“The nuns were so kind and beautiful like you, Lilyth darlin’, and they gave me the name Mary, like Mother Mary, who was from a good family, I’ll have you know. She come from money, Jesus’s momma did. She was a rich Jewish girl. It’s yo’ Grandaddy changed my name to Goldie. You din’t know that did’y, Paul, baby, ’cause I never tol’ ya. Life’s too complicated already, boy, I din’ wanna make yours any more complicated with your own daddy shot dead in the line’s duty, and that’s the truth, that is. You were too young to ’splain it all. And Grandaddy Charlie love you like he’ own.”
My dad just stood up and stared out the back sliding glass door like he was me looking for Jane, but I knew he was looking for something else. I knew that in that moment, he was putting his life together. And in turn, mine. Mamau ignored him and started singing “My Sweet Lord” again and draining the chicken. Suddenly, she looked around. “Oh Lord! Where is Charlie?” Mamau clucked and bustled finding James and Grandaddy with me out on the porch with the ponies that she had given him. She set down a little plate of Bull-Yawns for Grandaddy that I knew would only sit there for a tiny space before I would pick ’em up and return them right back to her.
“Good woman, yer Grandaddy got,” said James. And it was at that point that Lilyth broke the profound moment with my Grandaddy and his best friend, shrieking out the front door, racing down the steps crying, and then disappeared, heading off toward Magda’s. Mom in tears, Dad yelling, and Mamau and Grandaddy each shaking their heads in dismay and disgust, respectively. James just sat there silent, taking it all in, then he cuffed my Grandaddy on the head and said, “Charlie, y’all get the hell over it y’hear? Y’done all you can do, for that girl. Goddamn drugs these kids’re takin’ nowadays.”
My Grandaddy pointed to Lilyth as she ran off, and I knew something was coming. “Know why that one biting the hands that feed her? ’Cause them same hands is the hands that preventin’ her from feedin’ her damn self. That one ain’t never had t’earn nothin’. Important you keep ya babies hungry, hear me? Not so hungry they starve, but goddamn hungry enough that they gonna least learn how ta hunt. More Boudin, boy.” Grandaddy nodded at the plate of Bull-Yawns, and I knew what I had to do.
I don’t think Lilyth even knew what was on the plate that my Mamau always brought out to my Grandaddy, much less that they were always meant for someone else. My sister hardly ever spoke to him, and I had never even seen her on our glorious porch—except to go storm raging through it—the porch that shaped more of my life than my bedroom had. But I knew I wanted someone to give mine to, and that Jane was that someone. And that a pair of rescued 95s was no match for a plate of Bull-Yawns.
Chapter Eight
And that was it. Jane was sequestered in her new world over in the rich subdivision of Quail Valley. Lilyth disappeared from home off and on for a while. Mom and Dad never mentioned Lilyth’s condition to me, and years would pass before the topic of a little girl named Charlotte would resurface. Without Lilyth, home felt safe for a good long time. I relaxed. But high school was a wasteland; without Jane, life was difficult to breathe in.
* * *
Jane,
I can’t imagine a time in which disappointing you will be okay.
* * *
I got my first high school lungful one day at the roller-skating rink, although I despised our new football coach for buying into the current trend of using shit like ballet and roller-skating and ice-skating to increase the balance and agility of an athlete. He actually had us in full pads and helmets with roller skates on doing wind sprints across the rink like a bunch of nancies. There were trails of sweat thrown across the hardwood floors beneath our feet, and he had even duct-taped the arms of us running backs to our bodies to make balancing even harder as we raced from wall to wall looking like idiots. I wanted nothing more than to skip this ridiculous practice—until my lungs sent me a message. Breathing her in always felt like I had shoved my head into the deep freeze at the supermarket and inhaled like I had just resurfaced from a deep dive. And there she was. So my lungs and nostrils stood at attention and I almost passed out from the over-oxygenation.
I saw her skates before I even saw her face when she and about six other girls were sectioned off in the rink’s corner taking what I imagined was some sort of disco skating class. Through my helmet’s facemask, I couldn’t take my eyes off a pair of psychedelic purple, yellow, and green high-top roller skates from which silver and gold bells dangled on iridescent cellophane threads that only Jane could have produced, spinning around until the skates slowly came to a stop. I spat out my mouthpiece as I saw the only face that had ever given me a nearly paralytic physical reaction and yelled, “JANE” just before I impacted the wall. I got the wind knocked out of me and I collapsed on the ground, finding it harder to breathe in that moment than it had ever been in her absence. I saw her searching each of our helmets for recognition. Now, getting the wind knocked out of you usually creates a panic to regain the necessary lung function to prevent suffocation. But in that instant, I only needed it to find my voice. I just needed to scream her name one last time before our new age coach ended his count and sent us on our final lap and then to the changing room. I didn’t even care if she had seen me slamming into the wall like a kamikaze pilot. I vaguely heard Firefly interrupting Leo Sayer, who was singing about needing something, and touching something, until he finally drowned out Leo altogether. My breath came back to me too late for consciousness.
“Man, you had to crack a rib as hard as you hit that wall,” was the first thing I heard when I woke up in that stupid, boys’ roller-skating changing room. I would have preferred to hear Leo. And Jane was gone.
My Jane moments seemed to be even more fleeting after that. High school happened around me, and sports, and jobs, and saving money for a car. Nowadays, Mr. Milan sat out alone, grass up around the arms of his chair again. I still mowed the grass around him and he still looked right through me. He kept his right hand on the arm of Mrs. Milan’s empty aluminum chair and a beer in his left. I kept mowing the high patch at night after he went in. We never spoke. A number of things changed at that point in my life, but Jane was the constant. She always was. I’d read a lot about love in books. And it was always made out to be a wonderfully entrancing experience, available to only those beyond a certain age. But I knew I had already fallen in it. They were wrong. They were all wrong. Love was different. It was different from everything. Sports were always logical, a lot like mathematical equations. What I had fallen in far earlier than they said I could was something that I just could not navigate the same way I could when eleven people were trying desperately to slam me violently to the ground before I could find an end zone. And I was petrified of that level of helplessness. But I had my dancing mailbox. And I had hope.
* * *
Jane,
Sometimes they’re not just ships passing in the night. Sometimes they’re lifeboats.
* * *
Time had flown by, but they were wrong about it being a healer. Hell, time healed nothing—nothing real at least. “It heals all”…what a load of crap. The years had numbed nothing. And an emotional and musically fueled ride brought absolutely nothing to the surface, because the important things never leave the surface. That’s just where they live.
Some things are meant to be shared with lovers. And music was always one of those things to me. I never wanted that magical journey to be interrupted by trivial conversation. I just wanted to know that someone had experienced it, too…but only someone important. A concert, for example, was always something I had to take a minute to recover from. So I always went alone. And so did she. But we were not just passing in the night. Toward the end of my senior year in high school, I sat on the side of the downtown Houston auditorium after spending about an hour and a half with Gary Numan and three thousand screaming idiots that had been trying to sonically bastardize my experience. I watched all the people walking to the parking lot with concert shirts in their hands and cars dr
iving by pumping his hit song. And I felt it a bit weird. If they loved his music enough to attend his concert, why did they leave early? Most of the audience had already started to file out after he played “Cars” for the first song of his encore. But there were about ten to twenty people left still in their seats just staring at the empty stage by the time I finally drifted out. Those were the people who saw the same show that I did. I wondered if they, too, had been waiting for “Down in the Park.” I know I certainly was. And after hearing it, I just needed another minute alone on that brick wall to watch the people already going home who didn’t.
Standing up from that wall, strangely winded, I finally decided to walk back to the ’67 Beetle that Firefly and I had put together with junkyard parts and rusted panels. We called that car “The Toaster” because it had no firewall between the engine compartment and the seats. That, combined with the Texas heat, made it almost unbearable to drive. In fact, the rubber would actually melt off of your sneakers if you drove it too long.
You know, it’s usually only with a reflection on the collected moments of my life that I can truly pick out commonalities—never in the moment. But with her I always saw it immediately. And standing up from that wall, just like at the skating rink, I understood what that tiny bit of exertion affecting my lungs was trying to tell me. It was an indicator when something quickly took me from not enough oxygen to too much. For some reason, I just did not want to leave yet. I wanted to wait, to put off the long walk to the free street parking where I had left The Toaster.
After thirty more minutes of waiting for nothing, I finally trudged back to The Toaster. Hell, I was starving anyway and desperately needed to get something in my belly before my attitude went to crap. It’s really bizarre to me how my brain has decided to retain some random, very specific details about my adolescence, but I remember that I had exactly $6.50 in my pocket that night, and that three chili cheese dogs, french fries, and a drink cost $5.49 at James Coney Island, one of my favorite spots in Houston. That was going to be the second half of my date with myself. But first I decided to circle The Toaster back around to the front of the auditorium just to get one last look. I never should have doubted my lungs, because as I rounded the corner I saw a girl standing right in front of the theater in a short purple sundress—and I knew. I parked The Toaster on the curb about fifty feet from the front and got out just to make sure. But without her even facing me, I could tell. No one was that beautiful but Jane. No one moved like Jane. No one stood still like her. Just Jane. Only Jane.
She had stayed for “Down in the Park,” just like me. And now she was slowly rocking back and forth from her toes to her heels on that curb long after everyone else had gone home. Seeing her on that curb brought absolutely nothing back, because it had never left. I did not want her any more or any less at that moment than I did when I was eight. Puppy love is a story told by idiots, about idiots, for idiots. Through the years I’ve accumulated a number of ideas, secrets, and dreams. Jane’s been in every single one of them. I watched her on that curb and wondered if Jane had been at any of the other concerts I had gone to alone. And just how many lifeboats we had missed. My Jane dreams from growing up are all identical today, but dreams are never complicated by social status. In that perfect instant, I wanted so dearly to offer her a ride in something better than that shit box Toaster. And I craved to be able to buy her something, anything more than just a few goddamn chili cheese dogs. To this day, there has never been a time in which I have had less and desired more than that night with only six dollars and fifty fucking cents in my hollow pocket. I now know that I was embarrassed about all the things that had nothing to do with who I was.
All of those pathetically insecure thoughts raced through my mind, but I just wanted the car horn that was interrupting my mind to shut the fuck up! But then she turned around, and even though she wasn’t looking at me, her face gave me enough peace and security to offer her a ride on a goddamn bicycle if that was all I had. My God, she was lovely. But that horn was a wakeup call that came just a hair too late, and it drifted right past me up to the curb in front of her looking a lot like a brand-new red Porsche 911SC. She smiled as someone flung the passenger door open from within, and that tiny little familiar Grunt was there, but it didn’t leave my lips. Instead it clicked, a painful snap inside the roots of my sinuses, and then it left my soul. I watched Jane climb in, and I watched that car take her away. I had never grown out of crying and fighting, and I wanted nothing more right then and there than to have five minutes alone with the entitled jackass who would not at least get out and walk around to open a car door for my Jane. I wanted to hurt him badly…even though I could not control my eyes.
* * *
K7, K8, K9, and K0 were the four Elvis songs on the jukebox at James Coney Island. Those songs were important to me, and they were free, which left me with a dollar and a penny in my pocket when Kate walked up to my table with a smile, waving over two others behind her. She was a beautiful and bubbly girl in my grade with long blond hair, who came from a very well-off family and cheered at almost every football game in which I had ever played. It’s never a secret in high school as to who’s fond of whom, and it was no secret that Kate told her friends, who told my friends, who told me. As Kate and her entourage got closer, I recognized another familiar face under a hat—Jonathan, as in pee-hat Jonathan, whose entire being still repelled me.
Jonathan and his new girlfriend came into focus just as The King was finishing “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Jonathan pranced up to my table dressed to chill like Duran Duran in their Rio tour, trying way too hard with the New Wave look and short-sleeved Madras plaid button-down shirt synched with a thin black leather tie. He plopped down opposite me in the booth, leaning back to observe me smugly while singing “Hungry Like the Wolf” as if he had fucking written it and snapping his fingers for the waiter to hurry up. I really hated that kid, but I actually liked Kate, especially with her hand on my thigh beneath that table. But going dutch just wasn’t in my blood, and affording a girl like her was not yet in my economic plan. My mind could never escape Jane anyway, and I wanted them all to go away. I just wanted to be alone.
“So sorry we were delayed,” said Jonathan as he doffed his wannabe 1940s Dean Martin fedora right on the table between Kate and me. “We had to listen to my sainted mother carry on about how our housekeeper put the Mottahedeh in the dishwasher.” I had neither a housekeeper nor a dishwasher, except my own sainted mother, and hadn’t a clue what Mottahedeh was, but assumed it must be a living being, perhaps a pet lizard or hamster that would die trapped in a dishwasher. I could not take my focus off that goddamn hat near my food. Jonathan was now in college, drove a brand-new BMW, wore exorbitantly expensive clothes, and let everyone know it. About the time I landed his piss-sodden Nothing Runs like a Deere up The Pole, his dad struck it rich and I guess new-money Jonathan expected to be revered like a rock star, though he was an unoriginal Frankenstein in designer duds. He had attempted a few sports, mainly the tennis team at the country club, so he had slimmed and switched hats. But he still found opportunities to let me know he had the potential to be a threat in my life, at least financially. My self-worth was steered initially by stupid things like the economic difference between Jane and me, and by people like Jonathan.
You know, I’m embarrassed that I was embarrassed about being poor. Hell, I don’t even like using the term poor, because I wanted for nothing. My parents provided all of the basics and more than enough love. It was far more than I could’ve ever asked for. And as far as the things that I truly value in this life, they gave me more than any other child I knew. But I learned to wait. I knew that Jonathan’s bank account would slowly deplete, but what my family had given me would pay dividends my entire life. I trained myself to avoid the chafing social situations where my economic shortcomings would be obvious. I had accepted the world that my lowly high school income placed me in, but I could not fucking stand it when it was thrown in my face.
“Yup, that fedora cost me over a hundred and fifty dollars. It can reside right here where no locals can steal it off the rack.” He then lit up a Dunhill Red and exhaled at me. I wanted to want to be a gentleman, but that hat was something my Grandaddy would never allow on a supper table, and I really just wanted to shove it straight up that pussy’s ass. Some guys feared Jonathan, thought he was powerful. I thought he was derivative, an unoriginal piece of shit, always impersonating a prepackaged trend, like Lilyth with her perfumes but with a newly loaded bank account.
“Sad about your neighbor, Mrs. Milan, Mickey,” Kate tried to redirect gracefully.
“Cancer for how many years?” Jonathan’s girlfriend asked pertly like, Would you like a mint? As if she gave a shit.
“I can’t imagine suffering like that. I’m so sorry, Mickey.” Kate squeezed my thigh under the table, and I wondered, as her hand crept slowly up the inside of my thigh, if my body would react to her even though she was not Jane.
“Really nice, the Milans,” I said, emotionless.
“Probably somethin’ in the water in that part of town,” sneered Jonathan. Kate shot him fierce eyes. “What? I’m just sayin’, really. At least at the golf course we know which reservoir our home’s connected to.”
Three chili cheese dogs gave me an excuse to do most of the listening, so I was silent the majority of the time, but I was slowly losing control. In two hot dogs’ time, Jonathan had already asked me if I wanted to join them at Marisk, where he had reserved a bottle of aged Dom that we could split four ways at $250 each, and that Kate absolutely loved that place, and that it would be no locals and only good stock, and that maybe we could take my car because his 450SL was on order and he didn’t like driving that “bus of a BMW,” and that he desperately needed to find a new tailor for a new Armani suit he’d just bought while in New York at fucking Fashion Week, and did I “know anyone good?” and wasn’t I glad that I no longer had to work at Church’s Fried Chicken anymore? I knew he knew that I still worked there most days, and that I was still in high school. I knew he knew because that piece of shit would come through the drive-through window at least once a week and order something stupid with a car full of my classmates and mock me without having the balls to actually mock me. And he’d ask what year The Toaster was, every single time, feigning interest.
Jane Two Page 18
