Celerity, p.2
CELERITY, page 2
The guys I used to date were all losers, and three of them have been trying to reach me lately. Two of those cheated on me. They all cheat sooner or later. I don’t really care because I’m no longer wired that way, to care. To care about trivial things like love and loyalty and bonding and intimacy. Wiring changed. What’s in the wires changed too.
After my father’s death, after the Darién, I started to understand all this—the mating thing. More like the conquest thing. Always hunting, like an animal. Because they are animals. As am I. Now more than ever. Sensing. Always alert. Defenses up. Threats all around. Predator or prey. No planning. Pheromones. Instinct. Conquest and move on. Biological not emotional. I get that now.
Now they want to cling, now that I’m about to be more famous than Tiger or LeBron. Celerity, the flavor of the manic month.
I need to rework the laces on my new football shoes so they won’t slip.
There’s a knock on the door.
It was my new entourage: my agent, my business manager, my attorney, and my publicist.
Quick updates on a book deal, two book deals, a movie rights deal, interview schedule, endorsement deals, Nike, Adidas. Through sport we have the power to change lives. I had to choose one.
Tie the knots with a second wrap around so they don’t slip.
Red Bull, used to be Gives you Wings. Did you know some guy sued them for false advertising because he drank Red Bull for ten years and he grew no wings or achieved any enhanced performance? No kidding.
Almond Milk? Silky Smooth. Yeah, I’m a vegan, remember, team? Or at least I was. Make those deals. Send me the contracts. I will counter them all. Then counter some more. Want their last best deal, right before they break.
Tie the other shoe. Have two pair of socks on.
Rolex, A Crown for Every Achievement. Okay, good. Porsche Racing, Full spectrum – full synergy. Contract to include products that I want. Products I don’t need. Several. Lots. I have pain and suffering to make up for, goddammit.
Two pair, just enough extra padding with a firm fit so I can cut—double move. Skinny posts.
What about The Ultimate Driving Machine or The Best or Nothing?
Working on it, they said.
Curl route, slant. Jet route. Jet routes.
Stand up. Feel the fit. Adjust the pants. Settle in. Feel loose, quick, agile. I wish I could play with no pads.
And Limitless Freedom?
Who’s that, they asked.
Learjet. Need that. Come on guys, I said.
Adjust the tit guards.
The rest of the companies I can’t remember right now. They’re rattling off, asking me. Enough. White noise. No. No photos in here. Too close. Too personal. Send them my media kit. Have I approved the media kit?
I say thanks for the updates now get the fuck out of here.
They did.
Except for the publicist. Quick view of media kit.
Not now, I say.
Real quick, she says. Just approve the Instagram photos.
Okay, I say. I look at them.
You look like a movie star, she says. You’re the one, the chosen one.
Annie Leibovitz can take some kick-ass photos, huh?
She’s the best, she says. Now take a look at a couple more. The cover photo, the press kit photo, Facebook header banner image photo upload, Twitter cover photo...
I’m gonna slice your jugular with a hangnail, I say.
Okay, she says.
And lick the blood out of the air, the arterial spray.
You’re nervous, now’s not the time, sorry, she says.
You’ll do great, she says. We’re all proud you.
Who’s we? I think. I think it, not say it out loud.
She leaves, thank fucking God.
I hear my breathing. My heart pounding slow and steady. She said I’m nervous. She was nervous. I’m slowing the world down around me while they are all speeding up. I have hundreds of thoughts to their one. I can slip in between their shadows. Stalk like a specter between their spaces.
Another goddamn knock. Locker room time, the towel boy says.
Dick alert off.
I head towards the locker room.
My cleats click on the ceramic and the cement. Click-click. Click-click.
My hunger for turf. Real Kentucky perennial, 6.2 pH bluegrass, dense, durable, luxuriant green with firm terra for holding the hooves.
The smell. Its moisture rising, sucked into my nostrils. Where the gazelles graze. No, where they run. Where the lioness lies in wait in the tall grass. Then stalks. Sees. Smells. Sensing the gazelle. Stalking. They are the water buffaloes, flanked by gazelles, surrounded by zebras and hyenas. I am the lioness.
My cleats click. The halls are crowded. Nikons and Canons click and flash. Click and flash. I smile, major teeth.
I’m holding my helmet. The mane of the lioness.
I enter the locker room. All these water buffaloes clap and cheer and holler. They all are hippos in their suits of armor. These triple XL humanoids, coids, and zoids. The anabolic, catabolic metabolic glycobolic infants, breastfed with sterone protein powder laced with animal part enzyme treatments and creatine fish oil salads. Main-lined branched-chain amino acids. First grade at Fukushima. Mutation middle school, Chernobyl College.
I enter the locker room. An extra-large helping of bespoke; “sophisticated spaces that keep the mind, balanced, sharp and inspired.” Full-grain pull-up vegetable tanned leather from Horween, not the genuine leather crap at Green Bay. It’s a country club for water buffaloes with bling. Buffalo bling.
I have zero bling. What I have is zing.
I see the path right now, from here to there then that way then the other, jukes all the way.
I see my escape route on the other side.
They are high-fiving me and yapping and hollering and grunting, and growling real guttural, slapping down my shoulder pads with blunt force trauma, and I don’t hear a thing.
It’s the real thing. I’m the real thing.
I hear ringing. The ringing in my ears.
I am the lioness.
* * *
The agent stopped the audio.
“The lioness?”
He carried the laptop and flash drives to his living room, set them on the coffee table, went to his bar, made himself a drink, returned to the living room, and clicked on the first file.
Celerity File 1
Whenever you conduct an experiment, keep good notes, log your work. Keep a diary. You are a scientist, my father would say.
So, this is my first entry, and I will make up for some of the recent past, in this diary, or log, or journal, or lab notes. Whatever this is.
He said you must keep good notes so your colleagues can follow your work.
Except on his deathbed, he said to not follow his work. To destroy it all.
My father was a noble man. A brilliant man. A kind man. He was a great father to me, when he was around, that is. We had Hannah to help with me. Hannah, old reliable Hannah. She worked for my Dad. Spoke broken English and taught me Swedish. She was there because of my father’s excursions. Excursions to the jungle. Excursions to the Darién.
My father spent weeks at a time in a place called the Darién Gap. He would come home with one tropical affliction or another, infestations, infections, cutaneous larva migrans, things moving on his skin. These were protozoa, arthropods, bacteria, fungi. I think he even had scabies, so when he died, the coroner recommended quick cremation. The big fire. Did you know that cremation leaves behind an average of about two-and-a-half kilograms of stuff. The remains, ashes, they call it cremains. This is not actual ash, though. It is a pile of unburnt fragments of bone mineral. The coroner told me exotic viruses, or any virus for that matter, could not survive a fifteen hundred degrees retort.
We only had one bathroom in our house in midtown Ventura, only had one, and it was filled with benzyl benzoate, and malathion, that’s zero five percent in an aqueous base. Also, crotamiton cream and sulfur ointments.
I would get up before sunrise for my Cougars track workouts at Ventura High School. One time, half awake, I brushed my teeth with gamma benzene hexachloride—radiant minty fresh. I wonder if hexachloride whitens teeth while it kills tapeworms?
After graduating from Cabrillo Middle School, a school where you can see the Pacific ocean, pretty amazing to a kid, I entered Ventura High School and started to run track for the first time. My long legs were an advantage. I ran the 100 meters, the 220, and the 440 relay. Ventura High has produced some Olympic champions and world record holders. So, the place had good vibes, winner vibes. They even had some guys that went to the NFL, guys that is, of course. When I was a sophomore, I made the women’s varsity track team.
I loved to run. I loved the high from the body’s own internal opiates, the endorphins. Did you know that German researchers used brain scans to identify the prefrontal and limbic regions that are the factory for endorphins? I’m an endorphin junkie. The more the endorphin fix, the better the high. Although I run sprints, I trained with two-hour stints to get the full endorphin release.
During my junior and senior years in high school, when I went to state meets, I saw my real competition. I never won a state meet, but I took a few first losers. One of my coaches, forever nameless, introduced me to that term. The first loser is what he used to say, then would rattle off half a dozen other sports clichés, every one reinforcing my mediocrity. At least that’s how I took it. He was talking about coming in second. The athlete that comes in second is the first loser. Not “great effort, you tried your best, go get ’em next time,” or shit like that. No. Congratulations, you’re the first loser. Go take a shower. Like, wash off the loser layer. Loser layer down the drain.
After being the first or second loser time and time again, my times plateaued. I was eating right, training hard, more than any other girl, but I hit a roadblock. I concluded that my mindset needed to change. That’s when I came across the peak performance work of a guy named Tony Tango. Tony was from Ventura, a few years older. When I was a junior in high school he had become internationally famous, the self-help guru to the celebs. His Fly to Fate rallies filled football stadiums even though they cost big bucks to get in. His weekly retreat deals cost several thousand.
We had no real money to speak of, so I couldn’t go, but two of his books were in the school library. Plus, a real bonus, I convinced my track coach to let me borrow his DVD series. I think Tony spent a few weeks creating a reel of the most popular shaman slogans, Psuedoscienceology highlights, Sunday TV gospel money-raiser preacher’s greatest hits, wrapped in persuasion-training Tom Hopkins metaphors, Dale Carnegies’ course on public speaking, topped with 2 a.m. infomercial one-liners, all with a risk-free, money-back guarantee laced with juicy testimonials from over-the-hill Vegas singers wearing too much makeup and quasi-effective nips and tucks.
But what did I know? I needed a self-help fix, and I got free skag from school—what the hell?
So I started to take control of the communication with myself, self-talk, to control the state I was in, learned how to direct my brain to generate any state of behavior that supports my goals or needs. I had a serious need to not be a first loser. Tony also talked about how to discover successful models and duplicate them. I figured this stuff might help me shed my loser layer.
The model I wanted to duplicate was Florence Griffith-Joyner, Flo-Jo, who held the world record in the one hundred and two hundred meters set at the Olympic Games in Seoul. Florence, who was also from the Los Angeles area and went to UCLA, met an untimely tragic death at the age of thirty-eight with a severe epileptic seizure. I had to compartmentalize my modeling as to not include cavernous hemangiomas, vascular brain abnormalities, or tonic-clonic seizures.
This is because Tony taught me to learn someone’s strategy by observing their visual, auditory, and kinesthetics, but I didn’t want to court death at thirty-eight. Or twenty-eight. Tony said in the Director’s Cut DVD to be very careful what you send to your powerful subconscious, because it does not judge. You could send images of seizure by mistake, and one day you will be walking down Main Street to get an Acai Energy with double wheatgrass at Blenders, and seize up, drooling foam, shaking and vibrating like a Magic Fingers bed in the no-tell motel. That’s what Tony said. I added the last part. So, Tony said this was the way to get anything I wanted, achieve my mental mastery, or master my mind, or mind what I find. I was not clear on the last part, but I figured that was one of those “when the disciple…strike that…the student is ready, the master will appear” type of things. Or worst case it was in the premium package, limited time offer.
Tony helped me, not personally, of course, but in the DVDs, with the modeling strategy, and Flo-Jo went to UCLA, so that’s where I went. I had the grades to get in, and the track coach said maybe in my second year I might get some tuition help (bait and switch) depending on how I did. I created my dream board and my goals sheets. Smart goals. That’s specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Another Tangoism, but he didn’t create that, just put his own spin on it. I had to return the DVDs to coach, so I recorded them onto my phone. I listened to Tony every morning and during my workouts so my journey would align with my dream-vision goal-outcome. Tony said it is easy to get off track.
He was right.
* * *
About a year before my father’s death, Bolt and I came back to Ventura for a visit. Bolty, a Shepherd-Border Collie mix, was my best friend, other than my father, that is. I had not seen my father for a while. So we went over to the house. My key no longer worked, which never happened before, so I knocked.
His truck was in the driveway, but he didn’t answer the door. I hadn’t called ahead—wanted to surprise him. I walked around the back of our house, and the gate was locked, so I climbed over the fence. I could see into the greenhouse, he was in the very back with Estaphan, and they were tying up a large pitcher plant, like ten feet tall, with ropes, throwing ropes at it like lassoing a calf. This was about two months before Estaphan disappeared.
My father said Estaphan went back to Mexico to take care of his mother. He told people in town that, I think.
Except Estaphan was from Panama.
* * *
Hannah called me when I was living off-campus at UCLA.
That’s really when everything started.
Before the call, my life was mid-sized beach-town storybook, except for the one dead parent, and being raised by an overworked part-time father. When I was fourteen, I was pretty much self-actualized. I knew how to cook, clean, use Quicken to pay house bills online, do my father’s taxes, I even could drive his old pickup. I was tall for my age.
Fast forward to when Hannah called. I was taking a shower, living off-campus in Westwood, after a track workout, Tony Tango in my earbuds, before my kale green concoction, I’d made in the old Vitamix my father gave me. It smelled like some kind of weird chloroform super wheatgrass blend, aged and half-rotten. I got some low-grade acid from the UCLA science lab to clean the canister.
I had all the greens out on the kitchen counter, then decided to shower first since I was reeking of sweat. So I left the kale and the beets and the ginger and the rest out on the counter and took a shower. That’s when Hannah called.
My phone was on my dresser, adjacent to the bathroom, so I heard it.
She said my father had a coughing spell and collapsed in his number three greenhouse in the back. That was the largest greenhouse. The one with the oversized big-gulp tropical plants that he hybridized from seed from who knows where, probably the Darién.
He was in the Ventura Hospital E.R. She called and told me all this. That’s when I knew something bad happened with my father. That’s when this all started. My dream-vision on-track life took a turn. Tony said when this type of thing happens, to work on changing my state. I have the power to change my state at any moment. Or fake it. I’m figuring it’s kinda like that Strasberg acting thing in New York where Brando went and you blend all the mental shit together, real powerful. I tried for about two seconds, but it didn’t work. My state was panic and there was no faking it. The panic had the power.
When Hannah called my earth stood still, air suspended in my lungs, my eyes fixed on nothing, unable to blink, every muscle rock. That was my state.
When Hannah called.
* * *
I call it Ventura Hospital, they changed the name sometime I don’t know when to The New Community Memorial Hospital. That’s where I had to go after Hannah called. I had a very used Ford pickup, a hand me down from my Dad after he got a new used fifteen-year-old pre-owned one. Mine was a twenty-five-year-old pre-owned. Painted three times. Rebuilt, refurbished, renewed, no ninety-day guarantee like my Anaconda new old renewed cell phone. It was a beat-up old truck, but it got me from Westwood to Ventura. I dropped Bolt off at my father’s house and sped to the New Community Memorial Hospital that was not really new. To the refurbished hospital.
The E.R. was overflowing with people that could not speak English. What happened? I say.
What do you mean? the woman at the sign-in window said.
Was there an accident somewhere, like a factory? I say.
She laughed. Oh no, young lady, she says. It’s like this every day. What’s wrong with you?
My father, I said.
They handed me a mask, and I snaked my way back to his bed. The curtain was open, he was sitting up in bed. He frowned at me.
