The Benders’ big senior blowout was a costume party at Morgan Irving’s older brother’s house near the UCLA campus. I wasn’t invited. Lulu was going as a dead prom queen. She painted herself zombie white with dark circles under her eyes, and painted scars and lesions on her face and neck, and wore a white taffeta dress with painted bloodstains down the front.
Troy showed up at the house dressed as Julius Caesar, but he looked more like Flavius Victor or Magnus Maximus.
“You look like a total fag,” I told him quietly.
“Serious?”
“Totally.”
Lulu descended the stairs. “C’mon, let’s go.”
“See ya,” Troy said.
As they walked out the door I heard Troy ask her, “Hey, so I don’t look like a total fag do I?”
I went to the stoner version of the senior blowout, even though I wasn’t a stoner. The fact is, I defied all classification. I was a mystery. I doubt whether anyone had an opinion of me, unless they had poodle hair.
At the party, I stood around a dirt parking lot watching kids drink keg beer and smoke pot. I probably could have scored with Rachel Kinslow (poodle hair), but she puked on my Stan Smiths while I was talking to her.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Walter.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s Will.”
I scraped off the vomit on a broken cinder block and, for lack of any other purpose, gravitated toward the keg. Somebody had made off with the tap. They passed the hat. Somebody went after another.
I talked for a while with a kid named Chett who didn’t even go to Santa Monica. He went to Western in Anaheim.
So-and-so was his cousin, he told me.
I didn’t know so-and-so, I told him. But that’s cool.
That proved to be the extent of our common ground. Chett wore a yellow Spuds MacKenzie tank top, and even though it was night, he wore Oakley wraparound sunglasses.
He wanted to know if I liked NASCAR.
I told him I liked to drive more than I liked to watch other people do it.
What about Formula One, didn’t I like Formula One?
Yeah, I lied. It was okay.
NASCAR, that was the shit, he said. Dale Earnhardt was his boy. Cale Yarborough was a pussy. So was Elliot. Didn’t I think?
I concurred that anyone with a name like Cale Yarborough was probably a pussy. He added Foyt to the list of pussies, and Waltrip.
Other than that, the only thing Chett seemed to want to impart to me in the way of information was that he was Chett with two Ts, not one.
“It sounds the same, but it ain’t.”
Chett kept offering me a bong rip, and I kept saying no, and he kept reminding me about the T distinction at the end of his name.
“Remember—two Ts,” he’d say, and offer me another bong toke. “That’s how you can remember me, two Ts.”
“Got it,” I’d say.
I finally relented and took a toke from his green bong, which smelled more than a little like Doug’s ass.
“Clear the carb, bro. Clear the freakin’ carb.”
I cleared the carb, and I could feel the dumbness washing over me even before I exhaled.
After that, it seemed like a bad idea to keep talking to Chett-with-two-Ts. In fact, I was ready to effect my retreat altogether, ready to go walking somewhere dark, when Troy showed up in full costume, wringing his hands like Pontius Pilate.
After Dark
She’d been acting weird for weeks, Troy explained as we tore down Santa Monica in Troy’s dad’s convertible. The top was up. Troy was a little freaked out, and a little drunk, but more freaked out than drunk. Moreover, his concern was very genuine. I was beginning to think Troy might take the world more personally than I ever gave him credit for. But that didn’t mean I had to cut him any slack. He was still a sworn enemy, so the air I projected as we hurtled toward the Bender blowout was put-upon and a little annoyed at being torn away from . . . well, Chett. But inwardly I was terrified that something might happen to Lulu, and that I would be to blame.
According to Troy, the night had gotten off to a bad start. Lulu was nasty right off the bat.
“She was doing vodka and cranberry machines. And some bumps with Chad and Kathleen in the bathroom. Things started getting pretty wild. She and Kathleen started making out—just as a joke, for Chad’s sake—but Kathleen wanted to stop and Lulu wouldn’t let her. Kathleen kept trying to pull herself away, and Lulu had her by the hair. Chad got between them and tried to separate them, and Kathleen finally had to scratch Lulu’s face so Lulu would let her go.”
“So?”
“That’s just the beginning. I spent the next hour alone in the bathroom with her, and dude, she went completely Chernobyl on my ass! You should have heard her. She told me I was a phony and a poser and I made her want to puke.”
“You have that effect.”
“You’re a riot.” The car lighter popped and Troy fished a cigarette off the dash. “You have no idea,” he said. “It was like she was possessed. She just kept yelling horrible stuff at me.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t even want to get into it.”
“C’mon, like what?”
“She told me I had no poetry in me. What does that mean, no poetry in me? She wants me to write poetry? What is that all about? I hate poetry.”
“Beats me,” I lied.
“She told me she could never love me, not in a million years. She says the best she could do was not hate me.” Troy puffed his cigarette and sighed as he exhaled. “Your sister’s a psycho.”
“She’s not my sister.”
“Then she started going off on Kathleen and Shannon and Chad and Morgan, and Santa Monica and California and Ronald Reagan and everybody you could possibly think of. Who’s Ed Meese?”
“Beats me.”
“Well, she went off on him, too. And then, finally, she started to settle down a little, and I got her to sit down on the toilet. She started to cry, and I tried to comfort her and all that, and then . . . God, I don’t even know exactly what happened. I turned my back, just for a second, and the next thing I know she’s got one of those nail file things, and she’s carving up her cheek with it, and she’s bleeding pretty hard. And I go for the towel, and she runs out in the hallway, and she won’t let anybody stop the bleeding. Finally, I got her to take the towel from me and hold it over the cut.”
“Why didn’t you take her to the hospital?”
“She wouldn’t go! She wouldn’t even let me get near her. She ran down the stairs and through the kitchen and locked herself in the garage.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know, but yeah, I think. She wouldn’t talk to me. Chad got her to sit down for a while, but all she kept saying was William. I want to talk to William. Only William. And that’s when I came for you. I knew you’d be at that lame party.”
“Gun it,” I said, at the next yellow light.
Chad had managed to forcibly gain entrance to the garage. Having exhausted all attempts at communication, he sat silent watch over Lulu from across the garage. He was still sitting there silently when Troy and I arrived.
Lulu was balled up in the far corner, in the shadow of a storage freezer, where the sickly light of the overhead fixture could not quite reach her. She sat motionless, back to the wall, head bowed, arms wrapped around her knees. There was a bloody towel crumpled at her feet. Troy gave my shoulder a little squeeze, and Chad patted my back, and when they opened the door to take leave, the cacophony of the party flooded into the garage, but only for an instant.
Skirting a stack of boxes, two bicycles, and a surfboard, I crept carefully over to Lulu and sat beside her, not quite shoulder to shoulder. She didn’t lift her head. Her body convulsed with tiny sobs. I reached out to set an awkward hand on the back of her neck,
and when she didn’t recoil, I began to run my fingers soothingly through her mess of hair. When she didn’t object to that, I sidled closer until our shoulders were touching, just barely, and there was no sound except her muffled sobs, and the hum of the refrigerator, and the faint echoes of a party. In this manner we sat for a minute, or an hour. I could’ve sat there forever, grazing shoulders, touching her hair, getting drunk on her anguish. When she finally leaned into me, I felt like a giant, a benevolent God.
Eventually Lulu lifted her head just a little, and I placed two fingers beneath her chin and tilted her face up into the sickly light. I saw the gash on her face, running from her nostril to her cheekbone like a bloody zipper, and I could have kissed it.
Lulu turned her face away. “Don’t.”
I tried to turn her face back, but she wouldn’t let me. I tried to touch her hair again.
“Stop.”
But I persisted.
Lulu pulled away and slid over, so that our shoulders were no longer touching.
A cold hand gripped my heart. “I’m trying to help, you crazy bitch,” I said.
She didn’t say anything. Neither of us said anything for a while. She crossed and uncrossed her arms, and wouldn’t look at me.
“You’ve got the wrong idea about me,” Lulu said, at last.
“Is this about kissing Kathleen? Because if this is about kissing Kathleen, seriously, I couldn’t—”
“No. It’s not. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. That’s not why I—I just wanted to see you.”
I slid over, bit by infinitesimal bit, until our shoulders were grazing once more. “Are you okay?”
Lulu smiled faintly. “Am I ever okay?”
“You used to be okay, Lu.”
“Don’t,” she said.
“But, what about—?”
“Stop,” she said, placing a finger on my lips. “Let’s not.”
I knew I had to let it go or I risked losing the delicious graze of her shoulder, the ecstasy of being wanted.
“So, are you okay?”
“I’ve behaved badly, William. Very badly.”
“It’s all right.”
“It’s not. I was awful to Troy. I was awful to all of them. You’re right, I’m a crazy bitch.”
“Why do you do it to yourself, Lu?”
She turned from me. “Because I get angry.”
“At yourself ?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Absently, she traced a sideways figure eight in the oily dust on the side of the cooler, and promptly obliterated it with the sleeve of her dress. “At everything, I guess. At the way everything works. At all the things I can’t control, all the things I wish I could make different, all the things that are gone forever that I can’t bring back.”
“I know how that feels.”
“Maybe you do.”
But Lulu didn’t believe me, and I resented it.
“You know what Harry Pitts would say?”
“Of course I know what he’d say, he’d say the same thing my mom would say. He’d say that I do it to get attention, that it’s some kind of stupid cry for help.”
“Well?”
“Well, it’s not true. I don’t want attention. I’d rather be invisible.”
“I’m sure glad you’re not,” I said.
Lulu turned away from me again, toward the dusty cooler with her scratched-out figure eight.
“We should clean that cut up, Lu. It’s probably not so bad, really.”
“It’s not.”
I took her hand in mine, and she didn’t pull it away. I gave it a little squeeze, and my blood went all bubbly like champagne.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.
“Of course.”
Ever so gently, with the pad of my thumb, I traced the incision on her cheek until Lulu said it tickled. Then she rested her head on my shoulder, and my heart beat triplets, and the smell of her hair filled my lungs like alder smoke and lilies and newly mown grass. When I nestled my nose into the crook of her neck and gave her a little nibble, she let go a sigh that turned into a groan, like she’d been holding it in her whole life.
“What’s going to happen to me when you go away?” I said.
“Good things, William Miller. The things you deserve.”
“What about you? What’s going to happen to you?”
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.”
I leaned into the crook of her neck once more, but this time she pulled away, and released my hand, and rose to her feet.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“What’re you gonna tell Big Bill and Willow?”
“The truth.”
But Lulu never told Big Bill and Willow the truth about her cheek. And knowing what I know now, I don’t see why she would have, or should have. She showed them the truth, again and again. She was the truth. That should have been enough.
The Big Fat Deal
The day Lulu left for college, we all helped her load up the old van, cramming its fuzzy orange confines full of beanbags and boxes of books, baskets of paper, Hefty bags bursting with clothing, and, of course, her yellow, daisy-dappled footlocker, a little dented but otherwise none the worse for wear than the day that Big Bill first carried it up the stairs of the Pico house.
“Watch your speed,” cautioned Big Bill. “I don’t know how much that old van can take.”
“I will.”
“Honey, call when you get there, promise?”
“I will.”
“If you get tired on the road, pull over,” instructed Big Bill.
“Okay, I will.”
“And don’t you dare drive straight through.”
“I won’t.”
“Stop in Redding,” said Big Bill.
“Okay,” said Lulu.
“Redding sucks,” said Doug.
“You suck,” said Ross.
“Shut up, ass-face.”
“You shut up, you musclehead!”
“Faggot.”
“Throwback.”
“You two, enough!” said Big Bill.
“We love you, Sweetie. Please be careful,” said Willow.
“I love you guys, too.”
And then everybody stood around a little awkwardly for a half minute or so, until Big Bill, sensing my need, it seemed, for the first time in his life, mobilized the troops.
“Well, let’s let these two say their good-byes.”
And so they dispersed. Ross headed straight for Santa Monica Boulevard, presumably to smoke cloves and fraternize with his invisible friend. Doug headed for the backyard, where two days prior he’d dangled a forty-pound punching bag from the limb of a lemon tree. When he hit the bag with any force, lemons rained down, bonking him on the head. But he never moved it. Willow and Big Bill made their way slowly to the house, Willow walking backward with a pout on her face. Glancing back over his shoulder on his way in, Big Bill looked a little worried. Once inside, Willow lingered before the kitchen window, as though she were doing dishes, watching our proceedings at the curb.
“Here,” said Lulu, producing a Polaroid from the glove compartment and presenting me with it. “I found this going through my stuff.”
It was a photograph of Lulu and me at Cabazon, standing before Dinny the brontosaurus. I could intimate the photographer, just barely, in the form of Big Bill’s ghostly reflection in the gift shop window. Lulu and I were ten years old. Lulu had the red ring from a cherry popsicle around her mouth, and was wearing oversized sunglasses. I was squinting, pre–Martian glasses, but smiling ear to ear in my World Gym shirt from Uncle Cliff, the one with the gorilla holding up the world. On that particular afternoon, Ross had puked in the van on the drive out, and blamed it on Big Bill’s macaroni salad. Doug had dropped a nickel down the heating vent. An
d Lulu had let me hold her hand in the very back seat, and patiently explained to me how sometimes Neptune’s orbit, because it was shaped funny, was actually outside of Pluto’s.
“I think that’s about the happiest I ever was,” she said, and wiped her eyes. She smiled sweetly. “Please take care of yourself, William Miller.” She reached out and held my hand once more, and gave it a little squeeze.
Without another word she circled the van, climbed in, fired it up, and as she pulled away from the curb she did not recede, but only loomed larger.
An hour later I went to work at Fatburger. Lulu was gone, and I was consigned to wearing a paper visor and asking some guy with a cold sore whether he wanted fat fries or skinny fries with his Big Fat Deal. The future seemed unachievable. Willow once told me that as long as a person knew they were in despair, they weren’t really in despair. I didn’t see what difference it made, but it was something I kept in mind over the course of the next couple months, as I battered onion rings and bagged fistfuls of napkins. I knew I was in despair, so I must not be.
August 2, 1987
Lulu called today. She got a job already at Starbucks, wherever that is. Some café, I guess. Lulu doesn’t even drink coffee. She’s not going to declare a major because she can’t think of anything she wants to be. I asked her if she remembered how she wanted to be an airplane pilot a long time ago, and she said no, she couldn’t remember. She doubts she’ll ever want to be something. Seattle’s okay, she said. Babybusters (that’s what she calls people our age) are moving there from all over the place. I said it sounds like the Summer of Love, and she said she hopes not.
Big Bill and Doug made a habit of coming straight from the gym into Fatburger on the days I worked. They’d lumber in wearing their ass-hugging neoprene shorts, tank tops bursting at the seams. And every single time they lumbered in, my manager, Acne Scar Joe, would size them up, and without fail he’d say:
“Hey, Miller, what happened to you?”
It got funnier every time.
Big Bill and Doug would order Double Fatburgers with bacon and Swiss, and fat fries and skinny fries and cheese fries. And after they’d demolished those, they’d come back up and order Baby Fats and Kingburgers and chili cups.