Step aside Patrick Bateman, it’s Maeve’s turn with the knife.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Maeve Fly by CJ Leede, out from Nightfire on June 6.
By day, Maeve Fly works at the happiest place in the world as every child’s favorite ice princess.
By the neon night glow of the Sunset Strip, Maeve haunts the dive bars with a drink in one hand and a book in the other, imitating her misanthropic literary heroes.
But when Gideon Green—her best friend’s brother—moves to town, he awakens something dangerous within her, and the world she knows suddenly shifts beneath her feet.
Untethered, Maeve ditches her discontented act and tries on a new persona. A bolder, bloodier one, inspired by the pages of American Psycho. Step aside Patrick Bateman, it’s Maeve’s turn with the knife.
An hour or so later, I lean in close to the bougainvillea outside the tomb of Tower Records, still basking in the afterglow of the most delicious downfall of another, the demise of a woman who thinks herself chosen, who believes herself to be untouchable.
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Maeve Fly
Bougainvillea are the ultimate microcosmic display of this city. Exquisite, exotic, erotic. The shock of their purples and pinks a transgression against the dusty green of the palms, the smoky slate sky. Like the city itself, the bougainvillea does not belong here. It is too vibrant, too alive, never meant for this desert at the end of the world. And yet, here it is. And beneath the dazzling colors and intoxicating scent, there are thorns longer than fangs and sharper than kitchen knives, waiting to cut us all open. I like to gather them all up in my fists, punctured and pleasured and raw.
The Sunset Strip was originally a stretch of dirt road built to connect Hollywood with Beverly Hills. A no-man’s-land, a desert expanse of nothing. An absence to be traversed only when absolutely necessary. After some time, a few bars popped up, outposts for the traveler, and a gas station here and there. Then came the visionaries, the ones who saw the space for what it was and what it could be. Francis Montgomery. Arnold Weitzman and William Douglas Lee, the architects of the Chateau.
Over the years, the Strip has lived a life of extremes. High highs and low lows, heydays followed by periods of nothingness, of forgetting. The last great high, of course, was in the days of rock and roll. The riots in ’66. Mötley Crüe, Jim Morrison, Tom Petty, Blondie, Jane’s Addiction. The Roxy and Whisky a Go Go. The Viper Room.
Since the late nineties, it’s been somewhat of a ghost town, certainly not the raucous strip of glamorous anarchy it once was. There is the bookstore with the other bookstore behind it. There is the luckless hotel with the fit young bellmen. There is the tower that used to hold Spago and has sat mostly empty ever since, and there is the Coffee Bean and the Bullwinkle statue. Places to get your pussy waxed and your eyelashes extended. The rock clubs of old, all the many billboards. But mainly, it is quiet. It is the best-known and worst-kept secret anywhere. And it is all mine.
I inhale the air of the early evening, the bougainvillea bloom perfume, the light slanting sideways, long shadows, late heat, and I revel in the glory that is some degree of certainty about life. That is knowing home and fearing no one.
I catch sight of something.
A foreign body, a small creature tucked away inside the vines. I blink, think perhaps I imagined it. But no, there is something here.
I lean in closer and squint to inspect it. There are so many needles and errant pieces of trash in this city, it’s generally unwise to reach your hand in anywhere without having a good idea of what you’re reaching for. This thing in front of me though, it is not trash. It is intentional, meaningful even. And I know it was not here before.
Unease spreads through me like a sudden-onset illness.
It is a doll’s head, this newly arrived thing, without hair and with one eyelash missing, attached carefully and lovingly to a plastic toy alligator body by a dark red substance I know instinctively to be blood. I reach in, and gently extract it from its thorny nest. I cradle the little foundling as though it were made of glass or something even more precious and fragile. A single human hair is wound and tied around its neck. On its belly, scrawled in letters of the same red, it says “In order to know virtue.”
I blink, and a chill runs through me. The air is still. The Santa Anas soon will come, will shake the whole town. But now, it is crushingly quiet, stale almost. I pull out my phone and search it. I know I’ve read it before, I know—The quote is by the Marquis de Sade. I turn it about in my head, tumble it through the fissures and rapids of thought and hope and desire. I turn this most perfect creature one way and then another, the doll’s single remaining eyelid fluttering open and closed as I move it. It is so lovely. It is so much more than the feat I just accomplished inside my bedroom. It is everything. This creature existing here, as if hatched from my own flesh and mind.
It is something new.
I am unsettled. Deeply disturbed. Because I know with a profound and sudden clarity that this foundling portends something dark and ground-shaking. It is just a doll, it is just a thing. But I know the Strip like the back of my hand. Every bar, every tree, all its secrets. And this little entity has crept its way in, right under my nose. Someone made this. And while this person may not be like me, they are not nothing.
I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.
Time passes before I convince myself to unhand the thing and turn to walk away. My skin seems to thrum where I touched it. Stung, poisoned.
My step is maybe, momentarily, uncertain.
The Marquis de Sade’s words tumble through my mind.
“In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.”
The night stretches out before me, a great gaping maw.
VI
Give me a Slippery Nipple!”
Los Angeles’ architecture is chaos, and the Strip is a prime example. A trend emerged in the 1920s of buildings erected that were shaped in cartoonish imitation of what they purveyed inside. A giant hamburger for a burger joint. A boot, a flower pot, a piano. Dubbed programmatic architecture, examples are found everywhere in this town. There is a reason so much of Los Angeles feels like the movies, feels like the park. It was by design. People come here for the beautiful artifice of it, for the extreme kitsch that makes life feel somewhat more endurable. We all seek the dream of beauty even as we know fundamentally it is only a façade for the decaying in the dark.
The Gangplank is no exception. On the east end of the Strip, between the Velvet Taco lingerie store and Pink Taco Mexican restaurant, there sits a giant pirate ship. One enters through the front of the hull, beneath the extremely sexualized figurehead bearing the name Starf*ck on a gold chain that hangs around her neck, no doubt a later addition to the 1959 building. Initially, the Gangplank was a themed restaurant for families, but in the nineties, Pedro bought the building and turned it into the magnificent double-layered strip club it is today.
I brush past the girl leaning all the way over the bar for her Slippery Nipple and head through the faux shipwreck adornments to the door at the back that looks like it should lead to a coat closet. It slams behind me. As I descend, the music shifts from the upbeat pop upstairs to something moody and dark. I am bathed in the red light of Babylon. A pool table, a bar, round leather booths. Between and above the booths stand stripper poles, three in total. I know all the girls. The owner and sometimes-bartender, Pedro, pours generously for Kate and me, and Kate has on multiple occasions inquired, only ever mostly joking, about job openings on the poles. Pedro always smiles and pours us a little more. “You two are such sweethearts. I could not corrupt you! Especially you with that angel face,” he says to me and gives me a kiss on the hand.
Red lights. Red walls. The dancers sliding and writhing. Leather, mirrors, shadows, smoke. Pedro pours me a glass of whatever he can afford to get rid of. The foundling doll sits in my brain and my chest, insistent and sharp. I should have taken it. Or destroyed it. Done something with it. I down the glass, and Pedro gives me another. I turn and search for Kate.
“Bathroom,” he says. I nod my thanks and head over to my favorite booth. Irene, the dancer on the pole beside me, says hello. A man sits at the booth just beyond her. He is movie star handsome, and I think I’ve seen him in things. My eyes slide over him and to the rest of the bar. I turn back around in my seat and swirl the liquor in my glass. I shouldn’t have come out tonight. I shouldn’t have left the doll. I pull my book from my bag and try to distract myself.
At first I was drawn to illicit, banned, or subversive books because they were just that. But after a time, and especially since my grandmother’s illness set in, I’ve been using them as sort of instructional guides. How to Exist, as told by misanthropes throughout the ages. My grandmother is no longer able to guide me, but these characters can, in their respective (admittedly occasionally imperfect) ways. Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille is an old favorite, and Simone is one of the sole examples I have ever found of a female character (even if she is secondary to the male narrator) who possesses and embodies true savagery with no tragic backstory or expectation of victimhood. Like so many male misanthropes throughout history, Simone simply is the way she is, and the reader accepts her without question. We do not fixate incessantly and exhaustingly on the details, we do not cringe at the deviance. Instead we accept. We obey.
But more on this later.
“There you are, ho!” Kate says, sliding into the booth. She wears a minimal coverage gold dress and victorious smile. A man lingers behind her and sits down as well. “Maeve, this is Derek. Derek, Maeve.”
“It’s nice to finally meet Kate’s brother,” I say.
Derek gives me a strange look. His suit is expensive, cuff links, platinum wedding band.
Kate grabs Derek’s face and shoves her tongue into his mouth. He kisses her back and smiles, realizing, perhaps for the first time, what a prize of a potential mistress he has found. Kate turns and raises her brow at me.
“So, not the brother?” I say.
“No,” a low voice says from over my shoulder, “I’m a much better kisser.”
Kate squeals and springs out of the booth, leaping into the arms of a very large man standing beside me, planting a firm but mostly familial kiss on his mouth. “Yeah he is,” she says. “The best. Everyone, this is Gideon, my baby, baby brother.” She says this in a baby talk voice and ruffles his hair. He is a head taller than she is but somehow seems less huge with Kate beside him. She collapses back into the booth beside her man of the moment, one who is undoubtedly a show business exec for Kate to be fawning over him the way she is. Derek’s face lights up.
“Oh shit, I know you,” he says to the brother. “You do?”
“Yeah. You’re Gideon Green. From the Rangers.”
Irene on the pole dips lower. Gideon’s eyes flash to her and then back to Derek. Gideon shrugs. “Well, the Kings now.”
“No way, that’s crazy! I hadn’t heard.”
“You a fan?”
“No way, man, Islanders all the way. Sorry. No offense.”
“None taken. Who wants drinks? This round on me, for abandoning New York.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Derek says, and when Gideon leaves, he turns to Kate. “You didn’t tell me your brother played hockey.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“He’s like… a huge deal.”
She shrugs, moves her hair over her shoulder. There is a feeling there. Jealousy, perhaps. Something more complex.
Derek leans back in the booth and eyes Irene and the bar appreciatively. He is pleased with Kate, and she is pleased to have pleased him. I return to my book.
“Mind if I sit here?” Gideon is again standing beside me. I glance up. He is rugged, strong-jawed, tediously handsome. He wears a gray sweater and jeans. My face is level with the zipper of his pants and what lies beneath it. I slide over so he can sit, and I return to the page.
“So that’s crazy, they just swap you in?” Derek says.
“Yeah. Been here a few weeks, training. Haven’t gotten a minute until now though, with getting the new life set up, and all that.”
“Giddee, you found a place, right? Nearby?” Kate says.
“Not too far.” “Where?”
“I’ll show you this week,” he says.
She rolls her eyes. I can feel it even with my own eyes on the page. She is tense, and perhaps that is why I am focusing on their words and not the words written in front of me. I am always painfully attuned to the mild to wild swings of Kate’s moods. Perhaps it is because I know that one day she will leave me, even if that day is far off. Perhaps it is because Kate, while not quite like my grandmother and me, is different. Different enough. The tension continues through in her voice as she says, “Always so mysterious. And speaking of, don’t mind my rude friend, Maeve. Who clearly thinks it’s acceptable to read at a table full of people.”
I lift my head and exhale, tucking my book away.
“Maeve is a genius,” Kate says. “Well, actually Gideon too.”
“And we all love Kate for her vivid imagination,” I say.
“No one in this town has any imagination,” Derek says.
“And what is it you do?” I say.
Derek is annoyed that I do not know. A muscle ticks in his forehead. I smile, kindly.
“I’m a director,” he says.
“Ahh,” I say. “I only watch porn.”
“How much do pro players make in a year?” Derek asks Gideon.
“Derek, come here, I want to show you something,” Kate says. “We’ll be right back.” She gives me a meaningful look to say that I should behave. She drags Derek by the lapel up and out of the table and whispers in his ear. He smiles and follows her to the handicap bathroom. I glance up at Pedro who shakes his finger at me and mouths the word “naughty.” He always says I am the nice one. You are so innocent, he says, so beautiful!
Kate has been doing this more and more as she climbs the ranks of the ladder of Hollywood, as her dues are paid and she grows closer with each small part to The Big Break. Leaves early, arrives late. I can feel the tether between us straining with each new step toward her future, and I don’t know how to bridge the gap. I don’t know how to encourage her forward without moving her away from me.
We became fast friends three years ago, both pretending to be miserable working over the holidays but having the time of our lives. Hedonistic and deliciously willing to forget any troubles over spiked cider and a bender of nights we only half remember. It started on our first day at work. Liz had just been “promoted” to her supervisor position and had handed back her princess dress mere days before. Kate wouldn’t step into her role for a while, nor would I mine, as we still had our fur character dues to pay. Cinderella and Snow White, who had inhabited their respective princesses for some time, were to step in for our coveted characters temporarily until Kate and I were ready to take over.
In our first meeting, Liz broke down into tears in the middle of her welcome speech upon relaying this information to us and had to be escorted out of the room. I sat in a folding plastic chair in the back corner, and Kate sat a row up and a few seats over from me. There were quite a few new hires, three rows, each five chairs wide. I would learn later that the park tends to hire, and fire, in batches. I didn’t notice her any more than I did the others. Cinderella and Snow White sat at the other end of my row. I didn’t notice them either. I was too busy breathing in the magic of the place, the slight spoiled-milk scent of the break room, the creak of the cheap plastic below me.
And suddenly I was drenched, and covered in ice. I didn’t move, just blinked down at the iced coffee now seeping into my jeans and long sleeve shirt. I considered it as I slowly moved my head and looked up into the imperious face of Cinderella. I took her in now for the first time seriously. Average, perhaps a little tight-faced, eyes a little dull. I suspected she came from Missouri, maybe Arkansas. She had that look about her that said she grew up reigning over the aisles of Superstores with her girlfriends and visiting that homophobic chicken place every Saturday night, as they would naturally be closed on Sunday, and she would be eating Christ flesh then anyway. She wore flip-flops or boat shoes daily to her high school, saved up for them for many weeks to be able to fit the implied uniform of all the other girls. It was safest to never stand out. Bully or be bullied, and all that. She attended or cheered at every sporting event, her boyfriend on the team (not the quarterback), and smiled through the deep unshakable knowing that her life would always end up right back there. It would never amount to much more than this.
“Oops,” she said, looking down her little sloped nose at me. “Guess I tripped.”
I didn’t say anything, just looked at her, saw the slight caking of her makeup and the imperfections it covered. I realized she was waiting for a response, so I smiled, slowly, holding her eyes.
The smile dimmed on her own lips, and her brows furrowed. After another second, she took a step back from me. Gooseflesh raised on her arm. My smile deepened. This job, the job, was already so much better than I ever could have guessed, was so real as I sat here now with my wet clothing and the linoleum floors and the flickering lights above us. It was so… perfect.
She stood leaning back, staring down at me. I just watched her and smiled and thought, my life before Los Angeles didn’t matter at all. I had now found my grandmother, and I had found this. It was perfect. Just… meant to be, if there were such a thing. I thought all this as I smiled and looked at this girl and her empty iced-coffee cup in her nail-bitten hand. I held her eyes and did not blink.
“Jesus,” she said after a few seconds. She backed away further, and she knocked into the chair of a fur character. She stumbled and averted her eyes from mine. She hurried back to her seat. My eyes followed her the entire way, and she glanced back at me twice as she tried to tilt herself away, as she tried not to feel me watching her.
“Well, she’s fucking weird,” she stage-whispered to the girl beside her, who sat with her jaw open, watching me. My eyes flicked to her, Snow White, and she turned her head away. I took in the fifteen-dollar green juice in her hands, her willowy frame beneath her gauzy beige linen dress, imported beads wrapped around her wrist. She likely lived west of Bundy or Centinela and used words like wellness, cleansing, and fresh on the daily. She worked this job solely to fund her ayahuasca healing retreats and constant supply of crystals and herbs necessary to her therapeutic TikTok account in which she spurned measles vaccines and promoted beverages brewed with high frequency sound vibrations for maximal benefits. She likely kept this job a secret from her wellness community but secretly loved it, the shiny American fantasy that it promised, the same one she daily scorned in her other life. Cinderella glanced back at me again. I watched her shiver. I continued to smile.
Liz reentered the room, her face red and puffy, but mostly composed. I swept my eyes over the rest of the cast members. No one was looking at me, I suspected some might even be actively avoiding me given the stiff set of their shoulders. But one girl was. The one who would end up playing the sister to my princess, the one with the bloodred hair. She was turned around in her seat watching me. She winked when my eyes met hers, a small smile of her own playing on her lips, and turned back around to face the presentation.
We were eventually released for the day, and I left the lounge to stroll through the park. Cinderella and Snow White did not speak to me as I passed. Cinderella even flinched away. Outside, I inhaled the sugar, pavement, and sweat. I had never cared or thought much about the park, or its overarching brand. But what Tallulah and this city had taught me, what perhaps had always been inside, was a deep and ever-growing appreciation for pretense. For the lacquered kitsch of our town and the hidden proclivities it brings out and encourages in its visitors and denizens. To witness people giving themselves over fully to fantasy, to participate in it. When my prowlings around the city did one day lead me here, I knew instantly. I went home and flipped through the movie catalogue, and I settled on the ice queen. And as I watched, it was as though the world had fallen into my lap. It all came together for me, as much as it had when I first appeared on Tallulah’s doorstep. This was it. I knew my ice queen was the one.
Now, my first day on the job, I twirled in the sun and decided I might hop next door to the original park to take the teacups for a spin, just once, before heading home. It was one of the great perks, after all. I could be here now whenever I wished. It was, from this day forward, my extended domain. I had done this. I had given it to myself.
“Hey!”
I turned, and the red-haired girl was following me, jogging slightly to catch up. Her face was bright in the afternoon. She looked about my age and height. But of course she did. The park’s character height restrictions are followed down to the half inch.
“Hey,” she said again as she slowed beside me.
My eyes swept over her, and though her tight clothing clearly indicated she liked attention, likely male-variety, I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of who she was. I couldn’t pinpoint a location or a story. An aspiring actress, certainly, that much I could feel. I don’t know how to explain it, but even a few weeks in this town, and one just knows. But beyond that, who and where she was from, what she did with herself and her time, I didn’t know. I didn’t have any ideas. Strange. She didn’t present enough to give any one impression. I only knew that she stood before me when everyone else had flinched away, as I had intended for them to. And that was… interesting.
She pulled a cigarette out of her bag and slipped on a pair of mouse-shaped sunglasses that I suspected she had stolen off a distracted child.
“So we gonna go get a drink, or what?”
Excerpted from Maeve Fly, copyright © 2023 by CJ Leede.
