"What do you want, man?" I ask.
"I'm looking for someone," he says, adding "man."
"Someone's not here," I say, about to close the door. "I don't care anymore."
"Dude," the guy says.
"I just want you to go away," I say.
The guy pushes his hand against the door and walks past me.
"Oh, man," I say. "What the fuck do you want?"
"Where's Peter?" he asks me. "I'm looking for Peter."
"He's . . . not here."
The guy looks around the apartment, checking everything out. He finally leans against the back of the couch and after looking me over asks, "What in the fuck are you looking at?"
"I'm not even too mad," I say. "I'm just really tired. I just want everything to be over because I can't deal with it anymore."
"Just tell me where the fuck Peter is," the dude asks.
"How the fuck should I know?"
"Well, dude"—he laughs—"you better find out." He looks at me and says, "You know why?"
"No. Why?"
"Do you really want to know?"
"Yeah, I just said I wanna know why," I say. "Come on, man, don't be a prick. It's been a harsh week. We can be friends if—"
"I'll tell you why." He stops and dramatically, in a low voice I've become accustomed to, says, "Because he is in deep"—he stops, then—"deep"—and another pause, then—"deep shit."
"Is that right? Yeah?" I ask casually.
"Yeah, that's right," the tan guy says. "Señor."
"Yeah, well, I'll tell him you showed up and all." I open the door for this guy and he moves near it. "And I'm not a Mexican."
"It's a simple message," the guy says. "I'll be back and if Peter doesn't have it you are all dead." He stares at me for a long time, this guy, eighteen, nineteen, thick lips and blank handsome features that are so indistinct I will not be able to remember them, give Peter any particular characteristics, in five minutes.
"Yeah?" I gulp, closing the door. "What are you gonna do? Tan us to death?"
He smiles in a sweet way as the door slams shut.
I stay home from the car wash waiting for Peter or Mary to show up and I don't even know if they are going to show up and I'm not even sure what "it" is, what the surfer was talking about, and I just sit on a couch staring out of a window onto a street not looking at anything. I cannot even think about how Peter came and fucked everything up, because everything was fucked up to begin with and if Peter didn't come this week it would have been the one after that or one next year and in the end it's hard to think it makes a difference because you always knew this would happen and you just sit there staring out the window waiting for Peter and Mary to roll back in so you can surrender.
I tell them about the surfer who came over.
Peter walks around. "I think I'm gonna shit or something."
Mary starts saying, "I told you I told you."
"Get your shit together," Peter tells us. "We're getting out of here real fast."
Mary is crying.
"I don't have anything to bring with me," I tell Peter. I watch him walking around nervously. Mary moves into the back room, flings herself onto the mattress, stuffs a hand into her mouth, gnaws on it.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Peter shouts.
"I'm getting my shit together," she sobs, writhing on the mattress.
While she's back there Peter comes up to me and reaches into his back pocket and hands me a switchblade and I ask, "What's this for, dude?"
"The kid."
I've forgotten about the kid and I look over at the bathroom door, feeling tired.
"If we leave the kid," Peter is saying, "somebody will find him and he will talk and we will be in shit."
"Let him starve," I whisper, staring at the knife.
"No, man, no," Peter says, forcing the knife into my hand.
I squeeze it and it pops open with a click and it's mean-looking, long, heavy.
"It's so fucking sharp," I say, looking at the blade, and then I look at Peter for directions and he looks back.
"This is all it comes down to, man," he says.
We stand there for I don't know how long and when I start to say something, Peter says, "Do it."
I grab him and, straining, tell him, "But I'm not protesting, see?"
I walk over to the bathroom door and Mary sees me and runs, limping toward me, but Peter hits her a couple of times, knocking her back, and I go into the bathroom.
The kid is pale and pretty and looks weak and he sees the knife and starts crying, moving his body around, trying to escape, and I don't want to do it with the light on so I turn it off and try to stab the kid in the dark but I get freaked out thinking about stabbing him in the dark so I turn the light on and get on my knees and bring the knife down into his stomach but not hard enough so I stab him again, harder, and he arches his back way up and I stick it in again, trying to cut up but the kid keeps bringing his stomach up like he can't help it and I keep stabbing him in the stomach then in the chest but the knife gets stuck on bones and the kid isn't dying so I try to cut his throat but he brings his chin down and I end up stabbing his chin, slicing it open and I finally grab his hair and pull his head back with it and he's crying, still arching his back up, trying to twist free, bleeding all over the tub from shallow wounds, and Mary is screaming in the living room and I ram the knife deep into his throat, hacking it open, and his eyes go wide with realization and a huge geyser of hot blood hits me in the face and I can taste it and I'm wiping it out of my eyes with the hand that still has the knife in it and blood is basically spurting everywhere and it takes a long time for the kid to stop moving and I'm on my knees, covered with blood, some of it purple, darker than the rest and the kid moves into more quiet spasms and there aren't any more sounds from the living room, just the sound of blood running down a drain in the tub, and sometime later Peter comes in and dries me off and whispers, "It'll be okay, man, we're going to the desert, man, it'll be okay, man, shhh," and somehow we get into the van and drive away from the apartment, out of Van Nuys, and I've got to convince Peter that I'm all right.
Peter stops the van in the parking lot of a Taco Bell way out in the Valley and Mary stays in the back of the van because she has the shakes and Peter is hoarse from telling her to shut up and she's rolled up like a baby, clawing at her face.
"She is freaking out," Peter says, while he hits her a couple of times to shut her up.
"You could say that," I tell him.
Now we're sitting at a little table beneath a broken umbrella and it's hot and my overalls are drenched with blood, making cracking noises every time I move my arms, get up, sit down.
"Do you feel anything?" Peter asks. "Like what?"
Peter looks at me, figures something out, shrugs.
"We really didn't need to off that kid," I mumble.
"No. You didn't need to do it," Peter says.
"I hear you did some bad stuff out in the desert, man."
Peter's eating a burrito and says, "I'm thinking Las Vegas." He shrugs. "What's bad?"
I stare at the taco he brought me.
"No one'll find you there," he says, mouth full.
"You did some bad stuff out there," I say. "Mary told me."
"Bad stuff" he asks, confused, not faking it.
"That's what Mary told me, man." I shiver.
"Define 'bad,'" he says, finishing the burrito off too fast, and then, once more, "Vegas."
I pick up the taco and am going to eat it when I notice blood on my hand and I put the taco down and wipe it away and Peter eats part of my taco and I eat some of it too and he finishes it and we get into the van and head out to the desert.
12
ON THE BEACH
"Imagine a blind person dreaming," she says. I'm sitting next to her, on the beach in Malibu, and even though it's getting totally late we both have our Wayfarers on and even though I've been lying in the sun, on the beach, next to her, since noon (she's been on the bea
ch since eight), I'm still kind of hungover from that party we went to last night. I can't remember the party too well but I think it was in Santa Monica, though it could have been down farther, maybe Venice. Only things that pass through my brain are three tanks of nitrous oxide on a veranda, sitting on the floor next to the stereo, Wang Chung playing, holding a bottle of Cuervo Gold, a sea of tan hairy legs, someone screeching "Let's do Spago, let's do Spago" in a fake high voice, over and over again.
I sigh, don't say anything, shiver a little and turn the Cars tape over. I can see Mona and Griffin down the beach, walking slowly along the shore. It's getting too dark to wear sunglasses. I take them off. Look back over at her. The wig isn't crooked anymore—she straightened it while my eyes were closed. Then I look back up at the house, then back at Mona and Griffin, who seem to be getting closer but maybe not. I bet myself ten dollars that they will avoid walking over here. She's not moving. "You can't understand, you can't comprehend the pain," she says, but her lips barely move. Stare back at the beach, at the drifting pink sunset. Try and imagine a blind person dreaming.
She first told me about it at the prom.
I went with her and with Andrew, who was going with Mona, and we had this weird limo driver who looked like Anthony Geary, and me and Andrew had rented tuxes that came with bow ties that were way too big and we had to stop at the Beverly Center to buy new ones and we had about six grams that me and Andrew went in on and a couple tins of Djarum cigarettes and she looked so thin as I pinned the corsage to her dress and her hands, bony, shook as she pinned a rose onto my sleeve. High, I stopped myself from suggesting it should be pinned somewhere else. The prom was held at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I flirted with Mona. Andrew flirted with me. Snuck into the Polo Lounge, did coke in the bathroom. She didn't say anything there. It was later, at the party after the prom, on Michael Landon's yacht, after the coke had run out, while we were making out in the cabin below, that she broke away, said there was this problem. We walked up to the top deck and I lit a clove cigarette and she didn't say anything else and I didn't ask because I really didn't want to know. The morning was cold and everything looked gray and bleak and I went home horny, tired, had dry mouth.
She asks me, actually whispers, to turn the Cars off and put the Madonna tape in. We have been on the beach every day for the last three weeks now. It's all she wants to do. Lie on the beach, in the sun, outside her mother's house. Mother is on location in Italy, then New York, then Burbank. I have spent the last three weeks in Malibu with her and Mona and one of Mona's boyfriends. Today it's Griffin, a beach bum with a lot of money and friendly and who owns a gay club in West L.A. Mona and her boyfriends sometimes hang out on the beach with us too but not a whole lot. Not as much as she does. "But she's not even getting a tan," I had to point out one night. Mona waved a hand in front of my face, lit candles, offered to read my palms, passed out. She often looks even more pale when me or Mona run suntan oil over her body, which is beginning to look totally wasted—a tiny bikini already looks baggy, is draped around flesh that has the same color as milk. She stopped shaving her legs because she doesn't have the strength and everyone refuses to do it for her and the dark stubble is too noticeable, greasy due to the oil and sticking up on her legs. "She used to be totally hot," I shouted at Mona when I was packing a bag, ready to leave last Sunday. Tall (she still looks tall but more like a tall skeleton) and blond (for some freaky reason she bought a black wig when she started losing it all) and her body was supple, carefully muscled, aerobicized, and now she basically looks like shit. And everyone knows too. A friend of mine and hers, Derf, from USC, who was over here on Wednesday to screw Mona, said to me while waxing his board, nodding over at her, alone, in the same position, an overcast sky, no sun, "She's looking pretty shitty, dude."
"But she's dying," I said, understanding where he was coming from.
"Yeah, but she still looks pretty shitty," Derf said, waxing the board while I looked over at her, nodding.
I wave over at Mona and Griffin as they pass by on their way up to the house, then I look over at the pack of Benson & Hedges menthol by her side, next to an ashtray from La Scala and the tape player. She started smoking when she found out. I'd lie on her bed watching MTV or something on the VCR and she'd keep lighting cigarettes, trying to inhale, gagging or closing her eyes. Sometimes she couldn't even do it. Sometimes she'd put the cigarette out in the ashtray, which usually already had five or six crushed, unsmoked cigarettes lying in it, and light another one. She couldn't stand it, the smell, the first inhale, the lighting of it, but she wanted to smoke. Reservations made at Trumps or the Ivy or Morton's would inevitably end with me asking, "Smoking section, please," and she'd say it didn't make any difference now, looking over at me, like hoping that I'd say it would but I'd just say yeah, cool, I guess. So she'd light, inhale, cough, close her eyes, take a sip of the diet Coke ("No problem there," she'd groan. "Fuck NutraSweet") that would be sitting warm on her makeup table. Sometimes she'd sit there for two hours and watch cigarettes turn to ash and then she'd light another one and she told me that sooner or later she would get it right, and it would all kind of bum me out and I'd just watch her open a new pack and Mona would watch too and sometimes she would wear her sunglasses so that nobody could see that she had been crying and she'd mention that the sun bothered her or at night she'd say the lights in the house did it, made her put the Wayfarers on, or the glare from the large-screen TV, which she would watch anyway, made her eyes sore, but I knew that she was bummed out, crying a lot.
There's nothing to do but sit here in the sun, on the beach. She doesn't say anything, barely moves. I want a cigarette but hate menthol. I wonder if Mona has any pot left. The sun is low now, the ocean's getting dark. One night last week, while she was getting treatments at Cedars, Mona and I went to the Beverly Center, saw a bad movie and had frozen margaritas at the Hard Rock and then came back to the house in Malibu and had sex in the living room, stared at the tendrils of steam rising up from the jacuzzi for what could have been hours. A horse rides past us and someone waves but the sun's setting behind the rider and I have to squint to see who it is and I still can't tell. I'm starting to get a major migraine, which will only be helped by pot.
I stand up. "I'm going up to the house."
I look down at her. The sun, sinking, reflected in her sunglasses, burns orange, is fading. "I'm thinking about leaving tonight," I say. "Heading back into town."
She doesn't move. The wig still doesn't look as natural as it first did and even then it looked plastic and hard and too big.
"Want anything?"
I think she shakes her head no.
"Okay," I say and move up toward the house.
Mona's in the kitchen, staring out the window, cleaning a bong, watching Griffin on the deck. He takes his bathing suit off and, nude, washes sand from his feet. Mona knows I'm in the room and mentions that it's too bad the sushi we had for lunch didn't cheer her up. Mona doesn't know she dreams of melting rocks, meeting Greg Kihn in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, conversations with water and dust and air, the sound track an Eagles medley, "Peaceful Easy Feeling" playing loud, booming, sprays of turquoise napalm illuminate the lyrics to "Love Her Madly" scrawled on a cement wall, a tomb.
"Yeah," I say, opening the refrigerator. "Too bad."
Mona sighs, keeps cleaning the bong.
"Did Griffin drink the rest of the Corona?" I ask.
"Maybe," she murmurs.
"Shit." I stand there staring into the refrigerator, my breath steaming.
"She's really sick," Mona says.
"Yeah?" I say. "And I'm pissed off. I wanted a Corona. Badly."
Griffin walks in, towel wrapped around his waist. "What's for dinner?" he asks.
"Did you drink the rest of the Corona?" I ask him.
"Hey, dude," he says, sitting down at the table. "Like, mellow out, lighten up."
"Mexican?" Mona suggests, turning the faucet off. Nobody says anything.
Griffin
hums a song, in a trance, his hair wet, slicked back.
"What do you want, Griffin?" she asks again, sighing, drying her hands. "Do you want Mexican, Griffin?"
Griffin looks up, startled. "Mexican? Yeah, babes. Salsa? Some chips? Fine with me."
I open the door, move out onto the patio.
"Hey, dude, close the fridge," Griffin says.
"You do it," I tell him.
"Your dealer called," Mona says to me.
I nod, don't bother shutting the door, walk down the steps back onto sand, thinking of where I'd rather be. Mona is following me. I stop, turn around.
"I'm going to split tonight," I tell her. "I've been hanging out here too long."
"Why?" Mona asks, staring off.
"It's like a movie I've seen before and I know what's going to happen," I tell her. "How the whole thing's gonna end."
Mona sighs, just stands there. "What are you doing here, then?"
"I don't know."
"Do you love her?"
"No, but so what?" I ask. "What would that fix?" I ask. "If I did—that's going to help?"
"It's just that everything feels like it's on the periphery," Mona says.
I walk away from Mona. I know what the word gone means. I know what the word dead means. You deal with it, you mellow out, you head back to town. I'm looking at her now. Madonna's still playing but the batteries are running low and her voice is all wobbly and far off, spacey, and she's not moving, doesn't even acknowledge my presence.
"We'd better go," I say. "The tide's coming in."
"I want to stay," she says.
"But it's getting cold."
"I want to stay," and then, more weakly, "Need some more sun.”
A fly from a batch of seaweed lands on a white, bony thigh. She doesn't slap at it. It doesn't go away.
"But there's no sun, dude," I tell her.
I start to walk away. So what, I mutter under my breath. When she wants to come in, she will. Imagine a blind person dreaming. I head back up toward the house. Wonder if Griffin will stick around, if Mona made reservations for dinner, if Spin will call back. "I know what the word dead means," I whisper to myself as softly as I can because it sounds like an omen.