The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  “Scalp? Who’s scalping? Do you see any tickets for sale?”

  I snatched the afterparty passes from his hand. The girl tried to sidle away, but I stopped her with a snarled, “Freeze, sunshine.”

  “We weren’t doing anything,” protested the boy. “We were just looking.”

  “Yeah, that’s what the peep-show creep said. Now plant it.” They planted it. It’s really an amazing thing when you think about it. A fake badge and a command voice are all it takes to put you totally in charge.

  Examining the passes with a jaundiced eye, I asked Vic, “Where’d you get these?”

  “You know,” he shrugged. “Here and there.”

  “You stole ’em from your boss again, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe I bought ’em on eBay,” he said with the right mix of fear and fierceness. “What are you gonna do? Confiscate ’em and go to the party yourself? Try and get a groupie to slurp you one? They go for rockers, you know, not undercover douchebags.”

  “Watch your mouth, felch.” I waved the passes in his face. “Just because I can’t use these doesn’t mean I can’t make ’em disappear.”

  “Sorry, officer,” said Vic, changing his tune for the benefit of the spellbound stoners.

  I changed mine, too: to wistful. “Wish I could go, man,” I said. “I hear it’s going to be off the hook. Hef is going.”

  “Hef goes everywhere.”

  “Yeah, he does.” I handed the passes back to Vic. “Look,” I said, “keep this shit outta my sight, will you?” I turned to walk away.

  “You’re letting us go?” asked the girl.

  “Hey,” I said, “as long as there’s no price tag on the things, it’s not scalping, just commerce. Tell Hef I said hi.”

  Sold!

  We stooged off another half-dozen passes before the show got under way, then wandered down the street to a bar called Muskrat Love. Mirplo ordered a shot and a beer, but I’d done my booze for the month, so I just sat there at the bar, playing with a beer mat. Vic counted out the night’s get and passed half to me.

  “Keep it,” I said.

  “What, you don’t want it? Too chump change?”

  “Yeah, no, it’s not that. It’s just, you need it more than I do. I’m about to score big in this Merlin Game and all …”

  My voice trailed off into that place where all liars’ voices go, a fact upon which Vic’s takes-one-to-know-one sensor immediately picked up. He looked at me sideways.

  “You’ve got the guilts,” he said, as if naming a particularly virulent venereal disease. “Oh, my God, Radar, you’re going soft on the mark.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “What do I care if a couple of baked rockers fork over some of daddy’s extra green?”

  “Well, what do you?”

  Good question. A question so good that it almost bought me a beer. But I knew if I went down that road I’d be waking up on the floor again tomorrow, no nearer to an answer than I was right now. I shredded the beer mat instead.

  One thing you get used to in the grift is thinking in layers. Like, if the mark tells you something’s bothering him about a deal you’re on, you peel back the thing he thinks is bothering him and get to the one underneath. This is why their “I’m not sure my wife will let me invest” really means “Please give me a reason to trust you.” Peeling back your own layers is harder, because as a grifter you’re just naturally more devious than normal people, plus, everyone tends to put up more resistance when it’s them looking at them. But Mirplo had a point. If I wasn’t going soft on the mark (which happens to every grifter from time to time, no matter how hard we try to keep empathy at bay), then what, really, was toasting my cheese?

  Allie, of course. Allie on whom I not only wanted to go soft, but had gone soft, if you think about it: soft as runny brie, soft as a bunny’s belly, soft as the downy fur I imagined lay between her …

  Stop it, Radar! Get a fucking grip!!

  Mirplo and I spent an hour backpredicting everything that had happened between Allie and me since we’d met. The results were not pretty: Radar Hoverlander, a man of independent means and ways, was being led about by the nose.

  Or not exactly the nose, a point Vic underscored by shifting into his “Uncle Joe” persona, a booming sportscaster type who belted out his words a full octave lower than, and utterly unrecognizable as, Vic’s normal, reedy voice.

  “She’s got his dick in her hand!” boomed Uncle Joe. “His pants are up, his belt is buckled, his fly is zipped, but his dick is in her hand!” Normally, I found Uncle Joe quite funny. Not now, though. “She shoots, she scores!”

  Uncle Joe aside, the evidence was hard to refute. Just look at how I’d played every choice Allie had offered me so far: She wanted to flirt at a party; I flirted. She wanted a ride home; I drove. She wanted a meeting; we met. Mentor for Grandpa? Check. And then a big, fat, lively, major league snuke that stood to net some serious green. In the midst of which her cold feet suddenly want company.

  Only they don’t get it!

  For the first time, Allie hears Radar say no. Result? Tears and wet violence. And how does this make Radar feel, really? Bad. Really bad. Bad enough to displace his feelings to grift guilt, which is fully ridiculous: The mark always gets what the mark deserves.

  My half of the night’s earn was still sitting on the bar, minus the cost of drinks, which Vic had conveniently taken from my end. I snatched up the cash and jammed it in my pocket. So much, at least, for that.

  As for the rest, all I had to do was peel back the bottom layer and look at it with unblinking eyes: To say no to Allie Quinn was to feel remorse. Like Pavlov’s dog ringing his own bell and kicking his own ass.

  Well, that was easy enough to fix. All I had to do was stop saying no.

  No, I mean keep saying no. (God, now I’m Freudian slipping.) Keep saying no. Just stonewall until the vexing vixen gets frustrated or bored and goes off to shop for another Hoverlander to land on. Stop playing her game, Radar! Can’t you see she’s in your head?

  Just say no!

  I bought Vic a beer for his road and headed home.

  Where I found Allie waiting on my doorstep.

  The night had turned cool, and she sat with her arms wrapped around her bare knees in a TV attempt to keep warm. It made her look about twelve years old.

  She made a proposition no twelve-year-old should make.

  Long story short, I found I couldn’t say no.

  12.

  it’s tricky when grifters make love

  I t’s tricky when grifters make love.

  Even in the best of circumstances, the sack can be a hotbed of deception. “Of course I came.” I “love it when you do that!” “No, it wasn’t too rough … too soft … too short … too long.” “Honey, making love to you is exactly like the baby bear’s porridge, just right.” Oh, please: The lies we tell each other. And that’s just in the name of not brutalizing one another with the truth.

  Now put two notorious a prevaricators in bed together, where people are supposed to be vulnerable and real with each other, and watch the walls of false intimacy fly up. First thing you both do is buy into the useful fiction that it’s just a friendly fuck, a horny idea that one of you had and the other couldn’t refuse. But you both know that’s not true. One has an agenda hidden so deep it may never see light of day. The other fancies himself such a cocksman that, by damn it, he can bone the truth out of her. (I’m laughing at myself right now. What can I tell you? Sex makes everyone stupid.) Next, deny the fact that when clothes come off, things change. And I’m not talking about the physical flaws revealed. Everyone suffers that. The mole on your ass that you hate. Your outie navel you always thought was kind of a turnoff. The Dopey tattoo that seemed like such a good idea at the time. Maybe your six-pack abs are more like a pony keg. Maybe “objects in T-shirts are smaller than they appear.” Thanks to porn, we all know how gorgeous gorgeous can be. In real life, it’s never that way. You con yourself that your partner will fo
rgive a few imperfections, while secretly fearing she’ll realize it’s all imperfection. Well, buck up, bucko: She’s conning herself the exact same thing about you.

  When it comes to sex, rest assured, we’re all in the same bed.

  But for Allie and me to get naked together was to make a statement that all lovers make but grifters simply can’t make and mean: “I trust you. I trust you not to judge me, belittle me, laugh at my warts-and-all all. I trust you to gentle me if I need gentling and to reassure me with your words and not-words. I trust you to witness me at my most vulnerable and exposed and … approve. Just approve. And when it’s over, I’ll trust you yet more, trust enough to risk falling asleep beside you, nestled in connection, spooning in the cherished belief that, for once in my ragged, unworthy life, someone as gloriously approving as you could risk falling asleep beside me, too.” For normal people, maybe this works, but for grifters, it’s bad mojo. It should never be done.

  All of which I forgot the instant Allie threw me down on my bed, sprawled across me and stuck a tongue of pure electric fire down my throat. My tongue fought back, and for a while it was tongue war. With no clear winner in sight, we reached a rough accommodation, taking turns taking the swirling, darting lead, while our hands went looking for something to do. At first it was all safety zones: head and neck and knee and back. Then we discovered each other’s ass, and that was a party of sorts. She ground her pelvis into my groin, where, as with the tongue, she met a certain form of resistance. By mutual military maneuver, our hands soon opened a second front in front. I cupped a breast through a bra, while Allie came this close to touching my erection through my jeans. *

  I rolled her over. Her cinnamon hair sprayed a halo on my pillow. Color rose along her neckline, and her lips looked bee-stung, red and full. Her eyes were likewise wide—huge, with pupils big and black enough to fall into. She wore no makeup, and the flush in her cheeks brought out freckles I hadn’t noticed before. In her METRO RETRO T-shirt and kilt-style skirt, she looked so schoolgirl I suddenly felt illegal.

  She read some of this in my face, and uttered the word “What?” in a manner part naïf, part tart.

  “This is a bad idea,” I said.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” she murmured. Then she grabbed me and pulled me down to her, her tongue making the nonverbal statement that she could, in fact, agree a whole lot less. A stronger man than I might have found the power to resist. I’m not sure that such a man exists.

  Now it was all hands on deck, a frank exploration of each other’s body parts—or at least as frank an exploration as layers of fabric can allow. So then it was time for that awkward thing where you try to take off your clothes without looking awkward. Trust me, no man can pull off taking off his underwear and not be at least a little bit dorky. You’re fine over the hips, maybe even the knees, but once that cotton puddle is down around your ankles, even a sexy striptease will take a turn for the self-conscious. It helps if you can both laugh then; with tension that thick, you just have to.

  Allie had the sexy striptease wired, right down to the self-conscious way she laughed as she bounced up off the bed and did a little hippy-hippy shake thing at once so coy and so knowing that it made every part of me tingle. I tried to play it cool, just lying there with my hands behind my head, but my body betrayed me; I was so taut, I twanged like a bowstring. Allie pirouetted her bra off, holding it against her chest as she twirled, until centrifugal force worked its magic and I could see what I’d (recently frequently, I suddenly realized) pictured: that objects in T-shirts can be even more perfect than imagined. Her eyes reached out to mine for approval. I mustered a reverent, “Wow.” Then her skirt and panties were somehow made to vanish, and she stood before me, naked, in a state of grace. Part of me recognized that she might even now still be playing me, still easing me in. But then she hopped on the bed and straddled me. Then I truly got eased in, and just didn’t care.

  People can fake it when they fuck. Girls fake better than boys. Grifters fake better than most. You can fake the sighs and moans, the rising crescendo of imprecations to divinities. You can even fake the sticky stuff if you’re good, or at least fake the value you place on that. So, yeah, you can fake the union of bodies, sure—but not the meeting of minds. Because when the connection is there, it’s there. Undeniably. Inarguably. And you know it is, because you hit a groove, a real one, with organic pulse and tempo. Everything works and nothing is forced. Time slows and stretches till your whole world is reduced to the metronome of your bodies in synch, a perfect human piston delivering shots of combustion over and over again until you’re both dripping with sweat, slick with the glisten of it, over all the parts that pass between you. You anticipate each other’s change of pace and position as if the thing that links you is not pole and hole but some laser bridge between brains. You lick the sweat off each other and the taste is at once foreign and familiar, like this is the body your body has been waiting for all its life. You sense its chemical root; on top of everything else, it just smells right. Then all is lost: lost in a rhythm and cadence that can’t possibly be anything but the real deal, a sweet union so urgent, so unguent, that it just wants to go on and on and on but also wants to end right fucking now! You hear her screams, muffled by the pillow she’s shouting into, and you know that the force that’s overcoming you has overcome her, too: a force as old as animals, as new as ten seconds from now. Then a switch trips, and signals jet up and down the length of your spines, and the thing wells up inside you as your bodies race to keep pace, and it wells and it wells until there’s no place left to hold it, and in that brief frozen moment you realize this isn’t just sex, it’s a line that cleaves before from after, or no, not a line, a cliff, a cliff you poise on, cling to, then joyfully leap from as everything inside both of you just suddenly unspools and you come and come till your muscles melt and your bones dissolve and your eyes roll up in your head and you drop.

  And your shocked limbic systems look around themselves and ask, What the fuck was that?

  An eternity later, I looked over at Allie. She lay on her side, asleep. A drop of sweat hung from the tip of her nose, poised to fall. My tongue flicked out and snatched it, like a hummingbird sucking up God’s own nectar. In her somnolent murmur, a silent spit bubble formed and broke on her lips. Maybe everyone is innocent when they make love, I thought. Maybe sex makes everyone new. Then I was gone in sleep, too, and the night took us both away.

  I woke before dawn in a panic. What did I do?! I let the enemy inside the gates and then fell asleep! I sat up with a start, half expecting to see burning curtains and a benzene-soaked Dear John note. Or at least Allie gone, vanished into the night, off somewhere laughing at my pliancy and plotting her next duplicitous move.

  But no, there she was. Still in bed, still asleep, her deep, regular breathing punctuated at odd intervals by tiny, adorable snerks. I reached out to stroke her breast through the sheet. She took my hand and rolled with it, pulling me down in behind her. With my nose against her neck, I inhaled the scent of her shampoo and fell asleep again.

  Next thing I knew, it was full daylight and Allie was blowing coffee steam across my face. I opened my eyes to see her perched on the bed beside me, fully clothed, two hot Java Mans in her hands.

  “Drink,” she said. “We need to talk, and I bet you’re witless before coffee.”

  I have to admit this was true, and would admit also to a frisson of disappointment at seeing her so up and about, so manifestly dressed. What, no second act? No morning after the night before? Was I really just a horny idea she had? Was it really just that’s that with that?

  I sat up and started to get out of bed but, weirdly, bashfulness balked me. Allie shot me a smirky look, like, really? and averted her eyes. I jammed to the can, relieved myself, brushed away morning mouth, then returned to the sanctuary of my blankets, huddling there with the modesty of a Hasid on honeymoon, swigging my coffee and waiting for the caffeine to kick in.

  “Okay,” Allie said at
last. “Cards-on-the-table time.” I held my breath. Half of me anticipated just additional Allie Quinn Brand Quality White Noise. The other half dared to dream that her decision to sleep with me had somehow erased her insidity and rendered her real. The other other half of me just wanted to drag her back under the covers and screw the day away. I told that part to shut up. Such thoughts at this time could only be distracting at best, counterproductive at worst. Though I noticed Allie making no effort to deny me the view up her skirt. Was this a bit of Lorelei bait or the careless immodesty of a newly minted fuck buddy? It’s a measure of exactly how twisted up I was that I couldn’t even begin to guess. “You know how I told you we have to stop the Merlin Game?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, mime-wiping remembered hot coffee from my lap. “Seems we had some disagreement there.”

  “And do we still?”

  “It’s risk versus benefit,” I said. “I look at this play, I see plenty of benefit, not much risk. Tell me where I’m wrong.”

  She sighed what I at that moment mentally dubbed the Allie Sigh, so rich with regret you could almost taste it. “Radar,” she said, “I haven’t been entirely honest with you.” Now there’s a news flash. Seriously, did she not think I knew? “And,” she added, “I know you know it, too.”

  Oh.

  She shifted on the bed, and the upskirt shot went away. I felt an immediate nostalgia for it but forced that from my head. “The truth is, my grandfather’s not really the problem.”

  “He’s not freaking out about the grift?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether he is or isn’t,” she said testily. It was the first time she’d acknowledged the slightest seam in her story, and it came off like a crack in her cool. “You speak of risk versus benefit. Okay, let me spell out the risk. I think we’ve been pinged.” Her use of this word was another revelation, for pinged is grifter code for “discovered” or “found out,” like a submarine will ping another sub with its sonar. In saying we’d been pinged, she confessed at last, and in a way she knew I could not fail to understand, to being in the game. This was not news, but her admission of it was. Maybe our roll in the hay had kicked her candor into a slightly higher orbit after all. In any event, I let the lingo pass unremarked. There would be time for going back over who knew what when. Right then I just wanted to know who she thought had made us and why that was a big deal.