Colorado Boulevard

by Phoef Sutton

  By the time she pulled up in a red 1970 Buick GSX, Crush was curled on the step. Donleavy was sitting next to him, watching over him like a border collie tending a sick sheep.

  Gail got out, worried. “What’s wrong?”

  “Concussion,” Donleavy said. “He should see a doctor.”

  “I saw a doctor,” Crush said, eyes still closed. “He says I’m fine.”

  “He didn’t say that,” Donleavy said. “He said you should get an MRI.”

  “He says I should rest. I’ll rest.” Crush got up, all on his own, and walked to the car. “Thanks for worrying about me, Donleavy.” He swung open the driver’s door.

  “No,” Donleavy said. “Let Gail drive.”

  Crush looked at her as if she were a crazy person. “But I always drive.”

  Gail shoved him over to the passenger side and got behind the wheel. “Just this once.”

  Crush didn’t really fight it. “All right. Just this once.”

  Gail got in and Crush asked her, “What did you do with the ankle monitor?”

  “Don’t worry. I took care of it,” Gail said as she started the car. “Thanks,” she called out the window to Donleavy as she pulled out.

  Donleavy waved to her. “Get him to tell you what happened in 2000.”

  “Mind your own business,” Crush shouted back at her. The shouting was a bad idea; it made his head throb.

  He rubbed his temple and Gail noticed. “We’re getting you to a doctor,” she said.

  “No,” Crush said. “First, we’re going to a church.”

  “Did you get religion, Crush?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  Gail followed Crush’s directions and drove the Buick down San Rafael. Crush flexed his left foot when she touched the brakes, as if he was driving by remote control. To get his mind off the fact that he wasn’t behind the wheel, he caught Gail up to speed. “I have to talk to Noel,” he said finally. “He must have told somebody about his plan to get Zerbe arrested. They were waiting for him at the warehouse.”

  “Okay,” Gail said. “What else?”

  “What else what?”

  “Tell me what happened back in 2000,” Gail said.

  Crush frowned. “It’s only a ten-minute drive. It would take longer.”

  “Give me the short version.”

  “The short version isn’t possible.”

  “Sure it is. Come on, now, I know your mother was living with Emil.”

  “She was married to him. For almost a year.”

  “When you were sixteen?”

  “Seventeen.”

  She smiled. “I can’t picture you at seventeen, Crush.”

  “I haven’t changed much.”

  “And you lived back there. In that castle?”

  “Yep. Just like Downtown Abbey.”

  “Downton. Tell me about Renee Zerbe.”

  “She was their…I guess, my cousin. Emil’s brother’s daughter. We went to school together. Emil pulled some strings to get me into Pasadena Prep. I didn’t quite fit in.”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “Noel and Angela hated me at first. Hated me and my mother. K.C. was all right. I think he felt sorry for me. I know I felt sorry for him, growing up in that freak show.”

  “How did Renee treat you?”

  Crush was silent for a moment. “She was all right. But I didn’t hang out with them too much. I spent most of my time in my room, reading.”

  “Reading?”

  “Yeah, that’ll give you an idea how bored I was. That’s why I volunteered to be in the Rose Parade. It gave me something to do.”

  “You drove a float?”

  “I didn’t drive it. I was the animator.”

  “Animator?”

  “I operated the animation. The dinosaur’s tail. I wagged it.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “It was. At first.”

  Gail gripped the wheel uneasily as she asked, “And that’s how you found her father’s body?”

  “Yeah,” Crush said, “but everybody knows about that.”

  “How did Renee handle it?”

  “How do you think? I didn’t see her for a few weeks. Then…” Crush sighed. “My mom and Emil went out on a date one night and the kids had some friends over. To drink and smoke pot. And to play some stupid game.”

  “What game?”

  “One of those nerdy, geeky games nerdy geeks used to play back in the day. Dungeons & Dragons, I think. They were talking about gnomes and elves and orcs and throwing weird-shaped dice and doing all kinds of math and acting like it was fun. Maybe it was for them. I never really played a lot of games and I never liked math. Unless you count running numbers, which I guess is both.”

  “Was Renee there?”

  “Yes. Along with Evan Gibbard and Sonny Kraus. Those two were sort of interchangeable preppy punks. Evan was the blond Aryan mastermind, while Sonny was his dark-haired lackey. They did everything together. Smoked pot together. Cheated on tests together. They said they fucked girls together, though I don’t know why the girls were there, to be honest. Their real love affair seemed to be with each other.

  “Anyway, Noel was in charge of the game and he was asking the others if they’d ‘taken any damage.’ They all said ‘no,’ and Angela said Noel’s dragons were ‘asleep on the job’ and everybody laughed, like that made sense. Zerbe said he was going to throw an Acid Splash at the dragons, and he rolled his twenty-sided dice a couple of times and Noel added up the totals and said he missed and instead he hit Renee. Everybody found this hilarious too and they laughed and laughed. But Renee started crying and ran into the kitchen. They felt bad about that, but not bad enough to do anything.

  “Zerbe was the only one who ran after her. After a while, I went in, too, to see how they were getting along. Zerbe was standing there alone, looking all stunned. I asked what was wrong. He said Renee had cut her wrist and walked out into the yard.”

  “Whoa,” Gail said. “What did you do?”

  “I ran after her. She must have moved pretty fast because I couldn’t find her. She couldn’t have gone out through the gate. It was closed. So she must have headed across the backyard. To the Arroyo.

  “Angela ran up behind me and I told her to go back and call the police. She said Renee wouldn’t want that. They’d take her to the hospital and put her under observation. For some reason, I agreed that that made sense. I guess when you’re a teenager you just don’t trust the adult world to know best. Maybe you’re right not to.

  “I thought I heard footsteps in the distance, so I scrambled along the edge of the Arroyo, leaving Angela behind me. I went through the backyards of a couple of other estates until I made it to the Colorado Street Bridge. Suicide Bridge.”

  Gail shivered. “That’s an ugly nickname for such a pretty bridge.”

  “I don’t know,” Crush said. “If I was going to kill myself, I’d like to do it off a bridge like that. You’d have such a nice view all the way down.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Was Renee there?”

  Crush nodded. “They’d put high railings up there to discourage jumpers. I guess she just took that as a challenge, because she was climbing up the fence when I got there.

  “I ran onto the bridge and I called out to her. I walked up closer to her and I could see that she was bleeding from her wrist, but she hadn’t cut herself deep. That made me think that she didn’t really want to kill herself. That she wanted help and didn’t know how else to ask for it.

  “So I climbed outside the railing and held my hand out. She just looked at me and I thought I was supposed to say something, anything. Well, what do you say in a situation like that? I asked her why she was doing this.

  “She said, ‘Don’t you know I have the power of flight?’ I thought she was talking crazy. I said she didn’t. She said, ‘In the game, stupid. In D & D I can fly.’

  “I said,
‘I don’t know how to play that damn game.’ She said I should really learn. ‘It’s so much better than real life.’ I said real life wasn’t so bad. I said she had a lot to live for. She said, ‘Like what?’

  “I didn’t have an answer for that. So I just said her father would want her to live. She blew up at that. She started crying and screaming that her father didn’t kill himself. That the Nazis killed him.”

  “The Nazis?”

  “That’s what it sounded like to me. But then she said it was Zerbe’s fault. Then she said it was the Jews. She wasn’t acting rational.”

  “But she didn’t jump?”

  “She didn’t jump. She fell. She climbed to the top of the iron fence and let go. I don’t know how I caught her. I strained my back and wrenched both my shoulders, but I grabbed her and pulled her into my arms. I held her in my arms till the shaking stopped. Both hers and mine. Then I climbed back onto the bridge and dropped her on the pavement.”

  “Good for you, Crush.”

  “Yeah,” Crush said bitterly. “Good for me.”

  “So when did it happen?”

  Crush looked over at her, puzzled. “When did what happen?”

  “When did you fall in love with her?”

  Crush didn’t answer. They pulled up to the church and he hurried out of the Buick. He strode to a little outbuilding behind an old adobe church. It was a ramshackle structure that had looked like it was about to collapse for the past century. Sometimes the flimsiest things are the longest lasting.

  Gail caught up with him and stopped him at the door. “What are you going to do?” she asked him.

  “What do you think? I’m going to grab him and drag him out of there.”

  “You can’t do that,” Gail said.

  “Why not? I have to get answers from him.”

  “But this is a support group, Crush. You can’t violate that. You know that.”

  Crush shut his eyes in frustration. “You don’t even know what they’re supporting.”

  “Even so,” she said. “Wait till it’s over. There’s only another fifteen minutes.”

  “You don’t know that. It could be a marathon.”

  “How would you feel if somebody broke into an AA meeting and dragged somebody out?” she asked.

  Crush gripped the doorknob. “All right, I’ll wait. But I’m going in.”

  Gail tried to stop him but he pushed the door open and stepped in. The plywood walls of the room were lined with inspirational Christian posters. Underneath them were a number of old worn-out sofas, and the sofas were filled with people. People you might pass on the street and never notice. People of different ages and races and walks of life. The only thing they had in common was that they all called themselves Targeted Individuals. Whatever that meant.

  A woman in her mid-twenties was talking as they slipped in and took the last empty seats. Noel was sitting across the room, and he watched without expression as they settled onto the stained cushions. Crush noticed that there were no Big Books or pamphlets on display as was usually the case in twelve-step gatherings.

  “Okay,” the woman was saying in a faltering tone while brushing her long hair out of her eyes and wrapping her cardigan sweater around her like a security blanket, “my name is Amy and I’m a Targeted Individual.”

  “Hi, Amy,” the crowd said. Crush rolled his eyes and fidgeted impatiently while Gail smiled politely at the questioning gaze of a few other Targeted Individuals.

  Amy continued. “Until a couple of years ago, I didn’t even realize there was a name for what I am…a Targeted Individual. I didn’t know that was a thing, until…. Okay, let me start over. About three years ago I started to get these intense feelings of panic. It took me a long time to figure what it meant. I got a lot of…not mixed messages but mixed messages. I was new to the whole…not consciousness movement, but consciousness movement. I found that most of the time a Targeted Individual will experience extreme panic or a form of psychic attack. A lot of people in the Targeted Individual Community are convinced that the enemy is using actual weapons to do this. Like, they’ve got microwave weapons that they’re using. And that is true. There are people who’ve had documented experiences where they’ve come in contact with these weapons and they’ve seen them and they’ve experienced them first-hand. They cause extreme heat. You know, it’s a wave that’s being shot out of these weapons at a targeted person and it’s causing that person to, you know, feel different things.

  “But that’s not the only way that they do this. Now this might be extremely left field for most who won’t understand anything that I’m fixing to say, but we are more than just human beings. We have abilities that are encoded into our DNA. There have been studies throughout time about psychological…not transmutation but transmutation. There’s more than you can sense with your quote-unquote five senses. There are more senses in your brain than science or technology can even begin to understand. We are evolving and they want to stop us. It all goes along with…now I’m not trying to compare myself with Nicola Tesla, but he was a Targeted Individual. And they would steal his stuff. Like he would come up with the genius idea and this group of individuals would come in and steal it! And they’d try to destroy him. They didn’t want him live up to his full potential. He was trying to give people free electricity and free technology. And radio. I’m pretty sure that he invented radio, right? I don’t know, I’m not an expert on Nicola Tesla, but what I’m saying is, there are so many people out there that are being targeted and they don’t even know that they’re being targeted. They just think they’re having a shitty life. And they don’t know why. And it’s not okay. It’s not okay for these people to continue to do this. Like me. I would have these instances where they were trying to make me feel like a piece of shit. And it wasn’t my fault.

  “Did you know that if you’re a Targeted Individual everything you say and do is being recorded? It is. I know that as I am talking to you right now, in this room, every word I say is being recorded. I know it. I got to the point where I was scared shitless. Then I thought, fuck it, let them record me. They can’t hurt me any more than they already have. What can they find out about me? I’m not about to rob and steal. I’m not planning to blow up buildings. I’m not a part of Isis! I have vans, literally white vans that follow me wherever I go. Like, I’m at the bus stop, taking my kid to school and at the bus stop there’s a van that parks there every day and has for the last year and a half. With huge antennas on top of it. Can you explain that? Can you? And then it would start happening more and more. Like, I’m at Walmart and I come out and there’s a white fucking van with fucking antennas on top of it.

  “Now, I’m not saying that all Masons are bad. But I know that there are Masons who are involved in that practice of targeting these people. And hurting them. Trying to destroy them. I can’t post things on the internet without, it’s like jet lag, it takes a long time for them to be posted. It’s crazy. And a lot of people can’t handle it. Remember that lady who drove her fucking kids into the ocean? Remember that? And that lady, she was hearing fucking voices. That’s another thing they do when it comes to these fucking attacks, they’ll make you hear voices. I’ve never heard voices. I’ve never heard any buga-buga voices, but that’s ’cause my brain’s too strong to accept those vibrations. Well, I’ve heard voices sometimes, but just when I’m almost asleep and stuff. But when you hear voices and you go to therapy, some of these doctors are in on it! They’re in on the situation. So they’ll diagnose these people as paranoid schizophrenics. And as soon as you’re diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, your credibility is out the door. And that’s part of the way that it works! That’s all a part of the Overlords’ major plan! To stop evolution from occurring! I’m seeing so many people getting attacked!

  “So if you’re targeted and you’re spreading knowledge, I fucking love you, friend! I fucking love you. You’re not alone. Find groups like this. Don’t go shoot up schools for attention. Don’t do that. That’s bad.
It’s fucking sad that some people feel they have to go to those extremes to make themselves heard. Share the power. They can’t shut us up. There are way too many of us. Thanks. Did I go over my time?”

  Gail and Crush didn’t know how to react. They sat expressionless as everybody else in the room applauded. An African-American man wearing a chambray shirt over an old “Vote for Bernie” T-shirt nodded and said, “You went a little bit over, but that’s all right, we needed to hear that. Thank you, Amy.” He stood up and gave her a supportive hug. Everybody applauded that, too. This crowd really liked to applaud.

  When he was done hugging Amy, he looked around at the others. “Now, we’ve had some late arrivals. Would you like to introduce yourselves, using your first names only? I’m Will, by the way. I’m a Targeted Individual.”

  Everyone said, “Hi, Will,” in unison.

  An old man wearing a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap spoke up. “My name is Al. I’m a Targeted Individual.” At least the nuts in this crowd are bipartisan, Crush thought.

  Everyone said, “Hi, Al,” in unison. Then they turned to Gail and Crush. Crush cleared his throat. “My name is Caleb. I’m a Targeted Individual.”

  Everyone said, “Hi, Caleb,” and then it was Gail’s turn. She looked uncertain. “My name is Catherine. I don’t know what I am.” Everyone in the room looked a little sour but Will smiled at her in an understanding way.

  “We don’t any of us know who we are,” Will said. “Until we do.” He walked over and gave Gail a warm hug. Then he hugged Crush, too, just to be fair. “It takes a lot of courage to come here. Let’s all greet Catherine.”

  “Hi, Catherine,” they all said, shamed by Will into welcoming her.

  “You don’t have to testify yet,” Will went on. “Just sit and listen. But when you feel the urge, by all means speak up. This a place to be heard. It’s a safe place.” The room applauded that, too. “Now we open the room for anyone who wants to share for five minutes. No cross talk, please. If anyone feels triggered by the testimony, please signal by raising your hand. Who would like to begin?”