-old woman with pink hair. “Foofers!” Lizzie called. The minute dog ran back, gaily.
“No. You vont to know da problem? Bruce doesn’t LIKE me. No one in dis family likes me. I try — and I not perfect, I know dat. But wut can you do? You know?”
Yes, I knew.
Lizzie was genuine now. I realized this was the first time we’d actually talked. “Why you not like me?”
“Me?”
“All of dem.” She waved her cigarillo in the air.
It was true: It wasn’t just my mother who had a problem. “We don’t like anyone. None of us do. Don’t take it personally.”
Lizzie put the cigarillo out in her silver case, scooped up Fluffers, and started for the elevator.
Watching her, something overtook me. She never was a true mother to Twink, but in that moment I felt for the little girl. In fact, I felt I was Twink. If I’m being honest, I’d been Twink for a long time – we all had. Ever since dad went away.
“Don’t go,” I said. “She needs you. He does too.”
Lizzie stopped, and turned around.
* * *
When we arrived back at my family’s suite, the lights were dim, only tiny twinkling ones on the tree matching the glitter of the Strip outside. I wasn’t sure where everyone had gone. Oliver came out of the bedroom. He had another Viva Lost Vegas in hand, and Alan could be glimpsed inside — now in a suit – on the phone.
Twink came out of the shadows, and walked up to her mother, who was her usual self: Twink’s incessant tugging on her arm was ignored.
I walked Twinks over to the minibar and broke out a giant Capri Sun, putting the straw to her mouth. “You wanna see Heavens again, huh?”
“I want to make him know trouble,” she said between guppy-like gulps.
“You know you really should behave, darling-lu,” I said. “I mean, I think you’re a wonder, but polite society–”
Oliver walked up. “Let’s be honest: Hebbens had it coming to him.”
Twink shook her head like a 40-year-old. “But didn’t he?”
“Where’s your mother?”
“Your mother went downstairs to try her luck again.” He was smoking now, and accidentally ashed on Twink’s head. She giggled and wrinkled her nose. I brushed the ash away and gave him a look re Lizzie — who was putting antlers on Fluffer. “Don’t make a scene.” He went over, gave her a hug: “Nice to see you.” He turned back to me and mouthed: “What?”
I saw a small crown on the floor – apparently Twink had opened one of her presents and out had come this somehow joke-like toy. I picked it up and placed it gently on her head. She started to twirl around the room.
“Where’s Bruce?”
“With mother and Harold.”
“How did that happen?”
Oliver shrugged. “He likes being famous. Among the ‘people.’ Even if it means being around people who love him too.” He drained his cocktail. “We’ll see the club tomorrow. This is enough for one night. Oh, and Glen sent me another text,” he said. “Apparently, Suzy Wetlaufer has terrible shoes. Is your boyfriend gay?”
“Probably,” I said, glum. Oliver patted my head; I let him.
“What happened earlier?”
“You know as much as I do, dear,” Ol replied.
“No, in the bar.”
“Ask Harold,” he said mysteriously, and did a pas de deux with Twink.
Alan walked out, turning off his phone and looking warily at Lizzie. “Are we ready?”
“Ready for wut?” Lizzie asked, taking a swig from a half-gone bottle of Veuve.
“Christmas,” Alan said, forcing cheer.
“Why?” Twink said, slowing down. Her crown had fallen off, but she now had on a pink tutu and tiny Uggs. Still a platinum blonde princess.
We all looked at Alan: Oliver, Lizzie, Twink, me.
He pointed to the clock and smiled: “Because it’s already here.”
