Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization

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  Junie and De didn't care what train the music media said was coming or was already on the tracks. Unstarving musicians with half a band, it had been almost a year of seeking likeminded numbskulls. They were two Curlys looking for a Moe and a Larry. Even a Shemp would be OK. Clowns having laughed, they had tossed a pie into the air and closed their eyes hoping to soon hear a splaat! It was hard to be optimistic but the struggles of the modern rock & roll combo made it a requirement. On the upbeat side, neither of them owed anyone money and they both trusted their pie was still in the sky and not about to land at their feet.

  On Memorial Day weekend of 1993, they, along with Bryan, made the trek north to Bellingham for the second edition of Garage Shock-the definitive festival of lo-fi garage band and B-movie bombast. It didn't hurt that Dedra had stellar graphics connections amongst the dirty dogs of this scene, as well as with the owner of the record label who organized the whole affair. And it was a good thing June ferried them all in her faithful Toyota rather than trust someone else for transportation; there was beer, booze and a full agenda of bands between passing out in their motel room. Blasted and bowled over, the Big J reliably got them back home after the big bacchanalian bash. And they emerged better babes for it, too.

  If nothing else, they met Prez. Elvis "Prez" Morales was a percussionist who floated up to the northwest from SoCal to get away from certain "gang-y and bang-y activities," he said. He and Bryan hit it off at the 3B Tavern's bar and immediately formed a drinking alliance on the first night of the fest, and he offered to pitch in a little money for a space on the floor.

  A decent enough low-rider type, he was "just me, my Chevy and my drums, ese." On the second night he ended up in a drinking fete with Dedra, which landed them both in the same bed, while other inebriated occupants and guests caroused around and over them. He was also on the run from an insane chola girlfriend. "She tries to cut off my dick without using a knife. ?Ay, chingado!" No one was seriously concerned about sleep that night. Prez's "low and slow in East L.A." stories induced belly laughs, especially in June, which forced her to raise the bar with pithy in-flight comedies of yoga-pushy parents and their "precious needs" children, Mile High Club conventions, and the time an electrical malfunction caused oxygen masks to deploy-a self-fulfilling need once malfunctioning Depends hijacked the un-lost cabin pressure.

  The high-altitude humor made for a majorly fun weekend and the wayward beat man was a positive addition to the shenanigans. June didn't lose the dog-eared flyer she found in her back jeans pocket-the one with all the phone numbers and scribblings-upon doing laundry the week after the festival. Otherwise, they couldn't have called Prez when they needed to.

  Garage Shock was a high-water mark in the nonexistent band's life. They talked to him about joining their musical circus, to which Prez asserted he first needed to find a place to live, to find a job and, thirdly, to check out band situations he thought would be better for him. He refused to lead them on. Bryan was busy with other band commitments and mostly enjoyed hanging out with the girls for yucks and yammers. After the weekend in Bellingham enthusiasm ran high, but in a few weeks' time it ebbed to the same old knowledge that they were still far from being a real band. With Wendell they had actually begun realizing their goal, if only because he brought a decent drummer into the mix. As flaky as most drummers were, he showed up to most of the rehearsals and he wasn't a lying asshole like his guitarist buddy. But following the ejection of Mr. W, he lost interest and the girls were again on their own.

  Dedra had a lot more focus in those days as her writing excursions attested, but it didn't quell the little blonde's inner turmoil. As lucrative as her job was, she despised a crippling sameness that new standards of digital rendering were forcing upon the arts and graphics world. Major publications were more and more defaulting to the mishmash of what she called "junk and glue" style-a dodge-y, collage-y slapdash of eye candy that threw out all sense of classic style only to not make much sense on its own. Only the idiot savants of DTP-World could really appreciate it. She was constantly being called upon to kludge, re-kludge or desperately rescue some kludger's graphic mess before deadline. To her chagrin, she was good at it. One of the best.

  Aarrggggh!

  But?

  ?Dedra was having trouble with her eyes. Every telltale squint confirmed they were getting worse. Exacting computer work, day in, day out, kept her face buried in the color-corrected, double-page monitors. She'd lean in closer, closer, closer to eke out more, more, more detail, wishing high-grade monitors had more resolution. 96-bit would be a good start. Pi was an abbreviation for pixel and she wanted to get all the way to the end of the equation. Then her optometrist inserted a new equation that changed the power of the first. Proofing on little Mac and blocky IBM screens in the print shop (as well as the spasms of bicycle collision) made her need bifocals-doubling her vision, not doubling her pleasure, not doubling her fun, not doubling anything but frustration-and she was going from four eyes to six, with a shattered camera lens of a forehead, no boyfriend, in a career she seriously questioned.

  A few days following the diagnosis, while retouching some Photoshop files, she took an eyestrain break down at the waterfront and stared for almost two hours. No one in the family had been cursed with poor eyesight; glasses, yes, but the Fatiuchkas owed their survival to their eagle eyes. Ten to one, a wretch who sat in the hold of a grubby freighter inspecting life's parts came to the box that held her eyes, pulled them out and shot a game of marbles with them. Ghoul for grunt, he tossed 'em back in the box and sent 'em down the conveyor line and she got 'em.

  Damaged goods, no warranty, more crappy times.

  The near demise of the family business was nothing she'd talk about in the gruesome past when she was twelve, the year her mother was killed in a car wreck. Thoughts of breasts, hips and disfigurement went on standby-failures of faces in CRTs, her father plunging into suicidal bereavement-leaving no destiny other than the living over the dead. Death informs life far more than life commands or changes realities of death. Manhandling ink and determination, she controlled the print shop until Peter recovered. The shop then thrived ahead, and at fifteen she was appointed to co-owner.

  Deprived of a normal teenhood, Dedra earned finances that most adults spent their lives dying for, the former nerd becoming a workaholic whose skills trumped the best that a master's degree could offer. Before conquering Luke, she lived in the D-Cup-Day vacuum where boys and boys and boys applied for the position of satisfying her-the well-endowed fertility goddess their southern christian studies had insisted was merely a pagan ideal. Job requirements were always tough. Once relationships crashed, burned or settled themselves to kludges without borders, Luke was the deleted paragraph; eye charts were black holes.