Bruna Andrade
It’s been five years since I saw her in the Times. Many wars with reality both inside and out had passed in those years. The stark reality of horrible solitude in the shadows of galaxies and the unity of no time and space make us war because we cannot swallow it. It is beyond the last thing to consider.
Five years of thinking about the absence of Bruna Andrade. She had these freckles of a Pippy Longstocking and of course apple cheeks. Her name didn’t make any sense. She could have been the poster child of a nordic Nazi propaganda pinup. She told her fans and admirers her name was just made up since she had no mother or father. Her name, persona and even body and mind were made up...out of thin air. She was the darling of Manhattan.
Her designs carried a bold signature. Black and gray. In motif of length and at times breadth. Her models always had to course the runway with head down as if in shame. All the “right” parties had to have her. Her fantastic stories made the columns. She told the whole damned world that she was just only thirteen years old and had no history. No history normal folks have anyway. It was like she was here on this old earth but not here at the same time. Her creations of haute couture were stunning and generated wild sums of cash. All black or gray with just as stunning women displaying them on the Upper East Side with paparazzi recording them with their head down as if in mourning; it was the “thing.”
She even looked like she could have been thirteen but how in the world could she drink her favorite Cribari champagne and drive that vintage Healy with complete abandon if she were such a tender age? The word ‘mystery’ is a weak term to describe her. Could I be labeled a member of the sick perverted class if I confess I fell in love with her. I never met her being on the other side of the continent but I followed her in the press. The Chronicle loved to do pieces about her escapades.
...But what I have to tell you is that the legend of Bruna Andrade, while made up of only words it started to get under my skin. Get into my mind cells if you will. If Bruna was living and existing in the same world that I was then that world was revealing itself as ‘twilight’, and a ‘glass darkly’. The big deception had been that it was anything but. The Wizard behind the curtain was being outed. Could be, though, all that Elvis shit fermenting in my gut was percolating up to that sorry bowling ball on my shoulders and generating error messages. All the goddamned cosmos was and is in error and our lady Bruna came as its hero saviour and I’m her prophet...Fuck, what the hell am I trying to say? What am I saying? Nothing, it won’t make any difference anyway.
There is a photo of her that came out in the Journal showing her exiting a bus in Queens with a stranger, a Michael Jackson lookalike. I came up with a very plausible dialog. It came to me in a dream...She: It’s going to rain today but no cover while on the road to eternity. In five seconds I will drop my purse and look up at you and ask what the colors of my eyes should be. He: My shoes hurt me and that is the only thing I can think about now. Thinking and hurting seem to be the same thing. Can we come up to my place just minutes away, but first coffee and thinking about the minutes while I take my shoes off for only a minute.
Yeah, I wrote that shit down when I got up so I wouldn’t forget it. Probably didn’t happen that way in “real life” though. Maybe they didn’t speak at all, like the wind.
My brain was wheat toast and the legend of BA was invading the crevices like stubborn honey seeping gladly. Sweet though.
She once gave an interview for Playboy. The heading photo has her wearing a yellow gingham dress that went well with her side reach pony-tails and set-off her blue eyes, those ocean blue eyes. It was long and could have been a granny dress. She, in her usual aggressive manner, initiates the conversation with a comment about the big embroidered sunflower faces sewn on her that dress.… “Sunflowers inspire me so I wear them and only I should wear them. All women look so good in my black creations. They are in mourning. I am unique and not even a woman and I’ll never taste death.”
She goes on rambling uninterrupted until the interview starts in earnest.
Michael Talalin, the failed yet dashing actor turned Playboy contributing editor is curious about her stock and trade - the dark sleek gowns ubiquitous even in fly-over states. A sampling...
PB: You are never photographed or seen in your own dresses; only you’re in campy, childlike dressses you claim to have sewn at home in the middle of the night….Why can’t you sport you own Bruna line? Why?
BA: Michael, I’m not ready for them. I never have been ready and, Michael, I never will. I’m still a kid and I wear kids’ stuff. Anyway, dark doesn’t suite me, I’m a child of the sun.
The whole world is dying but I won’t. No dark for me but I’ll make and sell funeral rags for the masses because they’re burying themselves constantly.
I can even see you in one of my things. I’ll make it just for you and Ellen can have you on in it. The world is changing and men can wear women’s things and that’s a good thing. My cares are with the will of the sun.
Life is pretty good now, I have three accountants. But as the old folks say life is not life and death is not death, at least not for this child; I’m above all that.
PB: I can only congratulate you for you success, but how did this empire of yours get started? The press only claims that it started in the Village and says you are a genius twenty-three year old and a victim of some sort of stunted growth syndrome.
BA: Well hell’s bells, I still pay rent on that Greenwich apartment just for giggles but I was was born thirteen years old in a half-shell on the Atlantean shore but I can’t convince people of that so I don’t try. I sewed my skin and bones together from a stinking whale carcass so I tell the world deal with it.
I didn’t want really to be a household name in fashion; It all just happened on it’s own. All I wanted was a creative outlet since I’ve created myself as a creator. I couldn’t be a starving artist because I don’t eat.-- I breathe in the life force.
I see my gowns as art; therapy and no more. I hire good people to market my art and then it is no longer art for my head to feed on. It’s a product, Grace Slick said it all.
The money feeds my enterprise. I use it too for my traveling to Switzerland and California and other places to cool my head. I like my head for feeding and cooling.
Okay, here’s how it all started….
I have this friend, Annie Marvel, who owns a funky little store in Soho who allowed me to hang my very first dress and to put a price tag on it. Almost as a joke.
The next day a Polish lady with her chauffeur and dyed blond hair in an Elvira dress walks in and sees my “joke”. She says something to the clerk about the “unique stitching”. To make a long story shorter, she hires a private investigator to hunt me down thinking Annie would lie about my address. I later meet her in her limo and she has this suitcase full of hundreds offering me to be ‘partners’ for my ‘new line’. She would just feed me money to do whatever I wanted as long as I produced black gowns for discriminating clients. The stitching had to be that signature Egyptian weave. Also black and grey, black and grey were the mantra and the sutra.
I get to work from my small apartment and come with some very interesting designs all put together on my new German sewing machines I can now afford. The birth of Bruna Creations (™)! It was just the right placement of matt and shiny fabric that people love.
I hire a marketing agent, accountant; then a personal assistant. I meet with Madame Krupksii’s lawyer to agree to her share of the profits.
I learn Third-Eye-Meditation (™) from this crazy book I found in the Village. I need that shit to calm me down from all that pressure to pump out new designs and product. But life’s a blast since art is therapy, right?
I hire a professional seamstress who worked at the Bolivian embassy maintaining the drapery. Diminutive, shorter than me and so resourceful.
I design now just like I designed myself in the clouds. Therapy.
Madame Krupskii, or Krupskaya as she likes to be called, my scion benefactor, disappears without a word. I get a letter from her Virginia based lawyer saying she’ll contact me soon. She does.
I hire a Wall Street tax consultant. I’m making a million a month and still living in that tiny place in the Village.
I was was once a Buddhist monk in a thimble sized planet and know this is really not happening. I’m not even here, wherever here is. It’s a blast anyway.
Madame calls. Sixteen numbers light up on my cell phone while I was braving the hustle in the Garment district with my assistant. The awaited call.
She blurts out something about a satellite phone. Turns out I now have full ownership and owe her nothing except a free dresses for life.
She wants to start something like a lesbian tantric training center in northern Italy with a friend she met at a feminist conference in Oakland. She says my Bruna Gowns give her the seductiveness of Simone de Beauvoir. She hangs up or we get disconnected.
Madam is now famous for dying in a plane crash headed from Kennedy to Rome while engaging in tantra in a lavatory with her friend….Michael, remember the spread the Daily New did on her.
Without her, I would not be here today with you Michael.
Bruna had no friends to speak of. Tax documents found after she quit being with us on this planet report that she gave a lot to cat and horse charities yet she had none. No one can remember her eating or sleeping. She liked coffee though. Dark with no creme. She travelled to the oceanfront in California and to the lakes in Switzerland. She took no one except a storefront mannequin she called mother Mary. She always paid for a window seat for the mother Mary. This was before 9/11. Although she could afford better, she took coach. Mother Mary sometimes causing a stir.
Through the help of her assistant, Grace Krishnan, I was able to gather enough material to cobble together a screenplay. I want to submit it to Showtime.
Though the screenplay is still a work in progress at this time I want to share the odd little story of the origin of mother Mary...
-I always wanted a mother - she said to herself while in the shower. -Mothers are nice. Mothers say nice things if they love and bad things if they don’t.-This inner monologue continues all through the day. - All little girls have mothers therefore I need a mother to hang around with and soak up love. I will conjure up a mother and call her the same name the mother of a god had many years ago. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I will have a friend then. I will demonstrate that I’m in control and get all the benefits. I will finally have love even though I don’t need very much. It would be so much fun!
-Gracey, book a flight for Los Angeles, I want to be there by Christmas eve. I want to talk to Santa in a Sears store in Santa Monica. He has a gift for me.- Yes, ’mam, shall I pack your things?
I already have, many years ago. I’ve planned this trip for some time. I’ll have a present waiting, something for my heart.- Sounds touching, Miss Andrade; I’ll take care of things here. I don’t think you’ll miss the snow and cold.
She arrived at the Sears store in West Los Angeles looking for Santa. She found him and sat on his lap. He had a five o’clock beard underneath his fake one and bore a distinct aroma of cigarettes and whiskey.
In answer to his scripted usual question he gives to every kid who sits on his lap, Bruna reveals her little bud of a breast smiling and then flies off in in search of her ‘present’.
Bruna shortly is seen on security cameras carting off mannequin from women’s fashion and flees the store struggling with the thing. She is never caught.
A few weeks later she is seen on Montauk beach with a ‘friend’. This animated friend walks with the mannerisms of 3cpo and reportedly talks with a British accent. Bruna has to have her close . “Closeness is friendship” she is quoted as saying at a fashion news conference in Upstate about the time she acquires her “mother.” Ms Krishnan overhears a dialogue of mother and daughter and remembers it quite clearly:
-Mother, where did I come from? -From the future, my love; many stars have to travel on crooked lines to take up that amount of time. Space and time are one where you come from and where that is will converge with this world shortly. It will be as a gift, as I am to you. Someone who is close. Do you understand lovely, my lovely one? -I’ll try but...you will make a door for me so I’ll forget this place and become invisible like all true things are? -The door is in this teakwood box; it is underneath a pile of incense. You can transverse it and be free of this mad place and I will collapse and become a store dummy again. At any time, my love. At any time.
Bruna transversed that door less that two years later. She was never seen again, with or without mother Mary was found in the local dumpster smelling of the most sweet incense and stripped of her dress and wig.