Plus One (9 page)

In the dressing room Alex discovered he'd been given a size twenty-eight. Not a chance. He passed the pants over the door. “How about a thirty-four?”

“Just put on the pants,” Huck said. “It's how they're made.”

Alex pulled the pair back over the top of the door. The fabric was the color of deep space and springy to the touch. He stepped into one leg and then the other and tugged, yanking the pants over his knees, where they stopped mid-thigh, budged tight. He stretched out and leaned against the wall, elongating his torso. The jeans moved up a few inches, but to get them on he'd need to get down on the floor and transfer his weight from his midsection upward in a yogic exercise of breath control. Fabric squeezing his legs like the sleeve of a blood-pressure cuff, Alex held his breath, wiggled spastically, and tugged on the belt loops. This, he thought, is how it must feel to have an epileptic seizure.

After a few minutes, the jeans settled into what he guessed was their proper place. He stepped out, and the swinging doors of the changing room flapped shut behind him, a gunslinger stepping in from the range. The salesgirl stepped forward with an approving nod, then reached down and brushed his hip with her finger.

“Good line,” she purred.

His internal organs had realigned, and he'd lost feeling in his toes, but he couldn't argue with the view in the mirror. He had legs! A whole lower body, with a not-so-bad curve of the calves and a pleasing divot near his hip. To think he'd spent his entire manhood in sensible Levis and baggy khakis, when there was always this underneath—an actual form!

He wasn't sure what was more outrageous—the price or the instructions for care. (Washing machines and dry cleaners were out. The best way to clean them was in the ocean, “like every month or
two.” Alex knew his life was changing, but he didn't imagine those changes would involve periodic trips to Malibu to frolic in the surf in his new French jeans.)

Before today, it never would have occurred to Alex to wear a pair of pants like this. He was
not
a skinny jeans guy. But he was equally certain he was getting these pants. Things were different now. Normal was over. He'd had his fill of normal. He was ready for the skinny jeans.

Back in the changing room, before he could get the pants off, his gaze settled on the wall, which was decorated with old punk rock handbills, stickers, and ticket stubs. A familiar checkerboard pattern appeared on one of the shellacked pages, below a magic-marker cartoon of a kid with a Mohawk. Alex looked closer.

He knew that shaky lettering anywhere. It was the third issue of
R.I.P.
, the short-lived punk rock 'zine sold on consignment at a record shop on Melrose Avenue in the early eighties. This particular issue contained an interview with the band Minor Threat, a review of the latest Buzzcocks LP, and an energetic if not quite lucid screed against Reaganomics. The whole 'zine was written, published, and distributed by an enterprising and stupidly confident boarding school kid from Ojai named Alex Sherman.

He quickly did the math. Twenty-two years had passed since the afternoon Alex had put out issue #3 of
R.I.P.
Twenty-two fucking years. He clicked a picture of the wall.

Then he slipped his khakis into a shopping bag and strutted out, heading home to show his wife of nine-and-one-half years his new pair of skinny French jeans.

Four

O
n the drive home, Alex fast-forwarded through the 'zine's lifespan; he saw it flopping out of the innards of a refrigerator-size photocopier in the office at the Crestwood School, stuffed in Alex's backpack on a trip to the city, dropped off at Vinyl Fetish on Melrose, added to a confetti of flyers and stickers beside a cash register, tossed into an orange plastic bag, stashed in a basement, stuffed in a box and forgotten for years, then finally unearthed—and here its trip took its weirdest turn—by a decorator tasked with adding some authentic street-creddy ambiance to a pricey new boutique, a shop that Alex would never have even
thought
to enter before today.

But there he was. And there it was, so suddenly, so miraculously, at such a weird, vulnerable moment—it felt supernatural. It had to be a sign.

But of what? His first response was to cringe at the awful socio-cultural irony—like hearing Iggy Pop's “Lust for Life” on a
Holiday Cruise Line TV commercial. Here his crude, homemade, DIY tribute to punk rock protest was now literally the wallpaper of upscale consumerism.

Without even meaning to, without even knowing it, he'd sold out—and worst of all, without making a single cent.

Then again, the sight of
R.I.P.
—his scrawl, his words, his twitchy little middle finger raised high to the world—in that sleek, sexy context, repurposed as edgy modern décor… it was… kind of amazing. It meant that his misspent youth had maybe not been so misspent.

Which was terribly important to Alex, because even though he'd never admit such a thing out loud, he looked back on his stint as a teen publisher as one of the high points of his life. He had discovered punk at fourteen during one of his mom's periodic absences—she was always skipping off on road trips to Santa Fe or Big Sur. With her gone, Alex skipped school, slept in, and earned the top score on Missile Command at the local bowling alley. Every couple of days he'd get a visit from an older teenager named Dotti, whom his mom had tasked with checking in on Alex. Why his mother left her pubescent son in the care of a teenage girl with peroxide hair, raccoon eyeliner, and a magnificently mature physique never made a whole lot of sense to Alex—but in those days, not much did.

Dotti's developed, overt sexuality was a constant source of wonder and terror for Alex. For her part, the only thing she seemed interested in sharing with Alex was her love of glam rock. Until that point, all Alex had ever really heard was his mom's Joan Baez and Carole King. Dotti introduced him to Queen, the Runaways, and Alice Cooper. He liked glam fine, but all bets were off the moment she dropped the needle on the Stooges' “Funhouse.” Even as Dotti pushed him back in the direction of Bowie or T Rex, all he wanted was the harder, louder, more aggressive stuff.

One night they took a trip to Oxnard for a Circle Jerks show
in the back of a bowling alley. Alex remembered driving back up the hill drenched in sweat, ears ringing, revved up and excited for the future in a way he'd never felt before. Punk might have driven other kids to cynicism and rebellion, but to him it represented something else. It meant energy, discipline, take-charge initiative—in short, everything missing in Ojai. Overnight, he couldn't abide by his caring-sharing Freeschool and the calico-clad teachers playing mandolin under oak trees.

A few weeks after the Circle Jerks show, Alex got a buzzcut, put on a good shirt, and hitched a ride to the front gates of the Crestwood School, a live-in academy a few miles down the highway from home. Apparently, he was the first reasonably put-together townie to show up at the school, and as luck would have it, Crestwood had a scholarship program aimed at students in the surrounding community. Impressed with his relatively clean-cut appearance and earnest appeal, the admissions committee offered him a full ride. After a wan attempt to change his mind—“You know they make you wear shoes, right? And do
math
?”—Jane agreed to let him go. In short order he went from running wild with the feral kids of the Ojai Freeschool to living in a dorm with the sons of doctors and lawyers.

On weekends, when the other boys went home to Montecito or Laguna Beach, Alex would hitch rides to L.A. with Dotti for shows at the Starwood, Madame Wong's, and various foreign legions. He'd stay up late pounding out articles for his 'zine on a IBM Selectric and picking the lock of the staff office to run off copies on the school machine.

Alex liked to say he folded
R.I.P.
when the Scene Got Shitty. Jocks and surfers and swastikas started turning up at shows—the Orange County hardcore kids had taken over. For issue #23, he ran a front-page headline declaring “Nazi Frat Scum Kill Punk” and declared
R.I.P.
dead. He was a jaded purist at sixteen.

It took Alex many years to put together that the demise of
the 'zine had less to do with the dilution of the scene than the astounding arrival into Alex's life of a force even more powerful than punk. One night in his senior year, he got a call from Dotti, who'd quit babysitting to manage an apartment building in Ventura. She greeted him at the front door of a vacant unit with her top off and those magnificent babysitter breasts gloriously bare. She proceeded to take Alex on as her protégé yet again. She fucked him with a lazy nonchalance that astounded him just a little less than the sex itself. He still carried around with him a vivid, oft-replayed image of the white-haired, dark-eyed Dotti splayed out below him, back bent and ass up, face mashed into a pillow and head tilted to the side so she could carry on her phone conversation about a faulty air conditioner.

At some point in the years since, he'd read a magazine article about “Determining Your Mental Age”—it was hardly the deepest thought, but he couldn't shake the notion that while basic functions of personality grow and change and mature, the raw essence of identity is flash-frozen at a certain set point. If that was true, Figgy was eight, bright and imaginative but given to deep sulks and explosive bouts of insecurity. His mom was forever nineteen, endlessly a college freshman in the throes of self-discovery.

Alex's mental age was no great mystery: He'd locked in at seventeen.

He wasn't entirely stunted, of course—not like the middle-aged guys he saw cruising around L.A. in bill-sideways baseball caps, men with paintball guns and futons and dirty toilets. Alex passed as an adult. He had a 401K and a Subaru. Seeing the 'zine today, though, at the end of his hooky day with Huck—it had dislodged something, some deep reserve of DIY, burn it down, fuck-it-let's-do-itness. The jolt of desire looking at the girl at the butcher shop, the woozy feeling he'd gotten plopping down his credit card to pay for those jeans—for the first time in a long time, he remembered what it felt like to be old enough to move in
the world but young enough not to have a place in it. That unsettled, jittery, excited feeling had been missing for years, smothered by the job and the wife and the kids.

Now he wanted it back. Or at least part of him did—a small but insistent part with a voice like Iggy, circa
Raw Power
. Another part knew he was being stupid, that he was too old for all that now, that however great and even meaningful it had felt to skip work and cut loose a little, he'd had his fun.

• • •

Arriving home after his day out with Huck, Alex marched through the kitchen door, dumped his keys and phone on a countertop, and scanned the room. Figgy wasn't around, but Sam was camped out on the floor, busy measuring homemade lotions into an assortment of vials and beakers. Sylvie was wrangling the dog, wedging her paws into what looked like a tennis outfit.

After unpacking the bags and planting kisses on the kids' heads, Alex got busy with the rib-eye from Malcolm's, coating the meat in sea salt, garlic, and rosemary and then tossing together some cherry tomatoes, red onion, and basil. As always, cooking was weirdly meditative for Alex, even as he banged saucepans and butcher knives in an impulsive, chaotic rush.

As he was finishing up the meal, he called for the kids. “Honey, please stop torturing the dog.”

The dog lifted her head up balefully, shaking off a floppy pink visor. He'd found her ten years earlier wandering the streets in such a haggard, mangy, and swollen state that he'd mistaken her girl parts for male ones and given her a boy's name that never unstuck: Albert. For a while, in those carefree pre-kid days, Albert was lavished with stupid luxuries and sloppy, unbridled affection. The moment the first kid arrived, however, Albert went from spoiled alpha to neglected afterthought, her only treats coming
when Sylvie slipped her bits of Korean takeout under the dinner table. By now she had eaten more bulgogi than most Koreans.

“Daddy!” Sylvie locked eyes with Alex and flashed a giant toothy grin. “Mommy took us for noodles after school and now she's taking a nap and Sam's making another batch of Sammy's Salves!”

Alex sighed and turned toward Sam. “More creams?” he said. “Didn't we agree we wouldn't make any more creams until the old creams were gone?”

Sam kept his head down as he poured a dollop of bright purple fluid into a vial of viscous goo. “I keep telling you, Dad—they're not creams. They're lotions. Herbal lotions. I need new product—Mrs. Ramirez told me today she wants bath balm.”