“I think it was over some coke,” John Wales told me, while he stacked bottles of Snapple on aisle seven.
I doubted it. Coke was too high end for them. It was probably meth or weed, the kind of drugs sold by guys who still borrowed money from their parents.
“I heard they got their ears cut off like some fucking Reservoir Dogs–like shit and then each got a bullet in the face,” John went on. “Just unholy shit.”
We were working night crew at a Vons on the edge of the San Fernando Valley, two years after we were all supposed to graduate high school—me, John, and the two dead guys. None of us walked on stage with the cap and gown, and I was the only one who’d managed to get his GED, so everyone assumed I was the smart one.
“Their moms ain’t ever going to recognize them.”
“Jason’s mom died when we were in the sixth grade,” I said. “Can you pass me the case of Gatorade?”
“You know what I mean. It really just makes you think about the shortness of life and shit.”
“I guess.”
I’d been working nights for six months by then. It was a good job—union benefits. You and a crew of five broke down pallets and shelved cereal, beans, and vegetable oil from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. Most nights, I barely talked to anyone and instead just listened to music and daydreamed myself into a sort of trance. I liked it that way and so did most of the others, because we’d all taken this job for the sorts of reasons that make you think staying up all night is a good idea. Not John. He couldn’t take the quiet.
“Dude,” he said. “It’s weird, but I don’t think I’ve ever known someone who’s been murdered before. Like it’s one of those life things like prom or getting married or something.”
“What about Eddy?”
“Oh, yeah, forgot that.”
“And Maria and Tomas.”
“Yeah, but those kids were bussed in,” John said. “I mean like kids from around here. People like us.”
“Besides Eddy.”
“Yeah, but Eddy was an asshole.”
Around two, I ate a microwaveable meal in the break room before going outside to smoke a few cigarettes. Then I shelved macaroni and cheese boxes while listening to a Blur CD I’d just bought. I was really into Britpop that year, which I never told anyone because they’d have called me a pussy. Occasionally, I helped a customer find batteries or marshmallows or cat food because, unlike most stores that closed at midnight, ours stayed open all night long, so that after the regular checker and bag boy went home, one of us had to work the register. It was usually left to me because everyone thought I was the smart one and wouldn’t mess up the till. That night was quiet, but around four, John announced over the intercom, “Service Five on aisle six. Service Five on aisle six.”
A “Service Five” was a hot woman that we were all tasked to eye-fuck. I thought it was stupid but went over and peeked anyway. The one time I hadn’t, they’d called me a faggot for weeks. Usually, it was just a normal-looking woman, nothing to get so worked up about. But John was bored and horny and women didn’t like him because of his personality, so he called out “Service Five” at least twice a night.
“Come on, man,” he said. “Hurry up before she goes.”
I looked down the aisle to find a new mom with her baby.
“See the jugs on her?” John asked.
“Come on man, she’s probably nursing.”
When she reached the register, she handed me a basket filled with children’s Tylenol, Doritos, and a box of chardonnay.
“Bet you’ve never seen a weirder combination,” she said.
“Nah,” I said. “A couple weeks ago, a guy came in to buy condoms, tampons, and a pregnancy test. He had no idea how his night was going to turn out.”
“Boys are dumb.”
I followed her outside to watch her go to her car. Not in a creepy way, but because the week before, some guy got arrested for jerking off in his pickup, and our manager asked us to make sure everyone got to their car safely. No one was out there except the Scotsman, this old guy who wore a kilt and came out to the parking lot a couple of times a week to blow on his bagpipes. He came out here, I figured, so his neighbors wouldn’t murder him.
“I think his name is Michael or Matthew,” she said. “I can’t remember.”
I lit a cigarette. “Umm. . . .”
“I used to work here a few years ago,” she said. “So, I know what a ‘Service Five’ is, you fucking perverts.”
After my shift, I usually went back to my apartment, covered the windows with blankets, and tried to sleep. Other mornings, I went to the Sun Up, a bar that opened at 6 a.m. for guys who worked warehouse jobs or night work for the movie studios or some other gig where you kept vampire hours. The inside was nothing special, just Budweiser signs and Dodgers paraphernalia hung up on wood paneling muted by a smoky darkness.
I was only nineteen, but no one cared that early in the morning.
Steve, the bartender, passed me a can of Coors and an ashtray while he listened to Tiffany Springer talk about the two dead guys.
“I always liked Jason, but Derek was a dick,” she said.
“Yeah, he was,” Steve said.
“He owed me fifty bucks.”
“You lent him money? You should know better.”
“No, he stole it from my purse when I was playing pool and then said he’d pay it back later. Fucker. But Jason was a good kid. I remember he used to hang out with Eddy when they were little. They’d go out in the wash and play war.”
Her brother was the same Eddy who’d been murdered in high school. He’d been stabbed outside of the gym. I saw it happen.
“Nick knew them, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said and returned to reading the paper while Tiffany kept looking at me, waiting for me to say more. She was only three years older but looked thirty, with too much make-up and big blonde hair so that she resembled our moms back in the eighties. When I was a little kid, I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world, but then she grew up to be the type of women who gets hammered every morning after she clocks out of the AAA call center. I don’t think it was just Eddy’s death that got her stuck like this. Her life seemed like one of those choose-your-own adventures where the author half-assed it, and you only got to pick between guzzling Long Island Iced Teas or getting eaten by a boar. And fuck boars.
“Jason was a good guy, wasn’t he?” she said.
I shrugged.
“But Derek was an asshole,” she said.
“Stole my girlfriend in the ninth grade,” I said. “I never liked him after that.”
“What was her name?”
“Leah.”
“Leah Hawkins?”
I nodded.
“She’s such a skank.”
Tiffany kept staring with those pale blue eyes that reminded me of that Manet painting of the barmaid looking off into the crowd like she just wanted to die. Meanwhile, I kept reading the paper like I didn’t notice. Otherwise, she’d talk until she passed out. I found myself surrounded by people like that. I was quiet, so everyone thought I was a good listener. I wasn’t. I was just raised to be polite rather than telling people to shut up.
“Yeah,” Tiffany said. She began to dance by the pool table. “Fuck Derek.”
On my days off, I got stoned and played video games or watched General Hospital. But I also took a couple of community college classes, just one or two a semester, so that maybe in a couple of years I could transfer to Cal State Northridge. The problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted to do and couldn’t afford a degree I wouldn’t use, so I kept trying new stuff. Astronomy had too much math. Archaeology wasn’t nearly as interesting as Indiana Jones made it seem. History was okay: I really liked reading about the Civil War and ancient Egypt. That summer I was taking “Geology” and “Intro to Photography.” It was clear my future wasn’t with rocks, but I liked taking pictures.
I had an old camera, a Pentax, my dad gave my mom for their wedding, and she gave it to me after he died. Sometimes I drove over to Glendale or Pasadena and walked around taking pictures of shoppers when they weren’t looking. Nothing too deep. I just liked how the light looked in the afternoon.
My professor, an old man with a white ponytail, said I should study Robert Frank’s pictures.
“He was a student of Walker Evans,” he told the class, and when all of us returned a blank stare, he said, “Evans was famous for taking portraits during the Depression.”
He waved a piece of chalk at me. “Nick has some of that, except his photos are a bit less candid. You know, it’s okay to ask people if you can take their picture. It’s not like they’re going to hit you.”
That’s exactly what I was afraid of. I’d ask, and then they’d hit me.
After class, Gina Bello walked with me to the parking lot. “He really likes your photos. Have you been doing it awhile?”
“No,” I said.
Gina and I went to high school together. That summer, she returned from the University of North Carolina and was living with her parents and taking a couple of classes to pass the time. She also interned a few hours a week at LA Weekly because she wanted to be a journalist.
“Well, you’re really good,” she said. “I never thought of you as the artsy type.”
“I’m surprising.”
She laughed, and I felt my face flush. She was one of those really smart girls who no one noticed was cute until she returned from college with a fashion model haircut and the newfound confidence acquired from seeing a bit more of the world than the rest of us.
“Did you hear about Jason and Derek?” she said.
I nodded.
“Derek stole your girlfriend,” she said, her arm brushing against mine in a way that made me warm. “You were too good for Leah anyways.”
John Wales went to both funerals—they were on the same day, a couple of hours apart—and he wanted to tell me all about it when our shift started. He’d even come to work in a suit, as if to provide evidence of his attendance, before changing in the break room, so we all had to see him in his underwear.
“I didn’t want to go man, but you got to pay your respects even if the dead were dumbasses,” he said. “And, man, I’m glad I went. Did you know Jason was Jewish? Dude, I didn’t. We went to his house, and they had all the curtains down, and his stepmom and dad sat around while we ate raw salmon. Fucking weird-ass shit. And then it got crazy because Tiffany showed up and she was just fucking lit with her swaying and shit and Jason’s stepmom and dad had no clue who the fuck she was and when she said she was Eddy’s sister they didn’t know who that was either. Guess Jason’s mom did all the play dates before she died, and Dad didn’t know dick. So Tiffany just started crying and yelling and they asked her to leave. It was pathetic but I’d still fuck her. Why didn’t you come?”
“I had a test,” I told him, a lie. I’d stayed in bed watching Law & Order reruns. I didn’t see the point of funerals. When my dad died, we scattered his ashes in the ocean and got Mexican food.
“Gina Bello was there. You remember her? She was in all the AP classes and did yearbook and shit. Man, she has gotten fine. Like fucking fine. Thinking I might ask her out.”
I tried not to laugh.
“What?” he said.
“I think she has a boyfriend back east.”
“That’s back east, man. Boyfriends don’t mean jack if they ain’t in the same time zone. Everyone knows that.”
A week later, Gina asked me to get coffee after class to review her pictures. We sat outside of a Starbucks under a brown sky that made everything feel like you were living inside a daguerreotype. She’d gotten a vanilla latte, while I drank black coffee.
“Like I bet you’ve never even tried milk in your coffee.”
“I can’t remember. Why?”
“You’re totally the type to drink black coffee. You should’ve been born in the twenties. Like a grandpa.”
“I’m not sure how to take that.”
She reached over, slowly, as if she didn’t want to scare me, and touched my arm. “I’m just kidding. You just have this stoic thing going on. I’m sure girls love it.”
I laughed. I hadn’t so much as felt a boob in nearly a year.
“Tell me what you think?” she said, passing over her pictures. “Be honest. I can take it.”
They were mostly landscape photographs centered around an old fedora, one on a brushy hillside, another in the middle of an empty road, a third on a railroad track. The light was so bright it singed the film. They were terrible.
“You ever see Miller’s Crossing? It’s by the Coen Brothers. You know them?”
I’d seen Fargo, I told her, and thought it was weird.
“Anyway,” she went on, “there’s this fedora the main character keeps losing, and it’s like a metaphor for his soul and stuff. I like old hats like that, and I think guys would be classier if they wore them instead of those stupid baseball hats they always wear backward.”
I didn’t wear hats because I had pretty hair that I was vain about. I didn’t say that though.
“Really, what do you think? I keep getting B minuses, which are basically Cs. It’ll really kill my GPA if I bomb this class.”
“I like the ideas,” I said. “But I think you need to take them nearer to sunset.”
“The golden hour,” she said, her hand again touching mine. “You’re right. You’re smarter than you try to come across as. You should own it. Boys acting stupid are just stupid.”
We had sex for the first time on the fourth of July after we’d gone to the parade that rolled through town.
“Why are you smiling so much,” she said, on top of me.
“I’m so happy to be here.”
Going to the parade had been her idea. It started at ten in the morning, and I’d worked that night and was exhausted, but she’d insisted. She also wanted to get a beer at the Sun Up. I tried to talk her out of it, but she said she’d always wanted to see the inside of it.
“Like what kind of bar opens at 6 a.m.?” she said.
By the time we showed up, the party had already been going on for at least a couple of hours, the stools all taken, the line three deep at the bar. Steve, the bartender, looked at Gina and gave me one of those nods that old men do when they want to look impressed at the girl you’re with. Gina caught it.
“Secret life?” she said.
“Just come in once in a while to read after work.”
We stood by the dartboard and clinked cans. I asked about North Carolina. It seemed so far away to me back then, as if the South was on another planet, or at least in another century, based upon the news I read.
“It’s not like that,” she said. “I’m in a college town, so it’s not like guys in white hoods are hanging out everywhere. There is a Confederate monument, though, which sucks, and we’re hoping to get it taken down. I don’t know. It’s just a town with a lot of really smart people going places. Like so far from here.”
“It’s not that bad here.”
She pointed toward the other side of the bar, where Tiffany was dancing by herself to “Bed of Roses” by Bon Jovi. I hated Bon Jovi.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Gina said. “Turning into that.”
“There’s a lot of reasons someone turns out like Tiffany. It’s not like in the water or something.”
“Like do any of our moms seem happy? Can you name one?”
Later, at the parade, I saw her point. Amongst the crowd of day drunks, shirtless men, bra-less women, we watched the off-key marching band, the cheap car floats, and the soon-to-be indicted city councilman waving from a BMW. Then, at the end, a hundred Hells Angels rode their Harleys down Foothill, their beards long and gray, their old ladies held on to their hips, and the crowd clapped for a group of meth-dealing assholes as if they were World Series champions.
“This shit,” she said, “is why you need to get the hell out of this town.”
Gina basically moved in after that, and for the next few weeks I’d come home to find her just waking up and going to work, and when I woke up, she’d be getting home and we’d have a few hours to hang out and watch movies-–including Miller’s Crossing, which I thought was pretty cool. Or we’d go out and take photos. She had no problem convincing perfect strangers to pose for us.
“You just have to ask with confidence,” she said. “Deep down, people want to say ‘yes.’”
It also helped, I thought, if you were an attractive college girl rather than a moody dropout, but I didn’t tell her that.
While it felt for a while like we were going places, I didn’t let myself think I was in love. I knew this was temporary, that she’d go back to North Carolina to where I suspected she really had a boyfriend. And I’d stay in this town, a part-time student, never making up my mind about what I wanted to do next. Stuck. But hanging with her was like having someone lay out a series of photos taken with a telephoto lens to really dig into the details of your life. I’d always thought of the town as just normal, run-of-the-mill. A lot of people who worked with their hands. And while that was all true, there was also something dark and self-destructive going on, like a cancer we were all too stubborn to treat. It wasn’t just the boarded-up storefronts or the graffiti no one bothered covering up, but there was also a lack of grown-ups, people who took their community seriously and tried to make our lives better. Sometimes I’d drive down Foothill and imagine what the founders thought they were creating, the people who’d come here in the 1920s with beliefs in Hollywood and Manifest Destiny and the promise of the West. There’d been an asthma colony here at one point, a place where the rich came to breathe in clean air. My grandparents had moved out of their downtown slum to buy an affordable house off GI money, thinking they’d gotten the American Dream. But now it felt like it was one of those off-ramps you’d find in the Midwest, where there were gas stations and a McDonalds and a Kmart and people just struggling to get through the day. It was especially sad, I thought at the time, because we were at the edge of someplace special.
One afternoon when I didn’t have to work, Gina and I drove over to Westwood, near Santa Monica. We ate lunch next to an old movie theater, like something out of Singing in the Rain, and then strolled past shops selling fifty-dollar T-shirts and two-hundred-dollar jeans, before finding ourselves on the UCLA campus, with its beautiful brick buildings and perfectly cut lawns that seemed familiar even though I’d never been here.
“They film here a lot,” she said. “This is what college looks like in the movies.”
She talked about interning at LA Weekly and going to parties at fancy Hollywood restaurants and bars so cool they didn’t put a name on their door.
“I even went to a show at the Viper Room, you know, where River Phoenix died?”
Even though she was crashing at my apartment, she had enough of a foot on the side of Los Angeles sold on post cards that I began to get jealous. While I was breaking down pallets of cereal, she’d been dancing with the drummer from Stone Temple Pilots.
“But I don’t want to do that for a living.”
“Hang with famous people?”
“No, silly,” she kissed me on the cheek. “I want to be a foreign correspondent. You know, like Christiane Amanpour. I want to go to Yugoslavia and talk to people who went through the war or to go to Belfast and interview moms who lost their kids to car bombs. I want to tell those kinds of stories and see the world.”
And what did I have to say to this? Not a goddamn thing. I believed she’d do it, and I still didn’t know what I was going to do except lift heavy shit.
I hadn’t been to the Sun Up since the fourth of July, mostly because Gina was at my place but also because I’d gotten tired of sitting next to guys who reminded me I wasn’t going anywhere. You can only see the worst-case scenario for your sixty-year-old self so many times before you want to go to bed. But then, in early August, Gina went on a trip with her parents to Lake Arrowhead, and so after work, I stopped in.
There was hardly anyone there. A few guys wearing Vietnam Veteran hats shot pool. A woman in scrubs did the crossword. And Steve, the bartender, washed glasses.
“Long time no see,” Steve said. “New girl keeping you sober?”
“I just like going home to her.”
“I hear that.”
He passed me a Coors and an ashtray, but before I could pick up the newspaper, Steve said, “It has been slow as fuck, lately.”
I looked up, surprised. Like me, Steve was more the type to answer questions, than ask them.
“Maybe it’s too hot to drink,” I said.
“Nah, I think this place looks like shit, and people are going to the new Chili’s up the street. They got fajitas there and don’t have a bunch of old fucks spitting chew and grabbing asses.”
“What are you thinking? Redecorating?”
He took a cigarette from my pack and lit it. “Maybe. I mean, like this place looks the same since your parents used to come in.”
I hadn’t known they drank here.
“See that,” he said, pointing at a framed poster of a Dodger at bat. “That’s Ron fucking Cey. Hasn’t been a Dodger in like twenty years. And those Bud signs got pictures of cans you gotta pop with an opener.”
“My parents come in often?”
“Your dad did. Brought your mom once in a while. But yeah, when your dad got back from the Army, he used to come in after work and drink a handful. Funny guy. A few beers in though all he’d do is talk about West Germany. Fucking loved it over there. Most beautiful place in the world he said. Got pretty fucking annoying. But you could see he just wanted to keep traveling. By the way, I never said I’m sorry about him dying like that. He was a good guy.”
That night, I listened to Pulp and ignored the rest of the crew. I worked a pallet of baby food, which was the worst because there were always a couple of broken bottles of smashed peas or pumpkin, and it stunk and got all over your hands. I daydreamed about walking around Vienna like the couple in Before Sunrise, which Gina showed me and said was the most romantic movie ever. I thought it was pretty good. I wondered if my dad had made it there while he was in the service. Maybe he’d taken a train there when he was on leave and met a girl. I wanted to know, but there was no one to ask except my mom, who never wanted to talk about him. It had been a while since I’d felt the weight of his death and didn’t push it right out of my mind.
“What’s your problem tonight?” John said, around one in the morning. “Gina not sucking your dick lately?”
He made a blowjob motion with his hand and mouth just as we heard over the intercom, “Service five on aisle nine. Service five on aisle nine.”
I put my headphones back on and started stacking jars of mashed carrots.
“What?” John said. “You a faggot now?”
I walked toward checkout, where I waited for the customer, thinking about all the ways I’d like to tell John to fuck off but never would because I had only three friends in the world, and he was one of them. When the customer emerged, I saw it was Tiffany. She wore a short black dress and had her hair done up. While she wasn’t exactly pretty, she didn’t look wrecked yet. The six-pack in her hand, however, portended a long night ahead.
“Didn’t know you worked here.”
I’d told her at least five times, but I just nodded.
“You know Eddy worked here for a week or so,” she said. “It was just after he turned sixteen, and he was excited to get a job bagging groceries. Fuck, they made him wear this stupid bowtie, but he was really happy to get some money. Told me he was going to save enough to get a car and drive up to Santa Barbara and learn to surf.”
I nodded.
“That’s all you’ve got to say? He was your friend and it’s like no one remembers him.”
Eddy had been my friend in junior high, where we played war in the wash with Jason, but then in high school he got mean, punching kids in the halls, tapping their balls at the urinal. For whatever reason, he especially enjoyed torturing me, flicking my ear in class, cheap shotting me when I went up for a layup, starting a rumor I tried to fuck him. Worst of all, he made fun of my dad as he was dying, mocking his chemoed head, calling me a pussy when he found me crying in the bathroom a few days after he died. So when I saw him fighting this kid Greg outside of the gym a couple of months before I dropped out, I knew who I was rooting for. Even when the knife came out, even when it split Eddy’s gut, I felt nothing but joy. While the other kids ran away, I waited until his eyes shut. Decades later, I still don’t feel bad about him dying, and I keep wondering if there’s something wrong with me because of it.
“It’s hard to talk about the dead,” I told her. “People remember, but it’s hard.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”
I followed her out to the parking lot, where the Scotsman was blowing on his bagpipes.
She danced on the way to the car. I looked at her and then the bagpiper and knew that although this wasn’t my last night at work, I was doing short time in this town. I wasn’t sure where I’d go, just that I was going.
She opened her first beer before she shut the door and then began to drive off.
I called out, “You look really pretty tonight.”
***
Rumpus original artwork by Ian MacAllen
