Huck rolled his eyes and gave Alex a smile. Brandon, Alex learned, spent most mornings here holding forth on his theories of imminent social collapse and personal development, typically ending his monologues with a pitch for Operation: You, a paramilitary training seminar he ran out of a luxury hunting lodge in Colorado.
“Shooting practice and deep-dive seminars by day, wine pairings and spa treatments by night,” Brandon said. “Do you some good, boyo. Identify obstacles blocking your path, take ’em out. Therapy with firepower. You’re looking at the Tony Robbins of paramilitary personal development.”
“Wow,” Alex said, forcing a smile. “Send me a link.”
Alex finished his cappuccino and ordered another. Minutes stretched by. Alex was dimly aware that he was well on his way to being very late for work. Still, he made no move to go. The busboy brought over a plate of cinnamon sticky buns. Alex looked around at the patio. Every table was filled with bearded guys with band stickers on their laptops and ladies with tasseled boots and filmy peasant blouses. Who were these people? Didn’t they have anywhere to be? They nodded meaningfully and spoke slowly, in no particular hurry. All over the city, Alex could sense computers booting up, conference calls starting, emails flying. Not here. Alex broke off a piece of sticky bun and popped it in his mouth.
“Dude, you ever been to a Korean spa?” Huck leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s an experience. Let’s go hang some dong.”
• • •
Climbing into Huck’s Audi, Alex slid his seat forward and did a drum roll on his thighs. “How long does this dong-hanging typically take? I probably should get to work at some point.”
“Seriously?” Huck said, swiveling his steering wheel with the heel of his palm. “We can’t put a clock on this. Take a personal day.”
Alex settled back into his seat. “So what might that involve, generally?”
“Hit the Gem Spa, get a massage, then I dunno. I gotta cook tonight—maybe we hit Malcolm’s for some protein.”
Alex frowned and nodded. He considered putting a call into the office, and then stopped himself. He’d play hooky, full on—no need to spoil it with a tense exchange about a fictional childcare crisis or trumped-up tummy trouble. He left a message for Figgy that something had come up and she should pick up the kids.
Gem Spa was a four-story co-ed spa in a downtown building once occupied by a department store. Thankfully, the dong-hanging portion of the experience was brief, limited to the few minutes it took for Alex and Huck to stash their clothes in a locker and change into the Gem Spa shorts and T-shirt and head up to the jimjilbang, a windowless floor where napping housewives were splayed out on slabs of heated jade. Along two walls were doors leading to specialty saunas, one lined with salt crystals, another coated with ice, another containing an enormous pit of chalky, orange clay balls. Alex noted that he and Huck were the only Caucasians in the place.
“This is amazing,” he said, wiggling into the ball pit. “I feel like I’m in some sort of seventies future. But Communist. Like a North Korean Logan’s Run.”
“I know, right?” Huck said. He motioned to a flat screen mounted on the wall of the sauna, tuned to a subtitled Korean soap opera. “Awesome, it’s Honor Bride. Guy in the silk poofy hat is a ghost. Super intense.”
Alex squinted in the heat and tried to make sense of the show, which from what he could tell revolved around a princess, an opera singer, and a magical cantaloupe. They watched until droplets of sweat began leaking into Alex’s eyes.
“Huck—can I ask you something?” He jiggled back and forth on the top layer of balls, dry heat radiating across his back. “How do you have time for this? With me, anyway? Don’t you have a whole crew….”
Huck turned toward him. “Most of the guys in our position are too busy with their…” he rolled his eyes and spoke in a self-important bluster “…projects—photo exhibits and screenplays and artisanal, organic whatever-the-fuck,” he said. “You give a guy a little room to breathe and they trip out, I’m telling you. I wish I’d had someone show me the ropes.”
Alex nodded and shifted his weight, clay balls rattling under his back. “So what’re Bing and Penelope doing while we’re here in this…ball pit?”
“They’re with their lovely and devoted nanny,” Huck said. “Today is dance class. Or sign language. Maybe percussion. I forget. Anyway, they much prefer the nanny to me or Kate. Mama Bear gets weird about it sometimes, but I keep telling her: Everyone’s happy, why stress? Hakuna matata, right?”
• • •
Malcolm’s Meat and Fish was a narrow storefront beside a nail salon on Virgil, the Edwardian script of the logo a clear signal to the local fooderati that this was not just a run-of-the mill butcher shop. “You’re going to freak,” Huck said, leading the way through the glass door. “Malcolm’s a genius. Dude’s not a butcher. He’s a consigliere of meat.”
Alex stepped inside, a rich mineral tang heavy in the air. The boxcar-size store was immaculate and spare, the floors honed concrete and the walls chalkboard black. The glass case was a quarter filled, each item individually spotlit, the beef marbled and precisely trimmed, the poultry pink and succulent, the salmon fillets jewel-toned. Handwritten tags identified the farm, feeding, and preparation of each cut, along with the price, which Alex calculated as roughly 120 percent higher than anything he’d ever paid at his regular Armenian grocery.
“Huck! Homey!” came the call from Malcolm, bushy eyebrows darting in their direction. “How’d it go with the kalbi?”
“Amazing.” Huck pressed down on the gleaming glass case. “I did it with that rice wine marinade, like you said. Best ever.”
Malcolm seemed to know everything Huck had ever purchased here, referencing scallops and sausages like they were children dropped off in daycare. Alex hung back a few steps as the two traded firm and irrefutable opinions on spice rubs and wood chips.
Over Malcolm’s shoulder, Alex caught sight of a young woman in chef’s whites. She ducked behind the display case and slid a tray of hanger steaks through the sliding cabinet door. He watched her face through droplets of condensation. Pointy chin, blond eyelashes, red bandana knotted above her forehead, wheaty hair tied back in a complicated knot, a finely crosshatched tattoo of a cleaver on her forearm. There was something extra-terrestrial about her, something extreme-Nordic. Alex got a sudden picture of her on a rocky plain, in a knit sweater with a wolfhound at her side, the wind in her face and a dagger strapped to her thigh.
Alex took a step forward and tapped the glass, hoping to get her attention. She looked up and registered his interest, then motioned to Malcolm. “He can help you,” she said.
She ducked toward the walk-in freezer, the bow of her apron strings dangling over a ridiculously high twentysomething rump. As he watched her recede into the chilly dark, he was suddenly aware of what she saw when she looked back at him. It registered in a flash: rumpled shirt, clumpy hair, baggy khakis. Not old, but not young. A cross between Bob Saget and a dollop of sour cream. Unthreatening, uninteresting, uncool, entirely un.
Outside, carrying a black cellophane bag heavy with $75 worth of rib-eye, Alex agreed that Malcolm’s was indeed amazing. Then he asked about the woman stocking the case.
“That’s Miranda,” Huck said. “She’s got some kind of Tumblr feed or blog? Meatchick or Meatgirl, some shit like that. Why?”
“I just don’t think I’ve ever seen a lady butcher.” Alex lowered himself into Huck’s Audi and watched as Huck deposited their purchases into an icebox built into the dash. As he popped on his sunglasses and started up the car, Alex looked him over. Huck was about Alex’s age, maybe a few years younger, but next to him, Huck seemed like a college kid.
“Can I ask you something lame? Where do you get your—clothes? For instance, those trousers?”
Huck laughed. “Why? You wanna do something about the daddy pants?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“Hold on.” Huck pulled a quick U-turn
, gunned the accelerator, and drove to a tiny sign-less storefront on 3rd Street with blacked-out windows. It could’ve been an auto showroom if not for the booming funk on the sound system and the steel racks of menswear. Alex wandered around, checking the tags on the sleeves of button-snap shirts and velour V-necks. Huck chatted up the shop assistant, a drowsy-eyed girl with tousled red hair. She sized Alex up, summed up what he needed—“French denim, stovepipe cut, distressed not wrecked”—and flashed Alex a wide smile. He knew she was only being pleasant because she knew Huck. But niceness by proxy was still nice. Alex lapped it up.
In the dressing room Alex discovered he’d been given a size twenty-eight. Not a chance. He passed the pants over the door. “How about a thirty-four?”
“Just put on the pants,” Huck said. “It’s how they’re made.”
Alex pulled the pair back over the top of the door. The fabric was the color of deep space and springy to the touch. He stepped into one leg and then the other and tugged, yanking the pants over his knees, where they stopped mid-thigh, budged tight. He stretched out and leaned against the wall, elongating his torso. The jeans moved up a few inches, but to get them on he’d need to get down on the floor and transfer his weight from his midsection upward in a yogic exercise of breath control. Fabric squeezing his legs like the sleeve of a blood-pressure cuff, Alex held his breath, wiggled spastically, and tugged on the belt loops. This, he thought, is how it must feel to have an epileptic seizure.
After a few minutes, the jeans settled into what he guessed was their proper place. He stepped out, and the swinging doors of the changing room flapped shut behind him, a gunslinger stepping in from the range. The salesgirl stepped forward with an approving nod, then reached down and brushed his hip with her finger.
“Good line,” she purred.
His internal organs had realigned, and he’d lost feeling in his toes, but he couldn’t argue with the view in the mirror. He had legs! A whole lower body, with a not-so-bad curve of the calves and a pleasing divot near his hip. To think he’d spent his entire manhood in sensible Levis and baggy khakis, when there was always this underneath—an actual form!
He wasn’t sure what was more outrageous—the price or the instructions for care. (Washing machines and dry cleaners were out. The best way to clean them was in the ocean, “like every month or two.” Alex knew his life was changing, but he didn’t imagine those changes would involve periodic trips to Malibu to frolic in the surf in his new French jeans.)
Before today, it never would have occurred to Alex to wear a pair of pants like this. He was not a skinny jeans guy. But he was equally certain he was getting these pants. Things were different now. Normal was over. He’d had his fill of normal. He was ready for the skinny jeans.
Back in the changing room, before he could get the pants off, his gaze settled on the wall, which was decorated with old punk rock handbills, stickers, and ticket stubs. A familiar checkerboard pattern appeared on one of the shellacked pages, below a magic-marker cartoon of a kid with a Mohawk. Alex looked closer.
He knew that shaky lettering anywhere. It was the third issue of R.I.P., the short-lived punk rock ’zine sold on consignment at a record shop on Melrose Avenue in the early eighties. This particular issue contained an interview with the band Minor Threat, a review of the latest Buzzcocks LP, and an energetic if not quite lucid screed against Reaganomics. The whole ’zine was written, published, and distributed by an enterprising and stupidly confident boarding school kid from Ojai named Alex Sherman.
He quickly did the math. Twenty-two years had passed since the afternoon Alex had put out issue #3 of R.I.P. Twenty-two fucking years. He clicked a picture of the wall.
Then he slipped his khakis into a shopping bag and strutted out, heading home to show his wife of nine-and-one-half years his new pair of skinny French jeans.
Four
On the drive home, Alex fast-forwarded through the ’zine’s lifespan; he saw it flopping out of the innards of a refrigerator-size photocopier in the office at the Crestwood School, stuffed in Alex’s backpack on a trip to the city, dropped off at Vinyl Fetish on Melrose, added to a confetti of flyers and stickers beside a cash register, tossed into an orange plastic bag, stashed in a basement, stuffed in a box and forgotten for years, then finally unearthed—and here its trip took its weirdest turn—by a decorator tasked with adding some authentic street-creddy ambiance to a pricey new boutique, a shop that Alex would never have even thought to enter before today.
But there he was. And there it was, so suddenly, so miraculously, at such a weird, vulnerable moment—it felt supernatural. It had to be a sign.
But of what? His first response was to cringe at the awful socio-cultural irony—like hearing Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” on a Holiday Cruise Line TV commercial. Here his crude, homemade, DIY tribute to punk rock protest was now literally the wallpaper of upscale consumerism.
Without even meaning to, without even knowing it, he’d sold out—and worst of all, without making a single cent.
Then again, the sight of R.I.P.—his scrawl, his words, his twitchy little middle finger raised high to the world—in that sleek, sexy context, repurposed as edgy modern décor… it was… kind of amazing. It meant that his misspent youth had maybe not been so misspent.
Which was terribly important to Alex, because even though he’d never admit such a thing out loud, he looked back on his stint as a teen publisher as one of the high points of his life. He had discovered punk at fourteen during one of his mom’s periodic absences—she was always skipping off on road trips to Santa Fe or Big Sur. With her gone, Alex skipped school, slept in, and earned the top score on Missile Command at the local bowling alley. Every couple of days he’d get a visit from an older teenager named Dotti, whom his mom had tasked with checking in on Alex. Why his mother left her pubescent son in the care of a teenage girl with peroxide hair, raccoon eyeliner, and a magnificently mature physique never made a whole lot of sense to Alex—but in those days, not much did.
Dotti’s developed, overt sexuality was a constant source of wonder and terror for Alex. For her part, the only thing she seemed interested in sharing with Alex was her love of glam rock. Until that point, all Alex had ever really heard was his mom’s Joan Baez and Carole King. Dotti introduced him to Queen, the Runaways, and Alice Cooper. He liked glam fine, but all bets were off the moment she dropped the needle on the Stooges’ “Funhouse.” Even as Dotti pushed him back in the direction of Bowie or T Rex, all he wanted was the harder, louder, more aggressive stuff.
One night they took a trip to Oxnard for a Circle Jerks show in the back of a bowling alley. Alex remembered driving back up the hill drenched in sweat, ears ringing, revved up and excited for the future in a way he’d never felt before. Punk might have driven other kids to cynicism and rebellion, but to him it represented something else. It meant energy, discipline, take-charge initiative—in short, everything missing in Ojai. Overnight, he couldn’t abide by his caring-sharing Freeschool and the calico-clad teachers playing mandolin under oak trees.
A few weeks after the Circle Jerks show, Alex got a buzzcut, put on a good shirt, and hitched a ride to the front gates of the Crestwood School, a live-in academy a few miles down the highway from home. Apparently, he was the first reasonably put-together townie to show up at the school, and as luck would have it, Crestwood had a scholarship program aimed at students in the surrounding community. Impressed with his relatively clean-cut appearance and earnest appeal, the admissions committee offered him a full ride. After a wan attempt to change his mind—“You know they make you wear shoes, right? And do math?”—Jane agreed to let him go. In short order he went from running wild with the feral kids of the Ojai Freeschool to living in a dorm with the sons of doctors and lawyers.
On weekends, when the other boys went home to Montecito or Laguna Beach, Alex would hitch rides to L.A. with Dotti for shows at the Starwood, Madame Wong’s, and various foreign legions. He’d stay up late pounding out articles fo
r his ’zine on a IBM Selectric and picking the lock of the staff office to run off copies on the school machine.
Alex liked to say he folded R.I.P. when the Scene Got Shitty. Jocks and surfers and swastikas started turning up at shows—the Orange County hardcore kids had taken over. For issue #23, he ran a front-page headline declaring “Nazi Frat Scum Kill Punk” and declared R.I.P. dead. He was a jaded purist at sixteen.
It took Alex many years to put together that the demise of the ’zine had less to do with the dilution of the scene than the astounding arrival into Alex’s life of a force even more powerful than punk. One night in his senior year, he got a call from Dotti, who’d quit babysitting to manage an apartment building in Ventura. She greeted him at the front door of a vacant unit with her top off and those magnificent babysitter breasts gloriously bare. She proceeded to take Alex on as her protégé yet again. She fucked him with a lazy nonchalance that astounded him just a little less than the sex itself. He still carried around with him a vivid, oft-replayed image of the white-haired, dark-eyed Dotti splayed out below him, back bent and ass up, face mashed into a pillow and head tilted to the side so she could carry on her phone conversation about a faulty air conditioner.
At some point in the years since, he’d read a magazine article about “Determining Your Mental Age”—it was hardly the deepest thought, but he couldn’t shake the notion that while basic functions of personality grow and change and mature, the raw essence of identity is flash-frozen at a certain set point. If that was true, Figgy was eight, bright and imaginative but given to deep sulks and explosive bouts of insecurity. His mom was forever nineteen, endlessly a college freshman in the throes of self-discovery.
Alex’s mental age was no great mystery: He’d locked in at seventeen.
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