“It’s the Taft-Hartley Act all over again.”
“Huh?”
“It was a law passed in 1947 by a Republican Congress to weaken unions, curtail their ability to force nonunion workers to pay union dues.”
Dellavalle liked Deuce, but he sure didn’t like to be outclassed by him, or being made to feel stupid. “Okay, Joe College. Makes sense. More money in my pocket, right? Better for the working stiff.”
“Short term. That’s how they’d sell it, but unions are better for the working stiff long term.”
“I’m anti big government,” Dellavalle said, with the certainty that he was saying something of undeniable substance.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“The union is just like the government. Taxes, union dues—same thing.”
“They are absolutely not the same thing. Can’t you see that?” Deuce raised his voice for the first time. He was flabbergasted that this man was immune to reason; having met so few men, he believed Dellavalle must be unique in this.
“I see that my bosses tell me to squash any union talk I hear.” Dellavale was getting tired of being lectured by this pimply faced kid. “So let’s change the subject. Maybe you should think about your skin more than you think about the Mexicans, huh? Have you heard of Accutane? My niece took it—miracle drug, cleared all that shit up. Look into it. That’ll change everything. When you get laid, you’ll start to see what really matters and forget this union shit. Another Gator?”
Deuce was trying to put the whole rambling, surreal scenario in perspective, but the pieces wouldn’t fit. Why did Frank keep saying he was speaking French and then continue speaking only English? He wished Noam or Naomi would call him back and explain everything.
Frank put his hand on Deuce’s shoulder. “Bad things happen to good people, Ace. I gotta wash my hands of this. And so do you. You, me, Jaime—we all gotta dust ourselves off, get up, and move on past it. It’s the American way. No freebies.”
He guided Deuce to the door. “Drop it, Ace, let it go. Jaime is a big hombre, he’ll survive. You want a Gator for the road?”
“No, thanks,” Deuce said, wishing he hadn’t accepted the first one.
As he made his way home in a kind of confused stupor, Deuce thought of his heroes, of Marx and Klein, Zinn and Chomsky, Debs and Bronson, Lennon and McCartney, Lennon and Lenin, and realized that Jaime was a hero to him too, that hardworking man with a broken leg and pelvis he could no longer afford. A “working class hero is something to be,” John Lennon sang in his head. Part of the precious post-Beatle catalogue Bronson had allowed into Agadda da Vida. Deuce felt close to the edge of something. Jaime should have the power. The people should have the power. “Power to the people, right on!” Lennon sang again. Not corporate. It’s what Jesus and John Lennon wanted. It’s what Joseph Smith wanted. It’s why Bronson had fled the world and its corruption.
And it’s why, he began to see, he had been brought back to the world. To fight. And it struck him in an instant. He would fight city hall, whatever that meant. He started to feel the emptiness fill again with something new and true, the emptiness created when Joseph Smith left. He didn’t need to wait for Bronson; he didn’t need to wait for Noam and Naomi to call back. He heard the words of Eugene Debs, founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, echo in Bronson’s voice in his mind, for Bronson would sometimes read Debs to Deuce as he fell asleep as a child, what passed for bedtime stories in Agadda da Vida—“I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.” Deuce knew what needed to be done. Praxis.
He would start a union at BurgerTown.
21.
AS DEUCE BECAME MORE INVOLVED with Jaime’s recovery and local BurgerTown politics, he had less time for Mary and their nightly feast of Hayes/Maddow. Trump-hating wasn’t as much fun alone, but someone had to do it. She was obsessed with the president—his circus peanut–colored hair and dead lizard eyes, his intransigent stupidity and mean-girl fifth grader’s vocabulary, the sheer nightly Groundhog Day shock that millions had chosen this impulsive dunce to be the most powerful man in the world, and might again. He makes me want to run away to the desert, she would say.
The last president she remembered was the younger Bush guy. She saw him as an upward-failing, bumbling dummy with a quirky bit of charm in the grand tradition of Wasp establishment legacy placeholders, but she had disappeared into Agadda da Vida before the tragic fruits of his unfounded self-assurance, incuriosity, and entitlement were fully manifest. She was learning only now of Obama, and was sorry she missed him, in a way. She really liked the idea of him. The last president that she had paid any attention to was the second-term Bill Clinton hounded by the abominable, jowl-ballasted, undead Newt Gingrich and the specter of Republican impeachment.
The spiritual vertigo that Trump induced in Mary was all pervasive, and threatened to redline her growing sense of dislocation in Rancho Cucamonga. Trump’s deep, blind wound had created something less than a full human, a gargoyle who fed on chaos and hurt. The hate in him, like a dark shaman, brought out the hate in this country. Mary felt the regression, the violence, everywhere, and it freaked her out. She was not even sure that the desert was safe from this unleashed primordial, Cain-like vengeance; she sensed it spreading and borderless, like air pollution. To tamp it down, she wanted a drink or something, but not only at night, all fucking day long. She could smell it in her sleep. There was apocalypse in the air. She needed a meeting. She went to a meeting, but listening to the wild tales and sob stories made her want to use even more.
Mary, like many Americans in 2019, watched the political news as daily entertainment, like a soap opera, or rather a horror movie, and she could never watch those alone, so, having lost Deuce, she asked Pearl to join her. But Pearl, though still unexpressed in this, was in the midst of a yearlong punishment of Mary for having taken her away from Bronson, and would as soon sit next to an alligator on the couch for a few hours. So she recruited Hyrum as a replacement with the promise of more of the chocolate peanut butter cups that he’d become obsessed with these days, and he gamely tried for a couple nights; in fact, every time Trump talked, Hyrum would explode into laughter, to the point of hyperventilating, and look over at Mary dumbfounded that she wasn’t equally amused.
“What are you laughing at?” Mary asked. She’d never seen Hyrum belly-laugh like this at anything. She realized the guy entertained him, maybe like an Oompa Loompa.
“Everything. This guy’s hysterical. Like a cartoon. Why aren’t you laughing?”
“I don’t see anything funny.” It got to the point where Hyrum’s outbursts so discomfited Mary that she asked him if he had any homework to do.
“Sure,” he said. “You want me to go do it?”
“Please.”
“Okay,” he said, grabbing another peanut butter cup, disappearing back into his lair, and shutting his door. From the subsequent sounds coming through the walls, by “homework,” he apparently meant listening to rap music and playing Fortnite.
Feeling alone in this still new place made Mary want her little pill that much more as a reward for being on high alert all day. Good thing she’d been able to forge Frankie’s signature at the pharmacy across town and keep the supply of Percocet renewed, at least till she got found out. She slyly popped a pill, and, not having the gumption to face Trump alone, switched channels to a station called MeTV, Memorable Entertainment Television, that broadcast all the old shows from the ’60s and ’70s. She lost herself to an illusion of a simpler time and the shameless hambone of William Shatner on the starship Enterprise, truly warmed to the fast sad-funny patter of Alan Alda in M*A*S*H, and escaped mindlessly into the sublime incompetence of Linda Carter’s Wonder Woman.
While driving Hyrum the less than three miles to Etiwanda Intermediate School (Go Wildcats!) in the mornings, Mary, at first, would fight him for control of the car radio. A ten-minute battle royal for aural supremacy. She favored the Bea
tles channel on Sirius that kept them in their warm Apple bubble and no doubt was what Bronson would want, but Hyrum was stepping out into his new world a little. He wanted contemporary, and Mary figured maybe this was a good sign that he was trying to be present. She was surprised he knew all the lyrics to so many songs that were new to her, and then it was kind of exciting to hear him rap along. He was really good at it. He had the rhythm and the intonation; he called it his “flow.” He rapped along with a man called A$AP Rocky, “Praise the Lord”: “I came, I saw, I came, I saw / I praise the Lord, then break the law…”
Hypnotic as a nursery rhyme. It was actually thrilling for Mary to see Hyrum like this. Even though Mary didn’t understand half the lyrics, and doubted Hyrum did either, he seemed to really believe in what he was saying; he had conviction. It was the first time she’d seen him engaged since getting into Fortnite; something about the music and lyrics spoke to him in a way that didn’t speak to her. Something in it, she projected, must remind him of how he used to feel out in the desert, wild and free, the sky open and big enough for his energy, with the need to leave his mark. Rancho Cucamonga must feel like a cage to Hyrum after having known nothing but freedom every single day of his Mowgli life. This music tapped into his sorrow, his loss, and also his confusion and anger. These songs pissed high on every tree in the neighborhood. A recently caged bird had found a kind of talking song.
“Why do you like this music?” she asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“C’mon, tell me, I wanna know.”
“Why do you like any music? Why do you like the music you like? ’Cause you like it.”
“Yeah, but why, be a little more introspective. Use your words.”
“What?”
“I mean, I like the Beatles ’cause it reminds me of when I was young, and of Agadda da Vida.”
“I like this music ’cause it doesn’t remind me of anything.”
“You like it ’cause it’s not the Beatles?”
“No.”
“You like it ’cause I don’t like it?”
“What?”
“’Cause it’s new? It feels new? No associations, no baggage?”
“It feels like it was made for me. I like it ’cause it’s mine, okay? Can we stop this conversation?”
It was his. So she was thankful for that, at least. He fiddled with his phone and said, “Here, maybe you’ll like this. Sounds older.” She saw that the song was “Redbone” by someone named Childish Gambino. The name tickled her. It was a slow funk groove, something Sly and the Family Stone might’ve done, or George Clinton, or even the Stylistics.
“Oh, I like that. It’s like Parliament-Funkadelic. Thanks, Hy,” she said.
He said, “Okay, boomer. Please stop dancing.”
“I’m not dancing. I’m driving. I’m grooving while driving. I’m shaking my moneymaker.”
“Whatever it is, stop it, please.”
She made a sad face at him, but she didn’t mean it. She kept the beat in her shoulders. She was pleased—he was trying to reach a life compromise by making a musical compromise. She liked that. She tried to make out the lyrics—“But stay woke / Niggas creepin’…”
She asked Hyrum, “Is he saying, ‘niggas creepin’?” Hyrum nodded. “Oh, I don’t like that word,” she said.
“No, Mom, it just means other guys, just other guys are trying to get with his girlfriend, sneaking around behind his back—he wants to stay woke, you know, awake.”
“Oh, like ‘Back Stabbers,’ the O’Jays’ song—‘they smile in your face, all the time they wanna take your place.’” That song came out of the deep past to her tongue.
“Sure, Mom, whatever.”
He didn’t care what it reminded her of; he was not curious about her nostalgia and footnoting, nor should he be. His world was new and had no antecedents. Nothing of note had come before, and that was as it should be, Mary thought. It was incumbent upon her to live in his world now, the current one, become fluent in his tongue and not weigh him down, bore him with her ghost songs.
But as soon as she dropped Hyrum off, she switched back to the Beatles. She blasted “Helter Skelter” on her way to Equinox, where she would work out, pop a Perc, and kill time until school got out. But she would continue to try to meet Hy and this new world halfway. She would try to stay woke. She would try not to close her eyes. She would break the law, then praise the Lord.
22.
EVEN THOUGH SHE’D ALL but forgotten about it, Pearl had eventually been called back to the Rancho Cucamonga High principal, Dr. Jenkins, to discuss the “bathroom incident.” It had been some time—the wheels of school justice turn quickly, but are subject to improvisational change depending on the political and social climate, and the interplay between the whim or attentiveness of the student body versus the traditional authoritarian fiat of the administration. There was nothing specific on the books addressing a boy setting foot in the girl’s bathroom, but Jenkins was aware that this was the type of transgression that could go full nuclear mushroom in today’s climate. He wanted to steer a course between the crime and a punishment that created no martyrs on either side of that restroom door.
It was a few days after her aborted attempt to see Bronson, when she had seen him with another woman, and Pearl was still in a dark mood from that unhappy vision. She made it clear as quickly as she could to Dr. Jenkins that the boy, Josue, had not raped or touched or made a move to touch or talked about touching anyone or even appeared rapey or creepy at all. The principal informed her that she had a right, as a victim, to justice, and equally as important, to be heard. Pearl stated that she didn’t feel like a victim, that there were no victims because no crime had been committed.
She said, “I don’t know why we’re still talking about it.”
“Yes, I hear what you are saying,” Dr. Jenkins replied in his best Fred Rogers tone, “but I am also trying to hear what you are not saying.”
“…”
“What you’re not saying.”
“I’m not not saying … anything.”
“I don’t want to put words in your mouth.”
“Yeah, I don’t want that either.”
“At any time during the event did you feel unsafe?”
“Event?”
“The thing, the incident, the cisgendered boy in the girl’s bathroom.”
“Unsafe?”
“Uncomfortable?”
“I feel uncomfortable right now.”
“You’re being funny?”
“Trying to be. Guess not.”
“That could be what we call a ‘coping mechanism.’ Your ironic affect. Sometimes we’re funny when we are covering something, like pain, or abuse. Funny is one of our reddest of flags.” This guy spoke so slowly and carefully, Pearl thought, as if he thought words were spiked, or booby-trapped like land mines. At this pace, she’d be staring at his sad mug all day. She found herself mesmerized by the soft pouch of skin under his chin where his goatee ended. She wanted to flick it.
“And sometimes we are funny,” she said, “’cause we are bored out of our minds.”
She felt that Jenkins really wanted her to feel worse than she did. She thought it was all stupid. She did have a notion to bring up the mean-girl bullying, which had intensified after the bathroom thing, but she felt that was her business, her cross to bear. There was a group of girls, maybe about five in real life, and a larger, anonymous group on social media sites that weren’t known to the school, who were attacking her as a Mormon. The easy stuff. Calling her the “Notorious MMH (Mormon Mouth Hug)” and “Pearl Necklace” and “Butt Stuff Gal”—terms she had to look up that were so juvenile they didn’t even pierce very deeply. She didn’t want to be part of the “in” group, she was going to be out of this place in a few months, so being ostracized by a bunch of losers didn’t hurt that badly. Secretly she deemed the bullying an inverse badge of honor—if these fools hated her, she must be doing something right. She could learn the
lingo easily, she could sound like one of them, dress like them, but she’d never be one of them. Never.
She had resolved to do poorly in school, tanking the wager in favor of the homeschooling, and save the family that way. Let Deuce be the Boy Wonder. She’d put on the mask of the Fuck-Up, and enjoy her year of weed, Adderall, and Juul. Easily capable of getting all A’s, Pearl would let her grades steadily drop to B, to C, then D, like an expert jockey throwing a fixed race, even sprinkle in a couple F’s for seasoning by the final grading period. It was a simple, perfect plan, and the only thing in her life she could control anymore. Hyrum, with his video games and rap, his low-slung jeans and underwear showing, was gonna fuck up, too, without even trying, she saw that coming a mile away. She didn’t even have to enlist him. His grades were already slipping. It was in the bag. Homeschooling would win 2–1, underachieving Pearl and Hyrum over high-flying Deuce, and then they’d go back to Agadda da Vida like nothing had happened. This year would be a blip.
Pearl was royally pissed at seeing Bronson on the horse with that lady, but she’d be able to forgive him with time and God’s teachings, she knew that. And she knew it was his right, as a Mormon, to take as many wives as was fit. She knew he would marry her, he had said so—well, not in so many words, but he had implied a future for them, and she would ascend to her rightful place in the family. Mary would see the light. What’s the big deal? She was a woman now; she didn’t belong here with all these stupid, immature kids.
She knew better than to get into any of that with Dr. Jenkins, of course, so she kept mum about the bullying, about anything controversial. It was easy because Jenkins was so focused on this boy, Josue, and the crime he’d supposedly done. Pearl allowed Jenkins’s myopia to blind him.
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