All About Lulu

  “I remember. Of course I remember.”

  “You were only five.”

  “I know,” he said defensively. “But I still remember it.”

  “You guys were working out even then.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Big Bill was proud of you. He used to tell Kenny Waller that you guys would win the Olympia before him.”

  “Waller,” said Ross. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “He used to make you pose for Arnold and Franco. ‘Show them the triceps! Let’s see the crab, show Uncle Arnie the crab.’ And you guys would perform like little monkeys.”

  Ross smiled faintly, as though it were his duty to smile.

  “Goddamn, I hated it,” I told him. “The gym, I mean. I hated every last second of it. I would’ve rather been at the hospital, that’s how much I hated it.”

  “So you quit. So what?”

  “I just couldn’t give two shits. Big Bill knew it, and it really bugged him. It bugged him that I sat outside in the car and read comic books. Especially because they weren’t even the superhero kind. They were just Archies.”

  “I can’t remember,” said Ross.

  “He never really had much to do with me.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Dad’s weird sometimes.”

  “Why did you come in, anyway?” I said.

  “No reason. I just saw you sitting there, so . . . I don’t know.”

  “So, what is it?”

  “It’s nothing.” Then, after a pause, Ross said, “You want to know something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t ever tell Doug, and especially don’t tell Big Bill.”

  “I won’t.”

  He still wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell me.

  “I promise,” I said.

  “I hated it, too. I’ve always hated it, from then until now, I’ve hated it. I would’ve been happier if Dad were a professional roller skater or a fucking dentist.”

  For the first time in my life I wanted to hug Ross, I suppose for having endured something I never gave him credit for. “Why did you do it?” I said.

  He paused to wonder at this himself, and shrugged. “No pain, no gain, I guess. Or maybe I was just scared.”

  Ross stared out into the hallway. I started picking fuzz balls off my bedspread.

  “I miss her,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  A dense silence settled in, the kind that makes your ears ring.

  “Well,” I said, finally. “I guess I better get busy on my—”

  “Yeah,” said Ross, and he stood to leave.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure, I’m okay. But you won’t tell, right?”

  “Why would I?”

  “That’s cool.” He turned to leave, but then he turned back again. “So, I’m just wondering, what do you write in all those books, anyway?”

  I almost wanted to tell him. It might have been a relief. “Nothing,” I said.

  “Can I read some?”

  “Nah. It’s just stuff.”

  “That’s cool. I draw stuff sometimes. Doug thinks it’s gay.”

  “Screw Doug,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. So, I guess I’ll see you.”

  “Yeah.”

  He turned and left.

  Within a few months, Ross discovered his new self, and it couldn’t have been newer or more unexpected. While Doug and Big Bill spent their afternoons paining and gaining, Ross started smoking clove cigarettes and hanging out with a kid named Regan and listening to Duran Duran. Regan became his mentor: oft quoted, perpetually emulated, but always shrouded in mystery.

  “Where’s your imaginary friend Regan?” I’d ask.

  “Why don’t you look in your little notebook?”

  He grew his hair out and fashioned it after the lead singer of Flock of Seagulls.

  “Looks like somebody parked the Batmobile on top of your head,” I observed.

  “Looks like they parked it on your face and left in a hurry.”

  There was hope for the kid.

  Much to the chagrin of Big Bill, Ross soon started wearing eyeliner.

  “For Pete’s sake, you look like a raccoon. Take that off ! Why do you wanna go around looking like Boy Georgie?”

  “You look like a dill-hole,” said Doug.

  We were hard on him, it was the Miller way, but I envied Ross for finding his new self. I wished I could find a new self, or even an old self, or any self that didn’t require Lulu as the main ingredient. I wished I had the guts to wear eyeliner, or swagger around with overgrown muscles. I wished I had some goal, some thing or ideal besides Lulu to drive me forward all of my days. I wished I had the desire or passion or vision to build something, anything—a rippling body, a body of knowledge, a goddamn brontosaurus in the middle of the desert. Something bigger than myself. But I had only one crippling desire.

  The ripples of change brought about by Ross’s transformation soon set the geography of our household in motion again. Ross moved into the trophy room, and everything from the trophy room—that is, everything from our former lives—was moved into a corner of the garage, where it soon hosted black widows. Doug, haunted perhaps by a phantom top bunk, yearned for new surroundings, and soon traded rooms with Lulu, who could never resist change.

  Thus deprived of my precious swath of light, I turned instead to my radio, always mindful of the fact that it had once been a gift from Lulu. The radio became my bridge to the outside world. I lay on my bed, gazing at the walls of my prison, while Ken Minyard on KABC spoke to me like a best friend about life, the universe, and Mexican food. About history, politics, and current events. And like a best friend, I listened. That was my role in the relationship, to listen. I had other radio friends: Casey Kasem, Rick Dees, Shadoe Stevens. The radio was never about the music for me, it was always about the voices, the power of those invisible supercharged voices to lift me out of the morass, to open windows of possibility and understanding, to conjure by the force of incantation and verbal charm any image, idea, or opinion, and also their amazing power to persuade. Ken Minyard made a Bobby Kennedy liberal out of me and I didn’t even know who Bobby Kennedy was. Casey Kasem taught me the fine line between sincerity and schmaltz, by dancing that line with the cascading polyrhythms of his voice. But more than anything else, it was the companionship these voices afforded me in my solitude that kept me tuning in.

  While I had many friends, I had but one god, and that was Vin Scully. His voice rode crackling upon invisible wavelengths from St. Louis and Chicago and New York, arriving in Santa Monica to transform my bedroom into someplace altogether grander. And when Vin’s voice streamed out of my radio, the words were no longer weightless and invisible; they expanded like paper flowers until they had form and weight and color, and they smelled like pretzels and green grass and some place far away. Vin Scully spoke to me like a father. Sometimes I wished he were my father. I know that sounds weird. But I’m just telling you how it was.

  Everything Is a Crock

  Willow in the mirror: eyes like eight balls, crow’s-feet, a slackening of skin. She uses her reflection as an instrument for self-improvement, creating shadows and highlights, employing various implements. Plucking. Dusting. Applying. Sighing, stopping, looking hard at the mirror. Where? Past her reflection? Inside herself ? Into the future?

  Perhaps more than anyone, Willow tried to make me comfortable throughout adolescence. She reached out to me unfailingly, without ever crossing the line. She was kind and considerate. She yearned for me to confide in her, she longed to gather me up in her arms and squeeze me reassuringly, I’m sure of it. Yet, I never allowed her access. I could have made things easier on her by accepting her love unconditionally, like the twins did, and certainly she deserved as much, but I punished her instead with
aloofness, and with silence.

  Meanwhile, the dinner table became a nightly theater of contention between Lulu and Big Bill.

  “Reagan’s a senile boob,” she’d say. “He’s got a head full of stale jelly beans.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Big Bill would say, with a mouthful of turkey sausage. “He’s decisive. Something that peanut farmer your mother voted for wouldn’t know anything about. Reagan works fast.”

  “So does Maalox.”

  One benefit of all this antagonism was that it was contagious.

  “Cherry Coke sucks ass,” Doug would say. “It’s for butt pirates and Girl Scouts.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s way better than Coke Classic. Coke Classic tastes like Tidy Bowl.”

  “Does not!”

  “So then, you know what Tidy Bowl tastes like?”

  Doug was powerless against such guile. He walked into every trap, he seemed to have a genius for it. And as he strained to formulate his comeback, he was like an overtaxed robot. You kept expecting to see smoke come out of his ears.

  “You’re the one that drinks Tidy Bowl, ass-munch.”

  It was nice to see the twins fighting again, even if it was a massacre now that Ross had grown a brain.

  Willow rarely jumped into the fray. She ate with her eyes down, not so much like she had given up the fight, rather like she was silently nursing some grudge, letting it build up strength. You got the feeling she was a ticking time bomb at the far end of the table.

  It was hard to believe that our family dinners even endured this rough period, that we all didn’t take our plates and go our separate ways. It would have been so much easier than watching Willow simmer, and Big Bill bluster, and Lulu, the bright little girl who once lit up our lives, express her new disgust for the world.

  “It’s no wonder we have AIDS and acid rain and a giant hole in the ozone,” she said. “The whole world is lying to itself. Especially us.”

  Nor was Lulu’s disgust limited to the present—it extended well into the past.

  “The Summer of Love was a crock.”

  “Now, wait a minute, here—”

  “Oh, give me a break. Only two percent of the young people were actually doing anything. The rest of them were just posers—getting stoned and pregnant and living a complete lie.”

  “I was there, young lady. And let me tell you something—”

  “Tell me this: Where are your hippies, now? Where are all your enlightened revolutionaries? Selling tennis shoes on television and driving Beamers, that’s where!”

  “I don’t drive a Beamer!”

  “You don’t make enough money!”

  And always after dinner, after the arrows had been slung and the pot roast had been whittled down to a pool of blood and gristle and some greasy string, after the vegetarian contingent had finished picking at their lemon Jell-O and baked beans, we invariably did go our separate ways, and that was the most heartbreaking part of all.

  I suppose it’s ironic that in a household where closed doors were rapidly becoming the standard, mine alone stayed open the last years of high school. Nobody wished more than I did to isolate himself from the supreme disappointment that lay just outside the doorway. The only reason my door stayed open was the possibility of glimpsing Lulu on her way to the bathroom, or the increasingly improbable prospect of some reconciliation between us.

  Willow and Big Bill were less discreet than ever. Occasionally their discord rattled the rafters. I could hear it over the play-by-play of Vin Scully or Ross Porter, and at such times I thought of Lulu sitting in her room in her puddle of light, pondering God only knew what, and Doug, still ducking when he sat on his disjoined bunk bed out of habit, and Ross out somewhere smoking clove cigarettes and wondering how any of us fit together, wondering whether we were ever intended to be together in the first place.

  One night Big Bill and Willow spilled out into the hallway. Big Bill was trying for one of his patented short endings.

  “Just drop it!” he shouted.

  “I’m tired of dropping it! We’ve been dropping it for years.”

  “That’s enough!”

  Tudor is ahead in the count one and two. Pedro singled sharply to center in the first. St. Louis playing Guerrero to pull.

  “Some things you can’t put behind you, Bill. That’s a truth. Sometimes the best thing you can do is put them beside you.”

  “Don’t play grief counselor with me. I’m not your client anymore.”

  Tudor peers in for the sign.

  “It doesn’t make sense not to,” she said. “You admitted it yourself. There’s no ‘too late,’ Bill.”

  “Well, it used to make sense! It made good goddamn sense, until you decided to—”

  “I didn’t decide it, my conscience decided it for me! My daughter decided it! And it’s about time that—”

  “Stop right there!”

  Guerrero calls time, steps out of the box. LaValliere wants to have a word with Tudor.

  “I’ll never understand you,” said Willow bitterly.

  Tudor does not have his good change-up tonight, but he’s been spotting his fastball well, and making good pitches when he needs to.

  “Stop, right now,” ordered Big Bill. “I’m dead serious about this.”

  “That’s pretty serious, Bill. You ought to take a look at that.”

  “Don’t psychoanalyze me, Mary Margaret.”

  “Quit making me, then.”

  Denkinger out to the mound to break up the conversation. Nothing stirring in the St. Louis bullpen.

  “I’m done with this,” said Big Bill. “I’ve been done with it for years.”

  “You never started.”

  “It’s done. I’ve moved on, damnit!”

  And with that, Big Bill stormed down the hallway to the stairs.

  Now Guerrero steps back in the box and LaValliere is ready with the sign.

  “You moved to Santa Monica, Bill!” she called after him. “That’s not the same thing!”

  The Governing Laws of Lulu

  Thanks to the miracle of contact lenses, Clearasil wipes, and a growth spurt the summer of ’85, my seventeenth birthday found me less ugly than my sixteenth, fifteenth, and fourteenth birthdays. I was neither toad nor prince. My nose was flat. The walls of my nostrils were too thick. I was kind of oily. But I had good teeth and cowish brown eyes (no longer three times their natural size), and my velveteen voice was dreamy to anyone who could hear it. I was in the neighborhood of happy and well adjusted for the first time since freshman year. I even stopped eating lunch with Harry Pitts. I could not put Lulu behind me, so I put her beside me.

  Big Bill bought me a banana-yellow Plymouth Duster with spring-loaded seats, an ocean of black dashboard, and an AM/FM stereo. I took scrupulous care of that car, washing and waxing its yellow shell until it glistened like a mango, buffing the hubcaps, shining the nylon interior, vacuuming the black carpet, tweezing snags and loose fibers out like a surgeon. My credibility, real or imagined, depended on that car. Moreover, my psychic and emotional mobility depended on it. I drove the Duster aimlessly around the basin at night, listening to my beloved voices on KABC and KNX and KFI. Burbank, Glendale, Arcadia, it didn’t matter. As long as I was moving, I was at peace.

  That year, I kissed a girl for the first time. Her name was Shelly Beach, and I’m not making that up. Yes, she had an older sister, and yes, her sister’s name was Sandy Beach. She had a brother named Rocky. Sometimes there’s a very fine line between adoration and cruelty.

  Shelly Beach was two-and-a-half years my senior. After she graduated in Yelm, Washington, the previous year, Shelly had moved to Alhambra to live with her aunt and earn resident status. She wanted to go to Cal State Northridge and study Consumer Sciences. In the meantime, she worked at a Red Lobster near Pasadena. That’s where I met her,
on one of my aimless sojourns into the night. Hungry from my travels, I stopped at Red Lobster and discovered Shelly Beach at the podium in front, clutching an oversized crab-shaped menu to her chest. She had poodle hair, and, arbitrary as it may seem, it was an observable fact that girls with poodle hair liked me. Especially larger ones. Shelly fit both descriptions. She was in fact quite big boned in all the wrong places, but then, look at me. I don’t know why Shelly Beach decided to like me, whether her poodle hair was on too tight or she just felt sorry for me, but it wasn’t the voice that attracted her, because I could feel the force of her infatuation before I even spoke. Maybe she liked oily skin. Maybe I smelled like Big Macs.

  “Can I get you a Coke or something while you wait?”

  “Uh, no, thanks.” Had I known the Coke was free, believe me, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Uh, yeah. I’m good for now.”

  She smiled. “Okay, well, let me know if you change your mind. Sorry about the wait.”

  After that first steamy exchange, I started making Red Lobster a destination. I drove forty-five minutes across the southland to drink Cokes and coffee and order baked potatoes and side salads. I came at busy times, so that people were backed up in the foyer waiting to be seated. It didn’t occur to me that the waitresses probably groaned at the sight of me: prince of the eight dollar check, the bottomless refill. The guy who tipped in silver stacks.

  One night the place was crawling with Little Leaguers, and there was a line all the way to the door. I sat in the foyer, catching glimpses of Shelly Beach’s ample figure as she came and went, clutching her oversized menus, seating families of five. Around minute six, Shelly Beach brought me a Coke.

  “I insist,” she said.

  Three hours (and about fourteen Cokes) later, I kissed her in the parking lot. And it was not inexperience that bridled my passion, nor the wealth of her figure, but something else. Lulu, I guess.

  “What’s wrong?” Shelly wanted to know.

  “There’s nothing wrong. It’s just that . . . something isn’t right.”