I Finally Saw the Light (A Fiction)

[Disclaimer: This is one of the stupidest things I have ever written. Celebrate my stupidity with me, won't you?]

Judith Light was standing there, in a shallow pond of what we naturally presumed was her own vomit. Its color was manifold, undulating at its periphery in contrary shades of utilitarian brown and shrill raspberry. Occasionally, she picked up her foot, set it down, and then the other, very horselike, undemure, and set off a dozen or so generations of ripples riding out and dying in the shallowest reach. She was less graceful than I'd imagined--when I'd taken the time to (imagine her), that is. Which was--if I'm honest--never. Who after all takes the time to think about Judith Light anymore? She won't mind me forgetting her if I smile, pretend not to notice the fresh sick sloshing around her sad businesswoman flats.

I said to Angelica at first, "She looks like..." But I wasn't quite sure. It might've been Joanna Kerns, or even the woman who painted nails at the Wal-Mart kiosk. She looked like bits and pieces of every woman. A bleached blonde amalgam. Oddly sallow.

But Angelica said, "She is." A brutish declamation. Her voice rounded out with a degree of certainty that sounded borrowed. She (poor Angelica), you see, was a slave to binarisms. She fretted everywhere, almost vocationally. Even behind her empty shopping cart, she was debilitated by Choice, which chattered and cajoled in red sunburst packaging and orange clearance placards across the canyon of superstore. Lays or Ruffles? Pepsi or Coke? Glad or Ziploc? Paper or plastic? Sometimes she frazzled and hissed, like a dying flame, and then surrendered, leaving only with one waxed roll of Neccos and a bag of water softener salt. The small tasks were large, and vice versa. She decided to unplug her mom, dying of some vague debilitation, for instance, in a matter of only minutes. Life and death were obvious things, you see, but lunch meat--there was the stuff of dialectic!

"I know it's her," Angelica reaffirmed, almost as if I had protested. But I knew better. Angelica had seen every episode of Who's the Boss? many times over. She wasn't what I'd call a fan of the show so much as a fan of the routine of watching the show, which she did without fail. She was a religious woman who in fact paid no mind to gods or their long-faced retinues. Her rituals were, rather, crosswords and sitcoms and cross-stitching and hair brushing. Sometimes she bored me so much that I wanted to pick her up, crunch her up into fours, and flush her down the toilet; at other times, less frequently, she looked very much like a wounded adolescent deer, lapping up my too-easy sympathy. Her eyes were wide and very stupid but yearned for a gentle knead of the flank or a finger tipple behind the ears. All in all, our marriage was troubled. I had gambled and lost, I realized. I should've married someone who didn't speak English or didn't have long to live. Which one of us would die first? I was already making the calculations.

Before the beeping and castered supermarket microcosm had time to settle, to asborb the strange reality of a washed-up sitcom star standing in her own rebellious lunch, Angelica walked stutteringly over to Judith. She walked, I used to say, like E.T. did, clipped, swaying, and sort of silent-filmy, in the manner of Chaplin. Once I asked her sister if there was any even very, very small chance that she (Angelica, not her sister) were maybe retarded just a little, only I didn't use the word retarded but a prettier euphemism. I can't remember which, but one that made her (hypothetical) disability sound more like a cute foible. To my surprise, her sister laughed, quite sinisterly, but didn't answer. Later I found out that Angelica had once tried to kill her sister with the flat of a shovel. Angelica had been twelve, her sister nine. Her sister somehow survived and seemed mostly unresentful. She even sometimes claimed that Angelica was kind and smart. I wondered later, when I was lying in bed, whether she was being ironic. I almost wanted to call her and laugh and say that I finally got it. The joke, I mean. If she laughed too, fine; if not, well then, wrong number...

"Are you all right, Miss Light!" Angelica barked. It wasn't a question so much as the beginning of a show tune. I held my breath. Suddenly anything seemed possible: the end of the world or, worse, my very short wife hugging this has-been with her puggish snout reaching only the southern hemisphere of Judith's bloused hoohahs. I was tempted to flee. To abandon our groceries and run, melodramatically, like Tom Cruise in The Firm, whining and baring my rabbit teeth all the way. But I didn't. I was a failure even at cowardice.

"Uhhh..." was what I think Judith said, although I'd have to see the transcript to be certain.

"Are you overdosing?" my wife asked, very sympathetically. She had acquired a medium-grade showbiz wordliness from leafing through month-old issues of People in her psychotherapist's waiting room.

"Uhhh..." was what Judith responded. It seemed somehow eloquent in the moment.

"Whom should I call for help? An ambulance?" Angelica asked.

"Call Ricky...!" Judith rasped, rifling through her obviously knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag. Obviously because, I mean, you don't get that kind of money from doing stage productions and Lifetime Movies. I remember the TV flick-of-the-week where she was this ditzy married woman in badly patterned sweaters, who was being stalked by Jack Wagner. At some point he was chasing her through the bleachers of an abandoned indoor sporting venue. She, of course, had great difficulty eluding her well-coiffed pursuer. She stumbled on occasion over the bars circling the loges and crumpled like a ragdoll on the concrete steps; Wagner, meanwhile, was an experienced stalker, wearing black leather gloves and easing around plastic seatbacks as if he was born for this kind of thing. I think he either raped her, or almost did, but I couldn't quite suspend my disbelief far enough to make me think anyone would want to rape Judith Light. But to each, as they say, his own: in this case, Jack Wagner's own. No, she wasn't the ugliest broad around certainly, but she was unsettlingly avian. One dreaded, subliminally, her shriek, all of a sudden, like kookaburra, very hard of beak.

"Who's Ricky?" Angelica said, with a toughlove familiarity that made me feel suddenly intrusive, as I clutched a plastic bag filled with a six-packs of paper towels and a box of trashbags close to my groin. Should I be doing something? I wondered. Nah, I answered.

"He's my friend," Judith explained, her eyes darting around her to a Farmer In The Dell style ring of onlookers encircling her vomit puddle. Then she confided (I later learned from Angelica), very quietly, "My dealer..."

"Heroin...?"

"I don't remember anymore," Judith cried, suddenly very loudly. "My God, somebody help me! I don't...! I can't...! Is this here what I did? [The vomit, she meant. It was a rhetorical question.] Oh my God, oh my God... Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Sorry if there's kids around ... oh my god, kids... Alyssa Milano and I used to play parcheesi right after we... after we... What happened to those good old days, Danny?"

By Danny, we all assumed--in some meta-psychological congruance--that she was referring to Danny Pintauro, who played her awkward, geeky son Johnathan Bower on her sitcom. We had no idea then that Danny was also the name of her sponsor in the Church of Satan... Danny Ransbottom was his name, a middle-aged man weighing three hundred twenty-six pounds, living in Brentwood, and describing his hobbies as neo-rebirthing techniques and advanced origami. During an ensuing investigation, Pellicano-related, you understand, it was revealed that Danny was prepping Judith as an accolyte of the Church of Satan and, alternately, trying to lay her. He entertained morbid fantasies, never realized, of mounting her from the rear while querying, "Who's the boss? Yeah, who's the boss?" It seemed an inordinate bother for such a lame punchline, if you ask me, but then again you didn't.

After calling for this Danny Pintauro/Ransbottom archetype, Judith Light--the moderately erect, still self-supporting actress--suddenly collapsed, becoming Judith Light--the pile of overbleached hair and cheap navy-blue rayon. At least until the ambulance arrived. An indignant woman in a "Do I Look Like I Care?" sweatshirt was overheard remarking to no one in particular: "Well, I for one am never watching Mr. Belvedere again."

Angelica proudly supported Judith as she thrust the latter, ass downwards, into a shopping cart. She smiled emphatically, like Corky at special needs summer camp, while she wheeled Judith out to the curb to await the paramedics. She stood, supervising her cargo, while a slouchy teenage superstore employee waited, in a parallel stance, for a customer to pick up his Olevia LCD 42" television.

Finally, the matter was resolved. Judith was picked up by EMTs, who stalled for a smoke by one of the cart returns, and Angelica returned to my side to retrieve out groceries. The sloosh-sloosh of a saturated mop, flicked to and fro, snapped me out of my reverie, as I handed my wife the economy pack of Angel Soft toilet paper and reported, gravely, "Honey, I think we need to talk..."

Suicide Notes

1.

Dear Barbara Ann, Barbara, Louise, Tamara, Loqueesha, & Chuck:

Let me preface this by saying that it's been fantastic, relatively speaking, working with all of you, but I decided to kill myself last night after you all left. I hope that whatever mess you will find in my office can be remedied with a little Mop N Glo, but if not I'd advise googling "stain removal" and/or "tough stain removal" and seeing what this yields. All of the files pertaining to the Ramsey account are in my desk, right-side, bottom-drawer. I also wanted to say that for the past five years I've been stealing paper towels, toilet paper, and pens from the office. That has been weighing on me for some time. You're free to charge my estate a reasonable estimate of these charges, whatever that might be. I also want everyone to know that my life has been a complete and total lie--although I'm hesistant to spell out the nature of said lie because what if I don't die somehow and they take me to the hospital and revive me? Then you'll know my lie and I'll still be alive, and then of course I'll have to kill you. Haha. Just kidding. But anyway, right... Complete and total lie. Just chew on that for a while.

Jacob

2.

Patricia Ann,

I hate you. Enjoy my splattered brains all over your fucking brand new offwhite couch. Please cancel our reservations for the Caribbean cruise before July 1st to get a partial refund. I don't want those fuckers getting my money. Or I guess you can just take whoever you're fucking by then. Or whatever. You're one sick bitch, by the way. I finally realized that thing you had wasn't psoriasis.

Joey

3.

To Whom It May Concern:

Ha. That's a laugh. As if my death concerns anyone, as if anyone gives a good shit. They'll probably only bother to notice anything when I start stinking up the place. By then they'll have all forgotten who I was and won't be able to tell anymore because I'll be all rotten and shit. I guess that's why I'm leaving this stupid note. It's just that when someone finally gets around to finding my maggoty old body, I want them to know who it was that fed those maggots. Me. Ricky Limbeck. Yeah, I was that creepy guy all of you assholes never bothered to talk to. I saw you when I was downstairs getting my mail, but did any one of you ever bother to say hello or how are you? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Get real! Why waste the energy on me? Maybe you can't tell now, but before the maggots started eating me, I was a fat slob. A fat, bald slob with no friends and a dead-end job working for the highway department. I have never had sex with a woman in my life. And before you get all snide about it, I haven't had sex with a man or even an animal either. A wild boar would've probably even barfed at the thought of getting poked by me. And that wild boar would be right. Damn. I never thought I would have empathy for a wild boar.

Ricky Limbeck

4.

Lucas,

So there you go. I finally did it. You didn't believe me all these years, thought I was bluffing. It's not so pretty is it? Have fun explaining to everyone how you ignored the warning signs. I could have had "I'm Gonna Kill Myself" tattooed on my forehead and you would've asked me for the remote and farted. I really hate that I had to go to this length to prove a point, but as you are well aware I'm a principled individual. I believe in personal integrity. Now go get a bucket and scoop my integrity off the floor before it seeps into the basement. I do want you to know that I loved you once, in a theoretical sense. Let that warm your heart as you trudge through the years without me.

Judy

5.

Dear Sir(s) and/or Madam(s) and/or Other(s):

It is with great sorrow that the undersigned hereby tenders his/her suicide note, thereby notifying the above-referenced person or persons of the intent by the undersigned, whether acting singly or as a spokesperson for a larger group, to terminate his/her (their) life (lives) without additional notice. Furthermore, the undersigned would like to thank the recipient(s) for the immediate closure of all correspondences with, accounts of, and other exchanges to and/or with the undersigned or to and/or with those entities which the undersigned herewith represents as a legal and binding spokesperson.

The Undersigned (Please Print Legibly):___________________________