I Will Be Complete

by Glen David Gold

  Her shift was over before mine. She left without saying goodbye.

  TRUE CRIME

  WESTWOOD was designed to be walked in, but someone had discovered a market for pedicabs. They made no sense, because the village was about four blocks by three blocks in size. They were popular because the drivers were sun-swept, radiant men and women, most of them athletes from UCLA, some of them training for the Olympics. So the value provided was that rich, lazy people got to watch the backs, asses, and legs of beautiful students who would otherwise never let the passenger within a hundred feet of them, while providing a mildly demeaning service designed to cause them to sweat attractively as they advertised the wealth and status of the person being towed across the village. The pedicab drivers always smiled. It was a capitalist sociology experiment.

  Because there was so much traffic, I could walk on the sidewalk at roughly the same speed as pedicab drivers. I kept seeing one of them more than the rest. She was Asian American, I didn’t think Japanese, possibly Korean, with a gymnast’s body, and what startled me was how serious she seemed. She had a Louise Brooks bob and high cheekbones. When she was looking for fares, it was like she was gazing into the darkness of need, and when she was working, she did so as if hauling tourists to the donut shop was going to rescue her from a dire fate I couldn’t imagine.

  I wanted her, of course, but that confused me. Lust was primitive and wrong, but appreciating the beautiful was the basis of aesthetics. So I decided that seeing her was like the unexpected grace of seeing a painting from a museum sail by, and that my urge to see her again was like wanting to study its composition at length. It was an energetic contortion for a nineteen-year-old, but I could manage it easily, as long as I never actually talked to her.

  * * *

  —

  I went running in my neighborhood almost every morning before work. There was a woman up the block who had a lovely front garden, designed rather than planted, with a good understanding of what I might now call wabi-sabi, but at the time just recognized as inherently Japanese.

  She worked every morning in her yard under a huge-brimmed hat. Every time I thought, “I am going to speak Japanese to her,” I managed to lose my courage when I saw the glint of her sunglasses.

  Finally, feeling like I was dangerously veering into auténtica if I didn’t speak up, one day I slowed to a walk, caught my breath, and approached her. I wanted to say that her garden was very pretty. She looked up at me.

  “Anata no niwa wa taihen kirei desu,” I said.

  She stared at me. It was a sentence almost impossible to fuck up. No misplaced honorifics, no weird “to give” verbs that I couldn’t wrap my head around. Maybe she hadn’t heard me.

  “Anata no—”

  “Your parents live in the house at the end of the block,” she said, in English.

  I nodded.

  “How much did they pay for their house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She went back to gardening, ignoring me.

  That was the second-to-last time I spoke Japanese aloud.

  * * *

  —

  There had been little movement in buying the house in Bel Air. When Owen came by, my father said the owner was going to throw in a car. A BMW. The guy ran a dealership.

  “What kind?” asked Owen.

  “I have a model in mind.”

  “733i?”

  “Exactly. What color do you think?”

  I said, “Black,” and my father winced the way he did when I played a sour note on my flute, age eight.

  “Anthracite Grey,” Owen said, and my father approved.

  My father approved of Owen more than he approved of me at the moment. I was adamant about going back to Wesleyan in the fall.

  “I will pay you twenty-five hundred dollars to drop out of Wesleyan and go to Berkeley instead,” my father finally said.

  “No,” I said.

  Later, when I recounted this to Owen, he was impressed not so much with my intransigence as my father’s offer. Owen and I were drinking beers in his swimming pool, which is what happened whenever we thought we should try to work on a screenplay together. Generally we got a couple of ideas out, and spent the remaining hours making each other laugh. He lived in Hollywood, a few doors down from Drew Barrymore, in a converted garage–pool house behind the bungalow that his mother and stepfather lived in. This was a tense place. His mom tended to fall in love with artists or actors or producers who’d had potential when they were twenty years younger.

  So the bungalow was ruled by Bob, a mean gin drunk. He did the lights for Las Vegas shows. He was a writer, too, in the sense that he had worked on a novel for many years.

  Bob kept getting in fights outside a gay bar he insisted on walking the dog past. Owen and I talked about it like this:

  ME: Why does he keep—

  OWEN: I know.

  ME: Because if he didn’t—

  OWEN: Right.

  Owen kept to himself, then, working at a bicycle shop during the day and otherwise drinking beer and watching TV in his pool house. There was a great punk rock show coming up: the Dead Kennedys. I should come, Owen said.

  Punk was almost dead by 1983. There was talk about how it was becoming part of mainstream music in the form of “New Wave,” a cheery breeze blowing through production studios that was “fresh” and “fearless” and “passionate.” In other words, not scary and not angry. But punk without aggression was like Quasimodo without the hump. The radio played New Wave all the time, insinuating it was groundbreaking, and that it was the same thing as punk, which was infuriating. How was it different than punk? Simple: for New Wave, there was a boutique in Westwood where you could buy the clothes from the music video.

  New Wave was Owen’s enemy. He had patience for the B-52s, and the B-52s alone, because they were genuinely weird. But he witheringly condemned other bands’ harmonies and kookie sunglasses. The Red Rockers made him actively angry when he saw their mild, synthesizer-based video “China” on that compromised venue, MTV. “I saw them at the Berkeley Square,” he said, while cute Asian dancers jumped around on screen with flags in their hands. “They were frightening. They were the most frightening band I’d ever seen.” He was looking at them like an old boyfriend whose girl now had implants and no self-respect. The Red Rockers lacked integrity, and integrity was one thing that didn’t travel from punk to New Wave. Owen sang along, bitterly, falsetto, Chiiiii-Na, Chiiii-Naaaah.

  The bands who hadn’t sold out were fading away. Owen thought this summer could be our last chance to see the Dead Kennedys, the final hardliners, the most uncompromising. Few clubs would book their shows anymore because of all the violence. They were coming to Wilmington, an industrial town so far south of L.A. it might as well have been in Patagonia.

  Punk made me anxious. I was pretty sure that if I came to a show, someone, more as matter of policy than malice, would decide it was necessary to kill me. But Owen’s stories suggested there could be a howling moment of throwing off expectation and convention and fully committing myself to something. If I went to this show, I might become authentic. But fear won, and so I told him, No, not this time.

  * * *

  —

  I had a dream so horrifying that trying to wake up from it was like pulling myself out of a grave. After I struggled into consciousness, my jaw was clenched so hard I thought I’d popped the hinge free from its socket.

  In my dream, my father was winding the grandfather clock downstairs, only I knew it meant he was about to murder my half-brothers. And then it was clear he had already wound the clock on previous nights, and murdered them, and when he was finished this time, he would come upstairs and murder me.

  It was a tense house, too. It was never completely quiet, because my father had populated each room with clocks. Some were boxy and contemporary, and the
y stared quietly out from shelves like Donald Judd sculptures, but most of them were old, handcrafted. They ticked every second and chimed on the quarter-hour. Every time a new purchase joined the rest, my father positioned it precisely and he catalogued it in his portfolio, as if that would be enough. Then another one would come.

  I kept thinking, This is like measuring out your life in coffee spoons. My father was counting the hours as they passed. Hence my dream.

  To drown out the clocks, I would put on headphones and listen to music. KROQ played all the synthesizer hits, which felt like jingles that ignored how awful life was. But they also managed to sneak in hard stuff, like X, kind of rockabilly-on-adrenaline, broken-glass harmonies about the decaying life in Los Angeles. The lead singers were visibly and unashamedly married. They had a song about it called “We’re Desperate,” and I wondered if my dad would get more out of hearing that than Tchaikovsky.

  * * *

  —

  At work, I was at the register, and Rick was carefully making elaborate invitations, using the request forms we were supposed to send to distributors. He turned one over and carefully traced out a calligraphically precise letter to Melanie, asking her if she would come over and play.

  Rick handed his notice to her, and she replied, delighted, “Yes, of course I’ll come over and play. I love it that you ask me over like that.”

  “Glen, do you want to come over and play with me? And Melanie?” He gave me what I think he hoped was a saucy look. “We should have that dinner party,” he said. Now I had two invitations, punk and gay, to be nervous about.

  A boy came to the counter, and looked up at us. He wanted a really creepy bedtime story to scare his younger sister with. Melanie took him to the kids’ books, leaving me and Rick alone at this crucial moment: Rick asking me to help out for dinner. “Bring wine,” he said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not? I thought you were rich.”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  “WHAT?” He said this so loudly, customers across the store looked up. “You mean nineteen—as in years old?” Then his voice got quiet and wicked. “Does Melanie know you’re nineteen?”

  I didn’t know. “Why, how old are you?”

  “Approaching thirty. I love nineteen-year-olds. Your dick is always hard then.” He watched Mel, who was returning to the counter. “Let’s play a trick on Melanie,” he whispered. “You stand here.” He positioned me so I was facing her, across the store. When she was close, he leaned in and ostentatiously whispered in my ear. “Just look straight at Mel. Okay. Now look surprised. Really surprised!”

  I did. Mel was smiling and ready to be let in on the game.

  Rick said to me, “Are you embarrassed?”

  I said, “No.”

  Mel asked, “What are you guys talking about?”

  Rick said, “Nothing. Well, no, something—I just told him what you told me when you and I were shelving books.”

  Melanie’s face went—elsewhere. Her freckles disappeared, and she went a shade of red I don’t think I’d seen on a face before. She stammered out something like, “Oh,” and Rick looked at her kindly. “What, was that wrong of me to say?”

  And then he smiled so hard that Mel realized he was lying to her, and she started hitting him with a stack of index cards, harder and harder, until he burst into laughter. She wasn’t laughing, however, just angry. I stood there, fixed smile, dumbly, unclear on what strange games they played with each other.

  This was another day that no real dinner party invitation happened.

  Over the next couple days, Rick took every chance to test my nonchalance. I knew he was getting desperate when he gave me a back rub while I was at the register.

  “Rick,” I said, flatly, ringing up a sale, “you’re giving me an enormous erection.”

  “I give up,” he said. “Why aren’t I making you nervous?”

  As he’d never talked to any straight man about sex before, a perpetually unfazed nineteen-year-old seemed to strike just the right note of investigation for him. “Why are you straight? Don’t you like men? See that guy over there? The one in the muscle tee? Do you think he’s attractive? You do? But you still don’t want to kiss him? Well, why not?”

  I explained that I figured people were born bisexual and society conditioned us to be straight. Among my friends at Wesleyan, bisexuality was the preferred state in which to spend your junior and senior years. Myself, I’d never been interested in guys, but the idea wasn’t alien to me. It wasn’t like raw lust was something you should act on, but of course, being interested in someone’s essence—

  “Wait,” Rick said. “You don’t act on raw lust?”

  This seemed obvious to me, as obvious as anything I’d learned at Wesleyan about the personal being the political. Lust was authoritarian and arose from crippled egos, more or less. Lust wiped out Zen. Dough heads acted on lust. Melanie was standing there, and I’m sure she contributed something to this, a nod or something, enough to keep me going.

  Rick said, “If people are born bi, what happened to you? Have you ever had an emotional connection with a man?”

  “Sure.”

  “But you’ve never wanted to sleep with a man?”

  “No, I mean, men like that, they’re my friends.” I turned the idea on its head. “Have you ever slept with a woman just because you’re friends with her?”

  He nodded emphatically. “It seems to me that if you haven’t slept with men, you’re repressing something. Especially if lust isn’t a motivator for you.”

  I had no response. It seemed like a neatly framed argument. Having failed to shock me, he’d confused me, and that was enough for him. And I was confused. What was wrong with me?

  I think this is when my self-confidence hit a wall. I had thought I’d buried raw lust the way society had organized to take care of diphtheria, and now a set of questions came in at a strange angle that made me think the issue was dormant, not dead. When I looked at that pedicab driver, what was I feeling? Lust. I didn’t actually have any of the interior calm I was pretending. Would a dinner party at Rick’s be like an evening at a bathhouse?

  Rick selected a date in his day planner for a dinner party. I accepted. But he’d chosen the very evening of another kind of party that had until just then frightened me more. In the end, I chose one fear over another, and I told Rick I couldn’t come because I was going slam-dancing.

  ANTHROPOLOGY

  OWEN AND I were supposed to go to the Dead Kennedys with our high school friend Mike Conway, but he had to pass. His current girlfriend was about to come over to his apartment, and unbeknownst to her, he’d invited over a previous girlfriend, who had done pornos. For years, Conway had been obsessed with executing a ménage à trois, a higher mission we couldn’t argue with. He figured tonight was his chance, which it really wasn’t. Owen and I went to the show without him.

  After a forty-five-minute drive south, we were…somewhere. There were warehouses and giant machines that turned piles of gravel into other, siltier piles, and the air seemed dusted with chemicals. We weren’t sure if we were going to find the Longshoreman’s Memorial Union Hall that easily, given that punk clubs were always small and out of the way. But then we came around a corner, and Owen braked. There were roughly four thousand punks standing on the sidewalk. They fanned out around the entire block.

  “Is this normal?” I asked Owen.

  He shook his head. A good turnout was two hundred, maybe. This was roughly four thousand. I use this number because later, in the newspaper accounts, the cops kept using the phrase “roughly four thousand punks.”

  We parked the Saab a smart couple of blocks away, in case there was a riot. The line of punks extended through an otherwise deserted neighborhood of warehouses and train tracks, gravel pits and galvanizing plants. There were wrist studs and tattoos, mean boys in camouflage shi
rts and tartan kilts. Each costume was torn, mangled, folded, shredded, the fashion statement of the day being “I have recently been dragged behind a bus.”

  When I was in first grade, and studying Indians, a kid came to school wearing a hat. When someone knocked it off him, he started weeping and we discovered his mother had forcibly administered a Mohawk on him. I’ve since wondered if that kid invented punk hairstyles as revenge. One guy just ahead of us had a thrilling rainbow-colored Mohawk that was only a single hair wide. It stood perfectly on end, as if its owner were perpetually scared out of his wits. It was beautiful, and we admired it.

  In front of us, a conversation about injuries sustained at shows. One guy turned in profile to show off how his nose had been broken. The Mohawk guy nodded, as that was pretty good, but then he raised the right sleeve of his leather jacket. The sleeve was cut off about halfway down, and a wicked stump of a forearm poked out. The broken nose guy admitted defeat before he even noticed how the stump had a swastika carved into it. That was punk rock.

  I was treating the evening like a frontier anthropologist.

  I kept asking Owen what certain things meant—why was that guy wearing a kilt? What did the black-and-white checks mean on people’s jackets? Increasingly, he was irritated. “Nothing,” he kept saying. Almost everything meant nothing. The styles, the attitude, even the swastika all seemed like costumes worn by Disney theme park characters. It was like we were standing in line for a soon-to-be-closed attraction in Nihilismland. No one was trying to be smarter than anyone else, and being kind of dumb was kind of okay. Could I fit in with that?