Off they finally go in the Maserati, Jeannie and Mr. Lincoln, Jeannie no doubt wishing they could stop at the Ford Theatre for an assassination before going on to the party. They’ll come home after midnight spectacularly hammered and you just know questionable things have happened.
“An astronaut came on to your mother,” Dad will say, trying to explain a black eye.
“Honest Abe got punched by Napoleon for trying to kiss Josephine,” Mom will tell someone on the phone.
Whatever it is, they’ll sleep in separate bedrooms and won’t be talking to each other for several days.
Another thing I like about Halloween is that the year before she died, Dorie dressed up as the wicked, wicked witch from Oz. She painted her face green. She put on a dark dress and she put a pointed witch’s hat on her head. She wore a bandana underneath it because she was bald. She grabbed a broom.
“I’ll get you, my pretty! And your little dog too!”
We laughed.
And then she insisted I dress up as the Scarecrow. She told me this was typecasting because I didn’t have a brain. Only straw. Out we went, me just walking with her and looking out for her, making sure she didn’t get too tired as she collected candy. Then, just before going home, saving one piece for her and one piece for me, she handed all her candy out to other kids.
I still have my piece.
One of the things I don’t like at Halloween is how older kids go out of their way to ruin everything. Guys go around throwing toilet paper into trees and eggs at houses, cars, and each other. Girls use it as an opportunity to dress up as whores. It’s really sort of insulting because Halloween is historically a festival honoring the dead. It’s a time to pray for the souls that have recently departed purgatory but have yet to reach heaven. In fact, trick-or-treating started when poor people would go door-to-door and, in exchange for food, they’d say prayers for those who’d died and passed on.
Food for prayers sounds like a good deal to me and so every Halloween I go to the store and buy huge bags of Snickers and Reese’s and Jolly Ranchers, and after Mom and Dad leave, I’ll turn on the yard lights and stick a chair in the driveway with the front gate open and the little kids will come in.
If the kids are too old, I ignore them.
Our neighborhood, which isn’t really a neighborhood, just a collection of fancy houses, always gets a lot of poor Latino families who come from somewhere else to trick-or-treat. I guess they think our streets are a safe place to walk with their families. They’ll come to the edge of the driveway and look in. The kids are shy. “Go on,” the parents will say. “Sigue.”
Their costumes are great. The little girls are almost always dressed as angels or princesses, all wings and sparkles and glitter in their dark hair. The boys are vampires and ghosts and lucha libre wrestlers.
“Wow,” I’ll say. “You’re beautiful.”
Or cool. Or scary. I’ll hold out the candy bowl. And even though it bothers me that a lot of the little Latino kids have bad teeth, some already rimmed with metal, some not even real ones, I let everyone take as much as they want.
“Go ahead. Todo lo que quieras.”
I do this because in return for candy I want their prayers. Quiero tus oraciones.
For Dorie.
37
Only this year at Halloween it rains.
38
“This is crazy!” screams Gretchen.
The smile on her face says it’s not crazy at all.
With no possibility of trick-or-treaters, Gretchen has come over to the house and we have, of all things, done homework together. Which means, of course, we’ve accomplished absolutely nothing. The fascinating discussion of what’s your favorite flavor of frozen yogurt has taken us a good hour and a half alone. The only conclusion we come to is that yogurt would not be a bad idea. We take the Jaguar and Gretchen drives. We go to Bogart Yogurt and I get something orange and Gretchen gets something pink. We trade licks.
This, of course, gives me a hard-on.
“Where to now, James?” Gretchen says, when we get back in the car. She’s looking down her nose at me as if she’s totally in charge. It kills me, it really does, and so I make a sort of spontaneous decision. Playing it close to the vest, I only tell her the general directions. An hour later we’re only halfway there and it begins to rain harder. I ask Gretchen if she wants to turn back.
“Uh-uh,” she says. I can tell she’s busting with curiosity about where we’re going but I keep my mouth shut. I want it to be a surprise. And it is.
“A Ferris wheel!?”
The Pacific Wheel sits at the end of Santa Monica Pier. It’s the world’s only solar-powered Ferris wheel, is ninety feet tall, can move eight hundred people an hour, and contains 160,000 lights.
“If you’d gone a little faster than fifty miles an hour, we might have got here yesterday,” I say. I’ve become quite the comedian. Along with hard-ons, it seems to have come with the territory.
As I lead Gretchen by the hand down the deserted pier, it’s like looking at color trails in the falling rain. Gretchen’s hair and clothes are soaked. I’ve given her my hoodie but she’s left it unzipped. She’s wearing no bra and I can see her nipples poking out beneath her thin, wet top.
It is crazy.
I pay for the tickets. There’s no line. We move up the ramp toward the spinning baskets. The attendant, wearing a rain-slick green poncho, shakes his head.
“Getting ready to shut it down,” he says.
“Twenty bucks for five more minutes?” I say, and I hold out the bill. The operator takes the money. He brings the slowly spinning wheel to a halt. He opens the side door to the basket.
“Oh, I don’t like heights,” says Gretchen. You can tell she’s thrilled.
The attendant pulls the bar down, locking us in. He releases the gear. In a stomach-dropping surge, we move back and then up, the pier dropping away, the lights of Santa Monica coming to eye level, then dropping away as we move up toward the peak of the enormous wheel. Gretchen shrieks and buries her face in the hollow of my shoulder. Her hair is wet against my cheek and I put my arm around her shoulders. I’m laughing so hard. And then we’re falling, out and down, the pier rushing up at us, only to swing in and under, past the bored attendant, past the ramp, up again and on, touched by gravity and, a moment later, weightless. As we approach the top of the wheel Gretchen looks at me in a certain way and we kiss. She tastes of rain.
A wheel is a circle. A circle is a set of points in a plane set at a fixed distance from the center. A circle is a symbol of God, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. A circle is a ring that symbolizes love and hope. The hope is that love will take on the characteristics of the circle and capture eternity.
On pace for the world’s longest kiss, Gretchen and I come down and around and up for the third time and as we do, I reach beneath the hoodie. My fingertips lightly touch Gretchen’s breasts and erect nipples. Gretchen puts her hand just beneath the junction of my thighs and presses. The moment, the world, my entire life, is a sensual blur of touch, taste, rain, and light.
39
Unlike Halloween, Thanksgiving is truly a ridiculous holiday. The world is barely tolerable and getting worse. Why give thanks? This is especially true in High School Highville where anybody who has anything thinks they deserve it and those that don’t, think they deserve more.
However.
Thanksgiving is when my grandmother, Dad’s mother, Beatrix, arrives for her annual visit. Beatrix is a widow, probably a lesbian, and possibly a high-functioning autistic. Her deceased husband—Dad’s father, Larry—was a postman who was walking his route one day when he got run over by a garbage truck. The truck was backing up and didn’t see Larry. Larry was reading someone’s mail and didn’t see the truck. Beatrix never remarried. She trained and then took a job as a clerk to a judge in Fresno, California, which is where Dad grew up. She refers to the judge as the judicial train wreck, the pinheaded halfwit, and the alcoho
lic slug. She’s been writing his decisions now for over twenty years.
Beatrix is tall and thin with short white hair, never wears makeup, and is totally oblivious to what she wears. She speaks in a flat voice devoid of inflection, rarely smiles and if she does it’s this tiny, sort of self-amused little wrinkle. I’ve never seen her laugh. She doesn’t give a crap about what people think, she’ll say exactly what she thinks about anything and anyone at a moment’s notice, and she’s always leaving the room for no apparent reason, usually when somebody else is talking.
She’s just great.
“Your idea of clean,” she’ll say to the housekeeper, “would make a zookeeper blanch.”
“Your father was a complacent boob,” she’ll say to Dad. “Try not to take after him too much.”
Beatrix does try to be nice to Mom. I think she knows that Mom has been through a lot. “You’re a lovely, well-meaning woman,” she’ll say. “But unless you want to live the rest of your life as a borderline hysteric, you should be in therapy twice a week.” She’s not being critical. She just calls it the way she sees it.
I enjoy Beatrix. I always sense that like me, she’s on the outside looking in, but unlike me, she’s not so much dismayed as she is exasperated by what she sees. The world would be a better place if she was writing the decisions for everyone.
Another thing I like is that Beatrix is always asking me what I’m reading, and when I tell her, chances are she’s already read it.
“Martin Eden by Jack London,” I’ll say.
“The story of a disdainful drudge who thinks the world revolves totally around him,” Beatrix will say.
“It’s called individualism,” I’ll say.
“It’s called nonsense. An egotist so filled with life he has no other option but to kill himself. And then the idiot actually does it by jumping off a ship in the middle of the ocean. After making self-aggrandizing speeches for a good half hour, he finally goes down and good riddance to him.”
“Gee, now I don’t have to finish it.”
Beatrix also tells me about books that she thinks I should be reading. “Brideshead Revisited. Explores the act of love by which God calls souls to Himself. Written in 1945 by Evelyn Waugh, who at the age of twenty-three, in a fit of homosexual panic, also decided it would be a good idea to drown himself. According to him, he was talked out of it by a jellyfish.”
“Good thing that jellyfish didn’t run into Martin Eden.”
Beatrix’s lips don’t smile, but her eyes do.
“Indeed.”
Beatrix has a photographic memory.
I do too.
Beatrix knows a little bit, sometimes quite a lot, about everything.
I do too.
Which sometimes makes me wonder if I’m not a high-functioning autistic lesbian. Anything’s possible though I don’t think Beatrix lies awake nights unable to sleep.
Fact.
Thanksgiving dinner is a disaster.
“I think it’d be nice if everyone individually gave thanks for something,” says Mom when we sit down at the dinner table.
“The 49ers’s are ahead at the end of the half,” says Gordon, pouring from a bottle of expensive champagne. You can see Mom’s jaw clench. The San Francisco 49ers are Dad’s favorite football team. By telling us the game’s at halftime, Dad’s letting us know dinner will be over, at least for him, at the beginning of the third quarter.
We eat. The housekeeper has prepared this massive turkey with all the trimmings with the idea that there will be leftovers. And there will be a lot of leftovers because nobody at the table really likes turkey. Or aligot mashed potatoes. Or French green beans with caramelized onions. Or pomegranate-cranberry relish. Or a field-greens salad in a white balsamic dressing with crushed, toasted walnuts. Dad might if they were all deep fried.
“It’s the tradition,” says Mom.
“Meaning what?” says Dad, checking his watch.
“Meaning the Pilgrims ate it,” says Mom, trying to smile.
“Pilgrims wouldn’t have known a green bean if they shit one,” says Dad. “Pilgrims mostly starved to death.”
“Mmm, this is great,” I say, my mouth full. Storm clouds are gathering and I’m trying to head them off at the pass. “Thanks a lot for Happy Thanks-a-lot-giving!”
It doesn’t work.
“Well, Gordon,” says Beatrix, pushing oyster stuffing around her plate, “I suppose you’re still dressing right these days.” Totally out of nowhere. As if she’s been saving it up.
“Dressing left” and “dressing right” are terms used by tailors when fitting suit pants. It refers to the direction a man’s balls sag in relation to the zipper and for some reason is Beatrix’s way of discussing politics. She seems to feel that liberal or conservative is totally based on which way your dick points.
It’s as good a reason as any.
Dad, of course, began dressing solidly right around the same time he realized he had money. Before that he was a member of the “go away and leave me the fuck alone” party. Actually I suppose they’re one and the same thing.
“We don’t talk politics at the dinner table,” says Dad.
This is because, unlike Gordon, Mom is a liberal who cares about immigrants, war orphans, homeless people, social services, and puppies. I’m not sure if this means Mom’s left breast is slightly bigger than the other but, regardless, Mom and Dad are always getting into arguments over politics, especially when Dad points out that although Mom says she cares about all these things, she doesn’t do anything about them, not even vote.
“It appears to me,” says Beatrix, “you don’t talk about anything at the dinner table.”
“What would you like to talk about, Bea?” says Mom. She’s looking more and more nervous and upset. She really wants holidays to go well, which is why they usually don’t.
“Why don’t we talk about how many times I’ve asked you not to call me that,” says Beatrix.
“You’re right, I apologize,” says Mom.
“You apologize too much,” says Beatrix. “You either don’t mean it or you have identity issues. Which is it?”
“Gordon,” says Mom. “May I speak to you in the kitchen?”
“No,” says Gordon. Which is his way of saying he’s not going to touch this with a ten-foot pole. To which Mom gets up and leaves the table and comes back five minutes later with her eyes red. To which Dad leaves the table and comes back ten minutes later with a half-consumed bottle of Willamette Valley pinot noir. To which Mom leaves the table again and this time doesn’t come back at all. To which Gordon takes his wine into the family room, where no one ever gathers, to watch football.
“Our family is very odd, Billy,” says Beatrix, as she wipes her mouth with her napkin. “I doubt you’ll find much to be amused with in life unless you make it happen yourself.”
“What are your thoughts on breaking into strangers’ houses?”
It might be my imagination but I think I detect another one of Beatrix’s small smiles. “Knock twice to make sure no one’s home.”
I go over to Gretchen’s house just in time to see San Francisco lose in the fourth quarter.
40
We go over the wall. The house looks expensive from the outside. All stucco and glass. I knock twice, then EZ-pick the lock and push the side door to the kitchen open. We’re good at this now. Ephraim moves to the beeping security system and punches in the codes. I move to the phone to wait for the call, if it comes. Twom and Deliza move quickly into the kitchen. It’s only when we turn on a light that we realize it’s a pigsty. Drawers and cupboards are open. Open cans, milk and juice bottles, and Chinese takeout cartons are on the counters. There are unwashed pans on the stove. The sink is full of grimy dishes and there is the smell of rotting food.
“Maybe the maid didn’t come,” says Ephraim, weakly.
“Billy?” We hear Twom call from the other room and we move to join him. He and Deliza stand in the entryway to the living room.
“Whoa…” says Ephraim.
It is beyond badly decorated. Ashtrays overflow. Carpets are soiled. Wine bottles, glasses, and junk are everywhere.
It’s as if hyenas live in this house.
“Maybe it’s a rental,” says Ephraim.
“Maybe you’re an idiot,” says Deliza. “Choosing a house like this.”
“I didn’t know,” pleads Ephraim.
We don’t split up. We move as a group, going from room to room. Beds are unmade. Sheets are stained. You wouldn’t lie down for fear of what you might come up with. The bathrooms reek. Discarded clothes and trash are everywhere. There are no computers. There are no photo albums. There is no art on the wall, just faded paint where something once might have hung. The bookshelves are completely empty.
Maybe no one lives here. Maybe even now they’re running to save themselves.
“Billy.”
It’s Twom. I hadn’t realized he left us. He has a look on his face I’ve never seen before. He takes us to what in another house might be the maid’s quarters.
No. Someone lives in this house. Monsters live here. Grendel lives here.
The room smells of piss and shit. Vials of pills, chips, boxes of cold cereal and crackers, and an empty half-gallon bottle of Coke are on the bedside tables.
The old woman’s eyes are rheumy. Her thinning hair, the scabs on her scalp, her nightclothes, her bedding—all are beyond sickening. Her skin is green parchment. You can see where she’s scratched herself with her ragged nails. Her mouth works. Opens and closes, opens and closes. Like a sucker fish. She makes no sound.
I see a cell phone on the side table. Well beyond the old woman’s reach. Using a napkin, I pick it up. I put the phone on speaker. I don’t want to get it any closer to my mouth than I have to.
The firemen are the first to arrive. Then the paramedics. The cops come last. We’ve turned on the alarms before we left, When they force their way in, they go off. A few minutes of it and then neighbors come out onto the street to see what’s going on. We join them.
The Tragic Age Page 11