Hollywood Park

by Mikel Jollett

  The poems are sad and beautiful, filled with fear and a desire for comfort, images of lost children, sacred ghosts. There’s depth beneath all her earnest girlishness, her braces and self-deprecating jokes, a sense that something made her leave girlhood too soon, that the woman who rushed in to fill the void was assembled in haste, fragmentary, incomplete as if born of the imagination of a girl.

  But the thought is abstract in my mind and when I look inside, I feel only numb, as if she never existed, as if we were never captured in that universe in a raindrop, two people who found each other in this lame-ass school beneath the outbound jets.

  Then it comes rushing back all at once and presents itself whole: I need her. I can’t live without her. And she suddenly means too much. The amnesia is lifted and I can’t go another day without holding her hand. I have to see her face. She doesn’t deserve this. I am a shit. I am a shit. But the minute I feel the love, I also feel the guilt for having hurt her, having been cruel for no other reason than I couldn’t stand to need her so much.

  In the midst of the confusion, I’ll sit on my bed and strum a D chord, mumbling some words over some crappy melody, and before I know it, I’ve started a song. I know it’s bad as I’m singing it. D to G to A, like every song ever written. But it feels good to sing, to be in the Secret Place where I can put the mask down and visit my romantic and stylish friends who feel just as fucked-up as I do.

  I do this whenever I am sad or overwhelmed or angry or bored. The songs are not good. The melodies are simple and the lyrics strain, saying too much or too little. It’s nothing I’d ever play for someone else. I’d rather play a Bowie song. The point isn’t to be good at it. The point is the music makes me feel like I belong somewhere, that this person I don’t know, the one who swims beneath his life in a dark, chaotic, unknowable place, this one has a voice too.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE BIGGEST LIE EVER TOLD

  The Snake River Correctional Institution is a new prison in the high desert of eastern Oregon, five miles from the Idaho border. In the summer after my sixteenth birthday, Mom tells me she has a meeting to attend there and I could attend it with her, not the meeting itself, but the car ride. She explains that the car ride with her to this prison in the high desert will be my sixteenth birthday present.

  “We can talk about your future and have quality time,” she says. “Just you and me. Isn’t that what you wanted for your birthday?”

  I don’t know how to tell her that it isn’t, particularly. Because it seems to mean so much to her. She still sits next to me on the couch and expects me at sixteen years old to hold her hand while we watch TV, our fingers interlaced. When I get up and try to make a joke because I feel uncomfortable, she’ll say something like “I guess I’m just not important to you,” and her face will fall into that hangdog expression of disapproval. “I mean I never get to see you, Mick. Since you moved away.”

  There seem to be no good answers. I can either do something that makes me uncomfortable or feel guilty about refusing it. I used to think these invasions were just a kind of cluelessness about people, about boundaries, but I’m starting to think it’s something else.

  On the way through the mountainous corridor of the Cascade Mountains created by the Columbia River, driving down I-84, I tell her I’m in love with Laura.

  “That’s all just hormones,” she says. “It’s what kids do. They fall in love. If you would’ve stayed in Oregon, you would have met a girl here and fallen in love. Laura sounds like a nice girl but there’s nothing particularly special about her and there are plenty of nice girls in Oregon. You could’ve met one without leaving me.”

  The mountains are dusty and brown, dotted with huge boulders on either side of us. It’s so different from the lush green Willamette Valley with all its rain and trees. There’s a kind of silence in the car because I don’t know how to respond, only that she’s wrong about Laura, even though I know I owe her this trip, I owe her my gratitude for my life and for her forgiveness for running out on my job, which was to take care of her.

  When we stop for gas, she points at a woman in a tight shoulder-less elastic rainbow top and says, “That woman is too fat for that top.”

  “Maybe she’s comfortable,” I say.

  “What do you know now that you’re so skinny from all that running?” She pats my stomach, sitting next to me in the car. “That’s probably why you do it.”

  “No. I do it because I like to compete and I’ve always loved running.”

  “Yeah, but I bet it’s a nice side effect,” she says, shaking her head.

  I remember all the times she told me I was fat growing up. It’s strange because one afternoon as we were scanning old pictures in a photo album, when I saw pictures of myself in second, third, and fourth grade, all I saw was a healthy kid with a big overbite. If anything, the child in those photographs looked a little skinny, perhaps malnourished. I wonder why I thought he was fat, why, as a seven-year-old boy, I walked around thinking I’d done something bad and needed to suck my stomach in.

  She tells me it’s good that I run because the University of Oregon has a legendary track program and she can’t wait for me to go there so I can be close. “Eugene is a cool town. There are lots of hippies.” I don’t know why she assumes I like hippies. That’s her thing. I don’t know why she thinks I wouldn’t want to consider any other school. “Promise me you’ll go there, so we can be close.”

  “Okay, I promise,” I say, to end the conversation.

  When we get to the town of Ontario a few miles from the Idaho border, Mom checks us into a motel and leaves for her meeting at the prison. She’s gone all day. I turn on the TV and watch reruns of I Love Lucy until three o’clock when I lace up my sneakers and head out to the highway for a run. The prison is new and they’ve repaved this part of the highway. The new tar stings my nostrils as I plod along with the sound of my muffled steps, jumping sideways when an eighteen-wheeler rumbles past.

  It occurs to me that this is an odd birthday present, to be here alone at a prison in eastern Oregon. I think of my tenth birthday, when Paul had just left and it was still just Mom and me in the house on Breys Avenue. We still had the rabbits and it was slaughtering time and because we didn’t want to “let all that good meat go to waste,” we agreed I would do the slaughtering myself. I got out the white bucket and powdered the tree with lye. I picked up the twelve-week-old bunnies from their cages one by one and hit them on the skull with the iron rod, hanging them on the tree to cut off their heads. The hunting knife that Paul left in the barn was too big for me to hold properly, which made me clumsy with it. As I sawed at a rabbit’s neck, I gouged a thick piece of skin right off the middle finger of my left hand. I grabbed it and shook it and tried to suck the blood but figured it would stop soon enough. But then, while slicing the tissue between fur and hide on another rabbit, I cut right through the webbing of my thumb, nearly piercing it completely. I didn’t understand why it was so hard to handle the knife. I thought it would be easy to slaughter these rabbits on my birthday because nothing ever got to me, because I was the one who could do the necessary thing that had to be done. I began to blindly lash and thrust at the carcass until I sliced the skin at the top of my hand and yanked it away and realized there were thick streams of blood running down my fingers and wrist, falling into the bucket where it mingled with the rabbit blood and severed heads.

  When I came inside, Mom was sitting at the big table in the kitchen with a carrot cake she’d made. “I made it without any sugar,” she said, because sugar is a drug. “Happy birthday.” She didn’t notice the blood falling off my hand, running down my pants, dripping on the floor as I walked across the linoleum. I put the hand under the sink and let the water run over it then wrapped it in a napkin and sat down. She extended a hand for me to hold as we ate in silence. I told her I couldn’t eat and hold her hand at the same time because my hand was cut and bleeding. She straightened up and said, “Why do you always have to be so difficult?
”

  I stop on the side of the highway there in the Oregon desert and look down at my left hand, flexing it in the sun. I can still see the scars. There are ten or so that pockmark the skin from those slaughtering sessions. I’m still breathing hard from my run as I look out over the reddish-brown hills leading to the prison. It’s quiet except for the sound of the wind and my quick breath.

  I think of my classmates in Los Angeles with their sixteenth birthday parties at restaurants or amusement parks, Derek’s tenth birthday when we rented a VCR and watched Airplane!, staying up late to play truth or dare. It’s never occurred to me that my birthday was anything other than a time I owe to her and that all this pretending, this role I know I must continually play, is costing me something. It’s as if she doesn’t even see me, only a person who is an extension of herself, one who left, who betrayed her, to whom she gave life and therefore a person from whom a life is owed.

  It never occurred to me that other mothers don’t feel this way.

  For the first time in my life, right on the side of the highway near the Idaho border, it crosses my mind that she might not be completely sane. I think about the endless excuses I’ve made to myself and others about the world she constructs, the visions, the stories, the events which happened that she denied happened if they did not fit the narrative she created around herself—that these things might not just be the hallmark of a person who had a “hard life” but signs of real mental illness.

  I remember the times I would describe her to people who would say something like “Sounds like she’s a little off her rocker.” They’d laugh a little and I’d go quiet as the words hung in the air awkwardly, waiting for me to confront them, to explain them or confirm them. But I couldn’t. I was frozen. Because I was caught up in maintaining those narratives. I was a necessary piece of them, maybe the most necessary piece.

  Laura and I once had a long discussion while wrapping Christmas presents. She wondered why I had to spend Christmas in Oregon, because she would miss me. I told her that I had to go to Oregon because a boy’s job is to take care of his mother. She looked at me strangely. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean. I’m the kid. I’m supposed to take care of her.”

  “Are you serious? I can’t tell if you’re serious.”

  “What?” I looked at her. She stared hard.

  “Sweetheart, it’s the exact opposite. You know that, right?”

  I buried the thought like I bury all such thoughts.

  There are just so many stories my mother tells herself, illusions she believes, understandings that pad her life, for the same reason they pad the walls at the state hospital: to take away the sharp edges. There are too many to keep track of: illusions about who Doug is and where Paul went. Illusions about my father, who “left her,” about Bonnie, who “stole us,” the woman Tony and I trust as much as anyone in the world. Events like Phil’s beating or Paul’s disappearance, which were ignored, as if they didn’t even happen, as if they wouldn’t affect us, as if they affected only her. It was never mentioned that we watched and screamed, that we had nightmares and anxiety, that we cried alone in the dark wondering what to do.

  It’s an odd feeling because I’m aware that I’ve always known it. It’s just never been said out loud, in plain words: she lives in a different world, a different reality, one she has altered to make life easier.

  There’s an unreality to the feeling, a suspicion in my mind that I may be wrong or crazy for even thinking it. She is the one who has read all the books, attended all those self-help meetings. She’s the expert on psychology, on parenting, firing off terms and theories, phrases and slogans like defensive blasts of a cannon guarding a fortress. She has armed herself to the teeth with psychology. And she uses that armament, those terms, like weapons to enforce a code, a strict set of understandings that we are required to have about this endless hall of mirrors: the one she’s created with all the distorted reflections of what it means to be a “son,” a “mother,” a “friend,” a “F-A-M-I-L-Y.”

  Our car trips are usually filled with long, chatty, wandering conversations. But for the first time, heading home from that hot dusty highway, we drive all the way across the state in silence.

  An uneasy feeling follows me around all summer—between my daily runs, long phone calls with Laura in L.A., wasting time with Jake, and my fast-food job at the Oregon State Fair—the sense that people can hide entire journeys, entire lives behind a lie. As if reality is just an argument you can have with the world. Is the truth up for discussion? And if it is, what else is a lie?

  Over time it’s impossible to face all those delusions. Once you become lost in them—after thousands of days of denial—you simply can’t confront the truth anymore, because you no longer know it. So you become a victim of your own dishonesty. I wonder if that’s how it went with Mom.

  How do you face a lie that big?

  I fall asleep in the restless late-summer heat, closing my eyes to see the highway stretched out in front of me, winding through pastures and empty fields as it disappears over the horizon to some nameless destination. I’m overcome by the feeling that this is where we belong, we weirdos and orphans: out on empty highways among the pines and weary travelers, the men in their lipstick keeping us company as they sing their sad songs on the radio.

  CHAPTER 34

  MY DAD, THE EX-CON

  There is a distance growing between Dad and me. I know he’s proud but I can feel his concern about how important college has become. There is a road I’ve been walking down, but I’m not sure yet if this new road is the detour or the main path, like at any minute it might just turn and I’ll be back in that pit, the one that ends in rehab or prison. And Dad, he never finished eighth grade. Tony never got past ninth grade. Uncle Pete and Uncle Donny both dropped out of high school and ended up doing time. It’s hard not to feel like no matter what I do, this is where I will end up. So I’m vigilant. I study long hours. I keep track of deadlines. And I wonder if Dad is now worried that trying to be the exception to the rule established by the men in our family is a kind of defiance, a way of saying, You and I are not alike and we never will be. And maybe it is.

  When he was my age, he was running wild through the streets of San Diego, already a thief, already married, already a father, already a step in front of the law with his stolen credit card numbers, cars, drugs. I know he doesn’t want this life for me but I can tell he’s worried he’s going to lose me to something else, an institution, an education, an affectation that will cost him a son.

  A twelfth-grade headbanger named Greg Bauer has decided he doesn’t like my “faggy” hair or my “faggy” clothes. The hair is long in front now, hanging down past my chin and my clothes consist of a pair of black twelve-hole Doc Martens boots, a black bomber jacket, and a David Bowie T-shirt. Every day at lunch or while prowling the hallways between classes, he will yell something over his shoulder like “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill that little faggot.”

  He is six feet one with long black hair, steel-toed boots and a series of heavy metal rings on his right hand, including an eagle with spiked claws and a piece of flat steel through which he has driven the sharpened point of a box nail.

  Every morning for months I walk to school with dread, wondering when I am going to be plucked from anonymity and put on display in front of my girlfriend, in front of the whole school, as the “little bitch” that Greg Bauer insists I am.

  I don’t know what to do about it, so I tell Dad. At first I think maybe he’ll react the way the staid suburban fathers of my peers might, the ones who help them with their homework and give them advice about college applications. Dad knows more about 1957 Chevys than the UC system and it sometimes feels like this puts me at a disadvantage. I know that if Dad was like these men, he would call the principal or maybe Greg Bauer’s parents to discuss the matter.

  Instead, he removes his reading glasses very seriously, looks up from his racing form and says, “Well, you know, you’re gonna
have to kick his ass.”

  The idea floats in the air between us for a moment, suspended by its absurdity. At five feet seven, all of 128 pounds of essay-writing cross-country runner, it is not the answer I was expecting.

  He sees the doubt on my face. “You can kick his ass, you know. Just because you’re smaller don’t mean shit.”

  Ten minutes later I am standing in the driveway in front of the house while Dad holds a pillow for me to punch, offering me instructions on how to fight, like a heavyweight boxer. “Keep your elbows in. Stay balanced. You want to put your entire body weight into the two inches at the front of your fist. Block first. Always lead with your left so you can block, then come over with a big right hand.” I hit the pillow. “All you need is a good right cross. Or a quick strike to the windpipe, or the knee, or the nuts.”

  Like the good student I am, I stop to take notes in the notebook I’ve brought outside: Block first. Punch throat. Kick groin.

  “There’s no such thing as a clean street fight. Once you’re in a fight, win.”

  “But is that fair?”

  “Fuck fair. Fair doesn’t matter. It’s already violent. Be the most violent.”

  There are tricks he learned in prison, distractions and deflections and quick ways of gaining an advantage. He explains these things the way an astronomer might explain the properties of gravity to his son: calmly, with a commitment to getting the details right.

  “If he walks up to you, spit in his face. When he goes to wipe it off, punch him in the throat with the side of your fist.” He shows me how to hold my hand to aim for the wind box.

  “If you have a stack of books in your hands, just walk up to him and toss them in the air. He’ll grab ’em. That’s just instinct. And in that second when his guard is down, you can break his nose.”