Dark Sparkler Read online

  All the children knew better.

  Something was strange

  about the fleshed thing

  that lived at the end of their street.

  One of the children,

  a young boy named Bruce,

  called her Francestein.

  Francestein.

  3.

  Bruce and his mother sat in the living room

  watching an episode of This Is Your Life.

  The guest, Frances Farmer, listened to the voice of a surprise guest

  who would reveal himself as an old friend.

  The old friend ran out onto the stage

  and threw his arms around Frances.

  The audience applauded.

  Frances mirrored the man,

  doing as he did,

  moving her arms

  in his way,

  feeling as he felt.

  Bruce watched her nose

  sniff at the side of the friend’s head,

  her tongue like a worm, searching

  for a way in.

  Quentin Dean

  Was last seen in the last scene

  of “A Person Unknown.”

  Could be overheard offering lasso lessons

  to the mortician on his day off.

  Kept a box of black widow spiders as pets.

  Fed them fresh aphids from the bellies of calla lilies.

  Once poured a bottle of Campari in the kiddie pool,

  dared Patrick to dive.

  Broke my brother’s heart

  like the shell of an egg between meals.

  Never spoke of it again.

  Insisted we make the soup from scratch.

  Told us if we wanted to fly in our dreams

  we must eat cayenne pepper before bed.

  Had a doppelgänger in Nebraska

  who sketched missing horses for a living.

  Took too many mushrooms one summer, spent an afternoon reading

  Scripture and Meisner leaning over

  an ice tray in the freezer.

  Sent a care package of bologna packed with frozen books.

  Sent all the historians thank-you notes on stationery

  bearing their mothers’ names.

  Sent her biographer to a mental institution.

  Kissed me in a neon alley in fake Paris.

  In between Russian roulette’s bullets.

  All up against the fortune-teller’s window.

  Walked the walk.

  Talked the dirty talk.

  Tongue-tied the sword swallower,

  made a cherry stem out of him.

  Never tied the knot.

  Had four children.

  Was survived by three children.

  Went by the name Andrea.

  Was also known as Palmer.

  Will be remembered as Dolores.

  A.k.a. Corky.

  Gave me the nickname Blue Kid.

  Is still alive.

  Never lived.

  Epilogue

  © CSA Images/Archive/Getty Images

  True or False:

  The actress

  The batshit catalyst

  The spoiled brat

  The narcissist

  Mommy’s child

  Bonnie’s employer

  The most selfish friend

  The indecisive twentysomething

  The ambitious auditioner

  The adult ingenue

  The space case

  The one who is always late

  The flake

  The girlfriend you can’t count on

  The girlfriend you can take advantage of

  The self-absorbed whiner

  The gutless tearjerker

  The stunted mirror lurker

  The same ol’ same ol’

  The one who got away

  The one who is going away

  The fiery liar

  The uninspired for hire

  The networker extraordinaire

  The soul-broke millionaire

  The horror movie captivator

  The serial masturbator

  The serial cereal eater

  The best fucking kisser

  The second best fuck since Tinder

  The temper igniter

  The nameless woman

  Amber Tamblyn

  The abortionist

  The fortuneless extortionist

  The breadwinner

  The dead ringer

  Fake Emma Stone

  The poet

  The author

  died during the writing of this book.

  Facts about Brittany Murphy for Poem journal entry June 22, 2010

  • She died in the shower.

  • Her film Uptown Girls grossed $44,617,342.

  • Her film Abandoned was released posthumously, straight to DVD.

  • My old agent told me no one was allowed to call her house before 10:00 A.M.

  • She was 5' 2" tall.

  • She was diagnosed with a heart murmur as a child.

  • She was dropped from the film Happy Feet due to rumored drug abuse.

  • Her cause of death was pneumonia.*

  • Brittany wrote poetry.

  I took a break from writing about the dead

  and drinking from writing about the dead

  to walk around my childhood neighborhood.

  Everything’s for rent. Or for sale, for ten

  times the amount it’s worth.

  Palm trees are planted in front of a mural

  of palm trees under the Ocean Park Bridge.

  In the painting, the metal horses of a carousel are breaking

  free and running down the beach. Why didn’t I leave

  my initials in cement

  in front of my parents’ apartment in the eighties?

  Nikki had the right idea in ’79.

  I walk by a basketball court, where men play

  under the fluorescent butts of night’s cigarette.

  I could have been any of their wives,

  at home, filling different rooms in different houses

  with hopeful wombs. Agreeing on paint color

  samples with their mothers in mind.

  I’ll bet their wives let their cats go out

  hunting at night like premonitions of future sons.

  They will worry, stare out the front window,

  pray that privilege doesn’t bring home bad news

  like some wilted head of a black girl in nascent jaws.

  To say nothing of the owl who’s been here for years. I hear him

  when I’m trying to write about the deaths I’ve admired.

  I hear him when the clothed me no longer recognizes

  the naked. I hear him while writing and shitting and sleeping

  where my mother’s seven guitars sleep.

  I hear him in my parents’ house,

  their walls covered in my many faces,

  traces of decades of complacence.

  My childhood neighborhood is a shrine to my success,

  and I’m a car with a bomb inside, ready

  to pull up in front of it and stop

  pretending.

  From: Amber Rose

  to: Mindy Nettifee

  date: Tue, Jan 12, 2009 at 1:27 PM

  subject: Saturn’s return.

  . . . I know this is gonna be a bad year for me. Last year was a bad year for all my friends and I felt for them. And I felt mine coming. And here it is. I’m just going to embrace it and hope a spark ignites.

  I think I could very possibly be heading toward a full-scale breakdown in the next few months. I know, this is out of nowhere, right? I’ve been hiding it, I think. Even from myself. I am so creatively low and impotent, I know I have to make a move but in what direction . . . I don’t know. Where do I start? Get rid of Mom’s tchotchkes in my house? Get rid of ? Fire my agency? Go to London with David for a month and get some clarity or come back to L.A. for a month and find some clarity? What the fuck is clarity?
Can I just go the way of Brittany Murphy and say fuck it, do drugs until I drop and call it a day? What’s the point of taking care of yourself if you don’t even care about yourself? . . .

  Great Names for Fake Actresses 2009

  Linda Liftstrom

  Ivory Soapra

  Jan Power Strength

  Maple Tomahockette

  Rasputina

  Iwana Oscar

  Mesmerelda Burn

  Shiver Softgold

  I passed

  but it was offered to me

  but I passed

  I was heavily considered for it

  I killed in the room

  but they went in a different direction

  my agent couldn’t get to it

  she had to be at Amy Adams’s baby shower

  but if I manage expectations in my thirties

  one day my agent might send an Edible Arrangement

  to my baby shower

  like Sam What’s His Face did for me

  after The Grudge 2 soared in dollar bills

  but sank in reviews.

  When I went to Japan to shoot that film,

  the director asked me to lose weight

  through his interpreter. Every day I ate

  the ironed meat and beard clippings of an iceberg wedge

  off the bread of a Subway sandwich.

  I should’ve passed

  but it was offered to me

  but I should have

  an actress who is very famous now

  was heavily considered for it then

  she killed in the room

  but they went in a different direction

  her agent couldn’t get to it

  the agent had to be at my poetry reading

  but the actress managed expectations

  in her twenties

  and one day all the agents sent her rare orchids

  and licked the stiff slits of her red carpet genius

  and poured Up and Coming

  all over my Down and Going

  the auction of our bodies

  passing each other by

  between buyers’ hands

  down and going

  going

  gone.

  From: Amber Rose

  to: “tamblyn, russ”

  date: Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 6:36 PM

  subject: Papa.

  I hope that you are not disappointed in me.

  I hope you aren’t taking this show not happening as hard as I’m taking it.

  I need you to not give up in believing in me.

  I need you to help me believe in myself.

  I need you to not hit the bottle and stare at the television and be depressed the way I am going to do tonight.

  I need you to be strong for me. Strong in the way that perhaps, when you ever felt like a failure, you could not be for yourself.

  I need you to toast Mom to all that I have done in this short lifetime and say, my time will come.

  I love you

  Facts about Dana Plato for Poem December 2011

  • Her film Pacino Is Missing was never released.

  • She was fired from Diff’rent Strokes after becoming pregnant.

  • Dana appeared on Howard Stern’s radio program, where callers assailed her with comments like has-been.

  • Dana died of a drug-overdosed suicide the next day in her mother’s RV. It was Mother’s Day.

  • A friend of Shappy’s has a recording of a frantic Dana Plato on a tape from an old message machine. She left it the day before she died.

  • Dana’s son committed suicide almost exactly twenty-five years later. It was Mother’s Day.

  • My birthday often falls on Mother’s Day. It is always the day before my mother’s birthday.

  I’m the war I want

  to end.

  A woman of her word

  not spoken.

  I’m the war I want

  to end.

  Alone in my house, burning

  all the wood and the bridges.

  I’m the war I want

  to end.

  The persona, My Sharona,

  phony bologna.

  I’m the war I want

  to end.

  You’re good for nothing

  and nothing’s good for you.

  I’m the war I want

  to end.

  James Franco says

  write me off like a sunsetting trend.

  But that’s not a war I want

  to start.

  That’s the war he wants

  to pretend.

  I’m the war I want

  to end.

  From: Amber Rose

  to: Beau Sia

  date: Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 6:28 PM

  subject: Here is what I started writing to Mindy

  . . . I am ashamed to admit that I hate myself so much as to look in the eyes of the man I love and hate him for loving me today. To pity his love of such a failure. If I could close my eyes right now and never open them again, I would. I would do that.

  I’m trying to write your poem, Martha Mansfield. But I can’t memorize your lines. You are the last on my list of actresses. The last one owed her ode. Something about a hoop skirt that caught on fire in 1923 and seared an epitaph into our memories. Only no one remembers you, respectfully. No one will remember me, either. We’re last spring’s birds’ nests. We’re the venison at the steak dinner. That’s all I got. I’m fresh out of sober soliloquies.

  No more metaphors, no more similes. (See how I did that?)

  Let me search you on Wikipedia, see if I can find some oil for the engine. But before I do, how about another pat on the ass for this glass of comatose that’s roofied my throat? Do you think maybe Charles Bukowski once drank this same thing and said that same thing, only without red lipstick? I took a half of a half of a little pill, Martha, I must confess. Now the keyboard’s letters are so soft. Double-you. Eye. Kay. Eye. So this is what it would feel like to run fingers over the top of rush-hour traffic! That long school bus space bar. The little black limos and hearses at either end, celebrating in their own ways. The keyboard feels like a thousand silk tiles. Like the tops of a hundred baby tarps at an Ant Art Fair.

  Pea. Ee. Dee. Eye. Ay.

  It says you’d wanted to be an actress since the age of fourteen. When I turned fourteen, Martha, I wanted to retire from acting. I had already lived so much. I got my belly button pierced and crashed my parents’ car. A guy went down on me for the first time. He had a labret piercing. I had slender arms, long and soft like a stream of milk into a baby’s mouth. I was young. Now I’m just still young. I had a baby’s face. Now I’m just baby-faced.

  One night at a Hollywood party I met Leonardo DiCaprio. Think Buster Keaton, only minus some bravery. Leo didn’t flirt with me that night. I lined my lips with brown eyeliner like the cholas I grew up with in Venice Beach and wore a choker of silver plastic stars around my neck. I wasn’t his type. He wasn’t mine. But we did dance together for a few minutes. He in his black shirt and backward baseball cap, me in cargo pants and a red tube top. Shit, you probably don’t know what that is, Martha. It’s like a tiara for your tits.

  After the party, my friends and I picked up some wannabes and some wannados, minus Leo, though I think a friend of his ended up with us. I don’t remember how we all got to the beach from there but the wind was in our favor, the amateur tequila throwing up in our buckets. We picked up another guy from the party who was even younger than us, who smelled like lemonade aftershave. His eyes were big sapphires resting in platinum cheeks. His grandmother must’ve been Elizabeth Taylor, we were certain. Our coreless trunks struck partial headstands in the shifting billions of beige, and our bras played fetch with the jaws of the Pacific. A sand-ball fight seemed like the right plan. Our only towels, each other’s clothes. We slid onward and over ourselves, toward the light of the pier, toward the frozen fireworks and whatever might be coming next. I was hanging on to Not Leo, and another fr
iend—Sonya I think her name was—clung onto the night’s biceps, testing our curfew’s strength. And you, Martha, making us laugh, pointing a finger at the crooked pier pillars holding up the rickety wood extension. “Don’t sneeze,” you commanded. “The whole thing might collapse in an explosion of air hockey pucks and baby shoes!” Your white dress crystallized with seawater, your plum waist belt now in your hand, dragging through the foam behind you like a soft tail.

  Remember how you took us under the pier, where lovers and homeless huddled in a unified effort for warmth? In the low violet light, I searched a boy’s face for lips and leaned into my first kiss. I opened my eyes for a moment and saw you over his shoulder. When I closed them and felt his soft mouth splash into mine, our salts not saved for the sea, I imagined I was kissing you, Martha. I was kissing you.

  “He can tell you can and will write ‘blammo’ poems (I told him I’d quote him), but that these were not them (for him).”

  —Rejection letter from well-known publication

  “You should write under a pseudonym. People will take you more seriously.”

  —Well-known older male poet from New York City,

  over a plate of expensive cheeses

  © CSA Images/Archive/Getty Images

  Dear men in Congress,

  You think banning birth control is conservative progress?

  You think sanctioning my ovaries won’t bring me to violence?

  How about I tell you what to do with your caucus?

  It is now illegal to think about me topless.

  To keep your lotion where your socks is.

  To refer to powerful women as monsters like those jocks at Fox did.

  I am not afraid to cock block dick,

  to sew an instructional video for rape kits to your eyelids and make you

  watch it,

  I’ll take away your golf clubs and gun clips,

  I’m gonna fix this by getting YOU fixed!

  Enough’s enough, kid,

  come on stop that,

  if you want to make this Law

  then here’s my Law Rap:

  You have the right to get strangled by a bra strap,

  anything you sexualize with can and will get shot at

  with a Glock cap,

  I’ll shove your life in a duffel bag,

  hand it over to a sex trafficker, let him smuggle that.

  You wanna cuddle, Dad?