American Outlaw (5 page)

I blushed, momentarily at a loss. “Something . . . with a collar?” I mumbled.

“Something . . . with a
collar,
” she said teasingly. “Hmm . . . wait, what about this?” She moved to the nearest rack and pointed her elegant hand at a long-sleeved button-down Madras shirt.

“Yeah,” I said. “That looks good.”

“You know, we also have that shirt in red.”

“Okay.”

“Okay . . . to which shirt?” She smiled and leaned over the counter. The tiniest fraction of her bra could be seen down the front of her blouse. My pulse quickened.

“Both,” I said, woozy. “In fact,” I said, clearing my throat, “I’ll take every color you have in that size.”

“Every single color?”

“Every color,” I repeated, fingering my wad of stolen money. I looked up and met her gaze fully for the first time. “And then I’d like to look at some pants.”

She smiled at me. “Let’s get you all set up, hon.”

I walked out of GHQ half an hour later, my hands full of bags and boxes. I’d bought all the shirts they had in my size, plus about six pairs of nice pants, and a pair of slip-on boots with a black sole. Yeah, I was feeling like the preppiest punk in Riverside, indeed.

I threw on my new threads as soon as I got home. Primping in front of the mirror in my bathroom, I couldn’t believe what I saw reflected back at me. For the first time outside of the football field, I liked the way I looked. Repeatedly, I sniffed at my shirt, savoring its aroma: brand new.

Grinning, I waltzed into the living room, clad in new pants, new shirt, and new boots. I hung out there, watching TV, feeling pretty damn good. Then my dad came home from work. He took one look at me and frowned.

“Jesse.”

“What’s that?” I was watching the screen and didn’t look directly at him.

“I’m gonna need you to go change.”

“What are you talking about?”

He pointed at my shirt and my pants. “Go change out of that costume.”

“What are you talking about?” I was confused. “Why?”

“Doesn’t look right,” he said.

“Huh?”

“You look like a
faggot
in that!”

I stared at him, stunned.

“Go change.”

And he left the room.

I sat there for a few minutes, stung. Soon Joanna hovered over me, her arms crossed. “You heard your father. Hurry up and change into your regular clothes.”

“Beat it,” I muttered.

She took a deep breath. “Jesse, I don’t want to have to tell you again.”

I stomped out, slamming the door behind me. I knew what my dad was so pissed off about. It wasn’t that he knew I’d stolen money—he wouldn’t have cared about that. Rather, he’d realized I could survive without his help. I didn’t have to go through him anymore.

I set off down the road to Bobby’s. His house was only about ten minutes away from mine—we lived in the same shitty part of Riverside. I was still fuming when I got to his house.

“Jesse James, fuck me, you’ve gone fashion model!” He cackled, taking in my tacky new duds. “So, sexy, what’s happening?”

“Cut it out,” I said. “My dad’s already been giving me hell.”

“Sensitive,” Bobby observed.

“My stepmom is even worse,” I complained. “I hate that little bitch.”

“No way, James,” Bobby disagreed. “That stepmom of yours is
cute,
man.”

I groaned. “Come on, Bobby.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Disgusting?”
Bobby asked. “I don’t think so, my friend. That blond hair? So darn
cute
. I’d do her in a heartbeat. You would, too, if you had the chance.”

“You’re sick.”

“Were you born without a penis?” Bobby said seriously. “It’s okay if you were. I swear I won’t tell anyone.”

“Dude, come on.”

“Man, that is
tough.
But I promise, I’ll never tell a soul.” He kept up his serious face for about five seconds, then fell over laughing.

“You’re an idiot.”

Bobby cackled. No one could crack up Bobby like Bobby himself. “Now look, man,
cheer the fuck up.
That’s an order.”

“I am cheered up,” I grumbled. “You’ve made a big difference.”

“Finally,” Bobby sighed. “Jesus. Can we go steal shit, now?”

I wasn’t going to tell him the truth, of course: that in part, Joanna freaked me out because I had come across a stash of naked pictures of her when I was twelve.

I was all alone in the garage after school one day, picking through the thousand or so magazines that my dad had collected across the years at flea markets and swap meets. He’d bought up stacks and stacks of old
McCall’s
and
Life
magazines and
Saturday Evening Post
s and
National Geographic
s on the cheap; some were valuable collector’s items, others were just discolored garbage that he hadn’t gotten around to throwing out. From time to time, I leafed through them idly, just for something to do.

I was methodically making my way through a stack of
Post
s when I came upon a small box with a canvas cover on it. Just for the hell of it, I decided to open it. When I did, I found a black-and-white photograph of Joanna wearing a thin, lacy teddy. She was contorted in an awkward position that showed off most of her skinny little body.

“What the hell . . . ?” I muttered.

I peeled the picture back, revealing another. There was a whole avalanche of them. In some, my stepmother’s lips were puckered up dreamily. In others, she offered up a teasing pose. With equal parts dread and curiosity, I slowly examined each photo in the stack. A blank expression often played upon Joanna’s face, as if she was receiving direction she didn’t quite understand. In most, a freckled hand was atop her bare hip, awkwardly.

Joanna was small and pasty, with blunted breasts and an epic bush. This was the woman behind my nightly meat loaf. I felt confused, and somehow tricked. You don’t want to see your stepmom naked. At least, I didn’t.

I shoved the photos back underneath the stack of
McCall’s
and left the garage, face burning.

——

Joanna left awhile after that. It had nothing to do with my discovery.

“Dad?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“Where’s your wife?” About a week had passed with no trace of my stepmom. We had eaten dinner alone together for several nights running, mostly in silence.

He took a long, slow look at me. “Joanna doesn’t live here anymore.”

“Uh . . . where does she live?”

“Don’t know,” my dad admitted. After a second, he laughed shortly. “Try asking the guy she ran away with.”

I didn’t quite get it, but later I concocted a theory that Joanna and my dad had been “swingers.” It was the right era, and that would explain the racy pics. My dad was always a real ladies’ man, with a silver-tongued kind of charm. Maybe the photographs were meant to be sent off to swingers’ magazines, so on weekends they could ride out to Bakersfield or San Bernardino, taking part in wacky wife-swaps and oiled-up orgies. Of course, I had no evidence of this, but hey—I was in high school and I had a vivid imagination.

He’d posed her like a plastic love doll, but never in his wildest dreams could my father have predicted that his obedient and sedate wife of four years would suddenly spring to life, bouncing off over the Fresno horizon with another guy.
Who the hell understood women, anyway?
And so, just a few years after she’d entered my life, Joanna was gone.

So began a brief, cautiously happy era. It was just me and my dad at home together, like a couple of bachelors. I would cook or he would. I’d watch TV and he wouldn’t care what it was. I was staying up late and he didn’t seem to mind. Dishes got done haphazardly. But peace reigned in the James household.

“Jess!”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Need you to work tomorrow for me.”

“I have school, Dad. Tomorrow’s Friday, remember?”

“Then you’re just gonna have to be sick. I’m going to Pasadena for a big job, and I need you to help me out.” He grinned at me. “Your old dad’s getting feeble. He needs the young blood to step up and do its part.”

I flushed with pride. “Hell yeah.” It didn’t matter to me that I had a test the next day in algebra.

The next day we both woke up at six and ate breakfast together. “You want coffee, Jess?”

“No, thanks.”

He laughed. “Come on, kid. Live a little. Try coffee the way I do it: plenty of sugar and plenty of cream. A coffee made the right way can be a whole meal. Give you vitamins you need for the rest of the day!”

I grinned. “Okay. Just a little bit.”

“That’s what I’m talking about!” my dad bellowed. He reached out and pounded me in the chest twice. “My son is a walking beast, goddammit!”

In his better moments, my dad seemed to me like the perfect combination of Redd Foxx and George Carlin. He could make me laugh without even trying. I remember literally crying, tears running down my face, listening to swap-meet stories of his that I’d heard a million times before.

I loaded up his trucks like a madman. I tossed mattresses every which way, stacking boxes of books and antique tables next to refrigerators next to dinettes next to racks of chairs.

“Careful, careful!” my dad warned. “You’re wasting room, Jess! No, no fucking way! Let’s start this over. Don’t half-ass it. Unpack the whole thing. Start over from scratch.”

Turning around on a dime, I started unloading the truck. Just like on the football field, I attacked any physical task with enthusiasm
and a kind of animal rage. I was going to be the
best in the world
at packing up junk trucks. No one would do it faster or better or meaner than me.

My dad just watched, a bemused look on his face.

“
Much
better. Fuck, kid,” he said, laughing, “I should keep you out of school every day. My life just got ten times easier.”

The swap meets became my home away from home, and molded me into an even weirder teenager than I already was. Besides Bobby, I just didn’t have that many friends my own age. My peer group wasn’t really kids, they were my dad’s friends, Rick and Joey and Paul and Ronnie, sleazy pimplike dudes who were constantly running game, smoking cigarettes, and cutting deals, wearing three-quarter-length leather trench coats with floppy denim hats and loving every minute of it.

“Look at the
milkers
on that one,” Joey would say, motioning toward a young blond California mom pushing a stroller.

“Watch the mouth, Joe,” Rick would go, laughing and motioning to me. “The kid isn’t used to that kind of language.”

“Hell he isn’t! He’s seen a pair of tits before. You know what a good rack looks like, dontcha, Jess?”

“Sure do,” I bluffed, puffed up with my own newfound machismo.

“Yeah, but do you know what to
do
with ’em? Jesse, tell you what, how about you go over there and put those in your mouth, huh, kid?” He made a sucking sound with his lips and teeth. “
Milk
’em, is what I say!”

They were good-time guys, the original dirty rotten scoundrels. Fun for them was breaking a jar of mayonnaise on the supermarket floor. One well-timed slip-and-fall later, and they were suing the store for negligence. They fascinated me and made me feel sick to my stomach at the same time. I remember going out to find Joey in the parking lot one time, because he had an interested buyer for a lamp of his. He hadn’t been near his booth for about half an hour.

I craned my neck, looking for his green Thunderbird in the vast parking lot.

“Hey, Joey! Where you at?” I stretched my neck in vain. “Joey!”

Finally I located his car. I saw him sitting behind the driver’s seat and ran up to the window, knocking on it with my knuckles.

“Hey, Joey, someone’s looking . . . oh, sorry!”

A woman’s blond head was moving over his lap with a rhythmic tempo.

He glanced up and gave me a triumphant grin. “Little busy right now, kid.” His right palm rested lazily atop her crown of mussed golden hair. “Gimme five minutes.”

They were shitheads, creeps; I knew that. But they were my dad’s world, and I’d been given a ticket to the main show. As long as I pulled my weight, worked hard, and made sure everyone liked me, I’d be allowed to stay. That’s what mattered to me.

The year I spent alone with my father was unlike any other part of my childhood. It was exciting and gratifying. The most compelling moments came when my dad would take odd, brief fits of interest in me. One night over dinner, as he sipped from his Coca-Cola, he regarded me with a curious kind of look.

“Do you even
like
girls?”

“What . . . what do you mean?” I said, blushing.

“I mean just what I say, kid. Do you like girls, or what?” He chuckled. “Not that complicated.”

“Sure, I like girls,” I said defensively. “Of course I do.”

“Ya ever DONE anything with one, though?” he said, picking up a thigh from the take-out box of fried chicken that lay there between us. He gazed at me with a kind of intensity.

“I mean . . . there’s a girl at school who I kind of like.” That was true. Her name was Rhonda. She was the prettiest girl in the whole high school, as far as I could tell.

“You
like
her, huh?” My dad had an evil grin on his face.

“Yes,” I said protectively. I didn’t like the way he was smiling.

“Why don’t I ever see her over here, then?”

“Because, well . . . we’re not even together or anything. She doesn’t even really know I like her, in fact.”

My dad sighed. “Say no more,” he said, holding up his hand. “I get it.”

“What do you get?” I said angrily.

“You’re a goddamn virgin,” he said.

“Whatever.” I reached for some potatoes, awkwardly scooped a huge portion onto my plate.

My dad continued watching me for a second.

“Hey, it’s fine. You’re just a kid. No hurry.” Then he frowned, adding, “Christ, you eat like an ox, kid. Did you realize that? Leave some for your old man. You’ll eat both of us right into the poorhouse.”

I didn’t think much of our conversation until about a week later. It was late afternoon. I carried my book bag over my shoulder. There’d been no one to pick me up from school, so it had been the bus for me. Another long ride.