Dead Boys (24 page)
“Please don’t die in the ice,” she cries.
“Mom,” I say. “Mom.”
Her eyes begin to focus. The fear drains from her face, leaving it gray and devoid of expression.
You poor woman,
I think, as if she were a stranger.
“I’m fine,” she says, coming back to herself. “Let me be.”
T
HE CAR IS
a real beater, an old Sentra, but the engine is in good shape. Paul gives me the keys, and the title is in the glove box. I can live with the dents and dings for now. Mom and Kelly are standing on the porch. Paul watches them, ignoring what I’m saying. Mom reaches out and touches Kelly’s stomach. The baby is kicking.
We sit together at the kitchen table and eat lunch. It’s been a long time. Mom is nervous. Her hands shake when she passes the coleslaw, and she laughs at anything even vaguely funny. Paul shows us a scar on his leg, where he was burned by a motorcycle muffler. Conversation goes here and there, just like it should. We help each other along. I’m antsy, though. I don’t know where I’ll be sleeping tonight, and I’d like to get a move on.
Paul wants to see what I did in the bathroom. The bead on my caulking is a little crooked, and I also didn’t do the greatest job matching the pattern on the linoleum in a couple spots. He tries to be funny when he points these things out. I turn on the shower, and the pipes rattle and groan.
“There’s a project for you,” I say.
“Don’t worry about it,” he replies. “Don’t worry about anything.”
“Oh, so you’re the big daddy now.”
“What do you mean ‘now.’ ”
I pretend to swing at him, and he pretends to block my punch.
Everyone walks me to the curb. I put my TV in the trunk. The lock is broken, but it shuts tight. Mom presses some money on me. I take it without counting it. She tells me again I’m making a mistake. That’s fine. That’s her part in this thing. I promise Paul I’ll pay him back. The three of them are waving as I drive off. My people.
Y
OU PICK YOURSELF
up and go on. That’s what you do. Over and over and over. The big drunk Limey wants to know where the movie star footprints are. Three blocks west, I tell him. Across the street. Can’t miss them. I draw him another Guinness.
Martin’s drinking rum. He’s a director. Videos, I think. A nice kid. I show him the Spider-Man comic, my good luck charm. I keep it in a Ziploc bag behind the bar. “Ever seen one of these?” I say.
When my shift is over, I walk the Boulevard. I’m still not drinking, so I try to keep myself occupied. It’s Friday night, and the tourists are out. I offer to take a picture of a German family crouched around Clint Eastwood’s star. Music blasts out of a souvenir shop, and there are so many lights my eyes hurt. Dizzy, dreamy, I flop down on a bus bench and smile at the passing cars. Sometimes happiness sneaks up on you like a piece of a song on the wind. Just that random, just that rare. Jenny Pool, Jenny Pool, Jenny Pool. Hollywood sends its love.
D
EE DEE’S MOVING AGAIN, FOR THE THIRD TIME THIS
year. She doesn’t feel safe anymore, not since she asked the Mexican guy down the hall if he would fix her leaky faucet and his wife called her a
puta
and threatened to kill her. She says her life has taken a dangerous turn, and she’s always on the run from one assassin or another. That’s just the speed talking. Her green hair bugs me, too, and the haughty tone she adopts with waitresses and 7-Eleven clerks. But Grady’s God-knows-why sweet on her, and he’s my only friend, so here I am, watching her have a nervous breakdown and wishing I was somewhere else.
Grady promised she’d be packed and ready to roll by the time we arrived with the truck, but it’s been an hour already and the boxes are still empty, and now Dee Dee has collapsed on the living room floor, crying because she can’t decide where to stick what. My advice would be to drag it all out to the sidewalk and burn it. The dirty stuffed animals, the torn paperbacks. The thrift-store ball gowns and ancient punk rock records. All of it. Because there’s something morbid about hauling around so many mementos of your worthless past. Something morbid and resigned.
“Why won’t you help?” Dee Dee wails, and Grady leaves me sitting alone on the couch to kneel beside her. He lights her cigarette, cracks a few jokes, and pretty soon she’s laughing. I could join in when they begin filling boxes, I guess, but I don’t. I don’t feel like it. The hot wind that’s been blowing off the desert for days rattles the screen in the window frame and snatches up a blackened match from the coffee table. I stick my finger into the hole in my beer can and wonder how hard I would have to twist it to cut myself to the bone.
D
ON’T GET ME
wrong. I used to do pretty well with the ladies. I don’t know what it was, but for a while there I had it. The way some retarded people can play piano or memorize baseball stats, I could pick up girls. Black, white, brown. Twins once, at the same time; a mother and daughter separately. A veterinarian with too many dogs, a welfare queen who used her government check to buy me quaaludes, a former Sea World mermaid, a blind girl. A beautiful blind girl.
I spent years jumping from woman to woman. It was fun and all, but you get caught up in a grind like that, and you fall behind in other areas. That’s why I was glad when it ended, when the magic finally faded. Suddenly everyone saw right through me, and I couldn’t have been happier. Really.
Being alone took some getting used to, of course. I had my booze and pills and whatnot, but some nights I just wanted to die. I kept telling myself there had to be more to life than breaking hearts. I pressed on. I let the years pass. And now I’m doing fine.
M
ORE PEOPLE WERE
supposed to be here to help Dee Dee move. Grady said it was going to be like a party. We’d have a couple beers, everyone would carry down a box or a piece of furniture, we’d follow the truck to the new place, unload, and have a few more beers. It didn’t work out that way, though. Grady and I are the only suckers who showed, and Dee Dee’s idea of a festive spread is a bag of stale Doritos and a warm six-pack of Bud.
Grady does his best to keep me entertained as he and I wrangle the futon and kitchen table down the narrow stairway. He just got back from Vegas, where he hit a royal on video poker. A thousand and change. He goes through every hand the machine dealt him leading up to the jackpot, and I don’t have the heart to tell him that other people’s gambling stories bore the shit out of me. He’s going to use the money to get Dee Dee some new head shots — she’s taking acting classes again — and he wants to buy another gun.
We break for cigarettes after carrying down what seems like a hundred milk crates full of junk. Grady stretches out on the U-Haul’s ramp, I sit on the curb. There’s a hot spot on my left foot from my new steel-toes. I unlace the boot and pull it off and roll down my sock to see how close I am to blistering.
“Think she’s got any Band-Aids?” I ask.
“Somewhere, man, I’m sure,” Grady replies. He reaches into one of the boxes and pulls out a grinning ceramic monkey on a surfboard. “This won’t help?”
The battered ice-cream truck parked down the street is playing “It’s a Small World.” A bunch of Mexican kids have gathered at its door. They hop up and down and spin in circles and kung fu their buddies. One little girl stands apart from the rest, waving a dollar bill over her head. I don’t have any children. Nobody I know has any children. And nobody wants any. I squash an ant with my thumb. Then another. Then another.
Grady flicks away his half-smoked cigarette. “As of now, I’m quitting these,” he announces.
The wind picks up. It’s like a sick old man breathing in my face. I lie down and watch the shaggy crowns of the palm trees toss back and forth high overhead. The dry fronds crack and rustle and hiss.
“She wants me to torch her car,” Grady says. He’s running his hands over his crewcut, a nervous habit he’s picked up lately.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Like for the insurance. You take it out somewhere and set it on fire, so she can collect.”
“I know you’re not that stupid.”
He shoots me a fuck-you look. “I said she wants me to, that’s all.”
Grady loans me money. He steals CDs for me from the record store where he works. When I got my DUI, he bitched at the cops until they cuffed him and put him in the backseat of the cruiser, too, because he didn’t want me to go to jail by myself. You can see why I worry about him.
W
HILE HE AND
Dee Dee are carrying down more boxes, I’m left alone in her bedroom. I pick up one of her pillows and press it to my nose, then move to the dresser, where I finger her hairbrush, her makeup sponges, her lipstick.
The top drawer of the dresser is full of panties arrayed like the lustrous black and blue and red pelts of small exotic creatures. I slide my hand across them, then wriggle my fist deep into their silky depths and stand there buried to the forearm, listening to the wind slam a tree against the side of the building. My car insurance is due and I’m completely broke again. A mother lode of G-strings, and this is where my mind goes. My, how things have changed. Grady and Dee Dee come tromping up the stairs, and I grab a box of comic books to take to the truck.
T
HE BLIND GIRL
’s name was Mercedes. She was a Filipina who attended the Braille Institute, which was down the street from where I lived at the time. It was a funny neighborhood. The traffic signals chirped like birds to alert the students when to cross, and there was a small factory a few blocks away, Blind-Made Products, where many of them worked. In the morning they gathered in the doughnut shop, some in dark glasses, the bolder ones with their dead eyes bared. I loved to watch them prepare their coffee. Their hands seemed to have an intelligence all their own as they tore open sugar packets and tapped about in search of cream.
I met Mercedes at the liquor store. She’d asked for gummi bears, but the Korean clerk kept leading her to the chewing gum display.
“No,” she said after running her fingers over the racks for the third time. “Gummi
bears
.”
I stepped in and took her arm, steering her to what she wanted, and we ended up spending the rest of the day together. She lived with her parents out in Palms somewhere and rode the bus east every morning to the institute. At first we rendezvoused in the doughnut shop when her classes were over and walked together to my place, but after two weeks she’d memorized the route, so I’d wait in the apartment, listening for the zipping sound her cane made against the sidewalk as she worked her way up the block.
She was one of those who preferred to wear dark glasses, and even when she took them off, she kept her eyes closed. We’d smoke dope and listen to music, and when we fucked, those incredible hands of hers would roam my body like soft, warm spiders. She liked to talk about religion — silly shit. Once she told me that she believed God was blind.
She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever been with, but since she couldn’t see me, I wasn’t sure if it counted.
G
RADY’S GOING TO
drive the U-Haul to Dee Dee’s new place, and he asks me to ride over with her in her Malibu. It’s been sputtering at stoplights lately — the fuel pump, he suspects — and he’d feel better if she had someone with her in case it conks out. When I seem a bit hesitant, he gives me twenty dollars to pick up a twelve-pack on the way and tells me I can keep the change.
Dee Dee’s a complete idiot behind the wheel, nosing right up to slower cars in front of us and laying on the horn, a cigarette in one hand, an open beer between her legs. I roll down my window and try to relax. Most of the signs are in Korean on this stretch of Western. We pass a building I remember seeing on TV during the riots. They interviewed the owner as he stood in front with a rifle, holding off looters. About all he could say in English was “Why?”
We get stuck behind a bus, and the exhaust makes me light-headed. I watch the eight-ball air fresheners hanging over the rearview mirror swing back and forth and pretend I’m being hypnotized. A Jeep full of vatos pulls up beside us, and one of the guys points at Dee Dee’s hair and laughs.
“Fuck you!” she yells, flipping him off. The gob he spits lands on the hood, and the next thing I know she’s halfway out the door. I yank her back inside, but the vatos are in a fighting mood. They spill into the street waving baseball bats and tire irons, and I realize I’ve died this way before, in dreams.
The first of them reaches the car just as the light changes and traffic begins to move. A passing police cruiser slows for a look, and the driver of the Jeep whistles a warning. The vatos break off their attack and return to the Jeep, which speeds away while the black-and-white screeches through a U-turn to follow, one of the cops already calling in the plates.
My voice is shaking as bad as my hands when I shout at Dee Dee, “If you ever do that again, I swear I’ll leave you to the fucking lions.”
“I spilled my beer,” she sobs. Big, black mascara tears crawl down her cheeks.
I screwed her once, eight or ten years ago, back in my heyday. A quickie car date in the parking lot of some goth club off Melrose. She went by Trixie then, something like that, and what attracted me to her was her blue eyes, maybe, or the rings she wore on every finger, little screaming skulls. Anyway, I never saw her again until Grady brought her around a couple of months ago, and if she remembers me, she hasn’t let on.
She cleans her face with a fast-food napkin from under the seat and goes right back to swearing and swerving.
“You know what that motherfucker said to me?” she asks out of nowhere as we’re passing over the Hollywood freeway.
“Who?” I ask.
“Grady. He said, ‘I can rebuild you, baby. I have the technology.’ ”
I see the sheet of black plastic coming from a hundred yards away. It flaps and billows in the wind like an angry ghost. Pursing my lips, I empty my lungs in a quick puff, as if to ward it off, but this wayward shred of night has its heart set upon devouring us. It swoops low over the road and skips across two lanes before whipping up to flatten itself against the windshield with a loud slap. We can’t see anything ahead of us, yet Dee Dee doesn’t ease up on the accelerator one bit. I sit back and grit my teeth and wait for her to lose her nerve.