Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

“Yes, a snack.”

  “No thanks. I said I don’t eat. Food is weird.”

  I turned around, embarrassed, and headed for my bedroom.

  “Hey!” he called after me. “I’m watching Nekromantik. You want to watch it with me?”

  “Sure. Is it a comedy?”

  “It’s a story of a couple that gets off on fucking corpses.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “It’s the sexiest thing in the world.”

  We sat side by side in the dark, never touching. I could smell him. My first American male smell. It wasn’t a great smell, a bit sickly, but I welcomed it. We could be friends, I thought. We had things in common. I didn’t know what they were, but I was sure they existed.

  On screen the male protagonist unearthed a dead body from a cemetery and started to fuck it. Robert said that was so hot. I glanced at him from the corner of my eyes.

  “Yeah, that is hot,” I said.

  He drummed his fingers on his knees and picked his nose once, but I told myself I wouldn’t mind.

  Later on we all gathered at the table. Serena had cooked lunch. When I sat down, Ettore said that sunbathing topless by the blow-up pool made me look like a poor man’s Lolita. “It’s very cheap and you’re distracting my co-worker,” he complained in Italian. Never mind that he and Serena walked around the yard completely naked every day. I was to follow different rules. Especially when Robert was present.

  Robert was uncomfortable with his name being tossed around in another language. He was also uncomfortable with the quantity of food on the table and the number of family members gathered around it. Serena served spaghetti with fried zucchini flowers, humming over the awkward silence.

  Robert stared down at his pasta and tried to roll it in his fork.

  My grandmother sneered at him and pointed to his plate.

  “Americans don’t know how to roll spaghetti.”

  Robert looked at me for guidance. “What’s everyone saying about me?”

  “She said you’re no good at rolling your noodles,” Timoteo explained.

  I kicked him under the table.

  Exasperated by his bowl of recalcitrant food, Robert finally asked my mother for a knife, but they all stared him down and shook their heads disapprovingly.

  “Macché, knife! If you go to Italy and cut spaghetti, what will people think of you?” my father scoffed.

  “That you’re an idiot! A dumb American idiot!” my grandmother lashed out.

  Robert put his fork down.

  “Was it too al dente?” Serena asked, desperate for approval. “You don’t like it? But you are like a skeleton! Do you eat at home?”

  “We eat, just not all eat at the same time or around a table. Normal people don’t always eat together, you know,” Robert mumbled.

  Timoteo translated for my grandmother.

  “Normal people?” she said, gasping at his black lipstick and piercings. “He looks like the Antichrist!”

  “What did she say again?” Robert asked.

  “She thinks it’s not true American families don’t always eat at the table together,” I said, lying.

  “That’s terrible!” Serena sighed. “Your mom doesn’t cook for you?”

  “My mom is dead.”

  Everyone finally shut up.

  —

  That night I had a high fever from extreme sun exposure. I closed my eyes in bed, hallucinating and meditating on the effects Robert and the necrophiliac couple had on me. I was a corpse dressed in rags, washed up on a riverbank. Robert carried my limp body in the moonlight. My consumed, translucent flesh—soft and covered in mud—was his. His bony fingers crept up my legs, pulling rags up my thighs. My impotence got him hard. He made love to me, respectfully at first and becoming progressively rougher, pulling clumps of dead hair out of my skull until, when my head was almost shiny, he shoved me firmly against a tree and fucked me. I came and then fell asleep. I dreamed I was Sue Lyon, the actress from Lolita, aged and overweight, sipping on milk shakes and chewing on pizza. A poor man’s Lolita.

  4

  After the first month of school I’d earned my right to attend a regular English class, but I soon realized it was just a few steps above the ESL class. Most of my classmates could not read or write. Spelling tests included words like “tomorrow” and “teenager.” Arash sat in my row and left the page blank. He did not speak to me in class, but when his friends weren’t looking, he rolled his eyes and asked me to speak Greek to him because he thought it was hot. I didn’t know what to say so I listed Italian food items.

  “Prosciutto, mortadella, carciofi alla giudìa, melanzane alla parmigiana.”

  “Man o bokon—have sex with me,” he answered, thinking I was trying to seduce him.

  He spat out the window and whistled at the girls who passed by below our classroom. The teacher could not keep him or anyone else under control. The rest of the students only stopped screaming when she sniveled.

  My most challenging course was Physical Education. A gigantic coach with shiny red hair who looked like a walrus commanded us to run for what felt like miles around a football field. My legs were long, but I was stooped and slow. There was only one person worse than me on the track—a tiny Persian doll with a seventies wedge hairstyle and a big mole on her chin. Her head was disproportionately large and looked like it would unhinge from her neck with a small push. Neither the coach nor any of our classmates seemed to have any interest in her. She could not run. She could not jump. She could not catch balls. Under a slight mustache her swollen lips exuded a patina of saliva. Nobody got close to her. She stared vacantly into space until she caught up with me on the racetrack. I was dragging my feet to finish my first mile—hand lodged over my aching spleen. We’d been lapped by our classmates and still managed to be the last ones running. She gave me her bony hand to shake. Her name was Azar and her wrist was the size of two fingers squeezed together. She looked ill and desperate and begged me to be her friend. “Or just pretend like you are my friend in this class,” she said. “Be my PE buddy, please.”

  I agreed to be Azar’s friend in gym class, but when I saw Arash again during lunch break he said that was a terrible choice for a new girl in school. He tapped my shoulder in front of the football field, cigarette dangling from his lips, waiting for me. His theory was that as long as you kept moving nobody noticed.

  “Azar is a weirdo. Like she’s actually half mentally retarded and has a growth disorder. If you hang out with her, people will think you’re a loser like her.”

  “It’s okay. She’s not a loser.”

  “I’m just saying. She’s totally uncool. She’s like a half cousin so I feel bad saying it, but it’s true. I’m just trying to help you out.”

  We crossed a picnic bench area and Arash flipped his cigarette butt into the dirt, quietly agreeing to guide me through the school grounds so I’d get my bearings. He didn’t say it, but I knew that’s what he was doing and I was grateful for it.

  “Hey, is it true women in Greece don’t shave their armpits?”

  “Look, I’m Italian, not Greek. And anyway it’s a political choice,” I said, trying to defend myself.

  “You go topless at the beach, right?”

  “Yes, of course. We are topless and proud and we don’t get stupid tickets for being naked,” I insisted.

  “You know what? You’re kind of hot the way you talk all strict and serious and shit. Makes me pop a boner.”

  “Makes you what?”

  He took my hand and put it on his jeans. “New girl in town gotta learn what’s what.” He giggled.

  We arrived in front of the cafeteria area. Arash stole a small carton of chocolate milk from a tray on a table and opened it. He said I looked like a sorry ass walking around not knowing what to do. There was no Greek-Sicilian section in school, but I might get along with Jewish Israelis. They were peaceful and hung out under the only trees in the school yard. “They listen to Dylan and dye their hair green,” he said. I could also bec
ome friends with Chris. He pointed him out. He was a kind of stoner-looking dude with a beanie, bloodshot almond-shaped eyes, and beautiful long brown hair partly tied back with hemp string and beads. He was playing hacky sack alone. He was always alone, Arash said. He’d grown up in some kind of hippie situation in Topanga Canyon and had no social skills. But the good thing about that was that he had access to incredible weed. He was a superb pot dealer and if I wanted to purchase anything I should always go to him. His stuff came from a commune up in the canyon. It was the best in the Valley.

  Arash led the way out of the cafeteria toward an abandoned baseball field where he dropped me off. A group of Mexican punk rockers with bags under their eyes were smoking cigarettes.

  “For now hang out with these guys. They are anarchists. They don’t give a fuck who you are or where you come from.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hey! Don’t you fucking say ‘hi’ to me when you see me with my friends, though. I only like you ’cause I went to Greece that one time.”

  He came close to me and gave me a hug.

  “And don’t look so scared all the time. It’s a sign of weakness.”

  I forced a confident smirk and wiped a chocolate-milk stain from his lips. “So is milk on your lips.”

  He had long lashes and dark eyes that were more profound than he thought. He also had a boxy, fat chin. It was manly and square with a deep dimple in the center that made me think he was courageous, like Kirk Douglas. A chin that was ready for fatherhood or gladiatorhood. A chin that made me trust him. I now had a PE buddy and a protector in school. I was moving up.

  —

  The Mexicans on the field all looked younger than me. Many didn’t speak English. They barely said hello, but it was true, they did not mind having me there. I sat on the ground, smoked cigarettes, and read my feminist tract. At the edge of the field I noticed the girl who had snuck out of the tardy hall on the first day of school. She was a roamer, never remaining in one place. Every time I saw her, a door was opening before or closing behind her. She walked swiftly alongside the school fence. She threw her backpack over it, climbed up, and jumped off, disappearing down a residential street—long copper hair bouncing off her shoulders. In just a few seconds she was free.

  When school was out I emulated her. Wandering and meandering across the grids that formed the San Fernando Valley became part of my daily ritual. I picked Sepulveda. It was the longest road in Los Angeles and the closest big boulevard to my house. Nobody walked there, but I did. It happened naturally. At first I thought it was the ugliest street I’d ever seen. Every parking lot was fenced with barbed wire and there were often rags and bibs stuck in the metal spikes. There was a series of dismal strip malls featuring obscure Mexican fast-food chains, cycles of used-car lots, and Jenny Craigs. But day after day, the street began to transform in my eyes. The more I walked, the more the ugliness became part of my everyday life and those barbed-wire fences and strip malls became what I began to recognize as my neighborhood. A local reality. It didn’t smell like freshly baked pizza from Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, but it was familiar. A new form of familiar. I knew, for example, that when I saw the neon sombrero of the Mexican fast-food restaurant or the golden crown from the Crown Car Wash sign, it meant I was approaching my house. I started to look forward to those little landmarks and creating my own mythological stories about the place I inhabited. I stumbled on Sound City Studios, a crumbling recording studio just a few blocks from my house. It was a former Vox music-equipment factory nestled in front of a Budweiser Brewery that spouted nauseating fumes from its chimneys. From the parking lot it looked like another desolate Van Nuys store, but one day I saw Zack de la Rocha from Rage Against the Machine leaning on a car outside, smoking a cigarette. I came closer and since the studio door was open, I peeked inside. It smelled like cat urine. It was dark and dirty, but the walls were lined with rows of gold and platinum records: Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead had all recorded their most iconic albums there. The place had almost gone bankrupt in the eighties until Nirvana decided it would be where they would record Nevermind. That had happened just a year earlier. On the walls I saw intimate snapshots pinned to a corkboard of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl playfully grappling each other. As for many people my age, Nirvana was the fuel to deal with pain and anxiety. Kurt’s deep blue eyes seemed to reassure me. If he had turned Van Nuys in his favor, I could too.

  Walking in LA meant crossing paths with people you wouldn’t normally mix with. If you were a girl it also meant getting honked at. On Sepulveda a car passenger rolled down the window and screamed at me once. I didn’t understand anything except for “Baby,” but a tall Hispanic girl wearing a sequined minidress and slouched against a streetlight in front of a Food 4 Less stared me down, thinking I was trying to steal her job. She was as big as a man, with broad shoulders and a faint beard stubble. “It’s my block, girl,” she hissed and I kept going. I’d cross paths with her again and always made sure she understood I was just a pedestrian, one of the few.

  During one of my treks down Sepulveda I ended up on Ventura Boulevard—the only Valley street that did not have a cookie-cutter suburban feel. A sign in front of a shop called Archstone Vintage and Rentals read: “Welcome to the world’s longest avenue of contiguous businesses. We apologize for not living up to your expectations.” The place seemed closed. The storefront was a dusty display of antique dolls in Western costumes, some with no eyes or hair. A scarecrow sat in a wheelchair holding on its lap a pile of lunch boxes from the eighties. I pushed the door open. A guy with long hair and a Metallica T-shirt sat on a swivel chair with his feet up on a counter.

  “What’s up?” he greeted me.

  “Can I come in?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “You sure this is what you were looking for? Nobody comes in here.”

  “The storefront seemed interesting.”

  “Oh, the broken dolls? Phoebe says they’re antique.”

  I made my way into the dusty alcove.

  “Which they are if you consider that this one”—he got up and pulled a doll with a half-shut glass eye from a shelf—“was the initial tester for Chucky.”

  “Who’s Chucky?”

  “You’re not from around here?”

  “No, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Is it something from a film?”

  “Almost everything you see in this shop was, once. Even the scarecrow on the wheelchair. It was in Devourandia. Ever seen that weird film?”

  I couldn’t believe a prop from Max’s movie had made it to the store.

  “I know the person who produced it. He’s a family friend.”

  The guy didn’t seem impressed. “Max Velasquez? He’s the one who sold me the pieces. I think he was a bit low on cash.”

  “I doubt it. He’s friends with Phil Collins, you know. He wrote the lyrics to ‘Another Day in Paradise.’ ”

  “It’s a shitty song,” he said with a sneer. “He should be punished for that.”

  I was surprised to think that Max, with his grandiose attitude, would be selling props to a store like this one.

  “Simone de Beauvoir, huh?” he said, noticing the book peeking out of my bag. “Why are you reading that? Didn’t she, like, promote castration or something?”

  “What? No! She was an existentialist. She thought women were condemned in a world built for men.”

  “A ballbuster.”

  “She laid the foundations for the second wave of feminism. She’s incredible. I take this book with me wherever I go. As a statement,” I said, proudly.

  “Well, you shouldn’t. In fact you should hide it. Nobody reads in LA.” When he spoke, his lips curled forward in a heart shape that gave him a gay affectation. He had an aquiline nose and wild, squinty, light blue eyes.

  “I’m Eugenia. I’m Italian.”

  “Hey, I’m Henry and I’m poor.”

  We shook hands. His was pudgy and dirty.

  “You hate it here,
I can tell.”

  I nodded.

  “How’s school? Have you been recruited by cheerleaders?”

  “I can’t even jump on one leg.”

  “Sad. Want to smoke pot?” he proposed, bouncing off his chair. He locked the front door and huffed. “Nobody is going to come in anyway.”

  We walked to a small bathroom in the back. He loaded a bong and passed it to me. I’d never seen such an instrument. I took one hit and soon the store felt like a cozy gigantic piece of velvety fabric. I walked around the dusty wonderland in awe: Elvira’s original makeup set was on display in the Thriller section next to a hat that belonged to Bela Lugosi. Capes from Dracula went for under $100. Wonder Woman belts sold for $90. There were three of them on the hips of disfigured mannequins.

  A photo album from the fifties traced the history of the training of Lassie, the collie dog from the TV series. Vinyl records, old photos stuck together, ice skates—everything was bundled in moldy piles.

  “Phoebe is a fat-ass hoarder,” Henry explained. “She has a hard time letting go of things. I hate working here. It’s all going to shit.”

  “Phoebe is the owner?”

  “Yes. She’s my mother. She used to be a costume designer in the seventies, but then got addicted to crack, got out of crack, started shooting heroin, then got clean. Now she just drinks diet soda and eats junk food.”

  I liked his matter-of-fact way of speaking. He handed me a picture of an airline attendant from the sixties that was hanging next to a mirror.

  “That’s her when she was young. She was actually beautiful before she started using. So, like, she was beautiful until she was twelve.”

  I arched my brow at him.

  “I’m kidding, but not really.” He chuckled.

  He took out a big cardboard box from the back of the room and stabbed it with a knife. It was full of vintage clothes. I passed my fingers over a flimsy Dracula cape. It seemed too cheap to have been in a movie, but Henry explained that everything that was made for films was that way. It wasn’t meant to last.

  “Can’t you just sell fake things and pretend they’re original?” I asked.