Shovel and Shotgun

The winds are coming down off the Colorado Plateau in cool, sweeping gusts. Desert sand cyclones around the campfire, and the moon is a thumbnail in the west. We are surrounded by organ-pipe, giant saguaro, and cholla. The smell of sweet cactus blossom fills the midnight air. The lights of Sedona twinkle below us, down in Oak Creek Canyon. Loweman is digging a grave, four feet deep. He finishes, and looks up at me, tired and exasperated from my shouted instructions. Loweman throws the shovel up onto the desert sand, and starts to crawl out of the hole. I tell him to stop. He does.

I pour sand over the fire.

I aim the Mossburg 500 at his face.

Loweman: No, please don--

After: People appear from the shadows and do the rest, burying him, erasing him.


I Uber back to Los Angeles.

Dead Drop

Stan Loweman is ferrying me across the Mojave desert in his 2018 Porche Macan. We are moving fast. I take three Ambien. Confuse the reflectorization of freeway signs for trooper lights. Music plays. We pass an El Pollo Loco, which explodes, erupting into flames, turning the night sky to day. We are bound for something buried. Something I left behind.

From Cajon Pass we travel to the southwesternmost route through the California Mojave.

Barstow east to Needles and into western Arizona.

Hesperia and the Victor Valley, north to Mono Lake and Bodie.

Barstow west through the desert and up the southern Sierra Nevada to Tehachap.

Baker north to Death Valley Junction and Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.

What Loweman says when we reach State Route 190: "Let's turn back."

Me: I don't know what that is.

Stan Loweman

Loweman: You're trending.

Me: I don't know...what that is.

Loweman: Well, I have requests coming in, left and right. Fallon, The View, Fallon.

Me: What is "Fallon"?

Loweman: It's the Tonight Show, Dorren.

Me: Tonight? No. I have plans. Getty Villa. With...Jaxx.

Loweman: Then Sirius XM.

Me: What?

Loweman: Ok, strike that. A car dealership appearance in Simi Valley?

Me: Kool And The Gang.

Loweman: What?

Me: Too Hot.

Loweman: Ok. There's a taste-testing on Barrington this Sunday (dials his phone, whispers, confirms, ends the call) Little girl. Popsicles.

Me:

Loweman: Podcasts then.

Me: I don't know what that is.

Loweman: Radio shows, but on the Internet.

Me: I don't know what that is.

Loweman: I can get you on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast.

Me: I don't know what that is.

Loweman: Not for nothing, Dorren, but you're standing in the way of yourself.

Me: I don't know what that is.

Loweman: Fine.

Me: I don't know what that is.

Large Megellanic

This is not a story. My eyes see everything. An empty Captain Crunch box, the prize stolen by a sibling. Finding my first and only wife dead, an overdose. Two-a-day practices for the East Valley Falcons during the summer of 1980, so intense that one teenager died from heat exhaustion. This is not a story. The ant crawling across my bathroom mirror that survived the pesticide from yesterday’s spraying. An unconquerable web of freeway traffic. A man driving a tractor trailer with someone tied up in his cabin. A mother strung out on Ambien, sleeping on the couch, her four-year-old boy, curious, roaming. A loaded shotgun, hidden away in the back of some closet. This is not a story. Married people, together, but silent, looking at smartphones, on computers, alone in their Bluetooth headphones. Never knowing anything. But always hoping. For something that resembles “the best.” There is a fear and hopelessness so great in the world that it makes us happy when we feel something that drives us toward madness. A broad pancake of stars, deep within the disk of the Milky Way. A swath of space gas hanging like a spider’s web, entangling all the heavens within and without. This is not a story. My eyes see everything: A spread out carpet of light existing in the giant black ink of space. 

Forever in the process of self-destruction.

Taylor calls: "Just saw 'Life of the Party.' Loved it." 

Les Yeux Sans Visage

Say your prayers.

Taylor Calls

Message 1: "'Sup, bro."

Message 2: "Shhhhhhhh."

Message 3: "He's young. He's rich. He's available. He's Iranian. Lemme know."

Message 4: "Meet me on Little Santa Monica. Hello?"

Message 5: "Hey I--"

Message 6: (panicked, sobbing) "I'm on the deck and I can hear the waves and the sea gulls crying out and I can hear the hum of phones and wires and flatscreen TVs and I can feel the sun shining down on me and I'm listening to the sound of the trees shuffling in the warm wind and the screams of a young girl coming from a room or a television. I can't tell which is what. She's saying 'help me.'"

Message 7 (whispers): "I am the dream in your coma."

A Grey Place

When I was a child, there was a boy who lived next door to me in North Hollywood. His name was Ricky Jernigan. Our houses were across the street from Colfax Elementary, out in Valley Village. From third to sixth grade we walked to school together almost every morning.  We had an idyllic friendship. Pup-tent sleepovers. Late night walkie-talkie communiqué. Sharing dimes on pinball marathons at the arcade on Colfax Avenue. We even had matching Space 1999 lunch boxes that every kid in Homeroom envied. He was my best friend when I didn’t even know what that meant. I loved him when I didn’t know what that meant either. He was a very pretty boy: Shaggy hair that seemed spun from some fairytale. Sharp blue eyes. An impossibly perfect nose, dusted with a July’s worth of freckles. Teeth that would never see braces. Our friendship was the last good thing I would ever have, before he died.

Valley Village isn’t the same place today that it was in 1973. Nor is Colfax Elementary (it’s a Charter school today). Nor is Addison Street. Or Carpenter Avenue (an alleyway full of carports in shadows under deteriorating 50s-era Valley apartment complexes), where Ricky’s body was found in the summer of 1974.  He was left beside a dumpster, wearing only a sleeved pullover and Wallabees. Word got around that he was “bitten to death to cause insurmountable blood loss.” 

But this isn’t about that.

This is about the week before that.

When Ricky and I were spraying each other with the perpetually crooked water hose in his back yard.

And when we got bored and Ricky asked me if I wanted to see his father’s skin magazines.

And when Ricky and I cowered in the back of a master closet, laughing hysterically, shining a flashlight over the glossy pages of Hustler and Playboy.

And then later, when Ricky left the closet to go turn off the spigot in the backyard, leaving me alone.

And then when Ricky’s mother opened the closet door, fresh from a shower, naked, glistening, discovering me with the magazines. And when we locked eyes, and held it that way for what seemed like forever.

And then when she slowly, intentionally raised her forearm to her lips, and bit into the flesh until her fangs drew blood.

The Ellen Show

The Ellen show is a talk-variety show featuring comic Ellen DeGeneres in the studio performing an opening monologue and interviewing guests who include celebrities, newsmakers and ordinary people with extraordinary talents. Additionally, segments include performances from top music acts, audience participation and man-on-the-street interviews. Music is a key part of the show, with an in-studio DJ – including occasional celebrity guest DJs – spinning tunes and DeGeneres often breaking out into dance moves during the show. It is widely known that, despite her affable frivolity and easygoing demeanor on the show, DeGeneres is a light speed cunt.

The warm-up comedian is telling the studio audience a joke about the death penalty during the commercial break segment. I'm in my chair on the stage next to Ellen, and the studio lights are making me sweat, and I can feel my makeup beginning to run. A girl steps in and touches me up with some powder, whispering, “Please help me,” before she walks away, and I listen to Ellen on her iPhone X telling her assistant to “never make that fucking mistake again, or I will fucking gut you like the worthless pig you are.” I yawn and make eye contact with a man in the audience. He holds eye contact for an uncomfortably long time, and then, very slowly and very intentionally, he draws his index finger across his neck and mouths “It won’t end well,” before looking away from me.

A producer counts us down out of the commercial break as Ellen drops the call and stashes her iPhone under her ass. She looks into the camera lens and grins like a maniac as we bump back into the show.

Ellen begins talking: “We’re back with producer Dorren Daniels, the lone survivor of that terrifying Gulfstream crash in the Santa Susana mountains. Languishing in a coma for years afterward. Dorren, thank you so much for being on the show and bravely sharing your story.”

I look back to the studio audience, and the man from before, the neck-slash guy, is now holding an actual gun against his right temple. A snub-nose .38.  He’s staring directly at me again. He mouths the words, “In your sleep.”

Ellen: “So when did know there was something wrong? How did it feel to know the plane was going down and you were going to crash?”

Me: “Your brain is programmed to be bigoted and confirm stereotypes.”

Ellen: “Was there much gore when you pulled yourself out of the flaming wreckage?”

Me: "It is fooled by anecdotal evidence. Or a pretty face. Or a guy in a uniform.”

Ellen: “Uh-huh. And the dead babies. Were their bodies…intact…or…dismembered?”

Me: “It’s a master of rationalization. It believes what it hears. It overreacts.”

Ellen: “Right. Charred limbs. Eviscerated torsos. Gnarled, gaping bloody holes where the eyes used to be. Fascinating”

Me: “It is hopelessly incompetent at distinguishing fact from fiction.”

Ellen: “Right. Exactly. And I am absent of emotion, and incapable of feeling. I have known this for a very long time. Did you dream while you were comatose?”

When I look back to the studio audience, the man with the .38 is no longer there.

A Dream

It is night. I am in the desert, alone. I stumble through the brush, Mexican poppies, Palo Verde, a rattlesnake shaking its warning nearby, and then I move out onto a highway. My feet are shredded. Bleeding. Wrapped in gauze. I can smell the infection. I can barely walk.

The road stretches dark in both directions. The sky above is awash in a billion stars. I look to the highway. North, South? East, West? I can’t tell where is where. I am cold. I am crying. And then suddenly I see jacaranda trees in the distance, on either side of this abandoned interstate, their foliage engulfed in fire. I stumble, stagger toward the blazing copse. The heat is all I want. So, I go towards it, the flame.

And then I hear a noise to my left. I stop. Hold still. I’m shivering, my teeth, chattering. Keep my eyes on the fire ahead, but I listen. It sounds like a whisper; like palm fronds in a high wind. But then the whispers turn to words:

“Help me.”

I stop walking and look to my left: A row of Saguaro off the roadside, and beyond, in the wilderness, darkness.

“Help me,” she says, from the darkness.

I look ahead, towards the burning jacaranda trees. Twenty more steps, and I’m there.

I look back at the wilderness. The darkness.

“Help me. Untie me. Please,” she says. “I’m begging you!”

I turn. I move toward the darkness.

"Yes. Come to me," she hisses. And I--

Mark Brucer wakes me. “Ellen show in three hours, bro.”

Therapy: A Day of Fire and Fear

"Let's talk about the accident. Can we talk about the accident?"

"What accident?"

"The...crash? Does that word upset you? If it's a trigger, I can rephrase."

"A trigger?"

"Something that upsets you."

"Nothing upsets me."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Dorren. You were pulled out of the wrecked fuselage of a Gulfstream G550."

"Fuselage?"

"The aircraft plowed through a forest of sycamores on the side of the Santa Susana mountains on its way down."

"Down?"

"You were the only person who survived."

"Survived?"

"12 people died. Two of them were children."

"Children?"

"Please, Dorren. Tell me what you remember."

"Remember?"