I hope that Dad is holding up okay since my mom left. Before you resent him too much, remember that he’s been through a lot, and I’m not just talking about your mom. Don’t forget his dad died when he was four years old, and I’m not making excuses, I just know what it’s like not to have a dad, even if I call Dad Dad. I know that you’re probably thinking that you didn’t have a mother, and that’s even worse, but some people (like you) are naturally well-adjusted, I think. I think Dad and I are young souls, and I think that you’re an old soul. Dan is an old soul too. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s just lazy.
So now I’ve come to the question that is on both of our minds. You have to believe me, William Miller Jr., that I haven’t stopped thinking it. Sometimes I feel like it’s thinking me. Of course I’m talking about the night in Westwood in the garage. I’ve been over it and over it, Will, and probably it’s why it’s taken me so long to write. Trust and forgive that I’m not being careful with my words here. What I mean is, I’m saying everything just as I thought it and felt it. You have to promise me you won’t hate me. You just have to, Will. That night of the blowout when I came undone, you were the only person in the world I wanted to talk to. And if it happened again tomorrow, probably you’d still be the only person. And it wasn’t because you are my brother, but probably that was part of it. If you weren’t my brother, I couldn’t possibly see you as I do, because I probably wouldn’t ever have gotten close to you at all (don’t take that the wrong way). I know you think it makes a difference not really being related. But the bottom line is, to me there is no difference. I can’t be any more honest than that. You said things that night that nobody else in the world will ever say to me again, ever. I know that. I’ll live the rest of my life knowing that. Troy could never say those things to me. Dan will never be able to say those things to me, I can see that already. I will always settle for less than you, I’m sure of it. If you mean all the things you said in your notebook, and all the things you said to me the night in Morgan’s brother’s garage, then you have no choice but to not hate me for feeling the way I do about this, and especially not hate me for meeting Dan, because Dan and every other boy in the world is just to try to make up for you. You have to believe that, Will. It’s not fair if you don’t. If I don’t hear back from you in a month, I will assume you can’t forgive me, and if that’s the case, I guess I can’t blame you, but I still think it’s unfair. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m just being selfish again.
Love,
Lulu
P.S. Happy New Year! I know this is going to be a big year for you, Will! It won’t be long before your voice speaks to the whole world!
Dear Lulu
January 12, 1988
Dear Lulu,
I’ve written this letter a dozen times, so I am choosing my words carefully, every last one of them. First of all, I don’t know what ever gave you the idea I was “well-adjusted.” Jesus Christ, look at my handwriting! Well-adjusted people don’t write like this! Well-adjusted people don’t call their fathers Big Bill! Well-adjusted people don’t hate their own brothers! Well-adjusted people don’t fill notebooks full of fantasies about their stepsister! What you read in the bathroom was the very tip of the iceberg. So don’t think you’ve cornered the market on not being “well-adjusted,” Louisa Trudeau-Miller. And don’t think you’re doing me any favors by being “honest,” either. It’s a little late for honesty, when you’ve been pretending to hate me for three years, only so you could admit you loved me one night when you got drunk and carved yourself up. Your honesty hurts even worse than your lying. It really helps me a lot to know about Dan the bass-playing bartender, it helps me to picture him slack-jawed and skinny and tattooed and about to kiss you. Especially since you yourself say he’s not as good as me. Thanks for the honesty! Oh, and by the way, I’m not going to break Troy’s heart for you, either. Troy’s about the only friend I’ve got. Sorry, but you’ll have to tell him about Dreamy Dan the Bass Playing Man yourself ! You’ll have to tell Troy you think he’s worthless and shallow yourself, just like you did that night in the bathroom, only this time really sock it to him, Lulu. Don’t leave him any hope.
I wish Big Bill had never met Willow, and that I never met you, or touched you, or kissed you, or dreamed of kissing you, or clutched your pillow to my face and smelled you every chance I got, or jotted down every lovely thing you ever said, or every lovely thing you ever did, or wore, or didn’t do, or dropped on the floor, and I wish I never cried knowing that I caused you suffering, or that I never made a deal with the devil for half my life just to be with you for a night, and I wish to God you weren’t my stepsister, so you couldn’t use it as an excuse to not love me back!
I hate you, Lulu, and I wish I could say it right to your scar face!
Will
P.S. Happy New Year (a little late)! Say hi to Dan!
And so after nearly three weeks of waffling and agonizing over my approach, after a dozen misfires, and a dozen restless nights, this was the letter I finally sent off to Lulu by way of a reply, and for five seconds afterward, it was exhilarating to think how deeply my words would cut her, and for five seconds I basked in the genius of my own cruelty, and congratulated myself for not having pulled any punches, and not having tempered my hatred with a single kind or conciliatory word, and for five seconds I felt that I had finally conquered Lulu.
The Modern Game
It should be noted that no member of the Miller bodybuilding contingent could ever resist a mirror, or any other reflective surface. When passing a mirror or a shop window, my father and Doug, and in earlier days Ross, would often pause for a full knee-to-shoulder inspection of their rippling personage. At the very least, they snuck a sidelong glance at their own visages as they lumbered by with their shoulders straight, their elbows back, and their Adam’s apples jutting out their necks like dorsal fins. This phenomenon is not unique to the Miller men—I’ve observed it to some degree in nearly all bodybuilders—but in the Millers it seemed to be pronounced. The closer it got to competition time, the more time Big Bill spent before the mirror. This was especially true of the Olympia, and especially in ’88. As early as February, he spent upward of an hour a day in front of the full-length mirror in the master bedroom, polishing his poses, looking for chinks in his own fleshy armor. And that’s where I found him on Valentines Day, not three days after Willow had made it official that she was not returning to Santa Monica.
I was never a big proponent of Hallmark holidays, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little blue that particular Valentines Day. Lulu had been gone for six months, and I was living at home with absolutely zero romantic prospects, zero financial prospects, and very little desire or energy to create either. School was still seven months off, Troy was living in Venice (I scarcely saw him anymore), and Acne Scar Joe was hounding me daily to come back to work at Fatburger. Somehow, Valentines Day just magnified all of it.
As I stood in the doorway and watched Big Bill before the mirror, running through the very poses Willow had taught him as though it were the most normal thing in the world, I couldn’t help but wonder what was wrong with my father. How could he move on like that?
When he registered my presence in the mirror, he winked.
“How can you act so casual about it?” I said.
He did a front lat spread, smiling as though from the inside of a casket. “About what, Tiger?”
“What do you mean, about what? About losing Willow.”
Big Bill did a quarter turn with his upper body, and eased smoothly into a right bicep, trailing his left arm out behind him in a rooster tail so his upper body formed a backward S in profile. “Who says I lost her?”
“Dad, what is your problem? Your wife left you. How can you just stand there flexing your muscles? Aren’t you even going to fight for her?”
“I’m through with fighting, Tiger. From here on out, I’m just rolling with the punches.”
&
nbsp; My father remained a mystery to me. Where was the wounded elephant? Where was the guy who didn’t know what to do with himself ? Had he finally arrived at a method by which grief could be converted into muscle mass like carbs? Was it as simple as consuming seven years of one’s life at a single sitting, and then adding two sets of incline presses, and maybe some crunches? Whatever the case, Willow’s departure seemed only to sharpen Big Bill’s focus.
Seven years had passed since he finished as high as fourth in the Olympia. At forty, the window was closing on his career, and with or without Willow, Big Bill was determined to take a final summit run at Olympus in ’88. Though he’d failed even to qualify for Gothenburg in ’87, where an impossibly ripped Lee Haney won his seventh, Big Bill remained steadfast in the belief (some might even argue delusion) that ’88 was his year to win the Olympia.
I had no expectation or any wish for the distinction of a matching sweat suit on this occasion, nor did I harbor any secret hope that I would get the nod come oiling time. But I did watch Big Bill’s ’88 run from a distance, with the nagging interest of a retired coach, nursing some bitter misgivings for the modern game.
This time Big Bill altered his entire approach to conditioning. He began sculpting an entirely more subtle figure. Despite his rippling girth, and his artistry in the realm of posing, proportion had ever remained his Achilles’ heel. Big Bill was top-heavy. His biceps, pecs, and shoulders were as formidable as any the IFBB had ever seen, but his legs were puny by comparison. He was shaped like a drumstick standing on end, a fact that might well have cost him a dozen bids at Mr. Olympia.
In ’88 Big Bill was determined to change all of that. Sundays, formerly a domestic benchmark in our restless household deemed “at home day” (usually occasioned by Big Bill eating an entire ham in front of the television set as his children came and went), were now devoted exclusively to lower-body work at Gold’s, with an emphasis on quads and calves. So, if Big Bill was suffering in the months after Willow’s flight, I didn’t see it, and that’s the truth, because he practically lived at Gold’s Gym.
Acne Scar Joe finally succeeded in luring me back to Fatburger. I was officially moving backwards.
“We need you, Miller,” he told me in the parking lot one afternoon after he’d called me in to plead his case once and for all. “You may be a pussy, but nobody handles the lunch rush like you. These high school kids are always fucking up. Or their parents are calling in to say they can’t come to work because they’ve got a fucking track meet, or some shit. We need somebody older, more responsible. We need you, Miller.”
Somehow, I was unmoved by this plea.
“Look,” he said. “Let’s be honest here. I know what you’re thinking. It’s a nowhere job, right? Flipping burgers. It doesn’t exactly make the world go round, right? But just remember, Miller: In the Soviet Union, college professors and aerospace engineers are quitting their jobs to work at McDonald’s. Doesn’t that mean anything to you, Miller?”
“That they don’t pay professors much in the Soviet Union?”
“Besides that! Look, there’s a whole goddamn world of people to feed out there—be they Russian, or Japs, or Greasers, or all these fags and yuppies right here in West Hollywood. They’re all people. Even the fags. They all gotta eat. You think you can’t make a difference, Miller? Let me tell you a little story. You ever hear of honey mustard dressing? Of course you have. Did you know that this Fatburger, right here, was the first restaurant on Santa Monica between Martel and Fairfax to serve honey mustard? Yeah. And you know what else? We were the first ones to serve it on the side. That’s right. Now every bitch from Rodeo Drive to Los Feliz with a stick up her ass, in every yuppie bistro in town, is ordering honey mustard on the side. Goddamn Salt-N-Pepa are ordering it that way. Gorbachev’s ordering it that way! Fatburger needs you, Miller. Are you gonna turn your back on that?”
Acne Scar Joe should have been a recruiter. He had managed to work me up into a patriotic frenzy over hamburgers. I was practically ready to go to war for hamburgers if necessary. But mostly I needed the money, and Fatburger must have been serious about needing me, because they bumped me up to $6.15 an hour, a wage that might have afforded me a rented closet in Moscow. Ever the pragmatist, I opted to stay at home. The rent was only $150, a nominal fee, roughly enough to keep Big Bill in short supply of protein powder for about a week, but a fee nonetheless. I wasn’t living at home, I was renting at home, a distinction that afforded me a shred of dignity.
The high point of spring was breaking Troy’s heart. How I managed to wait that long, I don’t know.
We were bumming around the beach south of Venice one foggy morning in May. Troy was already a little mopey about something, so the timing couldn’t have been better.
“His name’s Dan,” I said. “He’s a great guy from what she told me.”
Troy dug some sand up with the toe of his shoe and shook it off, and looked out toward the surf, but didn’t say anything.
“Lulu says he’s hot,” I said. “I guess he’s in some band that just got signed. All I know is, she seems pretty serious about him.”
For all I really knew, Lulu had dumped Dan months ago, but it was a moot point anyway, because goddamn Troy took it like a prince. I almost felt bad for rubbing it in.
“Good for her,” he said, tracing a little squiggly in the sand with his toe. “That’s great. I’m glad she found someone.”
“You’re serious? That’s it? You’re glad she found someone?”
“Well, yeah. I am, actually. She deserves it, don’t you think?”
“I guess so. I don’t know, does she?”
“Yeah, I think she does.”
I drew my own squiggly in the sand with the toe of my shoe. “But what about you guys?”
Troy reached down, picked up a bottle cap, and winged it sidearm toward the surf. It caught some wind and sailed nearly straight up in a steep arc and then died in midair, and floated back to earth not fifteen feet from him. “Pfff. What about us?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
I suppose Troy was a bigger man than me for knowing when to concede, but that’s not really saying much, is it? After all, what kind of measure is giving up?
Pepperoni Sticks
I knew I’d reached an all-time low once I started fraternizing with Acne Scar Joe outside of Fatburger. It wasn’t that Acne Scar Joe was a terrible guy, though he was. He was the kind of guy that collected beer money from high school kids in the Circle K parking lot, then bought lotto tickets with their money and told them “tough shit” when he came out empty-handed, and then bragged about it the next day at work. It wasn’t that Joe was a bigot, though he was that, too. He said things like, “Hey, I got nothin’ against wetbacks. Shit, my neighbor’s a wetback. They’re better than gooks.” It wasn’t that we didn’t have anything in common, though we didn’t. I liked to hole up in my bedroom and stare at the ceiling and listen to Ken Minyard on my headphones. Joe liked to drink a few and go to the firing range with his Glock. So, we did have one big thing in common: We were both losers.
Our initial foray into the social arena consisted of a movie at the Beverly Center one night after work. Some bad people seized an armored car. Lives were at stake. A gritty Secret Service dude kicked their asses. Pretty stirring stuff. Just the kind of human drama that roused Joe’s slumbering moral imperative and sent his testosterone level through the roof. He was noticeably agitated afterward, like he was itching for the firing range. Joe’s moral ceiling collapsed again within ten minutes. He bought us some beer at a convenience store near the high school, where he collected money from the usual suspects, two kids with identical Misfits T-shirts, driving a Honda Civic. Probably sophomores, maybe juniors.
One of the kids confronted Joe afterward outside the store. “Hey, we wanted bottles.”
“Well, it just so happens that this beer ain’t for you, dumbshit. It�
�s for me and my buddy.”
The kid looked to me for confirmation, and I shrugged sheepishly from the passenger seat.
“Give us the money back then.”
“Pfff, right.”
The kid looked more wounded than angry. “You can’t do that. C’mon, dude. That’s fucked.”
“So, call the fucking cops, why don’t you? Oh, wait, you’re a minor. Ha! Nice try, Skippy.”
Joe climbed into the car and handed me the beer. The kid gave me one more pleading look. C’mon, he seemed to say, isn’t there something you can do? But all I could do was shrug sheepishly again.
We drank the beer by the empty pool at Joe’s apartment complex, where we sat in plastic chairs. The night was warm and windless, and a gritty residue of exhaust from the nearby 10 hung in the air. Indeed, the freeway was so close that you could spot the make of the cars. Whenever the flow of traffic subsided momentarily, you could hear the buzzing of the purplish patio lights. They sounded almost like crickets. The empty pool was littered with dead palm fronds and beer cans and an old bicycle with no wheels.
Joe kept throwing rocks at his neighbor’s cat every time the poor beast slunk out onto the balcony. “Climbs all over the hood of my car, the fucking rat.”
We talked about work a little, about the nuances of charbroiling and the dipshit delivery driver from Rykoff.
“That dude’s been at Jackoff longer than I’ve been at Fats,” he noted.
“What’s wrong with his teeth, anyway? How come he never opens his mouth?”
“It ain’t pretty, dude. He’s got a gnarly-ass grill. Looks like lava rocks and shit.”
After about a half hour of this, Joe finally cut to the chase. “Look, Miller, there’s a reason why I had you over tonight.”
All About Lulu Page 11