Natja Brunckhorst

God, take my will and my life.
Guide me in my recovery.
Show me how to live.
Amen.
3^rd Step Prayer

From Miss Junk’s fb chat:

♠: Hello beautiful, how r u?

♥: Hello doll… how are you?

♠: I’m ok… u?

♥: Kind of….

♠: …so, Rich Rod wanna fuck you, huh?

♥: I… don’t know….

♠: He DOES.

♥: He only asked for my phone number….

♠: I know he wants to fuck you.

♥: he just texted me last wed to ask if I was the one who told him of a video where there’s nothing but someone walking.

♠: what an excuse.

♥: no. it’s not. friday at dinner after the meeting I told him about Wrong, the new Depeche Mode video… it’s amazing. He remembered that and thought the other video was my suggestion as well, I guess….

♠: men in DAA are horny bastards.

♥: …?!?…

♠: You’re a hottie. Everybody in DAA wants to fuck you.

♥: …are u sure he wants to fuck me?

♠: he said so. when you left dinner he said in front of everybody “I know you all saw me asking the number to a newcomer and that’s TOTALLY NOT OK BUT she is so smart and funny….”

♥: …well, he is not my type and I have someone else in mind anyways….

♠: do you like someone in Drug Addicts Anonymous?

♥: kind of :)….

♠: who?

♥: The Prophet….

♠: oh, the prophet would definitely fuck you.

♥: really?!?

♠: yes

♥: how do you know that?!?

♠: we are good friends.

♥: …oh, so he told you he likes me :)?!?

♠: No. but I won’t tell him. don’t worry.

♥: …I’m not worried… just curious… how do you know he likes me :), then?

♠: I know ‘cause he tried to fuck me too.

♥: …

♠: for two years.

♥: …

♠: …but I have a little obsession on The Tortured Brain instead.

♥: …and… he wants to fuck you too….

♠: no. we are friends.

♥: well, you were friend with the prophet too and….

♠: The Tortured Brain is different. he’s so intellectual. so machiavellian.

he just went through a tough break up.

♥: so, maybe he’ll try to fuck you soon, right?

♠: hey, they are not all like that. he’s not. we used to chat a lot and then I gave him my number and he backed off.

♥: good for you. you picked a good one.

♠: The Prophet is good too.

♥: well, it’s hard to believe so, after what you told me….

♠: hey, he stopped asking me to fuck.

     he’s good now.

♥: …did you tell your sponsor about the prophet?

♠: no way! they are good friends. they’ve been in DAA together for like 15 years or so.

they got clean at the same time I think.

♥: I cannot believe your sponsor has 15 years under her belt… she’s always crying over the smallest shit… what a drama acidhead… is she any good?

♠: at fucking for sure.

♥: ….excuse me?!?

♠: she shares about it at meetings sometimes. she slept with a lot of fellows in DAA before marrying The Emperor.

she says she had to fuck no matter what. it was kind of compulsive, you know….

We’re addicts. that’s it. that’s all.

♥: you’re not even 19 yet – the prophet tried to fuck you when? when you were 17?

♠: 17 and loaded.

♥: did he know that you were still using?

♠: yup

♥: …and, what did he say?

♠: he said being loaded was ok.
  as long as we could have sex.

Story by Liliana Isella.

Right before the 10 merges into the 405, she’s nowhere to be seen.

I hope the 405 will become the 101 to Hollywood.
It won’t. It just becomes a dead exit two bikers take.
From a helicopter, I follow the ferocity of their competition and I wonder why.
Why the helicopter, if I was driving.

I land on the sidewalk of the amaranth field.
Shades of giants play hockey on the sand and a miniature couple ice-skates in between.
I wonder if concrete wouldn’t be better and concrete becomes the road under my feet,
at the same ruleless speed of the bikes’ run.

Over the next scene, everything slows down in the middle of nothing.
The wild ride slithers into the motionlessness of a palm, a red land and a cold lake.
The dream, the truth and in between.

Now I can see the final place visitors have to discover, here in Los Angeles.
A shimmering shoreline of shivering divers, white Range Rovers and forest trees.
Nothing really match around the waters within I still look for what I don’t.

Unexpectedly, I catch her again.
I spot her innocence through the bicycle on the verge of the lake.
The handlebar reclined toward the sun, the wheels waiting for her sandals, the saddle afraid to slide down into the water.

She glides out of the waves and the carelessness she abandoned her paternal gift with
fades into the green headband above her blonde eyes.
Sixteen candles, elusive thin skin and pale long legs.

I follow her.
She walks into the other room; into her country bedroom.
The pink, the wood and the dolls.

She tries to call the city theatre.
A thousand difficulties pick up the phone.
A southern childhood tries to sell her something. Something she never wanted to buy; something from someone who produces porn in the Valley.

She hangs up and a white Range Rovers parks under her window.
She runs and hides under the bed.

The two dogs find her.
Freddy walks in behind and asks why she has just denied him, on the phone.
She looks down and says she didn’t know about the porn.
When she looks back up, he’s vanished.

Bella and Rottweiler start fighting.
Bella and Rottweiler.
Two heroes in her teenage years of dreaming misery.

She pushes the silver door and the black veil garden discloses its latest enchants to her red petal lips. She turns them to her faithful companions and invite their devotion into the perpetual relief of all their runs and fights….

~

An intrusive noise of blades slowly reconnects my lungs to an unusual pic of what I use to call sky. A blue uniform is holding my head up and starts screaming …she’s back!! Come on guys she’s back!!! Let’s take off!! Come on come on come on!!

My right hand tries to reach down to this afternoon of fire sinking in a pool of blood between my thighs. I want to sweetly dip it into the cold waters of the lake. But, the path to it is burst into a million little rocks by the blue uniform’s imploration: Do – not – leave!! Stay – with – me!! Girl, can you hear me?!? Ok, listen… my name is John…. what is your name??? Tell me – your – name….

His crisis waltz distracts me for a second. But, the next I’m back to the black veil garden.
Bella and Rottweiler are still fighting and, from the silver door, I invite them to follow me. One step down and the three of us will be together – once again.
I try to explain that to John but, my words have no sound.

Nevertheless, he hears them.
He hears us. Bella, Rottweiler and me.
The summers, the dreams and the screams.
The rides, the bike and the lake.
The runaway, the valley and the shame.
He hears the years, the lies and the memories.
His hand grabs mine and her voice of black flowers finds a way through my garden’s cage of silence: U-lya-na….

Ulyana.
Sixteen candles, elusive thin skin and pale long legs.
No matter what happened later, something’s never changed.

Good job Ulyana… great job!! Now, Ulyana, keep listening to me….
I try, John… but, the deaf noise of these helicopter blades mixed with what I can envision only as a thousand cars stuck in an endless line takes over…. And, suddenly, I remember it all: the 10, the bridge and the 405.
Driving to Freddy. To the Valley.
The heat. The tears. The courage. I need it.
The I-Phone.  The video. Bella. Rottweiler. And me.
The pics. That last summer.  And our song, playing forever in my car :
Wish I knew what you were looking for
Might have known what you would find….*

And then… what?
John, here, now, again.
His blue uniform.
The Ray-Bans in his pocket.

The dream, the truth and in between.
That’s where John, Bella, Rottweiler and I stand, in this cloudless moment.
The lake disappears, the silver door to the black veil garden slowly closes and the helicopter takes off from the bridge’s highest point of our four lives hanging on. Together.

Story by Liliana Isella.

Photo by Peter Lindbergh.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

*Under the Milky Way by Church

Problem is, Gary was meant to be a girl.
At least, this is what his mother-to-be wished for.

She wanted a girl just to call her Gabry.

Of all her addictions, Brad’s Gabry had always been the most dangerous one.

She was sixteen and she had a plan.
One night, she ran away from home to go see him in Hollywood.
To meet him for the first time. To chain him for life.

Actually, she didn’t really need to run away from home:  the only person in that van in a Long Beach parking lot was her mother and, she wasn’t exactly in the mood for prohibitions.

She was lying on the old couch in front of the fuzzy TV, trying to smoke a cigarette that she was too knocked out to bring to her mouth.
She just looked somewhere else, somewhere really far away, somewhere Gary’s mother-to-be tried to reach when she went down on her knees, took the cigarette away from her incendiary fingers and whispered “…Mom, I’m leaving.”

The blind throaty sound she got as a response was not even close to something that can lead to a runaway.

She slowly stepped out of their van, lit a cigarette in the loneliest of her nights and, as her golden hills were impatiently beating on the mud, her mouth was blowing to the dark sky her crave for a change.

The red car of her girlfriend finally appeared through that industrial jungle.

The freeways sped them up to the hills of fame and their fake IDs opened the doors of the entertainment boulevard.

By the time she made her way through the crowd to the front row, Brad was already on stage.

Brad.
He was rock.
He was punk.
He was God.

Somehow, Brad saw her too.
Somehow, she snuck from her private hell to his heavenly body.
Somehow, her hot, damned, undone fragility pierced his heart of lights.
Somehow, their rendezvous broke through the locked up gates of history like any other love story had done before.

He could never say no to her.
He couldn’t say no to the grip she had on his skin, to the mark she left on his lips and to all her desperate attempts to prove that, for once in her life, someone, someone like him, someone still able to experience life, really belonged to her.

Here Gary comes.
A boy was born.
But, Gabry was the name for a girl.
Gabry was the name of her song. Not really her song, as Brad wrote it before meeting her and never revealed for whom but, still, her song.

“Gary is Gabry without the middle b, after all,” she thought.
That’s how she picked it as the name for her son and she seemed satisfied enough.

Brad, instead, seemed nothing but gone and… he actually was.
By the time he held Gary in his arms for the first time, he had been sent on a tour bus for his first world tour.

As time went by, Brad’s tour bus became a private jet and their home became a real home.
Not a crumbling van parked in a corner of hell but a brand new mansion in the Pacific Palisades.

But, Brad was never there; he was always far, on a rock ‘n’ roll stage somewhere.
He was being sent on another world tour and she was being sent home.
She was sent out of his way.
She was sent to the side, and she always felt alone.
Unfortunately, she was not completely alone:  she was with herself.

When Gary turned three, Brad had already toured Europe, Asia and America for the third time in a row.

Brad.
Something had mysteriously changed him.
Now, even when he was in LA, he felt more comfortable in a room at the Chateau Marmont rather than at home with his family.
God only knows why.

She went back to that first night she ran away from home to see him in that Hollywood club.
She became that girl again.
Difference is, now she had no hope.

She was spending her days under the sun, on the deck of their Palisades home.
She was waiting.
She didn’t know for what; she was just waiting.

She waited until her biggest trouble found her.
One day, he knocked on her door.
Unfortunately, Gary was behind that door too.

This unexpected loser, this unannounced wannabe, this inconsistent nothing, this solid nature’s failure was looking for a revenge on Brad through Gary’s mother’s loneliness’ door and he found it wide open.

She fell for him right away.
Not enough, she was also persuaded that he was the only love of her life and Brad had been only a passage to him: she started saying she had probably been attracted to Brad only by the similarities they obviously had, since they were brothers.

In order to boost her new wannabe’s self-esteem, which was clearly a bit down, she never refrain to express her new feelings for him in front of the audience in the house, that was always and only her little Gary.

Very soon, this wannabe felt like his time to make it big had come.
But, to make what, exactly?  To even come close to the fame of his brother in the music business was impossible.
So, he tried first painting, then surfing and, at last, acting.
The only positive feedback came from the closing credits he got for being interviewed in one of the many videos about his rockstar brother.

Until, one day, it came to his mind that he could succeed in the only thing Brad had failed: to give Gary’s mother the baby girl of her dreams, Gabry.

One night, as he was watching her asleep, he felt the right moment had come. 
By the time she came back from her hangover, she would find her dream come true.
By the time she came back from her hangover, his performance would be done irreversibly.

He took his thing out.
He made it hard.
He made it sharp.
Then, he undressed Gary and began the surgery.

Widow by Michael Hussar

“That was probably the work of someone who accidentally drank a little.”
This is all Gary’s not-anymore-mother was able to tell the police, the social workers, the judges, the journalists and whomever showed up at her door with the same horrifying pictures and questions: “Could you please explain us who did this to your son?!”

“That was probably the work of someone who accidentally drank a little.”
She never had anything else to say.
To Gary, she never said anything at all.

Then, one day, she just hid all of her words under a grave of pills.

The wannabe instead, on his side, had a lot to say to the doctors who studied his chemical induced psychosis.
He was telling them that, if it was not for a few unlucky accidents (he was probably referring to the multiple and severe infections and traumas his attempt of sex change surgery on Gary caused him), that would have been the greatest art work of his life.
Though, he was blaming himself for the two beef steaks he took from the fridge as Gabry-to-be’s breast implants: they were not round-shaped enough.

At the time, Gary was six years old.
At the orphanage he was taken to, he was given a picture of his dad Brad, holding him in his arms in the bathtub of a hotel room.
His mother had taken that picture.

Gary.
The more he looks at that picture, the more he feels his mother is still there; holding that camera behind him, holding Brad’s heart, holding their family together.

The more he looks at that picture, the more illusions of compassion replace the torment of the carmine cuts on his white chest.

The more he looks at that picture, the more he turns his enormous girly eyes to you and says:
“Just call me Gabry. That’s the name my dad wrote on my destiny with a song a long long time ago….”

Story by Liliana Isella.

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