by Andrew Roe
“There’s more,” Brandon dribbled on, trying to remember whatever Clarissa had scripted for him. “Oh yeah, right. Another thing, another reason why, is we’re talking some pretty major creative differences.”
Again, silence.
“She’s pulling a Yoko,” said Alex finally. “I can’t believe it. A classic fucking Yoko.”
“Or like the chick in Spinal Tap,” I offered.
The rec room mostly consisted of a ping pong table with no net, a dartboard with no darts. The sound of our instruments sometimes shook the windows, and we kept waiting for them to break, hoping for that kind of actual impact.
“What is it with chicks and fucking up bands,” Kenny philosophized from behind his drum kit. His T-shirt said RANDOM INCIDENT, which I’d always wanted to ask him about but never did—another of the world’s mysteries left unsolved. “Because it must be, like, in their DNA or something.”
Alex unstrapped his guitar and leaned it against his amplifier. A hiss of feedback began to build, slowly birthing to life.
“There’s an arc we have to go through first, before this kind of shit can happen,” he said. “Rise and fall. Rise and fall. And rise. There’s a fucking arc.”
Brandon fingered the amoeba-shaped hickey on his neck.
“I’m an artist,” he explained. “I need to grow.”
“Brandon, man, you don’t even own your own amp,” I reminded him.
“We just think I’d do better by going solo. I been working on some songs, of my own, you know, some darker, edgier stuff. With lyrics and everything.”
With lyrics and everything. How could we argue with that?
So just like that we were three, a trio. But with Brandon out of the band, we no longer had a place to practice. And with no place to practice, we could no longer be a band.
Summer ended. Kenny decided to go to school to become a massage therapist, and Alex moved back home, to one of those mini-sized states back east. I lost track of Brandon. As for me, I was thinking about thinking about enrolling for some classes at the junior college. They had a restaurant management program that suddenly seemed worth considering.
The week after classes started (I’d missed the deadline; there was always next semester) I ran into Clarissa at a Taco Bell. She pulled up on her trusty ten-speed, looking very high and very sexy as she parked the bike out front and then stood in line next to me. She ordered some Chalupas.
“How’s the band?” she asked.
“You broke us up. You know, so Brandon could be an artist.”
Uncharacteristically, she was wearing a shirt that covered her entire stomach. Still it was easy to imagine the sun tattoo that beckoned behind a thin veil of cotton.
“Oh that,” she said. “He listened to me too much. That should have been a clue right there.”
“Listened. As in past tense?”
“Very past tense. As past tense as past tense can get.” She laughed. It was an ugly laugh, a hurtful laugh, a laugh that reduced Brandon down to an inconsequential nub. But damn, she smelled nice.
Clarissa informed me that Brandon was still a boy, a child, and that she wasn’t interested in boys, in children, and that she had only one more week left and she’d have her license again, no more of this bike shit, no more Shitscape, no more slumming with the aimless masses. Then she’d be free. She’d get her life back. She’d get back to where she was. She had plans. She’d been reading this great book that said life was like one giant atom, it consisted of Positives, Negatives, and Neutrals, and from here on out it was only Positives. It was all mental, a matter of will, what you thought and decided in your head. Then you made it so. That was the trick. The manager at The Lasso, Dalton, he was being pretty cool about everything and was keeping a weekend spot open for her.
As she talked I realized that, for the first time ever, I was staring at Clarissa’s face from up close and not so much focusing on everything below. And there, around the stonily half-shut eyes, you could see where the lines would be, where they were even starting to converge, marking territory, determining who she would be in the years to come.
“You learn stuff about yourself though,” she said. “I suppose that’s part of the whole point of it, of punishment. That’s what the asshole Nazi fuck judge said at least. Being deprived. You are being deprived, Miss Riley. And that’s what I was all right. Deprived. You ever been deprived—I mean like really, truly deprived, where you wake up in the morning and you know you can’t do what you want to do?”
I watched the Taco Bell guy in the back squirting guacamole into our food with a gun-like device. A family of about like fifty picked up a Fiesta Taco Party Platter to go. The kids went nuts, pawing at the mother and the brightly colored bags of food like baby birds, nothing but pure need.
“Not really,” I said.
“These past six months or whatever it’s been, it’s been like living without really living, you know,” she said. “Like a ghost. Like one of those Charles Dickinson stories. How about you? Tell me about you. You’re kind of cute, you know that? Maybe you already know that. What’s your story?”
I thought about it for a while—thought about her naked on her bike, thought about that sun tattoo and what it would feel like against the press of my lips, and how she broke up our band that never even had a name, and how there’s probably a sadness behind everything, Taco Bell, certainly, and yes, the end of another summer, the end of something I wasn’t ready to face yet. I looked at my left hand, my fretting hand, and right then, right at that moment, I felt like it was capable of wondrous magic despite all that I’d never be, all that I’d never become.
“I’m an artist, too,” I lied, but wanting to believe it.
WHY WE CAME TO TARGET
AT 9:58 ON A MONDAY NIGHT
Donnie remembers just in time. So we run practically every stop sign and red light in town, and get there right before they close. They’re about to lock the front doors but we burst on in like we own the place, the goddamn heirs to the Target fortune, telling the puny Rent-a-Cop guy, It’s cool, it’s cool, we’ll be real quick, no worries T.J. Hooker. Then we prowl the aisles, through Home and Living, then Beauty, then Outdoors, and we’re laughing, laughing like pirates, and Donnie is still drunk from the Vodka Dews, and I probably am, too, though it’s starting to wear off, it’s that time where you’re crashing faster than you’d like and that feeling of you can’t touch me is slipping away and you’re starting to realize you can be touched, you can be touched, no one can escape that sad, basic fact. The puny Rent-A-Cop guy has one of those mustaches that looks like it’s been drawn on. And he’s shorter than me almost, and Donnie is big, beefy, an all-state wrestler his senior year. So what’s the guy gonna do? He doesn’t even follow us.
Next Donnie starts pulling stuff off the shelves (deodorant, denture cream, orange-flavored Metamucil), saying, Let’s buy this, fuck it, let’s buy everything. But I’m not laughing as much now, because I’m remembering why we’re here, why we came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday night. I pretend to be real interested in a dress I know I’d never buy. Donnie puts on a bright yellow baseball cap that says Bad Ass. The lights in the store dim (hint, hint). He turns the cap so it’s backwards and follows me. Tampons, panty liners, lady things. Then: there. So many to choose from. We should pick a good one, I tell Donnie, who says, How can you tell the difference? It’s like fucking cereal there are so many.
They make that announcement where they say the store is closed and you better bring your shit up front and get. Donnie’s picking up mouthwash, toothpaste, other crap we don’t need. I tell him, Let’s go, Bad Ass. And he dumps everything on the floor, including the cap. Some minimum wage slob will have to clean it all up. Not us.
There’s a long line to check out. Only one cashier open. The girl who rings us up doesn’t blink or bother with hi-how-are-you-did-you-find-everything-you-were-looking-for, she’s tired, she wants to go home, she has hair curled and gelled, plus this spooky lipstick and makeup like a
n old lady but she’s not an old lady and should know better.
The drive back is quiet. We stop for the lights. We don’t talk. The Vodka Dews have officially worn off. My head spinning like a pukey carnival ride. When Donnie and I first met it was right away. I’d always wanted something like that to happen to me. Then it did. It was both like I’d imagined it would be and also completely different, if that even makes sense. And it was something that got carved into me, something that was mine, something long-lasting and true. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to lose Donnie. He’s concentrating on driving, he’s squinting, he’s leaning forward. Lights flash across his face, fill it with meanings I can’t make out, not from this angle anyway.
Say something, I say.
Something, he says.
Come on, Donnie. What are you thinking? The question every boyfriend loves to hear.
What am I thinking? I’m thinking, actually, that my dad’s one of those dads. One of those dads who everybody’s always afraid of. Like he can explode anytime, anywhere. Push the wrong button and boom. You just never know. I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want my kid to be afraid of me. That’s what I’m thinking.
This sends my heart soaring, it does a little Michael Jackson dance, flutters like a beautiful fucking butterfly.
You won’t, I say. You won’t be like that.
Suddenly I’m very sleepy, very aware of my body and what could be happening inside of it. Have I gained weight already? Will I start throwing up tomorrow morning? I want to touch my belly but that would be lame.
So what do you think our odds are? Donnie then asks, braking, guiding us into a left turn, the steering wheel sliding slowly back through his hands. Fifty-fifty?
I stare ahead at the road and the lights and the other cars coming toward us, and I gnaw on my lip so hard it almost makes me cry.
Fifty-fifty, I say. That sounds about right to me.
NOT THE L.A. IN MY MIND
I know blood. The types, the variations of color and presence and absence. It’s what I look at all day long, the way an accountant looks at numbers, the way a butcher looks at meat, the way a painter looks at paint.
Phlebotomist: It was a job that paid well after I graduated from high school, that did not require a college education, that got me out of my parents’ house (a mother, a stepfather, no siblings). And it was the first thing I was ever good at. So it stuck. Then I just kept going.
Arms, veins, skin. I don’t see faces anymore. The people I see are not people. They are arms, veins, skin. I sterilize. I draw the needle. Insert. Extract what I need. Next.
Because I’m good, I take it personally if I miss the vein, if it takes more than one attempt. The rest of the day, and sometimes beyond, will be tainted by my mistake. I can’t let it go.
Phle-bo-to-mist: A lot of syllables, too. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, either.
When my coworkers have patients with thin veins or they’re having an off day or they have someone with tremors from Parkinson’s, they call me in.
“She’s our Terminator,” they say, and before the patient realizes it, it’s over, I’m out, I’m gone, who was that gangly frizzy-haired woman in the white lab coat?
That was me.
“Stab ’em and tag ’em,” my coworkers like to joke, but I don’t.
•
The lab has its regulars. Lots of people getting chemo who need their blood monitored. Even with them, with these sad, old, bald men and women, I keep my distance. I can’t. I just can’t.
Today I have a full schedule of appointments, and the waiting room is overflowing with walk-ins. An army of wheelchairs and walkers out there. Complaints about the lack of seats and space and the outdated reading material: copies of People and Sunset and O from three, four years ago. A lone plastic plant in a large pot occupies a corner like it’s being punished, a dunce plant. That smell universal to waiting rooms: sterile, chemical, mortal. I call out the name of my next patient. I read names all day and don’t remember a single one. Male or female, I don’t even notice. The patient follows me back to an exam room. Sits down. Rolls up his/her sleeve. Arms, veins, skin. Sometimes trying to make small talk, but more often that’s not the case. I put out a pretty clear vibe.
But it’s hard not to notice the particularities this time. He—yes, the patient is male—is young, and that’s fairly uncommon. He has long shaggy black hair, presumably dyed, reluctantly combed. Black T-shirt, black jeans, black backpack slung over his shoulder. A floral tattoo blooms on his left forearm. Pasty vampire complexion. He looks like he could be in a band, or wants to be in a band, or should be in a band. And he’s lanky, lean like a tree in the desert. He slouches in the chair, crosses his arms, and stretches out his legs, crossing his ankles as well, like he’s the smartest kid in class and isn’t having any of it.
He’s talking, too.
“So this is what you do, blood,” he says.
“Pretty much,” I say.
“Nine to five, dealing with blood,” he marvels, looking around, surveying the order, the minimalism of the exam room. “That’s cool.”
“Not really.”
“I don’t always take my meds.”
“Oh. Why not?”
“I don’t like to be predictable.”
I rub his nontattooed forearm with an alcohol swab, find the vein, massage it gently, noncommittally, with my thumb.
“This won’t hurt a bit,” I say, which is more than I usually say.
“I bet you say that to all the boys.”
He smiles, and I can tell this is something of a rarity for him. The smile seems pained and quickly disappears, back to neutral, back to safe.
Then we’re done.
“That it?” he asks.
“That’s it.”
“Cool. I’ll see you next week.”
That night I dream about the patient who looks like he could be or wants to be or should be in a band. I don’t remember what he says or does, or why here’s there. But he is there. He is in my dream. He has crossed over.
My coworkers at the lab are almost all women. Older than me, harder than me, although lately I’ve been feeling their hardness rubbing off on me—you know, the osmosis thing. They complain about their children and husbands, boyfriends and celebrities. Someone or something is always disappointing them.
The only guy is Salvador. Sal. Rumor has it he’s either gay or vegetarian.
“Could he be both?” someone once asked.
“It’s possible, I suppose,” someone else said. “Anything’s possible this day and age, which you could say is one of those Catch-22 deals. Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing, anything being possible. Depends on your life view.”
“Life view?”
“Hell. You know what I mean.”
“No. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well I’m not going explain it now, not here.”
And like most conversations at work it soon enough drifted off to another topic, someone started talking about something else, the phone rang, there was an emergency, a sample got mixed up, the UPS guy came, something. And the now-dead conversation never got resolved.
•
During the week that follows, I find myself thinking about the new patient way too frequently. Why? Why this person? He’s probably a year or two younger. Several inches shorter than me. Mildly reminiscent of an actor whose name I can never remember. Not someone I would ever conjure in my mind.
But he doesn’t come back that week. I return to my apartment at night, thinking about him. The heat arrives. Temperatures hovering near one hundred. Fires farther north, one in Santa Clarita and another in Santa Barbara. One evening I visit my mother and stepfather, my monthly trip to Norwalk, a short drive from Whittier. The house is smoky, cough-inducing, cluttered. You have to move something if you want to sit down.
My mother tells me, in great detail, about her latest urinary tract infection. She explains how she had called her Internet co
mpany to complain about a price increase and now she believes they are purposefully slowing down her Internet service. Randall can’t enjoy his nature videos as much anymore. There’s lag. The videos help him fall asleep at night.
Toward the end of the visit, after we’ve covered ailing family, annoying neighbors, and even more annoying actors and actresses, she informs me that she will not, as planned, be retiring next year. She can’t afford it. She’ll be working at least another five years, maybe more.
“I may never retire at this rate,” she says, lighting another cigarette. “Randall’s 401(k) has been practically wiped out. The bills aren’t going anywhere, we’re not going anywhere. Just so you know: There’s no nest egg here. Don’t be counting on that. Just to be clear. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore. You work hard all your life and this is what you get.”
On Friday, it’s someone’s birthday. We have cake, sparkling cider. Primarily middle-aged people holding paper plates and using plastic spoons because there are no more forks. I haven’t told anyone my birthday. They never ask.
My last patient of the week says she’s afraid of needles. Without realizing it, I put my hand on her shoulder. The patient is a woman. I notice.
“This won’t hurt a bit,” I say. “Promise.”
My annual job performance review: I am highly skilled. I am admired by others. I am seen as a potential leader. Coworkers value my input. They would also like to see more of this, for me to be more communicative, less solitary. We are a team, after all. It would be nice if I embraced that more. I sign a piece of paper, agreeing to all this. It’s the same as last year and the year before, the same as it’s been the past six years. Except that now I get an extra vacation day.
I call out his name the following Tuesday afternoon, and he’s there this time. He takes a seat in the exam room. My hands are trembling. Why? How am I going to do my job and extract his blood?
“I missed you last week.”