Brokenhearted in Bakersfield

 

34 - PEOPLE LOVE TO TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES

Even though the room was boiling hot, I shivered as I folded her sharpened fingernails in my hands.  I swallowed hard and tried to think of something to say when I noticed her prune face beginning to crinkle up.  She tightened her bony fingers around my trembling hands and seemed to make a smile.  “Or better yet, why don’t I start by telling you about yourself?”

Her breath could burn a hole in the side of a tank.  But I could see there was no stopping her now.  She strained to push herself upright on the pillows, grunting and groaning as she struggled, and she fought to put that turban thing back on her head while straightening out the platinum curls of her extravagant wig.

“What you may or may not know,” her voice was so low it forced me to draw closer, “is that you’re descended from a long line of dancing professionals.  All the women in our family have been dancers.  My own mother was the famous dancer known across the country as Little Morocco and Her Great Big Maracas.  And of course, everyone already knows about my fabulous career of dancing before the cameras in the early days of cinema.”

(Well, I hadn’t known that.  At least not until I’d read that brochure shortly after my rough landing here in Ulele.)

“Your Auntie Tovah and your Auntie Toots were known in dancing circles as my younger sisters who performed together as The Hot-Cha-Cha Girls.  Your mother, as my youngest sister, danced as Cha-Cha Kartone.  It was only after your mother’s careers began to sag that she brought you to live with me.  What you don’t know….”

“Who’s my Daddy?” I blurted out.

“Even your mother couldn’t answer that one,” Aunt Fanny shook a bony finger.  “Don’t interrupt me or I’ll lose my train of thought.  Now, where was I?  Oh, yes, as I was trying to say, one thing you don’t know is why your mother never came back.”

“Yeah, why was that?”

Aunt Fanny shot me a glance, and I demonstrated my willingness to shut up by putting my hand over my mouth.

“You see, shortly after your mother dumped you, she went back east and became a private dancer for a gangster named Johnny Harmonica.  Johnny was a cheap hood who ran a bootlegging operation out of Poughkeepsie.  He peddled youth treatments made from ground-up sheep glands.  A company called Robbins & Caruso was incorporated for this money-laundering scheme.

“Eventually, the Feds got wise to the mob’s operations and turned up the heat on sheep glands.  So he and your mother decided to take a little unplanned vacation, slipping out of Poughkeepsie and coming to California.  They rented a honeymoon bungalow in Santa Monica under assumed names.

“Then they made the mistake of sailing a yacht to Catalina.”  The old woman pulled a tissue out of her dressing gown sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.  “They were only supposed to be gone for a few hours,” she blew her nose on a satin sheet.  “Boy, let me give it to you straight:  your mother and stepfather were killed in a boating accident.”

I could see green, orange and black makeup smearing Auntie’s tissues as she wiped her eyes once again.  “But it was a very suspicious boating accident.”

I started to remove my hand from my mouth but Auntie shot me another sharp look.

“Not long after their mysterious deaths at sea, a couple of Beverly Hills quack doctors tried injecting sheep gland products directly into faces of aging starlets.”

Auntie stared me in the eye.  “I never touched the stuff.  Can’t you tell?  Anyhow, Robbins & Caruso’s product lines became all the rage, and before you could say blintzes the company’s stock shot off like a rocket.”

I could tell Auntie’s story was nearing some sort of grand conclusion when she hissed, “And some of the lowest scum on earth became millionaires overnight.”

Aunt Fanny was fading fast.  Her wig and turban fell on a nearby pillow.

“That’s enough for now.  I’m not as young as I used to be.”  She gazed up, “But you wouldn’t know it to look at me.”  The old hag waved a hand to dismiss me.  “You run along now,” she said.  “We’ll talk more later.  Tell Lars I’m ready for my martini colonic.  And no toothpick in the olive this time.”