“Yeah. I think you’re my illustrator,” Fenderson said.
Alcott took her artwork back and returned it to her portfolio. “Wonderful.”
He thought she’d be excited, but she almost looked more sad than happy.
“Now, about what I can pay you …” he started to say.
But Alcott cut him off: “I know. It won’t be much. I’m just a beginner and you’re a real pro. I’m sure whatever you offer me will be more than fair.”
Fenderson couldn’t believe it. This had to be fate, the Big Break he’d been waiting all his life to get. There was no other explanation for how easily it was all falling into place. He would have felt better if the fog lifted and he could remember something, anything, about this frumpy broad from her time as a student in his classroom, just so he’d have a frame of reference as he continued to play her for the fool he was counting on her to be. But what he knew about her now was enough, at least for the moment: she was talented, hungry, and willing to work with him at any cost.
“Cheers,” Fenderson said, lifting his beer mug.
“Cheers,” Alcott replied, tapping it with her water glass. And now the smile that stretched across her face seemed to hold no hidden meaning at all; it was just the smile of a lady on the brink of having her greatest dream come true.
“Ken Fenderson. Wow,” she said. “Do you know how long I’ve been hoping to run into you again?”
Fenderson couldn’t remember much of anything after that. He ordered another beer, went to the bathroom, they finished their meals and asked for the check.
Then, boom, the next thing he knew, he was in Alcott’s apartment, or what he assumed was her apartment. Between the dim lighting and the excruciating pain he was in, it was hard to be sure where he was.
As near as he could tell, he was sprawled facedown across her bed, naked, hands and feet hog-tied to the frame like somebody about to be drawn and quartered. His mouth had a sock or something stuffed into it and his head was pounding so hard every blink of his eyes came at a price. He tried to scream, yanking at his bonds with the fury of a rodeo steer trapped in the gate, but the gag swallowed up his voice like a sponge. All his muffled cries managed to do was draw Alcott over from another room.
“Ah. Finally awake,” she said, peering down at him.
She was wearing nothing but a bra and panties, both simple and white, without a hint of decorative lace. The sight should have disgusted Fenderson, even in the relative dark, but to his utter amazement, he found himself aroused by it. Rather than the shapeless blob her dowdy clothes had promised, Alcott’s body was full and curvaceous, a balanced blend of generous bosom and wide hips.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “This isn’t the body you were expecting. I don’t dress to impress the way I once did, do I? Or do you still not really remember me, even without my clothes?”
She was crazy. Fenderson had no idea what she was talking about. Why the hell should he remember what Alcott looked like without—
Oh, Jesus.
Jennifer Alcott. That Jennifer Alcott. One of several female students he’d had the hots for during his teaching days, and one of the few he’d taken to his bed. Some willingly, some not so willingly. Every woman was different. Alcott had been one of those who needed a little chemical push.
As the memory of that night finally came into focus, the mystery of how Alcott had managed to get him here today, in this place and in this unenviable position, without any conscious cooperation on his part that he could recall, was all too easily solved. No wonder he had a splitting headache. She must have slipped the drug into his beer while he’d been in the bathroom.
Now Fenderson was afraid. Really afraid.
He tried screaming again.
“Screaming’s good,” Alcott said. “I screamed a lot after you did what you did to me. I know. I hated myself almost as much as I did you, so I let my appearance go to shit and screamed when I needed to scream. Screaming makes you feel better.” She leaned in close to whisper in his ear: “But it doesn’t really change anything.”
Blinking back tears, Fenderson became vaguely aware that the room around them was awash in black-and-white comic book art, taped to a huge drawing board and pinned in overlapping layers to the surface of every wall. With flickering candlelight his only guide, straining his neck as he was to see anything beyond the mattress to which he was tied, it was hard for Fenderson to be sure, but none of the drawings in the room looked anything like the one Alcott had shown him earlier. This artwork was crude and listless, devoid of all the power the page he’d seen at the café exhibited.
Alcott followed his gaze. “Angry, isn’t it? That’s what everyone always says about my stuff. Aside from that it’s not very good. I’m a better inker than an illustrator. They say I’ve got a real talent for inking.” She pulled some rubber gloves onto her hands and rolled a tea cart over to the bed near Fenderson’s head where he could get a good look at the macabre collection of sex toys—oversized, heavily studded dildos, mostly—that was arranged upon it.
“The page I showed you at the El Cortez, by the way? That really was Jack Kirby,” Alcott said. “I bought it at the Con just before I ran into you.”
And with that, she picked up one of the phalluses—a giant chrome number lined all around with sharp little barbs—and proceeded to show Ken Fenderson a whole new perspective on the crime most commonly referred to as “date rape.”
Fenderson was never heard from again. Nobody cared enough about him to really notice he was gone. Alcott took her own life shortly thereafter.
I bought the four pages of art you see here from her sister, who inherited her meager possessions and told me the story I’ve just shared with you to explain my otherwise inexplicable fascination with them. She said her sister mixed something into the ink she used that gives the artwork that strange, ethereal glow. She didn’t say what that something was, but her inference was pretty clear. I don’t know if I believe any part of her story or not.
Someday, either I myself or a future buyer—you, maybe?—will have a DNA test run to find out for sure what these pages are really worth.
THE NATIONAL CITY REPARATION SOCIETY
BY LUIS ALBERTO URREA
National City
It wasn’t like Junior Garcia only hung with white people now. But he didn’t see much Raza, he’d be the first to admit. Not socially. That’s why you leave home, right? Shake off the dark.
As soon as he picked up the clamoring cell phone, he had that old traditional homecoming feeling: why’d I answer this? He didn’t recognize the number—some old So Cal digits. He stared at the screen as if it would offer him further clues.
When he answered, an accented voice said: “Hey, bitch.”
“Excuse me?”
“Said: Hey. Bitch. You deaf, homes?”
“You must have the wrong number,” Junior said, about to click off. Homes, he said to himself. What is this, 1986?
“Junior!” the guy shouted. He used the old, hectoring fakebeaner accent the vatos had affected when mocking him in school: Yoo-nyurr! “I bet you got some emo shit for a ringtone. Right? Like ‘The Black Parade,’ some shit like that.” The guy laughed.
“I’ve been talking to you for, like, almost a whole minute, and you already insulted me. I don’t even know who you are.” His ringtone was Nine Inch Nails, thank you very much. Emo? Shit. “I’m out, homes.”
He clicked off and pulled on his Pumas. Got his jog on along the beach. It was one of those rare sunny days, and everybody was out, looking in their Lycra and spandex like a vast, roving fruit salad. He tucked the celly in his shorts pocket. Who’s the bitch now? he wanted to know.
His nemesis caught him again as he was cooling off, jogging in place beside a picnic table, breathing through his nose, pouring good clean sweat down his back—he could feel it tickling the backs of his legs. “You let me penetrate you,” his phone announced. “You let me penetrate you.”
“You again?”
Junior said.
“It’s me. Damn!”
“Me, who?”
“Chango!”
Junior wiped his face with the little white towel he had wrapped around his neck. “I should have known.”
“That’s what I’m sayin’.”
“Fucking Chango.”
“Right?”
Junior could hear him smoking—he still must like those cheap-ass Domino ciggies from TJ. They crackled like burning brush when the guy inhaled. “Why you calling me, Chango?”
“What—a homeboy can’t check on his li’l peewee once in a while? I like to make sure my boyz is okay.”
“I haven’t talked to you in ten years,” Junior said. He sat on the table and lay back and watched the undersides of gulls as they hung up there like kites.
“So?” said Chango. “You think you’re better than us now, college boy?”
Apparently, the 1,000-mile buffer zone was not enough barrier between himself and the old homestead.
“Nice talking to you, Chango. Be sure to have someone send me an invitation to your funeral. So long. Have a nice day.”
“Hey, asshole,” Chango said. “I’m gonna live forever. Gonna be rich too. I’m workin’ on a plan—cannot fail. You gon’ want some of this here.”
“A plan?” Junior said.
And when he said it, he felt the trap snap shut over him and he couldn’t quite figure out how or why he was caught.
It was a short flight. Lindbergh was clotted with GIs in desert camo and weepy gals waving little plastic American flags. Junior caught the rental car shuttle and grabbed a Kia at Alamo. No, he wasn’t planning to take it across the border. Put it on the Visa, thanks. Oh, well—the homies were going to give him shit about the car. It would be badass if they rented ’67 Impalas with hydraulic lifters so he could enter the barrio with his right front tire raised in the air like some kind of saluting robot. He didn’t smile—he was already thinking like Chango! He poked at the radio till he found 91X and the Mighty Oz was cranking some Depeche Mode. At least there was that.
On his way south, he hopped off on Sports Arena, but Tower Records was gone. What? He pulled a U and tried again, as if he’d somehow missed the store. Gone? How could it be gone? Screw that—he sped to Washington and went up to Hillcrest and looked for Off the Record. He was in the mood for some import CDs. Keep his veneer of sanity. It was gone too. Junior sat there in the parking lot where the Hillcrest Bowl used to be. He could not believe it—all culture had vanished from San Diego. His phone said, “You let me penetrate you.” Chango. Junior didn’t answer.
He’d only come to check it out. It was a crazy adventure, he told himself. Good for a laugh. Chango had picked up a magazine in a dentist’s office. New dentures: our tax dollars at work. He thought it was a Nat Geo, but he wasn’t sure. Some gabacho had written an article about abandoned homes along the I-15 corridor. Repos. Something like six out of ten, maybe seven out of fifteen or something like that. Point was, they were just sitting there, like haunted houses, like the whole highway was a long ghost town, and the writer had broken in to look around and found all kinds of stuff just laying around. Sure, sad shit like kids’ homework on the kitchen table. But it’s on a kitchen table, you catch my drift, Chango demanded. There’s whole houses full of furniture and mink coats and plasma TVs and freakin’ Bose stereos. La-Z-Boys! Hells yeah! Some have cars in the garages. And it’s all foreclosed and owned by some bank. But the kicker—the kicker, Yuniorr—is that the banks can’t afford to resell this stuff, so they send trucks to the houses to haul it to the dump. Friggin’ illegals driving trucks just drag it all out and go toss it. A million bucks worth of primo swag.
“You tell me, how many freakin’ apartments gots big-screen TVs that them boys just hauled home? You been to the swap meet?” And Chango had noted, in his profound research (he stole the magazine from the dentist’s) that the meltdown had banks backed up. Some of these houses wouldn’t be purged for a year or more.
“Ain’t even stealin’, peewee. Nobody wants it anyway. Worst case is breaking-and-entering. So I got this plan and I’m gonna make us a million dollars in a couple of months. But I need you to help.”
“Why me?”
“You know how to talk white. Shit! Why’d you think?”
Junior motored down I-5 and dropped out at National City. He was loving the tired face of America’s Finest City—San Diego was a’ight, but National was still the bomb. The Bay Theater, where he used to see Elvis revivals and Mexican triple-features. He’d kissed a few locas up there in the back rows. He smiled. He checked the old Mile of Cars—they used to call it the Mile of Scars, because sometimes Shelltown or Del Sol dudes would catch them out there at night and fists would fly between the car lots. That was before everybody got all gatted up and brought the 9s along. Junior shook his head; he would have never imagined that fistfights and fear would come to seem nostalgic.
He drove into the old hood, heading for West 20th and Chango’s odd crib over the hump and hiding behind the barrio on the little slope to the old slaughterhouse estuaries. He wanted to see his old church, maybe light a candle. He didn’t mean to go bad in his life. He didn’t mean to go so far away and not come back, either. Or maybe he did. St. Anthony’s. America’s prettiest little Catholic church. He smiled. They’d sneak out of catechism and go down behind the elementary school and play baseball on the edge of the swamp. There was a flat cat carcass they used for home plate.
He turned the corner and beheld an empty lot surrounded by a low chain-link fence. He slammed on the brakes. It was gone, like Tower Records. Things seemed to be vanishing as if all of San Diego County were being abducted by aliens.
He jumped out of his car and beheld a man watering his lawn, surrounded by a platoon of pug dogs.
“Where’s the church?” he called.
“Church? Burned down! Where you been?”
“What! When?”
“Long time, long time. Say, ain’t you that Garcia boy?”
“Not me,” said Junior, getting back in the car.
He drove past his old house. Man, it sure was tiny. Looked like all his old man’s gardens were dead. He didn’t want to look at it. It had a faded For Sale sign stuck in the black iron fence.
The barrio had a Burger King in it, and a Tijuana Trolley stop. Damn. All kinds of Mexican nationals sat around on the cement benches savoring their Quata Poundas among squiggles of graffiti. Junior shook his head.
He dropped into the ancient little underpass and popped out on the west side of I-5 and hung a left and went to the end of the earth and hung another left and dropped down the small slope toward the black water and there it was. Chango’s house. His dad’s old, forgotten Esso station. Out of business since 1964. Chango lived in the triangular office. He’d pasted butcher paper over the glass and had put an Obama poster on the front, with some Sharpie redesigns so that it now said: CHANGO YOU CAN BELIEVE IN.
He’d given the prez a droopy pachuco mustache and some tiny, irritating homeboy sunglasses—Junior knew that Chango, ever the classicisist, would still call the glasses gafas. He knocked on the glass until Chango woke up from his nap.
“Car’s for shit,” Chango noted as Junior drove.
“Where we going?” Junior said.
“You remember the Elbow Room? That’s where we’re goin’. Down behind there. Hey, the radio sucks, ese. What’s this? You should be listening to oldies.”
Junior punched the OFF button.
“Damn,” Chango muttered. “Shit.” He looked like a greasy old crow. All wizened and craggy, all gray and lonesome. His big new teeth were white and looked like they were made out of slivers of oven-safe bake wear. His fingers were yellow from decades of Mexican cigarettes. “For reals,” he was saying. It was apparently a long-standing conversation he had with himself. His various jail tattoos were purple and blurry and could have been dice rolling snake eyes and maybe a skeleton with a sombrero and on the other forearm an out-of-focus obscenit
y. He had that trustworthy little vato loco cross tattooed in the meat between his thumb and forefinger. “Tha’s right, you know it,” he added.
He’d shown Junior the article. It was by Charles Bowden, and did, indeed, confess to uninvited recon sorties into the creepy abandoned homes. One found these places by looking for overgrown yellow lawns and a sepulchral silence.
“This guy’s a great writer,” Junior said. “I can’t believe you read him.”
“Who?” Chango replied.
“This guy—the writer.”
“I was mostly lookin’ at the pictures, homie. That’s what caught my eye.”
They pulled around the old block where everybody used to go to drink at the Elbow Room, except for Junior who was too young to get in. They rattled around into a dirt alley and Chango directed him to stop at the double-door of a garage. They could hear Thee Midnighters blasting out.
“That’s some real music, boy,” Chango said, and creaked out of his seat, though he managed to sway pretty good once he got erect, swaggering like an arthritic pimp.
Inside, a Mongol associate of Chango’s had dolled up a stolen U-Haul panel truck. He wore his vest and scared Junior to death, though lots of vatos liked the Mongols because they were the only Chicano bikers around.
“Sup?” the Mongol said.
“Sup?” nodded Junior.
“Sup?” said Chango.
“Hangin’,” said the Mongol.
There was a time when Junior would have written a poem about this interaction and turned it in for an easy A in his writing workshop. Oh, Junior, you’re so street, as it were.
The van was sweet, he had to admit. It was painted white. It had a passable American eagle on each side, clutching a sheaf of arrows and a bundle of dollars in its claws. Above it: BOWDEN FEDERAL and some meaningless numbers in smaller script. Below it: Reclamation and Reparation/Morgage Default Division.
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