All About Lulu

  Terrified by the possibilities, I braced myself for the worst.

  “I’ve got a proposition for you,” he pursued.

  My ass tightened.

  “My girlfriend’s cousin is coming to town,” he said. “And I need somebody to go out with her. You know, like a double date or whatever.”

  “You don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “We’ve gone out twice, Miller, so whaddaya call that?”

  I took a long hit of my stale beer. “What does she look like?”

  “She’s a hottie.”

  “No, the cousin.”

  Joe didn’t answer right off. He plucked a stone out of the empty planter by his lawn chair, and winged it toward the balcony. It ricocheted off the rail and narrowly missed a window. “She’s okay, I guess.”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound too promising.”

  “She’s fine, dude. From her picture it looks like she’s got big tits.”

  “I don’t know, Joe.”

  “Look, dude, she’ll probably suck your chode if you get her drunk enough. And believe me, we’ll get them drunk.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Miller, what’s there to think about? When’s the last time you got any pussy?”

  “Couple months,” I lied.

  “Ha! Try never. Miller, you’re gonna get your knob polished. Trust me on this one.”

  God knows why, but I trusted Acne Scar Joe on that one. I figured a good knob polishing (or any knob polishing, for that matter) would only strengthen my resolve to forget Lulu. And so the four of us were to convene at Joe’s apartment the following Friday night.

  I was a wreck for three days beforehand. It took me twenty minutes to scrub the smell of Fatburger off of me after work that afternoon. I doused myself liberally with Big Bill’s cologne, then promptly decided that I smelled like a freezer-burned ham. It took another twenty minutes to scrub that off, and I wasn’t altogether successful. I got rid of the freezer-burned part, but the ham lingered. I wore a shirt I thought was cool.

  Ironically, the prospect of failure was not the source of my anxiety that Friday night so much as the prospect of success was—that is, the possibility of revealing my little breakfast link to a perfect stranger. Though my Netherlands were no longer hairless, my willy was hardly bigger than it had been when Lulu inspected it in the trophy room at thirteen.

  I arrived at Joe’s casually late, having spent fifteen casual minutes in my car outside his apartment complex, gazing at my watch and listening to KMPC.

  The three of them were in the kitchen when I got there, huddled around the blender, laughing. Joe was making strawberry daiquiris.

  “For the ladies,” he explained. “There’s beer in the fridge.”

  I grabbed a beer from the fridge.

  Joe draped a proprietary arm around his lady right off the bat, lest there be any confusion. “This is Nicole,” he said, just as Nicole was wriggling out from under his arm. “And this is her cousin Cheryl.”

  My first thought was that there’s no accounting for taste, because Cheryl, whom Joe had deemed “Okay, I guess,” was pretty damn hot when you looked past the makeup and the fog of perfume. Joe’s date Nicole, on the other hand, looked like an anteater in tight pants and a halter top.

  One look at me and Cheryl started inhaling her daiquiri. Who could blame her? When I excused myself to take a leak in Joe’s hair-encrusted toilet, I could hear that Joe wasn’t exactly helping my odds.

  “Yeah, Miller’s kind of a wuss,” I heard him say. “But he’s not a fag or anything.”

  I might have been a solar flare for all the eye contact Cheryl bestowed upon me that evening, although she did exhibit a refreshing candor on the subject of her boyfriend back in Muskegon, a certain red-shirt freshman on the Michigan State offensive line named Bubby, who hailed from Arkansas.

  “His name is Bubby?” I chortled. “C’mon, what’s his real name?”

  She looked me in the eye for the first time and pinched up her face. “Bubby is his real name.”

  I was the romantic equivalent of mustard gas. Where was my beautiful voice when the lights were low and the music was soft, and some lovesick middle-American girl gooned on strawberry daiquiris presented herself ? My voice had forsaken me—it seemed I was incapable of saying the right thing. And as a result, Bubby seemed only to draw nearer with each daiquiri.

  Joe, meanwhile, was making headway, relatively speaking. Nicole was fighting him off, but he was still managing an occasional grope. Two more daiquiris and he might’ve been in business.

  After a covert conference in Joe’s bathroom, during which Joe released a wide stream of urine in and around the toilet, it was decided that we should take the Duster, as it was roomier, and things were liable to get horizontal up at Mulholland. It was also mutually decided (by Joe) that we should switch the gals to beer.

  “We just want them to lower their standards,” he explained. “Not lose their motor skills and shit.”

  But it was too late for Cheryl. By the time we set out for Circle K for snacks and more beer, she was already a mess. And hungry. When Joe went in to fetch the beer, Cheryl joined him, wobbling on high heels.

  “Is Joe always such a horn dog?” Nicole wanted to know.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Nicole was leaning over the front seat reapplying her lipstick in the rearview mirror. Her face was about four inches from mine. I could smell the daiquiri on her breath. “He wasn’t like this the first two times we went out.”

  “He’s probably just buzzed,” I assured her.

  Cheryl reemerged from the brilliant light of Circle K clutching a handful of pepperoni sticks, even as she gnawed on one. She offered them around once she got in the car, but ended up eating them all herself.

  Snaking our way up the canyon was a dizzying affair. Switchback after switchback, Cheryl swooned wordlessly in the passenger seat. Nicole did most of the talking, as I was intent on the spears of my headlights around each corner, and Joe was busy trying to cop a feel. For a girl who looked like an anteater, Nicole was blessed with confidence, and I admired that, although she was irritating as hell. Where did self-confidence reside in people like us—the unattractive ones, the awkward ones? Mine had only flourished in the borrowed light of Lulu, and perhaps in comparison to my idiotic brothers. But Nicole seemed to have arrived at some equation by which she was impervious to the reality that she was unattractive and profoundly aggravating.

  Cheryl, who continued to sway to and fro with each corner, looked peaked by the halfway mark.

  “You want me to stop the car so you can get some air?” I offered on more than one occasion.

  “No—hic—thanks,” she said. Or, “I’m all right.”

  By the time she uttered, “I think—hic—you better pull—” it was too late. Up came the daiquiris and the pepperoni sticks, all over my wide, black dashboard. Immediately the car smelled like hot daiquiris and pepperoni sticks. The windows came down in a flash. It was another quarter mile—with everyone but Cheryl hanging out the windows—before I could find a place to pull over. Cheryl spilled out of the car and staggered to the ditch. Nicole attended to her. In an act of chivalry, or more likely convenience, Joe volunteered his Husqvarna T-shirt to clean up the mess, leaving him shirtless beneath his jean vest. Were it not for the jug of water I kept in the trunk for the radiator, it’s doubtful whether I could’ve cleaned that muck off the dashboard at all. Even as I swabbed it up, I knew I’d be finding little dried flakes in the speaker grill for months. Needless to say, Joe’s T-shirt was a total loss.

  We crested the hill without further incident, and parked in a little clearing off the west side of the road surrounded by long grass. After about ten minutes of this stunning vista, Joe finally wore Nicole down in the backseat. The guy was tenacious; you had to give him that. She seemed like she
was pretty into it, actually. And about ten minutes later, my opportunity arrived, when Cheryl, who suddenly thought I was sweet for mopping up her vomit (I guess that’s one way of developing intimacy), threw caution to the wind, forgot about Bubby, and locked onto me like a succubus. Her tongue was doing unnatural things in my mouth. She tasted of vomit. There was grit on her teeth. My eyes watered under the strain. Finally, I pulled her off of me and tried to appear as though I were not gasping for breath.

  “Wh—hic—what’s wrong?” she said.

  “I just keep thinking of Bubby,” I said.

  That seemed to stun Cheryl into sobriety, if only for an instant. I couldn’t tell what emotions were at work in her. Her eyes started lolling around in her head again almost immediately, as she did her best to stare me down. “You’re—hic—sweet,” she said at last. And then she came at me again with renewed vigor, and this time her tongue wasn’t quite so unnatural, but she still tasted like rotting fruit. On this occasion, when I pried her off of me, it was my crippling fear of success that got the best of me. There I was in spades, unable and unwilling to close the deal, hiding inside my sweetness like it was a foxhole, so that I didn’t have to put my ass on the line.

  “But Bubby,” I said. “Don’t forget about Bubby.”

  This did not produce the desired effect. “Bubby’s an asshole,” she said, and forced herself upon me once again.

  “I can’t,” I said. And this time maybe I grabbed her wrist a little too hard. When I released my grip, she pulled away and sulked in the corner, gazing drunkenly out the window.

  Joe popped his head up from the backseat. “For fuck’s sake, Miller, what’s wrong with you? You are a fag, aren’t you?”

  “Just shut up,” I told him.

  “Whatever,” he said, and popped his head back down. But this time Nicole pushed him away, and popped her own head up. “Are you all right, Cher?”

  “F—hic—fine,” she said.

  Joe was giving me some heavy-duty stink eye. I could see his thoughts. Great. Nice fucking work, Miller. Not only do you screw things up for your own faggot self, you screw things up for everybody.

  “Maybe we should go,” said Nicole.

  I was actually concerned Joe might kick my ass later. But he didn’t. Nicole apparently warmed back up to him as we wended our way down the canyon. I heard some slurping and bumping in the backseat. Later he told me he “cooter-banged” her back there.

  The Incredible Shrinking Man

  As the Olympia drew nearer, Big Bill began cutting and defining his physique. He tailored his sets from low reps at high weights to high reps at low weights, and in this manner molded his muscles from the inside out. He was ripped by late spring; his lats and pecs and delts were scored with fingers. He was a monster, a behemoth, the Samson of biblical lore—something Rodin might have sculpted in the feverish throes of a laudanum binge. To see him lumbering around the house in his underwear—navigating tight corners, ducking light fixtures, drinking milk straight from the carton, and crushing the empty half-gallon container effortlessly in his mighty clutches—was to witness a true freak of nature. Everything looked small next to him; a fatburger looked like a novel appetizer between his fingers, a table setting like a child’s tea set. He looked better than in ’80, altogether more massive and deeply pocketed. He could scarcely wink without triggering some muscular response. The mere act of chewing set his traps to rippling from his neck to his shoulders. His right pec swelled like a pig bladder every time he raised his tiny fork. I was beginning to think Big Bill might be destined for Olympus at last.

  In July he started complaining of fatigue and reduced endurance during workouts. His right leg began swelling, so he worked that much harder on the left. For two weeks he forged onward in spite of the ailments. No pain, no gain. But one afternoon at Gold’s in the middle of an incline press, a tightening in the chest simply could not be ignored, and Doug was forced to spot him. Big Bill was so lightheaded that he nearly tumbled getting to his feet. Doug rushed him to Cedars-Sinai.

  On the phone Doug was uncharacteristically calm and serious.

  “You gotta get down here,” he said.

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “You gotta.”

  “I can’t.”

  He was silent on the other end. I could hear him breathing out of his mouth. “You need to grow up,” he said, finally. “You need to put that shit behind you.”

  I insisted that Doug meet me in the parking lot at Cedars. I found him leaning on the hood of the Malibu next to a laundry truck. He was still in his neoprene short-sleeved bodysuit. The nubby protuberances in his breadbasket left very little to the imagination.

  “Why don’t you put some pants on?” I said.

  “What for?”

  “Because maybe the whole world doesn’t want to look at your nut sack.”

  “Who cares? Anyways, I don’t have any pants. They’re at the gym. Now, c’mon, hurry up, we gotta see the doctor now. Then we can see Dad.”

  I sat down on the bumper of the laundry van.

  “What’re you doing? Let’s go.”

  I gazed across the lot, away from the hospital. A Mexican guy in coveralls was pruning shrubs nearby. “Just give me a sec,” I said.

  Doug shifted his weight restlessly from one massive leg to the other, and gave a little tug at his breadbasket to let his nuts breathe.

  Listening to the steely precision of the Mexican’s shears at work, I couldn’t summon the will to get up off that bumper. “I can’t do it,” I said.

  “Oh, please,” he sighed. “Get over it.”

  “You don’t understand. You were too young. You don’t remember.”

  “Don’t fraternize me, ass-lick. Dad’s in there and there’s something wrong with him. He might be fucking dying, for all we know. So quit being such a baby and suck it up. Why are you always such a little wuss about everything? What are you afraid of ?”

  Somebody said that the things we fear the most have already happened to us. I think they were right.

  When Doug saw that there were tears in my eyes, he softened a bit, and sat down beside me and rested a heavy arm on my back. I could smell his armpit. “It’s not even the same hospital,” he observed gently.

  “I know. You’re right. I’m being a baby, I know I am. It’s just that . . .” But I choked on the words. My stomach tightened in an instant, and my insides set to trembling in a paroxysm of yearning like nothing I had ever felt before, not even for Lulu.

  “It’s okay,” said Doug, squeezing my shoulder with his massive hand. “Get it out of your system.”

  For nearly a decade I had been in despair, really and truly in despair, not even knowing I was in despair. Of all the unlikely guides to hold my hand through the haunted halls of this darkest place, fate had chosen my brother Doug, with his overactive pituitary and his Neanderthal delicacy.

  “C’mon, ass-munch,” he said, giving my shoulder an impatient squeeze. “Get it together. We gotta talk to the doctor.”

  I walked right through those double glass doors just as naturally as if I’d been walking into Ralphs. The hospital was everything I remembered: the big colored Legos, the dead chemical air. The light made me queasy, but none of it was as bad as I anticipated.

  The doctor was Asian. His name was a verb—Chew, I think. He had a facial tic that caused his left eye to wink intermittently, so that you didn’t want to look him in the eye when he talked to you, because you were afraid he might think you were staring at his tic. But then when he wasn’t looking at you, you wanted to look at his tic.

  “Your father is experiencing what’s called cardiomyopathy. That means the walls of his heart have thickened.” Dr. Chew clipped an X-ray to the light box. “As a result, his cardiac functions have been significantly compromised. That’s what caused the swelling and the dizziness. His blood has thi
ckened.”

  “How did it happen? Is it from working out?”

  His left eye twitched. “Not exactly,” he said. He turned his attention toward the X-rays. “You see this shaded area around the heart, here? That’s the thickening. Normally this shaded area would be considerably thinner.”

  “What caused it?” I said.

  “It could have been a number of things.” Chew fidgeted distractedly with the corner of an X-ray. His eye twitched again. “But I strongly suspect steroid use.”

  I was absolutely dumbstruck. I looked to Doug, with his jaw hanging agape like a steam shovel, and I knew he was as shocked as me. Big Bill juiced? How could this possibly be? Big Bill had always remained above suspicion, perhaps because his gonzo work ethic and uncompromising veneer were so easily confused with moral fortitude. Where were the indicators: the hypodermics, the tracks, the volatility, the unchecked aggression?

  The very idea was unthinkable: gain without pain. Big Bill would never accept such a proposition. And yet it was true. The proof was in the massive arms and shoulders. But most of all, it was in the thickening walls of the heart.

  “Is he gonna die?” said Doug.

  “No. Probably not anytime soon. Your father’s condition is manageable. He’s going to be facing some lifestyle changes, however.”

  I remember looking at the X-ray and thinking it strange to see Big Bill’s superhuman physique photographed from the inside out—how fragile and human it looked without all that muscle buffering it.

  Big Bill was upbeat in his hospital bed, grinning less with relief, it seemed, than with forced levity. As in all varieties of clothing, Big Bill looked ridiculous in his hospital gown. The nurse had been forced to slit it up the side to get it to fit over his massive trunk.

  “I smell hamburgers,” he said. “I’m ready to strap on a feed bag.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said.

  Doug stood at a distance, tight-lipped and sullen. I think he felt betrayed. I’d never put Big Bill on a pedestal in the first place—he’d proved himself to be unfailingly human long ago—so I was not outraged by his breach of moral conduct so much as genuinely surprised. I still couldn’t see how he’d managed to hide such a big thing. But for Doug, the discovery was nothing less than a loss of innocence. I don’t think he ever forgave Big Bill for the juice.