Somebody Walkin’ in My House

KROQ; aka K-Rock, is counting down the top hundred rock songs of all time, the way they do every year. The list doesn’t change much—sometimes something decent like Nirvana cracks the list, but it’s mostly moldy old cock rock, and I get struck by this awful feeling that this is all we’ll have to listen to for a while.

“I need you to swing by the Lincoln,” I say.

“Nope,” Maggot Arm Joe says.

“I need some stuff.”

He says, “Look, I’m stuck for who knows how long wearing Sergei’s fucking clothing. If I can spare not going back, so can you.”

Sergei says, “You lucky man to wear Sergei’s clothing. Enough of your bad mouth.”

I’m thinking of the music that keeps me sane. Living underground in a box without some headphones. No way.

“Sergei, swing me by the Lincoln. I’ll be in and out.”

Sergei nods. He says, “You be very quick, Nick Ray. No dawdle time.”

He swings a left on Long Beach Boulevard and starts to pull into the loading zone when I see three guys in suits talking to Hank Crow under the fluorescent glow of the front desk. They couldn’t look more FBI if they were auditioning for the part in a movie.

“Sorry,” Sergei says. “Must go, Nick Ray.”

“Right,” I say.

We keep going, north to the 710. I’m in a funk, thinking of all I’m leaving behind. There’s not much stuff. Except for my CDs and some of my favorite clothes, I guess it’s all pretty much crap. I can replace the CDs. I start making a mental list of the ones I absolutely need. The bigger stuff, like the Stones and the Beatles, I can get in the desert, probably. Maybe I can get Wilco at Borders or Barnes & Noble. The smaller stuff, Bennett-Burch and the South San Gabriel and stuff like that, I need to order off the Internet. But I probably can’t do that because I’d need a credit card and they could track us that way.

I wonder how long this hiding’s going to go on.

Maggot Arm Joe and Sergei are sitting quietly in the front seat. Sergei merges onto the 91 East. The long boring part of “Free Bird” drones and stomps slowly to its ending on the radio.

“How long are we going to be underground?”

Sergei shrugs.

Maggot Arm Joe says, “A month at least. See if Harry Fudge gets better. Still try to turn a buck on this.”

“You don’t think the FBI will keep looking for us after a month?”

“Dude, I’ve worked with the FBI. They don’t catch anybody. That anthrax scare. The Olympic bomber. Those loonies that derailed the train in Arizona.”

“They got the Unibomber,” I say.

Sergei says, “No Nick Ray negative thinking.”

Maggot Arm Joe says, “They needed the fucking Uni-bomber’s brother to turn him in. McVeigh’s family turned him in.” He laughs. “They’re fucking stooges. We lay low for a while, and we’ll be fine. They don’t know our names. We just need to stay under the radar for a while.”

We get quiet for a while. I sit in the backseat and watch the lights and hills blur once we’re outside of Green Valley. I fall asleep as Sergei takes the 60 toward Indio.

I wake up at 11:30 when we’re outside of a Stater Brothers supermarket in downtown Twentynine Palms.

“How far are we from our place?” I say.

“Ten minutes,” Sergei says. “Let us get some Happy New Year things.”

It’s just before midnight, and the three of us are sitting in plastic lawn chairs we bought at the Stater Brothers. I also got some energy bars and some vegetables, but I’m wondering how long before I have to eat Sergei’s fucking dehydrated meat. The girl at the checkout told us the Marine base has a massive fireworks display at midnight, so we’re hanging out in the cold to see it.

I have a bottle of Sapphire Blue Bombay Gin between my legs, and I take a sip and feel the warmth spread through me. I think about maybe not drinking after this bottle. About maybe being a little bit more put together the next time I make my pitch to Tara.

“What are we going to do with your SUV?” Maggot Arm Joe says to Sergei.

“What?”

“Well, it’ll look pretty odd. Just having this thing parked in the middle of nowhere, no?”

Sergei takes the bottle of gin from me and drinks. “Tomorrow, let us worry.” He points with the bottle to the sky. “Tonight, let us have Happy New Year.”

“Fuck you,” Maggot Arm Joe says.

I can’t believe I’ll be trapped in a bunker with these guys for at least the next month. Sergei has a gun. I hope we don’t kill one another.

“Calm down,” I say. “We’ve got to be cool.”

Maggot Arm Joe says, “Fuck you, too. If you hadn’t hesitated, we would have sold everything fast and clear.”

“I didn’t hesitate. I disagreed with the way you wanted to do it. There’s a difference.”

“Well, if we’d done it my way, we’d be rich.”

“If it weren’t for me,” I say, “you never would have been included.”

He looks around and gestures to the vast emptiness of the desert, and then to his ridiculous clothes. “And look at all that I would have missed.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Sergei says. He points to the sky. “Army blowing everything up pretty.”

Some fireworks have started. They’re playing music, some hyperpatriotic piece-of-shit Lee Greenwood or Toby Keith slab of jingoistic crap about the greatest country on earth comes all distorted and warbled over the mountains. The sky explodes in green. In silvery lights that flower down like huge electric weeping willows. I can see my breath.

The fireworks go off above me and resonate in the valley. In between fireworks, I hear the distant cheers and oohs and aahs of people who have gathered to celebrate the end of the year, or the beginning of the new one, which, like the deformed frogs, like the floods and the earthquakes, like the end of fresh water to drink, like the mud slides, like just about anything you focus on, could mean the end of the world or something else entirely.

The fireworks keep going and the people keep making their noises. We haven’t been found. I will be okay, I tell myself. I will hide here, which is a retreat, a loss, but I will go back to Long Beach with a new plan on the coast where rebirth’s a way of life.

My ex, Cheryl, was right. Nick Ray is a loser, but that doesn’t mean I always have to be a loser. This is not carved in stone. I think about my options as the people celebrate and cheer the show of lights above me. Light strobes into the sky. Red. Then green. I feel my heart hammering in my skull. Music thunders and weaves around the explosions. I tell myself that I am alive and I have a fallout shelter in the desert and I have a brain and people have made more with less than that to start over with. This is, after all, America.