American Morons Page 5

  So all the way across the San Fernando Valley we played the Dolls, and she didn’t howl anymore, but she rocked side-to-side in her seat and mouthed the words while I snuck glances at her in the rearview mirror. The last time I could remember seeing her in this mood was on her thirty-first birthday, over a year ago, right before her mother died and the homeless persons’ political action committee she’d been serving on collapsed in the wake of 9/11. Right at the moment she’d finally decided to give up on the rest of the world long enough for us to try to have a child.

  I had thought maybe this Rebecca—arms twitching at her sides like folded wings, green eyes skimming the night for anything alive—had vanished for good.

  As usual, even at that hour, traffic snarled where the 101 and the 110 and the 5 emptied together into downtown Los Angeles, so I ducked onto Hill Street, edging us through the surprising crowds of Chinese teens tossing pop-pops in the air and leaning against lampposts and chain-shuttered shop windows to smoke. Rebecca rolled down her window, and the car filled with burning smells: tobacco, firecracker filament, pork, and fish. I thought she might try bumming a cigarette from a passing kid—though as far as I knew, she hadn’t smoked in years—but instead she leaned against the seatback and closed her eyes.

  We were pulling into Union Station when she turned the volume down, caught me looking at her in the mirror, and said, “A flowered one.”

  I grinned back, shook my head. “He’s a new man, remember? Official, responsible, full-time job. Brand new lakefront bungalow. He’ll be wearing gray pinstripes. From a suit he bought but hasn’t worn.”

  We were both wrong. And of course, the funniest thing—the worst—was that even with all that green and purple paisley flashing off the front of this latest vest like scales on some spectacular tropical fish, I still didn’t see him until I’d driven ten yards past him.

  “Hey, dude,” he said to both of us as he approached the car, then dropped his black duffel to the curb and stood quietly, leaning to the right the way he always did.

  He’d shaved off the last of the tumbling dark brown curls which, even thinning, used to flop over both his eyes and made him look like a Lhasa Apso. Even more brightly than the new vest, the top of his head shone, practically winking white and red with the lights from passing cars. His shoulders, big from the boxing classes he took—for fitness, he’d never gotten in a ring and swore he never would—ballooned from either side of the vest. His jeans were black, and on his wrists were leather bracelets studded with silver spikes.

  “Ash, you, um,” I said, and then I was laughing. “You don’t look like a nurse.”

  “Wait,” Rebecca said, and her hand snaked out the window and grabbed the side of Ash’s vest, right where the paisley met the black polyester backing. Then she popped her seatbelt open and leaned to look more closely. “Did you do this?”

  Ash’s blush spread all the way up his head until he was red all over, and his tiny ferret-eyes blinked. It was as though Rebecca had spray-painted him.

  “Do what?”

  “What was this?” Rebecca said. “Was this a shirt?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, El. Someone cut this shiny paisley part off…curtains, maybe? Something else, anyway. And then stitched it to the rest. See?” She held the edge of the vest out from Ash’s sides.

  Ash’s blush deepened, but his smile came more easily than I remembered. “No wonder it cost a dollar.”

  Rebecca burst out laughing, and I laughed, too. “Been way too long, Ash,” I said.

  Still leaning, as though he were standing in some invisible rowboat in a current, Ash folded himself into our Metro’s tiny back seat. “Good to be here, Elliot.” He pronounced it El-yut, just as he had when we were twelve.

  “You get all dolled up for us?” I said, nodding in the mirror at the vest, and to my surprise, Ash blushed again and looked at the floor.

  “I’ve been going out a lot,” he said.

  Both he and Rebecca left their windows open as I spun the car out of the lot and, without asking, turned south. With Chinatown behind us, the street corners emptied. I couldn’t see the smog, but I could taste it, a sweet tang in the air that shouldn’t have been there and prickled the lungs like nicotine and had a similar sort of narcotic, addictive effect, because you just kept gulping it. Of course, that was partially because there wasn’t enough oxygen in it.

  “Where are you going?” Rebecca asked as we drifted down the white and nameless warehouses that line both sides of Alameda Street and house the city’s other industries, whatever they are.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Just figured, between Ash’s vest and your mood, home wasn’t an option.”

  Rebecca twisted her head around to look at Ash. “Where’s all this out you’ve been going?”

  “Meditation classes, for one,” Ash said, effectively choking Rebecca to silence. She’d forgotten about Ash’s professed Zen conversion, or discovery, or whatever it was. He’d told us about it in a particularly cryptic phone call that had struck both of us as dispassionate even for Ash. Yet another 9/11 by-product, we both thought at the time, but now I actually suspected not. Even back in our Berkeley days, Ash’s sense of right and just behavior had been more…inward, somehow, than Rebecca’s.

  Also less ferocious. He hadn’t actually believed he could affect change, or maybe wasn’t as interested in doing so, and was therefore less perpetually disappointed. And now, as we floated between late-night trucks down the dark, toward the freeways, a series of quick, sweet feelings lit up inside me like Roman candles. I was remembering Friday nights lost in Oakland, gliding through streets emptier and darker than this in Ash’s beat-up green B-210, singing “Shoplifters of the World,” spending no money except on gas and Bongo Burgers.

  “I’ve been going to music, too. Lots of clubs. My friends Rubina and Liz—”

  “Long Beach,” Rebecca said over him, and I hit the brakes and paused, right on the lip of the on-ramp to the 10. Whether out of perceptiveness or meditation training or typical Ashy patience, our friend in the back went quiet and waited.

  “Rebecca,” I said carefully, after a long breath. She’d been taking us to her sister’s almost every weekend since her mother died. She’d been going during the week, too, of late, and even more than she told me, I suspected. “Don’t you want to get Ash a Pink’s? Show him that ant at the Museum of Jurassic Tech? Take him bowling at the Starlight? Show him the Ashy parts of town?”

  “Starlight’s gone,” Rebecca said, as though she were talking about her mother.

  “Oh, yeah. Forgot.”

  Abruptly, she brightened again. “Not my sister’s, El-yut. I have a plan. A place in mind. Somewhere our vested nurse-boy back there will appreciate. You, too.” Then she punched play on the CD player. Discussion over. Off we went.

  All the way down the 110, then the 405, Rebecca alternately shook to the music and prodded Ash with questions, and he answered in his familiar monotone, which always made him sound at ease, not bored, no matter what job he’d just left or new woman he’d found and taken meditating or clubbing or drifting and then gotten gently dumped by. Ash had been to more weddings of more ex-girlfriends than anyone I’d ever met.

  But tonight, he talked about his supervisor at the hospital, whose name apparently really was Ms. Paste. “She’s kind of this nurse-artist,” he said. “Amazing. Hard to explain. She slides an I.V. into a vein and steps back, and it’s perfect, every time, patient never even feels it. Wipes butts like she’s arranging flowers.”

  Rebecca laughed, while Ash sat in the back with that grin on his face. How can someone so completely adrift in the world seem so satisfied with it?

  We hit the 710, and immediately, the big rigs surrounded us. No matter what hour you drive it, there are always big rigs on that stretch of highway, lumbering back and forth between the 405 and the port, their beds saddled with giant wooden crates and steel containers newly gantried off incoming ships or headed for them, as t
hough the whole city of Long Beach were constantly being put up or taken down like a circus at a fairground. As we approached the fork where the freeway splits—the right headed for the Queen Mary, the left for Shoreline Village and the whale-watching tour boats and the too-white lighthouse perched on its perfectly mown hilltop like a Disneyland cast-off—I slowed and glanced at my wife. But Rebecca didn’t notice. She’d slid down a little in her seat and was watching the trucks with a blank expression on her pale face.

  “Rebecca?” I said. “Where to?”

  Stirring, she said, “Oh. The old pier. You know where that is? Downtown, downtown.”

  Just in time, I veered left, passing by the aquarium and the rest of the tourist attractions to head for the city center. Not that there was much difference anymore, according to Rebecca. Scaffolding engulfed most of the older buildings, and as we hit downtown, the bright, familiar markings of malls everywhere dropped into place around us like flats on a movie set. There were Gap and TGIF storefronts, sidewalks so clean they seemed to have acquired a varnish, fountains with statues of seals spouting water through their whiskers. Only a few features distinguished this part of Long Beach from the Third Street Promenade or Old Town Pasadena now: a tapas bar; that eighty-year-old used bookshop with the bowling alley-sized backroom that seemed to exude dust through the wood and windows, even though the windows were painted shut; and, just visible down the last remaining dark blocks, a handful of no-tourist dives with windowless doors and green booths inside for the more traditionally minded sailors.

  “Go straight through,” Rebecca said. “Turn right at the light. God, it’s been years.”

  Given her tastes and the sheer number of days she’d spent with her mother here, then more recently with her sister, that seemed unlikely. But Ash’s patience was soothing, infectious. I waited. And as we edged farther from the downtown lights, through sports cars and SUVs skimming the streets like incoming seagulls and squawking at each other over parking places, Rebecca shut off the music and turned to us. “My dad used to take us here,” she said.

  I hit the brakes harder than I meant to and brought the car to a lurching stop at the road that fronted the ocean. For a few seconds, we hung there, the lights of Long Beach in the rearview mirror, the ocean seeping blackly out of the jumbled, overbuilt coast before us like oil from a listing tanker.

  “Your dad,” I said.

  “Left, Elliot. Down there. See?”

  I turned left, slowly, though there was no traffic. Neither tourists nor sailors had any use for this road anymore, apparently. “It’s been a long time since you mentioned your dad,” I said. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time. She talked about her school-commissioner mother: stable, stubborn, fiercely loyal, nasty Scrabble player. Also her recovered junkie sister. But her father….

  “I’ve never heard you mention him,” Ash said, detached as ever.

  The frontage road, at least, did not look like new downtown Long Beach, or Third Street, or Downtown Disney. To our left, the scaffolded buildings loomed, lightless as pilings for some gigantic pier lost long ago to the tide. To our right lay the ocean, without even a whitecap to brighten its surface. Few other stretches in the LosAnDiego megalopolis were still allowed to get this dark. We’d gone no more than a few hundred yards when Rebecca sat up in her seat and pointed.

  “Right here. See?”

  I punched the brakes again and brought the car to a stop. Just behind us, a sign-less, potholed drive snaked between the black-iron posts of what must once have been a gate. Beyond that, I saw a parking lot, then the old pier, lit by dim streetlights on either side. And beyond those, right at the end of the pier….

  “What is that?” Ash said.

  It seemed to hover above the ocean, a dark, metallic, upside-down funnel, like a giant magician’s hat. Beneath it, dim and scattered lights flickered. If there were ocean rather than pier beneath it, I would have assumed we were looking at bioluminescent fish.

  I glanced toward Rebecca, whose smile was the wistful one I’d gotten used to over the past year or so. When I reached over and squeezed her hand, she squeezed back, but absently.

  “What’s the smile for?” I said, and turned us into the drive. Past the gateposts, we emerged into a startlingly large parking lot that sprawled in both directions. A handful of older cars—an orange Dodge pickup, a ‘60s-vintage Volkswagen van, a U-Haul trailer with no lead-vehicle attached to it—clustered like barnacle shells near the foot of the wooden steps that led up to the pier. Otherwise, there were only empty spaces, their white dividing lines obscured but still visible, rusted parking meters planted sideways at their heads like markers on anonymous graves.

  “There used to be a billboard right next to that gate,” Rebecca said, staring around her. “A girl dressed in one of those St. Pauli Girl waitress uniforms, you know what I’m talking about? Breasts like boulders, you felt like they were going to pop loose and roll right off the sign and smash you when you drove under them. She was riding one of the merry-go-round horses and holding a big beer stein. Her uniform said Lite-Your-Line on it, and in huge red letters over her head, the sign read, LONG BEACH PIER. GET LIT.”

  Ash laughed quietly as I pulled into a spot a few rows from the van and pick-up, and Rebecca got out fast and stood into a surprising sea wind. Ash and I joined her, and I had a brief but powerful desire to ditch our friend, never mind how good it was to see him, take my wife by the elbow and steer her to the dark, disused stretch of beach fifty yards ahead of us. There we’d stand, and let the planet’s breath beat against our skin until it woke us. The whole last year, it seemed to me, we’d been sleeping. Or I’d been sleeping, and Rebecca had been mourning, and something else, too. Retreating, maybe, from everything but her daughter.

  “I think this is the only place I remember coming with him,” Rebecca said. “For fun, anyway.” She moved off toward the steps. We followed. Ash’s vest left little purple trails of reflected streetlight behind him. His gaze was aimed straight up the steps. Rebecca had a deeper hunger for these spots, I thought, these night places where people washed up or swept in like sharks from the deep sea. But Ash could smell them.

  “You came here a lot?” I asked. I considered taking Rebecca’s hand again, but thought that would be crowding her, somehow.

  “More than you’d think.” She mounted the stairs. “Some days, he hadn’t even started drinking, yet. He’d wait until we got here. Buy my sister and me each three dollars’ worth of tickets—that was like fifteen rides—and plop us on the merry-go-round while he—”

  The hands closed around us so fast, from both sides, that we didn’t even have time to cry out. One second we were alone at the top of the leaning staircase and the next there were filthy fingers clamped on all of our wrists and red, bearded faces leering into ours. The fingers began dragging us around in a sickening circle.

  “Ring around the funny,” the face nearest to me half-sang, his breath overwhelming, equal parts bad gin and sea salt and sand. “Pockets full of money. Give it. Give it. Give it NOW!”

  Then, as suddenly as they had grabbed us, they let go, a hand or two at a time, fell back a step, and we got our first good look. If we hadn’t been on a glorified dock at the edge of the Pacific, a hundred yards that felt like fifty miles from anywhere I knew, I think I might have laughed, or wept.

  They stood before us in a clump, five decrepit men in ruined peacoats with their noses running and their beards wild and their skin mottled with sores red and raised like octopus suckers. Probably, I thought, Long Beach—like the former People’s Republic of Santa Monica, and every other Southern California town I knew—had passed and enforced a new set of vagrancy laws to keep all that fresh sidewalk pavement free of debris. And this particular quintet had scuttled down here to hide under the great steel magician’s hat and sleep with the fishes and pounce on whatever drifted out to them.

  “Here,” Ash started, sliding a hand into the pocket of his vest, just as Rebecca stuck an arm across hi
s chest.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d watched her do this before. Rebecca had worked with the homeless most of her adult life, and felt she knew what they needed, or at least what might be most likely to help. But I was always startled by the confidence of her convictions.

  “Nearest shelter’s on La Amatista,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder toward the frontage road, town. “Five, maybe six blocks. They have food.”

  “Don’t want food,” one of the men snarled, but his snarl became a whine before he’d finished the sentence. “We want change.”

  “You won’t get ours.”

  “Change.” The five of them knotted together—coiled, I thought, and my shoulders tensed, and I could feel the streaky wetness they’d left on my wrists and their breath in my mouth—and then, just like that, they were gone, bumping past us down the steps to disappear under the dock.

  For a good minute, maybe more, the three of us stood in our own little clump. There were unsettled feelings seeping up through my stomach, and I could neither place them nor get them quiet. Finally, Rebecca said, “The most amazing merry-go-round,” as though nothing whatsoever had occurred.

  I glanced down the pier toward the magician’s hat, which was actually the roof of an otherwise open pavilion. There were lights clustered beneath it, yellow and green and red, but they seemed to waver above the water, connected to nothing, until I realized I was looking through some sort of threadbare canvas drapery suspended from the rim of the overhang like a giant spider web, generations in the making. Between us and the pavilion lay maybe fifty yards of moldy wooden planking. Shadows of indeterminate shape slid over the planks or sank into them, and on either side of the streetlights, solitary figures sat at the railing-less edges and dangled their legs over the dark and fished.