The Grand Tour (19 page)

Not feeling like explaining that she'd allowed her service to lapse, and not believing him anyway, and furthermore not wanting anything besides to get away, maybe take a Halcion and sleep until it was cool and dark outside, she turned to leave and noticed the parking agent outside ticketing her car. Richard was saying something to her back, but she was already pushing through the hot metal doors, advancing on the small man. His shorts ended indecently high on his bunched thighs, between which he clenched his bicycle while he punched her license-plate number into a handheld ticket machine.

She said, “What are you doing?” closer to a yell than she'd intended. The agent looked back at her, surprised.

“Loading zone, lady.”

“Come on. I'm leaving. Please? Please.”

He shook his head and continued punching information into the machine. It fed out a little loop of paper, which he tore off, stuck in an envelope he pulled from a fanny pack, and handed to her. She pulled the ticket back out and looked at it. “Two hundred and fifty dollars? You've got to be fucking kidding me.”

He got back on his bike and started to pedal away. “Don't ignore me,” she yelled—actual yelling now. “Don't ignore me, you motherfucker.”

He stopped. “What did you say?”

“Oh, I've got your attention now? Nice job you have.”

“You want me to call the cops in on this? Don't park in a loading zone, okay? It's not complicated.”

“You know what else isn't complicated? Fuck. You.” She kicked the rear tire of the bike, not very hard, but it caused his center of gravity to shift behind him, and he sat on the ground to avoid falling. Before he could get back up, Richard was between them. His bulk was sizable enough that he managed to completely obscure one from the other. He helped up the parking agent and said, “Sorry, sorry. I'll pay the ticket, thanks, sorry about this.”

“I could sue that bitch for assault!” the man yelled.

“That bitch is my daughter,” said Richard, in a soft tone. “She's having a rough day. Cut her a break, okay?”

The agent felt his back tire, shook his head, and rode away. Cindy stalked to the driver's side, got in, and turned the key. Nothing happened. She turned it again, then a third time, but nothing, not even that shitty clicking noise that usually tells you that you're fucked. She screamed and beat her hands once, hard, against the steering wheel. The horn still worked, at least. At least one thing worked—she did it again and kept doing it. The wheel juddered and the horn honked in dying bleats, and she felt she might have gone on beating it, beating the wheel and the dash and the door, until she was sitting in a pile of rubble, or until her arms were broken and flopping around uselessly, but then her father was holding her still. She tried to pull away, but he held her tighter and tighter, and then—fucking goddamnit shit—she was crying.

T
he first thing Vance noticed when they entered Cindy's apartment was the overpowering smell. He was used to bad-smelling places—besides his own, there was the domicile of his aunt, who lived even farther than Vance and his mother out in the Spillman sticks and who was a crazy cat person that took in strays at the rate of a new one about every three months; the few times he and his mother had visited, the smell of cat piss and shit was so strong that it was like a physical threshold they were crossing—but this was different. It was composed of many different elements—beauty products, cooked food in the dirty kitchen, old marijuana and cigarette smoke, accumulated body odor and sweat, a light and not entirely unpleasant fecal tang—united in a sort of ur-female smell. The odor was magnified by the smallness of the space and the closed windows that looked to have been painted over and never opened. This was a dwelling overwhelmed, overoccupied by its occupant, and the air itself was redolent of an unhappy woman.

There was clutter on every visible surface, and it was difficult to move through the room without stepping on a magazine, a CD, an article of clothing. He and Richard tiptoed across spots of green carpet that appeared sporadically, like rocks in a rushing stream. Cindy collapsed on the sofa and stared at the dead TV, worrying her hands. Her eyes were still red rimmed, but at least she wasn't sobbing anymore. AAA had successfully jumped her car, which Vance had driven over, hoping the mood would magically improve once they got her home, but it hadn't. She seemed to be waiting for something to happen, for one of them to do something.

Richard said, “Glass of water?”

She gestured with her thumb in the direction of the kitchen, the airspace of which was guarded by a pair of fat, territorial flies. Richard returned with three glasses; Vance's was stained with purple lipstick. Cindy continued staring at the TV as though there were a tiny play being staged inside of it for her benefit alone. She opened a little handpainted Oriental box on the coffee table, plucked out a few pills, and washed them all down in one swallow. As he had since being introduced to her, Vance tried to get a handle on what she looked like.

It was difficult. For one thing, she was a blur of nervous fidgets—continually cracking her knuckles and smoothing her overtreated blonde hair back in a lank, high ponytail. For another thing, she was one of those people who looked very different from different angles. From the front, she was striking—gorgeous even—with unusually wide-set eyes that communicated a shimmering intelligence, even though all Vance had seen her do so far was yell at a parking attendant and have a nervous breakdown. But looked at from the side, she had a smushed aspect that reminded him of a dog his father had brought home to appease his mother—an idiot Chow that accidentally strangled itself on its own leash while tied up in the backyard. Vance had come home from school to find it lying on its back, grinning up at the sky, black tongue lolling. He couldn't square the two angles of her face—they didn't seem to belong to the same person.

She said, “You can go now.”

Richard sighed and said, “Cindy, I know I'm the last person on earth you want to take any help or advice from, but tell me what's going on.”

She opened her mouth to speak, and as she did there was a pounding at the door. She shut her mouth and the pounding stopped, which created the unnerving impression that the sound had come from her mouth. The door opened and a man walked a few steps inside, then stopped. He wore the kind of long, outdated leather jacket that expendable muscle wears in mob movies. But he wasn't muscular, instead was tall and rangy, about Vance's height, and stooped at the neck like a reading lamp. He was either the world's oldest thirty-five-year-old or the world's youngest sixty-year-old; however old he was, the look of unhappy irritation on his face was timeless. Without acknowledging Richard and Vance, he said, “Who are they?”

“My father and his valet.”

“Valet?” He pronounced the word slowly with an incredulous rising tone that, paired with the expression on his face as he looked at Richard and Vance, suggested he thought a “valet” might be akin to a catamite or a sexual slave, then he returned to Cindy. “Where were you last night?”

“Something came up.”

“Doesn't it always. Look, you can't keep avoiding me, we need to talk.”

“I know.”

At this, the man sighed and ran his hand through a mortified forelock retreating as quickly as possible from the dour face below. “When then?”

“I get paid tomorrow, I'll come by the Monaco.”

He sighed again, and his shoulders drooped. His very person conveyed a world-weariness so profound that it made Vance tired just watching him. He seemed like a man whom life had disappointed beyond all reason and expectation—“long suffering” didn't even come close to capturing the mythic ennui on display. He said, “Can you borrow it from your dad here?”

“I'm sorry, who are you again?” said Richard.

“Mikhail.”

“Oh, of course.
Mikhail.
I think my daughter would like you to leave.”

“Your daughter would probably like a pony and some ice cream, but that doesn't mean she's getting it.”

Richard cocked his head and took an angled, approaching step to the next patch of available floor space, but Cindy waved her hand at him. To Mikhail, she said, “Look, tomorrow, okay? I'll come by.”

“This shit is getting old,” said Mikhail. “Be an adult, make a payment.” He left. They could hear his footsteps pinging cheerfully down the metal stairs.

“Well?” said Richard.

“I owe him some money. He thinks I do.”

“Yeah, I got that. What the hell is going on?”

The room again lapsed into silence. She turned on the sofa toward Vance—her strange profile morphing magically into the other face, the beautiful one—and opened her mouth to talk:

Her teenage years had been angry and disaffected, full of dubious clothing and bad haircut choices, and silly punk rock played by silly-looking people. Pot figured prominently. She loved math, excelled at it, but hated the smart kids in their AP classes, the way their neat little lives were already chugging down the track to Successville. And though her mother was an accomplished English PhD and a rising star in her field, she could barely get Cindy to read a book. From puberty on, in fact, anything Eileen wanted Cindy to do was anathema. She blamed her uptight, judgmental mother for running off her father and keeping him away; that she hated her father somehow didn't make her resent her mother any less. The six years between twelve and eighteen were a pitched, unceasing battle of wills between mother and daughter with no winner besides their family therapist's bank account. When Cindy graduated high school—barely—she laughed at Eileen's offer to pull some strings and get her into Fresno State. (While she was at it, she said, maybe her mother could pull some other strings and get her into the Special Olympics.) Her best friend, Casey, owned a '66 Mustang that Casey's ex had retooled for her, and they set off on a road trip the week after they'd halfheartedly tossed their rented mortarboards in the air.

They spent the summer down in San Diego working at a fish restaurant on Pacific Beach, wearing tank tops and baseball caps. They were staying with friends of Casey's at the time, a rowdy beach condo full of so many interchangeable frat-surfer types that Cindy never fully pinned down who really lived there. Whoever it was, they didn't mind hosting a couple of good-looking eighteen-year-old girls, even if Cindy did have pink hair and an attitude. Life there was simple—smoke weed all day, hang out on the beach or anywhere, eat something sometimes, work now and then, and party most nights until the sun came up. At the time she was antsy to get back on the road, not realizing (how could she have?) that this would be the happiest she'd ever be.

Eventually summer ended and temperatures plunged into the low seventies. School started up, the apartment cleared out, and their tips at work ebbed away. One night, after their shift, without discussing it but by some form of psychic agreement (or maybe it was just that obvious that it was time to move on), they got in the Mustang and drove north through the night to Los Angeles. They found themselves on the corner of Sunset and Western, a famous-sounding intersection that in real life featured a hot-dog stand next to a seedy motel unimaginatively named the Sunset Suites. For a hundred dollars and a not-inconsiderable amount of corny flirtation, they haggled a double for two nights out of the Persian shift manager. Lying there with the ceaseless Hollywood traffic sounding like it was inches from the window, Cindy couldn't sleep. A dual vision of archetypal LA destinies flickered on her mental movie screen—that is, becoming rich and famous, or getting murdered. Or both—that was the ideal, in a way.

But nothing so exciting happened. Really, LA was kind of dull. She and Casey got a shitty apartment in Little Armenia—the real LA, as the local saying went—that they could still barely afford. Cindy walked through a mile of rank exhaust every day to a job at Rocket Video that the manager often reminded her how lucky she was to have. At night, she drank boxed wine and watched the free movies she brought home; many of them depicted Los Angeles as glamorous and sexy, and she supposed that might be the case if you had the money or inclination to ever leave your apartment. She preferred the seedier versions of LA, the city as a vast and depopulated ghost city, like
Chinatown
or, better yet,
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

When she did go out, she went to bars within walking distance that took her fake ID or else didn't care that she was underage. The places she favored were usually unmarked, besides a neon cocktail sign, and possessed of a certain anti-Hollywood charm. The regulars—square-jawed, walnut-faced alcoholic men with marquee heads of hair booze-glued to their scalps and faded blondes of a certain (very, very old) age—could have done community service starring in videos to be shown to any midwestern teen with dreams of stardom. But Cindy liked these dives. They were dark and quiet and suited her mood; no one hassled her as she sat in the corner drinking her screwdriver through a straw and wondering where her life would go next.

Casey started dating an
actor/producer/director/model/musician
named Burke and was around the apartment less and less. Cindy got invitations to a few parties out of the deal at first—mostly held at a white-walled modern cube in the hills, where she sat by the shimmering pool while everyone did coke somewhere upstairs—but after a while she realized she was on her own. Casey sometimes didn't reappear for weeks. The Mustang, unmoved for street sweeping, gradually accumulated tickets until the windshield vanished under a snowdrift of white paper.

In June, facing eviction and a sense of utter defeat, Cindy got her mother to send her eight hundred dollars, promising she'd buy a bus ticket back to Fresno. And she had sincerely meant to do so, but
SAN FRANCISCO
had somehow looked much more appealing on the Greyhound departures board than
FRESNO
. On the ride there, she got in touch with an old friend from high school, Matthew, who lived in the Castro and who agreed to put her up temporarily. They had momentarily been boyfriend and girlfriend before Matthew knew he was gay or was willing to admit it. There had been hot (to her) make-out sessions in her car, sound-tracked by Operation Ivy and Screeching Weasel, and even an abortive blow job outside the Mellow Mushroom where he waited tables. She still had fond feelings for him.

His roommate, an older man named Marco Priminger, apparently didn't have fond feelings for her; he didn't trust her with a key and forbade her from touching anything while they were out of the house. Not that she would have wanted to—the crumbling apartment was chockablock with seventies kitsch: Partridge Family toys, Sandy Allen records, Keane paintings, a Skimbleshanks costume from a dinner theater production of
Cats.
It was like being held prisoner on a John Waters set. Sitting there watching a vacuum tube TV, which supported a glass-enclosed Land of the Lost diorama, she had to come to terms with what she'd felt in Los Angeles: the experiment had been a failure, and it was time to return home and get serious, start taking classes. Apply herself. It sounded like a kind of death, but there it was.

It was one of those moments that didn't seem so pivotal at the time—just depressing—but in retrospect could have changed everything. She was booking another bus ticket, back to Fresno this time, when Casey's number appeared on her flip cell. Burke had dumped her, and she was going to Vegas for the fall, to cocktail waitress at a casino. Did Cindy want to go? She thought of the gray concrete buildings of Fresno Community College, her old bedroom at home decorated with posters of the Ramones, her mother's disapproving presence like a gray fog drifting in and out of the house. Yes, she did.

Up and down the Strip—as they had in San Diego—they applied in tandem, a team. The plan was to rake in the big bucks during peak season, convention time, when the blistering desert cooled down to just unbearably scorching. Then they would take off during the holidays, spend the winter somewhere in the mountains learning to ski. They were young and good-looking and had no trouble getting hired at Harrah's, where they wore incredibly short black leather skirts with sparkly gold tops. They teetered around in heels on the carpet, on endless orbits from the gaming floor to the bar area and back. At their apartment the morning after their shift, they would throw their cash and chips on the bed in a pile as though they'd robbed a bank and cackle over Bloody Marys as they rehashed the night—the losers who had seen
Swingers
and talked about each other being “so money they didn't even know it,” the crazy Arab guy who had Casey place a ten-thousand-dollar roulette wager for him, Paul the bartender who slipped them fruity shots in paper cups and wanted to bang both of them and never, ever, ever would.