All About Lulu

  Doug always made a point of being a pain in my ass, just to see me sweat it out.

  “This is grilled, ass-bag. I wanted charbroiled.”

  “These fries are skinny. I wanted fat.”

  “So, did you have to go to Hamburger University, or what?”

  God, I hated my brother Doug. What an ass-bag.

  As for Ross, we hardly saw him anymore. He and his imaginary buddy Regan had outgrown clove cigarettes and Simon Le Bon, and moved on to the greener pastures of Light 100s and black trench coats and knee-high combat boots. For no apparent reason, Ross began calling himself Alistair. He spent untold hours locked in his bedroom listening to the worst music I’d ever heard. It sounded like meat grinders and wailing infants.

  “Turn that shit down, Ross!”

  “It’s Alistair!”

  On the fronts and insides of all his school PeeChees, Alistair drafted elaborate portraits of bazooka-wielding Minotaurs with forked tongues, and gut-spewing she-devils with studded garters and impossibly large tits. It was official: Ross was weird. But not as weird as I thought, because I finally met his imaginary friend Regan one night at the promenade, outside the movie theater, and the guy actually existed. He was about four feet tall, with a cherubic face and quick little ferret eyes that I didn’t quite trust. His trench coat was hopelessly big, and the hem was tattered from dragging on the ground.

  “You wanna buy a half gram?” he said.

  “I don’t do coke, you little runt. And Ross better not, either, or I’ll—”

  “Noooo, of weed.”

  “A half gram? Do they even sell weed in half grams?”

  “I do.”

  “He pinches,” explained Ross. “He buys a gram, then he splits it in half. But not before—”

  “Shut up!” said Regan.

  “It’s true,” said Ross.

  “Well, it’s not like I’m making a profit,” complained Regan.

  “All right, what the hell, I’ll buy one,” I said. “How much?”

  “Six bucks,” said Regan.

  “But I thought a gram was only ten?”

  “Overhead,” he said.

  Six-dollar half grams became something of a mainstay. I’d steal away to my bedroom closet and smoke them in one sitting out of a 7Up can, and squeeze back out the closet door, trapping the smoke inside, and sprawl out on my bed with my headphones on and listen to the voices on the radio as I stared at the ceiling.

  The only real friend I had that summer was Troy. He wasn’t so bad. I didn’t go in for the whole Benders affiliation, just Troy, who, having fallen well short of Princeton, had registered at Santa Monica City College for the fall. It seemed like he was the only person I had anything in common with. We’d go to Dodgers games and talk about Lulu, walk around Venice and talk about Lulu, drive up to Malibu and talk about Lulu. Troy did most of the talking. I still didn’t have the courage to reveal my true feelings for Lulu to anyone else. My secret was safe with Pitts.

  “I think I’m starting to get it,” he said one morning at breakfast. “Lulu isn’t fickle, she’s just never the same person twice.”

  “I’m afraid you lost me.”

  “Like she keeps trying to reinvent herself every second so that she won’t have to be who she really is.”

  “And who’s that?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out.”

  But it wasn’t for lack of effort. I had to give Troy that. He tried to get his brain and heart around Lulu like nobody other than me. Poor guy. Pining away like that with no possibility of ever reaching her. She hadn’t written him, hadn’t called, had barely said good-bye. The more I commiserated with Troy, the lousier I felt.

  I found comfort in the voices, particularly in the voice of my god, Vin Scully. The Dodgers had a miserable season. Fernandomania hit the skids. Guerrero bounced back, but it wasn’t enough to pick up Heep and Landreaux. They lost eighty-nine games. But to hear Vin Scully, it didn’t matter. Vin Scully was bigger than winning; in fact, he was at his best when they were losing badly—eight–zero, twelve–two, nine–one—because he’d settle back into his psychic rocking chair and talk to me about life, and the smell of salami in the Carnegie Deli, and the weather somewhere else, and about Ebbets Field and Forbes Field and the Polo Grounds, and other places that no longer existed outside the imagination. Baseball was more than just numbers for Vin Scully. It was more than just a metaphor for life—it was life. It was a sensual experience, something to be smelled and tasted. Vin Scully ate baseball, drank baseball, and slept baseball. He probably fucked baseball, too.

  And one fine day, of all the burger joints in all the world, the great one himself came into Fatburger unbeknownst to everybody but me.

  “Hey, you’re Vin Scully, the voice of the Dodgers,” I observed.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I’ll have a Baby Fat with no pickles.” And the way he said it sounded just like he was calling a game.

  “I’ve probably listened to you a thousand times.”

  “Thanks. I’ll have a side of onion rings.”

  “I used to wish you were my father.”

  He looked at me strangely, like I was speaking Lebanese, and he bobbed his eyebrows a few times. “I’ll have a Diet Coke with that too, please.” This time he didn’t sound like he was calling a game.

  And with my own two hands I made the great Vin Scully his Baby Fat without pickles, and his onion rings and his Diet Coke (which I upped from a medium to a large at no extra charge), and instead of just calling his number, I took the tray right to his table, where I paused and faltered.

  And finally, I said: “Sir, have you got any advice for a guy who can’t see the future?”

  “Try looking harder.”

  “Thanks. I will.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  And then he unwrapped his burger as I stood there, and was about to take a bite when he gave me a sidelong glance and hoisted a brow.

  “One more thing, sir,” I said.

  He lowered his burger halfway. “What’s that, son?”

  “Well, I . . . you see . . .” But then I couldn’t find my velveteen voice, my crackling words.

  His Baby Fat was still poised halfway. “Well, what is it, son?”

  And when I still couldn’t find my voice after a moment, Vin Scully kind of squinted at me and shook his head in wonder, like I was a mirage in the desert—a juggling cactus, or a two-headed rattlesnake, maybe—until I finally came into focus, and then his upper lip curled and he raised his burger and took a bite, and he never looked back at me.

  I stood there for a moment in a kind of daze. I was numb as I made my way back toward the grill. Gradually I began to regain sensations: the sensation that I was impotent, ineffectual, a loser; and the sensation that it had always been thus, and was destined to remain thus; and finally, the sensation that I didn’t want Vin Scully to be my father any more than I wanted Big Bill to be my father.

  “What are you looking so pale about?” Acne Scar Joe wanted to know. “Hey, flip those Baby Fats, already! Wake up, Miller.”

  I looked at Acne Scar Joe with his thinning hair, and I thought for a moment I might have seen my future there, and it was too bleak to contemplate. I reminded myself that so long as I knew I was in despair, I wasn’t in despair.

  “What?” said Joe. “What the hell are you looking at? Jesus, Miller, what gives?”

  “I’ve gotta go,” I said, untying my apron.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means I have to go.”

  “What, to the bathroom? Jesus, Miller, could you do it between orders?”

  “That’s not what I mean. I just have to leave.”

  Acne Scar Joe was starting to give me that same juggling cactus look Vin Scully gave me. “Go where, for chrisssakes? It’s the mi
ddle of the lunch rush!”

  “Somewhere else,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  The Day Before Thanksgiving

  Willow soon set our family geography in motion once more, migrating to Lulu’s vacant room. By that time, active aggression had ceased between Big Bill and Willow. They stayed for the most part in neutral corners. But it wasn’t exactly an armistice—more like Willow retreated, just walked off the battlefield and put it all behind her. With Lulu out of the house, there was nothing left to fight for. Willow delivered no speeches, flew no white flag. She just turned her back and started walking, over craters and around cadavers, toward the wooded fringes.

  The Pico house was growing conspicuously quiet. Even Lulu’s signature was beginning to fade. Ross was running all over the basin with that little ferret Regan, peddling half grams at a twenty-percent markup. Big Bill and Doug were at the gym most evenings. This left Willow and me alone, though our paths rarely crossed as we stole from station to station, me with my notebooks and my dark little heart, she like a soldier getting over the war.

  Family dinners were a rarity those days. It got to the point where I became a bit nostalgic for those gatherings: the grunting and evading, the rank-and-file procession, the mess hall efficiency of it all. And more than anything else, I missed the repetition of it. It seemed there were no more fixed places in the universe, no reliable signposts to mark my way. All of this coming and going, all of these different directions. Where was convergence when I needed it most? The universe really was expanding. I could feel it for the first time: heavenly bodies hurtling through space, drifting farther and farther apart.

  The day before Thanksgiving I found Willow seated at the dining room table with two suitcases beside her.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  “I’m going to San Francisco.”

  “Does anybody know?”

  “You do.”

  I looked again at the suitcases. They were big. “For how long?”

  “For a while, anyway.”

  “But, what about Thanksgiving?”

  “You can still have it. The turkey is soaking. Cook it at three twenty-five for about five hours. Cover it with foil—”

  “Why are you—?”

  “Listen to me. Then take the foil off for the last forty-five minutes or so. Are you getting this?”

  “No.”

  “Let it sit for a half hour before you carve it. The dressing’s in the casserole dish on the top—”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “It’s complex, William. It would be awfully hard to explain to you.”

  “You could at least try.”

  “Yes, I suppose I owe you that.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  She reached out and gave my hand a little squeeze. “You’re a good boy, William Miller. Don’t think I don’t see that. Sit down,” she said.

  I sat down across from her.

  Willow looked both younger and older at the same time as she piled her hands in her lap. “I only wish I could have been more for you,” she said. “Not a mother, of course, I don’t mean that. Just more. A resource, a friend. Oh, I don’t know, just more.”

  “You tried,” I said.

  “Maybe I should have forced the issue a little.”

  “I always appreciated that you didn’t. But what’s this got to do with me, anyway? Why are you leaving? What is this about?”

  “People change,” she said.

  “I thought that was a good thing.”

  “Some of the time,” she said.

  “But Big Bill’s always been . . .”

  “I’m not just talking about your father, I’m talking about me, too. Some people change quicker than others. Sometimes people don’t change at all, but their context changes, and just by being the same they change.”

  It occurred to me that I’d never honestly believed people could change, I mean really change, until Lulu went away to cheerleading camp. And after that everybody started changing, and never stopped.

  “So you’ve grown apart, is that what you’re saying?”

  “A great distance apart.” Willow left a silence long enough to fill the great distance, or at least ponder it. She massaged the joints of her fingers like an arthritic. “Oh, so much is different, William. I was in college when I met your father.”

  “Big Bill went to college?”

  “No. But he went to parties.” A distant smile played at the corners of her mouth. “Humph,” she said. “San Francisco. It seems like a lifetime ago.”

  “So what happened? How did things get so different?”

  “I guess what’s changed the most between your father and me over the years are the things that haven’t changed.”

  “You mean like taking a backseat all the time?”

  Willow shot me a searching look. “That’s part of it. But only part of it.”

  She turned her attention back to her finger joints, which she continued to massage as she pondered the other parts. “You can’t resist change,” she observed. “You can effect change, I still honestly believe that. You can fight for it, you can even speed it up, but you can’t resist it, because it’s going to happen. It’s like gravity. It doesn’t matter how strong you are, or how stubborn you are, or how determined you are. The best you can do is accept it. Things happen. Bad things, good things. You have to adapt, you have to. It’s not wrong to change your approach.”

  “Sounds a little like a political speech,” I said.

  That same distant smile returned to Willow’s face. “I suppose it does.”

  I looked across the table at her, silently and unabashedly, and I felt pity for her. She’d given her best years to the Millers. She’d walked forever in the shadow of my mother, fighting for us, feeding us, trying desperately to draw us out of ourselves, to expand our horizons, and for what? What was she fighting for? The unattainable affections of her eldest stepson? A man who believed there was a necessary correlative between pain and gain? What was Willow’s stake in all of this? A father figure for Lulu? Ha! A breadwinner? That’s a laugh. Do you have any idea what second place in the Mr. Cal/Neva pays? A personal appearance at the Cerritos Athletic Club? Willow not only raised us, she paid more than her share of the bills. I’m guessing a lot more. And here she was, all these years later, two hundred hams and a thousand small rejections later, sitting across from me like a wilting flower. It was disgraceful.

  “Willow,” I said. “I’ve never really told you thank you for anything. I mean, you know, for everything. I’m sorry I was a pain—I mean, I still am.”

  “You were never a pain, William. Just distant.”

  “I’m sorry for that.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  There came a honk from the driveway.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’ll miss my flight.”

  Then I knew I had to say it. I had to tell somebody before it ate me alive. “I love Lulu,” I said. “And I can’t imagine that ever changing.”

  “Of course you can’t.” Willow stood up and took a few steps to the window, and turned her back to me. “William, I’m going to tell you something. But first I’m going to tell you that sometimes you’ve just got to know when enough is enough and walk away without asking questions. And for you, this is one of those times. I may not have the right to dispense that advice, but I hope you’ll take it. For Louisa’s sake and your own.”

  “What are you going to tell me?”

  “Only that your sister loves you dearly and truly, and that she is proud of you, and she looks up to you. More than you may ever know.”

  “She’s not my sister.”

  Willow turned from the window. “Walk away, William.”

  There came another honk from the driveway.

  She picked up her bags. “I’v
e got to go.” She leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. “Good-bye, William. I’ll call.”

  Dear Will

  December 27, 1987

  Dear Will,

  Merry x-mas (a little late), sorry I didn’t come home, and sorry I didn’t send gifts. Sorry I’ve taken so long to write. Sorry you’re disillusioned, and sorry about my mom. In short, I’m sorry about a lot of things. On the bright side, congratulations on quitting Fatburger! And yes, yes, yes, I think you’d make a wonderfully stupendous radio announcer, you have a beautiful voice, and the world needs to hear it, whether or not they deserve it. I dropped out of the U, but don’t tell anybody. I’m going to register again in spring, maybe. I just don’t have it in me right now. I might register at SCC instead. I don’t know. There are so many things I’m unsure of. I’m not even sure if life is a comedy or a tragedy, but I wish I laughed more, because I probably would make better decisions, and I probably wouldn’t mind the rain so much. I quit Starbucks. I may get a job at a bookstore, or maybe not. I left the dorm (don’t tell anybody that either!), and I’m renting a studio on First and Bell for $300 a month. I’ve still got student loan money, but it’s sort of dwindling. I may get a warehouse space with my friend Dan in Georgetown.

  Troy keeps writing and calling me, and I’m sorry to be cruel, but please tell him I met a boy. I know that’s awful, and I know it’s immature, and I know I should tell him myself, but I just don’t have it in me right now, and I don’t want him to suffer. Troy deserves better than me. I really did meet a boy, Will. His name is Dan and he plays the bass and works at the Comet Tavern. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know why anybody would ever want to be with me in the first place. I’ve been painting a little bit. Dan says they’re good, but really they’re ugly. Please don’t hate me or be disappointed in me, Will. You’re a better person than me. I’m sorry about all the trouble I’ve caused everybody with all of my drama. I’m working on it, I really am.

  Probably the reason Ross is calling himself Alistair is because of Alistair Crowley, who people think was a devil worshipper, but really he was just some kind of mystic. I wouldn’t worry about him being weird. It’s just a phase. If you ask me, Doug is the one who could use a phase. Usually the people trying to be weird aren’t the weird ones, and I have a feeling Ross is trying.