by John Decure
I wasn’t an ice queen, as some suspected. I merely lacked the tools to express my humanity.
For the first time in my career, I hated the part of myself that I’d always considered to be an advantage. It’s one thing to think you’re being tough; it’s another to treat people who are on your side with insensitivity.
At work you can’t help but hear the talk, and a few of the secretaries have described me behind my back as a stuck-up bitch. That I am not. But my personal touch is lacking, to say the least.
I stuffed Rue Loberg’s envelope into my desk and went home early, got a little shaky, the nerve-endings raw and exposed, as if I’d shed a layer of skin…
Oh, I thought—another little breakthrough: so this is how it feels to get in the game.
Went home feeling tired and defeated, and those walls seemed to come creeping, closing in. Had to see Mr. Daniels right away, in a tall glass, four, maybe five times. (So much for my rehabilitation project, the success of which I will have to measure like the AA people do: one day at a time.) Passed out on the bed fully clothed, woke up, and lay there, inert, until dawn, watching my thoughts scramble and dart across the ceiling like a pack of mongrels hunting for food.
These personal revelations come with a price. Put another way, my recovery is an ongoing process.
The next day, I closed my office door and called Rue Loberg. Instead, her daughter, my star rebuttal witness, Mindy, picked up. I told her why I was calling. She instantly shamed me by thanking me for thinking of her mom that way, by calling.
Yeah, I said to myself. Wasn’t I the considerate one?
Then Mindy stammered and stopped altogether.
My wall of defenses shot up. The call was a bad idea, an intrusion, a mistake. What was I thinking? This kind of shit just didn’t come naturally to me. Maybe I’d still mail that decision—
“My mom wants to see you,” Mindy said.
“She does?”
“Yeah. But she’s, uh, having a bad morning. The day after she has treatment is always like this.”
She said it with such a matter-of-fact tone that I stumbled right into one of the all-time greatest stupid one-word responses ever conceived.
“Treatment.”
Jesus—when Mindy told me her mother had cancer, it was like another set of blinders was torn off my thick head. All through the trial I’d seen Rue only as a victim coming to terms with her injuries by facing down the culprit. I’d missed any indication that for her, this may have been a last stand of an altogether different sort.
In a fumbled mess of words I can’t fully recall, I offered an apology.
Mindy brushed it off, said hold the line, went away from the phone for a moment, then came back.
My mom wants to know if she can see you.
Yes, sure, I said before even contemplating what I might be getting into.
I hung up the phone, constrained as I was by the four walls and big desk. What was I doing? Though I felt more alive than I had in I don’t know how long, I was afraid of what I was attempting. Reaching out only made me want to pull back to the familiar.
Which I found in the view outside my windowsill: another day, a dull, ubiquitous smog rendering the sky as a bland, flat blue brushed over dirty cardboard. High sunlight dominating the scene, bullying the street hawkers and parking attendants into any corners of shade they might find.
Down on the corner of Main and Third, a little tree-shaded spot with concrete planters and benches offers respite on hot days to Skid Row wanderers and junk collectors and crackheads. Always something going on. I glimpsed down through the branches to where a congregation of crumpled half-bent bodies nursed their cigarettes down to the nubs and clutched beer cans sheathed in brown paper bags that fool no one. Some waved their hands, and I knew they were arguing points no one in the real world would ever give a shit about. I’d knew because I’d heard the talk down on the street, times when I’d been out and about, looking to quell my mental dysfunction with a score. Even behind the double-paned glass eight floors up, I could hear every word they were saying.
Dis high! I was dis high when my daddy died. What I say, don’t need nobody no-how take care a me. I kin take care a myssef.
The snakes? Yeah, sure, they live down underground. Huge, like a cross between a boa an’ a anaconda, like this dude up inna Hollywood Hills, rock star? He breeds ’em that way, totally illegal.
Das pure bullshit, man!
Bullshit nothin, I seen ’em! Seen one come up from a storm gutter n’ snatch a fat little Mexican baby.
Don’ know what you seen!
Baby’s momma tried to stop it, had the kid by the leg, like a tug-o’-war, but then the snake, it’s like it gets bored, just opens its mouth real wide, swallows the momma right up, too. Swear to God!
You got shit for brains, man!
I tell ya, he’s right! I can’t walk near those storm drains, no, no, ’cause the snakes are callin’ to me, whispering to me just like in the Garden of Eden, man…
A shock went up my spine. This could have been me—my life—I knew. I could be down there, fishing through fast-food wrappers in the gutter for something to eat and guarding a cart full of recyclable trash with my life. All it would have taken was a tiny downward tweak on my internal chemistry set, resulting in a deeper, more profound imbalance. I’d have been born with it, would have had no choice but to live zombiefied in a sterile lifeless Shady Acres hell on earth, or go it alone on the street with all the other thieves and crazies and drunks and dope fiends. If I’d been stuck with that lovely set of non-options, I knew exactly where my stubbornness would have landed me.
Down there, on Third and Main.
My father? With a tad more volatile chemistry, he, too, would not have been a lawyer. In his day, wandering the city with a more highbrow patter than the usual shuffling loony, he’d have been called a bum or a hobo, written off as an eccentric.
And so, I must conclude that I am lucky. And if visiting a woman with cancer is my idea of a supposed… hardship? Well… no, the task does not measure up to the word.
I retreated from the window and the sun’s assault, blinking away the huge blotches of shadow obscuring my office. Tripped over a file box, but found my purse and got out of there before the weird sense of gratitude I was feeling could wear off.
* * *
Rue Loberg told me to wipe the long look off my face. But I had to ask my questions anyway. I’m a lawyer—sometimes even when I don’t want to be one.
She’d been shying away from treatment, but the trial, and Mindy’s example of courage, inspired her to be brave. The chemotherapy was a sickening pain, but it was more or less improving her medical outlook. Her doctors were encouraged. Guardedly optimistic. Those were the two words she was hanging on, of late.
Fifty-fifty got her attention, too. Decent betting odds.
She was feeling well enough to want to go out.
“Did you say you live in Venice?”
“That’s right.”
“How about the boardwalk? It’s a nice day—”
“Kind of a scene down there,” I said. “Lot of tourists, crazies, every kind of goofball. You know, LA at the beach.”
She smiled and pulled down the brim of the gray tweed train-conductors hat that hid her recent hair loss.
“Jeans and tennies okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “Anything goes down there.”
“That’s what I thought. Perfect.”
So we piled into my Chevelle and rumbled down to the Venice boardwalk, where Mindy, Rue, and I spent the better part of the afternoon walking and talking and soaking in the scene, with its street performers and superheroes posing for photos and stilt-walkers and buskers pouring their guts out on bongos and guitars and tenor saxophones and even a kazoo. Mindy’s big moment came when a magician with an African accent and a charming wit chose her from the crowd to help demonstrate several card tricks. He concluded his act with a bended-knee proposal to Mindy.
At a handmade jewelry display, Rue saw a glittering silver pair of skull-and-bones earrings and insisted on buying them for me. I reciprocated by picking up lunch: hot dogs and fries and soft-serve ice cream cones that we ate on a Mexican blanket I’d spread out on the sand as seagulls hopped around like little beggars. Rue said she was tired, so we sat a while longer, watching the wind-blown swells dump and explode near shore. In the deeper green water offshore, sailboats tacked in and out of the harbor against a steady breeze. An older man in a sweatsuit and mini-fedora swept a scanner across the lumpy sand, searching for loose quarters and other treasures. We fell into a deep, girls-only conversation, touching on everything from the high price of weddings to whether high heels are worth the arch pain to men who can’t commit to whether all women fake orgasms (an informal poll suggested the answer was yes). Had such a good time that I totally forgot Rue’s illness. That is, until she leaned forward on her elbows and smiled at Mindy and me, the sun lighting her tired face pink.
“There is nothing else I’d rather do than compare notes on the state of womanhood with you two fine ladies,” she said. “But my body is telling me I’ve gotta rest.”
Her sense of self-preservation gave me such a charge it’s hard to put it into words—I won’t even try.
Mindy and I scooped her up and walked her back to the car, our arms slung over one another’s shoulders.
* * *
A few mornings ago, I surfed Malibu. That’s right: in the morning. Daytime.
Craig Weaver made me do it. We’d been talking about having a paddle together, making a date of it. He’d called and stammered and asked me out not long ago, and we’d tried the usual dinner-and-a-movie thing, but I’m not inclined to sit in a dark auditorium and wait for startling images to be hurled at my consciousness—no thanks, that shit is too close to the way the less rational part of my brain functions. So then it was just dinner without the movie. He’s smart, and a good conversationalist, if too shy by half. Last weekend we were going to give a new sushi place in the marina a try, but when he rang my doorbell looking lean and mean in these tight black jeans and cool-guy boots, I yanked him off the porch and imprisoned him in my bedroom. We called the sushi place for takeout and ate from white cartons on the couch; sat in front of the TV watching High Noon with Gary Cooper, a hero just as brave as he was terrified, one man striding down an empty street alone in a wild-west town full of cowards. Best dinner and a movie I’d ever had.
Surfing-wise, Craig is a kook—that is, a barney, a tourist, a rank beginner. But he’s learning and becoming avid, and every time he feels the surge of a swell lifting him, he’s buzzed. Amped. Stoked. As a surfer, I’ve got to respect that stoke, even though Craig possesses all the style of a drunken cockroach when he’s up on a wave. But he’ll improve if he stays with it. Weaver’s never ridden Malibu, never harnessed the pure peeling down-the-line speed of a premier point wave. All he knows is the short dumpy beach break experience that spots like El Porto and Venice offer up, to be shared among a cast of thousands on sunny Saturday mornings. I like Craig, and I wouldn’t mind surfing with him, but I won’t lower my standards enough to stoop to that crappy-ass South Bay version of the modern surf-experience. Malibu is still my first love.
Yet he refuses to surf there at night. And I get that. If I were a beginner, I wouldn’t dream of it. Too rocky; too cold; too fast-moving and incomprehensible in the dark.
So I compromised; waited for a foggy morning when the visibility was so poor, you couldn’t even see the ocean from PCH. Couldn’t even see the surf from the odd patches of sand edging into the wet cobblestones along the point.
“But you can hear it,” I told Craig.
“I suppose,” he said, less than convinced.
“No soul-sucking monster crowd clogging the lineup.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “For good reason.”
“You think I’m nuts.”
He shrugged. “That’s not really a fair question.”
“Because you’re a psychiatrist?”
He toed the wet sand, squinting into the drab mist.
“I’ll, uh—what do you attorneys like to say?—take that one under submission.”
I socked him in the arm.
“Weaver? We’re going out.”
In surfing, especially in So-Cal, where the conditions are often junky and every guy and his brother are out there groveling like hungry dogs for every scrap of open face, that’s how it is a lot of the time. You’ve just got to throw yourself into what the ocean’s offering up that day and not look back. Otherwise you’ll spend your life talking bullshit over the back fence, waiting for the perfect day that never comes.
Weaver bear-hugged me.
“If you say so, Malibu guru. We’re on it.”
We turned back up the sand to get our boards and wetsuits. In the mist, a pile of black rags on the beach turned into a grizzled figure on closer inspection. A vagrant with black stringy hair and a short beard that looked like asphalt pebbles pocking his jaw line. His eyes were fearful, then resentful; we’d stumbled into his space, surprising him.
Weaver read the situation perfectly and squeezed my hand a little tighter, redirecting our path to create plenty of clearance.
“You!” the man grunted, pointing at me. “It’s you!”
“Easy, bud,” Weaver said.
“Know this! I never hit a girl! Not since my sister, and don’tcha know, that was back in the second grade!”
Just as abruptly he stared up into the fog as if in prayer. “Oh, Emily, forgive me, but you were a god-awful bitch!”
I stopped walking. He looked like a thousand other homeless men shuffling around the city, the kind you see so often that in time they become almost invisible: dark, weather-beaten skin; grimy pants; layers of holey, filthy shirts up top; laceless rumpled shoes; blackened fingernails; fearful, doleful, unhinged eyes. Still young, still big and strong and potentially dangerous. Wild, vaguely scary losers you cut a wide swath around to avoid. There was something familiar about this one. His… I couldn’t place it.
“Never hit a girl, you gotta know!” His lip trembled as his arms tightened like straps lashed around his chest.
“You hit me. I remember.”
“Nothing to eat, not a thing for days!” he said. “A hunnert bones! Right here, right in my hand! That’s a lotta money!”
The wind shifted, and for an instant I caught a whiff of his uniquely foul body odor. He’d attacked me in the sand, that late night I’d been surfing the point alone, with Miki Dora. Those pricks working for Dr. Don—those pricks had paid a homeless guy to jump me.
“It’s all right. Hey, a hundred bones is a hundred bones.”
“Emily?”
“I’m not your sister,” I said.
“I don’t hit girls! Pull a few pigtails, maybe, yeah, I’ve been known to do that, but—”
I nodded to Weaver, and we pushed on through the primer-gray mist.
The surf that morning wasn’t more than waist-high, but by Malibu standards, it was uncrowded. I guided Weaver into two pretty long ones, which he rode in his distinctive Quasimodo posture. But he managed to put some turns together, to build momentum with a continuity that the sand-bottom dumpers he was used to riding had never allowed for. The fog stubbornly sat on the point, and just before we came in, Weaver spun and nabbed an inside wave on his own, and we lost track of each other. Later, in the parking lot, he told me he’d been paddling back up the point, buzzing from his ride but chilled and ready to call it a session, when he saw the shape of a trim black figure streaking along, the rider’s right arm up and bent at the elbow, the hand and fingers cocked as if holding an invisible teacup. He knew by the delicate expression that it was me, and he said he’d quit paddling, sitting up just to watch me go by, somehow sharing the feeling.
“I know it sounds silly.”
I shook my head. “Not to me.”
* * *
That’s not to say I’ve quit night-surfing Malibu; I stil
l get out there now and again, but not on those blackout nights I used to prefer. I’ll wait until a decent swell coincides with a new moon and tolerate the presence of the handful of others who have the same idea. I must admit, I was mildly surprised—and relieved—to find that no one hassles much for waves at two in the morning. It’s as if the shared obsession of having to surf when the rest of the world wouldn’t even dream of it creates a bond, a cooperative pact between strangers that this experience is special and requires a different, more highly evolved approach. All the usual excessive jockeying and aggressive tactics, the kind of no-conscience water crimes routinely committed in broad daylight at every popular spot on the planet—well, that crap doesn’t cut it in this peaceful, ethereal setting.
A few weeks ago, I somehow totally misread the weather report and pulled up on PCH to a black night sky and zero visibility out on the point. I was feeling unusually turned-around that evening because I’d come home from work earlier to find a box—my stolen box of documents—sitting on the front porch. I popped the top off, my car keys still in hand, and peeked in sheepishly, but there was no surprise: everything appeared to be there, in the exact same order I’d remembered, and for a moment I almost thought I’d imagined the whole break-in episode. No. It was real, as was a simple fact hammered home with this box’s reappearance, the fact that they knew right where to find me and could slip in and out any time they wanted. I was equal parts angered and chilled by this reality.
Damn, I was thinking on that black night out at Malibu, a half-hour drive from the pad in Venice for nothing. Almost fired up the Chevy and peeled out of there; but then, the stars were out and a faint offshore breeze was seeping through the canyon passes and the surf forecast was tracking a small southern hemisphere swell for two days now. It sounds corny, but when you surf for a lot of years, sometimes you can sense when there are waves to be ridden. Sometimes, you just get a feeling.
I suited up, yanked the nine-six off the racks, and jogged down to the water.
