“When I jumped off the porch, I kicked over one of the lattes,” he said.
Troy twisted his ankle on a rut and skinned his hand on the walkway. He scrambled to his feet and circled the duplex. He fought his way through the hedges and wedged his fingers under the bedroom window, prying the bloated wood frame open as far as it would allow. He wiggled his way through the window onto the unmade bed, and darted down the hallway. What he remembered best later—indeed, what he would never forget—was the prostrate figure of Lulu illuminated in a shaft of light, naked and coiled like a fetus in her own bloody slough. Her mouth was agape. Her eyes were closed. There was vomit in her hair.
“It was all so fucking unreal,” Troy recalled. He began to sob into the receiver. “There wasn’t any fucking dignity in her lying there like that, Will.” His grief picked up momentum until his voice gave out. And when he spoke again, he choked on the words. “She just tossed herself aside like garbage.”
“Shhh,” I said. “What happened next?”
As far as Troy could tell, Lulu was unconscious, but still breathing. He said he was afraid to touch her and he didn’t know why.
He remembered making the call, and how his voice sounded as though it came from outside himself when he spoke to the dispatcher.
“And after I hung up, I wanted to say something to Lulu as she was lying there. I wanted to go over to her and hold her hand, and tell her everything was going to be all right. But I was frozen. My teeth were clattering together like hell.”
Though Lulu had carved both arms lengthwise from the wrist halfway to the elbow, leaving no hesitation marks, she had missed the arteries. The blood had stopped flowing to her extremities. And so Lulu was condemned to another day.
Troy was as devastated as if he’d lost her. “It’s my fault,” he kept saying.
“How? How is it your fault?”
He began to choke on his grief again. “I didn’t know, Will. I swear, I didn’t know. Not until the doctor asked me if I knew anything about it, and I told him I didn’t.”
“What? You didn’t know what?”
“About Lulu being pregnant.”
“Jesus,” I said. And I actually had to sit down.
Troy groaned. “It’s all my fault,” he said miserably.
I knew I’d been there for that child’s conception, just as sure as I’d emptied myself into Lulu amidst the supernatural light of her bedroom, and just as sure as Lulu had cried into my armpit afterward. And yet I let Troy suffer the belief—then and always—that it was his own loss, that he was the complicit party in pushing Lulu to the edge of the precipice.
I’m not proud of that.
Willow and Big Bill flew immediately to Seattle, where Troy picked them up at the airport. Nobody blamed Troy for getting Lulu pregnant, but it had to be uncomfortable. For three weeks Willow and my father roosted in Lulu’s apartment with Esmeralda. I was gently persuaded, overtly discouraged, and finally forbidden to make the trip to Seattle.
“You’ve done enough,” Big Bill reassured me.
Remanded to a clinic near the university, Lulu remained for two weeks under supervision, undergoing psychiatric evaluation and counseling. There she sat in circles, clutching a bear with button eyes to her chest. There she drew pictures of her emotions—trees like skeletons wrapped in barbed wire, faces without mouths.
Powerless during Lulu’s convalescence, restlessness moved me about in the world without purpose. All that was formerly meaningful and right in my world had been mysteriously altered. Hot dogs ceased to be a transcendental experience. Nothing, in fact, was transcendental. I was distracted behind the mic, never more than a few words ahead of the voice. My beloved events calendar, once the springboard for my wry witticisms and clever asides, was no longer imbued with a magical significance. My jokes weren’t funny. The blood drive sounded like a blood drive. The voice did not belong to me; it was alien and disembodied, floating unheeded through the Los Angeles basin, touching no one. And like the amateur I had become overnight, I could not even bear to listen to my air-checks.
The all-knowing Phil Spencer was quick to note the turnabout in my performance, and was even moved to pay me an unexpected visit at Hot Dog Heaven one afternoon during the tail end of the lunch rush. Spence ordered a chili-cheese foot-long, mounded it with onions and relish, and asked me if I could take a break.
I appealed to Joe with a glance. He nodded his assent, then grabbed his nuts when he thought my back was turned.
Even though it was my hot dog stand, Phil led me to the farthest plastic table, the one that always wobbled because of a lip in the concrete.
“Take a load off,” he said.
I should have taken my apron off, is what I should’ve done. A pro would have taken his apron off. Look at Phil. Even though it was a Saturday, Phil was still dressed for the office. He was always dressed for the office. That’s because Phil was a pro. Although, I must say, he had one chink in his armor in this respect. He always wore the same suit. And I think he just refastened the same tie knot over and over. Every Monday Phil was pressed and clean; he cut the buttoned-down figure of a hale and hearty radio exec. On Tuesday, he was still pretty sharp—good crisp lines and sharp pleats. By Wednesday, the fabric started to wilt a bit, and his tie knot started to go a little catawampus. Thursday lunch, maybe he got a spot of mustard on the lapel, and his pockets began to sag. By the end of the week, Phil looked like he’d just rolled off a couch and washed three aspirin down with some warm club soda. And by Saturday, all bets were off. Life wears you down, I guess. What I never figured out was—when did he dry-clean the suit? How was it possible?
It was Saturday when Phil sat me down at Hot Dog Heaven, so he was pretty rumpled. We sat quietly. A cloud of seagulls caused a fuss nearby. The tide was receding and the wind was kicking up, and you could really smell the ocean in the air, even over the myriad scents of Venice Beach: patchouli and sunscreen, hot dog gristle and barbecue smoke—the smell of my wayward adolescence. There was a steady flow of foot traffic along the boardwalk.
I kept expecting Spence to launch into one of his sage radio lectures, but he didn’t say anything for a while. He set to work on his foot-long, a little distractedly, I thought.
“You’re getting mental,” he said finally. “Losing your focus.”
“But I—”
“Tut tut,” he said, raising a finger. “Hear me out. See, what happens is you’re not distilling anything—you’re just opening your mouth and—”
“But, Phil, that’s all I ever did in the—”
He silenced me with the finger. “Listen.”
I listened.
“You hear that?”
“What, the seagulls?”
“No, your thoughts. Shush.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“I mean, when you sit still and shut your mouth, can you hear your thoughts?”
“Well, yeah, of course.”
“That’s your problem.” He nodded, as if to say, yep, just as I expected, and took a big bite of his foot-long, which he seemed to enjoy for the first time. “Ev fif fing feef ?” he asked.
“Huh?”
He rolled the big bite over into one cheek so that he looked like Sparky Lyle. “Is this thing beef ?”
“It’s everything,” I said, not realizing the philosophical implications of the statement.
He chewed a little more, nodding his head, and finally swallowed. “Hmm. Not bad. See, now, your thoughts should be quiet, Miller—as quiet when you open your mouth as when you close it. The brain is not so good at distilling—fucking thing spins in circles. You wind up with more in the end, not less.” He tore into his foot-long again. He was really beginning to like it. “Vif fing if big,” he observed, wide-eyed and masticating contentedly.
He then raised the finger to buy a few chews. When he finally choked down the bite, he w
iped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket and looked me in the eye.
“It doesn’t come from up here,” he said, aiming the finger at his head. “It comes from in here.”
I’m still not exactly sure if he meant to say it comes from the heart or the gut, or even the rumpled shirtfront, because Spence was pointing just a hair below his solar plexus, but I definitely caught his drift.
“So how do I turn my thoughts off ?”
“Beats me. How did you do it before?”
“I don’t know.”
Phil went thoughtfully back to work on his foot-long. He turned it around in his hands, inspecting it between bites. “Let me tell you a story, Miller,” he said, with his mouth full.
A momentary calm washed over me. Finally, I thought, the answer. Straight from the oracle. I leaned forward attentively in my plastic chair.
But he waved the idea off. “On second thought, forget about it.”
I was a bit crestfallen, and I’m sure Spence could see it, because I could see real empathy in the folds of his crow’s feet. “Look, Miller, I’m just guessing here, but I’d say you’re having doubts. I’ve seen this kind of thing before—and understand, it doesn’t matter the nature of the doubt—maybe you think you’ve got genital warts, maybe you think the world is poised on the brink of nuclear holocaust, hell, maybe you’ve fallen out of love with radio.”
“No,” I assured him.
He gave me a searching look. Spence was the master of pause. He understood pause like Gary Owens understood pause, like Balance understood pause, like Billy Graham understood pause; he understood that the effective pause was not all about the pause itself, or even the act of pausing, but about where you left the pause, what kind of English you put on it. In its rudimentary form, pause was punctuation, slightly evolved it became a question, but suspended just right, left out there long enough, it became a turning point for the listener. I’ll bet you that back in the day Spence could give his listeners a searching look right through the radio dial—he’d done it to me on the telephone.
“You just gotta look doubt in the eye, Miller. On second thought, don’t look at it at all. Just lower your head and charge at it. You need to find your center again, that’s all I know. That, or discover a new one.”
“How am I supposed to—”
“Shh.” He stopped me in my tracks with the finger. “Whaddaya hear?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
I listened distractedly. “Questions, all right, I hear questions. A lot of them. And, yeah, okay, doubts. Nagging ones.”
Spence nodded gravely. “Miller, you’re depressed, okay. It’s pretty simple. Here’s what I want you to do. Here’s what you need to do.”
“I’m not depressed, I’m just . . .”
“I want you to take some time off.”
“But I don’t think I need to take—”
“Tut tut. Shh. I insist. Just a week or two—however long it takes for you to stop thinking.” Phil set the last three inches of his foot-long down and patted his belly. I noticed a little chunk of pickled relish poised on the lip of his shirt pocket.
“We don’t think our way out of corners, kid. We act.”
Upon Lulu’s discharge at the beginning of August, she accompanied Willow and Big Bill back to Sausalito, where she agreed to remain indefinitely—or at least until the beginning of fall semester. According to Willow and Big Bill (only one of whom I had reason to doubt), a critical bargaining point in negotiating Lulu’s extradition was her stipulation that she receive no contact from either Troy or myself during her convalescence. Not until she was ready to initiate the interaction herself.
“She’s healing,” Willow explained over the phone. “Women feel their way through grief, Will. You have to respect that.”
“But when can I see her?”
“That’s not for me to say. Whenever she’s felt her way to that point.”
Thus, Willow and Big Bill withheld my letters and disregarded my Trojan horses, all for the sake of defending the sanctity of Lulu’s grief. I could forgive them a lot of things—their judgment, their hypocrisy, their deceit—but I couldn’t forgive them for shutting me out when I scratched on the door.
The Past, the Present, the Future (in no particular order)
I suppose before all of this is over, you’re going to want some type of accounting for my decision to drop everything—including what was shaping up to be a burgeoning, if not vaguely dissatisfying, future for Will the Thrill—and set out for Sausalito. You’ll probably want to know what I expected to gain by any of it, and if I don’t tell you, then you’ll probably just assume the answer is Lulu. But you’d be wrong, because I can’t honestly say that I allowed myself to believe for even one minute that I was actually going to claim Lulu’s heart. I was simply driven as a moth to flame. I could no more resist seeing Lulu than I could operate a hydraulic scissor lift blindfolded, or cure Klinefelter’s syndrome with a croquet mallet. In my heart, I knew that the real question was not what did I expect to gain by going to Sausalito, but rather what did I stand to lose by not going to Sausalito. And the answer, of course—though I didn’t know it yet—was clarity.
Joe wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of covering my ass indefinitely, especially on such short notice. The very evening of my departure he was scheduled to party with a chick in Cerritos who worked at Stereo Lab.
“Dude, she looks like Kim Basinger. Except she’s got braces.”
Indeed, it was a big night for Joe—preparations were in order. And I was really gumming up the works. He wanted to polish his rims first. He had to square off his sideburns and gel his thinning hair. He wanted to stop by Sam Goody and pick up the new Whitney Houston.
“Chicks dig Whitney Houston, dude. I’m gonna bang this chick, for sure. No way, I’m closing.”
“I tell you what, guys,” Eugene interjected, stocking the napkin dispenser. “I close.” He clicked the chrome cover shut. “Joe, you go have party wis chick, and Will, it’s not to worry about. Is no problem. It freshes me to stay late. I am winding down when I am closing.” He gave the chrome surface one final wipe for good measure, checked his reflection in it, and replaced it on the counter. “I cover for you tomorrow, too. As many days as you need. Sree Muskateers stick together. You want also I feed your cat?”
“He’s dead, Eugene. He doesn’t eat.”
“I leave bowl of milk, anyway.”
“Look, Eugene, the thing is, I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t even know why I’m going, really, or how long I’m staying. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I may need a lot of covering for a while. I just don’t know.”
He waved it off. “Bah! For however long you are talking, is no problem. We build Hot Dog Heaven so we can make for this kind of freedom.”
Good old Eugene. I think he knew all along I was in love with my stepsister. All those hours he spent listening to me as we diced onions side by side, all that talk about Lulu, surely he intuited it. Somewhere in his Russian soul, he understood the complexities without knowing them, I’m almost sure of it. I really loved that guy. I loved it when he called me Will Za Srill. It was never the least bit ironic—it was always genuine. It made me feel like somebody. I’m not sure that anyone ever believed in me more, or ever expected more of me, than Eugene Gobernecki. So how do you thank a person like that? How do you thank a person who never asks for anything more than a little solidarity in return, a little companionship, a guy who would walk to the end of the earth for you—and then cook you a duck once he got there? Maybe you never thank him, maybe you just mean to. That’s all I ever did. And I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet at the end of the road, when I’m cashing in my regrets, I’m going to wish I thanked Eugene Gobernecki for being the first real friend I ever had.
“And whatever you
do,” he shouted from behind the counter as I was leaving, “don’t crash za Srill Mobile.”
Maybe I should have stuck by Eugene, maybe I owed him that. Maybe together we could’ve taken China by storm, or maybe just gone bankrupt trying, like he did. But that was not my destiny. I’ve always suspected that Eugene had an inkling my journey north was the first step in my incremental disassociation with Hot Dog Heaven. I can’t really say that I had an inkling myself. Certainly I had no inkling that I would allow Eugene Gobernecki to slip away for good—not by design, or by any act of agency, but simply by the force of changing winds.
Last I heard, in the wake of the Chinese hot dog debacle, Eugene had moved up near Torrance and started a hugely successful lawn maintenance service with none other than Joe Tuttle. Two musketeers. I saw a TV commercial for Heavenly Gardens late one night during a Clippers rebroadcast. It was one of those shoestring budget commercials, where the colors are all blown out, and the audio sucks, and the graphics leave ghostly tracers in their wake. Despite his thinning hair and some new wrinkles, he was the same little potato of a guy; his gold tooth was still gleaming, the light of optimism still showing in his silvery eyes. And, by God, he still knew how to sell it—whether it was hot dogs or hedge trimming—that is to say, Eugene knew how to believe.
“So, why you waiting for, then?” he asked. “Why you not calling Heavenly Gardens right now? Heavenly Gardens making your garden out of this world!”
At the end of the commercial, they left the camera trained on Eugene at least two beats too long. But his smile never wilted. His tooth kept gleaming.
All About Lulu Page 27