Mother Mary and Janet Bergram were called into the meeting at the end for a recap and to sign off on any action or nonaction that would be taken. Mary’d made a quick call and invited Janet to attend as a “friend.” She could tell that Janet had much worse, legit shit to attend to today as well, her proper caseload as usual in the sixties. After a few minutes with Dr. Jenkins, Janet and Mary agreed with Pearl that there seemed to be no meat here, nothing to be done but move on. No harm, no foul. Satisfaction all around.
They all got up to shake hands. “Much ado about nothing,” Pearl said. “You know, if anyone got victimized here, I think it’s that Josue kid, ’cause that girl was a tower of bitch.”
Mary stifled a laugh; that was Jackie in Pearl right there, balls of steel. The principal was unamused. “We appreciate your input, Pearl, though as policy we discourage the use of female-derogatory terms, even if the user of said terms is female. My door is always open to a member of the student body or his/her/hir/zir/its/their family,” Dr. Jenkins droned, as if reading a cue card, a futuristic, almost lifelike, PC robot. He ushered them out into the hallway, his guiding hand hovering above their shoulders, but never making contact that could be construed as physically inappropriate or emotionally condescending. Then he pressed his palms together in front of his lips, bowed slightly in a vaguely Asian manner that he hoped wasn’t racist, and receded, silently as a mist, back into his office.
“What the what was that? Zir?” Mary asked in the hallway, removing from her lapel the “she/her” pronoun sticker that Jenkins’s assistant had asked her to fill in before joining the meeting. “It’s ze/hir, not ze/zir.” Janet Bergram explained the new gender-neutral pronouns and nomenclature. “Ahhhhhhhh, I think I get it. Hir is like a him/her combo. That’s cool, but complicated. Do you get it, Pearl?” Mary asked.
“Yes, my cisgendered LGBTQ progenitor,” Pearl answered. “It’s not complicated. I get it/she/him/hir/they/them.” Mary laughed, though she had a sudden pang of loss for the unironic girl Pearl was when she was ten. Where had that kid gone to be replaced by this flashing blade, this serpent’s tooth?
Pearl had the rest of her classes left, so she said goodbye to her mom, who went back to Equinox, and Janet Bergram, who went back to San Bernardino where the kids really needed her help. Pearl meandered back to class to fake that she was struggling to learn things she already knew. She was mildly irritated that the confab with Jenkins had made her miss her “Introduction to the Psychology of Mythology” class, which was really the only hour of school in which she had any interest. She had learned nothing of theories of the human mind in the desert because Bronson was adamantly anti-psychological; he was more of a Marxist who believed in the struggle of capital and classes, not psyches.
In this class, they discussed Greek gods as if they were an early version of a map of the psyche, which fascinated her precisely because it was pre-Christian, pre-monotheism, and pre-Bronson. The one-god setup started to appear so stingy to her, and limiting, and unrelatable. And no fun. Life was messier than that. Why not have a whole cast of deities? Zeus, Hera, Eros—Id, Ego, Superego. Persephone and Hades—beauty and the death principle. She really dug it. Started to make the beginnings of applying it to her life and experiences. She liked it so much, she was finding it difficult to get a D. And she’d missed it today ’cause of that stupid meeting.
At lunch, Josue found Pearl in the cafeteria, and asked if he could sit down with her. She was alone, as usual.
She said, “It’s a free country.”
“Thanks for this morning,” he said as he sat. “I heard you were like, my advocate. So, thanks for exercising your white privilege on my behalf.”
“What?”
“I’m just being a dick. Thank you is all.”
“Don’t thank me. I just told the truth. You didn’t do anything.”
“I know, but I did walk into the girl’s bathroom. That was stupid.”
“Yeah, that was stupid.”
“But, your pipes. Dat voice dough.”
“Yeah, you said.”
“I sing, too.”
“Congratulations.”
“I sing old stuff too. Musical theater.”
“That’s where you sing?”
“No, that’s what I sing, the style. But I also do contemporary, like Hamilton, Evan Hansen. I played Burr in Hamilton last year and Evan Hansen in Dear Evan Hansen.”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Haha.”
“I’m not kidding, kid, I don’t know what ‘musical theater’ is.”
“It’s a play with music, where the characters speak but also sing.”
“That makes no sense. Why would people just sing instead of talk?”
“Like opera. But not boring like opera.”
“Why didn’t you say opera, then?”
“’Cause it’s not opera. We’re doing West Side Story this year. They wanna do one that’s like updated and relevant for today with the situation at the border and all the current drama between whites and Latinos. They think it’s relevant again, whatever, but the music is so awesome. Stephen Sondheim/Leonard Bernstein.”
“If you say so.”
“Spielberg is doing a movie of it.”
“Who’s Spielberg?”
“You’re funny. It’s based on Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, you’ve heard of him?”
“Yes.”
“You’d kill as Maria.”
“What do you mean ‘as’?”
“Playing. Playing the part. You playing with me?” Josue didn’t know Pearl wasn’t kidding. He didn’t know her full story. Didn’t know she was half feral. None of the schoolkids did.
“Who’s Maria?” she asked.
“The female lead—the Juliet.”
Pearl nodded, and then inhabited the young Capulet from perfect memory in flawless iambic pentameter: “‘What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet; / So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, / Retain that dear perfection which he owes / Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name; / And for that name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself.’”
If Josue had been hit by a lightning bolt to hear Pearl’s singing voice emanating from the girl’s bathroom, now the impossible had happened twice, he was struck again. For a few seconds, without preparation, without seeming to try or care, she had transformed herself into Juliet Capulet in the Rancho Cucamonga High School cafeteria.
“Your mouth is open, buddy boy,” she said, definitely back to being Pearl.
“Are you for real?” Josue could barely manage words at this point.
“What kind of question is that?”
Josue swallowed and blinked stupidly, then got back to why he’d sat with her. “So Maria’s the female lead in love with Tony. I think you’re fucking with me. I think you know it.”
“Who’s Tony?”
“Me. The cool thing is—the way they wanna be woke is—I’d be playing the white guy, Tony, and I’m Mexican, and if you played Maria, who’s actually Puerto Rican, you’d be playing it as a … what are you?”
“Not Puerto Rican.”
“What are you?”
“I’m half my mother and half my father. I’m me. What does it matter?”
“It matters.”
“I’m Mormon. I guess, if I’m anything—a rose by any other name.”
“Mormon Puerto Rican and Mexican white guy. Perfect. They call it casting against type.”
“So I’m in love with you?”
“No. Your character is in love with my character, and vice versa.”
“You can sing?”
“Yeah, I told you that.”
“Let me hear you.”
“Right here?”
“Sure.”
“No way.”
“No way, Josue. Why not?”
“It’s totally in public.”
“Dude, you ran into a girl’s bathroom and you’re scared to sing here in
the lunchroom?”
Josue accepted the challenge and began to sing “Maria.” At first, Pearl wanted him to stop ’cause it was embarrassing in front of everyone, and all the kids kind of stopped eating to see the Josue show, but then he had a good voice, a really good voice, and the music, the melody and the lyrics, were so enchanting, she’d never really heard anything like it before, and she didn’t want it to stop. She let him go all the way to the end. A concert for one. She wanted to sing back to him, to join, but she didn’t know the words. She wanted to. When he finished, a few kids shouted, “Josue!” and some even clapped. Josue took a few big, self-deprecating bows to the room, and sat down again.
“That was pretty good,” Pearl said.
“Thanks. Will you come to auditions after school today? Will you audition for Maria? You’ll get it. I promise you. You blow everyone here away.”
“Maybe,” Pearl said, figuring, Why not pass the rest of my time here in Hell singing beautiful music. It wouldn’t get in the way, wouldn’t mess up her master plan to get back to the desert and Bronson.
23.
DEUCE DID HIS HOMEWORK. He contacted the National Labor Relations Board to see what preparatory steps were necessary to unionize BurgerTown. He needed to create an organizing committee—well, that was him. Done. He had to come up with an issues program—he liked the “Fight for $15” movement, and he wanted decent health-care coverage for those not on their parents’ plan. Done. Third, the NLRB rep told him, he’d have to create buzz, an excitement for the union. Deuce was an electric kid, he was a power line, he could buzz.
He armed himself with facts and figures. He’d been pigeonholing and isolating co-workers in intense one-on-one rap sessions for weeks, listening and proselytizing, educating, always educating. He knew exactly where it was okay for him to have these discussions—in the break room, or in off-work sites. He would do things the right way. His eyes had a new light in them. Mary thought maybe he was in love, and she asked him if he had a girlfriend. He said no, he was just involved in some exciting work stuff.
“Exciting hamburger stuff?” she asked absently.
“Exactly right, exciting hamburger stuff,” he replied with a smile.
After he felt he’d talked enough to the BurgerTown workers individually and had sufficient interest generally to call a meeting, he organized one behind Dellavalle’s back. He knew that Dellavalle, if alerted, might fight the union drive with the time-honored yet illegal weapons of the employer—offering raises and incentives off the books, threatening to close up shop because a union would break the business financially, and threatening to fire someone. But Dellavalle was still very fond of Deuce, didn’t suspect a thing, and Deuce knew how to play on his boss’s vanity and turpitude.
Deuce suspected the real enemies here were the apathy of the student workers on the one hand (they were gonna quit this job in a matter of months anyway—why make waves?), and fear on the part of the adult Hispanic workers (if they got fired, they had no options). Maybe they had concerns over documentation, real or imagined. There were horror stories under Trump that cowed everybody in the margins. Fear and apathy, Deuce intuited, were powerfully resistant to logic. He wasn’t going to rationalize his way to heaven, and he knew from his father, from Joseph Smith, and from Eugene Debs, that righteous passion was contagious. He knew the Greek origins of the word enthusiasm meant literally to have God in you. Zeal was just another word for God.
He needed 30 percent of the workers to pledge their unionization support in order to bring a petition to the NLRB. He worked fast because he knew if Dellavalle caught wind of it, he’d try to sabotage the drive any way he could with lies and scare tactics, to threaten that the union takes more out of a paycheck than taxes—tried and true coercion.
That’s what he was up against the night he got the entire staff together in the BurgerTown parking lot. Bottom line, when it came time for a vote, there were only twenty-five employees, so all he needed were those eight yes votes. He prayed for a moment, asking God for clarity, and the tongue of Aaron, the ability to inspire and the honor to be of service to his fellow man. Then he opened his mouth and spoke extemporaneously for twenty straight minutes without pause on the inherent dignity of man, the right of a man or a woman to dignified and fairly compensated work, the unfairness of capitalism, and the mercy of Christ. He knew his shit inside and out. He was possessed by a holy spirit, the spirit of God the Father and Bronson the father, the spirit of Tom Joad. Zeal. He did not hem or haw, he did not say uh or um. He imagined his father in the audience, pumping his fist, shouting approval; and that gave him courage. After fifteen minutes with barely a breath, he looked out in that dark parking lot beneath that stupid BurgerTown sign and saw grown men and women crying, crying with him, crying tears of hope and tears of joy.
When he had finished, the entire parking lot erupted into wild applause, chanting, “Union Sí! Union Sí! Union Sí!” and “Sally! Sally! Sally!” Deuce didn’t feel spent; he felt he could’ve gone on like that for hours. He scanned the little crowd, making eye contact with each co-worker, the recognition and respect flowing back and forth evenly, until his eyes fell upon a man he hadn’t seen when he’d begun his speech. A man clapping loudest of all, with the biggest tears running down his face. His father, Bronson Powers. Deuce made to go to him, but he got a little waylaid; he shook a couple hands and received hugs, a kiss and a blessing from Jaime, who, despite being fired, was there on crutches. By the time he got to where he’d seen his dad standing, it began to dawn on Deuce that the old man had never been there at all, that he’d just wanted him there, needed his presence there in his mind. For there was no one. If the man had been there, he was gone now without a trace, vanished like a holy ghost.
24.
TWENTY SECONDS INTO Pearl’s audition for the lead in Rancho Cucamonga High School’s spring production of West Side Story, Mr. Bartholomew, the head of the theater department and director, knew he had just met the girl to play Maria. He imagined the guardian presences of Bernstein and Sondheim tap him on the shoulder, point, and sagely nod. He felt like whomever the guy was who first saw a young Meryl audition. Because it wasn’t only her voice, which was Broadway ready, it was her acting, or rather inhabiting. She became a credible Maria in a moment, without preparation, as soon as she opened her mouth. She went from a sullen, bored, though beautiful seventeen-year-old girl to something as incandescent and timeless as Natalie Wood, in the time it took to count in the song.
Sure, she could use some help with details and technique, clean certain things up. She was in her salad days, green, but the immediate transformation had been seamless and complete. It was a magic trick. He felt blessed. He hadn’t seen a transformation like that since childhood Communion when the priest waved his hand, and cheap red wine and an unsalted cracker transubstantiated into Christ’s blood and body. Maybe, he second-guessed, he’d been waiting so long for something like this in this boring little town that he was overreacting. Well, so be it. He would overreact. He was a drama queen after all, always had been, always would be. He was going to be the man who discovered Pearl Powers. Pearl, like Janis Joplin. A ready-made star handle. She wouldn’t even have to change her name.
When she’d finished, he stood and slow-clapped, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “It’s yours, Pearl. All yours. You can play Tony, too, if you want. Sorry, Josue. Play everybody. Pearl, baby, you’re the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I just died and went to heaven. It’s you and Josue. My job is done. I’ll just sit back, watch it happen, and take all the credit.”
The next couple weeks, Pearl threw herself into rehearsal. Even though she had those walls up, that glum safety was nothing compared with the spirit that entered her while she sang and acted. She’d found the first inklings of a calling. This assuredly complicated any fallback to Agadda da Vida, would seem to preclude a return even, but she didn’t allow her mind to go there. Like any seventeen-year-old kid, she lived from day to day, in
the moment, and the moments on the rehearsal stage, looking into Josue/Tony’s eyes, watching the Jets get up to their shenanigans with Officer Krupke, were the best she’d ever had. She began to open up to Mr. Bartholomew, and to Josue. She really enjoyed the esprit de corps of the whole acting troupe; she’d found the subset of high school, of life, where she belonged.
Though Pearl was probably about two years his elder, Josue took it upon himself to be her mentor and teach her about the world after 1969. He was proud to have this beautiful, older girl—a woman, she seemed to him, with a mysterious past—under his wing. Pearl had confided in him the borders of her education and experience, that she was a pop culture blank slate, and he had devised a crash course in music and movies for her, some of which he’d be seeing and hearing for the first time himself. She liked Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson. Jaws made her happy she’d grown up in the desert. Bagdad Cafe reminded her of home, and she learned to sing the beautiful, haunting Jevetta Steele theme song, “Calling You”—“A desert road from Vegas to nowhere / some place better than where you’ve been.” She loved loved loved E.T. and 13 Going On 30 and Last Tango in Paris (Brando was a god, but she turned it off before the end as it made her uncomfortable to watch with Josue). Josue played her Encino Man because he thought she would relate to a character from the distant past being dropped into the modern-day Valley. She laughed. He called her “Encino Woman.”
She secretly watched to the end of the credits in some action films, which weren’t really her thing, looking for the name Bronson Powers among the stunt crew. She was amazed and proud to find it a number of times, most thrillingly in that cult classic (Josue’s favorite), the prophetic “Rowdy” Roddy Piper sci-fi vehicle, They Live. Bronson had had a whole other existence before her, an exciting life. She began to wonder if there would ever be a record, like a movie credit, of her anywhere, if her name would ever be written down for some future person to read and wonder about. Or would she disappear unseen and unappreciated like one of her beloved desert five-spots, which bloom and die in invisible obscurity? She wrote her name on a slip of paper and gave it to Josue to put in his wallet, like an autograph.
Truly Like Lightning Page 25
