Almost Home

by Jessica Blank

  I know everything and I can see straight through her, and the night of the day of the Scabius blowjob incident, right before the sun sets, Tracy comes over to see me when Laura’s up on Hollywood spare-changing for their tampon fund or whatever. I see right through the surface of her eyes like it was plastic wrap. I know she wants junk and that’s why she came back.

  She’s all like “Sorry about before, I know I was sort of a bitch,” and even though I’m the one they think is a bitch, I’m like “Yeah, well, whatever.” I can’t look at her: I know Tracy is constitutionally incapable of saying sorry and meaning it, but at the same time that “Sorry” is the thing I want most of all, and there she is saying it.

  It’s weird, hearing what I need and knowing that it’s just a lie, like wanting to be touched and having someone hit you. It still feels good even though you bleed. It’s the best you can do. And sometimes it’s enough: sometimes you settle, and you start to look forward to getting hit because at least someone’s hand is on your face, at least there’s something else touching you besides cold naked air, at least something makes the blood rise, and the tingling in your skin keeps you warm for a while. But then there are times when it turns to an insult, a mean joke that reaches into your ribs where you keep the buried shit, the shit you need, the shit you never say, and pulls it out and holds it up in front of you and everyone like dirty underwear. And everyone laughs but you can’t, and you can’t cry either, and you also can’t stand there but they won’t let you run and the hole in your ribs lets the air in and the bubble of it swells and swells inside you till you pop.

  I hit her. I hit her hard and her cheekbone pokes into my knuckles like a rock or a knife, sharp, and I know if I’d been one step closer, if she’d been one second less ready, I’d have shattered it. Her face would’ve caved like giving in to me, like surrender, the sharp of her would’ve gone soft and I would’ve won.

  But she doesn’t, I don’t, instead her cheekbone rams into my knuckles bruising the hell out of my hand, and it’s just another fucking blow to me, just another way she kicks my ass even though there she is bleeding through her fingers dripping brown onto the sidewalk and she looks up at me with her fuckin’ stupid-ass weepy eyes, faking that I hurt her feelings, and I know she’ll cry to Laura who’ll stand in solidarity against me as the big mean nasty guy. Bitch. I can’t stop getting my ass kicked by Tracy even when I throw the punch.

  After that, I keep going to the spot by the Dumpster to look at her blood on the sidewalk. There are five drops of it, dirt-brown like liquid rust on the grit of the asphalt, perfect circles. Weirdly it’s beautiful, the residue of her, beautiful like the gray-green glow off the Santa Monica Pier, like the alley-cat scratches on her bony shoulders. It’s beautiful because it’s real, and because I made it happen, but most of all because no one knows what it is. If anybody ever even saw it they’d think it was shit or dirty gum ground in the sidewalk, but they’d never think of it as blood from someone’s face. It’s a secret I have with Tracy: I can see her whenever I want. If I squint hard enough I can almost see her face in it, or sometimes her cells, all the parts of her she hides from everyone. She thought she could hide them from me too, but she can’t. That’s the thing of it. She walks through the world so tough, her and Laura holding hands and whispering like it’s fourth fucking grade and they have some world nobody else is part of, but the secret is that I can see right through the walls around that world. It doesn’t matter whether Tracy thinks she’s letting me look; I can see everything inside her.

  Now it’s the day after that night, the night she’d probably call The Night I Hit Her, and my knuckles hurt. Her face was so sharp it scratched my skin across the bones, and now they’re swollen up like purple popcorn; I keep my hands in my pockets because I really don’t feel like getting into it with Scabius and Rusty and Squid. They’d just be like “Fuck yeah, you showed her” and reduce it to their level, which is nothing like the real of it, the secret real of it where Tracy made me swell inside till I burst through my skin and burst hers too and now I can see inside her when I want. There’s no way they’d ever comprehend that, and besides if I told them it wouldn’t be a secret anymore, tucked down between me and her; they’d be able to go out by the Dumpster and see her too. And that’s bullshit. So I stuff my hands down in my dirty pockets and keep quiet, and when Tracy marches up to me with her purple-as-a-sunset cheek I grab her arm and pull her down the block.

  * * *

  I can tell when I see her that she has big plans. She’s probably gone over and over it with Laura, exactly how she’ll tell me off, bring me down notch by notch by notch. She’s trying to puff her skinny chest up like some bird or animal, but her ribs are tiny; I can see right through her.

  “I’m fucking quitting,” she says; it’s the first thing out of her mouth. “I’m taking off and quitting so that I don’t have to eat your fucking shit, and I don’t care if it hurts and I puke till my stomach’s dry, so don’t even try to tell me that’s what’ll happen. I don’t fucking care because it’s better than having to fuck your sorry scabby ass. I’d rather puke up blood than ever touch you again, so fuck off and go find some other bitch to pollute with your nasty fuckin’ jizz.” That’s what she says. And then she turns around and walks toward Hollywood.

  If I was smart I’d run after her, grab her shirt and make her stay. But I have that cartoon-invisible thing again where I vanish and reappear behind her, turn myself to nothing, and it slows me down, way down so when she walks away all I can do is stand there watching. She’s walking north and the mountains are beyond her soaking in the gray-blue smog, Hollywood sign half hidden by it. It’s like at the ends of movies, like she thinks that she’s some cowgirl on some screen riding off into the distance alone. Pretty soon the smog will swallow her up and she’ll just disappear.

  laura

  burbank never changes. It’s one big plastic strip mall, run together through the base of the hills like a thread, Jamba Juice Bed Bath and Beyond and nail salons like whorehouses, buff and frost like blowjobs for the rich white lonely women. On Cahuenga the road hugs the freeway and the lanes narrow, squeezing you tight between hill and highway, birthing your car finally into wider lanes, the spit and grime of Hollywood, and no matter who you are or where you’ve been it always feels the same.

  Six years ago I was here, speeding down Ventura with my feet on the dash of a clunky red truck, and now I’m here again inside some stranger’s Accord, and years have intervened giving my fingers their first faint wrinkles but it all looks the same out the window. When we drove through before, my mom pointed at the storefronts like they were somehow glamorous but I never believed her: sure, they were new and bigger than the things I’d seen, but even then I saw the grime around the plastic.

  We were here for Disneyland. We drove down 40 then 15 from Ludlow till the desert turned to endless suburbs, six hours of traffic till we got to Anaheim and found out they raised the entrance fee. She got pissed off because we couldn’t afford it, and plus the motel rates were jacked up for the tourists—Motel 6 cost eighty bucks a night. So we went up to L.A. I didn’t mind, not really—I was ten, already too old for Mickey, Minnie, Dumbo, and all them. The whole thing had been my mom’s idea. I think she thought it was obligatory, proof of her maternal commitment and skill. I remember thinking it was kind of a crock. I knew she was more interested in L.A. than Disneyland anyway, the promise of the city, the way the letters stretched across mountains and it looked how it looked on TV.

  It still looks like that up in those hills, and down at their feet it’s still plastic and dirty. It’s weird, the way so many things happen but the ground stays the same, how we turn inside out, molt, grow new cells while words endure: HAIR. CELEBRITY AUTO BODY. MEL’S. You could call them institutions but really it’s just that here in Los Angeles signs are built to withstand earthquakes, and we are not. I remember my mom told me what a fault line was while we were here and I thought every highway traced a place where the ground cou
ld open up and spill us all into the sea. I remember thinking that would still be better than going back to the desert. At least it would change something.

  But now it’s been six years and I’m back here and nothing’s changed but me. I don’t think places are what make you change. My mom always talks about them like when we get there something will happen, but there’s always a reason we don’t get let in. And when you’re looking from the outside, everything is just itself, the way they’ve built it, not what you’ve built it up to be.

  A few weeks ago I said fuck it. I didn’t mean to, not really: it wasn’t the kind of thing where I packed my bag and had it hidden in the closet, tracked my mom’s routine so I knew she’d be at the grocery store, plotted the escape. You always hear of kids running away like that, leaving notes, but that’s not what I did. It was more like this: one morning I got up at noon, took money from my mom’s secret coffee can, walked out the front door through the orange dust and crossed the blacktop to the 58. There was a truck. I put out my thumb. I’m sixteen and a girl so he stopped. I got in.

  We drove toward Hinkley, not so much where I wanted to go, but then I wasn’t trying to go anywhere in particular. He looked at me like I was bait and tried to be my friend. I rolled my eyes and spat out the window. It wasn’t what he thought: me some little wounded hitcher girl and him the big sexy teacher or the bad guy. It was more like the times my mom’s boyfriends told me I was pretty. My skin was pasty and my hair was dull brown and my body was just medium. I knew I wasn’t pretty. They all thought I rolled my eyes and shut my mouth because my daddy had hit me my boyfriend had dumped me or something, but really I’d just had about enough. “Such a shame,” they’d say, and my mom would say “It is, isn’t it?” It was more like that.

  It is, isn’t it. She had a few of those—phrases she used over and over, even if the people and places and rooms were different, even just with me. When I was little it was Disneyland she talked about over and over, and Someday; after that failed trip it was pretty much whatever the current boyfriend said. There were lots of those, boyfriends, and I got over trying to like them after I turned twelve or so. She liked them well enough for both of us.

  She would’ve liked this guy, too, with his green truck, gritty grin, dirty hair. Around the truck stops I’d smile at him just enough so he wouldn’t get bored and drop me off. Other times I watched the desert through his bug-stained window. It was flat and June already, and my arms smelled like sweat, the kind that’s still faint enough to be sweet; no salt, just skin and heat.

  We got to Hinkley, and he said “Here we are, end of the line. Unless you want to stay and ride around a little. . . .” My mom taught me how to say no thank you, so I hopped out at the BP, walked west like I was going somewhere and knew where it was.

  The rest of it was pretty much the same. I got five rides, south and west; on the third one I figured out I was going to Los Angeles. It was past eleven and the stars stretched out wide, glinting in the empty, and they reminded me of nighttime city. I said it out loud, a mark on the big quiet blackness like a star. After that I’d tell them my destination and they all thought I was nursing some kind of dream.

  None of those L.A. dreams are worth much, though. I figured that out back at ten years old when I watched my mom blink back the strip malls, drive around looking for things that sparkled till even the sky was grime, race toward Grauman’s Chinese to find the hooker standing in Gene Kelly’s footprints. Eventually she took me home. The city tries to feed those dreams, painting buildings pink and pasting posters everywhere, stars shining down on you bigger than your car, but the dirt gets in all the cracks like they’re creases in your hands and makes your palm prints filthy, and anything you were trying to find that was shiny gets dull fast.

  I guess I came here looking for a different kind of dirty than the one I knew. I’d memorized every inch of Ludlow, the neon and the highway and the dust, and the thousand or so words that people used; I’d used them up. I’d burned through every book in my tiny school library, made straight A’s since seventh grade and no one noticed: not my mom, not my teachers even. Past twelve, if you were a girl, all anyone cared about was pretty. Words swarmed inside my head like bees, and everyone around me was afraid of getting stung. So I sat there silent, picking at my cuticles in English class, peeling my split ends apart at dinner. Heading out to the porch when my mom switched on the nightly parade of glossy packaged people through our tiny TV. Shy, people said, or Sullen, or Isn’t it a shame. It is, isn’t it. I had all these sentences in my brain, so many more than my mom ever used, and all anyone ever said was Too bad, she could be so pretty, when I knew I couldn’t.

  I was bored I guess is what it was, and I wish I could say something more interesting like I had a goal or dream or there was something I was chasing but there it is. My mom could do without me, I was tired of TV, I came to L.A. by accident with a couple hundred bucks and a school I.D. from Ludlow High, hoping to find someone who at least knew how to talk.

  He drops me off at Hollywood and Vine, by a big billboard that says “Angelyne” and has a picture of some blow-up doll with big tits swathed in pink. Down the street there’s one for Spearmint Rhino Gentlemen’s Club, and the first thing I think is that’s the most fucked up name for a strip bar I have ever heard. What happens with kids like me in Hollywood is they become strippers or do grainy porn on cheap videotape in some guy’s basement and then get killed. I’ve seen enough TV movies to know that. But seeing it blown up full size above my head is another thing entirely, because some guy said about those girls: She could be so pretty and then painted her and stuck her up there. It’s real, the fake of it and the glossed-over raw, and it makes my ribs feel dirty.

  A couple blocks below that is the hostel. I asked my last ride, a puffy Honda-driving guy who worked in “the industry,” which he explained to me meant movies, where I should stay. I said it so pissy and mean that there was no way he could suggest his place. He said south on Vine there was a Vagabond Inn, and below that he thought he’d driven past a hostel once. Just when I’m starting to lose hope I find it. It’s eight bucks a night for a bunk bed. It’s like two in the morning and there’s nobody up. I climb in my bed in the girls’ room I’m assigned and look out the window. You can see HOLLYW stretched across the mountains and then a building cuts it off.

  That first night there the screaming wakes me up. That sounds dramatic, doesn’t it, like some crime or sordid thing. Really it’s just Tracy, this girl about my age with bleached-out skin to match her hair, pale yellow, yelling at her gorgeous, sketchy boyfriend before he goes back to the guys’ room or the street. He keeps saying Tracy over and over, like her name would make her listen. But she’s really upset, enough to be scary; he was late to something or other and she’s determined to rip him a new one. I try not to let my eyes crack open; I don’t want her to turn that flood on me, and besides, it’s none of my business. But by the time he shuffles off to his side of the building I am definitely up.

  Right before dawn has always been my favorite time. In Ludlow the sky is clear like glass above the gray-brown sand, the blue darker than daylight and lighter than night, the only deep, real color you ever see in the landscape around there. I used to wake up sometimes for no reason and lay in the sheets just to watch it. I could’ve snuck outside to see the sunrise, but it was so quiet I thought if I even rustled the bedspread I’d stir it all up. Sometimes a truck would roll through from Cleveland or Michigan or somewhere, but somehow their noise was part of the quiet too, like the tree in the forest with no one to hear. Except me, but I could keep the secret.

  Here it’s different. The blue is the same but the sounds are louder, not like trees in forests. Here they’re starting their days already, the first wave of them, padding out to get newspapers, turn keys in ignitions, beat the traffic. Someone breaks a bottle on the sidewalk below us. When I look down later it’s still there, green like grass or emeralds, glinting on the gray of the pavement.

  Trac
y’s three beds over from me and she keeps trying to readjust her sheets like it’ll make her warmer, cover her up. She humphs and rolls onto one side, wiggles herself into the covers and stays still for twenty seconds, then starts it all again. I see her mid-roll, when she flails the sheets off before swaddling herself. She’s rat-faced and skinny and her hip bones poke through the thin synthetic blanket. She’s been crying. Her clothes are black and she has pins and patches everywhere, spikes around her neck like a too-tough dog. I’m scared of her. I fall back asleep.

  By the time I open my eyes again it’s almost one. The sun is hot through the windows and I wake up sticky, filmed with gray like the haze on the mountains, blurred. All the other bunks are empty, and I’m relieved I won’t have to stand in line for the shower. For a minute I think of the bathroom at home, dingy roses on the shower curtain and how my mom would’ve been in there this morning, left the sink wet and her toothbrush out. I would’ve cleaned it up before school if I was there, but I’m not. Without me the mess will accumulate, a toothbrush here, a towel there, uncapped shampoo, a week before it gets big enough for her to notice anything is different or missing. I mean obviously she knows I’m gone, she probably even called the cops or some boyfriend, but it’ll take a while before she sees it makes a difference. As long as she still has her guys and dreams of Disneyland or something like it, it doesn’t really matter where I am.

  Which by now is in a white tile bathroom halfway between bus-station bathroom and McDonald’s, anonymous, mildew smell barely camouflaged by bleach, walls lined with those fake mirrors you can’t really see yourself in. The shower is Quarters Only and all I’ve got left is bills and nickels, so I wash my face with paper towels and head to the front desk for change.

  Whoever works it is apparently on lunch, and when I walk outside to find a 7-Eleven there’s this Tracy person squatted down and smoking beneath the Spearmint Rhino billboard. “Hey,” she says. “I saw you watching me last night.” The way she’s squinting I think she might hit me or something.