When we returned to Lulu’s apartment, I put the Prozac back in the cigar box. The first step in disarming Lulu, I reasoned, was to quit exerting my will, to quit pushing and pulling at her fate and let it decide itself. I would concede victory to Troy and the rest of the normal world. Then, under the guise of normalcy, I’d infiltrate this world. I’d woo Lulu with my evenness. And so when Troy and Lulu wanted Chinese food, I acquiesced. When they wanted to see a movie, I acquiesced. Every time Troy wanted to sit next to Lulu, I acquiesced. I said only positive things, and thus I hardly spoke. And bit by bit, as the week wore on, Lulu began to let her defenses down. On occasion, she even went out of her way, circling the table at The Moon Temple, or stepping over Troy’s knees at the Guild, to sit next to me. One night she clutched my hand while we were walking down the Ave toward Dante’s, where Dan and Lulu used to get drunk with the guy who played Mike Brady on TV. And not only did she hold my hand, but on our way up the stairs she even spanked my bottom.
And once Lulu was defenseless, I began to speak again, and I spoke in lovely metaphors and similes about sparrows and sandbags and hulking brute machine works rusting behind trapezoidal chain-link fences. I spun metaphors about snowflakes and wormwood and just about everything you could think of that wasn’t the thing itself, because Lulu, like myself, understood the world only as metaphor.
The Second Loneliest Number
Troy flew out on a Friday morning while Lulu was at work. I gave him a lift to the airport. The day was glorious, brimming with brilliant light. The colors were popping, especially the blues and yellows. Everything looked crisp and defined, separate from everything else.
Troy kept thanking me for the ride.
“Really, man. Thanks for the ride. I owe you big time.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said.
“You’re a pal, Will. You always pull through.”
I felt a little pang of guilt. “It’s cool,” I said.
“Seriously, I appreciate it.”
“Okay, okay, I know you do.”
After the third such outpouring, I distinctly began to feel as though Troy were thanking me for something other than the ride. Like maybe he was apologizing for something. Something like fucking Lulu four nights in a row while I lay pining on the Blob. Or possibly he was entreating me to undertake some course of action on his behalf, like giving up on Lulu.
“Well, cool man, thanks again, really. So, I’ll see you in a couple days, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Remind Lulu to call me tomorrow.”
“Will do.”
“About the apartments.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks,” he said. “And tell her good-bye for me. And thank her.”
“Right.”
The moment I dropped Troy at the curb in front of the United terminal, I began planning a celebration for that very evening: a grand feast for two, designed to thrill the ten-year-old heart of Lulu, because that, I decided, was the key to possessing her. That was where her will lay, unencumbered by the intellect. For five years I’d been trying to get Lulu back in that Westwood garage, when all the time I should’ve been aiming at her ten-year-old heart, simple and true.
I bought canned cranberries at Food Giant, the jellied kind, and I bought marshmallows and lemon Jell-O and baked beans and powdered mashed potatoes. I bought mac and cheese and ice cream and Fritos and old-fashioned rolls, like the kind that came with our school lunches, and bread stuffing, and pudding—in short, every high-fructose, artificially colored, culinary comfort that ever nourished us in our youth. I almost bought wine, but thought better of it, and bought chocolate milk instead. And I bought two bunches of gerbera daisies—one pink and one yellow.
Like a mad scientist, I ransacked the cupboards for skillets and pots and casserole plates, and for two hours I mixed and stirred and whipped, and heated and covered and cooled, and washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, and spread it all out banquet-style on the table, until it looked like an Appalachian wedding reception, with garish mounds of food, red and orange and yellow food. I made a Matterhorn of mashed potatoes, a caldron of baked beans, a quivering brick of lemon Jell-O. It was beautiful and horrendous.
When Lulu came home from work and gazed upon the Technicolor feast spread out before her, she was awed, and I could almost hear her ten-year-old heart singing.
“Nooo way,” she said. “This is amazing. Oh, this is perfectly amazing. I can’t believe you did this. Of course you did this! An authentic Miller buffet.”
“Minus the lamb shanks,” I noted. “Everything here requires silverware.”
“Oh, Will. This is so perfect. This is everything we ever—”
“I know. All for twenty-three bucks.”
She gave me a big hug, and her hair smelled like the flower shop, like lilacs and roses, and hugging her, I felt for once that I, William Miller Jr., weak-eyed vegetarian, might actually be nice to come home to.
When Lulu sat down at the table, she tucked her napkin in her lap like a big girl, and held her knife like a lady as she dissected her lemon Jell-O into even squares. She dug a deep crater in her mashed potatoes and filled it with baked beans until they were bubbling out like lava. She sliced off even rounds of jellied cranberries and halved them and cut open her roll, and placed a wedge of jellied fruit inside, and parked the roll on her plate. Then she took a handful of Fritos and did a most amazing thing. She set them end to end and fashioned a roller coaster around the perimeter of her plate, until her dinner looked like an amusement park, and she smiled. Then she moved her mouth in ten different directions at once, and she said, almost like a ventriloquist:
“Rook! Itsa Gord-zira!” Then she began to trample the amusement park beneath her walking fingers like Godzilla. The roller coaster buckled and the Jell-O squares quivered as Godzilla marched right up the side of the mountain and into the bubbling caldera, where he sank with a chorus of agonized wails into the steaming beans. Then Lulu wiped her hands off and ate a bite of lemon Jell-O and smiled.
“This is lovely,” she said.
“I’m glad.”
We ate together mostly in silence. Once Lulu giggled with her mouth full of beans, and once, while her mouth was full of lemon Jell-O, she smiled, and a little yellow blob squirted out of her mouth and stuck to the table. That started her laughing. And soon she couldn’t stop herself from laughing, until she actually shot a little blob of Jell-O out her nose onto my plate, and that made her laugh so hard that she started gagging, but even while she was gagging she was laughing. Finally, she managed to put the brakes on her laughing, and after a few staggering breaths she swallowed and heaved a sigh, and tears filled her eyes, and just as she was catching her breath, she began to sob, and she was out of breath again. After she stopped sobbing, she giggled a few times, and some yellow phlegm oozed out of her left nostril, and that stopped her from giggling. She blew her nose into her napkin and smiled. “So much for mood stabilizers,” she said.
“Mood stabilizers? You mean, you’re—”
“Was,” she sniffled. Then suddenly she brightened. “But things are so much clearer now. Tonight I feel normal again, not normal normal, but for me normal, I mean. Tonight is really lovely, William. I’m glad there’s tonight.” She wiped the leftover tears from her eyes. “Pass the stuffing,” she said.
And after we stuffed ourselves, we sprawled out gurgling on the Blob and drank valerian tea, and watched Murder, She Wrote with the sound off, and made up our own dialogue for Angela Lansbury. Then we played Crazy Eights atop the yellow footlocker, and Lulu won every time, and I was glad. I petted Esmeralda, and she purred and circled and finally curled up in my lap, and Lulu said, “Duth wittow kitty wuv William? Duth wittow kitty sweep in William’s wap? ” And I continued to pet Esmeralda until she purred like an air compressor, and I said, “William wuvs wittow kitty thooo much.”
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Lulu leaned in and kissed Esmeralda behind her ear. “Sometimes I think I’d like to be a mother.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I’m not saying I think it would be easy, but I think it would make the rest of life easier. Family dinners, all that stuff. The ritualism. I guess that’s what home is. How can you have that without kids?”
“Pets, I guess.”
“It’s not the same. Pets don’t grow up, they just get older. Sometimes I wish Dad didn’t sell the house, you know? Because even with everyone gone it was—oh, but let’s not talk about that,” she sighed.
So I told her about Eugene Gobernecki, instead, and his obsession with cooking ducks, and I aped his dialect to comic effect: Come to my house, we cook a duck, we make party! Lulu nearly peed her pants laughing, and I told her about Eugene’s dream of building an American hot dog house in China, and how I was starting to believe that he would someday make it happen, because he was already managing a Fatburger and an apartment complex. Lulu told me that in high school Shannon Stovel said she wanted to either be surgeon general or the wife of somebody very rich, and how she’d heard from Troy that Shannon had married the son of the CEO of some big pharmaceutical company, and she told me how Kathleen Topping, who always wanted to start her own cosmetics line, was married too, except she hadn’t married anybody rich, she married a tattoo artist from Long Beach, and she was a junkie. I told Lulu I’d probably never get married, and Lulu told me she wouldn’t either.
“Oh, but let’s talk about something nice,” she said.
And so we talked about Bigfoot and cherry Popsicles and Saint Thomas Aquinas. We talked about heirloom tomatoes and morphic resonance, about lemurs and glaciers and strange lights in the night sky. We talked about everything that happened before the big bang, and everything that happened after we closed our eyes at night. When I talked to Lulu, she listened, and when I knew she was listening with her heart, I said:
“Blink squint. Logarithmically speaking, squint. We are not exponents, nor even real numbers, squint. Blink. You are a stop sign, and I am a dog chasing its tail, squint. Suppose you and I were to invent a new math? Squint.”
“Do it again, slower,” she said.
I said it again, slower. And I watched Lulu’s face as she figured the blinks and the vowels and the consonants and the periods according to our ancient custom, and like a kiss, the word began to take shape on her lips.
And the word was always, because always is the shortest way to say I love you, and also the longest.
And after that, a kiss. Just one. Like just one Temple of Artemis, or just one moon, or just one dying moment. And when our lips separated, our phantom kiss remained, and Lulu took me by the hand, and we rose to our feet. And Lulu pulled the overhead string, and the Chinese lantern bobbed in the dark behind us as we headed for the crack of light that signaled Lulu’s bedroom door.
Everything had a supernatural glow about it. The room was illuminated by strings of soft blue Christmas lights festooned between ledges and windowsills and door frames. It was not the same room. Everything in it had been transformed, everything had a new significance. If ever old Hume rang true, it was this night. The future simply wasn’t conforming to the past. At one point I was completely outside my body and I observed myself belly down on the bed with my face in Lulu’s lap. But even as I was outside my body, I was still inside my senses, because I could smell her, and the smell of her lap was the fertile smell of wet earth.
Ever so softly, as softly as if I’d been whispering a prayer, I blew on the lovely folds of her blossom, until goose flesh began to rise along her inner thigh, and Lulu writhed and groaned and arched her back until she could no longer contain herself, and forcefully she took hold of me behind the ears and pulled my face into her, and I began to kiss and nibble her there, and soon her breathing was frayed at the edges, and when I came up for air, she pulled me right back into her before I could draw a breath, and I submitted. The taste of her was like mushrooms and cucumbers and sweat. And the slickness of her was like nothing I’d ever known, or even imagined.
As she received me, as I sunk into her, it felt as though she were trying to suck me up inside of her, all of me, and when I boiled over and exploded inside of her, after five minutes or an hour, I saw white light, inside and out, then I saw spots, and bursting bubbles full of something orange and effervescent.
Afterward, Lulu cried into my armpit, and told me not to take it personally. And I stroked her hair and told her I wouldn’t.
Alternate States of Formlessness
April 30, 1991
Dear Tiger,
I thought of you on Sunday when the Dodgers beat the Giants. Gross pitched a helluva ballgame. I didn’t think I’d miss Santa Monica but I do. I miss the old house sometimes like an old pair of slippers. I miss you kids (now that you’re gone). And I miss Gold’s. Sausalito is nice, though. The health spa I’m working at is nothing like Gold’s. But even Gold’s is nothing like Gold’s, anymore. Nothing’s the way it used to be.
Doug is being transferred to Travis to work as a jet engine mechanic. Ross is still selling shoes and started taking night classes to get his real estate license. He’s also working out again, at a spa downtown. He looks good. A little scrawny still, but good muscle tone. I don’t hear much from Lulu or you. Are you a big radio star yet? I hope you won’t forget the little people (actually, I’m back up to 190 with about four percent body fat). Got any girlfriends I should know about? I’ll bet you do now that you’re a big time disc jockey. I’m proud of you, kiddo. Maybe you could record one of your shows for me. Sometime maybe I could call in and make a request. Maybe I could drive down and we could catch an afternoon game out at Chavez Ravine. I never could stand the Stick, too windy. Imagine the numbers McCovey could have put up without that wind! Let me know (Saturdays and Sundays work good for me).
I’ve been trying new things (like last week I rode a skateboard, if you can believe it. The kids at the end of the street have a ramp. I skinned my hands up pretty good, but oh well, you know what they say, “no pain, no gain.”). I’ve been learning to play the mandolin also. Different from the guitar. But the same. I’m getting calluses on my fingers for the first time in years. I’m eyeing a couple of competitions for this fall sanctioned by the NANB (National Association of Natural Bodybuilders), which means they’re steroid-free contests. They’ve asked me for an endorsement, but I’d rather compete than endorse. Maybe I’m not as washed-up as I thought.
The pictures were taken in Sacramento. The girl is Willow’s niece, Sarah (you met her when you were little). She goes to UC Davis. Pretty cute, huh? She’s single! Well, I love you, kiddo. Let me know about the ballgame. I’m home in the evenings if you ever get the urge to call. Willow sends her love.
Dad
The first thing I noticed about the pictures was that Sarah was not cute. She looked like a guppy. And why was Big Bill trying to set me up, anyway? Why did he keep mentioning girlfriends? Did he think I was gay? Lonely? Did he know I was in love with Lulu? Did he mind? The second thing I noticed about the photographs was Big Bill’s new look. He was wearing a ponytail and a soft leather hat, a wilted, wide-brim thing that would’ve looked right at home on Duane Allman, or the father from Hillbilly Bears. But nothing personified the sad state of Big Bill’s nostalgia quite as vividly as his blue and orange tie-dyed T-shirt that probably came from the Gap. As for Willow, she must have been the photographer, because she didn’t appear in any of the pictures.
The image that sticks with me more than any of the photographs is the image of Big Bill on a skateboard. More specifically, that very instant in which Big Bill ceases to be on the skateboard, the instant in which the skateboard is shooting off down the street, and Big Bill, all two hundred rippling pounds of him, is about to fall on his ass, which is tightly packed into neoprene shorts. Most vivid of all are the expressions on the skater kids’ face
s as they stand around in a group watching in their baggy shirts, baked out of their minds, with their braces glistening in the sun, as they laugh their asses off at Big Bill’s folly.
But Not Forgotten
One Sunday morning in late May, 1991, when I hadn’t heard from Lulu in two weeks, and I was flat broke, Eugene Gobernecki knocked on the door of my apartment. My blinds were closed. I was still in my bathrobe.
He was wearing coveralls and holding a wrench. “Will, how you doing, Will! Can I come in?” He pushed past me through the door. He was nervous and excited, a little twitchy. He sat down at the kitchen table. “Sit down,” he said. “You have cup of coffee?”
“No.”
“Shit motherfuck. Oh, well. Sit down anyway.”
I sat down.
Eugene smiled. A slant of light through the blinds caught his gold tooth just right. “Now that you big radio guy, I have business proposition,” he said.
“Eugene, I produce overnights at the college station. Do you know what that means? I’m not even on the air. I answer telephones. I stack pastries. I don’t even get paid! So if this is about venture capital or something, I—”
“Okay, okay,” he said, fashioning a yield gesture. He rubbed his Super Mario mustache thoughtfully for a moment and furrowed his brow. “Okay, okay. You know what is sweat equity?”
“Uhhh, sort of. I think.”
“It means you work for ownership of somesing.”
“Of what?”
“Zat’s what I’m getting to. But first I say zis before I offer you great business opportunity: When I do wrestling, I always win. When I do business, the same. So. Now you know. You know where is Venice Beach?”
“Of course.”
“You know where is hot dog stand?”
All About Lulu Page 21
