Kat’s in my living room when I open the door, Victoria’s ring between my teeth. I don’t even bother wondering about the how, and I know the why, so I just cross the room and cover her mouth with mine, the ring still in my teeth, pushing her to the floor and pulling her clothes away from all access points while she tears at mine. Every time she tries to talk I cover or fill her mouth with something and she finally gives up with a small cry, eyes popped, when I smash into her cervix. I spend the better part of an hour trying to drive her through the floor, staining the carpet and then passing out to swim through disjointed visions of me and Victoria, our twenty-odd children surrounding us in a sun-smeared club remix of Raising Arizona redemption.
      The production assistant assigned to getting my ass up every morning’s buzzing from downstairs a few hours later. There’s a panicky moment, but after my eyes open I realize I’m alone, still on the floor in my living room. I buzz the kid in and do an upright crawling thing to the kitchen, hoping maybe some of yesterday’s coffee’s still in the pot, but no go on the joe. The kid’s got the key and the first thing I see come through the door is the Starbucks logo. I make it across the room in three strides, then two to the couch with the coffee, where I immediately fall into near-coma, enhanced god-juice notwithstanding.
      My P.A., Danny, calls to the hall, “We’ve got a dead one here,” and Kip, the new P.A. from Jersey, comes in. “Come on, Willard,” Danny says. They drag me into the bathroom and hold me up under the shower and I’m coming around to where I’ve seen this scene before and I’m not liking the overlay it gives. We’re playing out a Scene One and this is, I’m thinking, a full third of the way through my second act here. You do not get to rewrite my story just because you’ve only just now inserted yourself in the plot. You don’t get to start us all over. For my sins, I can see you saying, you’re giving me a mission; thing is I already never wanted another.
      Kip, helping me with my pants, asks me, “What does ‘with extreme prejudice’ mean anyway?”
      “Fuck if I know, son,” I say, wishing someone would let it drop. The subject, not my pants.
      We’re on our way out the door when I remember and scan the floor. Victoria’s ring is nowhere in sight. Probably under the couch or something. I remind myself to find it and put it somewhere safe—Victoria would probably like it on a chain around my neck, and, for that matter, so would I—and follow Danny and Kip downstairs.
      It’s the Wednesday show, so no recording, and we’re all kinda beat anyway from Fusillade last night. I find Ephram in sound when I get there and there’s the sense about him that me and him are suddenly friends. I don’t know what happened, but most likely it’s just that drinking thing doing the bonding thing it does. I mumble hello and fall into a seat near the board.
      “That Victoria–” Ephram begins. And I understand. Not the drinking thing. The chick thing.
      “Yeah,” I say, “that Victoria.”
      “She’s amazing.”
      I acknowledge Ephram’s wisdom. There’s a lot I could say, but I really like keeping it inside, on the off chance that any vocalization would diminish the still-undefined thing I may or may not have with the girl. Give it form and maybe it finds legs and walks away. I don’t want that. I’ve still got to get my exit strategy in order, figure some graceful bow-out that won’t leave me a charred and broken ruin on some barrio or suburb street by the airport, something I won’t have to explain to anyone, least of all Victoria.
      “You been seeing her a while?” Ephram’s not going to let me go terse.
      “Just a couple of times,” I go for bored, uncommunicative. I make a yawning display. “I’m trying to play it cool right now while I figure out where I stand.”
      “Seemed pretty clear to me,” he’s all gleaming and smiles, probably thinking it’s in his path too and he want to know just how far up he’s got to go before he’s presented with his own go-go girl.
      I tell him Victoria wasn’t like a door prize or anything. I tell him it’s not a perk and he can’t expect that it’s going to happen for him too. He’s got to meet them just like any other girl, has to go through the intros and do it step by step. He wants the door prize, I’m saying, that’ll be some other kind of girl. He looks like he understands, and even though when I walked in the room he saw me one way—and I don’t really know what that was—my little speech appealed to something traditional and Midwestern in him. Just your average all-American corn-fed heavily pierced latex-clad corseted kabuki Amazon, that’s Victoria, every young man’s dream girl.
      Seeing it was exactly that in his eyes, something in me softened a little toward him. “All right, son,” I said, “you and I are now officially friends. The war between us is done. And don’t think it’s that you proved anything to me, it’s Artie decided you’re good people and I’m going to defer to that decision and stop fucking with you.”
      And Ephram, who yesterday would have played it so tough, laughed me off and told me he didn’t need no fucking friends like me, today beamed, said, “You, sir, are the paragon of rocking.”
      “I am, in fact, in truth,” I intone, “the quintessence of rock.”
      Ephram looks about to cry.
      “Now off you fuck and set the lights. We’ve still got a show to do. Wednesday or not.”
      Artie, at the door, “Couldn’t have said it better myself. Off you fuck yourself, dollface.” He grabs my elbow on my way out of sound, “You and that Victoria girl last night…”
      I smile, at first just reflex, but then she comes up in me and pushes it real past the boundaries of my face and I’m showing Artie what I didn’t realize until probably just now exactly how I feel. Artie, in only his underwear and prosthetics pulls me into a bizarre approximation of a motherly hug, but good all the same. We’re both already pretty much in character, so if we don’t stop this soon we’re going to get all weepy.
      “If you and Victoria can be even half as happy as me and Kat,” he says and it’s like my colon’s tickling my heel, everything dropped so low, “well… I just want the best for you.” And then, all teary now, Artie floats down to his dressing room.

Artie’s father had a heart attack our third year at Webb. Biological, I mean, not Dad. His mother came to the school to tell him. The teachers gave him the day off, but Artie stayed, showing no signs at all that he’d heard what his mom had said. Me and Artie’d been close friends on three years now, but I couldn’t understand his reaction. “He’s your dad, Artie,” I said. Artie said the man was not his dad. I didn’t know until that day how things were. He’d just started to explain it to me, about the Dad and the dad—what happened was I asked him why his mom came to the school to tell him, I asked was it some weird codependency thing (trying out the new idea: we’d had an intro to it just two days before in our social sciences section) and he filled me in. Shit you’d see on Donahue, teary confessions and accusations and tales of debauchery, misspent youth, indictments of Hollywood and a few success stories tossed in to say that hope’s not gone, that there was a chance for this fucked up family to pull it all together, if they just loved each other hard enough. Dad and dad shaking hands, brothers all reunited and the little Korean girl introduced to her long-lost sibling, and she’d feel closer to Artie than any of the rest of her adopted family, like he was from Africa or Siberia, just as alien as her… All that filling my head while Artie gave a terse play-by-play, a shorter summation, winding down with a smirking scowl and a roll of the shoulders only suggesting a shrug. “Fuck it,” he said.
      And me, openmouthed, dry tongue stuck to dry teeth, all I could do was repeat myself: “But he’s your dad…”
      “Blood’s for shit, friend,” Artie said, no trace of emotion. Not even the kind that shows he’s suppressing anything, just simple statement. “I’ll take whiskey and vodka over blood any day.”
      And me with no reason to know, I knew what he meant anyway.
      I went with Artie and his Dad to the funeral. Stood next to them watching everyone watch Artie and the Dad, getting the idea that everyone knew all along what I’d known just a few days. Had this happened even a few years ago, it’d been a different scene, with Dad still drunk and all the eyes would have been all pity, hands hiding mouths while everyone said what a shame it was, and probably some talk of the kind saying Artie should have been brought back once the fight was done and maybe CPS would have been called… But the way it was, the Dad in a fine tailored suit, and two years of respectability and some renown in the industry, what talk there was had more to do with how a girl could find some subtle way of getting close to the Dad, maybe at the wake, and what could be said—since condolences wouldn’t mean shit to him, and how does one address what everyone knows but no one talks about, at least not to him?—to set the foundation for any kind of association. At least eight women positioned themselves nearby, shooting for a better chance at bumping him or being in his path so they could stumble or drop something. One woman behind us asked the woman next to her if she was absolutely sure, did she have firsthand knowledge, she couldn’t say anything about it if nobody had said anything before. “Why would the kid be here if he weren’t?” one asked.
      “Maybe some kind of codependency thing. You know his mom,” the other said. I couldn’t not smile, thinking the money at Webb wasn’t going for nothing after all. I wondered how I could tell my parents. Figured it wasn’t important. I told Artie. He laughed. The Dad asked what we were laughing about.
      “We’re educated,” I said. And the Dad laughed too, not caring that it was a funeral, us there only as a formality. The women behind us didn’t care that we were laughing. Artie’s mom heard it though, turned a hollow face at us, still an attractive woman even if she was old—to me anyway—and stared a long time at Artie, then longer at his Dad and I wondered if maybe Artie’d be spending the night at my house tonight so they could fuck and set it all, retroactively, straight.
      We’re graveside and the pastor guy’d gone through his spiel and Artie wanted to say something. All the talk was done at the service at the Unitarian church beforehand, but the pastor nodded and beckoned him to his side. Artie went a little slow, not hesitant, just slow, and turned to face everybody, just kind of sizing everyone up. You were over by your mom and you made a face at me to ask What the fuck, and I made a face back at you to say Fuck if I know. Your mom had your arm else you’d have been with me and Artie the whole time.
      “What none of you have said to me,” Artie started up, and already everyone knew what he was going to say. Nobody moved, I don’t think anyone even breathed. Artie paused, and not because he was nervous, but because it was how you played this kind of thing. Scanned the faces, then continued, “Is how sorry you are for my loss.”
      That got a gasp from some of the crowd.
      “You need not say it. I’m telling you all now there is no loss. Not on my part anyway. Perhaps at one time I may have felt it, but it was long ago, when the deceased–” and be sure everyone noticed the distinction— “chose, in a moment of all-too-human weakness and anger, to forsake me to salve his own aching ego. Whatever reasons there may have been for his decision, I do not question them, nor do I regret the result. The Lord Himself saw fit to abandon His own Son to the precocities and whims of His sinful creations in hopes of their eventual redemption and return to His love. The actions of the deceased—my father—while reprehensible to some, and incomprehensible to others, are, after a fashion, Godlike in and of themselves. The specifics of family in life here on God’s Earth are of consequence so slight as to be absolutely meaningless, the persons playing any given role, mother, father, sister, brother, matter only insofar as our Lord has seen fit to arrange it thus…”
      Artie paused again. Nobody was sure where he was going with this, but take the fact that Artie was talking openly about the thing nobody knew he knew and combine that with an eloquent speech about anything, the result was a hundred or so transfixed folks graveside. Me included. You just shaking your head, eyes locked, like an inverted tennis game where the court moved around the ball..
      “…None of us have a father. Perhaps I should rephrase that: All of us share one Father. The rooms in which we wake, the beds in which we close our eyes, are provided for us by our Father, whether that bed be in one house or another is not for us to question, but only for us to thank Him that we have a place to rest our heads—that we have heads to rest at all. Let us today not think of loss, but rather let us rejoice in the glorious fact that no matter what players pass in and out of our lives, there is a constant source of love and strength and compassion in our Father, from which, no matter how far we may think we stray, none of us can ever fully escape.”
      Already, even then, I could feel wallets opening.
      “I guess that’s it… what I wanted to say… thank you,” Artie said, “and God bless every member of His family, each and every one of you, my brothers and sisters all, God bless you.”
      And then everyone, some even in full tears, said, “Amen.” The pastor didn’t even bother to wrap it up.
      At the wake at Artie’s mom’s house—I’d never been, and Artie hadn’t been there since, well, since he left—you and me cornered him in the kitchen. “Where the fuck did you come up with that?” you asked, knocking your highball (we’d sneaked some drinks and nobody cared) against his nose.
      “I don’t fucking know,” Artie said, and his laughing made you and me a little uncomfortable, we were still thinking it’d been real. “I just thought, What can I say to these assholes to shut them the fuck up?”
      “Shut them up? They never said anything…” I was a lightweight back then. Halfway through one drink and already stumbling.
      “You know what I mean.”
      “Yeah, I guess…” even though I didn’t. I do now, but didn’t then. Simple enough, but still…
      You wanted to know what Artie’s Dad thought about it. Artie said his Dad picked up pretty quick on the bullshit, but that he’d even had him for a moment. Once he clued into the game, Artie said, his Dad sat back and enjoyed the ride. “Fun to take the existentialist route now and then, you know?”
      “Too bad Caroline wasn’t there,” you said. Caroline was this Catholic with huge tits at our school. “She woulda begged to take the holy sacrament right out of your pants.”
      I raised my glass to that, “I’d bless her so hard she’d be out of school for a week.”
      Artie told us to cool it, “You’d be the one laid up, friend. Your blessing’s no match for hers. But she likes a softer touch mostly.”
      My jaw, your jaw, our jaws, they dropped.
      “Says there’s no point going to confession with nothing to confess.”
      Artie’s Dad deep in conversation with one of the graveside brunettes, I asked Arte would he need to crash at my house. Artie said sure.
      That night, that’s when we started all this. Plan A was the ironic approach, romantic traveling-sideshow dadaist tent revival things. It’d be a small tent, probably, and the roads the major freeways between metropolitan centers—we weren’t looking to go heartland so we could find ourselves lynched; the plan hatched because we knew we couldn’t be rockstars. We didn’t play any instruments, and even though we both could do something sort of like singing, we just didn’t have it so we weren’t even going to bother.
      Jump ahead a couple of years, and there we were, doing shitty multimedia performance art nobody got and nobody really wanted to see. Our grand tour consisted of two cafés and three drinks thrown at our heads. Note to the director: This could best be done with two montage sequences: first one with a couple of kids setting up and getting beat down—and maybe a real beatdown would be good there—then setting up again with the same result. Then insert a scene with me and Artie having it out, big old disillusioned showdown thing, and after that we’ll go our separate ways. Okay, three montages. The second can show us working stupid jobs. And my jobs were worse than his, but maybe for sympathetic effect we’ll both have really shitty jobs, and at one point we’ll both be picking fruit or something and that’s where we’ll meet again. Set it up like that since that actually did happen. Oranges, we were picking oranges. We sucked at it too. Then the third montage can be… no, just two. After that we got restaurant jobs and made up and moved in together and started up a cable access version of our bad performance art.
      This time we were chicks. Toned down and shot from the hip, I played the Praise-God second banana at 3 AM every Tuesday night. What happened then was people started writing to us, thanking us for the comfort we provided, the light we brought to those till-then godforsaken hours in the endless hellish drudgery of their lives. Artie’s Dad did the early camera work for us, and then when people started sending us money with their prayer requests, it started to dawn on us that maybe there was something we could do with this. Artie’s Dad got us interns to do the lights and sound, got us incorporated and tax-exempted and we called ourselves a church. The Lord never sleeps, we told them. Our half-hour slot went to an hour, then two hours, then two hours a night two nights a week, then three, then four. Donations kept coming in and we quit our jobs. We hired people to work the equipment, but I kept doing mine and Artie’s makeup. I had a girlfriend that altered our clothes. When people complained that we took up too much time on the public access channel, Artie’s Dad worked a deal and got us our own channel cheap. Way up in UHF, out past Telemundo, we did our show to the Inland Empire five days a week, still late night, sharing the rest of the time with some shopping network that paid most of the costs of the airtime.
      Back then we did it all out of an old fruit-packing warehouse, building our sets right on the old machines. Anyway, it grew.