Ninety minutes south, the apartment in San Diego was just off the freeway, across from the abandoned El Cortez hotel. It was six hundred square feet, and she would be running her office out of the front room for now. The carpet smelled of cigarettes and mold. I wondered if her luck would change here. I wondered if my five dollars an hour would include the hour and a half the drive had taken.
My mother said she thought the apartment was nice. She was close to downtown but not so close it would make her rent go up. She confessed that she’d chosen San Diego because someone had promised her a job, but between then and now, it had fallen through. She didn’t have enough for the first month’s rent, and she didn’t know what was going to happen. This led to an awkward pause. Then she admitted she didn’t actually have the money she’d hoped to pay me. I said that was fine.
“But I promised,” she said, and she listed off ways she would be paid soon. There were men who owed her money.
“I don’t need the money,” I said, more quickly than I’d planned. What I meant was that I didn’t want to be part of this. I didn’t want money to come out of her situation and toward me. But what she heard was me bragging.
During our remaining conversations she wouldn’t let me out of her sight, as if she might miss it when some sour assessment crossed my face. She seemed afraid of me except for the moments where she would announce an optimistic slogan about how things would work out. She tried to ask me questions, but got tangled up in them and instead talked about her prospects again.
No, there was one question. Within minutes of my arrival, and every couple of hours from then until I was lining up for the bus, she asked me, “When are you coming back?”
* * *
—
My father met the bus in L.A. He drove me into Bel Air, and then we went airborne above Sunset on one of the streets I’d never driven on, because even though it was public, I strongly felt that I wasn’t rich enough to be there. It was a long way uphill. We passed the houses that were close together, then the ones that were far apart, and we kept ascending.
We didn’t talk about Mom. Instead I’d had enough amusing college incidents that I could tell him stories that ended with a good punch line. He noticed that every Wesleyan story had a melancholy twinge to it.
He finally said, “Do you actually like that place?”
“Maybe?” I said.
“Maybe?” A long pause. “Maybe.” And we both knew what that meant: it cost over eleven thousand dollars to go to Wesleyan. Berkeley, the state school I’d declined, was about six hundred dollars a semester. “Then why are you going back?”
It doesn’t matter what I said. We would have this conversation because we would never have the real conversation beneath it. Once, a couple of years before, I had broached the subject of how Wesleyan would be paid for, and it had ended badly, and I was unable to bring it up again. My father had never wanted to pay for Wesleyan, in part because my mother had squandered my education money, which meant he had to pay for it again, or rather Ann was paying, which meant I represented a prior debt he was bringing to the relationship. I—not that I understood this—resented the hell out of that attitude so I was committed to going as long as he hated paying for it.
Also, I was carrying an ember of shame with me. I wondered if it was betrayal to suspect that my mother’s luck wasn’t actually going to change. Rather: that it wasn’t luck. If I believed that, I would be aligning myself with my father, and that struck me as a grim way to live.
Here’s how I thought: “My mother is going to do well, now that she’s landed in the right place. And I’m going to make the most of Wesleyan. If you think that’s impossible, let me show you how I do impossible things.”
Our approach toward the house was from below, and it loomed over us, a sophisticated radar-station-like array of cool blue metal boxes. It looked like it was made of sunglasses. It looked angular and Dutch, contemptuous of weakness, and in its relentless brutal simplicity it was almost evil. We parked outside and stared at it. Bold houses can make statements. One look, and I understood it was better than I was. It knew that, too.
My father was looking at it with an expression I’d now say was of Moses sighting a distant hill and knowing to his bones that he was within reach of the promised land.
You could shoot perfume commercials there. If Catherine Deneuve stood on one of its balconies in a red dress, looking pensive, it would make sense. The house made me want to wear finer clothes, have an even better haircut, toned muscles, and maybe a diamond embedded in my lateral incisor. If I could live up to that house, I would feel better about myself.
My father clearly wanted it because he could see himself living there. The house was his blue-and-white-striped shirt, his sunglasses, but maybe just a little bit his straw fedora.
As we drove back to the old house, my father asked when I was going to look for a job. He said that it was getting late in the summer to still get a shift at Shakey’s, and I told him, No, I wasn’t going to work fast food again.
“I want to work at Hunter’s Books,” I said.
This surprised him. It surprised me, too. It pleased him. It was a step up from what he’d imagined. It was an independent bookstore, not a chain. People working at Hunter’s wore ties. They were smart and eclectic, actors training for work and authors working on novels. Celebrities shopped there. But the competition for a job was probably fierce, my father said, and then something dawned on him: “I doubt they take on summer hires.”
I hadn’t thought that through. But he was right. If I got the job, he said, it would mean I was working there through Christmas, and I knew what that meant, too: I wouldn’t be going back to Wesleyan. I would be living with my father, in his house, and maybe proving him right on many counts.
This was a problem, because when I looked at him, I thought: I am the person who is 50 percent made up of this. This annoyed me.
CAREERS, BUSINESS, & MARKETING
IN HIGH SCHOOL, Owen had been a soccer player and track team captain who favored white overalls and whose long hair was set off by a ball cap to which he’d affixed a raccoon tail. We had similar senses of humor, and his childhood—which we never talked about—was as inexplicable as my own, which is all that men need to become friends. He sometimes exercised by putting his bicycle on rollers in his room and riding to all four sides of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s One More from the Road. In other words, like the other people I loved best he had the courage of his eclecticism.
In the years we’d known each other, he’d introduced me to Earl Scruggs, Johnny Cash, James Brown, The Who, Buck Owens, more or less all people so tortured by love of music that they had substance abuse problems. Punk was the latest in a line of such sounds that spoke to his higher aspiration: to be courageous.
He told me he wished he had Keith Moon’s reputation for tearing hotel rooms up, but without having to do all that problematic destruction stuff. If he ever really destroyed a hotel room, he knew he’d feel so guilty it wouldn’t be worth it.
In a way, summer of 1983 began for me when Owen paid for a simulcast of a concert by The Who so we could watch it on television at his house. After getting some chips and beer, we were driving down Sunset in his 7UP-green Saab turbo. It was a sporty-looking car that gave the misleading impression that whoever drove it would have a well-planned personal style.
At a red light, a GTI pulled up next to us. Inside were two very cute girls. They rolled down their window.
“Hey, what’s up!” The passenger was leaning across the driver. She was smiling.
“Hey!” I waved back.
“What are you guys doing?”
“Who concert—” was all I managed before I was knocked backward into the door frame; Owen had floored it, running the red light. On the other side of the intersection, he swerved into parking spaces illegally to cut ahead of traffic, and at the next light he swung ri
ght so hard we almost fishtailed.
A minute later, I looked at him. His eyes were determined and fixed.
“Owen?”
The flush from his face retreated. “Okay,” he finally said. “I regret that.”
“We could have had them come over and—”
“I know. I regret that.”
“They were cute!”
“Yeah. Bad decision. When I tell this story in the future, it’s going to have a better ending.” He thought about it. “I’m going to say they asked, ‘What are you guys doing?’ and then I leaned over and said, ‘I’m going to fuck this guy.’ And I jerked my finger at you and you gave a big thumbs-up.”
We watched the concert alone. I opened beers for the girls who hadn’t come, and Owen glared at me. By the end of the evening, we’d told the story so that it ended with him promising to fuck me, then us both mooning the girls, only to accidentally trigger the automatic windows, so that our asses were sticking out into the night, us wailing in awful harmony as, somehow, the car kept driving itself around Hollywood. That still seemed like a better story than him panicking.
Owen concluded that fleeing like that hadn’t been very punk rock. Would Lee Ving have fled those girls? Greg Ginn? The guys from Black Flag? They would have jumped into that car with open containers.
He declared that he was going to live this summer with all the courage he could. He was going to go for it, and I agreed. I agreed so much that I, too, would go for it. I would go to a punk concert with him. This would be the summer I had courage. I would finally apply for a job—at a bookstore.
Owen stared at me. “What?”
* * *
—
The next day, I was on Westwood Boulevard, in Tower Records, dressed in my blue-and-white-striped shirt and fancy silk tie, thumbing through albums. I was in Tower not for the music, really, but to avoid Hunter’s Books.
I had no prior experience. My fast-food résumé, my part-time work, my summer work all counted against me. I kept glancing down at the tie my father had bought me and trying to lie to myself, “Sure, I wear a tie, every day.”
Westwood was a dozen geometrically diffuse blocks of stores, movie theaters, and restaurants that serviced the UCLA campus. The streets came together at eccentric angles, and alleyways led to hidden courtyards as if the planners hoped people who weren’t paying close attention might mistakenly believe they were in Europe.
Students were getting richer. This led to boutiques with four dresses on a rack, where drama majors poured Chablis for customers and the proprietress was someone’s cinq à sept. People started coming to Westwood to be seen shopping. The cafés were filled with incomprehensibly fit and handsome students joined by the people they would grow up into, meaning movie stars.
Tower Records was full of gorgeous people I thought I recognized. Or they were behaving as if I should know to recognize and not acknowledge them. I’d been working on my image for a few months but I was in the company of people who’d been thinking about such things for a lifetime, so I felt like I was behind. It’s a feeling that Los Angeles generates: it was disheartening to be the least handsome person in a given aisle of Tower Records.
I left Tower, and in the courtyard saw something I assumed was a good omen, a pushcart of men’s ties for sale. Since it was near Tower, the ties were skinny. They were five dollars. Made of viscose, some black, but mostly Day-Glo pink or that unknowable popsicle color between green and yellow. Some of them had silkscreened piano keys or musical notes on them, which I was smart enough to know were tacky. Then my world lit up as I found, one rack down, the skinny black leather ties. They were more expensive, ten dollars. I needed one. I took off my conservative tie.
Sometimes a good leather knot around your neck gives you confidence. The tie fit me and to my eye made my outfit finally viable, from my high-tops to my Ray-Bans.
I walked the few doors up toward Hunter’s, where they were obviously going to see through this facade instantly. I am a terrible liar and tend to flush deep red and stammer through things like, “No, I’m taking the year off from Wesleyan, so sure I’ll be able to work this fall.”
Hunter’s window displays were mild, just books, nothing flashy. Attempting to attract customers was gauche. Hunter’s was more discreet than that.
Inside, it was as quiet as a Beverly Hills Mercedes showroom. It was the kind of silence that comes with selling a life of superior thoughts.
Behind the counter was an ephemeral blond man, skin as white as the pages of a coffee-table book, who turned away before I could talk to him, leaving me alone until a woman with half-glasses and salt-and-pepper hair noticed me.
When I inquired, she whispered that they weren’t hiring. I asked if they might be hiring later, and she whispered, “We doubt it.” She said it kindly, or perhaps politely is more accurate. They did nothing bluntly at Hunter’s.
The phone on her counter buzzed. She excused herself, but with a finger in the air, as if she hadn’t yet explained all the ways I wouldn’t be hired.
She was having a quiet conversation with someone looking down at me, also over half-glasses, from the mezzanine. He was bald, with fringe, and he seemed confused.
The woman behind the counter was saying, “No…no. No, it’s not, Mike. He’s really not. He’s here to apply for a job.” She turned away from me and whispered further into the phone.
Then she returned to me and she said with disappointment, “Mike would like to talk to you. He’s the manager.”
Mike twinkled his fingers at me from the mezzanine. I walked across the store, and went up the stairs. He steepled his fingers and looked managerial, I suppose, but mostly what I remember was falling into a strange, circular conversation with a sweet, self-deprecating man who at two in the afternoon was conclusively drunk.
He let me know that there were no jobs, true, but he’d seen me come in, and thought—ha!—I looked like Timothy Hutton. Wasn’t that funny! Now that I was sitting here, I didn’t, obviously, but hadn’t anyone ever told me that? No? Was I local? I was looking for work, right? Where else had I looked? I told him the truth—nowhere. I was only interested in working in a bookstore, this bookstore. He asked why. I said because it wasn’t a chain.
That was the truth, but I had no idea how much Mike would vigorously nod. There was a Crown Books a block away. Mike said that unlike the chains, Hunter’s didn’t sell books stupidly. “Not like Crown, not like it’s toilet paper.”
He asked about my favorite books. I thought of my writing class and my fraternity. What authors did people slightly better than myself tend to like? Raymond Carver, John Cheever, I. B. Singer. I mentioned my interest in Eastern philosophy, and he asked for examples of that, and I talked about the Pillow Book and Yukio Mishima and the weirdness of Junichiro Tanizaki. He didn’t know Tanizaki, so I described how perverse his work was: decadent aristocrats, nose fetishes, submissive husbands. He was quite happy to hear about that. I seemed to him remarkably self-possessed for someone only nineteen. And it was just too bad they didn’t have jobs to offer.
He meant it. Hunter’s was part of a local handful of stores that wouldn’t survive the new realities of commerce. They had slightly profitable branches in Pasadena and Beverly Hills, where he said “there are still ladies who shop,” eyeing me to see if I knew what he meant. Hunter’s provided a level of personal service, but people who didn’t know better, who valued price over value, were going to that damned Crown, siphoning off Hunter’s business. With Westwood on the ascendency, rents were doubling. Hunter’s had a lease that would be up soon and there was no way they could afford to stay. So, he shrugged, sorry.
That makes the conversation sound more organized than it was. At some point, he seemed to be juggling the questions of whether he might find a job for me, and whether he and I might step over to the Hungry Tiger for a drink, before he corrected course. He was haphaza
rd, not predatory. I shook hands with him and agreed that I’d probably find work in another bookstore somewhere.
He saw me down to the counter. He seemed embarrassed, either because he’d thought of hitting on me or because he couldn’t offer me work. “This really doesn’t faze you, does it? Looking for work, it’s the worst.”
“Nothing fazes me,” I said, and it was true.
“The way to do is to be,” he said with a smile, like it was a bumper sticker he’d just seen.
The slim, white-haired guy behind the counter was having a problem and he waved at Mike. There were two tourists, Japanese girls, who had a question for him. Only he couldn’t understand them. One of them bowed her head and then tried to talk to Mike, who couldn’t get any further with them.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What are you asking?”
One girl said, “The books upstairs? Are they on sale today or always? If we come back tomorrow…” she said.
I explained to Mike what she’d asked. He looked at his co-workers then back at me. “They’re on sale always.”
“Always,” I told the girls, and then they laughed, took my photograph, and left the store.
“You speak Japanese,” Mike said.
“I do.”
A pleased look crossed Mike’s face. This was helpful, he explained. Hmm. They were always getting Japanese tourists. (They weren’t, really.) They needed someone to translate. (They didn’t, really.) Now that he thought about it, this was fantastic. (It wasn’t.) He wanted to tell the bean counters in Beverly Hills he was hiring me.
When could I start? Forty hours a week, minimum wage. “Wait—” he put his finger to the corner of his mouth. “You weren’t just looking for summer work, were you?”
“No.”
“What about Wesleyan?”
I Will Be Complete Page 22