Oola

by Brittany Newell

  Let’s just say we got carried away. The rest is a blur to me. What I remember is somebody pulling me onto their lap, and then the South African boy said he wanted to watch me give LR head. I LOVED it! The boy grabbed me right afterward, before I could swallow, and kissed me and then grabbed LR and kissed him. “Now you know what you taste like!” he said. That was a first. LR and I just looked at each other, like, DAMN.

  Eventually I noticed Peewee wasn’t getting any action. I guess he saw me looking—big mistake. He said, kinda loudly, that he wanted to fuck me. LR was doing something with somebody else but I knew that he was listening. I was honestly kind of annoyed that Peewee would even suggest that—to be frank, that kid is fucking FAT. We’ve all dropped hints about his nasty little mustache, but if he doesn’t want to help himself then c’est la vie. I wouldn’t even want to kiss his greasy cheek. I have my limits! Maybe I was being a slut but I would never be THAT slutty. I didn’t wanna ruin the vibe so I just shook my head and grabbed somebody else. I guess at this point it was a full-blown orgy. It felt like it went on for hours. I always thought an orgy would be messy and awkward, but honestly it was incredible. Afterward, we all sat around talking and drank more wine and someone passed around some speed and then we got dressed and went to go get falafel. Someone knew the owner and he cheered when we came in. We must have looked so guilty and out of place, standing there blinking in the fluorescent light, kinda like a group of sexed-up moles.

  While we were walking there, the South African boy came up behind me and put his hands on my stomach. He said something cheesy like, “You’re one of a kind,” and pulled up my skirt, but stealthily. I was wearing that yellow satiny nightgown, the one with a rip in the back that LR said he likes. I was also wearing this cheap garter thingy that LR found in Goodwill and gave me as a joke (“to my child bride,” etc.). I didn’t know where LR was but this boy was making me feel so good that I couldn’t care less. Is that bad?? We found a back table in the falafel place and pretended to act normal. He sort of clamped my leg between his thighs and fingered me till our food came. I tried SO hard to keep a straight face. He motioned his friend over and pretended to dip his fingers in tahini. “Try this,” he said. That boy had a fucking FIXATION! I don’t think his friend realized what was happening. “Good shit,” he said, which I found hilarious.

  By the time we all got back to the van, it was 10:00 in the morning and we had to SCOOT. I’m fucking exhausted now; my tits are covered in bruises. There’s a weird taste in my mouth … I don’t even wanna know what it is. Otis and Curt and I keep smiling at each other like goons. I only feel the slightest bit sinful. I’m ignoring Peewee; he can go choke on a Twinkie for all I care. Things seem chill between LR and me. He’s as guilty as I am, if he wants to make it like that. But he’s probably fine, he’s just being quiet. I bet this was a dream of his. An orgy in Berlin, how original. There was even a tender moment between us, in the middle of the fuckfest, when he “found” me (that’s how it felt, like pushing through a crowd) and wiped my mouth clean and just looked at me. We didn’t do anything else, we just stared at each other. Then he put my whole ear in his mouth and said, “You’ve got good form.” The way he said it was so sexy and formal, like a coach praising his student. “I didn’t realize till I watched you.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “That’s cuz you’ve always been distracted.”

  He smirked and said, “But now I see.”

  “See what exactly?” I said. It honestly could have been so many things. But he didn’t answer, and right then someone started rubbing my thigh and muttering something. I guess he took that as a cue to leave. “I like the way you take it,” he said, and then a million things happened at once and I lost him. God, Berlin is HIGH OCTANE. I can’t wait to come back. Hamburg seems pretty boring. This hot chocolate’s making me feel kinda queasy, I’m going to go throw it away. Or maybe Peewee wants a sip … TOO BAD, FATTY.

  And she’d drawn a winky face.

  After reading this passage so many times that I could recite the key phrases (and I’d go on to read it many more times that night), I got out of the tub and dried myself. I put on my pajamas but I didn’t go to bed. By then I was wired. I stayed on the porch and stared at the fairy ring of mushrooms, glowing like those plastic stars that kids put on their ceilings. It was as if I’d reached a breakthrough; I felt the tiny pop, the snapping-into-place, that I’d felt months ago, though it now seemed like years, in the Orbitsons’ beach house, holding the groceries, when I first began this mad project and took Oola as my muse.

  I hadn’t recognized the girl in that passage. The excitable slut, the teen queen on a spree. That was not the girl I called Oola, or Oolah, or lover-come-over; this Oola, this version scrappy and happy, was foreign to me, and the clash is what bothered me—sucked dicks I could handle, but not the cognitive dissonance. The Oola I knew only appeared toward the end, when she jilted poor Peewee. Despite my hurting heart, I had to laugh when I read that. I recognized that honesty; I had been stung by it before. Oola had a funny way of setting limits. She was wild, up to a point. She was open, but never wide. Her shyness always tempered her perversions. When a man in a restaurant was staring at her, she walked up to his table and said matter-of-factly, “Do you want to fuck me or is there something on my face?” He was too startled to answer. She handed him a napkin. “Here’s your chance. Dab it.” When he did nothing, she sighed and returned to her seat, looking relieved. “I was getting paranoid,” she laughed. “Guess it’s nothing.” I’d seen Oola do some crazy things, a handful of rather slutty things, but never with the kiddish jubilation that marked her retelling of that night. The Oola I knew didn’t even like fucking. And she’d certainly never wear a garter—a garter!—even if it was a gift. I could hardly picture it. The most heated I’d seen her was when wrestling Theo or squeezing the last drop of sauce from the bottle. But then, she was eighteen. She went with the flow. Le Roy had said it himself: It came down to form.

  Le Roy. Running my hands over the diary as one would a cat, I realized that Le Roy not only knew things about Oola that I didn’t know and saw sides of her that I’d only spied on, but he had also summoned up something in her that had never been given form before, selves or semi-selves that were only active, and detectable, in his presence. It had an almost science-fictional ring to it: He’d come back from the past to abduct the love of my life, he’d done things to her, he’d changed her ever so slightly, her pH was off, she got headaches; he’d implanted her with her very own dreams and desires. I needed an exorcist; I needed a drink. Without Le Roy sitting beside her, tapping his fingers on her knee, it was very possible that Oola herself could read that diary and encounter a total stranger. She might blush at the narrator’s candor or chuckle at the tone. I was a different person then, she might say, resorting to cliché. You had to be there. Everyone was doing it. Berlin changed me. I let loose. She certainly did. Something about Le Roy released her, greased her joints, made her brazen—or maybe something about me constrained her. She hadn’t lied to me, per se. But she’d hidden things. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, scream, Why don’t you trust me? For the first time in months, looking in the mirror and touching the triangular bone between my breasts wasn’t enough to dispel the longing.

  I was confronted, for the first time, by my arrogance. I should have known this night would come. Of course there would be other players in the game of who-knew-her-best. My mistake was in thinking I’d already won. I’d failed to understand that the remembered often have the upper hand in matters of romance. The very shirt I wore (lilac) bore testament to this sad fact. I wanted to throttle him, but also to compare notes. I kept replaying the image of him in the orgy, wiping her lips clean, leering down at her with avuncular fondness as if to say, My, how you’ve grown! His version of Oola couldn’t possibly tally with the one I held dear. I couldn’t claim to know her through and through with him lurking about, getting misty at after-parties, gabbing about a girl he once knew, oh, man, you
should have seen her. If only I could!

  As long as Le Roy was still out there, toting his memories of an eighteen-year-old Oola, airing the funny ones and hoarding the hot ones (baring her breasts on a dare in a club in Dublin), my project could never be complete. My work would be a fraud, 80 percent accurate at best.

  “A garter?” I cried aloud.

  But the heavens declined to comment. I flung the diary across the lawn. It Frisbee’d over the fairy ring and landed offscreen with a gasp. As if signifying their approval, the mushrooms dilated. If that ring kept getting bigger, it would soon surround the house.

  I lurched to my feet. As in old novels of suitors and duels, semi-virgins in crinoline re-smoothing their sheets, the answer was clear—I had to find this Le Roy, wherever he was. I had to wring him, my rival, in the name of integrity. My commitment, after all, was absolute. I immediately set about planning an outfit. I scrounged deep in her closet until I found what I wanted. There was no time to lose. I painted my nails by the light of the moon. The witch-hunt would begin the next morning.

  Super 8

  As it turned out, Le Roy was not a difficult person to find.

  Is anyone nowadays? Even I, living off the grid away from friends and family, had no illusions about being unfindable. Unrecognizable, maybe, but still tethered to a time and place that any computer could cook down. In the case of Le Roy, all it took was a Google search, and a photo popped up. From there, I learned that Judith Butplug had broken up after a disastrous South American tour, but Le Roy, the lead singer of dazzling gusto and soul-grinding force, according to some high schooler’s blog, had formed a new group by the less catchy name Corny Roy and the Pregnant Seahorses. I looked up their touring schedule and, lo and behold, they were the resident band at a restaurant–resort in a popular beach town just outside L.A. I made note of their set times and wrote down the restaurant’s address. I saved the photo to my phone, more to get my blood pumping than to study his face. I’d know him when I saw him; I had no doubt about that. And after a night’s worth of stewing, pacing the porch in my PJs and chain-smoking butts, I knew what I’d do to him when we came face-to-face. It wouldn’t be easy, but my mind had been made.

  It was an older photo, taken on the eve of the band’s Euro tour. This is how he must have looked to Oola when they were mostly together and she did things for him. He was six years her senior, a staggering difference at that time in her life, when his independence and seeming sureness of vision were so opposite to her burgeoning selfhood. He was as smooth in his bearing as she felt raw, still shackled to piano and calling home every Sunday to complain that she was “up in the air.”

  He’s coherent, she wrote in her diary. So whole. Everything he says or does makes utter sense for him. He’s made himself into something, and he’s so damn consistent—right down to the clothes he wears or the music he plays. Even the way that he LISTENS to music is fitting. He jams his hands in his pockets, his lower body is frozen, but he nods his head and shoulders so hard that he rocks back and forth, without ever moving his feet. People can’t help but admire him.

  I had to admit, the man had style. This photo seemed to capture it, Le Roy giving off pure Le Roy, even while off-duty. He sat balanced on a railing, clad in black jeans and a crisp blue postal worker’s shirt, the sleeves rolled up, squinting at the camera with a mix of fondness and exasperation, as if to say, ANOTHER photo? Only for you, babe. He had his left arm across his chest, hand tucked into his collar and rubbing his freshly shaved nape, while the other arm gestured broadly with a cigarette. On the visible hand he wore several rings, simple and silver. They matched his belt buckle, a big silver pentagram. He had the slinky build of a rock star but the poise of a yogi. He looked like someone who bent books out of shape, who ate rarely and kept cacti on the sill above his bed. He was harder than me but also calmer. He was in the middle of saying something and his lips were pulled back, displaying uneven teeth. I longed to know what he was spieling about; I could almost hear his low, measured voice, the precision with which he sprang t’s and q’s. One had the sense that around him, congregated just beyond the camera’s purview, were people hanging on his every word; it was clear that he’d been laughing, and the slight tilt of the photo seemed to suggest the photographer’s convulsions. On the ground beside him was a jumbo bottle of orange soda. There he sat, before or after a show: casual yet arresting, preened yet unprecious. I felt piquantly aware of my psychic split ends. A PR rep couldn’t have staged it better.

  I worry, Oola wrote, that I don’t fit into his image. Or that I fit, but not perfectly. LR is a perfectionist. And also—she inserted a series of x’s—the TRUE love of my life. Sometimes he makes me feel, I don’t know, sinful, but I can’t help myself … I’m in deep!!!

  Equally painful passages for me to read were ones in which she described his methods of kissing—rough, like my mouth is a riddle he knows he can solve—and a particularly graphic bedroom play-by-play that she summarized with shocking poignancy: I wish that he had been my first. A lot would have gone differently.

  This lyric tidbit haunted me. It was second only to the orgy scene, the memory of which gave me the energy, once I could sulk no more, to pack, clean, and plan for my second road trip. I even found the time to flat-iron my hair.

  I set off at 8:00 a.m., the motor practically purring from the previous day’s exertion. But instead of turning right toward Carmel at the bottom of the driveway, as I usually would, I turned left toward Hearst Castle and, ultimately, L.A. On this slip-slidey highway on the rim of all things, at the outermost edge of America proper, it seemed funny that my cabin should have become a midpoint, smack dab between an imaginable future (San Francisco, without her; an open-minded atmosphere, no questions asked, I could discover myself, take up coding or yoga) and an unforgettable past (Oola’s ex playing show tunes a stone’s throw from her hometown, the place where they met, unless forest fires had swept it away, and still I’d be tempted to pace that parched patch, the forever-black grasses, where she once played soccer and, years later, got high). It seemed almost too straightforward: red pill, blue pill, left or right. I didn’t bother to turn on my blinker.

  I wore a corduroy jumper dress, olive green, with a maroon turtleneck and black tights. I felt jaunty, almost sporty, with my hair in a fishtail braid (I’d been practicing). I looked like a college student cruising down the highway, headed back to campus (UCLA? CalArts? Curtis?) after a long weekend away. Get ready, I felt like whispering, a futile warning to a sleeping Le Roy. You won’t know what hit you. Neither would I, but on that fine snappy morning, the ocean breeze blowing, I was still 223 miles from finding out. The purity of my goal—get Le Roy—blinded me to any but positive omens, like the hot-air balloons I spied in the distance. I watched them scud, like sick clouds, out to sea. “You don’t stand a chance,” I said (thinking aloud a bad habit that comes with living alone). I took the bends of that crumbling road like a madwoman. I had to be spruced and ready for a 9:00 p.m. show. I had to be sitting pretty in the center first row, no matter if it killed me.

  * * *

  THE LAYOUT OF FISHBONES CAUGHT me off guard. I’d been expecting something grander. After a golden drive, punctuated only by a trip to Goodwill and a ten-minute stop in San Simeon to ogle the elephant seals, I was surprised to find myself in a blanched and sleepy seaside town, a fading hickey on the outstretched neck of California. I double-checked the GPS: Yes, this was where the gig was at. Like many California towns, it had a Spanish girl’s name that seemed bittersweet, as though the town itself were a memorial to her, whoever she was, or, sadder yet, an attempt to win her back. Its taupe time-shares stood empty for most of the year, once the vacationers had loaded up their SUVs at the first whiff of autumn’s coming, that unmistakable back-to-school ping in the air, and returned inland to their subdivisions where the leaves stayed one color all year. There were no trees in this beachside town, nor any libraries or parks; there was a sunbaked elementary school with a vast asphalt yard a
nd an attached daycare center in a trailer on blocks. There was a sweet little church with a steeple and bell, but it looked closed when I drove past. Scrub brush and sienna reigned, plus concrete and peeled paint. I could imagine that the town had a certain beat-down charm in the summer months, a humble driftwoody chillness as kids drifted from house to house sans supervision and heavy bodies got tan and, for the phantasmagoric span of June, were beautiful, in board shorts and sand dollars strung on cheap chains. The town had a post office, a surf shop, and one Super 8. Most people probably drove out to get groceries or to go to the Marie Callender’s, some miles away. Besides Fishbones, the only other restaurant in town was a taqueria called Burro’s (special of the day: Junipero Avenged). The streets were deserted when I drove through at 3:00 p.m.; I saw many bicycles, chained to street signs and door grates, and almost no cars.

  When I checked in to the motel—an Americana motor court painted peach with mint doors—a chubby preteen in a Hollister T-shirt sat behind the desk, staring into space, too bored even to text. He gave me my key and avoided my eye. “Ever been there?” I asked, indicating his shirt. “The town of Hollister is actually near here. North of Salinas. Have you been to Salinas?” He didn’t bother to respond. Even the freaky fake lady couldn’t shake him. He left me to find my room on my own.

  It was a standard-issue fifty-dollars-a-nighter: beige walls that looked chewed on, spongy carpet, a narrow pink bathroom (Jacuzzi tub! the sign outside exclaimed) that somehow called to mind an endoscopy, a modest kitchenette, a double bed with a bedspread whose floral pattern looked, in the dim light, more like camouflage, a TV on a table, and inch-thick orange curtains. I put on the dress I’d found deep in O’s dresser: a lemon-yellow negligee that went past the knees, with a butterfly stitched over each nipple. I swapped my boots for strappy heels and refreshed myself pronto. The motel was on one side of the town, marking its outermost limit. Fishbones sat on the other side, the first thing one saw, besides swaths of packed dirt leading down to the beach and the elementary school’s broad concrete yard, when pulling off Route 1 to ask for directions as to how to get back to Route 1.