“Katy got busted,” Grady says.
I nod like I know who he’s talking about. The bathroom is painted light green, hospital-gown green, and there’s wall-to-wall shag carpeting on the floor. I don’t even want to think about that carpet.
Back in the living room they’re playing a Greatest Disco Hits record, and a few people are dancing to it in that exaggerated way that lets everyone know they’re only kidding. We’re all on something or other now. A forest of beer bottles has sprouted on the coffee table. Everywhere I look, I see a guy chewing the inside of his cheek or a girl bouncing her knee and laughing too loud. Great secrets are revealed to strangers who will forget them by morning, and the smoke of a thousand cigarettes rises like scum off boiling meat and tries to find a way out through the earthquake cracks in the ceiling.
A space opens up on the couch, and I take it, settling into the thick of things. The speed is tickling the back of my neck, where my skull joins my spine, and my earlier drunkenness fades into a taut chemical clarity. I open myself up as wide as I can, so wide that all of the goodness inside me sparkles like diamonds there for the taking, and sure enough, the guy to my left, the white boy with dreads, asks my name.
My tongue can hardly move fast enough to push out the words my brain drops onto it. I’ve got so much to say to my new acquaintance, a whole life to explain. Twenty minutes or so into it, he excuses himself to fetch another beer, but that’s okay, someone else takes his place. And so on, and so on, for what seems like hours. One by one people get their fill of me and slip away. I don’t even try to keep track of the changing faces, because I’ve got this idea that if I stop talking before I’m all talked out, I’ll seize up and die.
I reminisce about Christmas when I was a kid and reel off the names of every dog I’ve ever owned. I discuss the themes of Moby Dick and explain how to make perfect scrambled eggs. I tell them about Mercedes and what finally happened between us and toss out every other miserable and degrading memory that comes to mind. Dee Dee finally jumps on me, pinning me to the couch. She’s laughing so hard she’s crying as she puts her hand over my mouth and squeezes my lips together.
“Shut up,” she gasps. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
I GET A grip on the reins after another beer or two, jerk myself back into a trot. Everything’s sort of whirling around me, slightly distorted, like I’m watching from inside a fishbowl, which is fine: I enjoy the distance.
Some joker comes prancing down the hallway wearing one of Dee Dee’s dresses and sends the party into hysterics. I’m swept up by the unruly stampede to the bedroom, where all of the men are soon tearing through the boxes of clothes and pulling on Whatever fits. Mine’s a frilly blue thing that reminds me of the toilet-paper covers in my grandmother’s bathroom. A seam rips when I bend over to roll my jeans above my knees. Dee Dee’s makeup case is unearthed, and we go to work on each other with lipstick and eye shadow.
“This is pretty fucking gay,” I say as I draw a bright red whore’s smile on Grady’s face.
He takes a hit off a joint that’s going around the room, then passes it to me, and it looks like it’s been dipped in blood. I realize that I’m sweating, have been for hours. I stink.
There’s some kind of contest. One by one we’re to exit the bedroom and let the girls judge us. I stomp out and do a couple of pirouettes and some half-assed pop-locking. A flash goes off in my face and a Polaroid whirs. My performance draws a few claps and hoots, but nothing like what the next guy gets when he raises his skirt to reveal that he’s not wearing underwear and shakes his gear in time to the music. The winner, instantly, and his prize is that he can kiss whichever of the girls he wants. He chooses a guy, though, and everybody loses it when they tongue each other right there in the middle of the living room.
“Cheater,” I keep yelling, “no fair,” until someone tells me to grow up.
When nobody’s looking, I sneak over and steal my picture out of the stack of photos on the couch.
I SHOULD HAVE told Mercedes when I began to date Pam, the barfly nurse. Instead I kept my mouth shut and pulled double duty, waiting for an easy way out. One day Mercedes showed up with all her hair cut off. She started to talk about getting a tattoo, a small one on her butt. The institute called her parents and let them know she’d been missing classes, and her mother sent her to a priest, who made her swear on the Bible that she was still a virgin. Mercedes could smell Pam on my sheets. “That’s another girl, I know it is,” she said.
In the midst of all this, I got a little strung out. My dealer, a fat pig named Alberto, had seen me around the neighborhood with Mercedes and was fascinated by our relationship. When I wound up in over my head to him, he suggested I could clear my debt by letting him fuck her. I told him he was crazy. “Let me watch, then,” he said. “She’ll never know.” He stood in the kitchen, and I turned up the music and got it over with quickly. He was right — she never suspected a thing.
Eventually I stopped answering the buzzer when Mercedes showed up. The tapping of her cane as she walked away made me want to puke. I felt creepy and weak and my blood burned like poison. I’d see her sometimes, headed for the bus stop or doughnut shop, and pass within feet of her without saying a word. “You are such a fucker,” Pam would tell me — Pam, who lasted less than a month. I wound up getting loaded on Percodan and driving my car into a Taco Bell. That was as close as I came to asking for help.
I BREAK THE surface somewhere between dead and alive in the backseat of a car speeding through the desert. It’s still night, and Dee Dee’s driving, and I’ve got my hand down Christina’s sister’s pants. She shoves a stick of gum into my mouth and pulls my face to hers. My lips are raw and slimy. We’ve been kissing for hours. I touch the ring in her brow, think about yanking it out to see if she’ll explode like a grenade, but she slaps my hand away.
Grady’s Cadillac is behind us. His headlights flash, and Dee Dee pulls over. I leap from the Malibu and cross the dirt road to piss against a Joshua tree. I’m still wearing the dress. I have to pull it up around my hips to get at the buttons of my jeans. The massive sand dune swelling on the horizon glows like a pile of lost, old bones, and the wind howls in my ears. It’s a lonely and truthful place, and it scares me. Grady and Dee Dee and Christina’s sister are standing around the Caddy, washing down little white doughnuts with beer. I see that Grady is still wearing his dress, too, so it must be something we agreed upon.
He tosses me a Bud, and we walk to the Malibu. He has me hold a flashlight on him while he uses a screwdriver to pry the CD player from the dash.
Who are these people, I wonder, and what happened to my cigarettes? I can’t stop looking at the stars swarming overhead, preparing to attack. Christina’s sister comes up behind me and wraps her arms around my waist. Her breath against my spine makes me want to scream.
When Grady’s done, he tosses the stereo into the Caddy, then hops in and backs the car farther away from the Malibu.
“Let me pour,” I say, just to say something, just to get away from Christina’s sister.
Grady hands me the gas can. Following his shouted instructions, I douse the interior of the Malibu, the tires, the engine. The fumes sting my eyes, my swollen lips. I want to be the one to put the spark to it, too, but Grady won’t allow that. He tells the girls to move across the road, to the Joshua tree. I stay where I am, beside him.
He strikes a road flare. It sputters and catches, giving off a rosy glow. With a smooth underhand toss, he sends it through the open window of the Malibu. There’s a loud roar, and the sun rises inside the car, finds itself trapped by the roof, and so forces itself out wherever it can. A fiery arm reaches for us. Grady runs, but I don’t see the point. The air begins to crackle around me, and hot fingers caress my cheeks, my nose, plunge into my eyes. My tongue crumbles into ash when I laugh, my teeth are nubbins of coal.
Grady yanks me backward by my collar. He rolls me in the sand to put out the fire. I sit next to the Joshua tree in the mud my pi
ss made and stroke the remnants of the dress that still cling to me. The clothes I’m wearing beneath it are untouched. Across the road, the Malibu pops and whistles, a musical inferno. Birds chirp in the false dawn, jackrabbits awaken confused. Black smoke billows up to obscure the marauding stars.
“You okay?” Grady asks. The girls await my answer, hands over their mouths.
“I’m fine,” I say.
We use the rest of the beer to wash the soot off my face. And I am fine, except that when I close my eyes there are flames dancing on the backs of the lids.
WE’LL STOP IN Barstow for booze and cigarettes. Back in L.A., Christina’s sister will crash at my apartment for a few days, and it will be fun and all, but we’ll finally come to our senses. I’ll tell her to leave, and she’ll try to stab me with a broken tequila bottle. After that I’ll be lonely for a good long while, but then things will get better. I’ll find a job, lose it, find another. A few years from now I’ll come into enough money to take a trip to Hawaii. I will not enjoy it. There will be birds there, flowers red as candy, and waves just like in the brochure, but they’ll all remind me of Mercedes. I’ll stand on the shore and scream descriptions of everything into the night, descriptions that will tremble and falter and fall, and be gobbled up by a black, buzzing sea.
Everything Beautiful Is Far Away
I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE WITHIN FIVE HUNDRED YARDS of the house, but rumor has it she’s hired a gang of Vietnamese hard cases to get rid of me, so order of protection or no order of protection, I’m going in. The back door is unlocked, and her mom and dad are just sitting down to dinner. They look like a couple of ghosts; I could put my fist right through them.
We had Christmas together at that table, Valentine’s Day. Her dad once complimented me on how clean I kept my car. I tell them not to mind, go ahead and eat. I lean against the kitchen counter to wait for them to finish. The sun pushes red through the window, and the refrigerator and Crock-Pot and microwave are hot to the touch.
“What’s this about?” her dad asks.
“Does a gang of Vietnamese hard cases ring a bell?”
“Lana moved to Chicago six months ago,” her mom says.
“Nice try.”
Her dad wipes his mouth with a napkin, then stands and walks out of the room.
“It’s true,” her mom continues. “You remember all the phone calls you made here afterward.”
“My finger slipped,” I explain.
Her dad reappears, carrying a shotgun. I try to grab something out of the dish rack to defend myself, but my knees give way, and I end up scrambling out the back door on all fours.
I’ve always thought their yard was special, the fruit trees and the fishpond. Concrete deer graze in the bushes and something is always blooming. I hop over the fence just as her dad appears on the patio. He points the gun at me, the same man who admired the shine on my chrome that time.
“That isn’t necessary,” I yell.
A couple of cop cars howl past as I drive out of the neighborhood. It’s not even dark yet, but already the gas stations and grocery stores are all lit up. There’s no such thing as a hiding place. Through a window I can see people waiting in line at McDonald’s. They comb their hair and smile at their own reflections.
In order to shake any tails I go home via a new route, cutting corners, doubling back, and running a few reds. After a while even I don’t know where I am. It seems impossible that I could get so lost in the city I grew up in.
MARTY BLAMES HIS worthlessness on one awful season of Little League. When he starts in on it sometimes, the whole bar yells at him to have another drink. You have to wonder about a guy who can trace thirty years of failure back to a grounder he bobbled when he was eight. You also have to wonder about the people who call themselves his friends but won’t let him get it off his chest.
In crowded places I sometimes have trouble with conversations. Here at the bar, for example, a dude can be talking right to me, but I can just as clearly hear the person sitting next to him, and the person sitting next to that person, which leads to confusion. It’s a filtering problem, I guess. Like drowning in words.
Marty’s sitting near the TV with three packs of Camels stacked in front of him. He smiles and points hopefully at his glass.
“Jennifer, honey,” I say, “get Marty another on me, okay?”
I help when I can.
Marty inherited a chimp named John Wayne from an uncle who had something to do with the rodeo. Marty thought he might put the chimp in the movies, but all John Wayne did was drink beer and smoke cigars. He got loaded one night and set Marty’s apartment on fire, and then a few days later he bit off the tip of Marty’s nose. When the cops showed up, John Wayne charged them. They had no choice but to shoot. Marty still carries the newspaper clipping in his wallet.
I’M CAREFUL COMING up the stairs into my building. One of the kids who lives here is riding his tricycle in the hall. I ask him if he’s seen anyone strange snooping around, and he stares at me with the blankest face.
My place is what they call a bachelor. It doesn’t have a kitchen, just a room to sleep in and a bathroom. It’s against the rules, but I snuck in a hot plate so when I get tired of fast food I can heat a can of soup or spaghetti. As soon as I find one cheap, I’m buying a little refrigerator. Then I’ll be able to cook bacon and eggs some mornings.
I sit in my recliner, which faces the only window in the room. The window looks out onto the brick wall of the apartment building next door. I don’t have a regular TV schedule other than the eleven o’clock news. A man who comes by the newsstand gets the listings out of the Sunday paper and underlines everything he’s going to watch for the entire week. That’s a little much.
At times like these I wish I still smoked.
They’ve got us on some kind of flight path here. All night long helicopters clatter back and forth, rattling the windows and the loose change on the coffee table. I tried to organize the tenants in the building to make a complaint to the city. I typed up a letter at the library, xeroxed it at my own expense, and slipped it under every door. The only response came from a squirrely guy on the first floor who calls himself an actor but who I know sells office supplies over the phone. He stopped me in the lobby and asked to borrow twenty dollars.
JAMES TELLS ME some people from a magazine are coming by to take pictures. They have his permission. They show up before noon, while I’m straightening the out-of-state papers. A bee has been hovering around the stand all morning, making me nervous. I try to swat it a few times, but it reads my mind.
The photographer thinks he’s a badass. He’s got muscles and tattoos and calls his assistant dickweed. A closet case, for sure. He drops a can of Red Bull on the sidewalk, and it spills all over everywhere. He doesn’t say a word.
“Hey,” I yell. “Do something with that.”
The models arrive later, after the camera and lights are set up. I figure out ways to stare without anybody catching on. The blonde looks like she’d break if you spooked her. Her face when she’s not posing is wiped clean of expression; she doesn’t give anything away for free. I used to drive myself crazy dreaming about banging girls like her.
The photographer wants me in some of the shots. I pretend to sell the girls a magazine. I stand between them with my back to the camera. In one I am looking over their shoulders as they read a newspaper. That pesky bee lands on the blonde’s throat, and I swear I see its stinger pierce her skin. She screams and crumples to the sidewalk.
“What is it?” the photographer shouts. “What the fuck’s wrong?”
She lies there bawling like someone died. The photographer, the assistant, the makeup girl — everyone gathers round.
“Are you allergic, Tina? Tina, listen.”
Tina’s face is bright red. She gurgles and wails, and snot drips off her chin. I watch from the register, not realizing I’m smiling until the photographer notices.
“This is funny?” he shouts. “This is funny?”
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br /> I CAN’T SLEEP, the helicopters and all, so I gather my dirty clothes and drive to the twenty-four-hour Laundromat on La Brea. Tricky shit goes on late at night. He-shes and burglar alarms. Moonlight. Elaborate detours pop up out of nowhere and disappear by morning. Men with long poles change the names of movies and the price of gas.
An old Armenian is asleep on the bench in the Laundromat. He snores loudly, and it looks like he’s pissed himself — there’s a puddle, anyway. Over by the sink a Mexican woman folds towels while her kid plays with a toy car on the floor.
Half of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling fixtures are burned out, which makes for some dark corners and jagged shadows. The change machine is on the fritz, too. I ask the Mexican lady to break a dollar, but she pulls the no-speakee-English bit, so I have to go next door to the liquor store. It all makes sense when I see that Ho Chi Minh himself is behind the counter. I get the feeling he’s been waiting for me.
NO CHANGE warns a sign on the register. I give him a dollar for a twenty-five-cent pack of gum, scoop up the three quarters he slaps on the counter, then lay down another pack of gum and another dollar.
“Got you,” I say as he slides over three more quarters. “They sure didn’t teach you much about customer service in Saigon.”
He goes back to the newspaper spread out in front of him. It’s written in his language, I guess. The letters look like bugs.
“You and your boys better watch yourselves,” I continue. “I don’t like being followed. My dad fought over there, get it? My Lai, motherfucker.”
“I’m Korean,” Uncle Ho says.
“What?”
“I’m Korean.”
I see myself on the security monitor hanging from the ceiling. Lana’s got me so wound up, I can’t tell if I’m coming or going.
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