CALIFORNIA
To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.
—FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
CHAPTER 23
THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND
I remember the first litter of tiny pink bunnies born naked and blind. How they crawled out from under their mother on the cold steel cage. It was my job to make sure there was a little cotton bed for them. Each day I came in to check on them, to give them new food and water, to make sure the ones that crawled out of the nest were put back safely.
One morning I came outside to the barn to find a baby bunny dead in the cage, his paw sticking out from the steel wire, a bloody gash along his neck. I picked him up, folding him into a brown leaf, and took him outside. I made a small hole in the ground next to a thicket of blackberry bushes in the alley, digging it out with the edge of Paul’s blue hatchet. I would’ve said a prayer but I didn’t know a prayer so I said, “You were a bunny that should’ve got to live free,” and placed two sticks in the dirt to mark the grave.
When I asked Paul about it, he said, “Oh yeah, the mothers do that sometimes.”
“Why?”
“It’s nothing they do on purpose. They just can’t help it.”
* * *
AFTER MOM CALLED my father to explain and I heard her say, “They usually get along great. He was out of control,” which Dad knew was a lie but no bones were broken so he wasn’t going to fly all-the-way-the-hell up to Oregon and “end up back in jail,” after Doug offered a weak apology, “Your mother says it’s, uh, hard for you to understand but I just come from a different set of rules where boys are not allowed to call their mothers names but I do understand that those aren’t the rules you’re used to,” after Mom cried on the way to the airport saying, “It breaks my heart for you to leave for the summer like this,” I am in Los Angeles sitting in the living room of Dad and Bonnie’s new house in Westchester, a mile from the westbound runway of Los Angeles International Airport.
Tony seems different. He’s got long feathered hair, parted in the middle now. He’s wearing new clothes that look store bought. I’m still wearing my five-year-old Salvation Army shoes and a stained Star Wars T-shirt that used to be his. He’s fatter. He’s lost the gaunt, hollow-eyed look we get in Oregon. At the airport when they came to pick me up, he looked at me with a smile and said, “Heeeeeeyy, little bro.” He even gave me a half-shoulder hug. I flinched when he leaned in because I thought he was going to sock me one in the stomach.
None of it seems real. The new house is a low cream-and-yellow stucco building with a sloping front lawn of crabgrass, two bedrooms, and a living room. It’s what they call a California bungalow. Bonnie says it’s no bigger than a postage stamp but it’s all they need. It sits along a row of other bungalows in a sleepy neighborhood. I wonder what Jake is doing back in Salem. After what happened with Doug, he told me he would run away with me if I wanted him to but we couldn’t figure out anywhere to go so instead we just snuck out at night for a few weeks. I know Mom is sad and I wonder if Doug is being mean to her and if anyone is taking care of Mork.
You can hear the jets from the front porch. And if you stand on the corner at the end of the block, you can even see the massive 747s as they taxi down the runway. The windows and walls shake whenever one of the big planes passes by. There’s the ocean to the west, the wetlands to the north, and the airport to the south. Inglewood is to the east. There are miles and miles of concrete strip malls, body shops, grocery stores, and fast-food chains between the quiet salt wind and the city of Inglewood. If you go up to the abandoned neighborhood by the beach, to the top of Sandpiper Road, where the high school kids go to make out, you can watch those big jets gather speed and practically knock you over as they soar into the sky and disappear in the clouds over the ocean. Living so close to the airport gives you a constant sense of movement, of people leaving and coming home, old lives ending and new ones beginning.
Tony suggests that we go hang out at the Bowl, which is what everyone calls El Dorado Bowling Alley. He says there’s no adults around. “None that’ll say shit, at least,” so that means, “Heads can kick it and smoke and fuck around. You’ll see. It’s sick.” I don’t understand his slang. Who is this guy?
The Bowl sits at the edge of civilization in a strip mall with a grocery store, a park, a bank—before the empty land around the airport. Dad gives us ten bucks each. As we walk down the block, I expect at any moment Tony is going to trip me and take my ten dollars. Instead he says, “Keep an eye out,” as he reaches into the bushes in front of the house two doors down and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. The pack is long and green with fancy lettering: Benson & Hedges Menthol 100’s. When we get around the corner, he hands me one. I wonder when he gave up on Marlboro Reds.
“Marlboro Reds are for hicks and rednecks. These are better. Try it.” I take a drag and feel the cool menthol fill my mouth and nose. It’s like brushing your teeth with a campfire.
“You play Super Mario Bros.? They got one at the Bowl. It’s sick.” He keeps using that word. His new Vision skateboard is sick, the waves at El Porto in Manhattan Beach are gonna be sick this summer and he’s bummed he’s going to miss them but then he’s going to football camp in Salem in a few days and that’s going to be sick too.
I wonder when he forgot we are mortal enemies.
He tells me we can wash our hands at the Bowl to get the smoky smell off them and Dad and Bonnie will never know. “How’s Mom? What’s that new guy like? I heard he beat you up.”
“He’s a dick. Mom is Mom.”
“Yeah, I hear you, bro.”
I tell him that Doug’s the whitest guy you’ll ever meet. “Like, he collects stamps and shit. He’s got all this food in the house that you’re not allowed to eat. He puts it on shelves and you can’t even touch it.”
“Even Mom?”
“She’s cool with it for some reason.” I ask him if he heard about Paul. He nods.
“Mom says he drank himself to death.”
Tony takes a long drag on the white-filtered cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He inhales deeply. I still don’t inhale. I just puff, letting the smoke linger in my mouth and around my eyes. The trick is to hold it in your mouth awhile before blowing it out through puckered lips so it looks like you actually breathed it in.
“He was a good dude.” We talk about the cartoons and the fishing trips and Mork, the coast, the rabbits. “He’s really dead?”
“I think so. Mom says someone told her he had a really bad binge and died.”
“Wait, so she doesn’t know for sure?”
“Nobody does. It’s either that or maybe he’s a bum somewhere. She was very Mom about it.” I know Tony misses Paul too but because his public stance is that all adults are full of shit, he doesn’t say anything, just tosses his cigarette on the asphalt and steps on it with his foot.
“So we don’t even know if he’s alive or dead? Damn, bro. That’s sick.”
At the Bowl he introduces me to the guys he hangs out with. It’s a ragtag gang of white surfer-type guys in tapered pants and karate shoes, smoking cigarettes while they take turns playing Super Mario Bros. They nod at me, lifting their chins, and say, “Sup.” No one seems to care that they are smoking, even though they’re only teenagers. I light a Benson & Hedges Menthol 100 and smoke it right there next to the video games. I can feel the eyes on me, the disapproving looks from the adults as they walk by us juvenile delinquents. It feels good to feel bad.
Every family has a script. That’s something I learned in Alateen, along with how to blow smoke rings and make a weed pipe from an apple. In our family script Dad is the big, tough, masculine father and Tony is his son. I am the sensitive one who belongs to Mom and Bonnie. Tony draws pictures like Dad does and people say they are “exactly alike.” I like books, like Mom. At least that’s what people say.
Once Tony leaves
for Oregon for the summer to stay with Mom because she still technically has “legal custody” and insisted on it, it’s just Bonnie and Dad and me in the house in Westchester, it doesn’t seem like Dad cares about the script. I am surprised when he says, “Hey, come give me a hand,” and I go outside to the garage to watch him stack boxes or organize his tools in the giant red Craftsman toolbox or to help him pack sunroofs into the orange industrial van he bought for his new business installing sunroofs. Mom says he’s nine-fingered, which is what they called Dope Fiends in Synanon, meaning they have something like a disability. But I count his fingers and there are always ten. Clasped around a jigsaw, messing up my hair, rubbing sunscreen on my back in the sand, tossing me in the waves at Toes Beach at sunset after we pack the van.
* * *
AT THE END of the summer Tony calls to say that he’s decided to stay in Oregon for the school year. He made friends at the football camp and wants to play for the North Salem High Vikings football team in the fall. He says this casually, like it’s his decision to make. At times like this he seems like a hero to me, the way he can ignore the rules the adults have made for us and do whatever he wants.
When we hang up, Bonnie says, “Well, what do you think?”
“About what?”
“About Tony staying in Oregon.”
I say it makes sense because he’s good at football. But all I can think about are the Indian burns and headlocks, the screaming matches, the weight of Doug’s knees on my shoulders, my fingers twisted back and sprained, the bruises, the spit in his teeth, the hazy outline of a fist. There is an anger that is new. The well. The blackness. The storm.
I blurt out, “I don’t want to go back to Salem.”
The words fall out of my mouth before I have the chance to think about them. She turns her head and calls my dad into the bedroom. “Tell your father what you just told me.”
I take a breath, unsure of myself, and tell him that I want to live in Los Angeles with them. Dad sits on the edge of the bed with his hands in his lap.
“Have you told your mother this?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a big decision. And you’d have to talk to her. But of course you can come live here with us. You’re my son.”
It’s strange to be referred to as his son, because everybody knows I am Mom’s son, I am Bonnie’s son, and Tony is his son.
“She’s gonna be upset,” Bonnie says. “I feel for her. Are you sure you want to do this?”
After a Big Talk, we call her from the kitchen and I tell her I have something important to tell her. I feel my throat go dry and struggle to find my voice. My hands are clammy as I wrap the white phone cord in circles around my fingers. There’s a long pause on the other end of the line. “Okay?”
“Bonnie and Dad and I have been talking and since Tony is staying there to live with you and he and I don’t really get along so well…” I know I can’t mention Doug. I know I can’t mention the wolf den or Paul or the 5:00 A.M. rabbit feedings, the slaughtering alone in the backyard with the ten-inch hunting knife that cuts my hand, the nights without food, her depressions that come like the rain, the feeling like my job is only to take care of her. There is a script, there were words I rehearsed not ten minutes ago with Bonnie and Dad, but I can’t find them. Tell her it’s about Dad. She’ll understand that. A boy needs a father figure. Isn’t that what she’s always saying?
But there is only an empty place where the words should be. I simply can’t make my voice do something she doesn’t approve of.
I close my eyes, trying to find the words. “And, well, since I’m, uh, gonna be a teenager soon and I don’t really know my dad that well and, um, a teenage boy needs his dad, like how you said with Tony…”
The words are drowned out by the songs I hear in my head, the lectures and talks and instructions on who I am supposed to be, what I am supposed to be in the world, the boy she is raising who is so special he can change it. The music. The old protest songs and folk tunes sung on those long car trips up to the woods:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
We would sing along from the backseat. Sometimes we’d ask her to sing a song in Dutch or French and we’d go quiet as the strange words filled the car, wondering where she’d lived and who she was and how she’d learned to speak whole other languages in another world, in another life sometime long ago before the changes, the crash, the wreckage, the terrible choices they were given between changing the world and turning their children into orphans.
“I think I should come live here with Dad and Bonnie for a year.”
I hear her take a long breath. I have a sinking feeling, exactly the way it felt to hit a baby bunny across the head, the presence of something dark inside me, something awful and cruel. And like the bunnies, I know she is stunned that for the first time in my life I am disagreeing with the World According to Mom.
“Is this because of Doug?”
“No.”
“Because I told him if it didn’t stop, I’d leave him and I meant it.”
“I know. It’s not Doug. I just think it’s time I get to know my dad. It’s only for a year.”
“Your dad was the love of my life.”
“Yes. You’ve told me that.”
“He and Bonnie have more money. I can’t compete.”
“It has nothing to do with that. This house is smaller than yours.”
“What did they say?”
“They said it was okay with them if it was okay with you.”
“Well, if it’s okay with them then I guess there’s nothing I can do. Only for one year, okay?”
“Okay.”
I hear her sigh heavily. There’s a kind of calm as I hang up the phone. I know I’ve caught her off guard. I didn’t think she would say yes. I know I’ve defied a rule, one made at a time before words, before I can remember, an ancient feeling that a promise has been broken.
These things are never said out loud. It’s just something I know.
CHAPTER 24
“NORMAL”
On the way into school on the first day at Orville Wright Junior High in Westchester, as a real-live student at a Los Angeles city public school, I walk past a wall with the word “CSR” written in big bubbly cartoon letters. Beneath the letters is a drawing of a rat on a skateboard drinking a bottle of malt liquor. On an opposing wall in much sloppier black spray paint are the words “w/s ROLLING 60’s 13.” The letters seem to run together. They remind me of the hieroglyphics I saw on a trip to the public library in Salem, Oregon, with the Talented and Gifted Program. I have no idea what it means but I know it means something important. Why else would someone bother to write it on a wall?
The hallways are noisy. I’m surrounded by older, louder, bigger kids, some with Jheri curls, some with short waves, some tall and foreboding in blue-and-black flannel shirts buttoned up to their necks and hair that looks like it’s been crimped at a salon. Some are dancing, spinning on backs or knees. They don’t look at me. I am invisible to them. They walk with heads held high, some fists locked at the waist. The girls look like women to me, with makeup and nails and big voices screaming down the hallway while I stand beneath them: “Hey, Tamika! Tamika! Girl, you know I need my notebook!” They have breasts. Real breasts. And butts in tight jeans with hips and heels and a sway that pings back and forth while they walk chewing gum with teeth covered in braces.
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