“Hi, Anne.” Andrew has aged a decade in the past few months. He looks miserable.
“Hey.” I think of showing him the funny report, for old times’ sake, then think better of it. He hasn’t had much of a sense of humor lately.
Long pause. Slowly it dawns on me why he’s here.
“You want to see me in your office.”
Andrew sighs. “I’m sorry.”
I get up, switch off my screen and walk with him to his office. I am the next lucky winner.
Now that Tommy and I are both unemployed, it’s even harder to be subtle about our association. We’re at the Blacklite most evenings from early afternoon until well after they close, doing our best to drink up my severance pay as if I don’t have to worry about what I’m going to do for rent money when it runs out. Some nights we barely make it home; on one memorable occasion we only make it as far as Stan’s Adult World two doors down from the bar. We pass out in a booth, only waking up to put in quarters when the cashier threatens to throw us out. Tommy still splits his time between Tina and me, and on the nights he’s at Tina’s I go to the Blacklite alone. One night while I’m obliviously playing pinball with Aunt Titty, Billy has the following fractured exchange with one of the new Mission residents who’s wandered in for a nip.
“God damn,” says the new blood, squinting around the bar. “These women are all men!”
“Most of ’em.” Billy, polishing his omnipresent highball glass, has had this conversation a million times before.
“Well, how about that one?” He points over to the pinball machine, where I, in jeans and a (surprise) stretchy black top, am showing Aunt Titty, resplendent in a rainbow-striped tube dress, how to score a double bonus ball.
“We’ve got a fan,” Titty tells me, and she and I wave flirtatiously at the newcomer.
“Is he looking at you or me?” I can’t see a dratted thing in the Blacklite, even with my big nerd glasses. It’s always dark and I’m always drunk.
“I don’t know, but I guess we’ll find out.” Titty blows him a kiss and I shake my boobs at him, then we go back to playing pinball.
Billy looks across the bar and doesn’t see me, hidden as I am by Titty’s broad frame. He just sees Titty.
“That? That’s a man.”
“No shit.” He whistles low, looking at my all-too-visible cleavage and bountiful booty. “Well, he’s had some kinda operation, right?”
“Nope,” Billy doesn’t even look up from his glass this time. “That’s just a plain old man, honey.”
For the rest of the night, I drink free while the poor guy stares at my boobs like he’s going to cry from sheer confusion. Not until he leaves to make his midnight curfew do we talk to Billy and figure out what happened. Titty thinks it’s a lot funnier than I do. I can’t say I haven’t noticed that over the past few months I’ve started to look, for lack of a better word, hard. My eyes are puffy, my cheeks sallow, and my jaw slack. Of course I can’t be one of those women who gets elegantly wasted like Marianne Faithfull or Frances Farmer. Instead I look like Truman Capote in drag. Oh well, I’m in the right place for that, at least.
It’s Wednesday night, early, and I am at home by myself, absolutely without plans and without structure. I sleep until noon, then drag waking and showering out into a multi-hour event. I play at writing, not on the forgotten screenplay but a short story—again, about the Blacklite. I consider going there, under the pretense of doing research, but remember that I have no job, no prospects, and bills to pay. I decide—wisely, I think—to stay in, maybe call Rae-lynn and see how Austin is treating her, maybe eat something. I figure I’ll walk down to Mister Kim’s and get a newspaper so I’ll have something to read while I’m eating—reading and eating, one of the simple pleasures of living alone. Congratulating myself on my self-control, I scrounge around the apartment for cash for my newspaper. I come up with exactly fifty-two pennies, which I roll up in a bandanna and take down to the corner to Mister Kim’s.
Placing an LA Times on the counter, I begin counting my fifty-two pennies. I sit them in neat stacks of ten on top of the newspaper. Mister Kim is not impressed.
“You know why you no have money?”
“I have money. I’ve got exact change. Look—ten, twenty, thirty, forty ... “
Mister Kim sticks out his index finger and, one by one, knocks over my tidy stacks of coins.
“This not money. This pennies. You know why you no have money?”
I figure I’m going to have to play along if I want my newspaper. “No. Why do I no have money?”
“Because,” says Mister Kim, leaning in close like he’s telling a big secret. “You and your boyfriend spend all money on beer.”
“What?” I can’t believe him. Mister Kim nods vigorously.
“Yah, yah! You and your boyfriend spend all money on beer!”
The nerve of Mister Kim, after all the money I spend here. I snatch up my newspaper and leave in a huff, wondering if I’m mad enough to start walking the extra block to the Adobe Mart.
Back at the apartment, I’m enjoying my single-girl dinner of mac and cheese right out of the pot when I hear the KTLA special bulletin jingle break into the white-noise sitcom I’m not really watching. I figure it’s another high-speed chase on the freeway, same shit, different day, and turn, only mildly curious, toward the television. On the screen, I see helicopter footage of a blue sign with the name of my street, Normandie, crossed with another street, Florence, which is a few miles south of Hollywood. The camera then zooms down to the street, where a crowd of people are pulling a man out of a truck and beating him.
This in itself is not that disturbing. It’s violent and horrible, sure, but Los Angeles can be a violent and horrible place and things like this happen more often than people like to think. The part that makes me realize that this is no ordinary L.A. gang bang is when the helicopter traffic reporter says, with a touch of panic in his voice, “What we don’t understand is where the police are. We’ve called them a dozen times in the last forty minutes as this has unfolded, and it is becoming pretty clear that they’re not responding.” The camera pans out from where the man is lying on the ground. Behind him, a liquor store is in the process of being looted. Someone picks up a metal canister and throws it at the man’s head. I think he may be dead. There are no police anywhere. It’s April 29, 1992, and four L.A. policemen have just been found not guilty of using excessive force on Rodney King. I pick up the phone and call Tommy.
“Yeah. Are you by yourself? Do you think you could come up here?” I check and make sure the hallway is clear, and Tommy comes up. He has no television in his apartment. He sits on the futon and watches the footage.
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
We watch together for about half an hour. It gets worse. There really isn’t anything to say beyond “Holy shit,” which is said several more times over the course of the broadcast. It’s getting dark outside, and we can hear Tommy’s phone ringing, Tina, calling to look for him. Eventually she comes and pounds on my door. We stay quiet until we hear her stripper heels clicking down the hall. After her door closes, Tommy reaches into his pocket and pulls out a ten.
“You’d probably better get us some beer.” I agree 100 percent. Pocketing the ten and checking the hallway again, I scurry down the stairs and out into the incipient riots to grab all the gusto I can.
Q: First of all, why did he send you out into the riots instead of going himself, and second of all, was it some sense of denial or fear or something stronger that made you need the beer?
A: The “who goes” decision was based on pure logic—if Tina spotted him, he wouldn’t be able to come back. And our need for beer was a fear-based one—fear that the looters would get all the beer and there wouldn’t be any left for us. Even in the face of violence of historic proportions, we have our priorities.
Over the next twenty-four hours, things go from bad to worse, at least from my self-centered perspective. A dusk-to-dawn cu
rfew is imposed on the city as the riots creep north toward Hollywood. I brave the smoke and violence to head farther north to one of the few grocery stores that hasn’t been looted. In line for over an hour with panicked families stocking up on bread and canned goods, I have a cart full of hard liquor, two boxes of Pop Tarts, and a bag of Twizzlers. The essentials. On the way home, I watch looters stream out of broken-glass storefronts, loaded down with cases of beer, electronics, clothes—anything they can carry. There are no police in this part of town yet; they’re busy trying to quell the violence in areas that are already worse off than ours. I am more fascinated than I am scared. I’ve never seen anything like this before. It feels like a fever dream.
That night, everyone in our building crowds onto the front balcony to watch the flames get closer. Even Tina and I are civil to each other. It’s all just a little bit surreal. Mister Kim’s is spared. We find out later that the Korean merchants guarded their property from the rooftops with rifles. The 7-Eleven is not spared. We can see smoke billowing up from Hollywood Boulevard; the air is filled with the sound of breaking glass. We’re anxious but at the same time eager to see what will happen next and how it will all end. It feels like some bizarre audience-participation performance art piece that we’re a part of. When a looter comes tearing across the front yard, being fired on from a car barreling down the sidewalk, we move the party inside and watch the rest of the proceedings on television. Seeing as we’re all confined to the building, Tommy can’t get away to come visit—but I do find a can of Olde English outside of my door in the morning by way of greeting.
I’m still getting my bearings, not quite back to comprehending what is going on and not really wanting to, when the phone rings. Everyone I know is aware that I have no truck with morning telephone calls. For the first couple of hours after I wake up, it’s pretty much tabula rasa with an attitude. Stacey used to hold briefings for houseguests when we stayed at her folks’ beach house in the summers: “OK, she’s about to come out of her room. Do not try to talk to her, do not try to touch her, and above all, do not tease her about being grouchy.” Only after I’ve had a few cups of coffee and a shower am I able to rid my heart of its hatred for all things human. Someone apparently didn’t get the memo, though, because my phone is ringing.
“Hello?” I am ready—nay, eager—to cuss someone out. I hope it’s an ex-boyfriend, or maybe a telemarketer. Sadly, if it’s one, the odds are decent that it’s the other as well. It turns out to be neither.
“Hi, Anne, this is Greg Donovan.” I start fast-forwarding files in my brain to remember at which dive I gave my number to a Greg Donovan when he adds, “From the MFA program at VCU.”
“Ohhhhhh, yeah. Hi.”
“How’s it going?”
“Um, you know . . . rioty.”
Q: By using “rioty” in the opening line of your first-ever conversation with the chair of the creative writing program to which you’ve applied, were you shooting for
a) an incredible show of linguistic chutzpah and creativity by coining a whole new word on the spot like it was nothing special
b) the same kind of crap you pulled when you tried to throw your entrance interview at William and Mary? Remember, it didn’t work there, either
or
c) did you simply, in all good faith, think that was a suitable answer?
A: The correct answer is c). It was early. Language eludes me before noon. I honestly thought it was a word.
Greg Donovan takes “rioty” in stride. He is, after all, a man of letters. “Oh, yeah, that’s right! You guys have that riot thing happening out there now. Hey, look—straight to the point. I’m calling to let you know that we got your application, and it was one of about a hundred applications for the creative writing program this year. Our program is very small. We only have eleven slots to fill.”
I figure this is going to be the part where he tells me they’re looking for more literary writers, writers who write poems about good-hearted homeless people, and essays full of thinky thoughts on Joyce and Woolf. I’m ready to tell him it’s no skin off my nose, that I know I’m not MFA material, and he’ll thank me for playing and I can go make some coffee. I consider cutting in and telling him I already know and that he doesn’t have to sugarcoat it any more, when he comes out of left field with this:
“So, be proud. One of those slots is yours if you want it. Congratulations.”
“Dude,” I say, because that’s all I can say while I let this sink in. “You’re kidding.”
“Dude,” says the chair of the Creative Writing Department, “I’m not.”
“So, I’m in?” I figure there’s something here I’m not understanding. There has to be.
“If you want in, you’re in. I do have some bad news, though,” he begins, and I figure this is where they tell me that I am going to be in the remedial MFA classes, and that I have to make all their bunks and type their papers or something, because there is no way this is true otherwise. “You didn’t get a graduate teaching assistantship.”
“That’s too bad,” I say insincerely, because if there is anything I totally can’t imagine myself doing more than being in graduate school, it’s teaching. Imagine, a grubby little lowbrow punk like me, standing up in front of a class full of students like I have something to teach them. Indeed! I’m still trying to figure out if I actually applied for a graduate teaching assistantship or if I just checked a random box without realizing it when a hail of gunfire whizzes past the window by my head.
“Hey, I have to get out of the window now,” I say apologetically, crouching as close to the ground as the phone cord will let me.
“I understand,” Greg says. “Call me when things calm down.”
I hang up the phone and combat low-crawl on my belly to the bathtub, which I figure is the safest place in the apartment. I drag a pillow and a blanket off the bed as I slither by. I hurl the pillow and blanket over the side of the tub and climb in after them. Lying in the tub as National Guard helicopters circle overhead through the billowing smoke, I stare at the ceiling and ask myself now what? I guess it’s over.
Q: You don’t sound exactly thrilled to have gotten into graduate school. Did you ever consider saying no?
A: I guess I kind of looked at getting into an MFA program like one would look at being chosen as a sacrificial virgin or being called to a religious order. I was so dumbfounded that they picked me that it never occurred to me that I could say no. I just kept expecting that eventually they’d realize they’d made a clerical error or something and they’d call me and apologize, and I’d find another day job and stay in Hollywood. Some days I still think they might call.
“I say we go for it. The police are busy with the big stuff.” Tommy and I are at the Blacklite against the advice of everyone in our building and our own better judgment. We’re still under the dusk-to-dawn curfew, but a phone call confirmed that the Blacklite was open—until dusk, anyway. Two doors down from the bar, a mob of looters is using a station wagon and a chain to pull the metal gates off the front of a jewelry store. People are walking, not even running, down Sunset Boulevard carrying televisions, VCRs, and cases of beer. On the way here, we passed the Sam Goody store with its entire front window bashed out, everybody and their mother—literally—climbing out with armloads of CDs. (Don’t think I didn’t consider acquiring the whole Rolling Stones catalog on CD right then; I hate rebuying the CDs of albums I already bought once on vinyl. Catholic guilt kept me from partaking; with all of my other transgressions, somehow I’ve never been able to steal. Tommy is trying to convince me that I’m being ridiculous.)
“Look at the other nine commandments. You’ve broken all of them.”
“I never killed anybody,” I correct him.
“Still. We’ll only do stores run by huge corporations, like Sam Goody and Vons. We won’t touch the mom-and-pop stores.” Tommy is dying to participate in the rioting, which he calls “a holiday for the disenfranchised.” I remind him that as a white ma
le with blond hair and blue eyes, his disenfranchised cred is sketchy at best.
“I’m an unemployed drug addict,” he says, trying to look pitiful.
“You’re unemployed because you’re a drug addict,” I remind him, “and besides, your argument is about as convincing as those idiots with purple dreadlocks and a million piercings who complain about being judged by their looks. You did this to yourself.”
“You don’t love me,” Tommy pouts.
“I love you,” Aunt Titty offers, and he blows her a kiss.
“Come on, Anne. There’s a Sav-On a block from here.”
“A Sav-On?” I laugh and shake my head. “What, so we can steal toilet paper? Preparation H? Come on.” I chuckle to myself at the thought of looting a drugstore. Indeed. I look up and Tommy and Aunt Titty are looking at me like I’m the dumbest thing they’ve seen.
“OK, who was just complaining this morning that she has to buy pills on the street now that her connection left town?”
“I do not buy them on the street,” I say haughtily. “I buy them at Boardner’s.” From a Mexican guy named Hector. In the men’s room. But not on the street.
“Whatever, little Miss White Gloves. The point is, where do you think those pills come from? It ain’t the Easter Bunny.”
Duh. I hadn’t even thought about drugstores as drugstores. Still, the thought of going into a store through a broken window and climbing out with stuff I didn’t pay for is too much for me. Not that I’m scared of getting caught, or hurt, or even getting killed. Consequences aren’t my motivation. I don’t even know for sure what is. I just can’t shake the “no stealing” thing. Call it the last taboo. Next to the last, at least. God knows I’ve been running low on taboos these last few months.
Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal L.A. Page 18