Shane and Carmen: The Novelization Ch. 06

"Short," Jenny said.

Shane looked at Jenny's face. She was calm, clear-eyed, sober. She was serious. She seemed determined.

"Okay," Shane said, sitting down and facing Jenny.

"Yeah. Yeah, I do," Jenny confirmed. "If you're not too tired."

"I'm not too tired," Shane said.

"'Kay."

"Are you sure?" Shane asked. Shane knew Jenny was serious, but there's the question of due diligence.

Jenny smiled. "Yeah. I just feel like I ... need to change."

Shane studied her. "Okay," she said again. She got up and put her chair in the center of the room under the light, and gestured for Jenny to take a seat. Shane went over to the CD player, picked out a CD, and slid it into the machine. Iron and Wine's Naked As We Came began to play. Shane knelt down in front of Jenny, studying her face, planning her moves. What to cut, what to leave. What style. How to frame her face. Shane felt a deep sense of satisfaction. This was what she did, this was what she was good at, really good. And this particular haircut was freighted with meaning, not for Shane but for Jenny. It was a statement haircut, a life-defining haircut, not just some do for a charity ball or a movie scene. This was a haircut about Jenny. This was about who Jenny was, wanted to be. Would become.

"Okay," Jenny said. Shane understood Jenny was talking to herself. It was a statement of affirmation.

"Okay," Shane said, communicating on the same elevated plane. She smiled, and it made Jenny smile, too.

""Yeah!" Jenny laughed, exultant.

"Okay!" Shane said, smiling and nodding.

"Okay!"

"Let's do it," Shane said.

"Yeah!"

Shane stood and picked up her clippers from the table. She walked behind Jenny and began to draw that long, beautiful black hair up into her strong, confident hands. Jenny closed her eyes, blinked back a tear, but it was too late. That one lone tear ran down her cheek.

Shane began to cut. Another tear ran down Jenny's other cheek, but Shane looked down and saw her smiling. There would be no going back now ... and Jenny didn't want to. She had her best, best friend Shane here to finally welcome her into the world in which she finally belonged, a world she had struggled so hard to find, leaving behind a world in which she had lost so much, and had never really belonged.

***

Shane and Jenny walked down Santa Monica Boulevard on their way to a new clothing boutique Jenny wanted to visit. It was only ten in the morning, and the first day of the New Jenny, the Makeover Jenny, the Jenny with the short dyke haircut. And truth to tell, Jenny felt like a million bucks. She walked with confidence. She had a bounce in her step.

A good-looking girl walking the other way smiled at Jenny, and then just after they passed, the woman turned to look back. Shane caught it all. She stepped in front of Jenny and spun around, walking backwards and grinning.

"What?" Jenny asked.

"You just got cruised!"

Jenny turned to look back at the girl who had just scoped her out. "Do you think she was looking at me?"

"Oh yeah, in broad daylight, too."

Jenny put her arm around Shane, who reciprocated. They kept walking.

"I love my haircut," Jenny said, giving Shane a kiss on the cheek with a big "Mwah!" Shane grinned.

***

Carmen sat at the kitchen table sorting through a box of her CDs. She was putting together a selection list for Dana and Tonya's engagement party. Tonya was a woman Dana had been dating, and the sad truth was none of the Friends – Jenny's word for the group who met at The Planet -- liked her. Still, you have to support your friends, and sometimes your friends' choices.

Shane sat on the kitchen counter nearby. Carmen had something on her mind. "You know what, I really don't know. Is Jenny always so weird?" Carmen wondered.

"She's not weird. She's great," Shane said.

"Well, maybe she's one of those people that's, you know, just constantly in her head."

"Carmen, she's a writer," Shane said. "She's supposed to be like that."

Carmen pulled a CD from her stash and handed it to Shane.

"Okay, so will you take a listen of this, please? And, uh, let me know if you think they'll be down for it. I mean, I really don't have that much of a sense of Dana and Tonya, so that would help."

Carmen began to gather up her DJ gear while Shane examined the CD.

"You kissed her," Shane said.

"What?" Carmen looked up from her sorting. Shane had gotten her attention. Where was this going?

"You kissed Jenny."

"Oh, okay. Right. Yeah."

"Right?"

"Yeah, yeah, I did," Carmen admitted, "but, um ... it was just the circumstances, I mean ... I - I didn't think that you would mind about--"

"And, no, and I - and I - hey, and I don't," Shane said, fully engaged in one of her periods of total inarticulateness, the noise roaring in her head, all those competing message, Carmen's lovely face, her body, hot as always, and the topic, how to not hurt this woman, how to not let her into your heart, how to keep her at arm's length, how not to let her know how very much a part of you wants her, how another part of you is trying to find a way to transfer her onto Jenny before this dull little heartache turns into a big fucking coronary. Reading all the clues of confused emotions flashing across Carmen's face. A face she wanted to kiss, knowing full well it was the worst thing she could do, because this girl could give you that coronary in a heartbeat, which was probably an oxymoron.

"Okay. Good," Carmen laughed weakly. "Thank God."

"You should um ... you know, you should give her a chance."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Shane said, sensing the presence of thin ice.

"You know what?" Carmen asked, getting up from the table with her gear.

"What? What is it, sexy?" Would flirting help? She had no idea. Conflicting signals. Fuck. Noise.

Carmen leaned close to Shane, coming close to her ear. Was she going to ...?

"Don't try to hook me up," Carmen whispered. "Bye." She left the room.

Shane looked after her, wondering just what the hell that was all about, and whether it worked, or had she somehow stepped in it. Fuck. This was why she hated relationships. So confusing, so painful.

***

Jenny was finishing her yogurt and fruit. Shane sat down with a bowl of Raisin Bran and milk when Mark came into the kitchen and started cooking up a couple of fried eggs for breakfast. He was aware that the girls had been talking about something, and he wasn't sure if they'd stopped talking because he'd come into the room, or if it was simply some sort of unrelated pause. On the one hand, neither woman was especially talkative, which was one of the nicer things about them (as members of the opposite sex), Mark thought. On the other hand, they would talk about ANYTHING, and they were never shy in front of him, not up to now. But then Jenny asked Shane a question, and Mark knew the pause had no special significance.

"I don't know. I can't tell. Do you really think Carmen is into me?" Jenny asked. "Honestly? Okay, when you went out with her, like ... was she just kind of, like ... you know ... I don't know ... reticent?"

They had Mark's full attention now.

"Wait a minute," he said to Shane. "You went out with this girl? The girl you--"

"Fuck you, Mark," Shane said without looking up from her Raisin Bran.

Mark laughed and turned to Jenny. "And now you're going out with the same girl."

"I am definitely not going out with her," Jenny said. Mark knew that was bullshit.

"And that's cool? You guys - is that common, you guys just, uh, share chicks and shit?" Lesbians never ceased to amaze Mark. What wonderful, odd creatures they were.

"We don't share," Shane said, annoyed. "I don't date Carmen anymore." Go right ahead, heart, bleed a little more.

"Oh, right, right, of course," Mark laughed. "You have your two-fuck limit, right?"

Shane just looked at Jenny.

"Shane, how do you even convince a girl to go home with you?" Mark asked, turning to face them and truly interested in the answer, because this cut to the very heart of the thing he didn't get about Shane: her phenomenal ability to collect pussy. "Doesn't your reputation precede you by this point?"

"How do you?" Shane shot back at him.

Mark thought it over. "I don't know. I, uh, make a lot of eye contact, laugh at all their jokes. Oh, and what signs and seals the deal is I tell a tragic childhood story."

"Oh, Mark, you're so full of shit," Shane scoffed, shaking her head sadly at him.

"You know it's true," he protested

Now Jenny was getting annoyed at him.

"Look, from what I know, the most important thing is to listen," Shane said, having swallowed the bait. "You get them talking, and you start hearing about their life, and then you figure out what they want."

"Yeah, it's true, chicks do like to talk a lot."

Shane ignored him. She was deep into The Rules and couldn't stop. "But, you do not talk too much," she instructed. "That's the thing. Talking too much can kill it. You don't tell your life story, and you don't let them tell theirs."

"You should just show Jenny what Carmen is like, Shane," Mark said. "Think about it. I mean, you know this girl. You've dated her, right? What a time-saver it would be for poor Jenny just to have a little three-way. Don't you think, Jenny?"

Shane sighed. So that's where this shithead was going with this. "Hate to tell you this, Mark, but I don't fuck my roommates."

Jenny smirked at that. One for Shane.

"Damn!" Mark said, trying to keep it light and hoping to minimize any damage.

Shane got up, put her cereal bowl in the sink and went to her room to get ready for work.

***

The late afternoon sun filtered through the kitchen window. Some days you just need to take the edge off, and Shane was having one of those days. The present untenable situation had begun a week earlier, when Shane had gone to one of the big studios to do the hair of some day players working on a movie called Shanghai Boulevard, a flick about a World War II war bride whose boyfriend was a bomber pilot who hadn't come back from Jimmy Doolittle's raid over Tokyo, and was lost somewhere in China. The female lead was being played by the notoriously difficult Alyssa Neros, who one particular morning was having a hissy fit that stopped production. Shane had been doing the hair of the woman playing Alyssa's sister, and had witnessed the tirade. Although it was none of Shane's business, she decided to go over to where Alyssa was sulking, and next thing she knew she had calmly talked Alyssa down off her snit. The producer of the film, the equally notorious and mercurial Veronica Bloom, had seen and overheard Shane's conversation with Alyssa, and had recognized Shane's extraordinary talent for people skills. Until that morning, Shane had no more idea of who Veronica Bloom was than she'd known who Arianna Huffington was, but before Shane knew what was happening, she'd become Veronica's "personal assistant," whipping boy, punching bag, mentee, hired gun, hairdressing crisis negotiator and empathy consultant. The salary was obscene, and was the only reason Shane even put up with all the horseshit that came with the job.

Today's crisis had been Priscilla Nabochenko, a hooker who'd been pimped out by a Russian mobster who'd made the mistake of using Priscilla's three-year-old daughter to keep Priscilla in line and earning her paycheck on her knees. Single-handedly, Priscilla had gone up against the mob, gotten her daughter back, and gotten out of Minsk alive, an unheard-of feat. The trade-off was her face, which had been horribly scarred by a razor-wielding gangster moments before Priscilla had disemboweled him with a kitchen knife. Her incredible true story had been picked up by a Paris stringer for the New York Times, and now, six months later, Priscilla and her daughter and a retinue of agents and lawyers were in Hollywood flogging the rights to her life story. It had come down finally to a duel between Jerry Bruckheimer's group and Veronica Bloom and her team.

In her own way, Veronica was good at her job—very good, even. But what came with it was her loud, obnoxious, irritating, prima dona behavior, the vulgarity and coarseness, the yelling and screaming, the tantrums, the mood swings, the violent capriciousness, the calculated insensitivity (for Veronica Bloom was actually far from insensitive; she had radar like a bat), the childishness that could whipsaw into viperishness in a New York second. She made good decisions—she just made them with all the stürm und drang of a Wagnerian Brunhilde. She knew one of her flaws was trust, her authenticity (or lack of it), and so in her negotiations with Priscilla Nabochenko she had gone to the bullpen and brought in her top reliever and closer, Shane McCutcheon, who was as authentic, honest, trustworthy, naïve, innocent, and no-bullshit as existed in all of Hollywood (Veronica was that good).

Tensions and voices had been running high, with Veronica's toady, Aaron, yelling and almost loosing it, he was so angry at Priscilla. But Priscilla had backed down the Russian mob, and wasn't going to be bulldozed by some ass-kissing lickspittle like Aaron. Veronica sensed the moment was right, kicked Aaron out of the room, and left Priscilla alone with Shane, who'd been a fly on the wall all afternoon.

Priscilla glared at Veronica's broad back as she walked out of the door of Priscilla's apartment. She sighed finally, sat back on her couch, and regarded Shane for a minute.

"You want some fruit juice or something?" Priscilla asked in a heavy Russian accent.

"Oh, no. No, I'm okay. Thank you," Shane said. She looked around the small apartment, wondering what to do. Priscilla studied Shane, trying to determine if this was an opponent, if she was dangerous, and if so what to do about her. It was why Priscilla had been able to best the Russian mob.

"So what do you do for a living? Are you like a producer or something?"

Shane chuckled. "Fuck, no. Um, I'm a hair stylist. And I guess I'm Veronica's assistant, too."

Priscilla nodded, "Really."

"Yeah."

"Hair stylist," Priscilla said.

Shane nodded. "Yep."

Priscilla looked down at her hands, casting her mind back to some earlier time. "That's something I always wanted to do," she said, wistfully.

"You could do it," Shane said.

Priscilla smiled a little, and shrugged.

"You know, I, uh ... I used to do what you did, kind of," Shane said.

"Really?" Priscilla said, some doubt apparent in her face.

"Yeah," Shane said, "I used to do tricks, down around Santa Monica Boulevard. And uh, there was this guy, this john, who was ... you know, he was ... , but uh, he was okay. He sent me to hairdressing school."

Priscilla thought that might be one of the strangest stories she'd ever heard, but from the way Shane had told it, Priscilla knew it to be true. There they were, two ex-whores. And redemption. And rebirth. In Hollywood, where everyone was a prostitute of one kind or another. Where people sold their souls even more often than they peddled and pandered their bodies. Who would fucking believe it? But Priscilla did.

She looked at Shane for a long time. Then she gestured toward the door Veronica had exited. "She okay?" she asked Shane.

Shane sat back and sighed. "Yes and no. She's a pain in the ass from here to next Sunday. But she makes reasonably good movies. She'll keep her word, as much as she has to. I mean, if you sell your story to her, you'll get paid. As long as she needs you, she'll treat you well enough, if you treat her the same way. You'll never be best friends, and when the deal's over, you'll probably never see her again. But I don't want to be the one to tell you what to do. I'm only a fucking hairdresser."

"What about this other guy, Jerry Bruckheimer?"

"I have no idea who that is."

"No? Really? He's a bigshot producer. He did CSI. Pirates of the Caribbean. Coyote Ugly. Flashdance."

"I don't think I ever watched CSI," Shane said. "I liked those movies, though. All I know is I'd fuck Keira Knightley, Piper Perabo or Jennifer Beals in a heartbeat. But I never heard of Jerry Bruckheimer before today."

"You don't like Johnny Depp?"

"I love him, but as an actor. I just don't fuck guys."

"I would fuck him, I think," Priscilla said thoughtfully. "You know what girl actor I'd fuck? Alyssa Neros. She's really hot."

Shane told Priscilla that Veronica was doing a picture with Alyssa right now, and she was sure Veronica would be more than happy to introduce her to Alyssa. But Shane didn't have the heart to tell Priscilla she'd fucked Alyssa Neros two days ago, in her trailer on the back lot of Shanghai Boulevard. She was only so-so.

***

Shane sat at the kitchen table and spread out the rolling paper, opened a small jar, and carefully emptied out the correct amount of marijuana onto the paper. She put the lid back on the jar and began to roll the joint when Carmen came into the kitchen. She had been hanging around Jenny's room all afternoon, and seemed to have made herself at home in the house.

Carmen went to the refrigerator, opened the door, and looked pensively at the selection: a couple of Mountain Dews, a jug of orange juice, a bottle of Jose Cuervo about three-quarters empty, a bottle of Jack, a bottle of pinot grigio, and a bottle of Dos Equis. Jackpot! Carmen reached for the beer happily. Then she saw the problem.

"Oh, last one," she said to Shane. "Do you want this?"

"No, it's all yours," Shane said, licking the edge of the doobie.

"Thank you," Carmen said.

"You're so very welcome," Shane replied, flicking her Bic and igniting the end of the joint and pulling into her lungs the first cloud of analgesic. Carmen did virtually the same thing, twisting off the top of the Dos Equis and tilting back a big, cold swallow. Boy, that tasted good.

"Mmm. Mmm. Mmm."

"Good?" Shane asked.

Carmen moaned her answer, taunting. "Mmmm."

Shane put the joint in the ashtray and stood up, going to stand face to face to Carmen.

"You're such a tease," she grinned "Well then, keep going. I know thirst, it's so intense!" She suddenly lunged for the bottle playfully, bumping it, but Carmen was faster, pulling it back in the nick of time, but the effort caused a shotglass amount to shoot up the neck of the bottle and onto Carmen's wonderfully sculpted chest.

"Oh, you shit," Carmen giggled at Shane.

Shane leaned in very close to Carmen and sniffed her neck with a deep inhalation. "Whoo! God, you stink!" she said, jumping back as if in disgust.

"Oh, God, really?" Carmen asked, as if she truly believed Shane.

"Yeah."

"Well, take this!" Carmen laughed, her thumb over the top of the beer bottle, shaking it up to generate a foam explosion and spraying beer all over Shane.

"Aw, shit!" Shane yelled, lurching away and out of range. Wet T-shirt fight!

Carmen laughed, her face lighting up in a way that burned inside Shane's heart. "Oh, now you are, too. Now you're gonna stink!" Carmen said, shaking the bottle and spraying Shane again as she cowered by the kitchen counter.

"I can't believe you just did that!" Shane said.

Carmen frowned, playing sad. "No, I didn't mean to, of course. I dunno--"

Shane lunged at her, grasping the beer bottle, laughing and managing to wrest it away, and dumping it over a laughing Carmen's head, and splattering beer all over.

"Hi," Jenny said, walking into the kitchen and the middle of the giggling beer brawl.

"Hey!" Shane said, releasing Carmen and standing upright. Carmen straightened up, too, but had a look of guilt on her face like she'd been caught, well, caught kissing Shane. She hadn't ... but God knows, that's where this thing had been heading. Another three seconds...