Love and Other Wounds by Jordan Harper

“But I know what will.”
    They follow the sounds of laughter to the outdoor bar. All these beautiful people. Green and Sarah find a table near the swimming pool. The drinks are eighteen dollars apiece. They have several. They charge them to Aaron’s room. It’s paid for by a studio, the one producing the animated film in which Aaron plays a love-crazed warthog. He’s supposed to be doing press all weekend.
    The landscaping rustles around them. Rats, Sarah says. They live in the plants around the hotel. They run wild in the Hollywood Hills. This afternoon she saw one fall out of the palm trees while a Vanity Fair writer interviewed Aaron. The thing lay dead for the full three hours of the interview. The staff didn’t want to clean it up, afraid they’d draw attention to it.
    â€œSmart,” Green said. “It’s the cover-up that gets you.”
    â€œIt’s getting me,” she says. Her smile is real. Some of the thing they’re carrying lifts off them then.
    The waiter comes by to let them know it’s last call. Sarah tells Green that the studio bought a second room for the night, sort of a green room for the press people. The other room is full of booze and food. Shame to let it go to waste. Green follows her to the room. He tries to remember how long it’s been. A long time.
    They drink. They swap stories. She tells him about getting a pedicure with the assistant of a reality star. The reality star is making a series about her upcoming wedding. Sarah tells Green how the girl told her there were cameras everywhere all the time, and the star and her fiancé never spoke to each other when the cameras were off. Nobody ever said anything about it. She tells Green how the Vietnamese ladies at the nail salon put their feet in bowls of tiny fish, tiny fish that fed off the dead skin of their feet. How the assistant watched the little fish nibble her toes while she said to Sarah, “I’m losing touch with reality. I don’t even know what’s real anymore.” How the girl had been near tears. How the wedding show had been a hit.
    Green tells her a story from the nineties, one of his first jobs in L.A. He worked a case for T, back when he was still a name, before the drugs got him by the neck and took him down. Twas the type of guy who figured that anyone with tits on their chest was woman enough to give him a blow job, no matter what they happened to have dangling between their legs. Green spent one hot and endless night cruising tranny row with Twhile the actor did lines of coke off the dashboard and lectured Green about twelve-step recovery. “What you need, Green,” Thad told him between coke shivers, “is to take a moral fucking inventory of yourself.”
    Green and Sarah both know about famous men who secretly died jerking off with belts around their necks. Autoerotic asphyxiation. It happens more often than you think. Green says those jobs are easy. Everyone will help the cover-up. Even cops. Cops find a guy with a belt around his neck and his cock in his hand, they hide the belt and call it an accident. Or at least they call it asuicide. David Carradine caught a bad break by dying in Bangkok, far away from the safety nets.
    She pours. She talks. Nothing left UNSAID. She takes a moral fucking inventory. She tells him how she got her break as a scripty on a big sitcom. How the women on the set had a special place, a closet behind the craft services table. “What’s it for?” she’d asked the PA who’d shown her around the set. “It’s where we go to cry,” the PA said. Sarah tells him that she’d laughed at that, thinking some women were weak. Some women gave the rest of them a bad name. Until the day one of the show’s stars yelled at her for eight minutes because she’d brought the wrong cup for his coffee. She found the right cup. Then she found her way to the special place.
    She tells Green about