TV's Biggest Smite

It’s nearing the end of week three of the writers’ strike, and I’ve broken out in the space between my eyebrows. I think it’s from too much sun. I’ve paced the block in front of Netflix, back and forth, charring in the May light, my skin unsure of anything else to do but sending zits to the surface to punish me.

Retreat to the darkness, gay, my flesh cries out, beyond begging. A demand.

But I refuse. I renounce indoors. I live outside now with my little picket sign and my horrific 7-Eleven sunglasses. I’ve made sure to tell people I bought them there when they’ve commented on them. I want them to know it’s kitsch! Camp! Intentional. I’m striking, I don’t need anything fancy. I spent twenty-one dollars on the worst sunglasses in the history of the world because I am in on the joke. Not because I have sixty-dollars in my checking account.

I was wearing them the other day when a cool-looking guy in his twenties and I tried to pull around each other as a truck took up half the street. I pulled to the side, still with little room for him to get around. When he did, he rolled down his window and told me I was “dumb as shit.”

“You’re dumb as shit!” I yelled back. I didn’t move for another minute or so, my heart racing. I caught a glimpse of myself in my sunglasses in the rearview: red and orange and metallic. Faux-aviators. Ghastly and pure. I had the sudden urge to stick my head out of my car and shriek “Young man!” but he was already gone. I remembered how a few months back, I told my fiancé about a conversation I’d had with our neighbors, calling them the “nice young people down the hall,” and then I almost burst into flames.

***

Last night was the Scandoval episode of Vanderpump Rules. My Super Bowl. My 9/11. It came and went, in all its dumb and perfect beauty. A horror movie. An opus. It felt like the pinnacle of reality television.

Ha! Lisa Vanderpump yelled from her glass mausoleum of a home, perched high above the city. She thought about this cast of gorgeous, horny miscreants—her children that she made years ago from wet earth to work in her restaurants and worship her as a god. They did right by her, this time.

Good kitties, Lisa said, petting Sandoval and Raquel with their heads in her lap and purring; eyes wide open and waiting for their next task.

Speaking of kitties… let’s protect the kitties.

Ariana and Sandoval, the Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell of Valley Village, demolished by the spectacle. Ariana sitting broken and lucid on her couch, staring into Tom’s darting eyes; her soulful and wrenching Jonathan Demme-esque monologue. A sniper decimating her dumb target.

Scheana in a bucket hat, eyes chaffed from tears, holding out her own bleeding heart. This was the worst thing that’s ever not happened to her.

Schwartz and Katie, locked again in their exhausting, endless rinse-cycle of codependent bliss. Schwartz flapping his mouth like a carp waiting for a kernel of popcorn, botching his lazy attempts to absolve himself from being Sandoval’s keeper. The secret Schwartz loved carrying. Half-jealous and hateful of Sandoval and Raquel, ecstatic to see his friend descend into villainy. Half-wishing to be physically absorbed by Sandoval once and for all, and live out the rest of his days inside him.

The dark and humiliating magic of Raquel and Tom’s molly-brained fuck cocoon. Those galaxy lights in Raquel’s sad apartment, spinning like a monstrous kaleidoscope, where she waited alone for days like Rapunzel with a bob. Waiting for this sallow man with white-painted fingernails and a black peacoat to come in from the night to lie to her some more.

Young man! I wanted to say to Sandoval, my hands on my hips, pursing my lips and shaking my head.

I don’t think we’ll get television like this again. It felt like the beginning and end of something, all within a span of forty-five minutes. It made me sad. Los Angeles peaked yesterday.