by Peter Craig
That winter break, as he turned seventeen in secret, he began the nightly routine of climbing to her cramped bedroom full of Anthrax and Megadeath posters. They would lounge on her bed together, sharing a bowl. He would explore her body while she lay naked and pale and motionless, quivering slightly whenever he tickled her by accident. She was so quiet that he sometimes forgot she was there. But, undeterred, he knew he had found a hobby to rival any magnetic strip encoder or algorithm. Unabashedly he studied everything he could find on sexual techniques and the female anatomy, running back to her lit window each night with his head full of new ideas, always to find her stoned and willing, her body stretching out flat as if for an experimenting scientist.
One night around Christmas it occurred to Kevin that she was becoming progressively more reserved, as if waiting to be tied to the bed. He asked, “Are we getting better or worse here, Denise?”
“Doug, I have to tell you something. It’s, like—important. I’ve been putting it off—”
“Because you know yourself better than I do—I mean, no matter how much research a guy does, no matter how much prep time, sometimes you got to talk the plane into the runway, you know—”
“I really think we should, like, see other people. I like you, but I just—”
“You mean a threesome?”
“No, I mean, like, you know, breaking up. I totally want to stay friends, but you’re just, like, so—like focused—and I’m, like, not ready for that.”
Initially, Kevin took this disappointment rather well, with a mild sense of failure, rationalized as a beginner’s overeagerness, and maybe a twinge of pain in his chest, a rock in his throat. This was only natural. When he joined his friends skating under the freeway overpass later that night, they were all high, cackling with hoarse laughs, breath steaming in the cooler air, and he endured their ribbing, refusing to join them in any negative commentary about Denise. When asked if she had “another dude up there already,” he threw a beer bottle, which smashed on the concrete over their heads. Everyone stood and spread out across the slope, each apologizing to him and trying to calm him.
“Anybody who talks any shit like that is going to get a piece of glass right through the eye socket and into his fucking brain. Understand? I’ll break into your houses when you’re sleeping, I swear to God, and I’ll piss on every fucking thing you own.”
He was impressed by how emphatically they apologized, conceding an entire six-pack as a peace offering.
Second semester, Denise had a conspicuous new boyfriend. She went through an astounding transformation. By February she dressed in a jean jumpsuit, wore her hair in a crimped mop, and abandoned her skateboard in favor of a white leather purse. The boyfriend, Kip Larson, was the son of a real estate developer. Flush with easy money, Kip apparently sold cocaine “for the adventure.” Wherever Denise went, his hamhock arm draped heavily over her shoulders. In mid-January, she wrote Kevin a letter in which she thanked him for giving her “the confidence to be herself and date other people,” and blamed their sudden breakup on the fact that “in three whole weeks,” he had never once said that he loved her. Though his eyes throbbed, his lungs burned, and he couldn’t sleep at night from rage and humiliation, he was determined to behave rationally.
He forged magazine subscription orders so that Kip’s parents were inundated by S&M fetish magazines in their son’s name; he hacked into the school computer via the lab at CSUN and flunked Kip in every class but wood shop. He filled their pool with instant Jell-O, and when the family was gone for spring break, he impersonated the father, left a credit card number, and had a locksmith change all the doors. Out of his trash, he found information for Kip’s very own American Express account, and—in a quiet moment of unsung victory—encoded it onto the magnetic strip of Daniel Herman’s MasterCard, charged a thousand dollars’ worth of massage oils and dildos at a sex shop, then dropped it down a storm grate. He called the school psychiatrist, pretending to be Kip in the throes of a bad acid trip; and when school began that Monday, he snorted with suppressed laughter upon hearing that Kip was in the office with a social worker, “undergoing evaluation.”
During a lull in the battle, on a rare night when he was home at the condo, Denise called and Melody brought the cordless phone to Kevin in his room. “It’s for yooooou, Doug.” She mouthed the words, “It’s a girl!”
He put the phone to his ear and mumbled a greeting.
“Doug? You have to stop this shit you’re doing to Kip. If you don’t, we’re going to call the police. I don’t know what you call it exactly, but I know it’s some kind of a crime.”
Melody was lingering in his doorway, watching and nodding expectantly. She whispered, “Is she asking you out?”
Kevin grimaced and waved her out of the room, but she wouldn’t leave.
“Listen. If we could just discuss this matter at a more convenient place—I could meet you somewhere.”
“Just stop. And Kip’s dad is in real estate and he knows mobsters, okay? So you’re totally dead if you keep this up.”
“Okay, Saturday night then. Right, right. Bye-bye.”
Melody gave him a wink and quietly shut the door.
The following afternoon, Kip and several friends in muscle shirts met Kevin in the parking lot, walked him across the school into a shaded spot behind the physical plant, and worked him over. Though his ribs hurt and someone had stepped on his neck, Kevin wasn’t impressed by their performance. They went about the beating with the dutiful nature of PE calisthenics, finishing with a flourish of stomping Converse sneakers while he curled up in the gravel like a pill bug. Doubled over, he skated across the neighborhood to Denise’s house, and, finding no one home, crawled through the pet door and hid in her room.
He waited for hours as the windows went dark. Showers hissed in the walls, the phone rang, the garage door rumbled in the floor. He heard dinner downstairs with clanking silverware, growing louder until an argument erupted. Muffled in the walls and carpet, he could hear Denise screaming at her parents, screeching and crying. Someone broke a dish, and then came a tremor of racing footsteps up the stairs. The contractor shouted and the child shrink admonished him. Denise stepped into her dark room, turned on the lights, and reared back against her closet door when she saw Kevin on a pile of stuffed animals.
“It’s a bad time for this—I’m sorry.”
“Oh my God, you are such a psycho.”
“I’m really not. I’m just single-minded. This letter you wrote me, I have a few questions about it.”
He unfolded the letter from his pocket while she moved all the way into the corner. Her posture relaxed when she saw his swollen face. “What happened to you anyway?”
“Your boyfriend and his goons. They had to resort to violence. I’m actually flattered. It’s a sign of weakness. Means I’m getting into their heads.”
She sat on the edge of her bed and clasped her hands together. “God, you’re like honestly all fucking Batman and shit over me, huh?”
“Exactly,” said Kevin. “And Spider-Man. I want to make you an offer, Denise. Will you hear me out on it?”
She looked up with a worried face and nodded.
“I’m having some problems at home too. With my stepmother. She’s like a schizophrenic bunny or something, and I can’t take it. I want you to come away with me. Get the hell out of the valley, and head someplace better for people like us. The fucking Riviera maybe.”
“Where’s that?”
“My point is, I’ve got skills, Denise. I got ten Gs saved up. You and I together could turn that into a hundred inside of a month. Wherever you want to go. Throw a dart at a map.” He looked around her walls at the assorted headbanger and satanic posters, and continued, “You don’t have a map, but you get what I mean.”
“Like Vegas?”
“Well, it’s not very ambitious. But okay: Vegas.”
“You really have ten grand?”
“Denise, I’m a magician, I’m an alchemist, pure
science; I can get money out of a stone.”
She nodded for a long time, until she seemed stuck in the motion, as if dancing subtly to one of the bands on the wall. Finally she replied, “Okay. Bring the money on Sunday night, and we’ll hit Vegas. No, wait. Monday night. Monday is better.”
Kevin packed for the rest of his life. Headphones, passport, cash. His father appeared to have withdrawn all the money from the local accounts, because when Kevin searched the apartment he found shoeboxes and drawers filled with hundred-dollar bills. Boxer shorts, a favorite shirt, the lucky diamond wedding ring on a chain necklace. He was preparing for a border check and a deserted island. His skateboard of disintegrating sugar maple and his two torn pairs of jeans. Favorite CDs (Iggy, Black Flag), favorite books (The Killer Inside Me and Endless Love), two boxes of Bisquick, a bag of oranges, and finally, for the first leg of the trip, he picked the lock on a cabinet and stole Jerry’s .38 revolver.
He hadn’t seen Denise in the time between their agreement and the designated night, but he assumed she was ready. At a little past two in the morning, he waited at the spot for an hour; then he moved to the hedges beneath her dormer window. He waited another hour, then climbed the drainage pipe along the side of the house to perch on the roof beside the windowpanes. The room was dark, empty and sealed. The posters were intact, but the mattress was bare. There was no more clutter on the shelves. It was a Spartan museum exhibit of her life.
He climbed back down, leaping the last few feet into the hedges; and he waited until dawn, while the house developed as a silhouette against gradients of lighter gray, details of windows and shingles clarifying slowly, hatching awake. Lights migrated from room to room. Then the garage door slid up to reveal her father, fishing for car keys in his pocket, a sweet roll held in his teeth. The morning was grim and drizzly and Kevin stood at the garage’s mouth, beyond a curtain of dripping water, his curly hair dampened flat onto his forehead. “Excuse me, sir?” He raised his voice over the drumroll of thickening droplets. “I don’t want to bother you, but I’m a good friend of Denise—and I was wondering if she went somewhere.”
He nodded with the roll still in his mouth, placed coffee on the roof of the car, took a bite, then in the midst of chewing seemed to become angry, finally pointing at Kevin with the dental imprint on the roll. “She doesn’t need any more friends like you, pal.”
“Can you tell me where she went, please?”
“Drug rehab. And when she’s out, she’s going to a different school. So move on, kid—or I’ll call the police.”
As Kevin skated home on the damp pavement, he was shivering, so enraged that he could no longer visualize Denise. Instead he pictured Colette burdened with shopping bags, his father stranded in front of Melody’s TV. When he saw the condominium complex rising like a drab prison complex, he hated the place worse than any tragedy in his life. He passed through the door and the hair on his neck rose.
Right away Melody was there with a rehearsed speech, wagging her finger in his face. He snatched it and twisted it backward, until Melody yelped; and then, responding to some gathering velocity, he grabbed her by the throat and jammed the gun up against her mouth. Her eyes bulged, her lips turned white. She tried to speak but only a lisp of air came loose. When he let go, she staggered back, robe flown open, tattoo of a compass beside the thin stripe of pubic hair, old bruises on her gardenia skin. She bundled herself up and quailed in the corner of the living room. Everything was disconnected; Kevin couldn’t relate himself to the splash of events in the room. His father was standing naked in the dark doorway, and Kevin winced and looked away.
He heard Melody sniffling, a ticking on his father’s teeth. “First of all,” Jerry said calmly, “killing somebody is a bigger commitment than marriage, you know, and I don’t think you’re ready. Second of all, you should pull the hammer back if you really want to scare somebody.”
“Are you crazy?” shouted Melody.
“He’s dusted up on something, just wait for him to come down. Put the gun away, dummy. You’re all right.”
“I want the rest of the money in the house and I’m getting the fuck out of here.”
“He’s a bully. He’s never been anything but a bully. He’s going to kill us both.”
“I’ll give you some money,” Jerry said. “But I wish you wouldn’t go like this, Kevin. It just doesn’t sit right. Besides, guns are for people with no imagination. You’re better than that. Put it down, Kevin.”
“What is happening here, Daniel? Why are you calling him Kevin?”
Kevin was suffocating on the air between them, so he turned and left with the gun at his hip, refusing to look back even as he heard a scramble and a wail from Melody. He was too angry and disoriented to plan his next move. His board was overturned in ground cover, and as he grabbed it, he heard doors slamming in the complex. After he had skated for close to an hour in the empty pool, he saw police cars racing past the back gate, pulling around to the parking lot without sirens.
He climbed the fence, crossed the street, and from the other side of the boulevard, watched as more vans and squad cars gathered. They parked haphazardly, slanting into one another, doors opening rapidly and deploying SWAT teams that ran to the stucco pillars around the stairs.
For a moment, Kevin was astounded that some hysterical phone call from Melody could provoke this level of tactical response. He walked toward the police cars with theorems of probation in his head: first offense, assault with a deadly weapon, mitigating factors. When he saw the piñatas piled around the unwinding yellow police tape, one of them placed upright on the hood of a squad car, he recognized his miscalculation. There were nine cars, far too many for a mere domestic dispute. He tried to figure out the relationship between the events. Had a neighbor called the cops? Had there already been a stakeout around the complex?
Suddenly an officer led Melody up the stairs with her hands cuffed behind her. She was crying uncontrollably with the pitch of anger and disbelief, and when he tried to guide her into the car, she shouted that he was hurting her arm. With a sick feeling in his stomach, Kevin realized that this moment had always been coming, like a card in a deck, and it was a divine joke that he had roused Melody and his father from bed on their fated day. Or maybe the shouting in the apartment had precipitated the raid. As a cop began to smash a piñata with a nightstick, Kevin knew everything as if recalling it from a nightmare: he knew the money around the apartment was from scams that had persisted too long and become careless; he knew his father and Melody had been conspiring together; and he was not surprised when out of a papier mâché horse spilled forged deeds, fake IDs, and leaves of hundred-dollar bills.
The star attraction under tiers of spectators, faces hanging out windows and families clustered on flights of stairs, Jerry rose out of the basement apartment in a circle of officers. Unlike Melody, his face was placid. Wearing a wrinkled white dress shirt and a tight pair of yellow shorts, he looked as if he’d been arrested out of the hamper. The sun and sky moved in flickers off his glasses, and his hair was blowing loose around his face.
Two shorter policemen reached up and placed their hands on his head to guide him down into the car, but he stood upright, and it was awkward to see two uniformed men straining to touch his crown of unruly hair. Then Jerry looked right at Kevin, smiled, and nodded slowly, a gesture that could have meant anything, and his lips opened into a crude circle around his gapped teeth, tightening and shrinking slowly like he was blowing out a candle, mouthing a lone syllable: Go.
TWENTY
In the spring of 1986, Jerry awaited trial in the Los Angeles County jail on over fifty-five charges of forgery, fraud, and money laundering all stemming from a single year in Melody’s apartment. The scam that had ultimately led to his arrest was one that might have worked in the old days, when he remained constantly on the move; but over the past six months Melody, with her cramped condominium and her inexhaustible supply of cocaine, seemed to have given him a sense of invincibility. H
e had begun forging quitclaim deeds. Day after day Jerry had been driving out into the relentless sun of the valley, searching for weeded lots and crumbling buildings, anything that appeared to have been abandoned by its owner. After looking up the deed in city hall, he would study the owner’s signature, practice it for a few days, then forge the property over to himself for a negligible price. There was no line of defense against this con other than a bleary-eyed clerk in the records office, who would stamp it through, plug the new details into a computer, and return to the doldrums of paperwork around him. Jerry would wait for the title, then borrow money against the new property. The problem was, several DEA officers were already watching the steady flow of cocaine going in and out of Melody’s condominium complex (the top floors apparently worse than the basement); and they became suspicious about Jerry as well. By the time he was arrested, he owned eleven earthquake-damaged houses, a condemned gas station, six abandoned lots, and a cluster of concrete slabs for a lost trailer park. Kevin knew that he had probably skateboarded through some of his father’s land.
On April Fool’s Day, while Jerry was still awaiting trial in the county jail, new charges accumulating each week, Kevin said good-bye to Douglas Herman in a quiet ceremony along a short industrial twist of the Columbia River through Portland. Washington and California state IDs, a learner’s permit never matured to a driver’s license, a passport never touched with a stamp—he could never have guessed the failure and loss he experienced as he watched the papers scatter in the currents, drift downstream, and vanish into the murky water.
He became Quentin Casellas, a suicide from West Seattle, whose untimely end seemed to haunt him far more than his carefree former alias. Kevin shaved the black locks from his head and was surprised by the long, slender quality of his face, the width and openness of his eyes. He dressed in combat boots and torn T-shirts and jean jackets covered with anarchy symbols, and in Portland, he found hundreds of young ragged teens around a lingering punk scene, kids who congregated with skateboards and cigarettes in the drizzle, under bridges and around the doors of clamorous shows, sweatshirts tied around their waists, girlfriends with dirty hair, angry pimples, and sad blue eyes.