Brankton Walks Austin (p5)

Brankton removed his hand after a moment’s hesitation. She said what he thought she might.

“Don’t,” she shook her head not exactly believing her own body language which leaned toward him like some far off tower in an Italian suburb. “I mean,” she tried to soften it a bit, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Yeah, probably not,” he said.

He reached out of habit for her hands -- the hands with the many lines and wrinkles on her palms as if she had been swimming for an hour, even when she hadn’t. She inherited this trait from her cherished grandfather and would most likely pass this oh-so-minor flaw on to her children. She didn’t like to think about that, the passing of an imperfect gene. The rest of her was as smooth and tan as the calfskin car seats of her 1957 SL Roadster. Brankton convinced himself long ago that she loved the car more than him. She placed her hands in his as she used to, but now a reserve could be felt, reflecting the permanence and resolve behind the decision she made in Dr. Sheila Stein’s office on a shady little street in Larchmont Village just a few shorts months earlier.

“You look good, girl … no matter what friend you’re meeting at The Roosevelt,” he said.

She didn’t answer him or his searching, not even with her eyes. She just looked at him. He was amazed how much difficulty he was having trying not to say “honey” to her. It crossed his mind that such pet names were really just pleasant conversation fillers or simply habit, like “um” and “you know” for couples who said nothing to each other, really.

The taste of his beer (the one still sitting on the desk behind him with condensation drops running down the side of the green bottle leaving ring after ring on his job offer from NBC) made him self-conscious about his breath. Although Brankton’s mind was a bit muddled from mixing his beer with two Vicodin, it only partially explained his inability to engage his brain in any meaningful way. There was also the scent of “eau de ex” now filling the carriage house, an amalgam of her private label perfume, shampoo and oils; the sound of her walking in those heals; the way she looked in those heals; and the memory of the last time those heals were safely tucked under his bed. The depressing night he caught her cheating was also thrown into the memory mix for good measure. Brankton was trafficking these emotions and feelings and memories like some illicit drug runner through the overburdened transformer that was his frontal lobe now arriving on time at the juncture of recrimination and longing and sexual tension when it finally blew spectacularly. A million cognitively dissonant thoughts and then … nothing.

“Turn around, let me see,” he finally said out of instinct.

“One last twirl, huh?”

“No, just one last look,” he said as she began to spin with an easy expertise. She was always willing to dance, to work the practice bar with grand plié, arabesque and demi-plié under the watchful eye of her Italian ballet teacher, the Cecchetti task master with her arthritic, withered hands clenching a stick from the old country to whack unsuspecting, inconsistent and imperfect students. She also tap, tap, tapped the floor incessantly with it, inculcating the girls with a metronome of rhythm for their trips across the floor. If a woman could be a misogynist, her teacher with the broken English was it. He reached for his ex’s hip and felt her body spin under his touch as her hand stayed perfectly balanced in his. When she stopped turning, she pressed into and through him kissing Brankton with a warm and wet aggressiveness that he had forgotten existed. He matched her efforts like any good partner in a pas de deux. Her countenance of indifference replaced with bedroom eyes, she reached up to the mattress still wrapped in its Ikea protective plastic that partially covered the window, adroitly avoiding the half-dozen empty beers, and handed the ashtray with half-attempted cigars to Brankton.

“That’s a nasty habit,” she said. She looked back at him through hair falling over her face and grabbed a fistful of plastic, yanking down the mattress. One bottle flew squarely into the fireplace and shattered into a dozen large and small pieces. The rest just bounced off wood floors like so many bowling pins finding their way into the kitchen, hallway, with one even bouncing back onto the mattress. “I approve.”

As Brankton walked south on Lavaca heading toward Barton Springs, he tried to remember that afternoon and those sixteen minutes of tussle and lusty rekindled affection. He remembered her and that dress and what was under that dress, the tan lines, matching lingerie, the things they said to each other and the things they didn't. He was, in fact, haunted by these things, stunted into a half-lived life of victim status whilst she moved on to a better life.

Two things Brankton the peripatetic Jew from Los Angeles didn't expect to see in the Capital of Texas: a Jewish Temple, and the woman he had only hours earlier flipped the bird in a hasty exit. Jackie and Nelson were dropping someone off -- Brankton assumed he was part of the gay coffee clutch -- at the Temple Beth Selah. It was a smallish, unremarkable building next to an Austin firehouse. Nelson carried some sort of dish behind their friend who was juggling several. Jackie recognized Brankton walking up to her British green convertible Mini Cooper.

“Oh, hey!” she said. “You left before I could give you this,” Jackie flipped him off enthusiastically and turned her back to play with her iPod to change songs.

“That’s mature,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I said …”

Jackie looked at Brankton and turned the volume up to “10.”

Mirror in the bathroom, please talk free. The door is locked just you and me. Can I take you to a restaurant that’s got glass tables? You can watch yourself while you are eating.

Brankton was mouthing something, pretending to use sign language. Jackie just smiled at him. She relented turning it down to a still-loud “6.”

“I said very funny. You could be a comedian,” he said.

“How do you know I’m not?” she asked. Nelson came around the building running down the driveway to where Jackie and Brankton continued to size each other up. Nelson with his baby dreads hopped into the Mini.

"You two kids still going at it?" Nelson said. He turned down the radio. "Where you going, dude? We'll drop you." Jackie looked with full disapproval at Nelson who was rocking shades and a t-shirt that said Not on my watch! featuring a tiny dog lifting his leg on to a Rolex. "What now?!"

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Brankton Walks Austin (p4)

“Soooo, I was on my way over to The Roosevelt,” she said over her shoulder as she was inspecting the mantel’s rather spartan display of nostalgia, none of which featured her.

She tugged at the dress’s hem, pulling it down. This was not to draw attention to her figure; it was her nature to tug and to fix. The Roosevelt is a hotel in Hollywood with a true “old” Hollywood provenance sitting amidst new Hollywood gentrification. Just a decade ago the area was the armpit of Los Angeles with its Pussycat Theatre, tattoo parlors, gangs and stores hawking knickknacks at 99 cents a pop up and down Hollywood Blvd. And now, well, now restaurateurs and The W Hotel and high profile clubs and New York-inspired luxury lofts with lofty price tags were the talk of the town. And, there, still proving to be a player in a town of washed-up, wannabe and new players, was The Roosevelt with its old soul charm and neo soul soundtrack.

Rumored to be haunted by two deceased silver screen icons from the 40’s, whose ghostie penumbra make for inconvenient, though now kitschy, appearances on several floors, the hotel was finding new legs from a decent anchor restaurant (which isn’t saying much in Los Angeles where restaurants are known to flip every six to nine months – very much like a bad play opening on Broadway), and a de rigueur pool on the roof and bar with some house dj spinning records most weekends with an electronica eclecticism steeped in a heavy bass, surrounded by short skirts. Today's Roosevelt is a far cry from its former self where the first Academy Awards dinner was hosted in 1929.

His ex was a trust fund beautiful baby with an expat Italian Baron father and black American mother who looked like Lena Horne. It should go without saying that her family’s team of lawyers saw to it that her small fortune was safely bifurcated away from her husband’s hands and assets vis-à-vis one massive pre-nup. There might have been premarital cohabitation between him and his ex, but nuptial commingling of funds, never. The Baron owned The Roosevelt. He also owned several other hotels across the country through a network of corporations, LLCs and joint-ventures that never ceased to impress and confuse Brankton.

“So, why are you here?” he finally asked.

“Well, you’re like the one person I’ve trusted for the last 10 years to tell me how my outfits look," she brought her hands together and her chin down like a bad girl, twisted one foot in and looked up with big eyes. "Your place ... what does one call this? It's sort of like Audrey Hepburn's Sabrina meets O.J. Simpson's Brentwood guest house, isn't it? Anyway, you were on the way and I needed your expert opinion.”

She moved from the flameless ornamental fireplace, which reminded her of a plastic rose on a restaurant table, towards Brankton and the large writing desk he had facing out the carriage house’s living room window. She was nervous, which knotted him up because he believed her nervousness to be for somebody new -- not to mention that he was pissed for the hubris she displayed in coming here ... dressed like that. He feared this visit might rip his heart out, or at the very least Julienne, dice and cube it with a dull blade.

Brankton noticed her stirring a bit as she does when she’s wrapping up, preparing to make her exit. It was nicely orchestrated after years of practice. There was the quickstep drumming of her fingers, usually accompanied by stacking of papers or finally setting an object in its place, and then the wrapping it up neatly with a phrase that was as practiced as any radio disc jockey cueing up the commercials heading into his break at the top of hour.

He walked over to her where she had put one-half of her ass on his desk, clutching a sandstone bookend which was still in search of becoming the terminus for a dozen or so books stacked on the far corner of his desk. Brankton picked up its mate and caught a glimpse of her out the corner of his eye. She didn’t look up as their legs touched and he pressed his palm on her lower back almost out of habit. Almost.

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Brankton Walks Austin (p3)

Brankton moved across the street seeking the shade of the oaks lining the other side. He liked the houses over there better besides.

“No, I haven’t read it yet. Can you make sure that Pat O’ knows I’m definitely going to see his guy at the comedy club?”

“It’s not a club!” she interrupted him, which he hated. “It’s some music venue, and from what I gather he’s opening for the band.”

“Put Friday on the phone,” he said.

Brankton’s other assistant was a former stripper, general contractor, and current law student. She was 62-years old and could get anything done, not unlike Radar on M*A*S*H, but with varicose veins and an AARP membership. "Friday," as most assistants in large agencies and some studios, was already on the line listening. She unmuted her line.

“Yes?”

“Can you please make sure my car is waiting for me at – what’s this place called that I’m staying at?" Brankton could hear Friday’s long nails punching the keyboard in its face with enthusiasm.

“You’re at the Driskill, and yes, your car is confirmed to be waiting for you after sunset,” she said leaning back in her chair, shaking her head looking down the hallway that led to Brankton's office where his other assistant was holed-up. Saturday office hours working for the network that had become a perennial loser. If you don't come in on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday it was sometimes said during these desperate times.

“Thanks, guys. Let’s keep our fingers crossed,” Brankton was wrapping up when his other assistant interrupted again.

“Please read the script! I put it in your man-purse...”

He hung-up in his usual style that revealed to the triumvirate of Team Brankton that she had been heard. 7 blocks from Brankton’s current GPS location, and within walking distance, was the Austin, Texas, home of his ex. Had it not been Shabbat, he would have punched up on his iPhone her address and turned his convertible in her general direction where he would have watched from the street to see who had inherited his problems and was now taking deep dives into the path of her verbal scythe and psyche.

Divorce finalized for a month or so, Brankton’s ex dropped by unannounced, where she witnessed first-hand the post-apocalyptic proof of her 30 year-old mid-life crisis and his moving in to a new place scattered throughout in the form of boxes, forwarding addresses yet to be affixed to envelopes, crates filled with knickknacks breaking under their own weight, an unplugged fridge and a freshly painted green front door wide open drying in the Culver City sun.

There was also a new mattress standing in the corner of the living room playing hostess to several Rolling Rock empties competing to see who could get closest to the edge without falling, and an ashtray with several half-attempts at his new habit of cigar smoking. The divorce and separation were complete before his new gig was finalized, and it made him feel a little better that she would have been proud of him for landing such a plum on her watch. When she frog marched up the back stairs to the carriage house early that evening -- carried both by a modicum of guilt and a dark secret -- he recognized her familiar gait, with YSL pumps pounding the way bravely.

“Hello?” she said.

Her curled brunette hair and buxom figure found their way over Brankton’s stoop like an octogenarian unsure of the distance of the next step. She wore a leopard print dress with pumps that rhymed with “eff” and “me.” Brankton first knew her as a twenty-year-old, when she was sinewy in the arms and thin faced as all women of her age are who have studied ballet for a dozen years, with a shapely figure that she was able to hide beneath most of her outfits as she was a modest, though sexual person. As a dancer, she was ashamed, for a while at least, of her large breasts, the talented dancer’s curse.

After one miscarriage and two decade’s worth of living in her twenties, only the blind could not see a woman to behold and to be held, with strong arms and legs, a curvaceousness that men admired and women envied, and green eyes that could size-up a person and adjudicate in a glance. Their relationship, though, was never about sex. Brankton felt it was about his disappointing her and him resenting like hell the nagging and judging that followed whenever he would make promises that were often not kept because of, well, for various reasons. They had both searched in earnest, treading water for the entirety of their relationship, taking that “deep dive” in counseling sessions into their psyche, looking for that important lever that could rescue them and haul their heavy burdens out of their troubled waters and onto a passing trash barge heading to New Jersey.

He was told by their marriage counselor, Dr. Sheila Stein, that renowned MFT who liked to say “deep dive” at least once a week to them, that he would have had a lot more sex had he kept a lot more promises whenever he complained about the lack of it.

“Huh? Oh, hey …” he feigned surprise at her arrival.

Half the neighborhood could hear her steps and their echo bouncing off of the walls of the too closely positioned homes with their stucco and brick walls, with her as the fleeing bad guy in a Western riding like hell through some winding canyon in the middle of nowhere with a tracking shot above as she outdistances the feckless posse.

“Where you going?” he asked in a tone intimating that one of these things just didn’t belong there.

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Brankton Walks Austin (p2)

Too late. Brankton had already packed-up noise-reducing headphones, a next gen iPhone, a tin of Macanudos for smoking after the show, a Montblanc fountain pen, the Wall St. Journal and a GQ with Eva Mendes on the cover (whom he went to undergrad with) into his leather satchel in record -- and it must be said, Dear Reader -- stealthy time. His back was already to Jackie as he headed out toward the doorway that led to the main dining room. Behind him lay two ten-dollar bills occupying their own little competing pile, face-up with two dead, white male Sec. Treasury Hamiltons (illegitimate bastard child that he was) enjoying the view.

“Pussy,” she said as quietly yet forcefully as she could muster, seeing now for the first time the family that had front row seats to her “blue” performance. She also saw clearly Brankton swing a hand behind his head with a middle-finger salute to show his appreciation for their conversation that never really started.

Out on 6^th St. Brankton stripped off his sweater, tied it around his waist, and hoped his sense of direction was true. The right arm of his aviator sunglasses in his mouth showed a decade’s worth of teeth marks, while the left was as new as the day his ex-wife had bought them for him.

He hated confrontations and heated conversations, which is most likely why he was still single. His older brother, the one who was a borderline sociopath (somehow, Brankton drove his older brother to this border often in their childhood), had once beaten him to within an inch of his life when he was ten year’s old because Brankton had discovered and eaten his brother’s entire Almond Roca stash. His brother simply followed the gold foil wrapper trail back to its source and found a contented if not bloated Brankton sitting on the couch watching a rerun of Highway Patrol starring Broderick Crawford, that porcine-looking actor with a waddle that wobbled every time he barked his lines. That was the last time Brankton ever talked to his brother-the-rabbi of his own accord, who now has a congregation in upstate New York, and by all accounts weighs over 300 pounds and closely resembles Broderick Crawford with his broad brimmed hats and sizeable waddle of his own that sways whenever he speaks his mellifluous Hebrew sermons.

The theme song for an NBC hit show began to play from the bottom of his leather messenger bag. Brankton continued walking and dug around inside his bag until his fingers felt the familiar plastic of an Apple-made Steve Jobs-designed product. Each time he swung his arm around inside his bag, he was reminded of the thousands of times his mother and wife had whisked hands around their own purses, with that rustling sound of hard and soft objects rolling over each other like so many socks and thongs and jeans in a dryer.

“Yeah,” Brankton said to his assistant. “Are you at work?”

“Yes,” she said. “Remember you were supposed to call me when you landed?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked.”

“Are you still going to see that guy tonight?” she asked. “The one that Pat O’ from UTA asked you to see?” Brankton pulled out the coverage of the script his assistant prepped for him earlier in the week. “Is it really this good?” he wondered.

“It’s the best thing UTA has sent us this year. Best script I’ve ever read. So, yeah, it’s pretty good.” His assistant was an MBA grad from Wharton who was probably one year from landing an incredibly high-paying job herself if Brankton didn’t get fired before she could transition out and up. "So, did you actually read the script, and not just the coverage?" she asked.

Brankton, as an exec at NBC overseeing “current comedy" didn't actually read spec scripts for development. However, as certain gigs go, this position at NBC was tenuous at best because of several seasons reflecting NBC’s ratings nadir, and Brankton was ready to develop some hits if he could. The low ratings weren't Brankton’s fault; he transitioned into this job after a merger of several companies that landed him atop the pile of mid-level execs as VP Current Comedy. Salary above $300k, and a staff of two talented and incredibly loyal assistants, it was hard not to like his “new” role. 18 months later, and Brankton knew his head was on the chopping block if things didn't change. When times are tough, it's better to ask forgiveness rather than permission which is why he and Team Brankton were now looking to land new writers and producers for development deals for the Peacock Network which was outside of his normal purview. It was a desperate move that reflected Brankton's and NBC's contretemps.

Please find Part 3 here to continue reading

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