Post #13 Mishnah: A Look Back On Lou's Life
As Lou lay tired in bed in his multi-million dollar mansion he realized he had not much time left and wanted to say his goodbyes to all the people he had come to know in his life. He contacted Bennie, an old protégé of his who had become a successful record producer like himself to contact the members of the rock band he and his friends had twenty years ago. Bennie was able to find Rhea living in Seattle and Jocelyn in LA. Rhea and Jocelyn were on their way to visit Lou for what seemed to be the last few days of his life to comfort him and Lou hoped to make peace with Jocelyn, who he was aware, had been having a rough life thanks to him. Rhea and Jocelyn were a couple of girls Lou met about two decades ago in his forties that he had become very fond of.
Rhea was a very sweet and confused young girl who was trying to find herself during her teenage years. Lou remembered her struggling to fit in with a rock group she followed around because she had a crush on Bennie who was the bassist at the time. He couldn’t quite remember the name of the band, the flaming something he thought, but he didn’t really care to remember since they were mediocre at best. He remembered her saying that she was the only one in their group that had no one to love her and it was because of her freckles. Lou knew that it was really because she was different from the rest of them, that she didn’t really want to be a part of the group and was only there because she was best friends with Jocelyn. Lou and Rhea had built a close relationship and had kept in touch over the years via e-mail. He was thrilled to hear that she was living in Seattle married with three kids; he even went to the wedding. He was proud to see her find who she really was and find someone who loved her, even with her freckles.
Lou was fond of Jocelyn in a different way than Rhea. He had a fling with her when the girls were around the age of sixteen, something that would catch up to him later. He picked her up when she was hitchhiking home in downtown San Francisco and their relationship started after he took her to his apartment to snort coke and have sex. A few nights after Jocelyn blew him during the Flaming whatever’s less than spectacular stage gig, she hitchhiked up to his mansion without warning anyone. She stayed there a couple of days for more sex and copious amounts of cocaine, and he returned her home the week after. Jocelyn made regular trips to Lou’s house and he invited her over for the many parties he held. Many different people attended Lou’s party, the rock groups he had sponsored, other moguls in the music industry, some of Lou’s closest friends, and other distinguished guests. Jocelyn was never much for the party scene though since she didn’t know anyone of Lou’s associates and it wasn’t a good idea to hang around with him at the parties since she was only sixteen and they would run the risk of everyone knowing Lou had relations with an underage girl, even though she was pretty sure about half of the guests there had probably done it too. It was during these parties that Jocelyn learned that Lou was married to a woman who was in her late twenties. Her name was Mindy; she had a master’s degree from the University of California Berkeley but never finished her Ph.D. since she decided to get married with Lou. Jocelyn and Mindy never met though since Lou didn’t want Mindy to find out about his extramarital affairs.
Jocelyn had spent a lot of time with Lou’s son Rolph since they were the same age. They were particularly fond of each other but Lou dismissed this as just a close friendship. During the parties the two wound hide from Lou and the rest of the party guests in various spots around the mansion. Behind the pool house, on the roof, on Rolph’s balcony, in various closets throughout the house that Lou never bothered to look in. Lou didn’t know that the two had actually developed a relationship that was deeper than just a friendship, not quite an emotional relationship, but more like really good friends with really good benefits. Jocelyn had experienced her first kiss with Rolph, despite all the things she had done with Lou that one typically does after a kiss. They even had sex once, on the roof during one of Lou’s parties; it was the first time that she had felt normal, being with someone who wasn’t 30 years older than her. They waited for the sun to rise together. They developed deeper feelings for each other but they knew it couldn’t be since she was also with Lou and lived all the way in San Francisco. Lou didn’t learn of their relations until Rolph was in his early twenties and Lou’s relationship with Jocelyn was long over. Lou thinks to himself that he should have known, Rolph always had a way with developing crushes on some of Lou’s younger girlfriends.
Lou and Jocelyn’s relationship ended when Jocelyn’s mother discovered that she had been having relations with Lou. They first had suspicions when they discovered a few packs of condoms in her backpack and later overheard her on the phone with Lou talking about their times together. After Jocelyn’s mother informed her Father of this he decided to press charges against Lou for sexual relations with a minor. When the police arrived at Lou’s house with a warrant for his arrest they found a packet of cocaine on him and a couple of pounds throughout his house. Lou was given a three year sentence but was able to get out after only a year for good behavior. Cocaine was found in his jail cell a number of times, but he was still able to get out early probably because the warden was a big fan of one of the rock groups Lou had discovered and had promised the warden an audience with them. During the entire Fiasco Lou’s wife Mindy divorced him and she took along with her a small fraction of his fortune and the two daughters they had together. She still kept in contact with Lou and let the two girls see their father. Lou would pay child support regularly and eventually their youngest daughter would become Lou’s protégée and inherit his business. Lou always tried to hold on to that feeling he got knowing he was able to do at least one good thing for the kids he shared with Mindy.
During his time in jail Rolph had to move from Lou’s mansion and live with his mom. His mother often commented on how much of a sleazebag Lou was and always had to make a remark about Jocelyn. This made Rolph mad at his mother and they had bad relationship issues for the year that Lou spent in jail. Rolph used to reminisce and wish for the days when his father and mother were together to come back, but now he despised his mother, and couldn’t wait until his father was out of prison so he could move back in to his mansion. Once Lou was released, Rolph left his mother’s as soon as he could and his mother couldn’t do anything about it since Rolph at that point was eighteen. Despite being back in his father’s house Rolph began showing some signs of depression and Lou had taken notice that his son was acting strange, but didn’t think that it was any serious problem until Rolph was in his twenties. Rolph had become solitary, sometimes locking himself in his room for many hours at a time without making a sound. Lou could tell that Rolph hadn’t been sleeping because he would sometimes find Rolph’s bed made in the middle of the night without a single wrinkle on the sheets. Some nights Rolph would just sit out on his balcony and wait for the sun to rise, staring off in the distance. Rolph’s depression had become painfully apparent to Lou when Rolph wouldn’t eat any of his food and had lost fifteen pounds in a month. Lou had finally decided to put his son through counseling.
The shrink that Lou hired to counsel Rolph was able to get him to finally eat some food and get to sleep by using hypnosis. Despite his efforts however, Rolph was still emotionally unstable. The shrink had asked Lou to attend some group counseling with Rolph to see if there was anything Rolph would tell them; something Lou could do to better support him, something he would only be comfortable saying if Lou was around, or anything that he might want his father to hear. Rolph spilled everything that he had been holding in for a long time, like why did Lou and his mother get a divorce? Why did they not love each other anymore? He felt like life would’ve been much better if they hadn’t split up. He told them how he liked Mindy when they first met, but started to despise her about halfway through their safari in Africa, and hated her even when she and his father got a divorce and he didn’t have to see her anymore. He asked why his Dad couldn’t just grow up and act like a normal father, be mature, not throw so many crazy parties, and not date women who are the same age as him. He told him about how he wished the Jocelyn still was able to come to their house so that he could see her and told Lou about how he and Jocelyn had sex on his balcony during one of Lou’s parties. That detail bothered Lou but he let his son finish talking. After having spilled everything he had to say Rolph was angry at his dad. His depression and isolation was Rolph’s way of keeping himself from blowing up on his dad.
Needless to say the therapy wasn’t a success as it had left Lou and Rolph’s relationship in pieces. Rolph became so angry with his father that he would stop talking to him altogether. Rolph’s older sister Charlie tried her best to try to make peace between Lou and Ralph but she just couldn’t calm Rolph’s anger. Rolph would carry this anger towards his father until he shot himself in his father’s mansion when he was twenty-eight years old. This left Lou devastated caused him to resort to alcoholism and to abuse drugs even more than he already had been to help distract him from his grief. Lou would overdose a couple of times due to the large amounts of cocaine he had been taking and as a result would experience two strokes. The first of the two only left him with one wobbly leg but the second would leave him where he was today, bed ridden hooked up to a machined with two tubes shoved up his nostrils, waiting on Rhea and Jocelyn to arrive at his mansion to say his last goodbyes. He wondered about Jocelyn; he knew she had been having a hard time but was she recovering? How is she doing now? Is she still as beautiful as she was when he last saw her? Does she hate him? He hoped that all his questions would be answered in due time.
Sometime in the afternoon the girls had arrive at his house and were escorted to the room Lou was laying in. Lou was thrilled to see the girls but thanks to his condition he couldn’t show much of it. All he could do was greet them with a half-smile and a quiet hello. Lou was right; the two were still beautiful like they were when they were younger. Sure they had a wrinkle here and there, but they were beautiful no less, especially Jocelyn considering her addiction to cocaine for a better half of her life. Rhea was very engaging, she asked Lou how he was feeling, joked around with him a bit, even showed him a current picture of her family, he made a comment on how he thought the oldest one was cute; something Jocelyn gave a subtle disgusted gesture to that Lou caught in the corner of his vision. Jocelyn wasn’t being very talkative; the only words she said to him were “Hi Lou.” That answered his question on whether she hated him or not. Lou wanted to ask her how she was doing and maybe try to apologize for what he had done to her and for the rough time she had been having, but judging by her silence and some of the glares he had been getting from her when she would doze off into deep thought, he knew that he probably shouldn’t bring any of that up and just appreciate that she was even there in the first place.
After a while Lou had asked the girls to help him outside to sit by his pool since he had been outside in weeks and wanted to lie out in the sun like he had when he was younger. He wanted to feel it all come back to him; the sun beating down on his face, the days he would swim laps through his pool or lay on a lawn chair in his red swim trunks tanning, even the days he and Jocelyn had spent swimming or tanning by the pool. Lou noticed that standing outside by his pool seemed to make Jocelyn a little more uneasy though. She had an almost angry look on her face and she was staring at the pool. He wondered what was running through her mind. Was she remembering their times together by the pool, or was she thinking something else? After some further conversation with Rhea and very little input from Jocelyn, Jocelyn finally spoke up in a loud tone asking “what about Rolph?” Lou could tell she was wondering where he had been or if he was there in the mansion. Lou very solemnly informed the girls about how Rolph didn’t make it, how he died when he was twenty-eight. Now Jocelyn had an infuriated look on her face, like her hatred towards Lou could no longer be controlled. She told Lou that she should kill him, but Lou was surprised or astounded, he almost agreed knowing what he had done to her and how much she and Rolph cared for each other, all he could say though was “too late.” His final request to the girls was to sit him up in his bed and stand by his sides, hold his hands while he takes one last look at his life, past and present. He stared out at his pool, clutching onto the girls hands, enjoying his last few moments with them. He never did get to take them on a safari in Africa, but he was happy enough having them there. “Nice to be. With you girls.” He says fighting to breath. “Another minute,” he says. “Thank you, girls. One more. Like this.”
