by Don Winslow
And then there are shoes.
“Men look at you from the top down,” Ana says, “women from the bottom up. The first thing those brujas will do is look at your shoes, and then they will know who you are.”
So Kim starts looking at shoes-in the newspaper, the magazines, in shop windows. She sees the perfect pair in the window of a snooty shop on Forest Avenue.
Charles Jourdan.
$150.
Out of her reach, and while she can make a dress, she knows she can’t make shoes.
It’s a problem.
Then there’s jewelry.
Obviously she can’t have the real thing-diamonds are as beyond her reach as the stars-but she finds that she has a flair with costume jewelry, and Tia Ana helps her pick out a few pieces-a bracelet, a necklace-that set off the dress.
But the shoes.
Kim goes home and looks at the waning days of the calendar-there are more X’s than blank squares-does the math, and realizes that she’s not going to make it.
Her mother might have told her so.
In the few hours between (scant) sleep and cleaning other people’s houses, the former Freaky Frederica, now just Freddie (her hippie days long behind her), sees her daughter’s activity-the photos on the bulletin board, the pattern bag, the comings-and-goings from Mrs. Silva’s trailer. Like Mrs. Silva, she misinterprets it as something to do with a prom or a dance or even (finally!) a boy, but she worries that her daughter is headed for heartbreak because she seems to be overreaching for a social strata in snobby Orange County that she can’t achieve.
Most of the girls at Dana Hills High have money, have access, have, above all, attitude and will quickly sniff out that Kim lives in a trailer and that her mother cleans houses for a living.
She doesn’t want her daughter to feel ashamed and, besides, she’s proud of who they are, who she is, an independent woman making it (just, but making it) on her own.
Kim is smart, Kim could go to community college, maybe even a four-year school on a scholarship if she’d study, but Kim is too interested in the fashion magazines and the mirror.
Freddie tries to tell her so, but Kim doesn’t listen.
What she could tell her mother is that you don’t start your journey of Upward Mobility on the stairs; you take the elevator.
But either way, you need the right shoes.
84
Stan accepts the rolled-up dollar bill from Diane’s hand — oh, Eve — leans over the counter at the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore, and snorts the line of cocaine.
Doc grins at him. “And?”
“Wow.”
Diane is already grinning because Doc, chivalrous gentleman that he is, offered her the first line. Her brain buzzes and the little bees quickly work their way down to her pussy, industrious (“busy as”) and lascivious (flower-to-flower) creatures that they are.
Doc has a sense of reciprocity-Stan and Diane turned him on to acid; now he’s returning the favor with coke. He and John have come over to the store with a sample.
Fair being fair.
Friendship being friendship.
And business being business.
(Not to mention alliteration being alliteration.)
It’s good business to turn the owners of the Bread and Marigolds Bookstore on to a free sample of your new product, because while the bookstore ain’t what it used to be, it’s still a nerve center of the counterculture (read “drug”) community, such as it is anymore.
(The community, not the drug.)
It’s timely.
Stan’s looking for something new, anyway.
He’s tired of selling the hippie stuff, worried he’s trapped in a fading culture, and, truth be told, he’s a little bored with Diane, too.
And she with him.
And the political scene?
The revolution?
That they thought they won when Nixon
— the Uber Villain
— the Evil Stepmother
— be honest, the Scapegoat
— (They are both conversant enough with their ancestral religion to know that the goat was loaded with all of society’s evils and driven from the town) fell from power and The War ended
It’s come to Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter.
Jimmuh Cahtuh.
With his lust in his heart.
Diane doesn’t want lust in her heart, she wants lust in her puss, in her yoni, if you must, and it’s been a while since she’s felt it with Stan. It’s all right… it’s pleasant… but… pleasant?
Funny thing is, even in the free love days-when people were twisted around each other like worms in a coffee can in the bookstore’s back room-she didn’t participate. Neither did Stan. She out of reticence and he, she suspected, more from a fear of disease.
Now they both wonder if they missed out on something.
The other thing they wonder about is money.
It used to be something you weren’t supposed to care about bourgeois but now people seem to want it and people seem to have it.
Like Doc, for instance
Taco Jesus has more than taco money, now, and he isn’t throwing it around or away. He’s buying things-clothes, cars, homes-and it looks good on him, and Diane can’t help but wonder are they missing out on something, or worse have they missed out on something like they’re standing on the banks of a river watching the future flow away from them, and now
Stan is looking at her as if he’s thinking the same thing, but she ponders if he is standing on the bank with her or floating away, and she also wonders if she cares.
She turns and watches John “do a line”-in this new vernacular. All traces of his adolescent cuteness are gone. He’s lean, muscular, and powerful, and suddenly she realizes that she is ten years-a decade — older than she was. This boy, this child who used to sell joints from the bottom of his skateboard, is now a young man. And rich, if you believe the gossip.
Gossip, hell, she thinks-certainly John owns the house two doors down from the one they still rent. And the parade of sleek young women going in and out screams of money, and one morning she saw Stan, his fucking teacup in hand, looking out the window watching one of John’s girls getting into her car, admiring-lusting after? — her long legs, her high breasts, her Charlie’s Angels blonde hair. (Who is the actress-the one with the fake, silly name?) And then he pretended he wasn’t staring, and she wished he had the honesty-okay, the balls-to come out and say, yes, he thought the girl was sexy, because she could see him chubbed up against his faded jeans, the ridiculous bell-bottoms, and if he’d been that honest she might have given him some relief, gone down on her knees and sucked his dick and let him shoot shiksa fantasy into her willing mouth, but instead he said some mealy-mouthed thing about the “superficiality” of it all so she decided to leave him hanging, as it were.
Now John hands her the rolled-up bill-it’s her turn again. Feeling a little silly, Diane pushes a finger against one nostril and inhales with the other and feels the coke blast her brain and then the acrid drip down her throat.
They each do another line, then, far too restless to stay in the store, decide to go for a ride.
Stan insists on driving and they all pile into their clunky old Westfalia van and she finds herself in the back with John as they cruise south on the PCH with her head and puss buzz-buzzing and she hears Doc talking to Stan about a “distributorship” like it’s Amway or something.
“Even if you just buy for yourself,” Doc is saying, “we’ll give it to you wholesale, so you’re already ahead. Then if you decide you want to make a business of it…”
Buzz buzz.
“… serious money…”
Buzz buzz.
“… can’t be a lot of profit in leather bracelets…”
Suddenly she watches herself turn to John and hears herself say,
“Kiss me.”
John looks startled. “What?”
She repeats herself with some urgency, with some heat,
with her husband two feet away, she offers her mouth, her full lips, and John takes them and she sucks his tongue into her mouth and sucks on it like a dick and she feels moist, wonderfully wet, and then Stan pulls off the road into the Harbor Grill because apparently the men are hungry and as he turns off the engine he turns and looks at her and she knows that he saw.
85
The waitress hands them menus.
“I know that girl,” Doc says, watching her walk away. He turns to John, sitting in the booth beside him. “We know that girl.”
John shrugs. They know lots of girls, and he’s still a little blown away by Diane kissing him with her husband right there.
But if Stan is pissed, he’s not showing it.
Not showing it at all, because his hand is under the table, stroking his wife’s thigh, and she’s looking across the table straight at John, her lips curled into a smile that wants to become a laugh.
“I know that girl,” Doc repeats, then gives it up and asks Stan, “So what do you think?”
Stan strokes his beard.
Black and bushy.
“I don’t know,” he says, studying the menu. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” Diane asks, as if she hadn’t overheard the conversation in the van.
“Doc has a business proposition,” Stan says.
“You know,” Doc says. “Business.”
“Oh,” says Diane. “ Business. ”
“Should we be talking about this here?” Stan asks.
Diane is surprised that she feels contempt for him.
The waitress comes back for their orders.
She’s pretty, Diane thinks.
A cheerleader.
They all order omelets.
Diane sees Stan (sneakily) look at the girl’s tits.
“Do we know each other?” Doc asks the girl.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think so.”
You couldn’t describe the girl as bubbly, Diane thinks, but you wouldn’t call her cold, either.
She’s reserved.
Older than her age.
“I just think I know you from somewhere,” Doc says.
Kim thinks, maybe it’s because you used to sleep with my mother with me there, but she doesn’t say anything. If Doc doesn’t remember her, good. If no one remembers her, good.
“Jesus, will you let it go?” John mutters at Doc.
Kim remembers him, too.
The boy who lived in the cave and ignored her.
Stan watches her ass as she walks away, then says to Doc, “I don’t think we have the money to buy in.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Doc says. “You don’t have to. You just go down to Mexico, bring some back with you, and keep a piece for yourself. Sell that piece and you’re in business.”
“I don’t know…”
Doc leans over the table and says to Stan, “You could sell right out of the store. I’m telling you, this is money. ”
“I don’t know,” Stan answers. “We’ll have to think about it.”
“Don’t think about it too long,” Doc says.
Cocaine doesn’t make you exactly patient.
Diane looks at John.
86
As they’re undressing for bed Stan asks, “So what do you think?”
“About the cocaine?”
“Yeah.”
Or about me kissing another man, Diane thinks. Nothing about that? We’re just going to let it slide? She tosses it back at him. “I don’t know, what do you think?”
“Do we want to be drug dealers?” he asks.
She knows that they can go on for hours like this, answering questions with questions with questions.
“We dealt grass,” she says; “is it so different?”
Stan unbuttons his denim shirt and hangs it up in the closet. Shucks off his jeans and hangs them on a hook on the back of the door. “Isn’t it? I mean, grass is natural-this is a powder.”
“That comes from a plant,” she says.
“So does heroin,” Stan counters. “Would we deal that?”
“No,” she says, impatient now, naked now, sliding into bed. “But is cocaine addictive?”
“I don’t know.” He gets in beside her. “It would be nice to have some money.”
“We could buy the house,” she says, thinking that if he says anything about “feminine nesting instincts” she’ll punch him in the face.
“But it’s drug dealing, ” Stan says. “Is that what we started out to be?”
“What did we start out to be, Stan?”
To his credit, he laughs at his own pretension. “Revolutionaries.”
Volunteers of America.
“The revolution is over,” Diane says.
“Who won?” Stan asks.
Diane laughs and then takes him in her arms, pulls him close. His body is warm and familiar, and he gets hard quickly. She knows that he wants to slide into her, but she rolls over and straddles him.
He looks up at her, his eyes shining, and she can see him thinking.
“You saw me kissing him,” she says.
He nods.
“Did it turn you on?”
He doesn’t answer.
She hovers, supports herself on her thin, strong-surprisingly strong-arms, her cunt just on the head of his cock. “You can’t have it until you tell me. Tell me it turned you on, watching your wife kiss another man.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, it turned me on. Watching you.”
She lowers herself down on him and he moans. She rises and then drops again, and then she says, “I’ll fuck him and you fuck her.”
“Who?”
“‘Who?’” she mocks. “The Hitler Youth waitress you were ogling.”
She leans over, rocks on him, and whispers, “I’m fucking him and you’re fucking her. You’re fucking her sweet little blonde cunt, you’re feeling her tits, her ass…”
Stan grabs her by the waist and turns her over. Pulls her up onto her knees and plunges into her. Uncharacteristically, ungently, he pounds her, bruises her ass and the back of her thighs.
“That’s right,” she says. “Take her. She wants you to just take her. That’s right, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right…”
Then she feels him go soft.
“I just…” he says. “I just want you. ”
Like the sex narcs are watching you, she thinks.
Later, he says, “I’ll talk to Doc in the morning.”
87
Diane sips her coffee and looks out the window.
At John’s house.
She pretends to vacillate, but she already knows what she’s going to do. Diane’s too honest to fool herself for long. Too honest not to acknowledge that she now feels justified by jealousy over Stan’s easy acquiescence to her manipulation, fantasy-fucking the teenage waitress, then unable to carry it all the way through.
Setting the cup on the counter, she walks out the door.
Warm spring morning.
Knocks on John’s door.
It seems like forever before he answers, but then he opens the door. His hair is sleep-tousled, his denim shirt unbuttoned.
Barefoot.
A cup of coffee in his hand.
“Hi,” he says.
88
Stan and Doc meet at the Harbor Grill.
Kim is their waitress.
“Do you ever go home?” Doc asks her.
“I wanted extra shifts.”
Charles Jourdans.
$150.00.
Money she isn’t going to make no matter how many extra shifts she works. She takes their order and goes to the kitchen.
“Have you thought it over?” Doc asks.
“Diane and I talked about it,” Stan says.
“And?”
Stan hesitates.
He’s more than aware of Diane’s (irrational, unfair) contempt for him. She despises him for not wanting to h
ave sex with another woman? Not even a woman, but a teenage girl?
It’s crazy, but he does feel emasculated.
He knows that money would make it better, money would give him his balls back, the kind of money Doc is talking about…
“We’re going to say no,” Stan says.
“That’s cool,” Doc says.
Stan can see he thinks it’s anything but cool.
He thinks it’s pussy.
But Stan has weighed the pros and cons. The money would be great, but you have to weigh it against the risk of getting busted, spending years in prison, maybe a Mexican prison, and then there are the ethical issues…
“Not that we don’t appreciate the offer,” Stan says.
“Sure,” Doc says.
The waitress brings their food and they eat pretty much in silence, with forced, desultory conversation.
Doc is relieved when Stan gets up and says he has to open the store.
“I’ve got the check,” Doc says.
“No, let me-”
“Nah, I got it.”
Stan thanks him and leaves.
The waitress comes over with the check, lays it on the table, and says, “ I’ll do it.”
“I’m sorry-what?”
“ I’ll do it,” Kim says. Just one time, but I’ll do it.
89
“She’s a fucking kid,” John says.
“You were a fucking kid.”
“It’s different.”
“How?”
“That was grass,” John says. “This is coke. That’s hard time.”
Doc shakes his head. “It’s juvenile time. Worst that can happen is that she does a few months in juvie.”
Doc knows this, for chrissakes-he did time in the juvenile system. He also knows that she may go in a kid, but she won’t come out one. Between the girl gangs and the dykes, she’ll be just a piece of white meat.
“She asked me,” Doc says defensively. “I didn’t ask her. Anyway, I remember who she is.”
“That’s great,” John says. He doesn’t ask, he doesn’t care.
“You remember Freaky Frederica?” Doc asks.
