by Yvonne Prinz
I wonder how M got here. I’m always curious about how people just arrive somewhere; maybe it’s because I’ve been here all my life. I wonder what it feels like to drive into a city and get out of the car and say, “Well, this is it. Guess I’ll unpack the car; I’m staying.” I wonder if he left a girl behind, or a dog. (Or is he a cat person? No, he definitely looks like a dog person.) Maybe he calls home once a week to check in with his parents and to make sure his dog is okay.
Matt jolts me out of M’s life by waving my first fanzine in front of my face. I take it and hold it in my hands. It’s fabulous. The cover I designed, a vintage pen-and-ink of an ice princess on skates wearing a tiara, executing an arabesque, using an LP as a skating rink, came out beautifully. I stick my head in the box and breathe in the printer ink smell, destroying about ten thousand brain cells. I pull out my crumpled bills and pay Matt and then I lug the box home. The weight of it feels like a good day’s work.
While I’ve been inventing a fake life for M and attempting to get a real one for myself, my mom has been creating one for herself. She’s hell-bent on making us look normal by Thursday, although, frankly, I don’t think “Jack” is going to buy it. The last few days, she’s been coming home with shopping bags filled with cartons of food and scooping it out onto plates as though she cooked it herself and then putting the plates in front of us at the dining table roughly around the time that she thinks normal people eat dinner. Last night we had Dover sole baked in parchment paper with lemon dill sauce, steamed baby carrots and mashed potatoes with truffle oil. It was delicious. The night before that we had grilled jumbo shrimp on a bed of angel hair pasta tossed in pesto sauce. It was also delicious. I’m so onto her, but I’d be an idiot if I said anything. It beats the hell out of chipping a frozen pizza out of the freezer or warming up leftover take-out Chinese noodles and eating them straight from the box. Growing up, I don’t recall one meal that we ate at the table as a family. For one thing, there was no table, and we weren’t that kind of family anyway. We were like wolves, foraging for ourselves and eating when we were hungry; for my dad that usually meant midnight, but my mom likes to snack all day. She has the eating habits of a gerbil. I like to mix it up. Cereal for dinner is fine but so is lasagna; so are doughnuts. Pizza is great for breakfast; so are bananas; so are doughnuts. I usually eat lunch at work and when I’m off I go up the street to the Japanese place on College Avenue and get a bowl of udon noodles in broth for three bucks. It’s the best deal around and the people watching is great. Not as weird as Telegraph—not everyone has abused a controlled substance before ten a.m. It’s more of a pharmaceutical crowd, but interesting enough to watch while I slurp my soup.
The food in front of us tonight smacks of “normal,” but my mom and I haven’t exactly perfected table talk. She reads a big hardcover volume of some dead guy’s poetry as she eats, while I read about Robert Plant in Rolling Stone magazine. Joe Cocker sings his shaky heart out on the stereo. Occasionally, one or the other of us will announce something newsworthy.
“The liquor store on Telegraph was robbed last night,” I offer.
She looks up from her book. “Really? What time?”
“Late. One a.m. No one was hurt.” I throw that in for her sake. She hates that I work on Telegraph.
“Did they catch them?” She takes a bite of her maple-glazed salmon.
“Nope, they’re still at large,” I report darkly.
“Hey, have you seen Pierre lately?”
“No, I haven’t. Do you think he did it?” I ask.
“Nah, what would he need money for?”
“Maybe it’s not the money; maybe it’s the thrill of it.” I try to imagine my cat robbing a liquor store. Height would be an issue even if he stood on his back legs. Besides, these guys had a gun. Pierre can’t even open a door with his paws, let alone cock a gun. If he could, he really wouldn’t need us for anything.
After dinner, we clean up, which entails throwing all the neatly labeled boxes into the refrigerator with the others and washing two plates. I go upstairs to take a phone call from Kit, who seems convinced that Niles is messing around on her. I’m lying on my bed, digesting my third “normal” dinner in a row. My jeans feel snug around my waist.
“When he came to get me last night he didn’t even say anything about how I looked.”
“Uh-huh, is that all you got?”
“No. I looked at his cell phone while he was in the bathroom and I saw a number on there I didn’t recognize. A four-one-five area code.”
“That could be anything. You dialed it, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did.”
“Who was it?”
“I got the voice mail of a girl named Chelsea. She sounded pretty.”
“You can tell by someone’s voice mail if they’re pretty?”
“Yes, I can. I can also tell that she has large breasts.”
“Of course you can. You think everyone has bigger breasts than you.”
“Well, they do.”
“You’re petite.”
“I’m breastless.”
“Well, you can’t really ask Niles about this allegedly large-breasted pretty girl named Chelsea, can you?”
“No, but I can catch him in the act. I think he’s a lying shithead, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. I think you might be rushing to judgment. She could be anyone. How are you going to catch him in the act?”
“I’m going to follow him next Saturday night. You have to come with me.”
“No, Kit, you know I hate surveillance. What if he sees us?”
“Don’t worry; he won’t see us.”
“Why not?”
“Because it won’t be us.”
I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming. Kit is very big on disguises. She gets first pick of whatever comes into the vintage-clothing store that she works in and she prides herself on looking like a completely different person every time she leaves the house. She owns a vast selection of wigs, hats, sunglasses, jewelry and shoes. She’d make a great gumshoe. Not including Halloween (which I won’t even get into), I’ve been dressed as a disgruntled shopper (when Kit needed backup on a complaint about a staff member at a boutique), a Girl Scout (when Kit needed a partner to go door-to-door, collecting empty bottles to support her fake troop), a guy (when Kit needed a pretend boyfriend to make her current boyfriend jealous) and a middle-aged woman (when Kit exceeded the one-per-customer on free samples at the Lancôme cosmetics counter).
“So, will you help me?”
As I’m lying there, Pierre appears in my doorway. He strides purposefully past my bedroom without even a glance in my direction. I jump off the bed and tiptoe to my doorway, poking my head out. Pierre stands in front of Suki’s door and meows. The door opens. Pierre disappears inside. The door shuts.
“Allie? Are you there?” asks Kit.
“Aha!” I say into the phone.
“What?”
“Pierre is cheating on me with a Japanese woman.”
“You see what I mean? You can’t even trust a male cat.”
“Okay, sure, I’ll help you. But I’m not wearing a disguise.”
“Yes, you are. Call you tomorrow.” She hangs up before I can respond.
I pull the Beatles’ Rubber Soul out of its sleeve and place it on the turntable. The needle drops and “Drive My Car” starts up. I lie there and listen to it, looking up at the ceiling. My eyes close. I imagine M lying next to me, listening, our fingertips touching, feeling the music and the heat of our bodies flowing through his fingers to mine and back again. There’s no need for us to talk. That’s what it’s like with us. We talk without speaking.
Chapter 5
The minimart on Telegraph and Alcatraz was robbed last night, and this time someone got hurt. The robbers were surprised when an employee came out of the bathroom holding a Road & Track magazine, which they mistook for a gun. One of them shot the guy in the arm. He’s going to be okay but I hope he wasn’t plann
ing a career as a major league pitcher. Right after that, as if that weren’t bad enough, the perps went another couple of blocks down Telegraph and robbed a barbecue place, a pretty bold move. The minimart got them on the security camera but they were wearing ski masks and it was too grainy for a positive ID. How is it that you can get a crystal-clear picture on a cell phone camera but security cameras still deliver the picture quality of your great-aunt’s black-and-white TV that she bought in the sixties to watch I Love Lucy on?
Bob has put the store on what he’s calling “high security alert,” which one might take to mean that he’s handing out assault rifles and digging foxholes, but all it really means is that we’re supposed to report any suspicious-looking characters immediately. That’s a bit tricky. Everyone on Telegraph looks at least a little suspicious, even Bob himself. The entire avenue is like one big Fellini film. The only way a person would look even remotely unusual to a Bob & Bob’s employee is if that person were actually standing in front of them in a ski mask, waving a gun, and it would be a little late to alert anyone at that point. And who are we supposed to report these suspicious characters to anyway? Homeland Security? Bob? You can’t arrest someone just for looking suspicious.
The neighborhood cops even stopped by on their bicycles. (I don’t like their chances of catching up to the perps in their getaway car on those bikes, even if they pedaled like the Wicked Witch of the West, and besides, even if they could catch them, what would they do? Ask the robbers to pull over and wait while they get off their bikes and arrest them?) They gave us some helpful tips on what to do in the case of a robbery. They told us not to play the hero. For eight bucks an hour? Don’t worry about it. And hand the money over to them cheerfully. We’ll hand it over, all right, but cheerfully? We don’t even do that for our customers. Record store employees are misanthropes. It goes with the territory. Plus, if you’ve worked retail for more than six months you will most certainly be suffering from Retail Burnout Syndrome. Even if you were cheerful when you were hired, you won’t be for long.
Jennifer and Laz have banded together as selfproclaimed “crime experts.” Jennifer knows someone who was shot in the leg (of course she does—spilled blood is only one of her many ghoulish preoccupations), and Laz has started his own perp walk of all the neighborhood unsavories that he’s acquainted with. He has a long list of suspects, and I hate to burst his Columbo bubble, but the cops say it’s very unlikely that the suspects are from the neighborhood. Still, I think it’s nice that the latest crime spree has brought him out of his shell.
I have my own suspects but I’m not saying anything right now. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed these two guys hanging around who look a little uptown for this end of Telegraph. Telegraph Avenue runs for miles and becomes Oakland somewhere along the way, but this end, the Berkeley end, is only about six blocks long and ends at the campus. It’s like falling down a rabbit hole and arriving in 1967. You notice new people, and these two are definitely a little slick for around here. When I first saw them, right around the same time that the robberies started, I figured that they were dealers moved in from San Francisco or Oakland or some other city, looking for a new customer base. One of my suspects is taller and wears a black wool beanie and a spendy black leather jacket. He wears some expensive-looking pimp bling too. The other one wears a tracksuit and a headband. It’s entirely possible that they have a little armed-robbery hobby. Everyone needs a hobby. These two also don’t look like the kind of people who would be entirely uncomfortable pointing a gun. I’ve seen them getting into an illegally parked late-model BMW with slick rims and throbbing woofers. One of them, the one in the tracksuit, was in Bob’s last Saturday night buying a hip-hop CD. He was definitely not interested in exchanging pleasantries with me. Next time I see Shorty and Jam, I’ll ask about them. Nothing happens on the street without those two noticing, at least nothing drug-related.
The other thing about neighborhood crime is that it tends not to be too good for business. People like to watch it on the news from the comfort of their La-Z-Boy recliners and shake their heads at the state of the world while they munch on a bag of Cheetos, but they’re not keen on getting too close. This has put Bob in a worse-than-usual state of mind and he’s filled the CD carousel with Nick Cave and Nina Simone and Jeff Buckley and a few other Gloomy Gus–type singers, consequently depressing everyone in the store until we’re all staring out the front window into the fog, which rolled in last night, casting a gray pall over the city. It’s the first fog of the summer and I forgot to bring a sweater, so I’m cold and miserable in my Babes in Toyland T-shirt and a denim skirt. Jennifer takes her shift to cover the cash register. She’s dressed for all kinds of weather in her knee-high Doc Martens and her leather motorcycle jacket, a year-round uniform. I go out on the floor with a price gun and mark down the soul section. Bob doesn’t like product to gather dust, so if the date on the price tag is more than thirty days ago, we mark it down by a dollar. It’s a tedious job and you have to keep stopping to change the price on the gun. That gets old fast.
My Vinyl Princess fanzines are now in position on the top row of the magazine rack next to all the other zines. After I made room for it, I stood back and tried to be objective. It definitely jumps out at you. Plus, mine’s the only free one. I figure I’ll give it out to specific customers and then let people take it themselves too. They’re obviously not for everyone. This is how it starts: one magazine at a time, and then, before you know what’s happening, you’re some kind of trendsetter. People want to know your opinion about things and where you shop and who cuts your hair (me) and how you got this movement started. To be honest, no one’s picked one up yet, but these things take time. I’ll have to be patient. Bob hasn’t noticed the zines yet. I’m going to give it a couple of days and then I’ll mention it . . . maybe.
Bob spends the afternoon in the cramped office, trying to start a fight with Dao, but she’s not having any of it today. Every time I go in there for something, he’s picking on her. She keeps her head down and ignores him. I give her a lot of credit for knowing how to handle Bob. Most people bite and before they know it, they’re involved in a three-hour rant about the shameful lack of socialized medicine in this country or how we’re getting screwed by the North American Free Trade Agreement or something like that. Bob finally gives up on her and comes out onto the floor to work on me for a while.
“Al, can you get to country today too? That section’s a mess.”
“Sure, Bob, but I did it a week ago; how bad could it be?”
He takes off his reading glasses and rubs his eyes. He puts them back on and regards me over the rims.
“Really? It’s only been a week? ’Cause it’s a mess. I checked it last night.” He tries to look like he honestly cares about the country section, which he absolutely does not except for Gram Parsons, whom we file in rock but a lot of people call him a country artist.
I click the trigger on the price gun and punch him in the arm with it, leaving a red $7.98 price tag stuck to his biceps. He looks at it as though he finds it baffling. He peels it off, folds it into a ball between his fingers and flicks it into the air.
“Did you see that Miles Davis vinyl that came in yesterday?” he asks.
“Yup.” I was there. He’s referring to a Miles Davis vinyl collectible called Miles Ahead with the original cover art from 1957. I’m trying to figure out how I can own it. “It’s totally cool.”
“Yup.”
He tells me again about the time he saw Miles play in New York City, how it blew his mind. I like hearing it again. It’s a good story, and Miles is dead now, so I’ll never get a chance like that.
“Hey, did you read the piece on Robert Plant in Rolling Stone?” he asks.
“Yeah, I did.”
Bob nods. This is something we do a lot of: this “blah, blah, blah, fill-in-band.” Bob can do it for hours. I’m one of an ever-shortening list of accomplices who can keep up with him. Bob and I talk about Led Zeppelin,
Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, the Honey Drippers and on and on, nothing new, really; it’s not like we haven’t had this conversation before. We get each other going and then we completely lose track of time.
“Did you ever hear him and Jimmy Page do that old Hank Williams Jr. song, ‘My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It’ on that Sun Records tribute album?” asks Bob.
“No. How did I miss that?”
“I’ve got a copy in the office. Hang on. I’ll throw it on for ya.” He heads to the office.
I watch Bob for a few seconds and then, out of the corner of my eye, I spy M walking past the front of the store. He glances in at the front counter, at Jennifer. Damn, that should have been me! Maybe he was looking for me. I pretend I have important business in front of the store and bolt out the door and onto the sidewalk, but by the time I get there all I see is the back of M as he walks to the corner, checks for cars and then walks across the street, alongside the empty lot toward campus, his long, lean legs taking him away from me. Damn, damn, damn! I stand there, dangling the gun at my side, watching him disappear, willing him to turn around but he doesn’t. Jimmy the Rasta dude grins at me from behind his incense emporium. When I walk back into the store, Laz and Jennifer are standing at the counter, watching me with interest.
“I thought I saw someone suspicious,” I say.
They both wait for more.
“But I was wrong.”
* * *
