Love,
Lulu
P.S. Happy New Year! I know this is going to be a big year for you, Will! It won’t be long before your voice speaks to the whole world!
January 12, 1988
Dear Lulu,
I’ve written this letter a dozen times, so I am choosing my words carefully, every last one of them. First of all, I don’t know what ever gave you the idea I was “well-adjusted.” Jesus Christ, look at my handwriting! Well-adjusted people don’t write like this! Well-adjusted people don’t call their fathers Big Bill! Well-adjusted people don’t hate their own brothers! Well-adjusted people don’t
fi
ll notebooks full of fantasies about their stepsister! What you read in the bathroom was the very tip of the iceberg. So don’t think you’ve cornered the market on not being “well-adjusted,” Louisa Trudeau-Miller.
And don’t think you’re doing me any favors by being “honest,” either. It’s a little late for honesty,
when you’ve been pretending to
hate me for three years, only so you could admit you loved me one night when you got drunk and carved yourself up. Your honesty hurts even worse than your lying. It really helps me a lot to know about Dan the bass-playing bartender, it helps me to picture him slack-jawed and skinny and tattooed and about to kiss you. Especially since you yourself say he’s not as good as me. Thanks for the honesty! Oh, and by the way, I’m not going to break Troy’s heart for you, either. Troy’s about the only friend I’ve got. Sorry, but you’ll have to tell him about Dreamy Dan the Bass Playing Man yourself !
You’ll have to tell Troy you think he’s worthless and shallow yourself, just like you did that night in the bathroom, only this time really sock it to him, Lulu. Don’t leave him any hope.
I wish Big Bill had never met Willow, and that I never met you, or touched you, or kissed you, or dreamed of kissing you, or clutched your pillow to my face and smelled you every chance I got, or jotted down every lovely thing you ever said, or every lovely thing you ever did, or wore, or didn’t do, or dropped on the floor, and I wish I never cried knowing that I caused you suffering, or that I never made a deal with the devil for half my life just to be with you for a night, and I wish to God you weren’t my stepsister, so you couldn’t use it as an excuse to not love me back!
I hate you, Lulu, and I wish I could say it right to your scar face!
Will
P.S. Happy New Year (a little late)! Say hi to Dan!
And so after nearly three weeks of waf
fl
ing and agonizing over my approach, after a dozen mis
fi
res, and a dozen restless nights, this was the letter I
fi
nally sent off to Lulu by way of a reply, and for
fi
ve seconds afterward, it was exhilarating to think how deeply my words would cut her, and for
fi
ve seconds I basked in the genius of my own cruelty, and congratulated myself for not having pulled any punches, and not having tempered my hatred
with a single kind or concilia
tory word, and for
fi
ve seconds I felt that I had
fi
nally conquered Lulu.
It should be noted that no member of the Miller bodybuilding contingent could ever resist a mirror, or any other re
fl
ective surface.
When passing a mirror or a shop window, my father and Doug, and in earlier days Ross, would often pause for a full knee-to-shoulder inspection of their rippling personage. At the very least, they snuck a sidelong glance at their own visages as they lumbered by with their shoulders straight, their elbows back, and their Adam’s apples jutting out their necks like dorsal
fi
ns. This phenomenon is not unique to the Miller men—I’ve observed it to some degree in nearly all bodybuilders—but in the Millers it seemed to be pronounced. The closer it got to competition time, the more time Big Bill spent before the mirror. This was especially true of the Olympia, and especially in ’88.
As early as February, he spent upward o
f an hour a day in front of the
full-length mirror in the master bedroom, polishing his poses, looking for chinks in his own
fl
eshy armor. And that’s where I found him on Valentines Day, not three days after Willow had made it of
fi
cial that she was not returning to Santa Monica.
I was never a big proponent of Hallmark holidays, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little blue that particular Valentines Day. Lulu had been gone for six months, and I was living at home with absolutely zero romantic prospects, zero
fi
nancial prospects, and very little desire or energy to create either. School was still seven months off, Troy was living in Venice (I scarcely saw him anymore), and Acne Scar Joe was hounding me daily to come back to work at Fatburger. Somehow, Valentines Day just magni
fi
ed all of it.
As I stood in the doorway and watched Big Bill before the mirror, running through the very poses Willow had taught him as though it were the most normal thing in the world, I couldn’t help but wonder what was wrong with my father. How could he move on like that?
When he registered my presence in the mirror, he winked.
“How can you act so casual about it?” I said.
He did a front lat spread, smiling as though from the inside of a casket. “About what, Tiger?”
“What do you mean, about what? About losing Willow.”
Big Bill did a quarter turn with his upper body, and eased smoothly into a right bicep, trailing his left arm out behind him in a rooster tail so his upper body formed a backward
S
in pro
fi
le. “Who says I lost her?”
“Dad, what is your problem? Your wife left you. How can you just stand there
fl
exing your muscles? Aren’t you even going to
fi
ght for her?”
“I’m through with
fi
ghting, Tiger. From here on out, I’m just rolling with the punches.”
My father remained a mystery to me. Where was the wounded elephant? Where was the guy who didn’t know what to do with himself ? Had he
fi
nally arrived at a method by which grief could be converted into muscle mass like carbs? Was it as simple as consuming seven years of one’s life at a single sitting, and then adding two sets of incline presses, and maybe some crunches? Whatever the case, Willow’s departure seemed only to sharpen Big Bill’s focus.
Seven years had passed since he
fi
nished as high as fourth in the Olympia. At forty, the window was closing on his career, and with or without Willow, Big Bill was determined to take a
fi
nal summit run at Olympus in ’88. Though he’d failed even to qualif
y for Gothen
burg in ’87, where an impossibly ripped Lee Haney won his seventh, Big Bill remained steadfast in the b
elief (some might even argue de
lusion) that ’88 was his year to win the Olympia.
I had no expectation or any wish for the distinction of a matching sweat suit on this occasion, nor did I harbor any secret hope that I would get the nod come oiling time. But I did watch Big Bill’s ’88 run from a distance, with the nagging interest of a retired coach, nursing some bitter misgivings for the modern game.
This time Big Bill altered his entire approach to conditioning. He began sculpting an entirely more subtle
fi
gure. Despite his rippling girth, and his artistry in the realm of posing, proportion had ever remained his Achilles’ heel. Big Bill was top-heavy. His biceps, pecs, and shoulders were as formidable as any the IFBB had ever seen, but his legs were puny by comparison. He was shaped like a drumstick standing on end, a fact that might well have cost him a dozen bids at Mr. Olympia.
In ’88 Big Bill was determined to change all of that. Sundays, formerly a domestic benchmark in our restless household deemed “at home day” (usually occasioned by Big Bill eating an entire ham in front of the television set as his children came and went), were now devoted exclusively to lower-body work at Gold’s, with an emphasis on quads and calves. So, if Big Bill was suffering in the months after Willow’s
fl
ight, I didn’t see it, and that’s the truth, because he practically lived at Gold’s Gym.
Acne Scar Joe
fi
nally succeeded in luring me back to Fatburger. I was of
fi
cially moving backwards.
“We need you, Miller,” he told me in the parking lot one afternoon after he’d called me in to plead his case once and for all. “You may be a pussy, but nobody handles the lunch rush like you. These high school kids are always fucking up. Or their parents are calling in to say they can’t come to work because they’ve got a fucking
track
meet, or some shit. We need somebody older, more responsible. We need
you
, Miller.”
Somehow, I was unmoved by this plea.
“Look,” he said. “Let’s be honest here. I know what you’re thinking. It’s a nowhere job, right? Flipping burgers. It doesn’t exactly make the world go round, right? But just remember, Miller: In the Soviet Union, college professors and aerospace engineers are quitting their jobs to work at McDonald’s. Doesn’t that mean
anything
to you, Miller?”
“That they don’t pay professors much in the Soviet Union?”
“Besides that! Look, there’s a whole goddamn world of people to feed out there—be they Russian, or Japs, or Greasers, or all these fags and yuppies right here in West Hollywood. They’re all people. Even the fags. They all gotta eat. You think you can’t make a difference, Miller? Let me tell you a little story. You ever hear of honey mustard dressing? Of course you have. Did you know that
this
Fatburger,
right here
, was the
fi
rst restaurant on Santa Monica between Martel and Fairfax to serve honey mustard? Yeah. And you know what else?
We were the
fi
rst ones to serve it on the side. That’s right. Now every bitch from Rodeo Drive to Los Feliz with a stick up her ass, in every yuppie bistro in town, is ordering honey mustard on the side. Goddamn Salt-N-Pepa are ordering it that way. Gorbachev’s ordering it that way! Fatburger needs you, Miller. Are you gonna turn your back on that?”
Acne Scar Joe should have been a recruiter. He had managed to work me up into a patriotic frenzy over hamburgers. I was practically ready to go to war for hamburgers if necessary. But mostly I needed the money, and Fatburger must have been serious about needing me, because they bumped me up to $6.15 an hour, a wage that might have afforded me a rented closet in Moscow. Ever the pragmatist, I opted to stay at home. The rent was only $150, a nominal fee, roughly enough to keep Big Bill in short supply of protein powder for about a week, but a fee nonetheless. I wasn’t
living
at home, I was
renting
at home, a distinction that afforded me a shred of dignity.
The high point of spring was breaking Troy’s heart. How I managed to wait that long, I don’t know.
We were bumming around the beach south of Venice one foggy morning in May. Troy was already a little mopey about something, so the timing couldn’t have been better.
“His name’s Dan,” I said. “He’s a great guy from what she told me.”
Troy dug some sand up with the toe of his shoe and shook it off, and looked out toward the surf, but didn’t say anything.
“Lulu says he’s hot,” I said. “I guess he’s in some band that just got signed. All I know is, she seems pretty serious about him.”
For all I really knew, Lulu had dumped Dan months ago, but it was a moot point anyway, because goddamn Troy took it like a prince. I almost felt bad for rubbing it in.
“Good for her,” he said, tracing a little squiggly in the sand with his toe. “That’s great. I’m glad she found someone.”
“You’re serious? That’s it? You’re glad she found someone?”
“Well, yeah. I am, actually. She deserves it, don’t you think?”
“I guess so. I don’t know, does she?”
“Yeah, I think she does.”
I drew my own squiggly in the sand with the toe of my shoe. “But what about you guys?”
Troy reached down, picked up a bottle cap, and winged it sidearm toward the surf. It caught some wind and sailed nearly straight up in a steep arc and then died in midair, and
fl
oated back to earth not
fi
fteen feet from him. “Pfff. What about us?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
I suppose Troy was a bigger man than me for knowing when to concede, but that’s not really saying much, is it? After all, what kind of measure is giving up?