Dead Stars Read online

  ALSO BY BRUCE WAGNER

  Memorial

  The Chrysanthemum Palace

  Still Holding

  I’ll Let You Go

  I’m Losing You

  Force Majeure

  DEAD

  S

  an entertainment

  BRUCE WAGNER

  BLUE RIDER PRESS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA·

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) · Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England · Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) · Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) · Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India · Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) · Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2012 by Bruce Wagner

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wagner, Bruce.

  Dead stars : an entertainment / by Bruce Wagner.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59995-2

  1. Cancer—Patients—Fiction. 2. Women photographers—Fiction. 3. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.A369D43 2012 2012016153

  813'.54—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  again, for Laura

  Comments (6)

  jolly roger

  Some people forget there is a hell

  August 11, 2012

  Uhh get your jollies rodger?

  You say that but you are on a porn site?

  August 15, 2012

  ;===0

  Omg shes so shy fuck her real gd dude

  August 20, 2012

  forever77

  It is amazing how many of you slept through English class.

  August 24, 2012

  Der Spermin8tr

  Once her hair is down, She getts pretty. No way those are C’s, her tatt’s don’t look good. Great BJ skills. Lovd her hair down!!!!!

  August 24, 2012

  ketamean

  if she has Cs, then I have f-cking Ds lol. So many of these small-breasted casting couch girls lie about their

  again, for Gavin

  and Yukimi, Taiyo & Zen de Becker

  Report Abuse

  Please be civil. Vicious comments, personal attacks and profanity won’t be published. Name and email are required; email address will not publish.

  to Clancy Imislund

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  SparkNotes: Inferno: Important Quotations Explained

  www.sparknotes.com/poetry/inferno/quotes.html—Cached

  It is greatly significant that both Purgatorio and Paradiso end with the same word as Inferno: stele, or the stars. It is clear not only that Dante aspires to Heaven . . .

  (GRAPHIC)

  Contents

  Also by Bruce Wagner

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1st Trimester ICM

  2nd Trimester CAA

  3rd Trimester WME

  4th Trimester

  (without representation)

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  You should never

  forget that

  you’re just a person.

  Even though

  you’re not like

  everyone else,

  you are

  just like

  everyone else.

  —Dakota Fanning

  Click Here to watch

  Morning is the time of Man: the Known

  salimmo sù, el primo e io secondo,

  tanto ch’i’ vidi de le cose belle

  che porta ‘l ciel, per un pertugio tondo.

  E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

  —I N F E R N O, XXXIV. 137–9

  CLEAN

  [Telma]

  Hurt Boobies

  Telma

  just found out she was no longer the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor (now 13, she had a radical mastectomy at 9, beating out Hannah Powell-Auslam who was diagnosed at age 10. They took the lymph nodes from under her arms too). Now here comes Mom saying there’s a 4-year-old somewhere in Canada as we speak wearing the crazy uncoveted laurel of youngest juvie breast carcinoma vic. The news left Telma a little at sea, lil Telma with her little big C, wondering if her demoted standing might affect the awesome amazing cornucopia of pink-tie charity events—the gala balls & schmancy fundraisers, the private lunches at the Hotel Bel-Air/Soho House/fijiwater teleflora Resnick chateau on Sunset—she was asked to participate in all year round in LA, and points north, south and east. She was actually famous.

  The irony was, her mother had a lumpy tit for months and was herself worried sick she’d been god-gifted with C. Gwen was one of those tiresome people forever skittish and terrified by doctors; it took almost a year for her to go in. She of course got an assist from her shrink who with more than a nudge from her client had prepped Gwen for a lumpectomy at the very least, any kind of maybe-ectomy, but all the oncologist did was some draining. She brought Telma with her and at the last post-drama moment showed him the fleshy pea under her kid’s nipple. A week later, immediately after the unfathomable diagnosis, mother and daughter were sealed into the scarifying rip-snorting over-the-falls barrel of break CancerWorld 2.0. A half-dozen shtarker moms helped Gwen survive her baby’s mastectomy (St. Ambrose Hosp/Westwood), for which she would be eternally damned/grateful.

  (She can never forget: the hospital lobby had vitrines filled with a traveling exhibit of Barbie dolls.)

  (The gal who created Barbie and Ken got breast cancer & patented a prosthetic called “Nearly Me.”)

  Telma was conceived in vitro when Gwen was 44. Her husband froze his sperm before being zapped for prostate cancer; he succumbed, as they used to say, when his princess turned three, right on her birthday. If Gwen was old when she conceived, now she was fucking old, an old broad old enough to remember the bookstore days. The Sixties. She was what, 12ish? The Village, as they once called it, had a profusion of bookstores (can ya imagine?) & head shops too, with
bongs and mushroom-lettered blacklight posters, the whole deal steeped in that sexysubversive patchouli smell imported from beyond—the foggy subversive motherlode of the Haight. In a sun-shadowed courtyard the girlpacks could buy huaraches/leather sandals (but never did) crafted onsite by a fabulous furry freak, fresh (seemingly) from the commune, or some commune or other, his adobified kittycorner wafting with that leather smell, biker leather smell (so the little girls they did guess) and when he got close to them and leered, they could subversively smell scary sexy bearded man smells, & triangulate from there. There was an on-campus bowling alley, wax and pine-smelling, where Gwen and her gradeschool peeps (they didn’t call it middleschool then) sometimes hung on weekends, instead of taking the 83 WILSHIRE or hitching to the beach. The blast of AC hit you right when you walked in, odor of foodcourt and future life, campus bookstore/indoor pool/bowlinglane sounds & smells, a grand and grandly sunlit subversive world: Gwen remembered thinking This is the smell of college, the smell of being grown-up, the mysterious alluring subversive smell of the end of carefree days. Her memories were saturated with the erotic energy unleashed by cliquish tween tribes venturing out on their own, testing wings with parental approval, the Village being a plaza that was considered safe for pubescent gazelles (back in the day when so many things were considered safe), their pairs upon perfect pair of rangy downy legs shod in magic markered Vans, perspiry hormone-blasted packs of flowerpower grrrls wearing chunky boyfriend I.D. bracelets (some of them) bought & engraved at P.O.P. on the pier, virgin wannabe wild childs out hunting and gathering for what they knew not.

  Then her trips to Westwood became the stuff of nightmares. Gradually, with the brutal ardent fellowship of kansurvivors (Telma’s portmanteau), dawn broke in Gwen’s challenged kancermom life. The C community was extraordinarily strong and supportive and unflinching, knitting melanoma newbies into a single gargantuan gargantuanly heroic quilt. Aside from the 1,000 useful things Gwen was taught—to change dressings, what to look for in getting the jump on opportunistic infections, what to hope for & what not to hope for or what to hope and not to hope for too much, the useful trick of rolling down the window and screaming as you drove along the spine of Mulholland—the kansurvivors helped her develop a spiritual practice. For the first time in Gwen’s life, she meditated. She yoga’d and breathworked & self-hypnotated. She alternately begged, bitched and railed at—& became inexplicably devoted to—her Higher Power. A mere month from ground zero (all the kancerfolk revved from zero to hero), she no longer needed to listen to CDs to trance out, she was a quick study and by then could guide her own meditation, levitating and vipassanating without aural aid to a private fantasy island, mystical cave or black sand beach, some safe bespoke exhilarating unicorny place, any airy-faerie (or not) conjuring that might serve as a light to shine its incorporeal voltage down on her daughter’s wayward cells, defusing/disarming/disrupting with its otherworldly assassin energy, blasting all those fucked up cells to Kingdom Come or wherever. At first, it was hard, so hard. Gwen was an unbeliever, not XXXL but L, maybe M, not a Hitchens but a large to medium agnostic, L/M, but you couldn’t go through something like this without investing/believing/trusting in something other than unbelief, you just couldn’t. She’d take Reiki, kancerkid Mom workshops, & wishing on falling stars in the Sedona sky over a vacuum any day. You’d have to be an asshole fool to go with vacuum over prayer. You’d have to be sick.

  Then something turned. Suddenly she was an XXXL believer, she couldn’t say how or why but Gwen became of an instant grateful, it was that simple, so simple————grateful Max had lived long enough to spend three years with their daughter, grateful for all her kansurvivor ladies (and kancer dads and kancerkids), grateful that after Telma’s surgery the docs said her baby wouldn’t have to go through chemo/radiation at all, seemingly ever, that was the first of a trickling stream of miracles that became a torrent: she could keep her beautiful nine-year-old hair. O thank you thank you thank you, an XXXL thank you for nothing for something for everything.

  (Those baldhead, puff-cheeked, irradiated Children of the Corn gave her the willies & Gwen hated herself for that.)

  (Ooh! Bad, bad kancer karma!)

  So she sucked it up and became an athlete. Embraced the whole subversive ha ha crazysexy Kris Karr/Donna Karan let them eat Sheryl Krow kancer posse, embraced the make C your bitch/I will fucking awesome tigermom ACE this for my baby! shining, crappy creepiness of it all.

  Made metastatic lemons into lemonade.

  You never know how you’ll behave in the face of the unspeakably shitty and Gwen took herself by surprise, flourishing somewhat in the most god-awful impossible suicide moments. Absolutely the best kind of kancermom—feisty and witty and wry, doggedly contagiously optimistic, a pulse and a beacon to all stricken stripes in all stages (or not) of recovery, because a lot of parents were just too passive to be properly posse’d, &/or constitutionally unwired for warriorship, they could never be anything but flipped-out vics. Fearslaves. Gwen & Telma were soon ID’d by kansurvivor kommunity honchos as the dynamic duo, the LOOK WHO’S HOT! ones-to-watch tagteam on the fast-track to fundraiser glory, rising emo-superstars on the horizon of fatal shores.

  . . .

  First as patient then short-term into long(er)-term survivor, Telma was a bloody prodigy, a natural, a once-in-a-generation Justin Bieber of HOPE. Funny and fearless, she buoyed her in-patient flocks, becoming unofficial “Hi!” priestess/ombudsgirl to the cause. She went to DC for stemcell hearings on the Hill & played with Sasha at the White House, so much fun tho she not so secretly wished Malia was there, because Malia was closer to her age and more likely to become a pen-pal, but Malia was somewhere with her grandmuhma. Why couldn’t she have just brought Grandma back? While Mom had tea with FLOTUS, Telma did younger-girl (younger than Malia) things with Sasha, hoping against hope they’d be asked to stay overnight but they only wound up spending an hour in toto. She bitched about it on the way back to the hotel and Gwen said stop being so greedy. Stop!

  And now there was a way younger kansurvivor on the scene (Telma called the girls hervivors); she needed to take action. Do something BIG. The world needed to be tweeting about her, not the Kanadian Kancerkid arriviste, not Kylie Jenner (dyke-whore) or Mackenzie Foy (so gay, whore), the world needed to be blogging about her, not Abigail Breslin (has-been) or Hailee Steinfeld (hairy/Jewish Whore) or Chloë Moretz (OMG such a bi-whore!!!!! <3) or Elle (slut/SNOB) or Willow Smith (rich biatch/total racist [LMFAO!!!]) or Willow Shields (so pathetic) or Bailee Madison (dwarfy jesusfreak) or the next Hailee Bailee or next Elle or next Willow (Pink just named her baby that, there was going to be a whole new wave of Willows) or the next Next. Next! And even though Telma had 4 years of non-recurrence and the interloper-ingenue’s recovery had just begun——Telma wished her the best but survival odds were so not in her favor——O Canada!——Telma especially didn’t want the world facebooking about whatshername’s zero to hero so-called courage because 4-year-olds were too young to have (so-called) courage, you just can’t be a kancerhero at 4! Besides, it was her experience that most kancerkids—she always spelled it with a K, to thumb her nose at it, make it fun, that was her trademark, she started a little movement, lots of people were using K now though she’d had the conversation with her mom that probably the Kardashians weren’t wild about it, they thought they owned K-World, & that might be the one thing to keep the K/ancer thing from really katching on, at least not til one of the Kardashians got it in the ovaries or the tits—it was Telma’s experience that most kancerkids were high-maintenance sympathy whores who went ballistic if you didn’t tell them what brave soldiers they were 24/7. The only time they weren’t wusses, snotting up their stuffed, lastminute giftshop animals, was a) when they were on a morphine drip; b) when they were being visited by the pro athlete/reality show star/Bieberish boy singer/Twilight/Hunger Games actor of their (make a) wishes. (The big Twilighters were never available so they always wound up with co-co-co-costars from the latest
sequel.)

  Telma was a warrior. It was time to enter the public eye again—she’d been away too long. Mom needed to touch base with that gal who did press for all the big s, the gal who got them into People on Telma’s 2nd anniversary of being kancerfree. Maybe now that it was Year IV & counting Telma could get a perfume, a fragrance, maybe call it hero™ or warriorgrrl™, Telma wanted someone savvy to pull out all the stops, wanted to do the Ellen Show victory dance with Flotus or Emma Stone or Greyson Chance, steal Greyson away from Jackie Evancho, she wanted more hits than Charlie Bit My Finger, wanted to rock together with Greyson or whoever, maybe Rihanna & Katy & Avril, to the SU2C (Stand Up To C) Manifesto to music . . .

  This is where the end of cancer begins!

  When together we become a force unmistakable

  A movement undeniable

  A light that cannot dim!

  When we take our wild impossible dreams

  And make them possible,

  Make them true . . .