“Do you have the Weirdos?” I shout over the stack before she speaks.
“Hey! I was next!” she says, shoving me out of the way. Dog and Butterfly by Heart slips from beneath her arm and she kneels down to readjust her pile.
“We’re the only ones in here, jerk,” I tell her. A white head, an old snowy peak, emerges from behind the pile.
“Sold one last week. Want me to order it?”
“No, it’s okay, I’ll go to the Tower. What about Team Dresch?”
“Who?” asks Sarah, standing.
“It’s queercore,” I say.
“We sure do.” He emerges from behind the register like the Wizard of Oz, shorter and more human than one would expect. I follow him to the used section and he pulls it out from behind the T card. “We’ve got Personal Best, want it?”
“Yes, please,” I say nodding. He walks back to the register and climbs the little steps back to his stool. He punches it in and I can hear him place it in a plastic bag. Sarah stands, trying to keep all her records in her grasp, mouth open, like I’ve just fucked a horse in front of her.
“Rude, much?” she asks, still glaring at me.
“That’ll be eight fifty,” he says. I hand the money over and he hands the bag down.
“Thanks!”
“Yup,” he answers unenthusiastically.
Sarah hands over her records next, head still twisted in my direction in disbelief and disgust.
“Close it,” I say, tapping her chin, “You’ll catch the airborne herps.”
“Oh, this is one of my favorites!” says the disembodied voice of old register hippie. “American Beauty was the album that defined the Dead! I listened to this on my drive from New York to LA in ’71. Just a record player plugged into a generator in the backseat, bumping along as we went …” The old man fades into the background and I can hear Sarah saying some boring business back as she hands more records over. I pull the Dresch album from the bag and look at Donna Dresch’s face. It feels cool, real good and cool.
We sit in Garfield Park in South Pasadena, eating sushi we five fingered from Bristol Farms. Sarah starts to pull her albums out and spreads them in front of her, arranged like a fan. She opens Goats Head Soup. “I can’t wait to listen to this.”
“My dad’s got that,” I say. “It’s good, I guess.” She puts it back in its sleeve.
“Hey, what’s going on between you and Dan? Is this all for him? This punk stuff?”
“What?” I ask, honestly confused. “Dan Martínez?”
“Well, yeah, obviously he likes you.”
“Obviously you’re crazy. He’s nice, I don’t know, we have English together. He was my carpool.”
“Thanks, by the way, for offering to take me to school.”
“Come on, you have Marc’s car. I thought you wanted to drive yourself. You made a big deal about it last year.”
“Yeah but, he’s called you on the phone, right?” she asks, ignoring me.
“He called me once, to invite me to the Malahini.”
“You went to the Malahini? You never told me that.”
“Yeah I did.”
“No you didn’t. When?”
“I don’t know, like a month ago.”
“Well, do you like him?” I look at Sarah as she bites into a piece of California roll and for a minute, with the sun shining down through the oak trees across her freckles and pale skin, lighting up the green and blue flecks in her eyes and long straight black hair, over her ruffled, hippie button-up shirt with the strawberries and snails on it, and her blue corduroy sailor pants, I see what boys see. Beauty. Her small thin waist and big boobs, pure hot, high school beauty. “I wonder why you aren’t more popular.”
“What?” she coughs. “What is going on with you, man? Is your brain scrambled in the frying pan or what?”
“It’s just that you’re so hot, and I’m like, your only friend.”
“Man,” she says, putting the container lid on her sushi and stuffing her albums back into their plastic bag. Soy sauce and wasabi drip onto her California rolls. “I want to go home,” she says, standing.
“Why?”
“Why? Why? Are you crazy? Look, I don’t know if I want to hang out for a while. I think you need to like, reevaluate yourself or whatever.”
×
I have the quiet of my imagination. I have the peace of mind given to me by solitude. In Northern California as a child the river ran along the side of my window, yellow, purple, red, green, blue. Rainbow fish leapt above the bank, catching a butterfly caught in the beauty of the sun. I had books. I had me. Myself. I. Later I had music. I have alone, everything this mind can imagine. And here, now, I have you, following me to the end.
×
Lyla lies across the couch, her feet dangling over the edge. Lyla leaves a pair of white dance gloves on the kitchen table, their wrists stained with cover-up. Lyla comes home with a group of kids costumed up like cross-dressing Nazis and heads into her room and slams the door. Cocteau Twins blares out from underneath, making the walls shake. Lyla leaves me locked in the car while she heads across the long parking lot toward the mall, says, don’t move. Lyla comes home late and dad comes racing out of the bedroom, fists clenched, shouting. Lyla jumps and covers her face. We’re at a Round Table in Gilroy, a little girl across from us in the dark parking lot is pulled from inside the dimly lit restaurant by a father, he’s drunk and snarling, she whines and sobs, he’s drunk. She knows it but there’s nothing she can do, because she’s a child and it’s time to go home.
×
Chelo and I walk into the party and I can tell things are about to get real cinema tonight. It’s a night when this city we live in really shows itself. There is a giant midcentury modern glass wall that hangs over a cliff of the South Pasadena hills and stares straight into Highland Park, Montecito Heights, Lincoln Heights, and downtown. We all sort of pause and bump into one another’s heels when we enter the giant wooden 1940s carved oak door. A large bull head resembling Picasso’s bull masks is carved into the wood, a gothic bronzed door handle pushing into a prefab castle, and we stare, briefly, dumbfounded. Lights. Buildings. Emerald erect. Emerald contained. Look at it, no wonder we’re all fucked up and broken. No wonder we’re all high and lazy. No wonder we’re all bored and trying to grab onto apathy with every ounce of energy we can muster, every fiber of our souls. No wonder we drink music like water, no wonder we watch movies like food. We are trapped like flies in this bell jar of yuck. We are specimens in God’s big joke. A super city of noncity. A city of death and reinvention, glittering arrows of black, pulsating like rockets through the night, ready to pierce the deepest part of our being. Fuck, we’re LA kids. We are the kids of LA.
They write books about us. They make after-school specials about us. And none of it is the real us. None of it really captures who we are. But we eat it, digest it, and let it redefine us until we no longer know what is real and what is fake, and how clichéd is that? We are the sticky center of the cliché. We jump off cliffs, Robotrip, slice our wrists, star in TV specials about the sixties, we OD in gutters and slam doors while peeling out of driveways in new and old cars. Sixteen and seething. We fall into swimming pools and float to the bottom. We stand on dark street corners waiting to kill our own, we drive by in cars ready to annihilate our faith in ourselves, ready to destroy that which is most sacred. We bleed. We walk down sidewalks daring the world to photograph us, daring the goddamn place to care. We party, we converge, we weep, we grow weary. Ivy tangled, one hand grabbing the next. A fantasy to behold. A fantasy to be beholden. We live here. We build this shit up and let it break us down. We dissolve into myth. We let authors steal our stories and toss them high into the hills where we spread like wildfire. The smoke of our lives hovers over everything until we have crept into every home, every school, every office and reminded you that this is a city of slash and burn. This is a city ablaze.
Mike yanks on my arm and pulls me toward him. Chelo is in the b
right aquamarine pool, her red hair fanning out as she pushes toward the bottom. Small twinkle lights strung through oak trees cover everything in a fairy tale hue of steam and spiraling pools of iridescence. The fluorescent soft yellow pool light creates black shadows of our bodies, moving and talking, laughing and drinking, eating and smoking. We’re the oldest kids you know, we’re all about a hundred years old.
Chelo is all, prehistoric, and then Dan grabs my arm and Mike yanks my arm and the entire place stops and we rise like zombies to the boomtown. Too much fighting on the dance floor! Wet, dripping, we look like “Thriller” extras. “Skank, bitches!” shouts Jessica and someone pushes her into the pool. A rainbow roll flies off a tray and over the side of a cliff. Wasabi is, like, all over the place. Mike and Dan cannonball, they kick, steam rising around them when they shoot back up, wet serpents, crawling onto land.
We’re so cinema. We’re so, like, we own this, we’re so, like, don’t even try. This? This is ours.
×
The lights blossom like midnight flowers, morning glories hang like sleeping bats.
The streets are windy and we wobble.
×
Ms. Lavoi calls my name on the way out of class. My heart sinks and I hang back near the door as other students file out.
“Oh shit, kid,” says Dan as he slips into the hallway. I roll my eyes, sit back down, and wait until she shuts the door. We’re alone. I swallow.
“It was nice of you to join us this week.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Listen, you can relax, you’re not in trouble, I mean, not with me, at the moment.”
“You’re excusing my absences?”
“No, I just want to have a conversation.” I look down at the floor and start to count the square, flecked 1960s tiles that cover the ground.
“Did you get help on your essay?”
“The Woolf one?”
“Yes.”
“No. I wrote it.”
She reaches for something on her desk, my paper, and walks to the desk next to mine, sits. “Here.” She hands it over. “Look at it.”
“You gave me a C,” I say, pulling back the first page. “Is that, what? I’m confused, is that considered good now?”
“I gave you a C because it’s obvious you wrote this the night before class and because the grammar is atrocious, but I wanted to ask you about the content of the paper. Are these your own ideas or did you read them in a book?”
“No, I mean, yeah, I mean.”
“No, yeah, what?”
“They’re my own ideas.”
“You think Virginia Woolf embraced a masculine projection?”
“Yes.”
“The word projection. It’s not in the foreword or anywhere in the edition I assigned. That was your word choice?”
“Yeah. I mean, I have a brain.”
“I know that. Is that a word you use in theater?”
“Yeah. Sometimes. We’re reading Dos Passos.”
“How is it that they can get you to read Dos Passos, but I ask you to read Virginia Woolf and it’s pulling teeth?”
“I didn’t actually read the Passos, if it makes you feel better.”
“You just said that you did.”
“No, I skimmed it.”
“And you gleaned the word projection? From skimming? What is a projection to you?”
“It’s uh, what I said here, in the paper.”
“Tell me, use your own words, pretend I haven’t read the paper.”
“This is weird,” I say, getting nervous.
“Nicole, did you write this paper?”
“Yes, of course I did.”
“What is a projection to you?”
“God, I dunno, it’s like when you pretend to be one thing in order to either get something you want or to not get bothered trying to do something else. You know, like Vito Andolini in Godfather II. He was always coming back for revenge but had to play dumb to get to America. If you want to be left alone you might project being stupid when you’re not so people let you coast, I guess.” I look down. Green, blue, gold flecks.
“You’re not a bad actress.”
“Ms. Lavoi, for real this feels exploity.”
“Is that the answer you think will convince me to leave you alone?”
“No, that’s the answer I believe.”
“What’s your homelife like?” This is sudden and catches me off guard. “You’re very quiet.”
“Just in here.”
“You don’t like English?”
“No, I love English.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Why would I lie about that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know very much about you. You read the books I assign, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“I know you do. Why read the books and not do the papers?”
“I did this paper.”
“Yes, well. If you need to talk to someone, sometime, you can always talk to me.”
“How old are you Ms. Lavoi?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Are you happy?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you think Virginia Woolf was happy?”
“It would seem not. Have you heard of Sylvia Plath?”
“Sure. She’s a poet.”
“That’s right. She also committed suicide.”
“Oh man,” I say, even though I already know this, but it seems like Ms. Lavoi gets off on dumping knowledge, and who knows, maybe she took this job to feel like she could make a diff.
“She pioneered something called confessional poetry, I wrote my dissertation on it. Her and another poet, Anne Sexton. She also wrote one novel called The Bell Jar.”
“Sexton?”
“Plath.”
“Sure. Yeah, I know that one. The gothy girls dig it.”
“Well, I think you might dig it too, if you gave it a chance. I could lend it to you.”
“No, that’s okay, I can get it at the library.”
“Will you?”
“Sure,” I say with a shrug. “I mean, if it’s good.”
“It is.”
“Then, yeah, why not.”
“When you’re done we can talk about it, yes?”
“Sure, whatever you want.”
“It’s not what I want that I’m getting at.”
“What are you getting at?”
“You’re very smart.”
“Thank you. Can I go?”
“Okay,” she says, standing and walking to her desk. She pulls out a pack of gum from her purse and raises her right eyebrow at me. “You can go.”
“Oh, okay,” I say, standing. “I’ll catch you later.”
She smiles and raises her eyebrows once more. Standing in her black jeans, penny loafers, silk button-up and navy blue men’s blazer, I’m hit with a sudden realization, oh shit, Ms. Lavoi is cool.
×
I’m walking down the middle of campus toward the library when I feel someone tug on my backpack strap. I stop and turn around, annoyed.
“Oh, hi,” I say, pulling my arms close and leaning on one foot. I grab a piece of hair and stick it in my mouth.
“Hey,” says Mike, coughing. He looks at the ground then pushes his hair back and smiles. Warm like sun on your back in a field of shadows. “I’m really sorry about Monday. I forgot George was picking me up.”
“It’s cool. I got a ride home with Meanstreetz.”
“Oh yeah?” he asks, starting to walk. I walk with him. “You like that guy?”
“Eww, no. He’s my friend, he’s sort of gross.”
Mike laughs and nods. “Yeah, I guess.” We’re silent a while then he stops and I turn and look at him. “You wanna get out of here?”
“I can’t. I’m on probation.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, he has sex with lots of girls. Maybe he’d have sex with you.”
“Dan? Eww. I don’t want to have se
x with him.”
“Why not?”
“Why does everyone think I want to have sex?”
“No, I meant, he’s—”
“He’s what?”
“Never mind, I just meant, I don’t know, forget it. You wanna get faded? I’ve got bud.”
“Sure, of course.”
“Okay, cool. You know, you’re prettier than you think you are. You’re really pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“He’d definitely fuck you if you tried.”
My heart is perforated and sopping. “No, I mean, if I wanted to I’m sure I could make it happen, but I don’t want to.”
“Oh hey, I’m done with your painting.”
“Really?” I ask, brightening.
“Sure!” he says, also blushing with a smile.
We chuckle a little and keep walking toward the science building on the other side of campus. The roof of which is always empty and prime territory. The Republic of Smokey.
×
We’re on the roof, proper baked, lying on our backs. I can hear the bell ring and sit up. I stand and walk to the edge of the cement wall that lines the perimeter and look out over campus. The doors to King Hall shove open and kids flood the steps and head toward F lot. I walk back to where Mike is and lie down again.
“Point one hour till Arts,” I say.
“Yeah, I got ears,” he snarls, surprising me. It’s so un-riddle-like, so clear and sense making.
“Oh, yeah, I mean, of course,” I say casually.
“I mean, totally,” he says kindly, correcting himself.
For the first time in our brief friendship I wonder if he fakes his interactions with me, if actually he’s much sharper than he lets on. “Oh hey, look.” He sits up and pulls a folded crinkled piece of paper from his pocket, opens the page carefully. It’s a black-and-white picture of Elvis covered in kisses and wearing a lei. It’s been ripped from a book.
“You do that, too?” I ask.
“Do what?” he asks, defensively, as if I’ve accused him of something.
“Tear pictures from library books.”
“Oh, no,” he says, after a long pause. “I found it in the hall.”
“Oh cool. He looks cool.”
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