The Exlusive Interview

by Kate Braverman

What do you think of Los Angeles?
Los Angeles has a rancid gleam like spoiled lemons. It coats everything in a sort of bad childhood waxy-veneer flashback. It smells of ash in August when oranges look like eyes bulging in alleys above singed hibiscus. You’re hungry. You want to eat them but they taste like chalk and make you thirsty. The sun here laminates you like photographs stuck between cellophane. People keep cemeteries in scrapbooks, little prisons they show to strangers. The images are leached and greasy. They could be anyone. You could buy them in a thrift store for a quarter and pretend they’re your relatives. Los Angeles reminds me of children in foster homes at nightfall, when they take their clothes off. Things with ropes and pieces of metal are done to them in added-on garages with the freeway rushing in the background like a cheap soundtrack. It’s in sync, but it has no meaning.

Is there more to this yellow? Did it inspire you to become a platinum blonde?
It’s not platinum, which sounds like constellations and redemption. It’s another yellow entirely. It’s asthma yellow. It comes from rotting oranges and camera flashes that permanently scar your face. It leaks from clusters of stucco bungalows that remind me of blisters and the lumps you get on your lips from kissing the wrong people. These are the new trailer parks with sheetrock and metal balconies where the sun is never in remission. Inside, people pretend to live. The radio poisons them. They come here after they lose the farm, after divorce and small-town disgrace. Los Angeles is the last outpost. It’s where to go after heart attacks and cancer. The last spasm with an ocean view.

Has your childhood affected your choices, both on and off the big screen?
Everyone knows about the uncles who fondled my breasts. They kissed my seven-year-old nipples and they got hard like marbles. A pulse like tiny moons rose from my chest. Then I knew I was a bad girl. I would always be a bad girl. It was like a private carnival just for me. There were balloons and streamers and birthday cakes with my new name in neon-pink letters. And no one could tell me no.

It’s been said that you are an example of the new phenomenon of personal history fusing with the sanctity of fame, gathering a critical mass and actually transforming public perception. Are we really “seeing” you through biography?
I have no idea what you’re talking about.

What’s your secret?
The divinity of accident. You take a bus to Hollywood and become a star. Anyone can do this. You don’t have to be born a countess or go to Harvard. There’s a truth beyond this, more fundamental. It’s a stained yellow lie. How to stay thin, get pills for insomnia and nerves. How to buy remedies at truck stops and under bridges. You learn illicit dialects and how to gesture with your fingers. The cinema teaches you. Then you get money. Your alias becomes permanent. You forget your hometown and it forgets you. Women who live in trailers and bungalows, women who change their names to those of saints and movie stars and flowers know. Ask Barbara and Tallulah and Jasmine.

What do they know?
Perfume is the oil of this and all other worlds. It’s always the hour of the concubine. It’s an afternoon of incineration. I rake my sins in like poker chips, silver dollars. My defects are monumental. I am bigger than buildings. I wear colors there are no names for, like whiskey, corn bread, amaranth, and the interior of flame. The women leaning on balconies wearing slips and names they weren’t born with know. They listen to the radio, glance at weeds. It’s the edge of fall and they’re not safe. Down the block, the river is falling. Stones know too much. Promises break like old branches, all the marrow leaking out. The air is fluid. I call my lies tributaries. I think myself an ocean. Swim to me. I can decipher the center of blue. I’ve memorized the elements. It’s just a script in blue chalk. Quiet harbor, a woman drinking from a porcelain cup. She is thinking of avalanches and amputation. That’s what women do beside lagoons and swimming pools. Do you imagine they actually read LIFE and consider fingernail polish?

Tell me about your shoes.
They clack on pavement, stilettos, yes, like a confusion of asphalt and thunder. They’re shoes to kneel in. In this town, you open your mouth and prayer goes down your throat and you don’t gag. You learn to vomit and smile simultaneously. And to wear the skin of animals, mink and fox. I can make my eyes the color of tragedy, a worn quarry-slate blue, enormous as a winter ocean. Or opening your enamel, it-was-a-gift compact and seeing no reflection. The keys don’t fit. The mail gets sent back. No answer. I begin to suspect I’m dead.

How old are you?
Jesus, it’s still that soiled amber out there. It’s an afternoon of corset fittings and frayed antiques. It’s always Thursday, pawn shops, a piece of ruined lace like nicotine on a stagehand’s teeth. There is no absolution, only increments of ravaged brass laying over the lawns, concrete and oleander. There are only transitions of necessity that break like paper bridges. My skin is a canvas like lampshades and borrowed opera shawls. I am not becoming enraged and vague. I did not ask if it was raining. Are you crazy? I am older than you are. I was born older than you.

What do you dream?
Last night, I knew the dreams of a serial killer. He sees mother carrying a wicker basket of sea-blue towels and just-picked apples, skin translucent as an infant’s. He rubs the apples mother carries, suddenly aroused. He knows what this means. It’s an image to remember with a knife. He’ll tattoo this on a six-year-old. Babette. Danielle. The sisters with yellow braids on the other side of the wire fence. I am not speaking of myself, no.

They say you are often late on the set. Is this true?
They give me a script like they’re doing me a favor. I’m the broad in the piece. I’m not satisfied. I want answers. I want to know why they invented rituals and calendars and machine guns. But the scripts are always the same. Mouth to yellow mouth. Call me dog and I bark. Wrap me in rags and tell me I’m beautiful. I’d like to tell them a few things. There is cinnamon in the well. Small cities float at the edge. It’s a day to bathe in almond, in the pond under magenta maple leaves and cathedral bells. Then they say I am late. Everyone is waiting, staring at me, angry. I’m astonished. I don’t even know these people.

Has love proved to be a disappointment?
Love is a form of contagion. The concubine knows, rinsing ginger from her hair on stalled afternoons. You can get trapped in amber. It’s important to be backlit and electric. I eat light bulbs that sting. It’s an interior tattoo, a road map to where I really live, strangling in static salt-breeze with too much wind and not enough skirt. You meet someone. And it’s not a night or a season. It’s a felony.

What are you regrets?
I have remorse, sure. I didn’t save enough summer, when my arms were tanned like adobe, clay pots, and the leather of saddlebags. I stood by Santa Monica Bay with my lips like burned camellias, with the water a drained, anemic blue like a sequence of stillborn waves near my feet. I didn’t have my stilettos. Perhaps I lost them. Sunset was a smeared iodine and I wondered what I did wrong. It was a paralyzed dusk, heavy with longing and loss, smelling like a two-day-old bruise, a blue tatoo. The world was a harbor where my ship never sailed. I wanted a benediction. I was quiet. I held my breath. I waited for revelation, some indication, however remote. I wished on stars. I was deliberate and graceful. I whispered. I didn’t break a single glass. I was careful with my shadows and the shapes my hands made. I forgot to be brazen. Nothing. Just palms in wind, ragged and exhausted. The same mute pause. And someone lied when they said I was wearing just panties and a bra....

Kate Braverman (ZYZZYVA 38) maintains a pied-a-terre in San Francisco. Her most recent book is The Incantation of Frieda K (Seven Stories Press, New York).