“The little boy and his father circled that elephant in the rain for almost an hour. They viewed it from every angle. The boy asked questions—how did they make it? Is there a real elephant inside? The father hoisted the boy up on his shoulders so Claude could see into the eyes of the elephant. And the eyes of the elephant had little cement wrinkles around them. And the ears had little cement folds. And Claude thought it was quite an amazing and unexpected thing, that something so big should have such little details. What the little boy felt was more than just awe, it was something else; he was inspired by what he saw. Looking at it, he dreamed his own dream—he imagined something even bigger than that elephant. He imagined a dinosaur. He imagined it with such force that he could see it. All the tiny wrinkled details. But that wasn’t enough. He needed to touch it, to climb up the neck, to peer into the belly of this thing he’d conceived. And there was only one way to do that, and that was to build it.” Lulu took a slug from the rum bottle. She fished a cigarette from her pocket. When she fired it up, there was a halo of light around her head.
“But little boys don’t build giant dinosaurs,” Lulu observed. “At least not out of concrete and steel. So Claude had no choice but to hold on to that dream for a lot of years. He held on to it with the greatest strength of all, and that is the strength of holding on to something without being able to touch it.”
Lulu fell silent and puffed her cigarette. I thought she was finished with her story. But she resumed.
“Even before Claude became a man, he realized that men didn’t build giant dinosaurs either, not without a lot of money. And the young man had no money at all. So he did some figuring, and what he figured was that it would take a young fellow of his prospects an awfully long time—and maybe a little luck—to ever amass the resources to make his dream happen. And Claude was discouraged, but not disheartened. He figured he could do it in ten years. So he got a job at Knott’s Berry Farm. And he saved every penny he could.”
Lulu dropped her cigarette and snuffed it out with her heel. “But Claude was all wrong. After ten years he was nowhere close. Building his dream just seemed to get more expensive as time went by. He was finally disheartened. He began to think that maybe his dream was a joke. Maybe he was wasting his time. Maybe he should buy a house with all the money he’d saved. But then he remembered the thing he’d been holding on to so long, he remembered all the wrinkled details, and the awe-inspiring size. And so he went back to work, and saving, and imagining. It took him twenty more years working at Knott’s Berry Farm to save the money to buy the gas station and the adjoining land. Thirty years total! And it took him five more years to build his dream out of steel and concrete. Right here, in Bumfuck, Egypt.”
I remember thinking that Dan must have felt pretty stupid. I know I did. Because even the cool jazz seemed noble suddenly.
“And not only did he actually build his dream at last,” pursued Lulu. “Old Claude began building another. And when he finished that one, another. And the coolest part is that after all the work Claude put into them, and all the money he spent, all the time and the energy he invested, they aren’t even monuments to himself.” She took a slug of rum, and passed the bottle toward Dan’s outstretched hand, then fished in the pocket of her blouse for another cigarette. “It doesn’t matter who thinks they’re silly,” she said. “Little kids love them.”
God, I would’ve given anything to be Claude Bell at that moment—if not to watch my dream rise out of the dust, then simply to have inspired Lulu Trudeau.
Dan toasted Claude Bell and his heroic dinosaurs. We passed the bottle, mostly in silence, as we sat on the tail of the tyrannosaurus under the stars, listening to cool jazz from the belly of the beast. Lulu sat on the end and I secured the space next to her, as close as I could get to her so that on those occasions when her balance faltered, she jostled me inadvertently. Troy occupied the space next to me, though only physically. Mentally, he was somewhere far out into the ether, or maybe deep down into himself. He’d given up on Lulu, that much was clear. He looked like a big white flag sitting there.
Dan the Man was restless, never sitting, forever climbing all over the dinosaur or hanging off the scaffold, always stirring gravel with his agitated feet, or vocalizing some bass line until, finally, he surrendered to the muse and went back to the Duster to fetch his bass.
I had to touch Lulu. It was not a matter of choice. And so I tried to put my arm around her waist, but she shrank from it. I tried to rest my hand on her knee, but she brushed it off. Troy bore silent witness to my rejection, while pretending not to notice. He sucked on the bottle with a gusto I hadn’t seen since his Bender days. He must have felt something coming as I persisted in my groping, because just as Lulu was about to unleash her thunder, he rose mechanically to his feet and ambled off toward the brontosaurus.
She seized my wrist fiercely and clambered to her feet. She yanked me to my feet, and began dragging me out into the desert, gouging my wrist with her painted nails. I had no idea what was going to happen to me.
After about fifty yards she stopped. She let go of my wrist, and stood at a distance of three or four feet, and looked me dead in the eye. It was the eye of the storm. She unbuttoned her blouse and tore it off and fired it into a nearby creosote bush. Unclasping her bra, she ripped it free of her arms and flung it to the ground. Then she just stood there, tall and straight as a redwood, naked from the waist up, glaring at me with X-ray eyes. I tried with all my might not to look at her full breasts and her flat tummy and the graceful curve of her hip, but I couldn’t stop myself. This was no gangly-legged teen with budding breasts, but a woman.
She all but threw herself on the ground. She rolled over on her back, and hiked her skirt up. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, and to my astonishment, her letter V was shorn. “Here I am,” she hissed. “Fuck me! That’s what you want, so just get it over with! Go on, I won’t fight you. I won’t scratch you, I won’t bite you. Just fuck me and get it over with. Fuck me however you want to fuck me. Pretend I’m whoever you want me to be, whoever you think I am. Just get it over with.”
“Get up.”
“Fuck me. That’s what you want.”
“Get up, Lu!”
“C’mon, William. Show me how much you love me. Fuck me like I’m your sister!”
Finally, I turned and stomped away from her in the direction we’d come. I could hear Lulu scramble to her feet behind me, and for one instant I was fed up, sick of it all, Lulu, I mean, and I just wanted to climb in the Duster without her, without anyone, and keep heading east, and never look back, get a job in Albuquerque, marry a fat girl, die in the sun. But no sooner did I hear the crunch of Lulu’s footsteps in my wake than I longed to feel her nails gouging me again, and her words cutting me to the bone.
Lulu stormed right past me, clutching her blouse closed in front. Up ahead I could just barely intimate the unsuspecting figure of Dan seated on the tail of the beast, plinging his bass guitar in concert with the cool jazz, as Lulu grabbed his arm and jerked him up, bass and all, and began dragging him out into the desert.
They were gone forever. Now and again I could hear the low drone of Dan’s voice, but not his words, and once I heard Lulu cackle, but whatever she was cackling about didn’t sound funny.
I wandered across the flat until I came upon Troy, leaning against a back leg of the brontosaurus, staring out into the firmament. He didn’t acknowledge my arrival. He was drunk, and every time his weight shifted itself, he recovered with a start, like someone falling asleep at the wheel.
“What the fffffffuck am I doing here?” he said.
I didn’t venture to guess, because I felt certain that he wasn’t asking me, and even if he had been, I didn’t have an answer for him. I left Troy to himself and ambled over to the Duster, where I lay down on the hood and listened to the crickets, and watched the stars, and tried to keep from asking myself the same question as Troy. Time pa
ssed, but I had no measure by which to gauge it other than the timepiece my forebearers had been using for seventy thousand years or more, the stars, and I couldn’t even do that. But I’m guessing an hour or more passed, maybe even two, before Dan and Lulu returned, Dan looking a little sheepish, and Lulu looking a little less determined than usual. Troy straggled in not far behind them, still toting the bottle. The bottle was empty.
We piled into the car. Only Dan buckled up. Soon the dinosaurs of Cabazon were behind us, and the mountains lay ahead of us, and no sooner did we begin our ascent than everybody passed out: Troy with his face to the window, Dan, sitting erect as though he were still awake, and Lulu with her head on Dan’s shoulder. And as I guided the Duster west on the interstate toward home, I was bleary-eyed and unshaven, and the desert air, now cool, whistled through the window, and for the first time in years, I truly didn’t care which way my hair fell.
Almost Twenty
Two months into fall semester, I finally moved out of the only room I’d ever known and into the real world, a one-bedroom apartment four and a half blocks from the Pico house.
I took three classes at SMCC that fall, one in Marine Ecology and two in Philosophy. Philosophy, I learned from Gerard Smith—a slight, bespectacled fellow who owned a pair of clogs and a billowy shirt for every day of the week—was an activity, not a doctrine. Oftentimes class convened outdoors on a patch of brown grass punctuated by a few smog-choked palms, below a blue sky buzzing incessantly with air traffic. Here, Smith arranged his pupils in a circle and indoctrinated us with impassioned lectures on Plato’s ethical solutions, Aristotle’s foundations of logic, and Bacon’s utopia of science. It was hard to fathom what Gerard Smith was so impassioned about, but there he was, pacing madly about in his clogs, center circle, his billowy shirtsleeves gathering wind with each grand gesture. He had hair like Richard Simmons’s, which, unlike his sleeves, was impervious to wind.
As for the texts, I slogged through Plato wondering why, and limped through Aristotle asking the same question, before I caught my head in the spokes of Spinoza, which I felt was his fault, not mine, because it seemed pretty clear to me that quotidian reality had very little to do with mathematics—at least not my quotidian reality, in which one plus one didn’t even equal two. Now Wittgenstein, there was a guy who made sense. Old Ludwig believed in the power of words and, paradoxically, the complete unreliability of words, or at least that’s how I understood it.
It was silly and fascinating, this doctrine that was not a doctrine, these analogies about shadows and caves that sought to explain the nature of understanding. Each great thinker borrowed from the last, spinning the former’s hypothesis into some new and logical conclusion, until every so often some nut like Hume came along and said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down here, let’s go back to where we started. I liked Hume. He was skeptical. He made goofy connections, then denied they were connections. He took cause and effect and bound and gagged them in a broom closet. Hume proposed that one could not assume the conformity of the future with the past, a lesson I had already learned twice, once when my mother died, and once the day I met Lulu. Just because the sun had risen every morning since the beginning of recorded time, Hume reasoned, didn’t necessarily mean it would rise tomorrow or the next day.
I bluffed my way through Kant, stumbled through Hegel, and arrived senseless at the feet of Schopenhauer. According to Schopenhauer, the world was his idea. According to Schopenhauer, everybody and everything had a will of its own that enslaved intelligence. A rock had a will of its own. A flea, a fire hydrant, a bicycle pump, they all had wills of their own. The blood had a will to flow through the veins. The veins had a will to carry the blood. The bowels had a will to empty themselves. And the will, according to Schopenhauer, was inexhaustible.
And if, like the flea, the fire hydrant, the bicycle pump, I had a will that enslaved my consciousness and my intellect, that will was only to possess the one thing that made me feel full, the one caress that set my whole being to vibrating like a tuning fork.
I kept on at Fatburger under the mentorship of Acne Scar Joe, who was once again hopelessly single. These days I was bringing in a cool eight hundred a month after taxes. The one bedroom I rented for three seventy-five was in the Tidal View apartment complex, which offered me no such view, though it did offer close proximity to several strip malls and an adult bookstore.
My apartment was directly upstairs from the laundry room. Anytime two or more washers were on spin cycle my living room rocked like Jericho; glasses vibrated off of tables, pictures fell from the wall. The vents for the dryer ducts were right below my window, and the smell was inescapable, like clean warm diapers. It penetrated the glass, leached its way through the stucco walls. The plumbing was temperamental, too. When those washers drained, they hissed and sucked and belched and rattled until you felt as though you were sleeping in the bowels of the USS Nimitz.
It wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton, but it wasn’t the Pico house, either. That four and a half blocks was a lot farther than it sounds. Freedom is all what you make of it. My emancipation consisted mainly of a fourteen-inch Toshiba, my own bathroom, a few issues of Juggs, some textbooks, and a lot of udon noodles. I split my evenings between Schopenhauer and Adara’s Dirty Diaries. I bought a futon and a desk and a phone that never rang. Sometimes Troy came over with rum or a six-pack. I didn’t drink much, though I did buy my share of six-dollar half grams. Troy and I would sit at my kitchen table and smoke herb out of a tinfoil pipe. We’d talk about the Dodgers or school or Lulu, but more often than not, we’d end up talking about how we could get rid of that diaper smell.
I soon discovered that the apartment was haunted by a cat. I saw its shining eyes a couple of times in the dark, glimpsed its gray form slinking across the room in my peripheral vision, heard it gagging on hairballs and padding across counters. It seemed to go about its business just like a regular cat, except you didn’t have to feed it. I called the cat Frank. It never came when I called it. Maybe it was a girl.
My apartment manager was a little potato of a guy named Eugene Gobernecki, with a gold tooth and a Super Mario Bros. mustache. Eugene was a Soviet defector, once an Olympic hopeful in Greco-Roman wrestling. Eugene jumped ship in ’84 at the summer games, whereupon he soon discovered the job market for Roman-Greco wrestlers to be even smaller in the United States than it was in the Soviet Union. So he started mowing lawns, washing windows, stealing grapefruit. He rented a one bedroom at the Tidal View. Within six months he was the manager.
For whatever reason, Eugene Gobernecki wanted desperately to be my friend, which probably said more about Eugene Gobernecki than about me.
“Come to my house,” he’d say. “We cook a duck.”
Thus he propositioned me for weeks every time I came upon him sweeping the parking lot, pruning the hedges, or cleaning the gutters. And it was always the same, always “we cook a duck.” Never “we watch a game,” or “we drink vodka.” The duck was always part of the deal, as if the act were somehow symbolic. Eugene wanted to cook a duck with me—nay, he was determined to cook a duck with me, and I had no idea what that meant.
Eventually he began to extrapolate on the evening’s events as he envisioned them.
“I buy vodka. You bring chicks. Friends, whoever you want. You come to my house. We cook a duck.”
The truth is, whenever I encountered Eugene, I always wanted to say something about the cat haunting my apartment—file an official complaint, so to speak. But I didn’t want to encourage Eugene. And besides, Frank was kind of growing on me.
“Sure, sure, one of these nights,” I’d say. “After midterms, maybe. Or maybe after the holidays or something.”
“Okay, fine. You have girlfriend? You have sister? You bring sister. Maybe she have friends. I buy vodka. We play music. Footloose. All zat shit. Make sure you bring friends and chicks. We make a party. I even cook two ducks, maybe. And I know a bar—maybe later we g
o out.”
“Sure, sounds good. Let’s plan something. Yeah, listen, so I gotta run, I’ve got an ecology lab, let’s talk.”
Finally, one evening, Eugene cornered me in the laundry room. “How come all the time you saying, okay, sure, we cook a duck, we make a party, zen you never make party. This Friday, we make party. You bring friends, chicks, whoever. Already I buy vodka. I rent pornographic movie. I rent other movie, too. You know who is Rowdy Roddy Piper? Okay, so I take care of everything, you take care of chicks and friends.”
I took care of the chicks and friends. That is, I brought the only person I could get, which was Acne Scar Joe. Troy was in Malibu, and even Ross (Alistair, that is) didn’t want to come. Eugene met us at the door in his apron.
“Will! How you doing, Will? All day I been cooking ducks. Hello, yes, Joe, glad to be meeting you, come, come, sit down. We drink vodka, wait for others to come.”