The first thing I notice as the plane lands at LAX is that it is cloudy and pouring rain. So much for the myth that it’s always sunny in Los Angeles.
Never mind. The weather matches my mood, though on the outside I am all clear skies and sunshine.
I smile. Even though I have to wear an embarrassing Air Canada Unaccompanied Minor baseball hat and a big lanyard around my neck holding a card with my name and address written on it like I’m a six-year-old who might get lost on a school field trip. Even though as I get off the airplane, I am escorted to baggage claim by an overly perky and way-too-in-my-business flight attendant named Candy.
I wish she could just break the rules. I wish she could just leave me alone to face the embarrassment that is my father.
“The Rat will pick you up at the airport, Katy,” Mom said when I left Montréal, and I almost thought I heard her say under her breath, “J’espère.”
I hope.
“Do you see him?” Candy asks, smiling at me. Big teeth. I’m glad to see there is a sesame seed stuck in one of them. I wish a cavity on her while I smile sweetly.
My eyes scan the baggage claim area. Any number of the men standing around looking eagerly like they are waiting for someone could be The Rat. I almost don’t want to find him, like maybe it would be best for everyone involved if he just forgot to show up. From what I know of him, that could happen. That’s not even stretching my imagination. If he didn’t show up, I could just shrug, say I tried, and go to Peru.
I size up this one older guy. He’s distinguished-looking, wearing a button-down green oxford shirt and khaki pants. The man looks like he’s wearing his Sunday-best-trying-to-impress, like a cleaned-up version of the last picture I have of The Rat. He could be The Rat. Sort of. If I squint. I am almost relieved. I could maybe hang with this guy for two and a half weeks. Maybe. I start to make my way toward him. But then someone else catches my eye and my heart sinks.
“Yeah,” I say to Candy. “I see him.”
Everybody sees him.
The Rat is six feet five inches tall and wears a tiny cowboy hat on his head. He’s got a rolled-up cigarette (I hope not a joint) hanging out of his mouth, and his skinny sleeve-tattooed arms poke out of his once black, now faded gray T-shirt that says NOSTRA DUMB ASS. He is scruffy, greasy, unshaven, and probably unwashed. His pegged jeans are dingy and look like he wears them every single day.
My father, Beau Ratner, punk name The Rat, looks just like a bum.
As soon as he sees me, he stands up on the edge of the baggage claim belt, throws his hands in the air, waves them around, and yells, “Hellllooooooooooo, Katy!”
Some people look at him and laugh.
Some people are irritated.
Some people follow The Rat’s laughing eyes straight to me.
Someone please throw a pail of water on me so I can melt right into the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Candy goes over to The Rat and signs me over to him. Transaction complete.
I wish I’d grabbed my receipt release form right out of her hand. I was close enough. I could’ve made a break for it. I could’ve hopped on a plane going anywhere. Out of here. I think about moving fast. I think about running for the double doors and pushing people out of the way. I think about just disappearing.
Am I doing it? I check my surroundings. No. I’m still standing in place with a smile on my face. I even lift my hand and make a little wave hello to The Rat, which makes him take his mini cowboy hat and swing it around his head.
I should have spoken up. I will never ever understand why Mom wouldn’t let me accompany her on the archaeological expedition to Peru. I should have outlined an argument to her that it would have been much more educational there than two and a half weeks in Los Angeles. I could have helped her finish her PhD thesis. I could have made a history-altering discovery. I could have seen Machu Picchu!
Usually, she takes me everywhere, even research trips. Usually, she lets me sit at the adult table. Usually, she lets me participate in everything. She is patient with my questions and giving with her time. In all my life Mom and I have never been apart for more than a few days.
We’re a team.
But this time, the site was too remote. This time it just wasn’t going to work out. This time she was just going to go by herself. This time it was just easier that way. This time I would be in the way. This time she would get more done if I weren’t there.
I know how to be quiet. I would’ve stayed out of her way. I’ve done it a million times before. She knows that. That’s one of the things she loves about me.
Now I have to be without her for a whole two and a half weeks.
“It’s going to be hard for me, too, Katy,” she said while she was packing her bags, but I could see that really, she was excited. Her thoughts were already in the Andes uncovering the secrets of the Incas. She was already living there without me.
“Think of it as an adventure,” she said. “Think about how much we’ll have to share with each other when we get back.”
The difference is that Mom is visiting the Andes and I’m in Los Angeles with a man everyone calls The Rat.
I want to frown. I try. I try to grimace, but instead, my smile just gets wider.
An alarm signals and the suitcases start to spit out onto the spinning conveyor belt. The Rat jumps off the belt and runs toward me and swoops me up into a back-cracking bear hug.
“Look at you! Look at you! You’re huge!” he says. “I can’t believe how much you’ve grown. I mean, of course I’ve seen the pictures. But now you’re here! In the flesh!”
The Rat is all bending and hugging me, and I am as stiff as a board. I can’t relax. It doesn’t feel natural. I want to remind him that he’s not anything to me that I would call Dad. He hasn’t even come to visit me in Canada since I was seven years old. I want to remind him that to me he is just e-mails, phone calls, some letters, and a bunch of awkward presents.
“Your guitar will probably be with the oversized luggage,” he says. “I’ll go pick it up while you watch for your bags.”
He rushes over to get the guitar that I didn’t ask for and didn’t need. I definitely didn’t want to bring it with me to California. But Mom insisted.
“Music is his life,” she always says with a smile that looks like a secret.
“His life,” I remind her. “Not mine.”
The Rat has been the drummer in about a million bands, but he’s best known for being in a band called Suck.
I might not know music, I might not like music, but everyone with half a brain knows the band Suck. They were never famous. They were more like infamous. Infamously un-famous. Infamously messed up. Infamously the greatest band that never made it.
I have tried to listen to the seven-inch vinyls my mom swears are classics. I have tried to listen to the CD reissue of their out-of-print first (and only) full-length record. Nails on a chalkboard sound more pleasing.
But no matter how much I protested, the guitar, a purple acoustic/electric Daisy Rock guitar, a present for my thirteenth birthday, had to come with me to California.
I have taken it out of its case exactly three times. Mom always says you should try something truly and completely before you give it up. She knows of what she speaks, though perhaps in her day she has taken that idea a bit too far. But it’s a good point. It’s following an academic line of inquiry.
I, myself, discovered that I feel about the guitar the way I feel about eating eel. I knew I wouldn’t like it as soon as I set my eyes on it. Trying it didn’t change anything.
It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t budge. She insisted. So there was no getting out of taking the guitar along for the miserable ride.
With the help of a stranger, I struggle to pull my bags off the movi
ng belt, and The Rat returns with my guitar in his hands, pumping it over his head like it’s a trophy.
“It’s like a crazy exciting time now,” he says. “Sam is really back. Really ready to start Suck again. And this time I think it’s going to take!”
We push the bags over to his beat-up hatchback. It sports stickers on the bumper: DESTROY ALL MUSIC and KILL RADIO and KXLU and SEA LEVEL RECORDS and KCRW and AMOEBA RECORDS and INDIE 103, and we have a hard time shoving my bags and the guitar into the backseat because the trunk is filled up with The Rat’s drum kit.
“It’s not my full drum kit. It’s my emergency drum kit,” he says. “You know, in case I need to get to some gig or rehearsal last minute.”
Normal people keep spare tires and emergency roadside kits in their trunk, but The Rat needs to be able to cover rock emergencies.
I nearly have a heart attack when the car starts because the radio comes on at about one bagazillion decibels. The Rat must have serious ear damage, or, more likely, severe brain damage.
“Let me turn down the music, so we can talk,” he says, leaning over. “First of all, I think you should call me Beau, because The Rat doesn’t sound right for us and Dad feels kind of weird. Unless you want to call me Dad? Or The Rat? Or you know what? How about I’ll leave it up to you? What do you think?”
As he talks a mile a minute, his hands never stop thumping out a beat on the steering wheel. I don’t get a word in edgewise because he just keeps talking and talking and talking, mostly about Suck and their new plans and the old days. Every so often he remembers that I’m in the car and remembers he’s excited that I’m here visiting.
I’ll just pretend the next two and a half weeks are already over. I’m glad it’s a temporary situation. I’ll pretend it’s a bad dream. That way I’m already back home, with my friends. Living with my mother. Enjoying the rest of my summer.
I try to forget that I am not in Canada today, and that today is Canada Day, our national holiday, July 1.
“This is great,” The Rat says, “because I can show you everything. From now on, when I write, you’ll be able to picture it all in your head.”
He’s still babbling away as we walk up the steps to his apartment.
“And see, we’re on Sunset Boulevard, so there’s plenty for you to do without having a car, ’cause Los Angeles is mostly a car town. You need a car here. Not like in Montréal.”
He tries to say Mun-tree-ul, like a native, and fails.
The Rat unlocks the door to his apartment, stands in the middle of the living room, and spreads his arms out wide.
“Welcome to your temporary home sweet home!” he says.
And then he smiles big and proud.
I take in the view. Model airplanes hang from the ceiling. Colorful, bawdy rock posters cover the walls. The shelves are stacked with too many CDs, too many vinyl records, too many books, and too many DVDs. A full drum kit is squashed into a closet in the corner of the room with foam and egg cartons covering the inside of the closet door. Junk is piled on the floor, on the coffee table, next to the coffee table, and underneath the coffee table, which sits in front of the shabby couch covered by a rag of a knit blanket. I recognize the blanket as one of my mother’s knitting projects. Her knitting style is unmistakable. Tiny, complicated patterns — even, perfect, clean. Good yarn. Classy color combinations.
I feel a pang in my chest. I’m already missing her. It’s only been one day.
This place is a mess, and it reeks of stale cigarettes poorly masked by room deodorizer. I can’t imagine the rest of the apartment looks or smells any better. I want to say, You could have cleaned up. You knew I was coming.
But I don’t. I don’t say a word. I’m polite. I can’t help it. The Rat takes off his cowboy hat and throws it on the couch and then rubs his bald head.
“You know, I really meant to straighten up,” he says, busily trying to rearrange the mess, like cleaning up now is going to change my first impression. “I just got bogged down with practice. Suck is going to play a secret show on the Fourth of July, and we’ve been working really hard so we, you know, don’t suck. And you know how time just kind of gets away from you? I mean, I kept thinking I had more time, and now suddenly here you are!”
And right there, right that second, my whole heart sinks. Living on the moon with no oxygen would have been easy. Living in a tent in the jungle with no running water and bugs the size of small dogs would have been easy. Living in a cave during the Lower Paleolithic Era, clubbing my own food for dinner while dodging woolly mammoths, would have been easy.
Two and a half weeks of this mess with him, without her, seems impossible.
For some people, clutter is OK. They can live amid chaos, but not me. For me, piles of things on top of things scattered on things equals me not being able to think straight. A mess actually hurts me. Physically.
I know one thing for sure. This is going to be the worst two and a half weeks of my life.
“Excuse me,” I say. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Down the hall,” The Rat says.
When I open the door, I think I’ve made a mistake at first because it doesn’t look like a bathroom. It looks like a construction site. There’s a ladder leaning against a peeling wall. A bare lightbulb hangs dangerously low from the ceiling. There’s a bathtub that once was white but is now caked with yellow lime. The separate shower has a constant drip that I can’t turn off, no matter how hard I try. The hand towel has a hole in it. Thankfully, the toilet seems relatively clean. I use the last few squares of toilet paper.
I go to wash my hands. Even the soap is dirty.
I begin to cry.
I am still on East Coast time because it is six a.m. according to the clock next to me on the bedside table. I had opened my eyes hoping maybe I’d wake up in a tent in Peru, but no. Bad news. I’m still in L.A.
The first thing I see is that my room is not dingy, which is something I did not notice last night. It has a fresh coat of lavender paint, cheery funky curtains on the windows, and colorful transparent fabrics stapled to the ceiling with rope lights blinking on and off underneath. It looks like The Rat went through a lot of trouble to make my room look cool. But it’s for the wrong girl. It’s not very me. I don’t want funky. I want modern. Clean lines. Spare furniture. Neutral colors. Like my room back home.
I turn my face to the window, and from where I lie on the bed, I can see the Hollywood sign. The Hollywood sign is a big disappointment. Surprise! It’s totally tiny and boring. They completely misrepresent it in movies. I guess, like most things, it gets too many close-ups so you can’t see the whole picture.
It has stopped raining, and the sun streams into the room, forming a yellow square on the painted black wood floor. In that square is a big fat cat sleeping with a paw half over its face like a little drama queen.
The Rat has unpacked my guitar and put it on a guitar stand with a Post-it note on it that says, “All tuned and ready to go!”
Ahhhhh . . . Like I know what do with it. Like I even care. I flick my eyes over to my suitcases in the corner by the door. I know I should unpack, but I won’t.
I am not going to stay here in Los Angeles. I cannot stay here. I cannot live with The Rat. Not even for just over two weeks. Not even for one day. I am going to go to Peru and stay with my mother as she scours the Andes for Incan treasures.
I sit on the edge of the bed. In my head, I get up and I grab my bags and go down to the corner very quietly. Can you hail a cab from the street in Los Angeles, like in Montréal? Or do you have to call one, like when I visit Grand-maman at the old age home? I don’t care. Somehow, I hail a cab. I use the fifty U.S. dollars that Grand-maman slipped me. It’s totally enough. I arrive at the airport and I use the emergency credit card and I buy a ticket nonstop to Lima. In my mind, I do it. In my mind, my feet are moving. In my mind, I am that kind of girl.
The cat meows.
I’m gripping the edge of the bed.
I pi
ck my phone up and text-message my mom. She says I can send text messages anywhere in the world. Even Peru. If I’m going to leave, I’m going to have to do it the right way.
Mom. Rat is tres drole. Feng shui wrong in L.A. Pls wire $ 4 tkt 2 Peru. Luv kd
Hunger forces me to go and explore, so I find the kitchen. The big fat cat, whose name is Sid Vicious according to his collar, follows me, nipping at my feet, hoping for food. He keeps purring and rubbing up against me. He doesn’t live up to his name at all. He’s a total softy.
“Don’t get too attached to me, Big Guy. I know I’m lovable, but I’m not staying,” I say.
I find a basket of fruit hanging over the sink, and after sifting through it, I find one banana that doesn’t look too bruised. At least by eating a banana, I don’t have to touch any of the dishes, which all seem to be dirty anyway and piled up in the sink. I see something brown and fuzzy floating in one of the cups, and I gag. I can’t sit at the table, because there’s a half-done model airplane kit spread out on it. I can’t sit in this kitchen. It’s making me freak out. I open the sliding door that leads onto a tiny balcony and notice that it looks onto a courtyard where a perfectly turquoise-blue swimming pool stares up at me.
Where is the beach? Isn’t Los Angeles supposed to be some kind of paradise? Does every single place in Los Angeles have a pool? That’s what I saw from the airplane. Tiny blue pools everywhere. Why would you swim in a pool where there is a beach not that far away?
I start daydreaming. I’m swimming in Peru, maybe at a water hole, with a waterfall. Or in a river, with fish nibbling at my toes. Wherever the water would be, I am having the time of my life. Who knows what could happen in Peru? I might even skinny-dip. I might just be that daring. I take swim breaks after assisting Mom on her dig. I’m a real help to Mom on the excavation. She tells me how she just can’t do her PhD thesis without me. It really is a godsend that I ran away to Peru. She’s not mad at all. She’s happy about it. After all, we’re a team.
A splash shakes me back to the reality of The Rat’s stinky apartment.
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