From where we sat drinking Sangria and munching, we could make out most of the neck and head of the atrocious cement giraffe we’d seen in the pictures sticking his head over the eight-foot high stucco wall. The long-necked waste of statuary materials was ugly in so many ways, and Jelicka might have used it for continued target practice had her Glock not been safely stowed in the A8. Instead, she poured the last of the Sangria as Rachel explained her own choice of artistic subject matter.
“The ‘Nude Men Without Faces’ series was inspired by the lack of spirituality I find in men today—not even just the good-looking ones,” she was saying. “They’re not spiritual, but it’s like they’re trying to promote their own godliness, almost as if they have become their own Gods and, therefore, only worship, guess who—?
Themselves
.”
There was some
mmm-ing
in acknowledgment as Kiki returned with a full pitcher of Sangria, along with a tiny pot of
Tiger Balm
for Maddie’s trigger finger, which had suffered minor strain from excessive gun firing. I worried that Kiki, being the most religious of all of us, might object to any discussion of G-O-D, but she just sat there gently rubbing the tiger balm into Maddie’s finger while the warm, early Encino evening embraced us all.
Kiki’s own recent crisis of faith—which involved a lot of soul searching having to do with her being a lapsed Catholic married to a secular Jew—had apparently left her less beholden to any one dogma and more accepting of other perspectives, no matter how crazy.
Rachel continued, “So all this need for worshipping sort of presents a problem for us ordinary women when ordinary men want to be worshipped as if they’re real Gods—not that a God is even real.”
Kiki put the lid on the tiger balm. “As real as you want to make Him.”
“
Mmmm
,” said Maddie, ruminating. “It’s hard being mortal.”
“Saul’s doing a pretty good job,” said Kiki.
At least one of us was in love.
“We can’t possibly accomplish
multiple
man-God worship in any viable way today even if we wanted to. If every man wants to be a God...?” Rachel shook her head. “Think about it; at your agency, Quinn—do you bow down to acknowledge every manifestly-huge ego walking around the place?”
I’d lost the thread of what it was we were talking about. I shrugged, holding up my hands in surrender.
“Right, because it can’t be done,” Rachel plowed on. “So, to answer your question, Maddie, what I’m saying in the paintings is the faces can’t be displayed because they belong to the soulless and interchangeable, thus cannot be worshipped; they are, in fact, unworshipable.”
“Wow,” said Jelicka. “Did you make that up?”
“I
read
, Jel.”
“You must have gotten that from some militant feminist magazine,” said Kiki.
“What I’m saying is the ‘everybody is a star’ syndrome is backfiring,” ranted Rachel. “Sure, anyone today can lay down music tracks in their garage using fake instruments, stealing other artists’ work and manipulating the sound. Anyone can put her ‘art’ online where, if it feeds into some zeitgeist-y movement, it will get discovered and the ‘artist’ moves into the mainstream. But even though there’s a bigger potential audience, it gets diluted because there are so many of these people. Other people rip off the first group, then the fat cats come in to monetize anything that is truly good, and they take it and get away with outright theft! I’m better off than most of these artists because my work is kind of hard to steal, you know? I work on huge canvases—you can’t just download them.”
“I’m a little confused,” I said, looking at the others, a couple of whom had gone slack-jawed. “What are we talking about?”
“Not everyone can be a star,” said Rachel. It was true but, at that moment, it appeared as though she’d lost all of us.
“
Shhhh
,” whispered Kiki, just in time to save us from further confusion. She quietly walked closer to the wall that separated her house from the house next door. Jelicka finished pouring herself more Sangria, and we joined Kiki to listen.
Snippets of sentences drifted over—innocuous words like house, exterior, kitchen. Nothing they were saying immediately suggested nefarious activity. From their conversation, they might have been talking about upcoming renovations.
A different voice was audible now; somebody new had come onto the patio.
“That’s the owner,” Kiki whispered when she heard him.
The speaker was male, and I pegged his accent as being from somewhere in Eastern Europe. He spoke loudly, peppering his conversation with terms like “tracking shot,” “kino,” and “video monitor,” which told us the subject of their conversation was not home improvement.
“They
are
making porno,” said Jelicka.
“Sounds like they’re planning to anyway.” That’s our Maddie— never one to accuse too hastily.
“I told you!” Kiki said as she directed us back to the table. “I really don’t want Troy hearing or seeing any of this.”
“So far it’s just film moves they’re talking about, not sex moves,” Jelicka quipped.
Kiki held her finger to her lips and vehemently
shhhd
her.
“Don’t you think he knows what’s going on?” asked Rachel. “I mean, he knows about sex, right?”
Jelicka took a big gulp of Sangria. “More to the point—don’t you think he’s watched it on the Internet?”
“No,” said Kiki with a trace of defiance. “Definitely not. We have Net Nanny.”
“How old is Troy now?” I asked.
“Just turned fourteen,” said Kiki.
Rachel glanced away and under her breath mumbled, “Yeah, good luck with that.”
“Net Nanny?” Jelicka chortled. “No matter what kind of nanny, when it comes to making movies, you always want the biggest piece of
gross
, never
net
.” She hesitated for a second. “
Gross Nanny
sounds kind of interesting, though. Could be a sequel to
Bridesmaids
.” She knocked back another gulp.
“It’s software. He can’t access certain websites,” Kiki said, deadpan.
“As far as you can tell,” Jelicka said pointedly. Clearly, she knew nothing about parental control software, but I could also see that Kiki was in denial about what Troy, and for that matter,
all
kids these days knew.
Trying to be supportive, Maddie put her hand over Kiki’s. “It’s possible he really doesn’t know. But at some point, sooner rather than later, you and Saul are going to need to talk to him. Might as well not put it off too long, just in case he
is
listening to what’s going on over there.”
“Parental controls are a lost cause anyway,” said Rachel. “His friends will just show him on their stupid smart phones.”
“Life is so complicated,” Kiki said, dispirited. “I realize people have worried about their children since humans started having children, but these days it seems impossible to keep things from them.”
“I have a similar problem with Lila,” said Maddie. “Some of the popular girls at her school are getting their pubes waxed, so now
she
wants to. I didn’t get my
legs
waxed ‘til I was thirty, so there’s no way I’m letting her do it!”
“Why? What’s the problem with it?” Jelicka asked.
“Are you really asking that, Jelicka?” Kiki inquired.
“Well...yes.” She seemed truly mystified.
“I’m glad you didn’t cave,” I said, Maddie having decided after talking it through that day at Babalu.
“
My
big objection with it,” said Rachel, “is that she probably wants to do it so the boys will notice, which is a horrible reason.”
“Why would boys be looking at Lila’s pubes in the first place?” asked Kiki appalled.
“They’re not,” said Maddie. “She doesn’t even have enough down there to wax. For all I know, the mean girls aren’t getting waxed, either, and they made the whole thing up to make the not-so-popular girls feel bad.”
“I hate bullies,” Kiki said.
Jelicka snorted in semi-drunken amusement. “Why bother anyway? No man notices, unless it’s a full-on Brazilian with vajazzling—no straight man, anyway.”
I wondered what sort of sampling of the male population Jelicka had used to reach this conclusion. We really needed to talk to her about her drinking.
“Regardless, it’s a bad precedent to set.” Rachel sounded annoyed again. “I mean, if she’s living to please boys now, what hope is there?”
The Muffs should also talk to Rachel about her growing militancy.
“It’s just peer pressure,” Maddie said. “But enough. We need to brainstorm about how we can help Kiki close down the porn palace. Right?”
There was general agreement among those assembled.
“Okay, good. Ideas? Maybe we start by each of us asking ourselves the question: What would we do if there was such a house next door to us?”
There was a pause while we pondered the question.
“Watch?” said Jelicka.
Kiki and Maddie threw her a look.
“Oh, come on, I’m
kidding
,” she protested. “Taking all this too seriously is not going to get rid of them.”
Though I agreed there was some prurient value in watching, it was also true that Jelicka’s comment wasn’t helpful; and we were there, after all, to get rid of the prosecutable pornographers.
Kiki seemed to be losing patience with us, as she’d lost patience with the people in the house.
“Okay, we’ll focus now,” said Rachel, staring at Jelicka.
Jelicka sighed. “I’m sorry, I’ll stop. Does anybody remember right after Roscoe took up with the older woman, when I was thinking about going into the growth field of mature porn?”
We
mmm’d
and nodded, very glad she hadn’t pursued that career path, but unsure of its relevance to Kiki’s problem.
“Well, I did some research—even went to a shoot.”
“At a private residence?” Kiki asked.
Jelicka shook her head. “A warehouse in Chatsworth. But still, everyone downplayed what they were doing there. You’d never know they were shooting porn from the way they dressed when they weren’t on set. They told me they never made a big show of it because they’d only get harassed.”
“Makes sense,” Rachel said, looking at Kiki. “You probably can’t tell that the people going in and out of that house are in the porn business, can you? And since this is a residential neighborhood, they’ll be extra careful about not getting exposed.”
“Ha-ha,” Kiki said sardonically. “Just because they aren’t getting out of their cars wearing thongs doesn’t make them any less visible. Believe me, I can tell.”
“What I’m saying,” said Jelicka, “and what I think Rachel is suggesting—correct me if I’m wrong, Rachel—is that if we were to hang around the house wearing very provocative clothes, like she said she could, and we pretended we were involved with the movie getting shot inside, maybe more neighbors would complain to the city and eventually shut the place down.”
Kiki frowned. “Maddie—did you find out anything from your friend in the film office?”
“Maddie inhaled sharply. “You’re not going to like it.”
Kiki wailed. “Pleeeeze, don’t tell me that.”
“What I discovered is it’s not necessarily illegal to shoot a movie, including a smutty one, inside your own house. The thing is, if you plan on selling the film or using it for any commercial purpose, you need a permit. Getting that permit is, unfortunately for you, pretty easy—even for porn, as long as certain restrictions are met having to do with parking, noise, security guard—stuff like that—with porn having the additional requirement that the shooting of sex scenes has to be concealed from the public.”
“Are you freaking
kidding
me?” Kiki was about to go ballistic.
“Define ‘concealed,’ ” Jelicka chortled with Rachel adding, “Right, and ‘public.’ Neighbors and cement animals don’t count.”
“Yeah, you can shoot porn anywhere these days,” Jelicka went on. “Don’t forget all the selfies the politicians sent around before Snap Chat.”
The two of them found all this hysterically funny and continued on about recent public sex scandals, political implosions, and the like, forcing Maddie to top them. “The good news is,” she spoke over them, “my friend also told me that your neighbors did
not
pull a permit, which means that unless whatever they’re shooting is for their own use... ”
“Yeah, right,” said Jelicka. “Who rents Kinos and does tracking shots for home videos?”
“Homosexual Republican Senators?” giggled Rachel.
“...it’s illegal to shoot in that house,” Maddie finished.
“So they’re probably thinking that since they’re keeping it small, with bare bones personnel and equipment, they can get away without a permit,” I said. “If no one notices, they can't get caught.”
“Exactly,” said Maddie. “But they’re thinking
wrong
.”
My mobile vibrated, making me jump. Caller I.D. showed it was Steven—and Rachel, regaining her composure, peered over to see. “Do not take that call,” she said. I hit
Dismiss
.
“If somebody does notice,” Maddie continued, “and they get caught, the fines are pretty steep.”
“And we have noticed,” Rachel said.
“Right.” Maddie stabbed the last garlic shrimp. “We have noticed.”
Kiki was smiling. “I’m feeling better about this, you guys.”
“So all we have to do is catch them,” I said warily, “which shows we noticed.”
“That’s it,” Maddie said. “And that’s not all that easy. Let’s say Kiki thinks her neighbors are in the midst of shooting and she calls the cops. They can’t just storm through the house and catch the pornographers in the act. They have to enter the premises legally, which basically means they have to be invited in, which isn’t going to happen. The only other way is for Kiki to work with the cops to build enough probable cause to get a warrant and force entry.”
“I
was
feeling better,” Kiki said, returning to her state of frustration.
“This sucks,” said Jelicka. “Our tax dollars, hard at work.”
Rachel chimed in. “You’d think Kiki’s rights as a quiet, law-abiding citizen would trump what is clearly a violation of zoning laws.”
“Come on, Maddie. There has to be something we can do,” I said.