Artie’s Dad tried a couple of weeks to play the role, but he didn’t have it in him, or it was blocked by vodka and either way Artie knew enough by then to make a sandwich or some eggs or spaghetti when he wanted spaghetti and so Artie played dad to Dad. Covered him with blankets at night when he stopped moving, got him to his car to go to work when he had a job. The jobs picked up after Artie got there. Lots of work on music videos and shit like that, and it occurred to both of them that maybe Artie’s mom had something to do with that. Artie got good at doing the laundry and patching up his clothes when they got torn in fights. He got really good at the sewing: lots of practice, every other day or so a collar ripped or a sleeve torn off or a hole in his pants from where he hit the ground; he got really good, at the same time, at doing the tearing himself. Not his shirts, but the other kids’. Started out as a joke in the house, between him and the Dad person: “You should see the other guy…” and then Artie’d detail the creases and pleats, how the guy’s hair stayed just so, how one kid actually did his algebra homework with the hand that wasn’t busy beating the shit out of Artie. “So you’re saying this kid took an intellectual approach to it then,” Dad was no stranger to irony.
      But the day came: “I broke his nose with his right shoe, Dad.”
      Dad recognized that this was one of those turning points after which everyone in the world had to conduct themselves differently. We put men on the moon and everybody stepped up to the plate and went space age, Dad remembered that. This was like that. His contribution to the new order of things was to cut by half his alcohol intake. And maybe that doesn’t seem like much but it was. Dad never became a dad, but Artie didn’t want one anyway. He’d had one and gotten fucked. He didn’t need another. That Dad got to work and got more jobs on his own in real movies without any intervention from mom was enough. Dad figured out by this time that Artie’s mom was a liar, but he wasn’t going to go stirring the waters on it. He liked the kid, and the kid seemed to like him, and all in all, everything was kind of working out really good now. One thing that got him was when he realized that Artie wasn’t his kid, he realized Artie knew that all along. Made him wish that Artie really was his. Made him wonder at the same time what it would be like to fuck Artie’s mom.
      When Artie started designing his own clothes in high school all the kids were really supportive. When Artie asked the kid with the broken nose to model his designs in the talent show, the kid accepted without hesitation. The designs were a hit and soon all the underclassmen had Artie originals. Dad even had a few outfits he’d wear on set.

“Satan: Ephram.”
      Give it five seconds with a couple of clicks and a little static pop, “What you need, dollface?”
      “Hey, Artie calls me that and I don’t say anything. You call me that and we’re going to have some problems.” I’d meant to be cordial, to go congenial conversation, but he started bad.
      “Whatever. What do you need? You’re not going to try to pull some shit like Sunday? Artie told me all about that. Won’t work twice.”
      “Hang on. Satan: Direct. Ephram.” Most of our conversations are just on the open channel and everyone can hear them, but we got the private channels too. Artie doesn’t like us using them, and not that he’s paranoid and has to hear, we just do the chatter all open so everyone stays up on what’s going on from minute to minute. It’s a freaking great system, worth the six digits we put up for it. I’m going private because this isn’t anybody’s business, probably not even mine, but I am paranoid, a little, so I make use of the private when I have to. Satan only calls Artie by name, so I just get a quick tone to clue me we’re secure. “Ephram, you got a minute?”
      “No, I have to get to the board.”
      “You can talk while you walk, just give me a couple of minutes.”
      “You said a minute.”
      I almost snap an eyeliner, I almost rip the mirror from its frame, “Since when did that get specific? Hey, just forget Sunday, you know that wasn’t me.”
      “I’m almost at the board, you tell me what you want or I’m switching open again.”
      “You guys shot pool the other day, what was that all about?”
      “Nine colored balls, two cues, one white ball. The usual.”
      “I’m not talking the game, fuck…”
      “Some beer, too, I think.”
      “What did you guys talk about?”
      “Five… four… three… two…”
      Bitch. “I can’t explain why right now, but you gotta tell me.”
      “Satan: Open.” That’s pretty much my life right now, just this endless series of truncated interactions, nothing ever really happening and me never getting an endpoint to paste in and call a period. Maybe I should write jagged poems instead of story form, make it accurately reflect on the page the way it is.
      I don’t stop my mouth in time, “You fucking piece of shit–” And of course that’s to everyone.
      “Maybe you’d like to watch your language, dollface.” And that’s Artie.
      I realize I have to kill Ephram, no two ways about it. “Sorry, Artie. I broke a nail on my box.”
      “Just watch it.” Not on the com. Artie’s right next to me, looking at my hands, looking for my box. “Something I need to know?”
      So I don’t bother with the obfuscation, don’t dissemble, don’t stammer, don’t ha-ha or anything. I would have, if I had maybe half a brain, that’s the smart move. Look like an ass, make him frown and tell me I’m a freak and he’s going to be watching me, but don’t say anything. “You and Ephram on Sunday, out shooting pool, what was up with that?” See, I’m really stupid. Not just now and then, not about this or that, but all the time about everything.
      “One: None of your fucking business. Two: I, in case you forgot, can do whatever the fuck I want with whomever the fuck I want. Three: What do you care about it?” And part of Artie’s mad, and I can see that, but there’s the part that’s my friend and he thinks it’s just a little girly jealousy that he didn’t hang out with me and that’s pretty much all I need to know and suddenly I don’t need to talk to Ephram about it.
      This would be so much easier if I wasn’t sleeping with his wife. “We were supposed to hit that club in Pasadena, you forget?” That I didn’t fuck Kat on Sunday makes it easier to pull a little bullshit right now. “You said we’d go check it out, remember?”
      Artie gives me crestfallen, and so genuine and I feel like crap. And there’s no such thing to remember and that makes me feel worse. “We’ll go tonight, okay? Right after closing prayer it’s you and me. Satan: Kat.” Satan will dial out, too. Artie’s talking to Kat and I try to think of some new club in Pasadena to hit when we’re done. I have Satan look up the city week listings in the Reader, make a mental note to have Artie have Satan look up Fusillade’s address before we go. I’ve got the address now, but it’d seem most natural for me to be incompletely informed. Artie makes kisses at the com, at Kat, and I’m pretty damn certain Kat’s all sweetness and kissing back. Satan’s getting a lot of love right now.
      Today’s a regular Tuesday show. Some prayer, some praise, a couple short films our boys threw together last week, an hour of rock and rap videos, highlighting our new signings to TLH’s label, ResurReach Records. It’s good in Lawrence, Kansas and most of Mississippi and Tennessee that they think we’re saving the urban youth in L.A. and New York and Miami. We tried at first to work with the actual born-again rockers and rappers, but the music… oh god, the music. We ditched the first three projects and just started from the dirt, getting some hungries and some hopefuls and 5 faceless, technically perfect studio musicians, made the singers unrecognizable—so as to not wreck their chances in the secular industry; we paid well, so there wasn’t really much turnover, and these kids knew they didn’t have a chance in the real world anyway—hired dancers out of high schools and community colleges-girls with “realistic” body shapes, believable faces, and a degree of talent and ability sufficiently lacking to allow our core’s children to think that maybe this is something they could aspire to. Think about it a minute and it gets clear, how we’re serving the underserved, how we’re actually bettering the whole of society with this carefully calculated deception. Or don’t think about it. It’s kind of boring. Point is that we went an intentional 85% of industry standard on all of it, which is still a full 70% more than the genuine articles were capable of giving, and reaped and raked exponential.
      The films are our weekly serials: we shoot the last three days of the week, three weeks a month, which is why I didn’t get any sleep. Which is why I’m not going to get any sleep this weekend either. The serials are basic morality plays, played out the same every week, a kind of lo-fi “David and Goliath.” Claymation makes the core think of Mormons, and polished action and production makes them think of Scientology, which makes them think of Hollywood, in that order, all of which gets them really uncomfortable and raises questions about what God we, in fact, serve. Artie’s Dad helped us accomplish the look we were going for; he said after the first one that he’d never worked so hard to make something so bad. He said it was actually more work to be, believably, this shitty than it was to just do it right in the first place. Once we got the technique down it wasn’t so bad. Set sets and minimal costume changes. Our scriptwriters stole a missal from the Catholic church around the corner and adapted each week’s gospel, transposing it and fitting it to Karen, Bobby, Stephen, Alice and a pair of generic adults we’ve never clearly identified as being any of the kids’ parents. We use the Acts and the Epistles for the other show, about a dark, mysterious loner in bad leather on a Yamaha doing a redeemed Cain thing through the Midwest. Our loner even does the chop-chop karate action every once in a while, when required, when he runs out of cheeks. Off weeks we just repeat. “Special Presentation.” We probably don’t need to do as much shooting as we do, could do with more repeats, but Artie wants to keep ahead of the competition.
      Artie’s messing with his lipstick. I grab for his hands, don’t want him to wreck it. He says it feels strange, and I tell him that’s because it’s got a little spearmint in it. “Why’s it got that?” he’s still touching his lips. I bought a new kind, wanted to test it out. I told him to just try it today and if he didn’t like it we’d switch back tomorrow. “Just that it tingles, that’s all. Gotta get used to it.” He said he liked the taste and I told him to just leave it alone. I’m holding his hands now, since he can’t seem to stop touching his lips. I feel his arms relax and his eyes searching out mine. That sacral twinge thing, some kind of preconscious awareness of impending shit. I let go of Artie’s arms, hoping it’s just a let-go-of-me stare, but he grabs my wrists and he’s still staring at me.
      “You and me, we’ve been friends a long time,” he says. And no good conversation ever started like that. And his hold’s not firm or anything, just holding.
      Note to the crew adapting this for the screen: This would be a great place to kick down a montage showing how I didn’t know Kat was Kat at that party, how Artie was going to tell me the next day that he got married, how Kat knew exactly who I was and yeah, the sex that night was A-one, best of my life, and make sure there’s a close up on her face the next day when Artie introduces us and she says how nice it is to meet me and haven’t we met somewhere… no, she’s sure she’d remember me. Make sure all that gets in. Follow it with a quick visual summary of the hell that followed, maybe ending it with a kind of Lynch-fade to a long shot of one of the streets in the garment district after 5 PM, no cars, a few motionless dying trees that make it look like a still except for the trash sailing in the gutter. Make the sewer grate a kind of peripheral focus, not the center of the shot, but the point of it. Note to the editor working this: Maybe just cut this out altogether.
      I move my thumbs into his palms—we’re both in dresses, we play the part—and his fingers close around them. “Friends since high school, Artie. A fuck of a long time.”
      He looks about to cry. I’m about to shit my underwear. I actually think about it, how I could go commando, how smart I was to wear the garter-stockings combo on a shit-my-shorts day. I even put them over the stockings, a trick I learned from porn.
      “We have to talk about something,” he’s not staring at me anymore. Some point on my shoulder.
      “Artie, we got ten to live, let’s just do this at Fusillade.” Me not wanting to do this at all. Get him to the club, get him drunk, get him on the floor and moving and we’ll never have to finish these sentences. Of course, if this is the Kat conversation, we might not even make it to the club… no, probably to the club: get me to the club, get me drunk, get me on the floor and moving and then tomorrow Artie’s got a new makeup girl and a then couple more days and Kat stands passively next to Artie at my funeral.
      “Something’s been bothering me a long time. I need it out.”
      “There’s no time.”
      “It’ll take just a second. I hope it will, anyway. That’s up to you.” And I’d appreciate it if everyone could be cryptic. I’d really like it if nobody would ever come right to the fucking point.
      Insert a pause, insert a slow sigh-thing. Would be a sigh if it weren’t broken with my shakes. Then, finally: “What is it?”
      “I never apologized.”
      Big silence from me. I’m so Ephram.
      “For your nose. I’ve always felt shitty about that, even more lately. You’re so good to me, such a good friend and I should have apologized years ago for breaking it in junior high.”
      I might have to go commando anyway, but I don’t mind. Just a little piss, not too bad. “Hell, I deserved it, and maybe you don’t remember my nose before you fixed it.”
      “I had no right.”
      “Shit, the way you grabbed my foot and came up from the ground to clock me like that, that’s legend, Artie. Tarantino wishes he wrote that fight. Anyway I had it coming. And I never said it before, but that don’t make it less true, but you pretty much saved me that day. Never knew anyone like you before that and I think sometimes about what it would have been like if maybe I’d just been your friend all along.”
      Artie lets go and laughs so hard he messes up the powder crying. “Sorry, dollface, you don’t get to take that away. Maybe I should thank you, but I always felt like I should apologize.”
      I’m dragging him to the box, I have to fix his cheek. Eight to live. “So you’ve apologized. We done now?”
      “I like the lipstick.”
      “Good. I wasn’t going to switch back anyway.”
      “Let’s sing the baritone today, fuck with Janie on sound, all right?”
      “Anything you say, Artie.”

The show always goes fine. Any glitches just make us human, make us accessible to the core, and while Artie doesn’t exactly encourage fuckups, we’re all trained to roll with them when they occur. Mostly it’s just extra “Praise His name” or something like that until things come back under rein. Producer Joe will point and whoever he points to will put their arms up, have them a moment of grace, however many seconds of divine connection he needs until we’re back up. The audience cues from the one on stage and the core sees us all bliss and it seeps right off the screen into their living or bed or bathrooms and they praise our Jeannie for the direct uplink to Him Most High. So long as it doesn’t happen too often, Artie’s glad for intermittent spontaneous technical transcendence.
      Satan’s buzzing me. “Kat: private.” This never happens. This should never happen. This gets logged. Artie will see that Kat called me direct and private. Artie’s birthday’s in three weeks, so maybe he’ll think we’re doing a surprise party for him.
      I don’t even wait for a hello. “Kat, you and me are going to be throwing Artie a surprise party.”
      “What the fuck are you talking about, faggot?”
      “You called me direct on the com. It gets logged, Kat. Artie will see that you called me.”
      “Fine. We’ll throw a surprise party. Not like I have anything else to do anyway. I’ll make some calls.”
      “Good, now don’t call me like this again. I have to go. Goodbye Kat.”
      Did I mention she hisses? I probably did, and she does. “I’ll call you whenever and however I want and you are not going to say anything about it. I want to know something, bitch. And you answer me with no bullshit.”
      I wait, I don’t say anything. I’m hoping she’ll just take it as assent. Whether she does or doesn’t, she asks anyway. “Where are you going tonight?”
       No bullshit? No problem. I tell her.
      “You do not find yourself a new girlfriend.” Still hissing. I’m thinking of The Plague and the guy and all his sibilants messing up his book. I’m thinking Kat should never talk about sorrel horses. I’m thinking there’s little risk of that. Kat hates horses. She rode in high school, did the competition circuit, got thrown at probably the most important show in her life and did not get back in the saddle.
      “Me?” I’ll delete all the sputtering, the ten sentence fragment/figments falling out of my mouth before fixing on this: “Me? What about Artie?”
      “You love me. You love me so fucking much. Do not forget how much you love me.” Satan tells me she hung up.
      In case Kat calls again, I tell Satan I’m logging off and going home. I’m not going home, but Satan can’t see me, so it doesn’t matter where I am. Only matters that I tell Satan something. Update its database and all that. I take the earpiece out and head up to sound to put it in the box.
      Sound’s on the third level, overhanging the loge on second. The control room’s three walls of windows and one wall wall. Our recording studios are to the left and behind the control room, a kind of L-shape with the isolation boxes at the joint; the third window wall looks out at the stage. Production’s to the right, that wall actually three staggered sliding insulated doors either open or closed depending on whether we’re doing shows or straight-up recording. They’re open right now for the show just wrapped. We don’t record for repeat the Tuesday or Wednesday shows, so the staff today’s pretty light. When I get up to sound Artie’s there too, talking to Ephram. I press down my paranoia, calling it unfounded and stupid, telling myself I’d only give myself reason to be paranoid by acting it out. I’d just been curious, maybe forcefully so, but it was just curious, that’s it. The conversation looks casual so I try to look like I’m strolling, doing it nonchalant and easy while I slip the cord out of my dress, unhook the box from the earpiece. Artie nods at me. I nod back.
      I nod at Ephram; he smiles. “No,” I say, “we’re nodding today.” Ephram laughs and nods. It’s like he doesn’t hate me, it’s like I don’t think he’s a punk. There’s nothing really between us, no blood good or bad… just he’s primadonna kid and I’m old-school and it all just kind of rubs me. And not right or wrong, just rubs and some days I don’t want to be touched. I don’t know what today is, don’t know what I want. I’m just being stupid and I know it so I make some kind of decision to stop it. I decide and I stop and I hear myself laughing too, pulling it short because I can feel that it wants to go past comfort, that it wants to change and maybe do cackle and not chuckle; the cut gets me looks, but not the kind I would have got if I let it run out.
      “That sweep and focus right before close kicked ass, son,” I say, referring to the unexpected trick Ephram pulled at the end of today’s show. We try out new things on throwaway days.
      “You liked that?” Ephram waits for a jab, but I really meant it. It did kick ass. Three separate rows of incrementally-hued spots sweeping up from upstage to bathe the entire cast, Ephram upping the intensity with each consecutive sweep, then bringing them all to bear on Artie while fast-fading the rest of the lights, killing even the rowstrips by the seats and guides offstage. All forty spots narrowed so all you saw was Artie luminous and levitating, no light on his feet or the stage beneath them. Do that when he’s rhinestones or sequins and I bet the core’d just shit hundreds right into our accounts.
      “How’d it look from your perch, Ephram?” I was next to Artie and the effect worked on me.
      “Rhinestones or sequins and the core would just shit.”
      I said I thought so too. “For video, though, probably something like sheer cream over lamé…”
      “Jesus not rockstar. Yeah, that’d kill.” Ephram asked Artie what he thought.
      “I can’t ever see, you know that. But you two agreeing on it, well, that’s something I can’t argue with.”
      “Something with which you cannot argue, dear,” I say. “Mind your prepositions.”
      “Mind my Fuck Off, dollface.”
      “Again, the preposition… illiterate and foul.”
      Ephram tries to figure out the proper phrasing, “But off fuck doesn’t make any sense.”
      “I’m not saying it does, I’m just saying.” And then I think about it, “It’s lacking an object. I guess you’d say: Off you fuck.”
      Artie: “So mind your own damn prepositions, and off you fuck, then.”
      “Snoot it up British,” Ephram offers, “and it’d make perfect sense.”
      I went to the rack by the main console, where Satan lived. My hook’s the second from the left on the top row; Ephram’s third row middle. I hung the box and earpiece, turned back. “You coming tonight, Ephram?”
      Ephram and Artie both did blank faces, but Artie broke right out and clapped twice. “Yes, come with us. Three’s a crowd, so they say, and I think tonight we should have a crowd.”
      Ephram asked where we were going, and I told him. He said he’d been there when it was Sacrum, and he thought it was shit, but sure, the architecture was good and who knows? Artie gave Ephram his box, and Ephram gave it and his to Satan. I said I was heading to my dressing room and would meet them up front in…?
      “Twenty’s good,” Artie slipped out of his heels, “I didn’t fuck with the extra prosthetics today, so I don’t need much time.” Ephram said he was good to go.
      My throat threatens to close. Artie only forgoes the extra prosthetics when he’s going to get refitted soon. I grab his arm on the way out of sound, slow him down until Ephram hits the stairs. “You doing a refit?”
      “Yeah, my tits are sliding lately. I think I lost some weight. Probably need a new ass too.”
      I pretend like my knees aren’t about to let go. “When you doing it?”
      “Probably next week, not confirmed yet. Why?”
      I discard three stories, then two more. “I just need to know so I can adjust your makeup, that’s all.”
      Artie frowns a little, a confused frown, “You never said anything before.”
      “I knew beforehand the other times. No big deal.” I’m lying, but not about the first part. It’s the big deal part’s the lie. And it’s only a big deal since the last refit, when me and Kat got caught fucking in a cove in Laguna. Why you were there, in that cove, at that exact time… I still don’t buy your story but I guess if it’d just been me alone and I ran into you I wouldn’t have thought anything strange. It’s the guilty that see a more elaborate picture, that can plot all kinds of relationships where there might not be any, and it was me fucking Kat in the cove so I’m the one who sees the sheer convenience of your having a friend with a house on the cliff right over that exact spot. I wonder if I can get Ginger/Bruce in Portland to have some kind of prosthetic tragedy requiring your expertise, wonder if I can afford what it would cost to get you to cancel on Artie. If there’s anyone else can do your level and quality, if there’s anyone like that available right away while I pay to have you hook up Ginger/Bruce. You said I can rely on your discretion, that it’s none of your business, and it’s not a good move to upset a client anyway, that whole killing the messenger thing… but you and me, with our history… well, you can see why I don’t trust it. Not least because Artie never gets a refit before eight months from the last, and this is just three. Lost weight, bullshit. You’re supposed to give him a 20% +/- margin of girth. You see, of course, why I’d suspect, even without the guilt overlay, some ulterior motive.
      I can’t say it enough, I’m sorry, okay? That girl, Amy, I didn’t know you had a thing for her, didn’t know you had a thing with her. She left me for that Samantha chick after a week anyway—how can you be sure it wouldn’t have ended for you on Samantha too? You said it didn’t matter, only mattered that I was there for that week, that had it been Samantha then there’d be no problem between us, but that wasn’t the case so there was. I don’t get why Amy got off free, why it’s all my fault when she was the one who knew she had a thing with you and not me. And why it’s my fault Amy came home and rubbed it in your face… I know I wouldn’t take too well to that either, my girl fucking some other guy then coming home all sultry and lovey and pushing me down on the floor and spilling that other guy on my nose, but fuck, I didn’t know. We only talked about it once, I know, and yeah you can’t stop thinking about a thing like that, but it seems to me that after a couple of years you’d see it’s her and not me. That you don’t let it go makes me not trust your discretion. I think you know that. I think you like that. That’s why I think you set this up, to come back and make me pay.
      “Pay for what?” Artie wants to know. So I was reverie-man for however long and Artie’s got to think something’s up.
      “Tonight,” I manage. “It’s your birthday this month, so it’s on me tonight.”
      Artie’s not so suspicious as he should be, so he just smiles and claps me on the back, saying we should get changed. Messing with his boobs, “Good thing there was an opening, I have to stand like a statue so my tits don’t slip. Hard to raise my exalted arms to the heavens when I’m afraid I’m gonna drop my shit on my shoes.” He laughs and I manage to laugh, and it’s a funny thought anyway so it wasn’t really all that hard to laugh at that, even considering.
      Artie’s on his way to his dressing room. “Off we all fuck then. Meet you out front in twenty.”
      What I’ve never understood, and I’m going over it again while I unhook my own tits in my dressing room, is how nobody’s ever figured out it’s us. That Jeannie Crout and Valerie Gaspar were never recognized as Artie and me just doesn’t make any sense. Somebody from school should have figured it out by now. Not that anybody from school would ever watch our show, but everybody’s seen it at some point, just flipping through the channels there’s no avoiding us. It’s that car-wreck fascination thing, everyone sees at least a couple of minutes. More than enough time to put it together.