Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  He throws the head in a bucket. “You have to let all the blood get out before you do anything else.” We wait in silence while the blood drains.

  Paul breaks each of the rabbit’s legs “to make it easier to remove the skin.” He makes an incision just below the point where the string has been tied around the rabbit foot. He cuts and pulls, cuts and pulls, removing the fur in one big piece, slicing away stubborn bits of creamy white skin. When the pelt is halfway down, he puts down the knife and gives it a hard pull, removing it all at once. What’s left is a small rabbit carcass dangling from a tree. At this point it looks more like the meat we see on our plates every night than the bunnies that hop around in their cages.

  By the time we get to the tenth rabbit, I get the hang of it. How to hold it down by the neck, even saying “shhhh” to calm it before bringing that club down as hard as I can with all my strength and determination to not make him suffer, to crack the life out of it on the back of its skull in one swing.

  We cut off the heads, remove the skin and empty the guts, careful to cut out the little green gall sac that hangs inside the rib cage. “That’s the nasty stuff,” Paul says. “Got to be careful not to puncture the sac. Could ruin the meat.”

  When we’re done, we put the carcasses into small bags and take them down to the freezer in the basement. “How about some cocoa?” Paul says. “But not that sugar-free shit your mom buys. I got the good stuff.” He gets a chair and climbs up to reach the cabinet above the sink, moving aside the purple cold medicine and a box of gauze. “My stash,” he says with a wink. We have cocoa and he gives us each a five-dollar bill. “Good job today. Now you guys know how to slaughter. It’s basically the same with all animals. In theory you could field dress a moose.”

  I drink my cocoa and try not to think about the bunnies, about the queasiness in my stomach, how I didn’t want to hurt them, how doing so meant that I had to imagine it as a game and not the thunderclap of life as it ends and I watch their little bunny souls fly up into the sky.

  CHAPTER 10

  SUUUUUUN

  There is a crackle of static from the plastic yellow phone when my brother hands it to me in the living room. We have a ritual when Dad calls from Los Angeles. The ritual is we fight over who gets to talk to him first and Tony wins. I don’t mind. He’s nice to me when he’s talking to Dad and Mom lets us stay up past bedtime since she’s always telling us children need a father figure even if it’s a drug addict ex-con who left her for a tramp.

  Dad says he’s looking forward to seeing us in L.A. in the summer and that we can go to the beach and he’ll take us to Disneyland and how does that sound? It sounds like another world to me and I’m not sure if he’s even serious and if he were to say, “Just joking. Ha-ha,” I would say, “Good one, Dad.”

  “I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”

  “Me? Who?”

  “Hold on.”

  I hear the shuffle of movement through the tinny speaker and then a familiar voice that seems to speak in song. “Hello? Is this the Mouseketeer, Mr. Mikel himself, writer of stories, drawer of pictures? Is this really and truly the one and only Suuuuuun?”

  “Bonnie?”

  “Who else calls you Suuuuuun, silly?”

  “But. What?” I can’t find the words. It’s been years and yet her voice is so familiar, like the sound of birds in a tree. She sings a silly little song, “Mouse-kateer, Mouse-kateer, we can’t wait ’til you get here.” There’s something ancient, a memory, like everything from Synanon before the move, before the bad men with their clubs in Berkeley who made us come here to hide in the rain.

  “But what are you doing there with my dad?”

  She says he just showed up one day. She opened the door and he was standing on her doorstep in his socks with his boots in his hand. “That was three months ago. He won’t leave. I can’t get rid of him so we shacked up.”

  “Shacked up?”

  “Yep. That dad of yours is one crazy guy. He can’t wait to see you next week. Every night he wakes me up and says, ‘Are they here yet? Are they here yet?’”

  The warmth in her voice seems out of place in Salem, Oregon. She says, “Okay, Suuuuuun, I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  It’s different from how those words are spoken in the house on Breys Avenue, which is like a question I’m supposed to know the answer to. These words are more like when your feet are cold from cleaning the rabbit barn in the rain so you come inside and put them next to the woodstove to watch the water steam off your shoes. I thought maybe I dreamed her up but there she is on the other end of that phone, “shacked up” with my dad somewhere near the ocean on the other side of the mountains a million miles away.

  * * *

  I PROMISED MYSELF I would memorize the details of Dad better this time. How he looks, how he talks, the way he walks. I go through the checklist in my head. Curly black hair like an Afro. Mustache. Tan neck. The boots. The jeans. The lines on his face around his eyes when he smiles. That cackle. The slight dip and the swing of the arms as he turns on the heel of his boot. When we land at the airport in Los Angeles, I see him standing next to Bonnie at the end of the hallway. He’s got a goofy smile and she’s decked out in a long purple dress, hanging on his arm with her curly dark brown hair. I can’t even walk the last twenty feet so I run and throw my arms around his neck as he lifts me up and says, “Hey, dude. You’re here. You’re actually here.”

  Bonnie squeezes me. “Suuuuuun! Did they let you fly the plane?! I heard they let you do that sometimes.”

  Their apartment in Playa del Rey is only blocks from the ocean. On the way home from the airport, Bonnie takes us down a highway where you can see the waves and the sand, the big oil tankers parked offshore and the people playing in the surf. The apartment is on a sunny street at the back of a courtyard with a redbrick wall under a huge purple tree called a jacaranda that Dad says sounds like a kind of snake.

  There’s ice cream in the fridge and big bottles of soda pop, string cheese and crackers, potato chips, frozen dinners, Popsicles, burritos and fruit. We can’t believe our luck. We’ve never seen so much food. Tony asks Dad if we can really have string cheese anytime we want. He gives him a strange look. “Sure. Of course. If you’re hungry, eat.” We fill our bellies with Fruit Roll-Ups and bags of Fritos, microwave taquitos and celery with peanut butter and raisins.

  At night we sit with Dad while he watches the Dodgers, smoking his Marlboro Lights and drinking a six-pack of white Budweiser cans. Nobody seems to care that he drinks in the house, or that he drinks at all. He doesn’t seem any different after the sixth beer than he did after the first. He just talks louder, yelling at the TV, “Dodger blue, my ass. These bozos play like a junior high rec team.”

  “Dodger blue, my ass!” we yell in unison.

  I know Mom would say that once an addict always an addict and therefore Dad shouldn’t be drinking and she may be right but it just doesn’t feel bad. Maybe because he’s in the house. Maybe because it’s just beer, not heroin. Maybe it’s as simple as he doesn’t leave.

  He likes to talk about sports, about people I know nothing about. “Kareem was un-guardable last year. Un-guard-able. The release on that skyhook is like nine feet in the air. Watchu gonna do, climb a fuckin’ ladder?” I make a mental note of phrases so I can repeat them later to the kids back in Salem. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Un-guardable. Fuckin’ ladder.

  We hang all over him, grabbing on to his neck and pulling on his arms. “You got to do some push-ups, kid.” He picks us up, tying us into pretzels as we try to wrestle him to the ground.

  He sends us for cigarettes at the Dales Jr. Market down the street. “Here, tell the guy they’re for your dad. Marlboro Lights, in the hard box.” He gives Tony five bucks. He never asks for change so we spend it on Starburst and Hershey bars, asking for quarters for the Donkey Kong Jr. next to the door where we play doubles.

  We sleep in the living room on the fold-out couch. It’s neve
r completely dark because of the huge window bringing the moonlight and electric lights from the courtyard.

  He takes us to his shop where he’s the manager, overseeing the mechanics like he did in Synanon, the team of Goodyear Tire salesmen. The place is called Foogerts, in the center of the city on a busy intersection. There’s a showroom with walls stacked floor to ceiling with tires. Next to it is a hydraulic lift where they put the cars when they change the tires with noisy air guns pulling off the lug nuts with one squeeze of a trigger. One of his mechanics says, “Hey, Jimmy! You see that shit on lift two?”

  Dad says, “Yeah, fucking Fiats, man. Too many hoses and wires. How do you drive a thing like that? Those I-talian engineers.” He looks at us with a wink. “The Italians take too many lunch breaks. They made shitty tanks too. The old lady used to say if it wasn’t for Fiat, Mussolini would’ve stayed in power and Italy wouldn’t have switched sides. Bad Italian engineers are the reason we don’t speak German.”

  At night I drift into the bedroom where Bonnie is reading Stephen King or Danielle Steel. I sit by her side or sometimes I curl into the bend of her knee as she lies sideways. We call this my “favorite spot.” She says, “So, Suuuuuun, you bored with baseball? You got a girlfriend in that school of yours yet or what?”

  We lie on our backs looking up at the ceiling, discussing school or how mean Tony is or her family or Dad or our mom. She’s horrified by the rabbits. “So you have to cut their heads off? That’s terrible.” I tell her it’s not so bad and you got to eat anyway.

  She tells me about her job where she does phone sales and what it was like in Synanon when they made her get divorced from her husband, Eddie, who she loved. She seems so confused by it. She wanted to stay married but Eddie believed in the “Synanon system.” “We got to trust it,” he said. “We came this far.”

  The Old Man said that the marriages had to end and that was that. Either people got divorced or they left.

  “I didn’t know what to say. This was my husband telling me he was going off to be with another woman.” All the couples were paired with other people by the Old Man and Eddie liked the woman he was paired with, Emily Durst. “She was pretty, I guess,” Bonnie says, wiping her nose with her hand. She was paired with Lenny Dickenson who was short with bad breath. She wanted to leave but stay married. But Eddie wanted to stay which meant divorce. “So we got divorced and here I am.” She lets out a bitter laugh.

  She looks at me. “I can’t believe I’m telling all this to a little kid. What are you, thirty? Ha-ha!”

  Whenever I ask her about the School and how the Old Man wanted us to be new, special kinds of people, she says, “That was his bullshit. To me, you were just a baby. And you know, you don’t plan to fall in love, you just do. I had a special bond with you. It’s weird how that happens. Someone puts a kid in your life and next thing you know you’re like a…” She pauses and looks at me.

  “Like a mom,” I say. She hugs me and tells me I was always special to her even though Chuck wanted us to be the new kinds of people who aren’t children of their parents but children of the universe which if you think about it just means we were no one’s children.

  “What two-year-old is independent?” she says. “You were a little baby. You all were.”

  Bonnie’s parents are Grandma Juliette and Grandpa Nat. That’s what they tell us to call them from the first time we visit them at their house in the center of the city, just off Fairfax and Wilshire Boulevard. Grandma Juliette is a tiny woman with an electric smile in red lipstick and red boots whose face shakes as she opens the door and says, “Look at the punim on this one!” She squeezes me tight. She is in the doorway next to her golf clubs in the house where Bonnie grew up. She and Grandpa Nat bought the house in 1956 after a trip to California from Brooklyn, when she sat in a sunlit garden and thought, We’re never going back.

  Grandpa Nat is in the living room watching golf. He lights up when he sees us. “Bonita!” he says and stands up to give Bonnie a hug, singing, “Bonita … Chiquita … banana.” He turns to Dad and says, “Hey, Jimmy, so good to see you,” leaning in to give him a wet kiss on the lips. “You taking care of my girl?” He’s tan and handsome with a broad face and piercing blue eyes, wearing a golf shirt and white shorts that show off legs strong from years of golf and handball. He and Dad like each other. There seems to be an understanding they share. Life is hard, let’s enjoy what we have.

  Bonnie told me that Grandpa Nat’s family came from a place called Pole-land “before the war,” the one Grandpa Frank fought in for Dutch and America. They left aunts and uncles and cousins there. They were all killed by a very bad man named Hitler. Some of them got out before the war but others could not be convinced to leave so they ended up losing their homes, then working in camps then put in trains then in furnaces. Grandpa says there were six million of them who died because of the bad man, Hitler. It’s too big of a number to think about all at once. I try to imagine, like the bunnies, the sound made by six million claps of thunder rising up into the clouds leaving a tear in the sky so big it could be seen from anywhere on earth.

  It’s great to have a new grandpa and a new grandma, these funny and kind people who treat me like a grandson. I wish I could have all the aunts and uncles and cousins I could’ve had if it weren’t for that crazy man Hitler who hated Grandpa Nat and his family so much.

  Grandma Juliette is my favorite. She doesn’t care if I hear dirty jokes. If someone says, “Mom, where is the fuckin’ ice? I’ve been looking all over for it,” she puts her hands over my ears and says, “Don’t you ever say the word ‘ice’ in front of my grandson.”

  Bonnie’s sister Nancy is a large woman with brown hair who moves exactly like a little girl in a woman’s body. She is a singer with a high voice that she says is a “soprano.” Jeannie is Bonnie’s other sister. She’s short and funny and just joined the Police Academy because she’s going to become a cop. Even though she’s so small, I can see why because there’s something tough about her. When someone teases her, she doesn’t give an inch.

  They have another sister named Joey who died when she was only nineteen years old. Her eyes turned yellow and they took her to the doctor and three weeks later she was dead from something called hepatitis. They cried and cried and Bonnie says it taught them that family is precious and you should enjoy it while you can and make it bigger if you can and I feel so lucky to suddenly have more family.

  Bonnie says she doesn’t believe in God. Neither does Grandma or Grandpa. She says religions get carried away. People believe too hard and start to “buy their own bullshit.” She says it’s been the cause of more death and suffering than any other force on earth. Her eyes get small and she pounds her fist and I wonder if she’s mad about Synanon or God, Chuck Dederich or Hitler. They seem to be fused together in her mind as examples of what happens when people believe in something too much.

  All I know is that we lived in the School like an orphanage and Grandpa Nat lost all those people he loved and maybe it’s okay to believe in things as long as it doesn’t mean people have to be alone or dead.

  * * *

  WHILE DAD AND Bonnie are at work, we go to summer camp which takes us to the beach or the zoo or a park where we drink from giant coolers of red fruit punch. Sometimes we play baseball. A coach comes and teaches us to field grounders and get under fly balls, how to bunt and slide and lead off from first base so that the pitcher can’t throw you out. Dad picks us up at the end of the day and takes us to Toes Beach at sunset where we bounce in the waves, riding up onto his shoulders as he throws us into the surf. The water is cold when you first go in but Dad tells us to just run at it and dive, to let the cold hit you all at once so you can forget about it. We cling to him as he heads deeper into the ocean until our feet can’t touch the bottom. We use him as a home base, swimming away into the deep water, then swimming back to hold on. He seems to know that’s what he’s there for, piling us into his truck even if he’s dog tired after twelve hours on
his feet in the middle of a six-day workweek.

  Toes is not the best beach in the world. It’s nothing like those tanning spots for teenagers in Manhattan Beach that we drive by, or the surfing coves in Malibu that you see in magazines, nothing like the long stretches of spotless sand from all the movies about California. No tourist would visit here. There are enormous red-and-white smokestacks spitting black clouds of pollution into the air from the oil refinery to the south. Just to the north is the mouth of Ballona Creek, which is where all the storm drains from the city empty into the ocean with their cigarette butts and dog shit. The 747s taking off from the runway at LAX seem close enough to touch as they fill the sky with a rumble, casting massive dark shadows over the sand. But we don’t care. It doesn’t matter. We care about the taste of salt in our mouths, the white foam in our hair, the soft waves as they pour over us and Dad, shirtless and tan in the sun, standing still like an anchor in the water.

  Afterward we go to Might-T-Mart to get raspberry frozen yogurt which we eat in the car before we get home so Bonnie doesn’t know and we can still have ice cream after dinner. “It’ll be our secret,” Dad says with a wink.

  There’s a nook in front of the big window where the sun hits a patch on the ground and you can sleep in it on lazy afternoons if you don’t feel like doing anything. Bonnie will put Linda Ronstadt on the stereo and move around the apartment singing in one of her night robes.

  You can sing. You can not sing.

  You can sleep. You can not sleep.

  You can eat. You can not eat.

  They ask me how I’m doing and how I’m feeling and what I want for dinner, where I want to go this weekend. It feels like exhaling after holding your breath for so long. Like I’ve been crouched in a flinch, the way you tense up before getting socked in the face, and I can finally let my guard down. We both get tan. Fatter. We fight less. We eat more. We lie with eyes closed in the sun thinking of precisely nothing.