The day Lulu left for college, we all helped her load up the old van, cramming its fuzzy orange con
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nes 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
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rst 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
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rst 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. And 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,
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red 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
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stfuls 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.
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 of
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cial: Ross was weird. But not as weird as I thought, because I
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nally 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 pro
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t,” 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 af
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liation, 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
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ckle, 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
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gured 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
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ne 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
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nally, 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
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nd my velveteen voice, my crackling words.
His Baby Fat was still poised halfway. “Well, what is it, son?”
And when I still couldn’t
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nd 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
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nally 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
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nally, 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,
fl
ip 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 middle of the lunch rush!”
“Somewhere else,” I said. “I don’t know.”