by Ron Koertge
I DON’T EVEN GET OUT OF BED before I light my first cigarette of the day. Light oozes through the louvered windows. Mexican light. It’s already hot. A faucet squeaks in the bathroom. The woman I was sent to find is in the shower. Water like silver moonlight pouring off her body. Well, I found her all right. I found her and I’m not taking her back to the United States or the Divided States or any other states. I’m taking her somewhere nobody can find us, ever.
“Benjamin?”
“What, Grandma?”
“Are you awake?”
I can hear her right outside my door now.
“I’m going to yoga,” she says. “Will you be all right?”
“You go five times a week, and when you come back, I’m always right here in one badly assembled piece.”
I listen to her pad away. I’ve perfected getting out of bed, but it’s still not easy. Thanks to cerebral palsy (aka C.P.), I’m pretty much half a kid. The right side is fine, the left not so good. I saw a tree once that’d been struck by lightning. Part of it was all shriveled up. The limbs were naked and gnarled. The other part was green and good to go. I’m that tree. Struck by lightning.
No wonder I want to be Robert Mitchum: big, strong, super-cool, with those Freon eyes of his. That’s who I was pretending to be a minute ago — Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past.
But this is the present, where it takes me forever to get cleaned up, partly because I can’t stand to look at my naked self. That’s why I keep the TV on pretty much constantly. About a dozen physical therapists have told me to make friends with my body, but I just can’t.
Waiting for me in the kitchen is green tea and All-Bran. Grandma thinks there’d be world peace if everybody had regular bowel movements. Colleen and I cracked each other up once talking about the global power brokers meeting in their pajamas and passing the high-fiber cereal around while they chatted amicably. The West Bank? It’s yours. Just make sure there’s an ATM. Pass the prunes, okay?
Colleen. Somebody I can’t think about. So once I’ve choked down the last bite of bran, I cross the street to my friend Marcie’s. It’s early and the neighborhood is quiet except for a gardener or two. One of them is sweeping with a big push broom because there’s a city ordinance about mowers or leaf blowers before eight a.m. South Pasadena is like that.
I’d be glad to push a broom if I could have two arms and two legs that worked. That’s what I tell Marcie right after she answers the door.
“Really?” she says, stepping back so I can get past.
“Absolutely. I’d have a pickup truck and a bunch of clients. I’d mow and rake all day, then go home and watch DVDs.”
“You should talk to them. Make another documentary.”
“About gardeners?”
“Why not? Your movie about high school killed the other night.” She points to the coffeepot. “Want some?”
I shake my head. “Grandma says I’m not old enough yet. And, anyway, it makes me jumpy.”
Marcie sits down beside me. The caftan she’s wearing this morning is blue, with gold birds on the sleeves. Her face is all angles but not hard-looking. Her life seems pretty sweet — nice house, enough money, time to do whatever she wants. But she’s had heart bypass surgery, a couple of divorces, and she goes to AA meetings.
“So you’re a bona fide storyteller now,” she says. “Part of a community of storytellers. What’s your next story? I think you ought to have a plan.” She stands up before I can argue.
Marcie takes batter out of her refrigerator and starts pouring perfect little circles on the griddle.
I get down a couple of plates, the ones she made when she was a potter and had a kiln of her own and a husband. On the bottom of each plate is a line from a poem, hers for all I know. The one I’m holding says, Pleasure is permitted me.
“What happened to Colleen, anyway?” she asks. “She sure disappeared in a hurry.”
I sit down heavily. Like there’s any other way for me. “With Nick.”
Marcie turns away from the stove and points a spatula at me. “And this Nick is . . . ?”
“Just a guy with a couple of joints and a Pontiac Firebird. Can we not talk about it?”
“I thought she was going to twelve-step meetings.”
“She said she wasn’t having any fun. I said, ‘How much fun was it flat on your back in the hospital with IVs in your arm?’ And she said, ‘It’s just a little weed this time.’ How could she do that? Drive down there with us and then go home with somebody else?”
Marcie puts pancakes on my plate, then nudges the maple syrup my way.
“Besides being a card-carrying stoner, do you think she was jealous? People loved High School Confidential. So there you are with everybody shaking your hand, and there she is with a pin in her nose.”
“Everybody didn’t shake my hand, and she doesn’t actually have a pin in her nose.”
“I know you like her, Ben. And I’m not going to tell you girls are like buses and there’ll be a new one along in a minute. But you’re a talented filmmaker. You proved that at the Centrist Gallery. Concentrate on that.”
I take a bite of pancake. Colleen eats at McDonald’s. I’ve sat with her. I’ve paid for her coffee and McSkillet Burrito, first when she was groggy and wasted and couldn’t remember the night before, and then in rehab when she couldn’t shut up.
Never again, man. I’m not doing that ever again.
Marcie points her fork at me. “I’ve been thinking — for your next project, you need a camera of your own. You’re welcome to use mine again, but it’s from the Dark Ages. I’ll look around online.”
“Who’s going to pay for it?”
“Your grandma.”
I just look at her. “Grandma wants me to major in business, not film.”
“You can major in business and still make movies. You don’t have to be one thing; you can be a lot of things. Right now you’re in high school, so you’re really majoring in Getting Out with Your Frontal Lobe Intact. Anyway, all you really need is a nice little Flip Mino HD. Couple hundred bucks. Peanuts to somebody like Mrs. B.”
“I don’t know, Marcie.”
“Tell her you’ll never see Colleen again.”
“Colleen’s already history.”
“Maybe. But your grandmother doesn’t know that. And don’t say, ‘Oh, she was was at the gallery the other night, so she knows,’ because, yes, she was there, but she wasn’t thinking about Colleen.” Marcie narrows her eyes. “Negotiate, Benjamin. No Colleen, all As, and merit badges in Archery and Lifesaving.”
“Interesting sequence, given my skill with the bow and arrow.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. I’ll ask her. I will. At the gallery, she said she was proud of me.”
Marcie takes a sip of coffee. “For what it’s worth, I’m not so sure Colleen’s an ex-girlfriend. She likes you. I can see it when you guys are together.”
“Well, she’s sure got a funny way of showing it.”
Marcie picks up the small remote and aims it at the little flat-screen Sony. “Let’s see what’s on the movie channel.”
I take the bus to school. Not a regular school bus, not even the little bus, but a city bus, with real people going to real jobs. Or coming from real jobs, maybe, because about a third of my fellow passengers are crashed against the window or each other. If I had a little digital camera, I could take pictures of people sleeping. All kinds of people. Work up some kind of montage.
I look out the window. I look with intent. Kids walking to school, hoping they’re finally wearing the right outfit; people in their cars, putting on makeup, talking on their cells and eating bagels.
As we make the turn onto Glenarm, somebody’s lawn sprinklers are all out of whack. A big old
geyser waters the concrete, and rich guys in their BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes weave around the downpour.
Yesterday, Marcie and I watched part of Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s great neo-noir thriller. It covers the whole William Mulholland/Owens Valley water scandal better than any history book I ever read. Without the aqueduct, L.A. would still be what the Chumash called it: “The valley of smoke.” And the pollution then wasn’t smog from cars and trucks, just smoke from their campfires.
I look at the buildings and the cars and the busy streets. It’s hard to believe people lived in tents and adobe shacks and walked around in moccasins and hunted and fished. Nobody went to an office or to school.
There was C.P. then, too, I’ll bet. There’s always bad stuff. What happened to a Chumash kid with C.P.? Did he sit around with the women and bitch about the maize?
In grade school, I did a report once on the Chumash, and they were hard-core about manhood. A kid gets to be fourteen or so, and it’s time for “fasting, hallucinogenic rituals, and trials of endurance.” And that last one means — I’m not kidding — lying on anthills. Anthills populated by red ants. Those big mothers.
The funny thing is, I could do that. Maybe, anyway. Probably. I’ve been through more than most kids, and I didn’t wimp out. Ever. Hospitals, tests, physical therapy, all of it.
So I could probably lie there while the ants bit me and some shaman chanted about the seven giants that held up the world, but when I got up, I’d limp. Courageous but crippled. The really cool guys would get the Minnie Ha Ha girls, with their little fringed skirts, and I’d get Moody Boo Hoo, Minnie’s bipolar sister.
Unless I could sit with the elders, the Old Ones, and listen. Native Americans have great origin myths. There are Sky Fathers and Earth Mothers and Grandmother Spiders. There are Rainbow Serpents and moon goddesses.
I’ll bet I could’ve been that kind of storyteller then, the way Marcie says I’m the kind of storyteller I am now. The kind with a camera and a computer. I don’t have to run fast or shoot straight to tell stories. I can do it sitting down.
At school, I can’t help myself. I look for Colleen. I want to see her and I don’t want to see her. I want to talk to her and I don’t. I want her to be sorry she took off with that guy, and if she is, it’ll just make me mad because she can never be sorry enough.
I sit through history and social studies, then hobble down to eat lunch. Colleen almost never eats at school. She and Ed used to climb in his car, fire up a joint, then inhale four orders of onion rings at Wolfies. And she still had beautiful skin. Once when we were alone at Marcie’s, she took off all her —
“Hey, man.”
It’s Reshay Pettiford. He’s about six three, wearing a Kobe tank top two hundred times too big for him.
I step away from the big double doors that lead into the cafeteria and the usual lemming suicide stampede. “What’s up?” I ask.
“I want you to put me in your movie. You talked to Debra. You got her side the story. I want you to get my side. She come on to me. She was all, ‘You don’t have to worry. It’s taken care of.’ And the next thing I know, it’s, ‘You my baby daddy. You got to do the right thing.’ You know what I mean, little man. She’s like that Colleen. She’d go with anybody.”
“Colleen’s not that way. She won’t go with just anybody.”
“She went with you.”
“And I’m what? The bottom of the barrel?”
“I’m just saying.”
I look hard at him. He’s either been shooting hoops or he’s scared to death, because he’s dripping sweat. He’s not Native American, but I can guess his origin myth: the earth was without form and void until Phil Jackson came along with the triangle defense and covered part of the earth with highly polished maple.
“The movie you’re talking about is kind of done,” I tell him. “It opened at eight p.m. and closed at ten.”
He grimaces. “Dang. I’ll bet it don’t make me look good.”
“You can see it if you want.”
He shakes his head. “That’s all right. I know it make me out to be the fool.” He wipes his face by pulling up the tank top and using it like a towel. “You gonna do another one?” he asks. “Let everybody else testify?”
I nod. “We’ll see, okay?” That’s an answer I learned from my grandma. It always means there’s no way.
He holds out one fist and I tap it with my good hand. Everybody’s afraid of the other one. Everybody except Colleen.
“Let me have my say when you do, awright?”
He’s through with me then and charges through the doors and heads right for his homies. Somebody whips a basketball to him at what looks to me like almost the speed of light. Reshay charges, dribbling low and hard a couple of times, making tricky moves, ball between his legs, head fake — the whole NBA tryouts package, and right in the corner of the school cafeteria.
To be able to do that. To be agile and dexterous.
I look for an empty table. There are my classmates: Preppy, Sporty, Goth, Emo, Skater, Mansonite, Mean Girl (aka Heather, from Heathers, a Michael Lehmann movie I’ve seen about six times).
“So, am I famous yet?”
I turn around and there’s Oliver Atkins, looking like he just stepped out of a Banana Republic ad. As usual.
I tell him, “You missed it.”
He points, so I take a cafeteria tray and shuffle forward while he says, “Why don’t you dice and slice that little movie of yours and put the best parts on YouTube.”
“And your part would be the best part, right?”
“One of, anyway.”
Right in front of me is something in a big pan that looks like curds and whey. I point and wait for the lady in the hairnet to hand it over.
That’s when I see Colleen. She’s wearing a flimsy little dress and trashed motorcycle boots with the laces undone. She’s not lining up for lunch, either. She’s looking around.
I tell Oliver good-bye, put my head down, pay for my lunch, scuttle toward an empty corner, and pretend to eat. I try to act surprised when she sits across from me. Her skin is see-through pale, and everything just stands still for a second.
She says, “I thought I’d test the limits of the word tardy.”
I glance at my watch and pretend to be casual. “So far, so good.”
“What were you talking to Reshay about?”
I shrug. “He wants his say if I ever make another documentary.”
“So you’d what? Follow him around with a camera? I can tell you how that’s going to come out. He’ll go to some community college on a little scholarship, flunk out, then come back here and get in trouble.”
I pick at my lunch. Colleen reaches across, takes a little bit between her fingers, inspects it, puts it back.
“Hey,” I tell her. “Go handle your own lunch.”
“Why don’t we cut to the chase here, Ben. How mad are you? And put that fork down before you answer.”
I take a deep breath. “I had to tell my grandma that you had a headache, so your mom picked you up.”
That seems to push her away from the table. “You should switch from documentaries to sci-fi. In what parallel and much more attractive universe would my mother ever pick me up from anywhere?”
“Do you still mean what you said about getting high every now and then?”
She shakes her head. Or maybe moves it ambiguously. “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to anything I say when I’m buzzed.”
We sit for a minute. She always wears this patchouli stuff, and the scent wafts over my mac and cheese. Queen Victoria used patchouli in her linen chests. And how do I know that? Because I Googled everything about Colleen, including the stuff she dabs behind her ears. And other places. Why is that any more pathetic than watching seven movies a day?
I can’t look directly at her. I focus on her hands — the gnawed cuticles, the black, chipped nail polish. I poke at my ice cream, which is still as hard as a meteorite. “What now?” I ask.
> “Well, that’s easy. Now I go to a meeting, say, ‘Hello, I’m Stupid and I’ve been clean for forty-eight hours.’ What about you?”
I shake my head and say, “I don’t know.”
“Want to do something after school? Get something to eat, go to a movie, fool around?” She stands up. “I know what. Let’s go to your house. I love your room. It’s unbelievably tidy. How do you do that? I tried dusting once and I hated it. I mean, what’s the point? It’s just dusty again tomorrow.”
I know she wants something, and I don’t care. I’m just glad to see her again. I’m not addicted to drugs, like she is; I’m addicted to her.
I ask. “You seem a little amped.”
She shakes her head. “Caffeine. Not like you mean. So, what do you think?” She points out the window, toward that other world. “Want to get out of here?”
“I’ve got class, Colleen.”
“After, then? I need to talk to you about something.”
Ah, here it comes. “Give me a hint?”
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to your house? I might have to take a shower. You might have to bring me a towel.”
“How many pages?”
She grins and her teeth seem pointier. “Just three. On Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Over-Soul.’”
I stand up first. “Well, I’ll tell you what. Because we had such a good time at the gallery the other night, because going to dinner afterward with you and my grandma and Marcie was so much fun, I’ll absolutely help you write your paper.”
“I’m sorry, okay? I made a mistake.”
I put my tray down. “What a crappy thing to do, Colleen. How could —?” But that’s as far as I get before she goes off on me.
“One ‘I’m sorry’ is all you get from me, pal. I apologize, you accept, we move on. That’s it. No lectures, no whining, no raking over the smoldering coals.”
“Well, then maybe you should do your paper by yourself, because I’m still mad.”
“Fine. And maybe you should jerk yourself off with your one functioning hand.”
I can’t stomp off in a huff, so I leave that move to her. I just take my tray to the big aluminum racks. On the way, though, I pass Chana and Molly, girls I interviewed for High School Confidential.
