"Adam and Eve and Kiss-Me-Quick"

Lindsay Eanet

The last time he visited, we went to the Old Hollywood Wax Museum. He tried to teach me to samba in front of Carmen Miranda, in spite of his broken toes from a carriage-horse that stepped on his foot. Broken bones and bruises from working at the damn theme park. This wasn't as bad, he said, as the time a disgruntled ex-CIA operative on vacation once threw a show at his head while in line for the log flume ride. The agent apologized of course, explaining that it was nothin' personal, he just looked an awful lot like Che Guevara. Instead of compensation the park managers just asked him to "shave that facial hair, Son, you look like a draft-dodgin' hippie."

I could tell he was uncomfortable at the Wax Museum. He talked a lot about the girls in Loss An-guh-less with wax faces, how sunken and emaciated their cheeks were, how the chin implants sometimes resembled the melted nubs of a candle, and how, if you looked hard enough, he said, you could see the Botox coursing in streams through the lines of their faces.

It was after he got to Hollywood that he stopped sculpting. When he was still at art school, the only place he was ever truly at home, he said, because the name of the city sounded like the breeze rustling through prairie grass and everything resembled what it was in plain holy wholeness, he used to sculpt. When the class was still learning about the human form, he sculpted full wax figures of a naked John and Yoko, John curled up like a child, with his arms around Yoko and pressing his lips curled in an innocent-yet-all knowing smile against her cheek.

He loved those sculptures, he says, because they "captured the innocent divinity of their relationship," the kind of thing he wanted so badly in a woman. After so many tried to make him a man, he still felt like a child, he told me, still wanting to curl in the crook of his beloved's arm. He wanted to preserve their ecstatic moment in full, even laying the wax lovers on a display bed with signs reading "BED PEACE" and "HAIR PEACE" surrounding them. His professor, despite the technical prowess of the thing, hated it. "John Lennon is dead," he said, "stop concerning yourself with your idols and ideals. Concern yourself with real people, real forms, no more of this idealistic celebrity fluff. Trying to emulate some lost idol will only lead you to failure." All the other students had crafted lithe, limber dancers in mid-arabesque and glowing fertility goddesses, Gone With the Wind-style Southern gentlemen and square-jawed Marlboro men. They were not met with the same hostility by the instructor as he was. He sorrowfully placed a white sheet over his beloved creation and withdrew from art school that day.

Hollywood for him was an act of revenge against the instructor, I think. "If idolatry gets you nowhere," he scoffed, "then why are Hollywood bombshells making a shit-ton of money?" He told me the theme park job was temporary, he was gonna get a full-time job with a studio doing set work. Go back to making things. He told me he was still a child, but he hadn't lost his ambitions. He told me he was gonna sneak into Graumann's before the next Hollywood A-list hunk plunged his hands into the wet cement and lay his hands there instead. He said he was gonna make movies that would exceed mere cult status and inspire annual fan gatherings with foosball and margaritas and oversized sunglasses, and he was gonna find a girl and they would live well among the sacred spirits in Laurel Canyon. I told him he was nuts.

We are standing in front of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his Terminator gear, guns blazing at us when I tell him this: "You should get out of Hollywood," I tell him. "It's not safe in California, what with this guy as your governor and all." He shakes his head, his eyes pensive and vast, and I want to compare them to the Pacific because it seems like the safest metaphor. He has always told me I was too practical, too safe. He once told me I was scared to be feminine after I wouldn't make an effort to seduce him. I told him I couldn't get the image out of my head of him as the boy who, when we were in third grade, sat me down on the jungle gym and taught me how to swear after I overheard him singing: "The farmer in the Dell, the farmer in the Dell, he died when he was thirty-six and then he went to Hell." Hell. He represented for me that temptation, that danger that I had never been exposed to. Always several steps ahead, more than I could ever hope to be in ambition and in energy. But he was still so innocent, so wide-eyed, pensive and vast like the Pacific because as he says, I can only think of things in practical terms. I told him he was naïve. Even leading up to the one night we actually were together, he would flirt with me using playground rhymes: "Adam and Eve and Kiss-me-quick rowed out on the lake one day/Adam and Eve, they both fell out/who do you think was saved?"

Before leaving, we stop in front of Charlie Chaplin dressed as The Little Tramp. The night after Prom it was raining and neither of us wanted to go home, so we watched Modern Times together. He does a dead-on Chaplin impression, which always makes me laugh and even forgive him sometimes for sleeping around and being a fugitive from maturity. Behind the wax figure is a still from Modern Times, of the Little Tramp and the sprite-like young girl he falls in love with, repairing a damaged seaside shack with the hopes that it will one day be their dream home. I told him that I stopped complaining openly about my situation after watching the movie with him, because if Charlie and his girl could still have hope in the throes of a depression, then why couldn't we be happy for what we still had. He told me I think too much, that I should own up to my emotions and impulses and to stop being afraid of disappointment.

He tries to teach me to dance again, telling me walking from the El station every day in heels has made my feet too heavy to really let go. The artist and the clerk, the free spirit and the pragmatist, once again butting heads on the dance floor. I ask him if he thinks you can reverse the aging process. He takes my hand and begins to sing softly: "All you need is love..."

In a little while, he will follow handprints and highways back to Hollywood, back to his lust for fame and dreaming of Yoko Ono and Laurel Canyon, like he always does. And I will go back, like I always do, to one-date-a-weekend rounds with bankers and real-estate agents with hybrid cars and nice apartments and yes, maybe souls too, and hating the working world and walking by the tattoo parlor by the county clerk's office and contemplating walking into work with a small silver nose-ring every day.

And maybe, in a little while, we will be able to see on level ground, to meet eye to eye in the middle of the lonesome, rustling Midwest, and find a place together, a broken-down home in the middle of some manicured community, an eyesore with colors that only we can see.