Lauren SPITZBERG

Waiting For Room Service: A French Existentialist's Exile In Southern California

Four long white toes wriggled out from under the sand. Tersalt had chopped off the big toe, of his right foot, in a paroxysm of passion, and had sent it off in a ring box to the questionable lady he had met at the Rue De Fin. A few days before his flight, the ring box, had returned, still containing the digit: Return to sender, address unknown, no such number, no such phone.

Now, as Tersalt lay, far away, in Hermosa Beach, California, he wondered where and in what condition it would be. Tersalt's well shaped mouth twisted into a strange smile. He put his socks back on. As a boy in Leon he could remember the prisoners clanking past his house—on their way to work duty. The cuffed and shackled men would sing a tune he grew to know well:

Starve me, whip me, break my bones,
Laugh hearty as you hear our moans.
Cruelty can take no toll
When you have a hardy soul.

Tersalt laughed dryly as a paroxysm of weakness made him shiver. The prisoners had been so stupid; their doggerel—so prosaic. Tersalt had grown up to be a French existentialist who specialized in the soul.A siren wailed in the distance sending Tersalt's heart into palpitations. Had they found him? He looked outside the window to see if they were coming for him. He saw that it was only an ambulance. Now, we shall leave our hero, under
his blanket. And go back two weeks ago or to the beginning of the end.

Tersalt had asked the cab driver outside of LAX to take him to a reasonably priced,( He had overestimated old lady Dusault's treasure) clean dwelling. The cab driver had taken him to a Howard Johnson's . The staff looked like earthbound stewards and stewardesses, the décor a fruity blend of colors such as he had never seen: aged frog greens and overripe tangerines. Tersalt had
concluded that this Howard Johnson, like America, had much money but little taste.

When he arrived, the woman, at the front desk, had handed him the key with a smile, a smile that struck him as odd. It wasn't a warmth or pathos or an insincerity. It wasn't anything poetical usually attributed to the bearing of teeth but the very teeth themselves. So white. So white! A belly of a fish looked dingy by comparison.

The tag on her bosom identified this stranger as "Daisy". Was she lonely? Was she true? Behind the gleam did cruel cuspids lie? Daisy is a type of weed, he postulated, and walked towards the elevators.

"Would you have rather been a rose?" he called over his shoulder, hoping to catch sight of those wonderful tiles just once more.

Daisy pursed her lips and started punching a keyboard. Tersalt smiled sadly and forgave her. Such teeth must be displayed only when necessary. Too much air might mar them.

Again, Tersalt stretched out on the thin orange bedspread. His mind wandered back to Sophie, sitting at the Café De Voire, laughing fully as he made his way towards her, her jagged yellow teeth unafraid of the elements. The fever that had been lying dormant came knocking at his head and peels of moisture broke through his skin. He stared at a vase of plastic flowers. How different was this lodging from any other? Most certainly it was quite unlike the last one: Madame Dusault's boarding house with its rusty bedsprings and tiny trellised windows. The bare floors that creaked, old Dusault banging on the ceiling as he paced day and night, night and day-thinking and thinking and thinking.

"What's a young man doing up there all day and all night? Nosy Madame Dusault would shout, when she caught him sneaking out at dawn to slip Sophie a note or to filch an egg.

"I am thinking," Tersalt would respond.

Tersalt would scurry past the querulous old bat and think about what she had just said. But this room, this room with it's comical colors, its mewling air conditioner seemed to mock his whole purpose of which he wasn't sure of yet but knew involved a lot of thinking.Images of Sophie, fantasies of the questionable lady at the Rue De fin, and the enormity of what had transpired at Madame Dusault's grew hazy in this environment. Even a simple rumination on Daisy wilted in this stale soil.

Days passed in a haze of channel changes. As a child and then a teenager, Tersalt had never been fond of the picture shows. It distracted him from the torments of youth. Yet now, he found himself cursing rabidly at the Preview Channel. The drama promised to appear on Channel thirty-eight, the drama that he had been waiting for since noon was nowhere to be found. He searched the hotel's complimentary cable guide to find confirmation.

38- Tattered Innocence
Drama 2:00
(1996) A teenage girl (Michelle Vagner) gets lost in the uncaring world of foster care. Tim: Shawn Hessy

He flipped the remote back to channel thirty-eight. A banjo's sad strings plucked up as a young blonde walked up a dirt road. The title letters rolled. Tersalt held his breath as the title letters rolled—"Tattered Innocence". The relief he felt was unnatural. He glanced at the phone sheepishly. In another few moments he would have phoned the front desk to complain. Tersalt was not a
stupid man. He knew that all the strained American politeness could not mask the irritation, dislike, and Anti-Gaelic sentiments that were spreading throughout the staff.

There had been little time for reflection, yet he had learned a startling revelation about himself: he was a horridly impatient man. After ordering from room service he'd find himself staring at the clock's black hands until they seemed to reach out and propel him to lift the receiver and inform Daisy (Who he now considered an enemy) that he had been waiting on lunch for far too long. Just as he was about to berate her in French, the doorbell would ring, bearing the boy with the tray. Tersalt blamed his behavior on the fever. It was maddening his mind as the room service hamburgers were defiling his body. Had he done what he had done just to meet his fate as "that fat French man in room 403" ? Tersalt decided to leave this godless place right after the movie. Tersalt lost faith, when the leering foster brother offered the blonde girl a cigarette, It was quite obvious what would occur next: The little virgin
would accept, cough violently, then smoothly inhale the devil's breath into her waiting lungs, and exhale it as a jaded vixen.

"A million different variations, one plot," Tersalt sighed, "much like life itself."

He threw his forearm wearily over his eyes and flashed back to his little garret on the corner of the Fin De Gaulle, pacing, pacing back and forth, day and night, thinking, thinking, thinking and something else? What was it? Tersalt jumped off the bed with the self-mocking laugh of one who searches everywhere for the mattress but the bed. "Smoking! Smoking," he gasped, slapping his
forehead. In his fevered state he had not brought cigarettes. He had forgotten to smoke. How much this explained. His mind like a furnace was waiting for its coal. He switched off the TV, the girl was at the last stage (cheek's rouged, eyelids painted) As a gesture of some sort, Tersalt picked up the half-eaten burger and spit into its jangled and red intestines.

Tersalt bought a pack of Marlboro's at the hotel's gift shop and decided to walk towards the beach. Tersalt: the traveler, the thinker, the smoker—ready to meet what must be met and ponder what must be pondered. Tersalt had walked almost twenty blocks without anything to meet. He had smoked ten Marlboros without anything to ponder but the passing cars: shiny, oddly impressive vehicles. Suddenly, he smelled brine and followed its scent down to the Ocean.

Tersalt sat brooding, listening to the ocean: A wave, a crash, a crash a wave—a two-note symphony. He had brooded on beaches before. He had brooded on a beach in Algiers while, Sophie, romped around the water's edge, her pale skin flapping as she ran, bouncing as she bounced. So very different from the two ladies who had just settled near him, to his left. Their flesh did not stray
from its master. Tersalt glanced over and noted how their breasts were like cantaloupes displayed in the open-air markets of Pierre de Luc. Their bosoms did not tilt towards the armpits as Sophie's had when she lay horizontally. These bosoms seemed independent from the torso, like soccer balls that would disengage and roll away if someone patted their backs too hard.

The girl nearest him turned her head and he felt his cheeks flush hotly. He fixed his eyes in another direction. He wondered if he should explain that he was not simply a lecher but a student of the mind, which was inextricably attached to the body.

Tersalt sat up and lit a cigarette. A man was coming towards him. Tersalt inhaled deeply on his cigarette. Ah, could it be another lone traveler? Another searching soul, traipsing through the nettles of his black brain in search of a flashlight?

The man was young with sun kissed hair and a chest that made Tersalt's own grateful for its shirt. The youth sauntered towards the girls. The seemed glad to see him. Three cans were removed from a white box, and passed around. The young man sat beside them and began to tell a story.Tersalt tried to concentrate on the youth's lazy voice and the tale it told. From what Tersalt could gather:

The youth and his chums had gone to a pub, the night before, where they had entered into a contest of who could drink the most. The chum who won had lost consciousness and fell down-face first—into the spillage of his own foam. Or as the boy put it 'He puked something fierce and then passed out.' A barmaid then approached and requested that they take their leave but the group
held it's ground and began banging their mugs on the table. They then began chanting a four-letter indecency or as the boy put it, "Fuck you. " Then, the tavern's proprietor threatened them with imprisonment. The boy fell silent, pretending he could not continue.

"Oh c'mon, and then what happened?" asked one of the girls.

Wearing a wide grin, the boy rose, spun around, pulled down his bathing trunks, and exposed his buttocks. He began to shake them. "Kiss this, that's what I said." The boy said.

The girls burst out into laughter, no doubt from nerves, Tersalt thought. The inappropriate giggles one gets when a man trips over an unforeseen lump in the sidewalk. The mock merriment continued. Tersalt thought that they were really overdoing it.

With a start his heart began thumping, a metaphorical tide had taken over him and no scissoring of his legs or chopping of his arms could save him now. One of the girls squealed, " You are too funny!" And threw her sun cap at the boy. Tersalt watched them snort and warble and he could not understand. The last time he had carried on in such a fashion was when Marmar had taken him to the
puppet shows at the Cirque le fin. He had never made that sound in any sincere form, since. Sophie would laugh like that, but he would cut her off with some tart remark.

He looked solemnly at the indentation in his sock where his toe had once been. The questionable lady at the Rhue De Fin had laughed too when he had told her he would have her .

He had hoped that she would think that it was his own. Instead, she had said, "Ah, le enfant, how original, you must patent it quickly."

He had abandoned Sophie, throttled old lady Dusault, and stolen her hoarded treasures, all for the nameless harlot who had ultimately dismissed him with a curt "Aur voire le enfant."

Tersalt's stomach contracted with an ache unrelated to the physical. He stared shamelessly at the three carefree youths. But beneath the surface, beneath the surface, and at that moment, Tersalt had his last real thought. It was this:

When he had gone to his Mamer with questions and complaints about the mysteries of life, she'd smile her placid smile and say, "Things can always be worse, Tersalt. Just be happy that you are not blind."

He had told her that at least she wasn't deaf. He still remembered the pain as she had lashed her new steel stick against his pelvis.
Slowly, Tersalt stood up and brushed the sand from his trousers.

The phone rang. The woman, who picked it up, sighed deeply.

Lauren Spitzberg was born in Brooklyn. She is now living in Gehonom, California, where she lives a glamorous and fruitful life ... in her sleeping hours. In her waking hours she waits for her comic novel, The Daily Planner, to reach the masses. She illustrates, and has a forthcoming children's book, full of despairing swine, sadsack yaks, a flirtatious fox, and an arrogant frog.

Many of her images are available at www.epictura.com/E.mv?c=spitzberg