I started paying attention to her when I was on the run the first time. I'd been working as an interior decorator in LA for about ten years before the incident, which, Dear Reader, is what I will call it though the good men and women of the LAPD probably have another term. Beauty has a way of taking me to a bad place. I won't deny it. It surprises a lot of people considering that before joining her campaign, my job was to bring beauty to people's homes. But the beauty-to-violence reflex isn't unusual for interior decorators - or anyone else who's kind of artsy.
People don't realize it but there would be a lot more paintings and symphonies and power ballads in the world today if it wasn't for the Itch. The Itch, just for clarity's sake, really isn't an itch at all. It's more like a pulsing feeling that overcomes you when you see something that moves you. A lot of people talk about having the breath knocked out of them when they see something they like. But if you suffer from the Itch, you feel like you have to knock right back.
Beauty, I know, is relative, but the Itch isn't. Everyone who I've ever met who suffers from the Itch describes it in the same way. The feeling starts in your chest and builds until something snaps. Then it floods through your torso out to your arms and legs and roars up to your jaw where it fills your teeth until you think your fillings are going to pop right out of your mouth. That's when you have to hit something, (ideally not the thing that made you Itch in the first place) and hopefully break into as many pieces as physics will allow. There's no other way to relieve the Itch. At least I've never found one.
Thankfully, my old clients - they were all Hollywood types, big wigs and A-list stars - suffered from what we in the business call "The Shites." I won't name names. If you're looking for a confessional of that sort Dear Nosy Reader, stop reading. What I will tell you is that most people don't have the sense God gave them when it comes to picking a color scheme for their living rooms or an accent piece for the study. Even you, as you sit and take in my words on the page, even you might be surrounded with awful things that you've convinced yourself are special. Some item that you've had since college, a side table the color of Heinz ketchup, an old comfortable lounger that is nothing short of truly horrible. Please don't worry. Your bad taste is what allows people like me to function in the world. Ugliness is just a lot more common than beauty if you think about it.
And still, sometimes beauty can sneak up on you. Like this morning, for instance. I left the design business and went into politics because where else in the world are you more isolated from beauty? Big egos, big hair. Bumble-bee yellow pants suits (even made by Armani, yellow just doesn't work.) I figured politics was the one place where I'd be safe from the Itch. And then this morning, I turn on my hotel room's TV - a room so un-Itch worthy I can't even begin to describe it - and there I find her in front of a crowd at the rally we'd planned the whole week. It was supposed to have been a victory rally, but after the last set of primaries, she took the opportunity to break the bad news. She was throwing in the towel.
Reader, Dear Aesthetically Challenged Reader, her hands, which moved in soft shapes, in circles and waves, moved me. There were no pumping fists, stabbing fingers, no sharp ugliness or angled chops - the kind of politically effective but aesthetically unpleasing stuff I'd been seeing from her for months. And as I watched, taking it all in, the Itch, which after almost a year on the campaign I'd almost forgotten, came back with a vengeance.
Maybe I was just tired of holding back. I know in her own way, she was. After twenty-one debates, thousands of stump speeches and probably a million handshakes, her hands were done with all the promising and lying. That morning, her hands were like earnest parents to our devoted children. They were teaching us that life isn't fair.
Did I feel angry or disappointed about this? Maybe. But more than that, her beauty (and she's not really a beautiful person) made me want to slam something into some hard, immovable thing in my room.
As a result of giving in to said feeling, (and boy did I ever) I'm on the run again. Just like I was a year ago. At some point, I know I'm going to have to give up. Turn myself in. By the time you see this, read my words in the book you're holding, Dear Sweet Unitching Reader, as you sit there on your horrid little chair with your legs up on a completely, Itch-unworthy divan surrounded by your chachka, I will no longer be a free man. I imagine I'll be locked up in a small place, safe from the Itch, among men who probably have never known the Itch themselves. Of course, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe prison will have its own Itch-inducing qualities. I was wrong about politics, after all.
What I do know is that before I'm taken in, as a last act of freedom, a final scratch if you will, I want to leave this story behind. I want others who itch to take my advice: don't run away from who you are. Take my word for it. You can't run very far.
As I said, a little less than a year ago, I was working as an interior decorator. I survived Itch-free for years because every client I worked for had some kind of need for ugliness that he had to give in to. At some point in the project, every client would pull out a bright orange drape or a Lawrence of Arabia-styled bedroom set and any potential Itch I could've felt vanished. Poof. Like a child star's career.
Nothing old survives in LA. The whole city is based on make believe, so it's not really surprising that everyone drifts toward dumb fads. Old buildings are done away with like middle-aged actresses. Old trees (the few that can survive the heat and smog) are dug up to make room for new housing developments. People in LA are always looking for what's new even when that new thing leads down the path to the very sad and the very ugly. Hollywood types are no exception. In fact, they're worse.
But like beauty, people can surprise you sometimes. Albert, my last client and the reason I went into politics, was different. He was polite and unusually open to my opinions. He'd just bought a new house (he called it a spaceship on a cliff), but he'd only bought the place because his realtor convinced him that it was fitting for someone with his career (she probably meant bank account.) Albert confessed that what he really wanted was something cozy and warm. Basically, he was hiring me to make his spaceship more earthy.
His house, as it turned out, was less grand than a spaceship. Ultra-modern and boxy with lots of chrome and glass, it was more like a microwave on a cliff and had as much potential for being cozy. Still, it didn't take long for us to start making real changes to the place. One of the tricks I'd learned over the years was that if you have a giant appliance for a house and you want it to be less appliance-like, you have to compartmentalize. You have to make it so that if you're in one room, you're so comfortable and at ease with the things around you that you forget there's a desolate mile of glass and steel until you reach the next room.
Albert gave me complete control. The only thing he asked was that after my work was done, I'd find some place in the house to hang a portrait of Burt Lancaster that he'd recently acquired. The Rainmaker, Mr. Starbuck himself, was his favorite actor, which is fair enough. But Reader, Understanding and Sympathetic Reader, remember I told you that you were probably sitting surrounded by something ugly, something you loved for no reason other than that you were clueless. Well, nothing in your possession could match that painting for shear ug-power. Pound for pound it was the King of Awful, a true Master of Disaster. I can say this safely because money allows rich people to buy things that are brutal in a way that the rest of us couldn't begin to contemplate. The portrait was done in different shades of blue and in a faux-Cubist style. It looked like Mr. Lancaster had been put through a Cuisinart after drowning.
And yet, after saying all of that, I secretly was glad for it. In a way, the painting freed me up to do my best work. I picked up fabrics from artisans in Mendocino and embroidered pillows and Persian rugs from a family-owned place in Glendale that had a contact back in the mother country. Danny O'Reilly (Yes, the same Danny O'Reilly who Homes & Gardens called the Mass-ter Painter of Massachussetts last year) happened to be visiting LA just as we were starting, and he acted as an advisor on the interior color schemes. For furniture, we split the project up between a new up-and-coming designer out of Brooklyn and a versatile Spanish team that I'd used on other projects. You usually had to wait about six months to take delivery. But with Albert's influence and money, we got everything a few weeks after placing our orders.
By the time I was done, the place was amazing, but I was working so hard that the Itch never flared up. That made me cocky, I guess. I thought maybe I'd licked the Itch, my companion since childhood. And because of that I felt altogether comfortable telling Albert that I would not allow his blue Burt Lancaster to hang anywhere in the house. I don't know if it was the way I said it, maybe the intensity (I'm not a small man), but it wasn't hard convincing him. Instead of the blue monster, I hung up a pair of smaller paintings by the San Francisco artist, Eileen Starr. Her stuff's a little surreal for my taste, but I picked the pieces less for their content and more for the strands of indigo that ran through each of them and that matched the Persian rug in the room.
I didn't realize it when I was done. Like wine, a home needs time to settle before you can really appreciate it. But about a week after I finished, Albert invited me over for a little party. As soon as I got there, my hands were tingling and I knew I had to get away. I don't know if I ever experienced the Itch as strongly as I did that night. Usually if I think something is beautiful, that hit-something kind of beautiful, it comes in small doses: a picture, a room, maybe a woman speaking from the heart as she gives up her bid for the presidency. It used to be that if I caught the Itch early enough, it would go away without me having to break something. But Albert's place was a palatial dose of perfection and a broken window or, better yet, a broken hand breaking a window wasn't going to suffice.
I remember Albert pulling me over to a friend of his - a prospective employer, he whispered. And then I remember blood spurting out of Albert's nose and a pain running through my hand. Albert's guests scrambled. Someone yelled that someone else should call the police and maybe an ambulance, too. I didn't care. I walked out to the yard to the tool shed behind the pool to get something big and heavy. Then I came back into the living room and found Albert with an ice pack covering most of his face. I still didn't give a damn. I started swinging around the rubber mallet I was holding, and within a few minutes, the Spanish furniture, the freshly painted indigo walls (which were supposed to be calming, by the way), even the cartoonish paintings - all of it ruined.
Let me say this now, my Frightened Reader, before the Incident, I used to watch cop shows - not for the cops, but for the criminals. Though they always get caught in the end, TV bad guys put up a pretty good fight. Somehow they always seem to know what to do right after the crime. But in real life, there's no manual for how to act after you've committed a major felony. After I satisfied the Itch, I got scared and ran. I went home, packed a bag, and got in my car. I had a friend in Reno and thought it might be a good idea to get out of the state until my lawyer could figure something out. (Watching cop shows had taught me that when possible, it was a good idea to flee the state you committed your crime in.)
I drove as far as I could and ended up in a town called Comfort somewhere east of Sacramento. A sane person would've left the next morning, continued on to Reno until things blew over. That was originally my plan. As soon as I woke up I called Glenn, my lawyer, and told him what had happened and asked him if he could reach out to Albert and maybe convince him to drop any charges he'd filed against me. I suggested that he tell Albert I had some kind of psychotic break. Looking back on it, my decision to stay in Comfort proves I wasn't lying.
Dear Unbelieving Reader, yes, I actually stayed in that tiny dot on the map of California. The Incident had loosened me up, making me unable to resist the Itch. Call it what you will, right as I was about to check out, I realized something that I'd missed the night before. Dear un-Itching reader, you have to understand that places are like people. They want to be beautiful. They need their spa treatments and their Botox injections, too. The Comfort Hotel had been built sometime in the 1800s around the time of the Gold Rush. It'd been a gambling house and a brothel and had survived three earthquakes and four fires. With all that history, it's not surprising that that the lobby was in a lot of aesthetic pain and I knew I could help out. Then and there I decided I had to convince the hotel owner to let me liberate his lobby from its piled-on ugliness. I turned back around and settled into my room. If I was going to go to jail for what I'd done to Albert's house, then I was going to make one last room a little better before they hauled me away.
I spent the day holed up in my room flipping through my free basic cable channels while trying to come up with a pitch for the owner of the hotel. I knew Glenn would work out some kind of magic with Albert, which allowed me to focus on how I was going to convince the owner to let me, a perfect stranger, touch up his lobby. Then I saw myself on TV.
Everybody's got a video camera nowadays, which is probably even truer at a house party made up of Hollywood types. While I was having my way with a rubber mallet, one of Albert's guests had gotten out his phone and filmed me. The resolution wasn't very good, but the video had made it onto the cable news show I was watching. There I was on the Wonderful World of Weird, a segment usually devoted to videos of people diving into vats of pickles or sticking hot dogs in their noses, stupid things that get people put on You Tube until they're replaced by the next idiot. Well, that night, I was the next idiot. I was also viral.
Did I care? Was I worried? Dear Dear Dear Reader, can you blame me for my decision to run to something as ugly as presidential politics after seeing myself destroy a multi-million dollar house? Obviously, I needed help. Albert's house had uncorked the genie: the crazy me who wants things to look beautiful so I can then break something else. I was so far gone that it never dawned on me that someone in town (the owner of the hotel perhaps) could also be watching the same show. I was obsessed with the Comfort Hotel's lobby.
So I spent the next morning tidying up my pitch, completely forgetting my video until Glenn called me. His son had shown it to him the night before. "F*%king Things Up Old School" was what the good people at YouTube called it. "They're sweating us, you idiot," he yelled into the phone. "We're talking civil suit - a fucking ball-draining civil suit!" Then he took a deep breath and told me to hold tight but to expect the worst before hanging up.
Let me be clear, as that Obama guy is always saying, I didn't give two shits about Glenn or his drained balls. I went ahead and made my pitch to the hotel owner (who apparently never watched television) later that afternoon, and after he checked up on a couple old references I gave him and looked at my website, was pretty impressed. Still, I had to sweeten the pot by saying that I'd do the job in exchange for my room. Free doesn't just go a long way; it goes all the way.
In a manner of speaking, things were looking up. Not only did I have a new project to take my mind off of Albert's house, but by that night, Google Trends no longer had my video in their Top 50. I'd been replaced with video of my future boss crying on the campaign trail. Just the night before, Keith Olbermann had me as the third "Best Person in the World," Jon Stewart was having a field day with me, and now, I'd been forgotten because Hillary Clinton shed a few tears at a rally somewhere in the Heartland.
Sometimes you don't realize when you're going through a life altering experience until after the fact. Like a bottle of wine or a beautiful home, it takes time. Seeing her cry wasn't a tingling-hand, smash-a-wall-with-a-limb kind of experience. But oh Dear Apolitical Reader let me be clear again: seeing her cry was the only thing that pierced through the manic cloud of dust I was kicking up. The sight of her, those metallic drops hitting the microphone, the nasal drip turned flood moved me, but not to the point of violence. Something I'd never experienced before was happening to me - or at least I thought so.
The next morning I woke up and started calling around to get a painter into the place. Derek had come recommended, but considering he was the only house painter in a forty-mile radius, that wasn't saying much. After a walk-through with him, I made my way down to the diner on the other side of Main Street and to my horror, I saw a Mini Cooper parked across the street that looked exactly like one of Albert's. The guy could afford any car he wanted, but small and cozy were qualities he looked for in houses as well as in cars. Albert had a fleet of Minis, actually, and as soon as he bought each of them, he had them converted to run on vegetable oil. (His accountant had advised him that going green was a tax write-off.) That's why even without looking at the license plate I knew the car was his. The smell of burned salad dressing was thick in the air.
Still, Minis are pretty popular nowadays so I crossed the street to make sure. That's when I saw it: Tatr-hed2. For some reason, Tater Head was his nickname in college. He told me that at some point. Quiet, shy Albert had been in a fraternity. The man must've been abused. And now, here he was, abusing me.
I ducked into one of the many antique stores that line the two blocks making up the whole of downtown Comfort. I figured he might be watching me from behind a tree or something. Silly, I know. Sillier still was the fact that I didn't leave town immediately. If Albert was coming after me, so be it. But I was still determined to get that hotel lobby in shape - not hittably-magnificent, but pretty in a non-violent way - like when I saw Hillary cry.
I ran back to the hotel and Leo, the hotel owner's son, was behind the desk. I asked if Albert had checked in as a guest, but he told me that I was the only one in the hotel as far as he knew. I then gave him twenty bucks and told him to go down the street in a couple hours and see if Albert's Mini was still there. He asked me why. I think he said something about me being a spy.
A couple hours later, he knocked on my door and told me that the car was still there. I gave him another twenty and told him to look again in an hour. He was a dutiful kid - the type you hear McCain talk about when he talks about family values. The type of kids you're supposed to find in the Heartland. (After almost a year on the campaign trail, Dear Coastal Reader, I'm still not sure where the Heartland is.)
That night, while Derek started working on the lobby and while Leo regularly reported back about Albert's Mini, I watched a lot of cable news shows. It was getting to be part of my nightly routine. I don't know how it happened, exactly. Maybe it was the fact that I had a lot of time on my hands, or that I saw her cry, but for the two weeks I was in that hotel room, I started becoming a political junkie. The candidates weren't just talking heads; they started affecting me. I wanted to yell at the screen whenever McCain came on. Good patriot. Probably a fine senator. But president? Obama was fine, but I didn't get all the hype about him. He was perfect and polished, sure, but where was the heart? He would never cry on TV and show himself like she did.
When I got tired of the pundits, I watched her cry on YouTube. I even memorized her speech. She talked about finding her voice, about the future and how much she wanted to help us if we'd just let her, and then the tears. They started like something caught in her throat, a thick cloud off in the horizon. Her voice quivered. A small crack of thunder. And then she let herself give in to it. While the audience members sat in awe as they felt the tension, the walls she puts up, get swept away, this strong lady let herself show us what was on the inside - all the grief and disappointment. She'd hit bottom and I could relate to that.
The speech marked a new beginning not only for her, but for me as well. I wondered if maybe once the Albert thing blew over, if then I could start over. Maybe I'd been fighting myself. Maybe I needed to forget the interior design business completely and get involved in politics. Then I could bring some good to the world and not worry that I'd end up breaking the thing I worked so hard to create. I couldn't decide anything for sure at that point. I still was committed to the hotel lobby.
By the end of my first week at the hotel, the project was going well. Derek was making good progress on the lobby, and though my order for the lamps was delayed (normally, I would've been all over the lamp company, demanding my order be sent yesterday) I couldn't get mad. Hillary had just won New Hampshire and I took her win to be a symbol for my own situation. Maybe people could get second chances.
My optimism was short-lived, though. The day after New Hampshire she was wearing her yellow suit again - this time with a black blouse underneath. That was a sign of my impending doom. I yelled at the screen, telling her she looked like a bumblebee. She can wear what she likes. I knew that. But I also knew that sometime that night - Olbermann or Matthews more than likely - would start in with some snide comments, and then the well-dressed twat on CNN or his goofy counterpart Wolf Blitzer (I know he made that name up though I don't know why) would try his hand at the same. She's not physically beautiful, Reader, I think you have to admit as much, and dressing like an insect wasn't going to help her case. Bees are not loved members of the animal world. I appreciated her inner beauty because that's what I was trained to do: appreciate the interior of things. Not everyone's like that, though.
In fact, one of the panelists on David Gregory's show was saying something to that effect right as someone knocked on my door. I thought it was Leo with my dinner, but it was Albert. That's right, my Dear, Surprised Reader. While some writer from the Philadelphia Inquirer was talking about Hillary's big win and her insect-outfit, Albert stood in the doorway looking like he just posed for the cover of Field & Stream. He had on one of those vests fishermen wear with all the hooks and colorful feather do-hickies, and one of those floppy Gilligan hats that looks like a bowl with a bill running all the way around it. Even stranger than his outfit was the fact that he was smiling.
I told him to come in. I'd been eating all my meals there since I saw his Mini and the room must have smelled awful, but Albert, polite as ever, didn't say a thing. He pushed some of the greasy bags of old food off one of the chairs and sat down in front of the TV. "You're a fan?" he asked, pointing at the screen.
Right then, she came on - a clip of one of her victory speeches from the night before. She'd traded the bumblebee suit for something a lot more elegant. She was feeling good after her win.
Albert cleared his throat, which brought me back to the room. Revenge of the Tatr-Head. It could almost be the name of a bad horror movie, and I easily could've been its star. But as it turned out, Albert didn't yell or serve me with papers. He gave me a hug and thanked me instead. He even told me that when I took that rubber mallet to his house, he thought he'd seen God. That's why he followed me to Comfort. He didn't come to my room right away because he said he wanted to think about what had happened - get some perspective, which he did I imagined, by standing hip high in some near-by stream. I wouldn't have taken Tater-Head for a fisherman, but then again, I wouldn't have taken him for someone who sees God in his interior decorator, either.
He then told me he was quitting his job and wanted to be my assistant because he wanted to help bring beauty to the world. (The film industry, like politics, wasn't much on beauty.) He told me he understood me, suffered from the Itch like me, though he didn't call it that. For obvious reasons, he knew he couldn't bring about too much beauty. That wouldn't be very productive as a business model. But he wanted to bring some beauty, enough beauty, to the homes and apartments that needed it. And, if along the way, we went over the top and really hit the mark once in a while, all he asked was to be allowed to bring a mallet of his own to the party.
I was glad to know he wasn't going to sue me, but I didn't have the heart to tell him that there wasn't going to be any more "parties" and no more mallets, either. I'd decided sometime that week: The Comfort Hotel was going to be my last project. I couldn't keep going the way I was. After the Incident, I couldn't trust myself to stay within the bounds. When I finished with the lobby, which I was forcing myself not to overdo, I planned to go to Reno to get involved with her campaign. The Nevada primary was around the corner and I thought I could help out. The work was meaningful, and it wasn't Itch-worthy. That was good enough for me.
Yet again Albert surprised me with a smile and said something that I didn't understand until much later - until this morning. He told me he didn't care what we did because there was beauty everywhere if you knew how to look for it. (Not in the movie business, but everywhere else, he said.) Then he pointed at the TV screen and added, "even in all of that craziness, there's beauty." And with that, he told me he'd wait for my answer.
All these months since he's been following me on the campaign as I followed her, and he's been watching for it. Waiting for me to blow. Now, I get that, too.
This morning, he was in the next room and probably watching her on TV when I decided to let my room have it. I didn't call him over for the party, though. Dear Loyal Reader, don't judge me. I didn't include Albert in on the fun. The truth is that when you give into the Itch, it's best to be alone. It's not good to include an innocent person in a felony act.
By the time my boss was ushered off the stage and made her way home with her husband and daughter at her side - some place where she could cry as much as she needed to without the Olbermanns of the world laughing at her. While all of that happened, I left my room beaten to a pulp, and I followed up that felony with another: I stole Albert's salad-burning Mini.
I'm not sure where I'm going next, but I am sure that sometime soon, I'll be somewhere and I'll give in to the Itch and I won't be as lucky as I've been with Albert. A policeman somewhere will stop me and my salad-burning car, lock me up. I deserve it. But Dear Itch-less Reader, take it from me, I don't really regret any of it. Sometimes you just have to let yourself scratch.
