The first woman says the second woman will see me now.

I adjust my coat and tie. Ties paint a desperate need. Coats add obligation.

The second woman, the executive, is so taut the air in her corner office hums. She twists her necklace and studies my application. Her hair is blonde surrendered to roots. She has a constriction at the base of her left-hand ring finger where an entire past used to be, perhaps until recently. She has a big desk and a big monitor. She has a nameplate that reads Judy Rothman. Judy Rothman, Vice President of Technical Support. She has a framed 5x7 of a cat on her credenza. I know her type. I can see the Powerpoint graph of her career and relationship curves, divergent over time.

"Why did you leave your last position?" she asks.

"Religious reasons", I answer.

"And are you available for periodic travel?"

"No."

"You write on here, under "Tell Us Something About Yourself", that you’re faith is Christian, but you spelled it wrong. I’m not supposed to ask about creed, but since you volunteered it, and you can’t spell worth shit, I think it’s appropriate. I won’t hire a technical writer that technically can’t write."

"It’s spelled correctly", I say. "Not Christian - Christianne, as in the name."

"I don’t get it", she says.

"You would if you met her", I say.

"Why are you telling me this?" she says.

"Because I’ll probably need to take some days off every now and then", I say.

"To do what?" she asks.

"Worship", I answer.

She’s obviously not getting this at all, tugging on her jewelry and staring at me and starting to get up from her chair and I’m seconds away from being shown the door, so I let fly, so I ask her: "Ms. Rothman, if you could tongue the sun without burning your own face off, if you could just taste that magnificence, wouldn’t you do it? Wouldn’t you tear off hunks of it and cram as much of it into your mouth as you could?"

She sits back down in her chair.

"Ms. Rothman, forgive me, but if you knew of sex that could be like rolling naked in warm shards of starlight, like drinking the entire Renaissance distilled into a cup, wouldn’t you take whatever oath and pay whatever tithe just to keep it? You’d chain yourself to that altar and play the acolyte, just like I do. And if the sun wanted some things done around the house, you’d do them. And if the sun needed more money and told you to quit trying to be a novelist and go get a real job, you’d find yourself in some office just like this one, begging for a chance."

She’s twisting her necklace so tight that it looks like the thinnest of leashes around her neck. Her eyes are liquid.

"I’m sorry", I say. "I shouldn’t have said all those things. I’ve got to learn to stop praying in public like this."

"Shut my door", she says.

I smile, and obey, and this is no longer interview, but conversion.

Yes, ma’am, I’m fine with that, let’s cut the crap.

What do I really believe in? Well, I’d say goddesses are defined on all sides by their loneliness. I’d say religions are convergences of need, like waves collecting on oceans, which I guess makes all worship transactional. So that’s basically what I believe in. Transactions.

She buzzes Human Resources. I’m sending someone down, she tells them. LS

It was about a month before the incident at the 7-11.

Nobody knows this part of the story except me and, now, you.

We were in his backyard shooting his BB gun at a magazine page target nailed to a big maple tree. At first it was Nixon. I had no trouble shooting at Nixon. Got him once, too, right between the eyes. Hell of a shot. Then Ted took that one down and put up a page from a Playboy centerfold, went back to his shooting position and aimed the rifle.

“What are ya’ doin’?” I asked, but he had his eyes locked on the picture.

“Target practice,” he said, with a crooked smile, then pulled the trigger. He took two, three shots, then handed the gun to me.

“No,” I said, “I can’t shoot at . . . that.”

You have to remember, he was sixteen and had been trying to get to second base with Suzie Wiederman for six months with no luck. None whatsoever. I don’t know what he was thinking.

“Let’s take it down,” I said. “Maybe get Nixon again. Or Agnew. They make much better targets.”

“What the hell’s wrong with you,” he said, and grabbed the gun away from me, aimed and started pulling the trigger, pushing off several shots before I yelled out: “Stop! Enough! You can’t do that!” Staring at the picture of that naked woman. Air-brushed, but a woman, no less.

He dropped the gun and stared at me with that open-mouthed look he used to get, looking like a caveman, a degenerate, like somehow he wasn’t all there. Not a pretty sight. Not at all. But it was Ted. My best friend at the time.

The 7-11 thing, nobody could have seen that coming. It was 12:37 in the afternoon, July 2nd. A hot day. Flags flying everywhere, waving in the breezed, displayed in the store. We went in there for Slurpees.

We were at the machine, the slushy blue stuff slopping into my cup. That’s when we heard the pop and the cup flew out of my hand, blue sleet flying everywhere. I turned around and saw the back of this blond-haired guy with a Led Zeppelin T-shirt at the checkout. The curly-haired clerk had his hands up over his head. I slid down to the floor but Ted, he yelled out “Hey!” I don’t know why he did it. The guy whirled around and next thing I knew Ted was dropping like a bag of cement to the floor, red oozing out of him like in the movies. It didn’t seem real. He was on the floor, just lying there, breathing light, shallow breaths. And, meanwhile, the guy was yelling at the clerk, gun pointed at his face, ordering him to open the register, put the money in the bag. I was behind the magazine display, lying on the floor, shaking, trying not to breathe. Red was spilling out of Ted, a sea of red, out onto the floor. I couldn’t move, couldn’t get up. And from the cover of one of the glossy magazines some fashion model was staring at me with a bored haughty fashion model kind of look that seemed to be turning, at the corners of her mouth, into a smirk.

Then, in minutes that seemed like hours, the guy was gone, the police and paramedics were there, but Ted, Ted was gone. Gone, gone, a pool of red surrounding his prone body. They were all around him, looking at him, prodding him. Electronic voices staticcy voices on police radios, lights flashing outside the front window, the curly-haired clerk in hysterics, telling what happened, the cops standing there, one of them telling him to “Calm down, calm down,” writing in his little pad.

And I was standing there, shaking, watching my friend, my former friend, Ted, lying in his own blood, thinking about how he looked when he was lining up his shot with that crooked smile, saying “Target practice,” just before he pulled the trigger. LS

As dusk set in, the highway heading south was clogged with cars, vans, SUVs, Hummers, tour buses and trucks.  The vehicles were crawling, inch by endless inch, a sea of pebbles at the mercy of a sluggish Friday rush hour tide.  Vonda Barrett was boxed in by a moving van on her left and a Mack truck on her right, each the length of the Great Wall of China, or so it seemed.  She tried to extricate herself from these mountains of steel but it was impossible; she was resigned to the fact that if she dozed off and an accident occurred she’d be crushed to a gory death, and that would be that.  A grape squashed by the foot of a gorilla.  No one would know she was even there.

Behind her smoky Goth eyes and platinum blonde hair, Vonda was a small town brunette who used to play baseball and bake red velvet cakes.  At seventeen, she conjured up a new life, turning Halloween into a daily activity.

When the traffic began to flow again, allowing vehicles to increase their speed, Vonda was thinking about the Standard Hotel with its white façade illuminated by eerie blue lights, and its quirky, eye-catching upside-down banner that seemed like the work of a prankster or a legally blind hotel employee.  With its live performance art, electric blue astro-turf sundeck, and nightly DJ in the lobby, the place thrilled and energized her.   

The Sunset Boulevard exit was just one mile away.  Vonda veered into the right lane and prepared to head east, toward the half-mile portion of the Sunset Strip that was crowded with weekend cruisers, young partiers, and industry peeps dripping in fur, ego and bling, desperately trying to become part of the cutting edge.  The men didn’t wear worn overalls.  The women didn’t don homely housedresses.  The neighbors didn’t stare at you with disdain as if you were some foreigner who didn’t speak the language.        

Vonda closed her eyes and could practically smell the hotel’s heavily perfumed air that seemed imported from some magical place where it was manufactured with a combination of oxygen and opiate.  She inhaled, and pretended.        

Just as Vonda opened her eyes, she thought her car had been struck by a missile from the sky, and the world was coming to a deafening, fiery end.  Then came the screeching of metal, and then the blasting or horns like the brass section of an amateur orchestra trying in vain to play the same note.  Like a flash frame in a movie, she caught a fleeting glimpse of her smiling parents before the screen abruptly cut to black.  

In the end she was wrong.  Many people knew that Emily Vonda Barrett had been there.  LS