Jerry’s brother races Mustangs. Not the horses, but the cars. He actually belongs to a club that races them. I find this out when I get to Jerry’s apartment. There’s a party going on, and Jerry apologizes for not inviting me. “Dude, I’m glad you’re here. I would’ve told you about this thing, but it’s really my bro’s doing. These fuckers get together every couple of weeks and race their cars and then party together. Shit’s gonna get wild, man. You gonna hang?” He notices my puffy eye and lip and my grass-stained Sizzler shirt. “Hey, what happened to your face?” he asks. “Did you and Ayala finally mix it up?”
“I need a place to crash. Got home problems, man.”
Jerry’s cool. He doesn’t need to hear the whole story. “You can stay here, but don’t plan on getting too much sleep. Not tonight.” Jerry gets called in to the kitchen and I head off for the bedroom. His room smells like he’s cooking old socks and ass soup. It’s depressing that I’ve got to sleep here.
I roll a joint and smoke it next to Jerry’s window. I’m all worked up even though I’m so goddamn low. I need to calm down, keep my heart from exploding right there. I feel the gun in the waist-band of my pants and I think about how close I was to blowing my head off back there. The gun’s cold and ready and I get this urge to head right back and put that fucker in my mouth and pull the trigger in front of them all. My moms would feel like shit.
It’d serve her ass right, and I can’t think about anything else but how much I wish I could hate her, could just walk back to that house and do it, just blow my fucking brains out right in front of her, and just before, shout, “I’m doing this because of you, you weak, crazy bitch!” But right away I start to repent for it. I ask God to forgive me and I realize that I don’t deserve to get what I want, that my moms doesn’t deserve such a demented fuck-up son. And I start to panic, wondering what they did to her after I ran out like that. What she must’ve done when she heard me and my pops fighting. Did he tell her? Did she hear me? And what about Antony? What did he see? What a fucking mess, and I keep saying that to myself in my head, What a fucking mess, what a fucking mess, what a fucking mess. I want to take it all back, but I know I can’t. And I see it in my mind’s eye, my insides, all blackened, rotted. My spirit, its outline shaped just like me, but made of ashes, burned and coal black. I am a piece of shit. “What a fucking mess,” I moan from so far deep inside me that I can taste the words sliding out of my mouth, vile and heavy and true.
I hear my voice and it hits me. I’m stoned. I’m tripping. I gotta catch hold of myself. I tighten my fists and I slam them against my thighs hard, then harder, then harder still, until my legs are aching and the physical pain tears me away from my thoughts for just a second, long enough for me to take a long peep at myself in Jerry’s dresser mirror. I reach back and pull the gun out, put it to my head, and watch my reflection for a second. “Fuck you,” I say finally, flipping myself off. I smile big and suave and give myself the thumbs-up sign. I say it: “I am untouchable, goddamn it! I am untouchable. I am untouchable.” With that I shove the gun back in my waistband. I walk into the bathroom and stick my head under the faucet, soaking my hair, using Jerry’s soap bar to wash off the goddamn grease. I take off the Sizzler shirt, wash my armpits. I look in the mirror, and The Face is there, in the middle of all this craziness. It’s there. It isn’t gone. It hasn’t failed me. I can go out. I have to.
The strange people I saw when I first entered now look a lot stranger, almost like aliens. They are not cool and collected. They are freakish, off-the-hook defectives yammering away in a dingy two-bedroom apartment with old, stinky, cigarette-burned carpet and a beer-stained couch. Only the TV is new, a thirty-six-inch model Jerry and his brother probably bought hot. I make my way to the kitchen and to my surprise it’s clean, the only room in the joint that doesn’t inspire nausea. I guess it’s because Jerry’s a busboy.
The keg’s tapped and I go back out to the living room. I move around listening to conversations, not wanting to join in till I find something that won’t wig me out. I don’t want to hear other people’s horror stories, but I’m damned sure that these freaks aren’t going to help. There’s about forty people bobbing and weaving in threes and fours, smoking cigs and holding cups that look like they’re filled with piss. I walk around listening to them laugh at shit that only a heartless asshole could find amusing. The women look ugly, overly made-up, like demonic clowns wearing skanky halter tops and faded Levi’s. The dudes look mean and suspicious, a roomful of flat-out junkies talking stupid shit about motors and mag tires and horsepower. It hits me that I don’t know a goddamn person in this city. This apartment has become the center of all loneliness. I am a stranger amongst the strange.
I make my way over to Jerry, who’s sitting on his urine-y couch with his girlfriend, Gina, and her cousin Gloria. Gloria’s been drinking all night and she’s right away interested in finding out why I’m sporting a shiner. I’m not even close to wanting to explain it. “You get in a fight?” she says. I say no, but she doesn’t get the message. “You a boxer? What happened? Does it hurt?” I try to ignore her, but the mystery is killing her and it seems to turn her on. She starts hinting about how ready she is. “I’m feeling gooood,” she says, trying to wink, but she’s so drunk that the wink looks more like a wince, making her almost-pretty face look psychotic, a crazy woman who eats tubes of red, red lipstick. It’s scary.
Then from nowhere this goth-looking figure appears. He’s wearing a pair of black shorts and an unbuttoned black wool overcoat with no shirt underneath. It’s gotta be ninety degrees outside, but the guy isn’t even sweating. His skin is white with a rash of ugly pimples and scabs running across his forehead. The dude’s so skinny that I can see his spine ridging from below his belly. His face, emaciated, is dominated by black-lined eyes under which he’s painted bloodred teardrops. I knew a few goths back home and they were a freaky bunch. But this guy is so hardcore, it hurts to look at him. He seems nervous, one shout away from a meltdown.
It doesn’t seem like anyone knows this cat at all. He seems just to have wandered in, but soon he’s telling us how blood is the only real bond with chicks that counts. “We cut each other all the time.” He’s got a bored-like affected tone. It makes him sound sedate and fruity, almost English. “I drink her blood and she drinks mine. You should see it.” He pulls the sleeve of his overcoat up and reveals his puny white forearm. Every half inch or so lies a razor-blade–thin red scar. “She’ll take our blade and slice me and I do the same to her. It’s better than fucking.”
I go try to find a beer. I can’t listen to that sort of shit right now. It’s too much. I focus on drinking. The vampire follows me, though. He wants a beer, too. “I thought you just drank blood,” I say. He smiles at me. “I drink all sorts of things.”
From outside I hear a loud motor revving. The Mustang racers are heading out to look at Jerry’s brother’s car. “We gotta check out my bro’s car, dude,” Jerry says, poking his head into the kitchen. He’s obviously loaded, but people seem genuinely excited to see the car. Jerry explains that his brother has taken the air-condition out of his Mustang to make it even faster. “It’s hotter than two rats fucking a wall socket,” he tells me as we walk out to the street, “but that bitch moves!”
His brother’s car is pretty cool. It’s a ’67 Mustang, bright red, tricked mags, black ragtop, and a kinghell engine that sounds like it’s ready to fuck a herd of elephants. I realize right then and there that what I want, what I need, is a car. Something that’ll move me the hell out of here. “You think your bro or any of his friends can get me a line on a car? Nothing fancy, just something to get me around,” I say.
Jerry nods. “Fuck yeah. You came to the right place for that.”
I go back into the apartment wanting to get away from the noise, and I find the vampire there alone. He’s sitting on the couch, his black wool overcoat splayed out, his knobby, pale chest acting as a resting place for his beer. He has razor scars running across his stomach, too.
“You into that devil shit,” I ask him, but in a friendly way. “You one of those goths that go around killing their parents?”
“No, oh no,” he says. “Those people are giving us real vampires a bad name. They’ve listened to too much Slip Knot. Now everyone thinks that just by blowing a boy and cutting their wrists, that they’re vampires. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Just how does it work? What do you have to do, watch The Hunger and drink blood?”
“Let’s not get into it if you think it’s a joke.” He doesn’t say it angry, just like he’s getting bored being asked dumb questions.
“I don’t think it’s a joke,” I say. I flash him the smile. “See?” He nods his head understanding that I’m part of the brood.
“So what’s there to do around here tonight?”
“What do you have in mind?” he asks.
“Anything, nothing, whatever. I just want to be occupied.”
“Well, that gives us a lot of leeway,” he says. “How long have you been here?”
“Long enough, but I’ve been spending most of my time in Mission Viejo.”
“Don’t spend too much time in Orange County,” he says. “Spend time in L.A. It’s worlds better.”
“To me,” I tell him, “this whole fucking mess is L.A. The whole goddamn place.”
“We need to take you on a tour,” he says. “My bar’s in Hollywood. Coven 13.” He looks me over, “But you’re not dressed, Sizzler boy.”
“This shirt’s got more blood on it than you or your girl could drink in a week,” I say.
“Oh, I believe you, but that won’t get you into 13. We could go to a rave my girlfriend knows about. It’ll get going at about one, out near Laguna, dance till the sun comes up with real children of the night.”
“You got a car?” I ask him.
“No.”
“You and me must be the only two assholes here without wheels. Do you fly when you need to go somewhere?”
“That’s funny,” he says, making bored. “Why don’t you ask that girl that you were talking to if she wants to drive us. She seemed interested.”
It’s only about midnight, but I ask Gloria of the red, red lipstick if she’s interested in heading out, maybe drive a little bit. She’s cool with it. “You’ll have to drive. I’m fucking drunk,” she says, giving me a kiss. She’s gone, boozy breath sour and not all that attractive, but at least she’s willing to roll out. “Let’s go, papi,” she says.
* * *
She gives me the keys to her (big surprise) Mustang. It’s not a show car, but it runs. The vampire directs us to his girlfriend’s place. She lives near Newport in a nice house, big palm trees, open, roomy avenues, with a fancy, rich mall featuring all the mind-numbing, asshole department stores. She comes out, a pretty used-to-be-blonde, now jet-black-brunette. She’s wearing black, her addict-eyes dark holes. Her name is Blair. “Like in the Witch Project?” I say. She takes it like I’m being an asshole.
“My real name is Blair,” she says, giving the vampire a big kiss. She calls him Stevie. So much for good vampire names like Cassandra or Victor or Raul or Lestat. Even Lomos is a better vampire name than that.
* * *
The car is almost out of gas and we have to stop on the way. After I pump, I go in to buy some cigarettes. As I walk back to the car, this kid, probably a couple of years younger than me, maybe fourteen or so, comes out of nowhere and he says, “Hey man, hey. Can you help me? I just need directions. That’s it. No shit, no joke. Hook me up with some directions.” He looks scared, sad, empty, a runaway probably.
“I’m not from here,” I say as if it’s a mystery to anyone. “I’m just as lost as you.” He’s lanky, with black hair like me. He’s got a scab on his forehead. He says again, “Man, help me out. Help me get home.” I look at him trying to figure him. “Help me out, man,” but this time he’s out and out pleading even though he’s trying to smile. “How about a ride? Where you going?”
“Laguna,” I say.
“Man, I just want out of here.” I feel bad for the guy, but Gloria starts honking the horn. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she yells, laughing.
“I’m lost, too,” I say and I throw him a couple of bills, whatever I have in my front pocket. He looks at the money, but doesn’t jump at it. I get in the car and drive looking at him in the rearview. He stands watching the car move off and I think I see him bend to the money before I have to turn onto the highway.
Gloria is hitting some hash the vampires gave her and I take a couple of hits, turning off where the vamp Stevie directs me. I got no sense of where we’re going or how long it takes to get there. These people could be driving me to some demented witch meeting, some coven ritual where they’re going to cut me open, take out my burned heart, and whip each other with my intestines in a no-holds-barred satanic fuck frenzy.
That’s just what I’m thinking as the traffic drops off to the odd pair of headlights moving in the opposite direction. After a while, though, we seem to be heading toward the beach. Just before we get there, we turn into a warehouse-looking building. There are hundreds of cars in the parking lot and I can see a line of people waiting to get inside the doors, smoke rising above them, music pounding. I try to calm myself down a little. “This is going to be good,” Stevie whispers a little too closely in my ear. We get out of the car, but Gloria is already pulling that sick shit, talking about being dizzy and tired and she just wants to lie down for a minute. “Just leave me here,” she moans. I got the keys, so fuck her; I say “cool” and we leave her there.
We make our way to the front. It’s all kids, hundreds of them waiting in line, talking, smoking, laughing, rubbing each other, a real love fest. “Everyone’s rolling,” Stevie says right in my ear again. “I’m gonna score a couple of hits for us. This won’t be good unless you get some E. Are you going to try it?” I nod although I don’t need any more distortion. Already I’m seeing goblins and ghosts under and behind every car. “Twenty bucks, you gotta give me twenty bucks for yours.” I hand him a twenty. We get up to the front quickly, but long before that I can hear the bass and computer bleeps pouring through the walls, already making me ever so slightly rock my head back and forth even though I don’t want to. The hash was good, good enough to almost drown out my anxiety. The sounds make it seem like I am getting ready to enter a really soothing but haunted pinball machine.
We get in and the place is alive. The place is one big light show with a beat, strong and primitive, flowing, pulling everybody in their own direction. It’s pac-man gone wild, with limitless silver quarters dropping from heaven, the game gone public—louder and brighter than ever. Motherfuckers are high, hand-jiving, looking like brain-dead hippies just rocking to the beat and that beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. The vampire Stevie sneaks up behind me. He leans toward me and says something but I can’t hear a word, then he slips a pill in my hand, blue, small, a cure for what’s ailing me. He yells something else in my ear that I don’t hear, something about letting go. I pull a stray Dexadrine from my pocket and stick both pills in my mouth and swallow without water. I’m here, I figure, and I might as well go with it.
Just as the beat breaks loose, I look up to see Gloria come running through the crowd like either the greatest thing that ever happened to a human has just happened to her or like she’s just woken up to find some horrifying, green-eyed demon slurping at her tits. Somehow, seeing her, seeing how confused she looks and how stupidly she runs, gives me the assurance that my mask is still good. I give her the grin, a grinding vampire grin, a friendly warning that I might bite her fucking head off if she gets too crazy. She keeps pulling, though, and we start dancing, rubbing each other, but not like we’re horny, just like she’s this incredible soft living warm thing that moves with me that’s moving with everything else, and I close my eyes and move with her, with myself. I move against the wall, alive with vibration and thunder, as if there’s a hundred trapped miners behind it screaming and kicking to get the fuck out before the air ends. Then suddenly it’s so loud in there that I can’t even hear my own sadness. All of us, deaf to what we don’t want to hear, dancing like we’re being pursued by some invisible terror, like we can get away from it if we just keep running in place. And I know it’s too late, because it will catch me, I know it will, with a bang, and I don’t give a fuck. Gloria’s trying to whisper something in my ear, but all I can sense in this deafening wave is her puky breath. I don’t move a facial muscle, I just stare. She won’t get to me, no one will. Not anymore. I’m cool, detached, aloof. No one can hurt me now. I’m putting everyone on alert because I’m fucking dangerous.
Hours of bam-dance-distortion and more dance. Thirsty and sweat-drenched, shrunken but still aware, the E fades and I feel my nerves returning to tautness. I can make it out of this crowd now. I need water. I need another Dexy. I say, “Let’s go” to Gloria. We start to walk out. No water in sight, so I pop the pill dry. I’m ready to get the fuck out of here, out of California. I’m not digging this shit one bit. We hit the door, the vampires Stevie and Blair behind trying to get my attention, but my attention will not be got in here. Not anymore. I will walk out of this motherfucker before my skull implodes, and as we make the door, the cool ocean air hits me square in the face like a cold shower the morning after. I feel the up coming on already. I stop to face them. “What?” I say, the first voice I’ve heard since we came in, my own, sounding small in my numb ears. “We’re gonna stay,” he says, “but you got some of our stuff in your car.”
“Oh,” I say, glad that I don’t have to lose my shit with these people. There’s a crowd outside, no longer waiting, just grouped out there, talking, smoking, laughing. I need to stand there for a couple of minutes, get my senses adjusted, wash out the echoes of the hours’ sounds with something close to silence. I pull a cigarette out to buy me some time. I need clarity. Which way to walk? Where did I leave that jacked-up car? If that Gloria moved that motherfucker … Then I hear somebody from behind me say real loud, “Hey, Sizzler, you steal my wallet?”
I turn around and I look over at him and he’s looking at me, in my direction, a white boy wearing a baseball cap backward, with three or four other white boys. His nose is pierced and he’s wearing a wife-beater, his hair bleached, trying his best to look like that asshole Eminem. Some kid, maybe a couple of years older than me, probably from the valley. I make eye contact and I can tell he and his crew are here to bomb on someone, and they’ve picked me. I check my mask. It’s on straight. Tight. Ready. “Hey, Sizzler, I’m talking to you,” he says.
Gloria and my vampires sense the trouble and they try and pull me toward the parking lot, thinking that it can be avoided. But I know better.
“You must be tripping talking like that,” I say, but I say it with an out. All he has to do is take it, walk away, just turn around. But I know he won’t.
Because he’s ready. He thinks he is cool, detached, dangerous. “You motherfuckers are always stealing.” He says this to his friends more than to me. One of them says, “Fuck up that spic, O.” O’s on it. He starts walking up on me, his boys right behind, and I know it’s on. “We oughta call the border patrol on all you wetbacks, especially you, you spic-assed, cockroach-loving, motherfucking busboy.” But before he can say anything else, I flat out hit him with everything I got as he walks right into the punch. I put all my weight into it and follow through like a homerun hitter swinging pure and swift and hard. I know at the instant I make contact that his nose is gone, obliterated, fucked like frozen mashed potatoes. He’s got a lump where his shit used to hang and as he falls down he says, “Jesus,” and before I can put my steel toes to him, his boys jump in catching me from all different directions, going wild with their fists, hitting my face and chest and back, till I go down and they start kicking. All the vampires watch, clutching their toys, their goddamn Big Bird stuffed animals and their Teletubbie backpacks, just a playground brawl set to a pulsating beat. “Motherfucking spic, goddamn Mexican,” his boys yell. They want to crush my teeth, to pound my ears flat, to break my last rib. No one jumps in to help me till a bouncer or two comes tearing out of the club, yelling what we already know. “The cops are on their way, you assholes.”
They pull back and Stevie helps me up while I look at Eminem who’s still covering up like he’s being kicked. His face is laying flat on the concrete and his blood, black in the dark, is pooling and now he’s putting his hand in it, trying to roll over, maybe push himself up. His boys pull him to his feet and disappear fast into the parking lot.
“You alright?” Stevie keeps asking me. I don’t answer, feeling this sick exhilaration because I’ve left blood on that concrete, relieved that for a while I can concentrate on my physical pain, that for a minute I can locate its source exactly. I can touch it and see it, not like this other shit weighing my heart down, boiling my stomach, felt everywhere and nowhere. “At least I’ll know I was in California,” I say walking away toward the car where the girls are already waiting. They’re nervous, saying, “Hurry up, hurry up,” but I don’t because I don’t give a fuck. I remain cool, detached, aloof. No one can hurt me now. My mask is on straight, tight, ready.
“That was crazy,” Gloria says when we pull away. “That was really crazy. Man, that was insane.”
“Shut up,” I say, the adrenaline pouring out in a cold sweat. “Or at least learn another goddamn word.”
“Fuck that asshole,” the vampire says. “Fuck those racist fucks. Why do they have to do that shit?”
Finally everyone shuts up, and I drop, just like that. My energy, the juice, is gone. My heart’s beating like hell, though. I need to relax. I feel like my chest is gonna explode, like I’m going to puke out all the acid that’s been building up in my stomach all night long. And then I do. Stevie pulls over just in time for me to throw up all over the 5. “Are you alright?” someone is asking me. I wave them off. I just need everyone, everything to be fucking quiet. But of course the cars keep rolling by, a few even honk at me and scream drunken curses.
“Come on in if you’re finished,” Stevie the vampire says from the driver’s seat. “You don’t want a cop pulling up with the drugs we’ve got. They’ll take all of us to jail.” He’s got a very good point. I wipe my mouth off and swing my legs back into the car. “Do you want some water?” Gloria has a bottle in her shopping-bag-sized purse. Usually those things drive me crazy, the whole bottled water obsession that all these fucking Californians have. Polluted ocean draining into everyone’s consciousness. But I take it, grateful to wash out the blood in my mouth. I got to get out of this town, but I know that it isn’t just this crazy fucking madhouse. The madhouse is in me, and I can’t run fast enough to get away from me. I’ve tried. I’ve tried hard. The vampire hands me the pipe. “Take a good, long pull. That’s what you need. Chill out.”
I suck some smoke in, and feel it rush through my teeth and over my tongue. I try to become that smoke, to get into the rush fast. My window is open and the wind blows over my face, same as the smoke, drying the sweat and blood on my forehead and my eyes that have teared up from the labor of vomiting. I need to calm down, I keep telling myself. I think about where I’m at and who I’m with and what I’m doing and anyway I look at it, it just seems completely surreal, completely empty. I feel like jumping from the car right then and there, out into the crazy SoCal night, just get away from the chaos I’ve invited inside the car, inside my life by coming out here and thinking that I could make my life sane in this insane shit town. This fucking place is as bad as I am, worse, and you can’t shake your demons in hell.
* * *
Gloria’s place is way up near Hollywood, but the drive gives me a chance to clear my head a little. The sun is coming up and I can see my face in the rearview mirror. My face isn’t so bad. My lips took a couple of shots, but mostly my back and legs got the brunt of it. By the time we get to the apartment, I’m just hoping to get a little rest. The place is nice, soft and girly, with wicker shit everywhere, and pictures of flowers. But Gloria’s room is different. It’s got books and a poster of the Farmworkers Union eagle. I’m tired, but she wants to fuck. Violence turns her on.
“You like that one?” she says, pointing to another poster, this one a nude by some famous painter. “Give you any ideas?” We start to kiss and I’ve got her half-naked when she reaches under her bed and busts out a Polaroid camera. She wants me to take shots of her giving me head, playing with her own pussy, spreading her legs. She wants the shit down on film, for posterity, for whatever. “I keep the pictures in this box,” she says, pulling an old, purple school box from under her bed. “You want to look at them?” she says, spreading a handful on the bed next to where I sit. I look down at dozens of pictures of her with other guys and some even with girls. I can’t handle this trip. I couldn’t get it up right now if she were to break off into a lap dance. I say, “I’m going to sleep,” and before she can even start to complain, I walk out to her living room and lie down on the couch. “Punk-ass,” she says, coming out of her bedroom a few minutes later. She’s naked. Behind her she’s dragging an old Scooby beach towel. She goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower without closing the door.
I shut my eyes, but I can’t fall asleep so I turn on her TV. The morning news is on. Some little girl got hit by a car last night and instead of stopping and checking on her, the fucker rolled over her trapped body so he could make his big getaway. They got her moms on the screen, crying, her eyes looking for someone to tell her that all this is just a horrible dream. I shut the set off and limp out before Gloria can drag herself out of the bathroom.
I stand on the pavement, my Sizzler shirt torn to shit, my face puffed, my legs weak and bruised, and watch the people driving out to the highways to get to work. I only got one place to go and even though I know what’s gone down, that I’m not welcome, that sick part of me that hangs on to hope when even God would give up, wants to see the thing through to the very end. So I find a pay-phone. It’s early enough that Naomi answers. “Hello,” I say after almost hanging up.
“Robert,” she says like she’s smelling baby shit. Long pause, then, “you’ve got a lot of people worried. You need to come here. We need to talk.” That’s all I need to hear. “I’ll be around tonight,” I say. Of course, I have no intention of talking to that bitch tonight or any other night. I’m going to wait for her to get out and then try one last time to get through to my moms.
* * *
I can’t get a cab looking like I do, so I get on a bus. People on their way to work do everything they can not to look at me. I swallow another Dexy to keep from falling asleep and concentrate on not throwing up.
By the time I get to the house, I’m shaking all over the place, like I have Parkinson’s or something. My gramps died of that, and I don’t remember much because I was so young, but I do remember that his hands were in constant motion, always shaking in time to some deep, unutterable fury, like he was directing some mad symphony in his head. My hands are shaking, too. My stomach doesn’t feel any too good either. Between the acid swishing around in there and my jittery hands, I half-turn around and fuck the whole thing off. Just leave. I know this isn’t going to get me anywhere. But I push on ahead. I gotta see this thing through all the way so when it all explodes, I’ll know I did everything, said everything.
I’m aware that I haven’t prepared: no speeches, no laundry list of my best features, no top ten reasons Moms should forgive me for being such a fuck-up. Nothing. All I got is a nervous stomach, jittery hands, and useless, raggedy vampire teeth.
Instead of knocking at the door, I go around to the back and peer in through the windows. Antony is at school and Naomi is definitely gone. I can see my grandmother napping her old age away, but Moms is nowhere to be seen. I climb up to the second story, to where my room had been. It’s not easy. I use the tree, dragging my sore body up a little at a time. The pain is coming in steady and sharp now, my chest, back, and legs begging me to be still, to lie the fuck down.
I go in through the bedroom window that I left unlocked, and real quiet, take off the scraps of my Sizzler shirt. I put on a clean T, rinse my face, cupping big gulps of water because I’m so thirsty I can’t stand it. Then I creep downstairs to my moms’s bedroom door. It’s half-closed. I stick my neck out and take a look. Moms is lying down, her eyelids pressed together, but I can tell she’s not asleep because her forehead’s knitted.
“Mom,” I say, my voice shaking all over the place in almost a whisper. “Mom,” I say again. This time she responds but she doesn’t open her eyes.
“M’ijo,” she says. “Roberto. Come here, m’ijito.” Hearing her say “my son” makes me feel so good for a second that I forget the razor blades in my stomach and the blood on my shoes. I walk over to her and before I can even say a word I slide down on my knees right in front of her. I can’t even talk. All my energy is gone and all I can manage is to fucking start crying. A perfect beginning. “Stop. Stop.” I order myself in my head. I can’t, though. I can’t maintain my shit. I just kneel there weeping, only no real sound is coming out of my mouth because I’m still hoping I can control it, keep it from her, hide how lost I feel, how lost I am because I don’t want her to know that I’m such a goddamn mess, that I need my mommy, a mommy, any mommy. This isn’t part of my plan. Goddamn it, I came here to show her that I was past that. That I was gonna take care of her and Antony, and how can a goddamn baby do that? But before I can get it together, she puts her arms on me and draws me to her.
Finally, she says, “I’m sorry, m’ijo, I’m so sorry.” I tell her she’s got nothing to be sorry about. Nothing. “You haven’t done anything to me,” I say, but the words come out small and choked up. “Can’t we just be together?” I ask.
“I’m not strong enough,” she says, “I can’t get away from my sadness. I’ve tried everything to swim away from it, but it’s not something I can swim away from. It’s the ocean itself. I thought for a while that I could just float on the top of it, just keep kicking my legs and my arms and that I’d get past it. It’s too broad, too deep. I can’t find the bottom. It’s in me now. I’ve swallowed so much of it that it’s in my blood and I can’t wash the smell of all this sadness away.” Her eyes are open all the way and she’s looking dead at me.
Her pain washes over me and I want to look away because I recognize myself in there. I look closer and I see my father, too. I see in that reflection that my father and I are the same thing, are the same package for her. We’re the Siamese twins of pain and memory. I can see him staring back at me through her anguish and I realize that it will always be like this for her. I’m not going to change that. She says “I’m sorry” again. I hug her tight, tighter than I’ve ever hugged her or anybody before. I want to tell her that I love her and that it’s okay, but I can’t move my tongue in my thick fucking throat. Instead, I just give her a kiss on the cheek. My lips linger there, and I soak in the feel of her skin for just a few seconds thinking, like a punk, like a sucker, that I better remember that—the feel of my mother’s face. In that instant I know that my mask is for shit, because I’m still nothing but a kid, no bigger, no better, no harder than my little Antony.
I stand up and I look at my moms, and I know. I know it’s time to leave for real. I limp out of the room like I’m just going to the bathroom or something, but once outside the doorway, I walk up to what was my bedroom, grab my bag, and crawl out the window like a straight-out thief who’s found an empty house where he was sure he’d find riches.
* * *
Jerry has a line on a car for me. He has me meet him at the Sizzler during his break. Jerry notices how much worse I look than I did last night. “Jesus, what happened to you? Last night it was a puffy eye, now you look like you got jumped into a gang.”
“Nothing,” I say, but it makes me realize that my moms didn’t notice. “Where are the wheels?”
The car isn’t fancy or even very attractive. It’s an old ’85 Mustang, but it’s black and the inside is in good shape. “It’s a decent car. It’ll get you where you’re going,” Jerry says.
“I’ll take it,” I say, surprising myself. We exchange money and keys. As I’m leaving I see Ayala. He starts talking shit about why didn’t I show up this morning. “Fuck you, shit brains,” I say, and I dump my rolled-up Sizzler shirt into the deep fryer as he watches, his big, stupid mouth open.
* * *
I can’t leave without saying good-bye to Antony. Could try to use another fake note, but with my face the way it looks, they’d never buy it. Could just make my way into the school, kidnap him. Could unload the gun, leave just one bullet. I’m not looking to pull a Columbine. Just get my little brother, maybe take him to Mexico. Why not? My moms won’t do him any good, and leaving him for Naomi is worse than stealing him away, right?
I roll up to the school. I’m sweating like crazy, wondering what I’m going to do. I got no plan, got no real idea what it is I’m doing here. A good-bye? A kidnapping? Offing myself? I got one bullet in the gun, a regular Deputy fucking Fife. I sort of laugh at the idea of it. But it’s not funny. I check the piece, making sure the round is next up. I get out of the car, reach behind, and slide the gun in my waistband again. I walk toward the big glass-and-aluminum double doors. In the reflection I see myself for just a second, skinny, fucked up, bruised, face all puffy. My breathing is quick, like I’ve run a mile, but I walk in steady. The office door is to my right, with the old bird who runs the desk sitting there drinking her goddamned coffee, just a normal day. I have choices, I gotta think, what am I here for? Antony, but what? I walk right past the office door, just like the breeze, no fuss, no muss, and I head for the hallway to the first-grade classrooms.
Just take him because he’s mine. Take him to Mexico. Just get in the car, run off, live free and clear. I peer into the classroom, hidden most of the way by a column in the hall. Antony is sitting in his desk, his hair slicked back, combed neat. His face is clean, white, smooth. He’s writing something down, maybe working on a math problem. Whatever it is, he’s concentrating, his face scrunched up a little because whatever he’s doing, he’s finding it hard. It makes me smile, makes me want to cry, makes me wish I was little like him, maybe that I was him.
But I’m not. I need to think so I head for the bathroom. I go inside one of the stalls and sit on the toilet, the gun poking my back. I’m not him. He’s not me. I don’t want him to be me. It’s then that I know I’m not going to do shit. Not to myself, not to Antony.
But maybe if I chill in there for a little bit, I can catch him, at least say good-bye. I wait a little while. But he doesn’t come in. I hear two other kids, but they’re older, already talking about fuck this and fuck that. After they leave, I figure my little bro doesn’t need to see me like this, anyway, big fuck-up that I am. But with a marker some kid left behind, I write on the wall in big black letters, “I love you Antony, Your Big Bro Robert.”
I sneak out, nobody knowing I was even there. Maybe I wasn’t. I get back in the car, take the gun, toss the bullet in the backseat. Fuck this shit. Daytime is burning and I can only think of one thing now. Getting the hell out of California and getting back to San Antonio.
I drive like my ass is on fire until I get to I-10. It’s going to take me straight through to S.A. A 1,200-mile shot, back the way I came. Here I am, a needle, pulling red thread again, but this time I don’t want to look back. It’s a mess again, no pattern, nothing that would make any sense. From the time I got off the bus at the L.A. terminal, I’ve left a confused trail, a path not even Sherlock Holmes could follow. If I could see the pattern, I’d see that it’s a thick coil, its center my moms’s house, such a confused mess of a coil that it’s no wonder I got tripped up in it.
By the morning, I’m almost in New Mexico. Somewhere between here and there, I bury the gun right in the fucking desert. My gramps’s service revolver finally laid to rest.
I haven’t slept in two days and I park at a rest stop and nod off. After a few hours of sleep, I’m back on the road. I have this running conversation in my head with my moms. In it I ask her what I wanted her to answer for me. “How am I going to know who I am; who you are?” And nothing comes to me except her stories, the ones she would tell me way back after Pops had first left. Thinking about them, they pick me up a little.
I would keep her half-cheerful by asking her questions like “What were you like as a teenager?” She’d get to remembering her youth and her old boyfriends and how she liked to make them jealous. How they chased after her, because my moms was a knockout with her dark brown curly hair and her big green eyes and dimples. She would tell me, “Your grandfather was very strict.” She liked remembering him because he took care of her like a father should. When he died, he left her alone just like my old man.
He was a preacher. He didn’t take money from his congregation because it was the Depression. So Moms’s family had to live in a tent for a long time and drink water from the river, water that was polluted and killed her baby brother. “Your grandfather had to sell vegetables to keep us in food.” I never got to meet him really, because he died when I was only three. But my moms would tell me his stories and how he was strict, but had a soft spot for her. “He would let me get away with a lot more than the boys. He never yelled at me, and if Momma got mad, he’d say, ‘Esposa, leave my Teresa be.’” I liked hearing my moms telling me those things. It took us out of that dark room to another place, like a movie in my mind, where my moms was the star of one of those fifties romantic comedies she liked so much.
I stop only to get gas or at the occasional McDonald’s. I’ve got about a quarter ounce of weed left, and that’s enough to get me home. There’s a cassette tape someone left behind, Who’s Next. I listen to it for almost the entire drive until I see the city lights and I catch FM 99.5 on the radio. It hits me that I’m back in San Antonio, that I’m going to see Grams, that I’m alive, and for a minute I feel almost good.