Brankton Walks Austin (p6)

“What now?” An incredulous Jackie shook her head. “How about now you don’t offer my taxi services to complete strangers,” she said. "I might be the Sabbath Goy-toy, but I'm your Goy-toy." The designated and occasional Gentile driver for Nelson showed her irritation.

“Jackie, chill. I bought your breakfast again. And, stop saying Goy, you sound ridiculous. Let’s just see where big man needs to go,” Nelson and Jackie looked at Brankton in unison. Jackie worked the convertible's clutch, turning the car off. Her flexed runner’s calf muscle pulled her sock down just enough to reveal the top of a tattoo, six tiny numbers from her grandmother's Auschwitz internment as a non-Jewish political prisoner. As freshmen at the University of Texas, Nelson and Jackie became best friends the semester he asked her about the tat.

Brankton didn't want the ride. He was about to head-off for one of two places on his list before heading over to The Driskill to check in and get his car. The other person in their group reappeared and walked down the driveway halfway.

“Okay, kids, all set,” he said. “Thanks again for the lift.” He waved them goodbye.

“Dad, come meet someone,” said Nelson. Nelson’s father obviously wasn't from the not-so-secret society of same sexed singles breakfast earlier in the day. Brankton had gotten the wrong end of the stick on that one.

Nelson switched to kneeling on the seat as he directed his dad over towards Brankton. His long frame and muscular shoulders and arms tested the Mini car seat’s integrity as he pushed forward over the headrest with folded arms. Several women and one male admirer had suggested that Nelson get a tattoo on one of his oversize they-make-me-weak-in-the-knees shoulders. Jackie also thought it the perfect canvass for some ink, like some “baller in the NBA.” Nelson would only answer this chorus of devotees that he wasn't about to put ink on the temple of God.

Brankton and Nelson’s dad met at the rear bumper like the Union and Central Pacific railroads coming together, two men running on the same gauge tracks, but most likely not quite on the same page in life. The Rabbi, a man of faith, and Brankton a man of what exactly? In search of meaning through his father’s faith, with his father’s off-the-rack suit of Judaism not quite fitting as snug as he would’ve hoped.

“Very nice to meet you,” said the Rabbi. “Rabbi Yauch.”

“You, too,” said Brankton trying not to say too much.

Up front Jackie said to Nelson under her breath, “I’m a yuck mouth, ‘cuz I don’t brush!” mimicking a PSA from the ‘80s.

“Shut it.” said Nelson.

“So, how do you know my son and Jacqueline?” asked the Rabbi with a bit of twang, surprising Brankton who expected a bit more of a New Yorker, Yiddish sort of vibe.

“I don’t, really,” said Brankton.

Jackie piped in more loudly this time up to the sky, “He flipped me off, Rabbi! In front of a young family, on the Sabbath no less!”

Brankton shifted on his feet a bit embarrassed and tried to put a hand on the back of the car to act more casual but he misjudged the height slipping off the well-polished ride. The Rabbi jumped in lending a hand.

“Jacqueline, is that what I saw you doing just a moment ago? A reenactment of this alleged malfeasance?” he asked. Jackie looked about curious. Nelson tapped her and pointed aloft to a pole-mounted security camera some 30 feet in the air.

“Full HD security video feed. Dad had it put in last week and can check-in from the house or even his Smartphone,” said Nelson. “Two more in the back”

“So, are you a Jew also?” the Rabbi asked as he let go of Brankton’s arm. Brankton was surprised by the directness of the query which is why he probably answered so directly in reply.

“Well, my father was a Jew, so I guess I’m not really a Jew by birth, but I have been trying to follow in my own way by keeping Shabbat as best I can.”

“As should we all,” said the Rabbi.

“Dude, are you going to … what’s your name, by the way?” asked Nelson sensing a moniker was sorely lacking amongst the group.

“Brankton,” he said. Brankton thought the less people who knew his name, the less likely his being hurt. He had a belief that when meeting strangers if he gave his name they would instantly Google or search public records to get to bank accounts, family member addresses, and college transcripts. He was often the guy at the party that kept his back to the wall searching sight lines for ill-intentioned interlopers and exits should the need arise.

“Brankton?!” said Jackie to herself adjusting the mirror to look out the back.

“Brankton -- huh, that’s cool. So, Brankton, what, are you like walking all over Austin observing the Sabbath? We saw you a few hours ago on 6^th and now over here. That’s like walking a marathon to catch up on some rest,” Nelson put finger quotes up for emphasis mocking the observant non-Jewish Jew.

Rabbi Yauch was a tall man, who looked every bit the part of a movie star styled cowboy, with several discernible features similar to his obviously racially mixed son. Brankton wanted to ask about this, but thought against it because, one, it would be rude as shit. And, two, it would only delay his absolute desire to be the hell on his way, and presently two was much more on his mind than one.

“Brankton, if I may, please forgive my son’s bluntness. However, for Reform Jews, your Jewishness, if I may use an awkward term, is as secure as mine or my wife’s or that of my son’s,” said the Rabbi. That last part raised more questions for Brankton.

Jackie was still watching from the rear-view mirror when she decided to switch her vantage point as well by kneeling like Nelson. The two of them appeared as kids looking out the back of their parent’s car at the local drive-in movie theater.

“Even without converting?” said Brankton.

“It’s certainly not required, unless you seek to return to Israel. But here in the US, your efforts would certainly fall within the practices of Reform Jews like us here at Temple Beth Selah,” said the Rabbi. Brankton was convinced the Rabbi was really working an angle here for his membership and commitment of money, but then the Rabbi asked, “Where are you visiting from, Brankton?”

Instead of asking how he knew, Brankton simply said, “Los Angeles,” and assumed that it must have been his debonair manner and swarthy good looks that shouted “visiting Angelino!” to inquiring Rabbis.

“Oh, shit!” Jackie turned and slid down her seat adjusting the mirror again.

“Los Angeles. A wonderful place to visit,” said the Rabbi with a wink.

Brankton felt sure cowboy Moises Yauch (“Mo” to his friends, Goy and Jew alike) was making a joke of some kind about L.A. not being a place to live. Maybe this was what Reform Texas Jews looked like. Brankton felt sure that the Yauchs must be the exception.

“Have you traveled here today to Austin for business?” asked the Rabbi.

“Yeah, flew in early this morning for a meeting,” said Brankton. “But, I really should be going now.”

“Well, we've already said Kiddush, my son and I, and I’m having several friends over for an after service luncheon. Why don’t we continue our conversation out in the courtyard?” said the Rabbi. Mo-the-Rabbi poked a finger up toward the synagogue like a man pointing out his choice of doughnut to his local baker.

“Dad, I told you that Jackie and I are going to Barton Springs for a swim at the pool and then we have some things to do tonight,” said Nelson.

The Rabbi gave a fatherly shushing with his hand, clearly the paterfamilias even to 6’4” scions. “Nobody was asking you, kiddo,” said the Rabbi with a bit more of his Texan drawl creeping in again. Unbeknownst to Brankton, the Rabbi played strong safety for the University of Texas, still holding the record for most tackles in a single game -- 28 tackles, 18 solo. He was used to telling large men how to behave on and off the field. Brankton pictured the Rabbi saying Kiddush as John Wayne with leather and hat and spurs, he thought he might like to hear how that would sound.

Click here to continue reading part 6.

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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?!"

Click here to continue reading part 6.

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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.

Click here to continue reading part 5.

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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.

Please find Part 4 here to continue reading

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