American Dream Machine (20 page)

The moment it happened, the instant the gun went off, the two other boys, Rufus and Sergei, took off running. They weren’t going to hang around to see what they’d just done. Rufus dropped the gun and they bolted, bashing past Severin through the door.

He didn’t see it either, really. His eyes were closed, and he was already running, even as he heard the shot and then the sound of something heavy, the suddenly inanimate freight of a body as it clattered against the shed’s wooden wall.

Beau entered the shed. Severin remained behind him, outside. The lantern was still burning and the gun was on the floor and Kate seemed to be breathing still as the lamplight flickered around her face. The air was cold and wet. It smelled like the sea. Firelight trembled across the bare wooden planks. And Beau knelt down on the cot, beside her. He brushed her hair aside, and then he saw it. The lower half of her face was missing, her left cheek blown away to expose teeth, viscera, bone. He doubled up and vomited, one strong and pitiless stream. The smell of powder hung in the air, rotten kelp. Beau puked and when he was done, he could not move. One long moment in which his body was locked tight, bitter as a crustacean’s.

“What happened, son? What happened?”

A cop jostled Severin. Someone had given him a blanket. But still, he couldn’t speak. Sitting in the dirt outside Bryce Beller’s shed.

“Ahhh, cock—fuck—”

This, my brother remembered. Beau’s hands splintering wood. While Severin knelt and willed his mind white. A pillbug rocked on the brick in front of him.

“Mother—”

Beau Rosenwald was sobbing, a high-pitched and unfamiliar sound. Bryce came running around from the house, gazelle-like down the garden path.

“Severin! Get inside! Severin!”

Sev’s mind was empty. Who remembers life before tragedy? He prodded the bug with a stick and Bryce straightened him up and handed him off to the girl he was dating.

“Come on, sweetheart.” The girl, whose name was Mary Altschul, coaxed him. Behind him the lantern shattered, and Bryce ran into the shed. “Let’s go in now, let’s go.”

Severin couldn’t move. The cops were there, they were searching for the other kids. Rufus, blubbering, came up from the beach, his hand swallowed by a policeman’s. Were they in trouble? Was anyone in trouble?

“Follow me, honey.” Mary Altschul dragged him away. “Let’s go.”

“Oh, God!” Bryce’s voice shot up in discovery. “Oh, Rosers, God, c’mon—”

Severin followed Mary. They gave him a tetanus shot inside, bandaged his foot. The sky over the Pacific was silver, almost white. Mary Altschul was weeping, now. Someone ran water in the kitchen sink. And Beau’s voice rose away from coherence as he shrieked like an animal, some words about a head, her head, that head, the wrong, the wrong, the wrong motherfucking head!

PART THREE:
DREAM BABY DREAM

MY SUSPICIONS BEGAN
that fall. I had nothing to base them on, no real feeling that Teddy Sanders—sly, nebulous Teddy, who took me out to lunch every Saturday and drove me around town in the passenger seat of his Jag—wasn’t my father. It was subtler than that, a drift. I was eight years old. I had some inchoate sense my parents didn’t quite fit together like other people’s. Not like Little Will’s, who seemed like equal portions of a balanced unit, no matter how contrasting. I’d hear Teddy and my mom talking, and whenever there was an argument, my mom always took my side. But when Severin came, everything changed. The whole world threw itself open to question. Even if it would be years before it was explained to me, before I learned my father and his were the same. I knew, before anyone said anything. Isn’t that always the way?

“Hey, Sev!” And as we made our way through the headbanging crowd at Gazzarri’s, all those years later, I couldn’t help but think back. “Remember?”

“Remember what?”

Perhaps my brother should never have been asked to remember anything, considering where he’d been. He was entitled to a whole lifetime of erasure. But as we pushed toward the stage I looked up and saw three dudes hanging over the balcony, three leather-clad heshers staring down with intent. They were smoking, glowering, scanning our sea of neon bodies and hair. Severin looked up and smiled.

“Hey, Will.”

But Williams had already clocked it too, was thinking just what I’d been.

“They look like us.”

They didn’t, of course. The three of us were never such wastrels, such utter cartoons. But Severin had arrived late in September of third grade, had come into our class at St. Jerome just like a package delivered into my care. And the moment he and I and Williams were united, we found ourselves arrayed just like those guys. Standing outside the classroom in our Keds and our Toughskins and our pale blue short-sleeved shirts—the St. Jerome version of a uniform—while we hocked loogies over the edge of the upper grades’ balcony and mocked the kiddies below.

Our schoolhouse was two-storied: administrators and lower grades downstairs, third through sixth above. Williams and I of course were already friends. We still played basketball under his dad’s watchful eye; on certain Saturday mornings the elder Will would take us to Bond Street Books in Hollywood to buy comics. But Sev was the glue that cemented us, that activated our friendship for life. He came over that morning without a word. Seven fifty, on whatever September morning of 1976. We were trying to hit the God’s Eyes, those woven clusters of yarn on popsicle sticks, on the tables below. A smell of rubber cement and wet papier-mâché rose up to greet us.

“Ooh,” Williams said, after I let a long string of spit hang off my lips and released it down. “Bombardier!”

It was a small school, about twenty-five kids per class. Both of us had heard about the boy who was coming, the one whose sister had died and whose mother had just—this was the rumor—vanished, after that. We knew our fathers, all three of them, had worked together, but what did that signify to third graders?

“Ha!” I’d streaked some little towhead’s navy sweater. “He doesn’t even know it’s there!”

Severin sidled up to us. You could smell the New York stink on him, this outlander. Williams and I were just beginning to piece it all together, to sprout through our boyhood into pre-pre-adolescence. Vans sneakers and
OP
shorts, Sims Skateboards and Independent Trucks were soon to become the new currency. Our schoolyard selves matched imprecisely with who we were at home.
Severin came over in his horizontally striped Hang Ten T with his horn-rimmed glasses. He looked like a little boy, only wiser, made serious by something—even I could see it—beyond our ken.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” Williams mimicked him. Sev looked, in other words, like a total feeb.

“Whatcha doing?”

“What does it look like? Valley.”

“He’s not a Valley,” I said, only because I wasn’t sure this particular cruelty was justified. “I’m pretty sure he’s from somewhere else.”

This was it, the dawn of meanness. God knows we’d marinated in it long enough.

“Where’s he from then? Where you from, then?” Williams loved this part. “
Val
.”

“Stop it,” I said, but Severin just folded his arms then and leaned forward against the metal railing.

“New York City,” he said. “I’m from Jane Street.”

In a few minutes we’d be called into Mrs. Ginsberg’s class, the kids we were drooling on downstairs would be summoned into theirs—Mrs. Duncan, Mrs. Julian, Mrs. Schwartz—but for now we were struck by Severin’s imperviousness. It wasn’t cluelessness. He didn’t give a shit if we teased him.

“I have a
Fantastic Four
#1,” he said. “You want to see it?”

“You brought a
Fantastic Four
#1 to school with you?” Williams stared. “That’s worth fifteen hundred bucks.”

“Yep. It’s in my backpack.”

Those geeky new clothes. He didn’t even know enough to wear the school’s uniform! But not a word from Williams now about his backpack, its sartorial violation—just like that, a whole set of codes had begun—since he was too impressed, too impressed as well with Severin’s unwillingness to impress.

“Wow.” Who cared what it was worth? It was totemic, priceless. “Where did you
get
this?”

Another shrug. We didn’t actually get to see it until recess. Ask any one of us and we’ll tell you, however, those of us who
can
still remember—whose memories haven’t been compromised by subsequent events—that we met on a balcony, standing together and leafing through a
Fantastic Four
.

“Can I hold it?”

“No, Williams, it’s my turn.”

Severin was generous.
My dad gave it to me
, was all he said. As our families gave us plenty of stuff, as Teddy and my mother spoiled me too, I doubt Williams and I worked out that it might have been offered recently as a salve, a bribe, a desperate plea. By lunchtime we’d decided we’d never part. Picture three boys gathered over one comic book, the Spanish-style schoolhouse dissolved in Santa Monica fog, its milk-colored interior walls covered in construction paper, time lines, dinosaur dioramas, silver foil. Long before Severin and I learned the truth, we knew. All three of us did, really. We were our own invention.

“Those fags could never be as cool as we were.” We remained our own, some fifteen years later. Williams glared up at Gazzarri’s balcony, drawling the word
fags
in a way that was ironic and preemptive, bending our own weakness into a gesture of self-protection.

“Yuh-huh.”

This place was jammed to a point of excruciation. Faces melted, bodies scrunched up against the walls. It was Bosch-like, infernal. Capacity was barely five hundred, but there had to be twice that in here. The fire marshal would’ve shut down all of Hollywood if he or she had known. Only those folks up there in the VIP section—or whatever it was, exactly, perhaps they were on the outside looking in—could breathe. The rest looked like the band, the rumored band, since the stage remained empty except for Marshall stacks that could’ve belonged to anybody, bottles of Jack Daniel’s ditto. The crowd nipped at
JD
& Coke, shots of schnapps and Jägermeister. The women all wore fishnets and leather. I copped not just feels but whole lifetimes of inadvertent sexual experience while I moved, writhing between pillowy tits and invisible asses. The girls couldn’t have cared less about me, in their pilot caps and heels, their torn T-shirts and long-strung beads and hair that was teased up into all sorts of vari-colored contortions. Their faces were waxen, gorgeous, cold. In the morning you’d be able to read their failure but just now, under the house lights, they were goddesses. Of the men—skinny flamingo-punk junkie scumbags, dumb tunnel kids from the other side of the hill—the less said the better.
Valleys
, we would’ve called them back in the day, these Reseda heshers and wishfuls from out of town, dudes who had their own bands that would never fly.

“Where are we going?” I followed Sev, who was suddenly our true leader again. He was on a mission.

“We’re moving up so we can see.”

“You didn’t want anything to do with this band a half hour ago.” I had to raise my voice above the PA, which played a ballad about every rose having its thorn. They were teasing us now, baiting us with songs that suggested this “secret” show was real.

“I do now.”

“Why?”

He turned to face me. His eyes gleamed. “It’s an experiment.”

“What kind of experiment?”

The crowd swirled, opened up a little bit to allow us our passage, or to allow it its own tint of hostility. Finally, we were noticed, just enough. A couple of dudes grumbled, snickered.
Nerds
.

“We’re going back.”

“What? ‘Back’ where?”

“I want to see if it works. To see if we can transport ourselves.”

“You’re serious?” I stared at him. He wasn’t talking about
back-stage
, he meant back, chronologically. A journey through the past. “You think this band is a fucking time machine?”

He nodded, slowly. That Peckinpah T-shirt, those glasses. He looked like a doomed scholar. The ruined Marxist, adrift in a sea of hair metal faces, squared against the late-capitalist flower that was Guns N’ Roses.

“Christ, Sev. If you’re gonna be this high, I should join you. Did you leave everything in the car?”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you’re serious. This is a fucking metal band.” Someone shoved me. “This is not metaphysics.”

Someone else jostled me in the groin. It was so crowded in here I couldn’t see what was what or who was where, but I felt that spiky vertigo of being kneed in the nuts. I gasped, folded over.

“It’s
music,
” he said simply. “That’s all there is.”

I blinked away tears, straightened up finally. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Beyond music, what is there?” Sev spread his hands now, in a gesture almost Egyptian. “You’re the nostalgic one, Nate. You know about all this.”

I shook my head. All I knew was that my brother was most enviably wasted.

He just turned away. “It’s going to work.”

The lights were up at that murky, post-ambient level, that golden tone that suggests a band may be coming on soon. The few people around us who’d tuned in to our conversation just snickered.
Fuck-in’ pussy
, said one guy. The air smelled beachy, like suntan lotion and cigarettes, like cheap island rum.

“Hey!” I tugged Severin’s sleeve as he made his way forward, ever forward to the stage. “Where’s Williams?”

“He probably went to take a piss.”

“You think?”

The danger here was not lost on me. This posse that surrounded us was predicated on violence: asses were there to be kicked or fucked, nothing in between.

“Look!” Sev pointed. There was Will on the opposite side of the bar. Unless it was someone else in one of those wrinkly faced Nirvana T’s, receding toward the cigarette machine. “All right?”

“Sure.”

The lights dropped, suddenly. The PA cut out. We were left with the red buttons of the Marshall stacks and monitors and the wash of a blue overhead. I watched my friend vanish down the hall toward the restroom in darkness. The room swelled with an anticipatory roar, a few exuberant voices twittering above it.
Guns N’ fucking Roooosssees
, someone yelled.