MONA: Do Not Judge Lest…

Chapter 1

Jesus, a life, idea and dude who, one way or another, inspires our hearts or fuels our fears. Despite the fact that no one ever took a picture of him or sketched out a drawing with charcoal on papyrus, and the fact that he said ‘I am not what you see before you’ to all of his followers, we all have an image of him in our image-requiring brain boxes. To those of us with Caucasian biology, he’s a handsome-looking White guy with brown hair, blue eyes, an Aryian face. To the Bros in the hood, he’s a Black dude with an Afro that ain’t gonna be straightened out by any Whitey wearing a Roman toga or an Armoni suit. To Yaqui Indians on the peyote express to something beyond and within themselves, he’s a red-skinned dude who made several trips to what’s now Mexico through astral projection 1500 years before Columbus, and burrows the bodies of animals to do so now. To those who appreciate the love that happens between members of the same gender, he’s a champion of that expression of compassion who maybe has male and female parts under his robes. To those who serve their country by joining Armies that clobber the hell out of people in other countries, he’s that guy on the lead horse that’s always White, leading blood-thirsty Crusaders who are also always White.

But some of us remember what Jesus said. Like ‘let he who is free of sin throw the first stone’, which applies to everyone who ever pontificated from a pulpit. ‘Treat others as you’d like to be treated yourself’, which works for everyone in the congregation, except for workahollic masochists. And, ‘Do not judge, lest you be judged….or a lot worse’. Okay, Jesus didn’t say the ‘a lot worse’ part, but he inferred it. Especially to the ‘cool kids’ who grew up becoming popular and influential adults, gods and goddesses themselves by the time they hit their 30^th birthday.

Two of them, Jennifer Selkirk and Brad Crane, were the top stars in the art exhibit where my official investigation ended, and where the real test of the oath I took as a Cop to Protect and Serve was to begin. The featured work was a life-sized statue of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Adam was making love to Eve, every muscle in their bodies fully engaged in the task and Passion of it. Below them were real plants, Communis Ricinus, to be exact, the aromatic extract of the leaves penetrating from their skin, mixed with very human olfactory emissions from the bodies of forerunners of our sometimes magnificent species. Bodies that, at the core of the work, were sculpted with the best clay the gods of Olympus could get, molded into place by the combined hands of DaVinci, Michalangelo and Hippocrates. Bodies that, at the core of it, displayed the best elements of being both cool and hot, as well as the model of perfect health. Bodies whose faces had been seen around the world on television, movie and computer pop-up screens by hundreds of millions of commoners at least three times a week. Bodies that a few hours ago belonged to Jennifer and Brad themselves, before the merciful delivery of death turned their mutilated and tortured bodies finally into corpses. Corpses that succumbed to not only the ricin in the Cummunis ‘garden’ in which they were making love, but to a multitude of other punishments inflicted upon them by someone far more clever than the devil below, and compassionate than the Heavenly Father above. Punishments which resulted in disfigurements of their faces with pustules and warts. Breasts, testicles and penis torn apart from their attachments to the body trunk, kept in place by pins and plates. Their magnificent, thick and long locks nothing more than short scrub grass which was barely holding onto a scalp, that scalp was more blood than skin. And beneath that scalp, cranial vaults filled with a brown ooze that emanated out of the loose plates on the crown of the head, and around the orbits of the eyes which showed fear and regret, both at the same time. The aroma of the ooze was unmistakable.

“Hmm…Shit coming out of shitheads,” I related to Liz as I smelled the odor on the tip of my examining glove as I allowed my lips to turn upward and let out an ironic, and justified, chuckle.

“This isn’t funny, Detective Vogel,” Captain Elizabeth Thorverson shot back at me through her angry steel blue eyes. She had a body as strong and Herclean as any of her male Viking ancestors, and gentle female features which would be the rival of any Walkurie. But she seemed very ‘mortal’ that day. As scared as Brad and Jennifer were before they became exhibits. As scared as I secretly was as well. But like her Nordic Ancestors of old, the five-foot-ten, blonde, chisel-chinned model of unconquerability knew that the best way to control fear inside yourself is to inflict it upon others. And when combined with justification of that infliction, it made for a powerful weapon. “This was supposed to be YOUR case!” Captain Liz blasted at me. “An easy assignment that you screwed up. Not me. And I’m not taking responsibility for these ‘accidents’ happening, or any of the others on your shift. You killed them as much as whoever you’re protecting who did.”

“You’re right,” I told her as a horde of Crane and Selkirk fans rushed in past the first perimeter of securty guards, called to the Gallery on that day by an announcement on the net that Brad and Jen were giving away free roles in movies, cars, kisses and fucks to anyone who came to their art exhibit. Most of them were horrified to see what had happened to the movie stars who, two months ago, they wanted to be or be liked by. And who a few short weeks ago had acquired…other reputations.

“So,” Liz asked me, keeping, for the moment anyway, what I told her to herself. “Who’s next to be displayed as ‘art’ for the tourists here in the museum, the rats in the Bowery or the fish in the East River?”

I thought long and hard about giving Liz the answer. The REAL answer. The no bullshit one. The one she could handle, and maybe even understand.

“Well?” she pressed, folding her arms this time. She tapped her right foot while preparing to kick the answer out of me in three more beats of the Fireball Symphonia raging in her head.

“Me,” I replied, only to her. Holding back as long as I could. “Me,” I told myself as I looked in the mirror. “Yes, me,” I repeated to another painting on the wall. An abstract work of a woman with a face that was evil and vindictive on one side, merciful and kind on the other. And hoping that Liz would not notice my obsession with that unsigned painting. Or the ones of Jesus on the walls by perhaps the same artist, or perhaps not. With writing in blood reading ‘Don’t Judge Lest You Be Judged, or worse.’

“You and her, you have a history, Sean?” I could feel Liz saying as I felt her investigating me more than the woman in the painting. Or the purp who immortalized Brad Crane and Jennifer Selkirk in waxed-formaldyhe. For the rest of my plan to work, so that SOME kind of justice could be done, and my real connection with all of these victims could be justified and rectified, I needed time.

“Everyone in this room, living and dead, on canvas and in three dimensions, has a history with me that’s still in the making,” I told Liz, knowing that we had history between us as well. History that if I told anyone else about, would wind up with Liz being converted into a corpse, or a blob of paint splattered against a wall.

While I let Liz stew over what she would do with the investigation, and me, I reconsidered what had happened when it all began. When some of it began anyway. Such is the way of investigators. By looking over old data, again and again, some kind of solution to the problem at hand would happen. In a world where everyone was part of both the problem, and the solution.

Three long months and two successful careers ago, the emergency room of Long Island General Hospital was turned into an operating room. As the drama unfolded itself, Kirk O’Neil, whose body type and voice out Bonded any of the James Bonds, had many talents included being both a Cop and a Doctor. He was really good at both of course. Evidence of such of course came from the other doctor on staff, Linda Westmoreland, a 29 year old woman with a whole lot of clever between her ears, a body Barbie would sell Ken to a Chinese snakehead for, and a mane of long blonde hair that flowed down to her ass. I remember the conversation they had over a young Jamaican cab driver semi-legally living in Oceanside who wound up on his operating table after a massive accident at the LIRR station in Lynbrook. A very real conversation the reflected a whole lot of realities.

“Two more stitches and another accident victim brought back to the land of the living,” Kirk proclaimed, as he completed the most difficult task on the most difficult surgery in the overcrowded room. “So he can get another DWI and wind up back here,” he mused with an arrogance which his current role and social status not only rewarded, but seemed to require.

“Without DWI’s both of us would be out of work,” very attractively-able-bodied ‘Doc Linda’ reminded him as another wave of victims were brought into the standing room only ER from the two car accident that resulted in a lot more vehicular and body damage after the drunk drivers of the first two cars started shooting at each other.

“True enough, true enough,” Kirk replied, whipping off his gloves, tearing off his mask, and tossing them both towards, but not into, the waste bucket after giving the street rapper a shot at seeing his 20^th birthday. “Anyone else I can resurrect from the dead?” he requested of the blue-shirted Paramedics and nurses behind him.

“Me,” Linda smiled at Kirk with an alluring smile, knowing all too well that the Jamaican rapper was not quite ready to go back to the streets yet. “After we get this puppy back to his dawgs in the hood,” she continued, appending it with a sexy wag of her tongue.

“Hmm…me,” O’Neil considered with a hard-to-get facade while waiting for his next ‘impossible’ medical case which he would rescue from the dead. “I suppose it’s appropriate,” he conceded while Linda awaited his answer. “After all, it is my job to protect, and serve.”

“And please,” Linda added, taking in a very deep breath, arching her back and giving her medical collaborator an ample view of her sized ‘perfect’ cleavage. “I’d expect nothing less from a full time Doc.”

“And I’d expect nothing less from a full time Doc who in her spare time is engaged in activities I’d have to arrest you for,” he smiled back at her, discretely drawing her attention to the gun, badge and handcuffs strapped to his overloaded Police utility belt.

With their eyes, lips and tongues, Officer-Doctor O’Neal and Doctor Westmoreland had a private conversation regarding what would transpire between them once their badges, name tags and surgical greens would come off. Behind them, the worker bees of the OR frenetically tried to stay ahead of the human carnage presented to them by a wave of other patients coming in. Most, as I observed it anyway, knew less about medical procedure than Kirk knew humility and Linda knew about celibacy. Directing traffic and perspective behind them was Kate Yolinski, an attractive nurse of no more than thirty years of age whose assigned role was to see that the docs got what they wanted and the patients got what they needed. Though everyone around her was panicking, she was cool as a cucumber. But hot as hell under the collar when she saw how Doctors O’Neil and Westmoreland seemed to be more concerned with each other’s anatomy than repairing the broken parts of the patients who needed them most.

Just as Kirk and Linda were about to dive into the blissful, bucolic abyss between their romantically-enamored eyes, Kate pushed them back onto separate ledges. “GSW with elevated CRT. HBC with escalating HR and dropping BP,” she said to Linda as she presented one of the worst patients in front of her.

“And this one, one of your favorite kind of cases,” she continued, as she pushed another patient in a wheelchair into Kirk’s angry face. “He’s next in line,” Kate added. “MY line,” she asserted then ran over to assist Linda.

According to the ‘bible’ upon which this absurd drama was built, what Kate said went. What she said in the OR, ER and every room in between was law. And Kirk knew that if Kate revealed what happened between him and Doctor Linda in those other rooms, his ass would be grass.

“So, Sammy,” Kirk said to the odorous, unwashed and shaking thirty-going-on-fifty man in the wheelchair with mismatched shoes garbed in clothing that was more holes and stain than cloth. “What fart wind or accidental misfortune brings you here to my—?”

Before Sammy could say anything, a projective of vomit came out of his mouth. This time he vomited a bit faster than Kirk could duck, adding a fine layer of ‘granola brown’ specs onto Kirk’s Dockers just below the knee.

Kate smiled with vengeful delight as Kirk tried to shake it off, wishing that the stain on his pants occurred between the legs, a portion of his anatomy which Kate knew very well from recent times that he yearned to get back in her weaker moments, and lamented ever having in her stronger ones. But Kirk was with Doctor Linda now. A fresh romance that Kate vowed to stop. Maybe for Kirk’s own good. And certainly for her own personal satisfaction.

But the script at hand called for something more procedural and practical than Kate’s lingering karmic bond with Kirk. “Howletzer retractors…and metzanbaums,” Linda barked out at Kate, her hands extended out impatiently for the instruments. “Now would be nice,” Doctor Linda added sarcastically, a mode of communication which Linda was best at. Along with of course being a bitch who looked like a beauty. A beauty with long, blonde hair that flowed down to her ass. Hair which Linda ‘accidently’ whipped into Kate’s face as Kate tried to look back at Kirk to see how much he used to or still could love her. Nurse Kate handed the instruments to Doctor Linda as commanded, after which the former nurse who became a doctor went into Commandress mode, impatient with the hired staff who didn’t move with as much speed or flair as she did. “Come on peons,” Linda said to the staff who she was told could keep up with her. “We have a patient here. This isn’t a drill.”

“No, it isn’t,” shoulder-length haired brunette Kate said softly as she pushed Linda’s three foot blonde mane away from her face, noting a pair of scissors on the instrument tray that wasn’t doing anything. And Linda’s back turned to her. And Linda gazing with blissful lust back at Kirk through mirrors between medical motions which were more theatrical than practical.

It was not in the written plan for the day, but it would make for an interesting, and perhaps deserving beginning for another drama. Kate took the pair of scissors in hand and subtly edged it closer to the twist tie at the base of Linda’s mega-sized pony-tail. It’s being chopped off would of course be an ‘accident’, as Doctor Linda was moving faster than everyone else, in ever bigger motions, moving to a beat of her own personal drummer, not giving a shit about anyone else’s. Linda’s hair meeting Kate’s sharp metal cutting edge would embellish the day, and the recording of the events of such. Most importantly, it would be ‘cool’ as well as cruel, and as everyone, except perhaps Sammy, knew, it was cool to be cruel. And colorful. But just as Kate edged in to make the day, and the ‘scene’ at hand, she heard from behind her—“Hold it!”

“Hold it right there!” Kirk continued as he held Sammy’s arm up, motioning for a nurse to put a third surgical mask over his face to hold back the homeless man’s body odor.

“I’m clean, Doc,” Sammy said with an Okie drawl straight out ‘Grapes of Wrath’, as sincere as it was hoaky. “I ain’t used them tracks for months.”

“Ain’t wershed there neither,” Kirk replied mockingly as he completed the basic requirements for a physical exam. “Or changed them ‘designer grunge’ duds of yers.”

“But, Doc,” Sammy continued, his arms shaking, his skin pale green. “My stomach. I ate somethin when I was dumpster diving that—“

“—Kate, darling. Angel of mercy, grace and hot loving for those in need of affection and companionship,” Kirk said in a loud voice.

“What is it, Kirk,” Kate replied, remembering the times when that description of her applied to what happened between her and Kirk, and not her and most of the other Cops or Docs who frequented the ER on those interesting nights when the moon was full and the common sense bank was empty. Thinking about the best of possibilities, for everyone, Kate let go of Linda’s hair just before the almost sheared doc turned around to see what was going on behind her

“I told you not to bring any more SHPOS’s into my ER,” Kirk proclaimed regarding the in house achronym for sub human piece of shit.

The clammer of noise in the ER diminished as all eyes, including those of the upscale suburban patients, gradually turned to Doctor Officer O’Neil. “No more fucking SHPOS’s!”

Kate and Linda both smiled, thinking the same thought, feeling with the same mind.

A nurse carrying another bucket walked by Kirk. While he was using his right hand to flash a light into Sammy’s eyes, looking ‘medical’, he pulled on her blouse just at the bra strap, stopping her. He pointed to the bucket, then to Sammy, then put out three fingers. On the count of ‘three’ he jumped away from ‘smelly Sammy’ while the bucket of cold water splashed all over his body.

Kate and Linda’s grins got wider as Sammy went from the shivers to the shakes. As did those of most of the staff and some of the patients. “Heelllpp meee doc?” he pleaded.

A nurse passed by him with a bucket of water. Kirk instructed her with a nod of his head and flick of his hand to pour it over Sammy’s unwashed body. to “Ifff I ddddooo, hellpppp yooouuu ‘Hound Dough’” Kirk said as he observed the disfigured writing on the hobo’s fading tatoo under the now-removed dirt and grime. “Then it’s YOYOMOFO. You DO know what that means, don’t’ you? YOYOMOFO?”

“Huh?” Sammy replied, dumbfounded.

“Everybody!” Kirk proclaimed in a loud, regal voice. “On the count of three. YOYOMOFO means…”

“You’re on your own mother fucker,” everyone else in the room yelled out in unison. With big superior smiles on their faces. Followed by chuckles converted to laughs as Kirk pushed the starving, shaking and still smelly hobo towards the door, then kicked his ass out the door.

“And that’s a cut!” came out from the person in charge of the madness, drama, ‘comedy’ and everything in between. “Great energy guys!” Taylor Olsen said as she got her, calling it as it really was, fat ass out of the director’s chair and stomped to the actors in front of camera. Actors who were all better looking than she was. From Brad Crane as Cop-Doc O’Neil. To Krystal O’Shane as former-nurse-now-Doctor Linda Westmoreland, Brad’s in-front-of-camera main squeeze. To Jennifer Selkirk, who was Brad’s main squeeze after the Hollywood ‘work’ day was done, whose jealousy of Krystal and her desire to see her with far less hair than she had was not acting. To Eddy Westin, who under all the hoaky Okie hobo make up was a blue blood rich fuck who spit on the homeless every time he could, and on some occasions got a kick out of throwing into their collection cups dried up terds with pieces of broken glass in them.

“I really liked the way you honored the writing, too!” Taylor exclaimed regarding the script she personally wrote and felt very personal about. “You got into the sensitivity of it all, and the grit!” she continued. She then gave the Assistant Director a ‘peace sign’, a cool gesture for someone of 28 hip years of living.

“Two minutes, then back to one’s,” the effeminate, short and thin-boned Assistant Director who Taylor never called by name, but used as a lap dog announced to the congregation in Napoleonic fashion.

The hungry crew and background actors threw two day old donuts down their gullets, watered their parched throats with no-name coolaid or stepped outside the archway of the open exit door of the spare ER room of the hospital the studio had rented for a quick smoke. Brad, Jennifer, Krystal and Eddy availed themselves of more upscale and fresher gustatory snacks from their own private table, along with recreational pharmaceuticals forbidden to anyone else on set.

Taylor turned around to me, and asked me, humanoid to humanoid, “How was it for you?

I was wearing my badge at the time, in a Columbo overcoat to look ‘Cop like’, and convincing. My service revolver was strapped to my belt, as always. As required whenever I was on duty as a Cop. A duty which my bosses, for reasons I never understood but was always suspicous about, put me here on set as a technical advisor and head of security. An easy gig with people I grew up with…or maybe outgrew.

“So, how was it?” Taylor asked me again, needing a real answer. Maybe wanting one as well.

“Well, Cops, like the O’Neil character would do things a little differently,” I said to Taylor, giving her the part of the truth that I know she could handle. I could feel her thinking rather than fuming behind those green eyes of hers framed by a good looking but not overly attractive face. “And some of the interaction between the medical team and the patients…In MY experience in ER’s anyway…Somehow didn’t make logical sense.”

I realized two short beats later that maybe lying to Taylor would have been kinder than being truthful, or constructive. “In the world that I created, in print, and that’s materializing in front of the camera, it makes INTRINSIC sense,” she said, in the same way that she did when she was a 17 year old hot babe, at least relative to what I remember I was during those ‘golden cool’ times at Brooklyn Arts Academy. “It does make intrinsic sense, doesn’t it, Sean?” she continued, the seed of self-doubt I saw in her then having germinated into a full-grown set of weeds strangling her brain that she showed to no one. And, as I assessed it anyway, hid from everyone else on set, particularly the ‘Artsie Posse’, Brad, Jen, Krystal and Eddy, all reunited to do a film that was funded by a sugar daddy whose identity wasn’t known, and was irrelvant to everyone’s agendas anyway. Even mine, at the time anyway.

“So,” Taylor pressed, demanding an answer and afraid she would get one. “It makes intrinsic sense, doesn’t it Sean?”

“Suppose it does,” I said. “I’m just a Cop now. You’re the artist.” It was the truth. The best I could offer.

“But did it move you, here?” Taylor asked, pointing to my heart.

“And here?” Brad interjected, pointing to his penile organ.

Everyone in the room laughed, the cool Posse as well as its peasant servants. They all seemed to have heard the private conversation between me and Taylor. Perhaps because of a microphone ‘accidently’ being put on, or the Assistant Director’s request for quiet between takes finally being heeded.

Taylor seemed caught. Found out. Or about to be found out. She was never one who could handle the truth. Telling her lies made things easier. For everyone. She looked to me for the critique of it all, as did the Posse, and the servants.

“Well?” Taylor inquired of me. “How was, and is, all of this for you, Sean?”

“It made me…think,” I replied, choosing my words very carefully, allowing everyone to derive their own conclusion. As it made me think as well about…a lot. Much of which was not what Taylor was thinking, or anyone else who backed this film that celebrated cruelty and manipulation, two elements which were becoming increasingly popular in the world in front of the camera, and behind it.

“I knew it!” Taylor proclaimed from her most powerful and comfortable place. “This film is making you think! I fucking knew it! We have a goddamn winner here, people!”

Everyone seemed to agree. From the royalty on top to the schleps on the bottom. Hell, even I was agreeing with her. Yeah, it was a ‘winner’ film. In a world where there was being number one or number nothing, with no numbers in between except imaginary ones.

“Let’s get set up again,” Taylor said with renewed enthusiasm, vigor and, in her own artistic way, intelligence. She grabbed hold of her script like it was a newly discovered Beethovian manuscript of a symphony the world wanted, needed and deserved to be played. “Moving on to—“

“—repeating the scene. With a few medical prop and medical treatment suggestions,” a soft, sincere woman’s voice said from the back of the room with a Serbian accent. “Suggestions I wrote down that you please to will read?” Doctor Mona Kelosevic stood up on her good leg and hobbled her small framed five-four body over towards Taylor and gave her the list.

“And, ‘Comradski Doctor,” Taylor said with a mocking Serbian accent, being sure to let her eyes display a culturally superior roll of the brows to the group before letting them look at list handed to her by the always-dark-mood, dark haired Doc hired as the medical consultant on the film by the studio . “I should to incorporate these linear suggestions into this intuitive, multi-tracked artistic Vision, because…?

“….Someone in real world will try to save lives by imitating what the actor do, and kill people instead?” the good Doctor said with an Old World civility and gentle assertiveness that I hardly saw in the New World, or for that matter, in the Old World in the 21^st Century as well.

“An affirmation stated as question?” Taylor replied in a mocking accent with a tinge of hip-cool Valley Girl Mall-Rat mixed into the diction, this time directed at Mona rather than at Doctor Kelosevic.

The congregation under Taylor’s iron thumb and always on-the-ready-for insult third finger burst into a mixture of smirks, chuckles and laughter. I snuck in a good look at the list of Mona’s suggestions regarding medical procedures and protocols, and she was very right. As a Cop in the real world for the last decade not a week went by when I saw someone do more harm than good by imitating what cool-looking-Docs did on screen in medical dramas, and even medical ‘reality’ shows which, of course, everyone with OPEN eyes knows are scripted.

But Taylor was interested in another reality. A reality where she was ‘Philosopher Queen’, the director of the film, though she secretly wished she had the body, voice and ‘presence’ to be an actor in it as well. In a world where she was on top, at the expense of everyone on the bottom in a world where, to be accurate and understanding of her situation, if you weren’t number one, you were number nothing. Glancing over Doctor Mona’s list, after having carefully read her audience, Taylor went on, in her own diction, a mixture of Upper East Side New York and Beverly Hills, in keeping with her pedigree. “These suggestions are interesting? From someone who washed out of Art School and had to become a doctor?”

Mona had nothing to say, lowering her head, guilty as charged. Made to feel even more guilty by the smirks from Brad, Jennifer, Eddy and Krystal. Smirks that, I hope, Mona didn’t see.

But Taylor was a sensitive artist who was well overpaid to portray the human condition on screen. She continued in an understanding tone that sounded sincere, even to me. “But…we do need you keeping our bodies going, Doctor Mona. So we can be creatively expressive with them. Not that your life is worthless. And that you aren’t part of the creative process. Even Creative people need doctors, just like we need mechanics, plumbers, carpenters and—“

Taylor’s maternal monolog was interrupted by a ring on Mona’s pager. Awakened into a world she could control, and cared about, Doc Mona looked at the message. An emergency call, by the look in her eyes. “—You will take into consideration. What I put on the list? I have emergency call on third floor.”

Mona walked out of the room as assertively and quickly as she could. The laughter in the room stopped, the smirky faces turning serious as everyone on set was at one time the observer or victim of a real medical emergency. As Mona hobbled out the door, determination and Purpose in her eyes, she reminded me of Mileva Einstein, Albert’s first wife who was far smarter, wiser and caring than her husband was before he hit his thirtieth birthday. An old and time tested soul amongst slow thinking, fast-talking, self-absorbed immature souls who, in time, like Albert, would be educated into being Higher Beings.

But, that would be then, and this was now. “What the fuck is up with her?” Taylor voiced no more than two seconds after the always civil and never back-talking Mona slammed the door behind her. “We aren’t paying her enough fucking money?” she continued, looking at the accountant on set who answered to the executive producer whose identity was kept secret from everyone.

“We all aren’t paying her with enough RESPECT,” I wanted to say, but didn’t. Taylor looked at me with her Philosopher Queen stare, demanding that I take care of what needed to be done. Something that I, some of the time, did when we were teenaged kids. And something that as a presumably grown up man with a badge, I had to do all of the time now. “I’ll get her back,” I pledged, self-observing that I was very good at delivering words that meant different things to different people, the real truth behind them known only to me.

I walked towards the exit door with that ‘professional’ gait which said to all who were watching ‘relax, I got it all under control…show’s over’. “I’ll get her back,” I pledged.

“Or get me a doctor as a technical advisor who knows his or her place!” Taylor barked out at me. “Mona was always a sore loser anyway.” Empowered by smirks of superiority from Brad, Jennifer, Krystal and even Eddy, director Taylor Olsen indulged in being an expressive comic actor, a killer combo of Don Rickles, Joan Rivers and Denis Miller. “’Moaning Mona’, ladies, gentlemen and everyone in between. Hobbling back home to Mama. Who gave her, like, too many dull out virus infected dolmathes and dumplings when she was a kid, ya know? Then convinced her, like, gotta-pump-out-as-many Christians, virgin, baby-making machine daughter that she actually had artistic talent beyond finger-painting Easter eggs for her imaginary friends. Then sent Polyanna Korinina out into the world with a thin skin, making Mona unable to shoot back insulting, colorful or creative digs at anyone.”

“Or willing to,” I said to myself as I opened the door and left the room, feeling divided between two worlds, realities and moralities.