“Sure,” I said.
She waited an awkward moment for me to ask for her phone number, and then smiled and said, “Looking forward to it. I am so tired of bein’ dead. Hey, thanks for the rescue.” Then she got out and leaned back in, reached into her purse, and took out a card, which she dropped on the passenger seat, only her first name and a number. She said, “Just in case,” and backed away and closed the door and hurried up the sidewalk to get ready for her appointment, whoever that might be, a rangy, lonely, small-town Texas girl hopelessly lost without a map, a few short blocks south of the Walk of Fame.
I felt like I had a large stone sitting dead center on my chest, a dense mass made up of many unpleasant things: the separation from Ronnie, the aftermath of my brush with the Slugger, whatever tangles had developed in the relationship between Tyrone and Rina, the state of Casey’s life, the commitment I’d made to Jake. Plus, of course, Jake’s damn, impossible movie and the fact that I was pledged to commit a burglary to find out whether Jeremy Granger, a.k.a. King Maybe, exploiter of teenage girls, was intentionally shredding Jake’s legacy.
And the sheer persistence of the wind had stripped the coating off my nerves. My skin felt like a collection of tiny electrical short circuits.
Was anything all right anywhere? I gave it a few minutes’ thought, sitting there, and didn’t come up with a yes. If—as some ironic people used to say as they flashed air quotes—life was a box of chocolates, someone had sat on the box.
It occurred to me that I was about twenty minutes away from Ronnie’s neat, bright, book-filled little apartment in West Hollywood, where most of my clothes were. I was either going to have to make up with her and move back in, if she’d have me, or else go pick up my clothes in some kind of final gesture. Or, I thought, defer the whole thing until she was in a better mood and go buy some new clothes.
I drifted my way around the block a few times, literally unable to choose a direction. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to put things right with Ronnie. There was no good reason to go back to the Dew Drop Inn and many reasons not to. It would have taken me ninety minutes in the thickening afternoon-to-evening rush to get to Rina and Kathy’s house in Tarzana, where I’d probably be pushed aside in all the preparations for the party.
Yikes, the party. Rina’s birthday, mysteriously moved to a different night that was not actually her birthday and apparently off-limits to Tyrone. That settled it: go see Kathy and Rina. But first the coward’s solution: don’t go see Ronnie, call her.
In all the time I’d known her, Ronnie had never recorded a personalized voice-mail message. Either she was happy with the electrically cheerful female voice the phone company supplied or, more likely, she didn’t want her real voice hanging out there where it might be heard by someone from her (apparently) permanently shrouded past.
So it was a surprise, when I was idling at the curb half a dozen addresses east of Casey’s shoe box with my phone at my ear, to hear Ronnie’s voice say, “Hi, this is Ronnie. If you want to leave a message or recite some poetry, please wait for the beep. On the other hand, if you’re Junior Bender, go fuck yourself.”
I didn’t wait for the beep. With my ears burning and the stone on my chest twice as heavy as before, I turned my badly dented white Toyota toward the Cahuenga Pass and the San Fernando Valley, toward the house I once thought would shelter my family and me forever.
The Cahuenga Pass, which derived its name from a Spanish mispronunciation of Cabueg-na, a Native American trading post that once occupied much of the space where Universal Studios stands today, was for centuries a footpath through the chaparral covering the Santa Monica Mountains that lie between the Valley and the Los Angeles Basin. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the original trail had been broadened to create a rough and rocky dirt road that led over the hill from the abandoned ruin of Cabueg-na to the booming little townlet assembled from four adjoining sections of land by a developer named Harvey Wilcox. His wife, Daeida, named the development Hollywood after an estate (which she’d never seen) owned by a friend of hers, back east in Illinois. Although Daeida chose the name for its upper-class intimations of quality and grace, by the 1930s Hollywood would be so linked in the American public’s mind with sex, drugs, and moral corruption that the residents of another Hollywood, in Indiana, would change their town’s name in self-defense.
In its infancy, though, Hollywood was a model of civic virtue. Wilcox was vigorously opposed to fun of the louder varieties and prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol within the limits of his new city. The nearby Pass, as it was called, inevitably became rum-sodden outlaw territory, home to high spirits and loose women. Many of the latter operated out of Eight Mile House, the first hotel in the area, which was noted for the extreme frequency with which its rooms were rented, often six and seven times a day, and the heavily armed desperadoes who congregated there. No less distinguished a personage than Cecil B. DeMille had been shot at on the Pass.
By the mid-1920s, Eight Mile House had been reduced to a pile of old lumber, and Hollywood’s most socially prominent women were agitating to plant an enormous and reproving cross high in the Pass, a reminder visible to sinners for miles around that the Lord’s righteousness did not expire at the Rockies. They won their battle, but eventually the cross went the way of the whorehouse. In the end they were, after all, both just wood.
I saluted mentally as I crept past the place where Eight Mile House had so briefly filled the Pass with the sounds of gunfire, breaking glass, and groans of simulated pleasure. The footpath was now an eight-lane freeway, cratered with potholes, stained with oil, and choked with carbon monoxide, just another permanent vehicular ordeal to be endured by commuters twice a day. It was enough to make me yearn for a horse, a dirt track, dappled sunlight, and oak trees full of songbirds. Lord, how we’ve battered and pasteurized the world.
At Woodman I gave up on the freeway and coasted down to the surface streets. I grew up in the Valley, and Valley residents have always seen traffic jams as a sort of noisier weather: they came and went, like smog and heat waves, and there was nothing to be done about it.
But that didn’t mean we didn’t try. I zigzagged my way across the grid toward Kathy’s house, running residential streets and alleys, selecting obscure detours through the east-west streets that only seasoned Valleyites know. In the end I probably added six or seven miles to the trip and subtracted two or three minutes from the clock, but I was feeling vindicated as I made the right onto Santa Rita. On some tiny, meaningless, totally trivial level, I still had it.
I was pulling to the curb when I saw Tyrone standing at the open door. He had his back to me, and the person blocking his way into the house, silhouetted against the light in the hall, was my ex-wife, Kathy. For a small, usually genial woman, Kathy can project a really impressive force field of rejection. If there were ever a Star Trek movie set in Tarzana, Kathy’s Rejection Force Field would get a story arc all its own.
Tyrone stepped back, and I took my foot off the brake to kill the red lights and let the car roll forward. I heard Kathy’s voice, as edgy as a bouquet of razor blades, and then I was out of sight. I drove past a couple of houses to the little circle off to the left, did a 360, and waited as Tyrone slouched toward me, head down, hands in his rear pockets.
When he was about eight feet away I lowered my window and said, “Hey, kid.”
Without looking up, he said, “Yeah, yeah.”
“Tyrone,” I said.
He stopped and looked up at me. “It’s you,” he said.
I said, “I hear that all the time.”
“I don’t mean to be rude,” he said, “but I already heard all about what a shit I am. And you know what? If you’ve got something to add, I’d just as soon you keep it to yourself.”
“Tyrone,” I said. “Please get in the car.”
He looked me in the face for a good five seconds. Then he sa
id, “Why?”
“Short version, I don’t know what’s going on, and I’d like to hear it from you. Long version, I . . . um, I’ve come to appreciate who you are and the way you are with Rina, and who knows? Maybe I can help.”
Tyrone’s eyes were the golden brown of autumn leaves. Against the dark skin of his face, they seemed to leap out at me across the dusk. The only expression I could read in them was doubt. An almost-friend, a hit woman named Debbie Halstead, had once taken a single look at him and predicted that Tyrone would spend his life trying to escape from women, and I’d been watching him ever since, searching for a glimpse of the corruption that extreme good looks can bring. So far I hadn’t seen it.
He went around and got in. Then he loosed a sigh that practically blew out the windshield. “They know this car,” he said. “You want them to let you in sooner or later, right? So you don’t want them to see you sitting out here talking to me.”
“The conspiracy of the patriarchy,” I said, putting the car in gear.
He said, “Say what?”
“Talking to myself.” I made the right onto Vanalden. “That happens when you get divorced.”
“So,” he said. “What did they tell you?”
“Nothing. Just that I wasn’t supposed to mention you in front of Rina.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sweep old Tyrone under the rug.”
“I think the implication was that Rina is in kind of a fragile state where you’re concerned. In other words, if you’ll excuse me pointing it out, it was more about her than you.”
“Well, sure,” he said. “Her family, it’s about her. Me, sitting here on my side of the car, if you’ll excuse me pointing it out, it’s about me, too.”
I said, “I am so weary of everyone having a perspective and all of them sounding so valid. How the hell am I supposed to get anything clear if everybody’s right?”
We glided in silence past a couple of houses, all lit up and containing theoretically happy families, and then Tyrone said, “Hard day, huh?”
“Don’t ask.”
“I don’t care. I was just being polite.”
I found a nice empty stretch of curb in between streetlights. The sharp, bright tip of the moon peeped over a tree, and wind-borne dust danced in the beams from the headlights. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“Truth is?” He sighed again. “Okay. Truth is, I kind of screwed up.”
“How badly?”
“In spirit,” he said. “I screwed up in spirit.”
“This is either a fine distinction or not, depending.”
“You’re her dad.”
“And.”
He put down his window and looked out of it. “And this isn’t easy to talk about.”
“If you don’t talk about it,” I said, “I can’t do anything for you. Assuming I’d want to, once I hear what you have to say.” This was greeted by silence. “I was a kid once, you know.”
“Yeah,” he said. “All old guys say that.”
I had turned off the lights, and now I turned them back on. “Up to you.”
“Okay, okay. Just give me a minute.” He put the window up and put it down again halfway. “You don’t have to worry about Rina,” he said, slowly enough to have picked the words out of a bowl.
“In what regard?”
“Boy, does that sound stiff. In what regard? You could add ‘my good man,’ you know. Sound even stiffer.”
“The question stands.”
“In regard to what you probably mean when you say ‘a good girl.’ No, Jesus, don’t ask me, you know what I mean.”
I said, “Boy, is this awkward.”
“So she’s nothing to worry about in that department, she’s got a strong will and she’s smart and she’s decided not to do anything that would limit the choices she can make. That’s what she said to me, she’s not going to limit the choices she can make.”
“Good for her.”
“Yeah, I mean it’s not very personal or very romantic, but it’s clear, you know? Girl’s real clear.”
“So I assume that the context of that conversation . . .” I completely ran out of gas.
“Well, sure. I’m a guy, right?”
“I’d noticed that, and believe me, as her dad I’ve thought about it many times.”
“And since you made the point that you were young once, then you know what I’m talking about.”
“A minute ago,” I said, “I didn’t think this conversation could get any more uncomfortable. I stand corrected.”
“But you do know.”
“I know, if we’re going to focus on my own mythical youth, that I wouldn’t want Rina dating anybody like me.” A sudden gust of wind hit the car, rocking it slightly, and a ragged bunch of dry leaves skittered across the street. Not only was the heat sticking around, so was the fire season.
“Well, then, you can relax, ’cause I’m not like you. But I am a guy. And . . . um, you also know that just because you can’t—you know—get a drink of water someplace, that doesn’t mean you’re not still thirsty.”
“You didn’t,” I said.
“No! No, I didn’t.”
We sat there as the moon inched its way higher. The wind wasn’t bothering the moon any. And then Tyrone said, “But it might have looked like I was going to try.”
I said, “Would it be possible for us to dispense with the conditional tense?”
“Is that like if and might have?”
“It is.”
“They don’t teach us that.”
“They don’t teach you shit, if you want my opinion. But that’s not the subject.”
“Yeah, okay, okay. So there’s this girl named Denise, and Denise, who is not, like, totally unattractive, told this friend of hers who told this friend of mine that she wouldn’t mind hooking up with me.”
“As in—”
“Oh, come on.”
I said, “Look at that moon, would you?”
“Yeah,” Tyrone said. “There it is.”
“You know why you sometimes see it as a crescent?”
“Yes,” Tyrone said. “That’s one of the things they do teach us.”
I drew a breath that seemed to include most of the air in the neighborhood. “So, to summarize, there’s a sort of barrier to the further exploration of one possible aspect of your relationship with Rina, and you’re down with that but not fully satisfied on a sort of hormonal level, and this girl named . . . named . . .”
“Denise. Fine looking—”
“I don’t care if she’s got six legs. This . . . this Denise, who could probably use a little aggressive parenting, sends you a verbal chain letter to inform you that she has an interest in making the beast with two backs—”
“That’s Othello,” Tyrone observed. “Interesting you should choose Othello, with me being—”
“—and you say, what? ‘Good to go’? ‘Ready when you are’?”
“I don’t say shit,” Tyrone said. “But I hung around with her a little.”
“Hung around.”
“Like at school. In broad daylight. In public, with about a million people looking.”
“‘In public’ where?”
“Outdoors,” he said. “A park once and the mall once. We were always vertical.” He cleared his throat. “But I held her hand.”
“Oh, boy,” I said.
“So naturally, that was when Rina’s friend, this little scab on the world’s nose—her name’s Patty—”
“Patricia,” I said. “They’re going twosies, as my wife said, for a dual birthday party.”
“And that’s like a first-class ticket for Patty, who’s been trying forever to get close to Rina.”
“Why?”
“Because Rina’s tope. Everybody thinks—”
“Wait. Taupe? You mean, like, beige?”
“No, tope. T-O-P-E. Like tight and dope, put together. Okay, okay, for you, cool, remember cool?”
“We’re talking about Rina?”
“Top of the ticket. Dudes want to hang with her, sisters want to be her bra.”
“Tyrone.”
He gave me the first grin of the evening. “Like bro,” he said, “but for the other half. You know, like tight with her.”
“She never talks about this.”
“If she did, she wouldn’t be tope.”
“So Patty, or Patricia, saw you and . . . uh, Denise, holding hands, and she used that as a way to make friends with Rina.”
“To get tighter,” Tyrone said. “They were already on hey-there, nod-in-the-hall terms. But then Patty goes and gets all weepy and says, ‘Oh, I hate to tell you this, but— No, never mind, I can’t,’ and Rina’s like ‘What what whaat?’ And finally Patty breaks down and gives her the news. Kleenex everywhere.”
“How do you know it went like that?”
“Because Rina told me. ‘God bless Patty,’ she says, or something like that, ‘I practically had to torture her to get her to tell me,’ and I’m seeing old Patty just beauty-queening it up in a corner, probably rubbing her legs together like a cricket.”
“You saw her?”
“No, that’s a figure of speech. Rina told me over the phone, but Patty was in the room. Rina said so.”
“What did you say.”
“What could I say?” Tyrone asked. “I denied it.”
“You lied?”
He looked at me as though I’d begun speaking in tongues. “Course I lied. What would you have done?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right.”
“So I denied it, but, see, Patty had brought someone with her, another marginal girl, who had seen it or said she did, and she told Rina, Patty did, to break it to me, like, one witness at a time, so she could see whether I’d lie.” He looked up at the moon for a moment. “And I did. I said I hadn’t done it, and this other girl pipes up and says she saw me, too.” He lifted his right foot and kicked himself in the left shin with his heel. A tree branch, leaves intact, tumbleweeded across the street.
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