“You wish. Every film costume comes with a certificate of authenticity from the studio. Falsifying one of those is worse than murder in this city.”
“Wow.”
“Last week a store down the street bought the DeLorean from Back to the Future. It was sitting on the back lot at Universal rotting away. You should go check it out if you’re into these things. This area is full of film-memorabilia stores.”
Henry moved his long hair away from his eyes and I noticed there was something wrong with his ear. It was almost nonexistent, eaten away. I tried to look elsewhere, pretending not to notice, but he sighed immediately.
“Yep…I don’t have an ear.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“No problem. That’s why I keep my hair over it. I hate getting those fake heartfelt looks. It’s just an ear.”
“Yes, well…”
“Did you drive here?” he asked.
“No, I walked.”
“You live close?”
“Not really.”
“A Valley walker. I used to do that. Met a lot of weirdos that way.”
“Well I’m sure they must have said the same about you.”
“Right.”
We both laughed.
Henry walked me home. He said the sameness of Sepulveda soothed him also.
“Every time I walk in front of this place I think about my mom. I imagine dropping her off here and never picking her up again,” he said, pointing to an overweight lady in a Jenny Craig parking lot.
“So where is she?” I asked. “Your mom.”
Henry tilted his head toward me to hear me better from his functioning ear. He shifted his weight from one side to the other, leaning in just enough to not look like a deaf old man.
“At home. She can’t really move. She’s obese.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Not kidding. She’s huge. Like seriously morbidly obese. She’s horrible. I hate her.”
“But you work in her shop.”
“It’s a job.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have a different employer?”
“Well, it’s actually kind of awesome having a boss who is never around. I do whatever I want, like walk sad Italians home in the middle of the afternoon.”
I laughed. I was drawn to his missing ear. It wasn’t entirely missing. The lower lobe was there, just curled inward, like the tail end of a fat snail. I tried to scrutinize it from up close each time the wind stirred his long mane, but Henry was quick to pat the hair back down.
We walked past the Crown Car Wash and Henry turned in to a strip mall. He asked me if I had ever been to the twenty-four-hour Taiwanese party store. I had to meet those guys, he said. They sold everything from balloons to drugs to desserts and iced teas.
“They’ll sell you cigarettes even if you’re underage. Two bucks for a pack of Camel Lights.”
Inside the store Henry high-fived a group of quiet Taiwanese kids in oversize starched baseball caps. He introduced me and ordered us a bubble tea, an ice-blended drink filled with floating fruit jellies. It was overly sweet and toxic and delicious. That taste was the first magical thing that had happened in my neighborhood.
When we reached Sunny Slope Drive, Henry took a look at my house from the front yard. The lights were on inside. We could see Serena in the kitchen with her apron on.
“Seems like a nice place to be.”
“Sometimes.” I smiled.
He leaned into me and kissed both my cheeks.
“Isn’t that how you Italians do it?”
5
“We cannot be happy in this land if we don’t pay tribute to the people who originally inhabited it,” my mother proclaimed. She had concluded her repertoire of books and biographies on the Sioux tribe and felt that in order to love America, we had to see it as it was originally imagined. Shortly after our family-lunch fiasco, Robert the Goth went off his medications and had a psychotic breakdown. He ran away from his art-school campus and tried to electrocute himself on a high-voltage security fence. He needed a couple of weeks off from work while he got back on his feet and started his new pills, so my father had time to kill.
We made a Thanksgiving trip of it and visited the battlefield of the Wounded Knee Massacre of the Lakota at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. My grandmother would not come in the Cadillac convertible. She hated it and said it was ridiculous and uncomfortable, so we bought a used Pontiac station wagon with tinted windows for $500. It took us three days and a few mechanical problems to get to South Dakota.
When we arrived we drove straight to the reservation. We parked in an empty lot by the mass grave. When the engine was turned off, the valley around us hummed. My mother got out and scurried to the trunk. She had been preparing for this moment. We would pay tribute to the deceased souls of the Lakota and honor the fact that they were there before anybody else. She decided we would plant cyclamen bulbs by the graves and say a prayer. She had packed a suitcase full of loose flower seeds as well as a pile of white rags we should wear for the ceremony.
“A hundred years ago, three hundred Indian men, women, and children were massacred by American troops,” Serena said solemnly as she passed around the faded garments. She did not find anything that fit my grandmother, so she gave her an old white bedsheet, insisting she take her clothes off and wrap herself in it “as a sign of respect.”
“I’m not going to do that,” my grandmother replied. She got back in the car and shut the door. “I am not getting arrested for being naked again, and I am not walking around in a bedsheet.”
“Stop acting like a baby!” Serena complained.
My grandmother stomped her feet and remained glued to the backseat of the Pontiac.
“You can’t make me do this.”
“Fine! When the spirit of Spotted Elk comes to you in the form of a fierce antelope and tries to stab you with his horns, don’t tell me I didn’t warn you!”
Timoteo and I rolled our eyes. This was a typical phenomenon that followed our mother’s intensive research phases: clippings, books, excessive enthusiasm, then playing the victim if others dissented from her opinions.
“I’m not going to that stupid grave site. I’m not afraid of Spotted Elk and I am not wearing this!” My grandmother took the bedsheet, threw it out the window, and locked the car.
“These people were here first!” Serena pounded her fist on the glass.
“They can stay here for all I care! I’m going back to Italy in one month and you know what?” She rolled down the window so we could all hear her. “I think you should do the same! You can’t just carry your kids with you everywhere you go.”
“I do whatever I want with my children!” my mother screamed at her. “They love me and are happy to follow us whatever we choose to do, right, kids?”
We did not answer.
“See!” my grandmother squealed.
Serena’s lip started to quiver. I knew what was coming.
“There you go. I can never do anything right, can I?” She broke down crying in the barren South Dakota field. “All you do is complain! I’m just trying my best!” she wailed in a fit of self-pity.
Making a scene inside the quiet cemetery seemed wrong. I hated seeing my mother sob. Her melodramatic tantrums always caught me off guard. I didn’t like it when our roles reversed, when she cried like a baby and I had to be the grown-up. I would do everything I could to stop her from going down that route.
“We’d follow you anywhere. We are all happy to be here.” I tried to console her with a hug.
My father wrapped his arms around her also. He knew the drill. He told her how much we all adored Native Americans. There was no other place we’d rather be than the barren battlefield of Wounded Knee.
“Then is it so much to ask of you to put some white clothes on?” Serena whimpered.
My grandmother scoffed from her seat in the car, crossed her arms, and mumbled, “Manipulative bitch.”
�
��What did you say, Mom?” my mother snapped, peering through the window.
“Nothing,” I interjected. “She just doesn’t want to wear the white robe.”
“Sheet!” my grandmother screamed from the car. “Bedsheet, not robe!”
I found a sleeveless baby doll nightgown in my suitcase and gave it to my grandmother to wear over her clothes, but Serena kept frowning, unconvinced. She handed my brother his outfit: extra-large white boxers and a T-shirt that belonged to my father.
“I don’t want to go around in Dad’s underwear,” he complained, but our mother’s lip trembled again and he put on the boxers without further discussion.
My father wore yoga pants and a long-sleeved Indian shirt. My mother slipped into a white tunic-style nightgown and I put on yellowing thermal pajamas from the Salvation Army.
Together, finally, we walked toward the site.
The aluminum fence that guarded the Wounded Knee burial grounds was shut. Inside were dusty graves and a chapel that was missing part of its roof. White bunnies scavenged for food, unafraid to get close. We hopped over and pried the gate open so grandma could get in. The great battlefield was silent. It was freezing. A brutal, dry wind scratched our skins. We stood next to one another in front of the mass grave where hundreds of Sioux had been buried. A wooden plaque told us we were officially on a U.S. National Historic Landmark, but it didn’t feel like it. We were the only visitors. The graves were falling apart, some were so dirty it was impossible to read them. Others were made from mud, decorated with skimpy wooden crosses impaled in the soil before them.
My mother’s eyes swelled with tears. She had been reading about this battle for months. She thought we would be visiting some kind of Holocaust museum, but we were all discovering America wasn’t interested in conserving certain chapters of its history. She read out loud from a cement slab that vaguely resembled an obelisk: “In memory of the Chief Big Foot massacre December 29, 1890. Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here.”
“Is this it?” My grandmother sighed as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I didn’t want to come to this stupid site anyway.”
Serena ignored her and let her grumble away. She held my hand and my brother’s, then closed her eyes in prayer.
“Dear Sioux, I bring you my family and ask you to welcome them to your land. We know this country belonged to you first and we want you to know we come in peace. Namaste.”
My brother elbowed me.
“That’s not the Native American way of saying ‘peace.’ It’s Indians from India who say that,” I corrected her timidly.
Serena shot me a look.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s the energy the word carries that counts. You should know that.”
“Amen,” concluded my father.
The high sun emanated a metallic light that cast a wild luminescence on the tall grass around us. The wind blew through the holes in my Salvation Army thermal underwear. We were all too vulnerable under the huge South Dakota sky. It felt like it would swallow us whole, inter us into its sacred land with the lost tribes.
We planted Serena’s cyclamen bulbs close to the mass grave. We all knew they would never turn into flowers. A graceful hawk circled in the sky. On our way out we noticed a large FOR SALE sign on the back side of the cemetery’s fence. The eighty acres of the Wounded Knee Historic Landmark were being offered for more than a million dollars by the owner of the land. What was left of the Sioux tribe could not afford the price.
—
From the parking lot, the Prairie Wind Casino and Hotel looked more like a warehouse than a hotel. A long, horizontal cement structure extended from both sides of a faux-tepee sculpture that served as an iconic entrance gate. On each side of the building, rusty billboards depicted multicolored horses galloping into the wind.
“Feel the Wind and Feel the Win!” an advertisement said.
My mother was drawn to the idea that the place was owned and run by the Sioux. Choosing to stay there was a way to pay them back. While my parents checked in, through the revolving doors I caught a glimpse of a lonely Native American Elvis impersonator getting hammered at the bar, preparing for his evening performance. We were all aware we had ended up in a desperate place in the middle of nowhere, but we also knew that saying anything would precipitate Serena’s final breakdown and ruin the rest of our vacation. We made a silent pact not to mention drunk Elvis or the senile gamblers who sat like zombies in front of the slot machines next door.
Thanksgiving lunch was served at the casino buffet. We could eat all we wanted for $13.99. My mother’s quasi-religious views about Indians and their tribes, about the purity we had to give back to the once-virgin land, disappeared into a plate of turkey nuggets and canned cranberry sauce. Over our heads TV screens looped diamond-studded gambling catchphrases: “Cold Days, Hot Cash!”
A giant turkey with dollar bills coming out of its tail fan winked: “Free Thanksgiving bingo. We’ll give you something to be thankful for!”
I forced myself to eat and smile and prayed that my mother’s furrowed brows would smooth out over her eyes, that her lip would stop trembling and time would go by fast.
—
The five of us stayed in the casino’s Black Elk Imperial Suite so we could all fit. The kitchenette was decorated with a framed portrait of the very white Charles Fey of San Francisco, the man who invented the first slot machine. “A big THANK YOU Mr. Fey!” read a golden plaque beneath him. We visited a hot tub in a glass house in the casino’s internal courtyard. The water was lukewarm and brownish, but hot tubs were exciting for my family. Any kind of pool or water container that fit people was. If it had the ability to produce bubbles, generate heat, and massage body parts with jets, it made an entire journey worthwhile.
We bathed in silence. Nobody else was in the glass house.
My grandmother, in a golden one-piece bathing suit, exhaled through the vapors. Her hair turned turquoise under the neon lights. She was trying to get the sore parts of her lower back directly in front of the tub’s jet. I imitated her and sat in front of the gushing water, pretending I also suffered from incurable ailments.
“Watch out for hemorrhoids! They can creep up on you if you let the jets in your anus” she warned me.
I didn’t know what hemorrhoids were but I knew I didn’t want anything in my anus that was problematic for my grandmother’s. I floated under the neon lights. The windows got fogged up. We were bathing in a hospital room and I knew then, with complete lucidity, I did not want to be there.
6
Dear Mary, please forgive me and please make sure my parents forgive me. It is time for me to leave. I cannot stay in this country with them. I must find a solution. I know you were a teenager when you had Jesus so you must know what it feels like to be handed a situation that is unmanageable. You might think giving birth to the son of God is more traumatic than living in Van Nuys, but I think that’s because when you were alive you never visited the San Fernando Valley. It’s easier to be a virgin who gives birth than to be an Italian who lives on Victory and Sepulveda. Amen.
Ettore and Serena came back that night elated from playing blackjack—the free drinks in the game room yielded the desired effect. When they fell asleep I packed a bag with peanuts, tonic water, two small bottles of vodka, a banana from the minibar, and ran away from the Prairie Wind Casino and Hotel. A bunch of local kids were partying at the hot-tub glass house, skinny-dipping and drinking whiskey from bottles. A good sign from Mother Mary. I walked straight into the glass house and picked out the man I thought might save me: Alo. He vaguely resembled Ethan Hawke. If I worked with my imagination, I could pretend he was a celebrity. I didn’t know how to approach him because he was naked and pale, so I went back outside, opened my bag, and downed my minibar vodkas for courage. I waited a few minutes until I was sure my good judgment was impaired. In my mind it was imperative that I make a wrong choice that night. Any wrong choice. It was the only way to break free.
I observed the vaporous glass house from outside and admired the flashing breasts and butts simmering in the tub. As soon as Alo left the group to get cigarettes, I took a breath and made my move. I asked him for a smoke and drunkenly introduced myself to him, trying not to look below his waistline. I told him I was Italian and traveling around the United States alone, looking to have fun.
“Do you have any weed or hash or Jack Daniel’s?” I asked plainly.
Alo exhaled his Marlboro Red and looked at me with focused, excited eyes.
“Are you for real? Where have you been all my life?”
I laughed lasciviously.
He said smoking pot was a sacred thing and it was important to do it in the solitude of nature. He saluted his drunk naked friends and loaded me into a pickup truck. We drove toward the hills.
Alo was half white and half Native American. His name meant “he who looks up,” he said. Normally he lived in Ventura, a small surfing town north of Los Angeles, but on holidays he came to South Dakota to visit his mother—a cocktail waitress from Nevada who worked at the Prairie Wind Casino. She had married and divorced a Sioux man with a drinking problem who lived on the reservation and got in trouble. Alo didn’t say how, but I gathered he was in jail.
“Oh my God, we, like, share so much!” I exclaimed, forcing a Valley girl accent. “I totally live in Los Angeles also. I mean that’s where my stuff is while I travel around.” It was the first time the Greater Los Angeles area had given me something in common with somebody else.
“That’s cool. I escaped South Dakota when I was your age, but it was too far away to get anywhere. I had to wait a few years before things got fun.”
“Oh, I’m not a runaway. My parents know I travel. They’re bohemians.”
I didn’t know where my proclamations came from but I felt they were sending me in the right direction.
We were the only car on the interstate. The full moon was rising in the sky. I had never seen such a gleaming ball of light. Everything in America—even the moon—was bigger. We pulled off the highway onto a winding dirt road that led into the woods.
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake Page 5