All About Lulu (14 page)

I knew I’d reached an all-time low once I started fraternizing with Acne Scar Joe outside of Fatburger. It wasn’t that Acne Scar Joe was a terrible guy, though he was. He was the kind of guy that collected beer money from high school kids in the Circle K parking lot, then bought lotto tickets with their money and told them “tough shit” when he came out empty-handed, and then bragged about it the next day at work.

It wasn’t that Joe was a bigot, though he was that, too. He said things like, “Hey, I got nothin’ against wetbacks. Shit, my neighbor’s a wetback. They’re better than gooks.” It wasn’t that we didn’t have anything in common, though we didn’t. I liked to hole up in my bedroom and stare at the ceiling and listen to Ken Minyard on my headphones. Joe liked to drink a few and go to the
fi
ring range with his Glock. So, we did have one big thing in common: We were both losers.

Our initial foray into the social arena consisted of a movie at the Beverly Center one night after work. Some bad people seized an armored car. Lives were at stake. A gritty Secret Service dude kicked their asses. Pretty stirring stuff. Just the kind of human drama that roused Joe’s slumbering moral imperative and sent his testosterone level through the roof. He was noticeably agitated afterward, like he was itching for the
fi
ring range. Joe’s moral ceiling collapsed again within ten minutes. He bought us some beer at a convenience store near the high school, where he collected money from the usual suspects, two kids with identical
Mis
fi
ts
T-shirts, driving a Honda Civic.

Probably sophomores, maybe juniors.

One of the kids confronted Joe afterward outside the store. “Hey, we wanted bottles.”

“Well, it just so happens that this beer ain’t for you, dumbshit. It’s for me and my buddy.”

The kid looked to me for con
fi
rmation, and I shrugged sheepishly from the passenger seat.

“Give us the money back then.”

“Pfff, right.”

The kid looked more wounded than angry. “You can’t do that.

C’mon, dude. That’s fucked.”

“So, call the fucking
cops
, why don’t you? Oh, wait, you’re a
mi-nor
. Ha! Nice try, Skippy.”

Joe climbed into the car and handed me the beer. The kid gave me one more pleading look. C’mon, he seemed to say, isn’t there something you can do? But all I could do was shrug sheepishly again.

We drank the beer by the empty pool at Joe’s apartment complex, where we sat in plastic chairs. The night was warm and windless, and a gritty residue of exhaust from the nearby 10 hung in the air.

Indeed, the freeway was so close that you could spot the make of the cars. Whenever the
fl
ow of traf
fi
c subsided momentarily, you could hear the buzzing of the purplish patio lights. They sounded almost like crickets. The empty pool was littered with dead palm fronds and beer cans and an old bicycle with no wheels.

Joe kept throwing rocks at his neighbor’s cat every time the poor beast slunk out onto the balcony. “Climbs all over the hood of my car, the fucking rat.”

We talked about work a little, about the nuances of charbroiling and the dipshit delivery driver from Rykoff.

“That dude’s been at Jackoff longer than I’ve been at Fats,” he noted.

“What’s wrong with his teeth, anyway? How come he never opens his mouth?”

“It ain’t pretty, dude. He’s got a gnarly-ass grill. Looks like lava rocks and shit.”

After about a half hour of this, Joe
fi
nally cut to the chase. “Look, Miller, there’s a reason why I had you over tonight.”

Terri
fi
ed by the possibilities, I braced myself for the worst.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” he pursued.

My ass tightened.

“My girlfriend’s cousin is coming to town,” he said. “And I need somebody to go out with her. You know, like a double date or whatever.”

“You don’t have a girlfriend.”

“We’ve gone out twice, Miller, so whaddaya call that?”

I took a long hit of my stale beer. “What does she look like?”

“She’s a hottie.”

“No, the cousin.”

Joe didn’t answer right off. He plucked a stone out of the empty planter by his lawn chair, and winged it toward the balcony. It ricocheted off the rail and narrowly missed a window. “She’s okay, I guess.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound too promising.”

“She’s
fi
ne, dude. From her picture it looks like she’s got big tits.”

“I don’t know, Joe.”

“Look, dude, she’ll probably suck your chode if you get her drunk enough. And believe me, we’ll get them drunk.”

“Let me think about it.”

“Miller, what’s there to think about? When’s the last time you got any pussy?”

“Couple months,” I lied.

“Ha! Try never. Miller, you’re gonna get your knob polished. Trust me on this one.”

God knows why, but I trusted Acne Scar Joe on that one. I
fi
gured a good knob polishing (or any knob polishing, for that matter) would only strengthen my resolve to forget Lulu. And so the four of us were to convene at Joe’s apartment the following Friday night.

I was a wreck for three days beforehand. It took me twenty minutes to scrub the smell of Fatburger off of me after work that afternoon. I doused myself liberally with Big Bill’s cologne, then promptly decided that I smelled like a freezer-burned ham. It took another twenty minutes to scrub that off, and I wasn’t altogether successful.

I got rid of the freezer-burned part, but the ham lingered. I wore a shirt I thought was cool.

Ironically, the prospect of failure was not the source of my anxiety that Friday night so much as the prospect of success was—that is, the possibility of revealing my little breakfast link to a perfect stranger. Though my Netherlands were no longer hairless, my willy was hardly bigger than it had been when Lulu inspected it in the trophy room at thirteen.

I arrived at Joe’s casually late, having spent
fi
fteen casual minutes in my car outside his apartment complex, gazing at my watch and listening to KMPC.

The three of them were in the kitchen when I got there, huddled around the blender, laughing. Joe was making strawberry daiquiris.

“For the ladies,” he explained. “There’s beer in the fridge.”

I grabbed a beer from the fridge.

Joe draped a proprietary arm around his lady right off the bat, lest there be any confusion. “This is Nicole,” he said, just as Nicole was wriggling out from under his arm. “And this is her cousin Cheryl.”

My
fi
rst thought was that there’s no accounting for taste, because Cheryl, whom Joe had deemed “Okay, I guess,” was pretty damn hot when you looked past the makeup and the fog of perfume. Joe’s date Nicole, on the other hand, looked like an anteater in tight pants and a halter top.

One look at me and Cheryl started inhaling her daiquiri. Who could blame her? When I excused myself to take a leak in Joe’s hair-encrusted toilet, I could hear that Joe wasn’t exactly helping my odds.

“Yeah, Miller’s kind of a wuss,” I heard him say. “But he’s not a fag or anything.”

I might have been a solar
fl
are for all the eye contact Cheryl bestowed upon me that evening, although she did exhibit a refreshing candor on the subject of her boyfriend back in Muskegon, a certain red-shirt freshman on the Michigan State offensive line named Bubby, who hailed from Arkansas.

“His name is Bubby?” I chortled. “C’mon, what’s his real name?”

She looked me in the eye for the
fi
rst time and pinched up her face. “Bubby
is
his real name.”

I was the romantic equivalent of mustard gas. Where was my beautiful voice when the lights were low and the music was soft, and some lovesick middle-American girl gooned on strawberry daiquiris presented herself ? My voice had forsaken me—it seemed I was incapable of saying the right thing. And as a result, Bubby seemed only to draw nearer with each daiquiri.

Joe, meanwhile, was making headway, relatively speaking. Nicole was
fi
ghting him off, but he was still managing an occasional grope.

Two more daiquiris and he might’ve been in business.

After a covert conference in Joe’s bathroom, during which Joe released a wide stream of urine in and around the toilet, it was decided that we should take the Duster, as it was roomier, and things were liable to get horizontal up at Mulholland. It was also mutually decided (by Joe) that we should switch the gals to beer.

“We just want them to lower their standards,” he explained. “Not lose their motor skills and shit.”

But it was too late for Cheryl. By the time we set out for Circle K for snacks and more beer, she was already a mess. And hungry.

When Joe went in to fetch the beer, Cheryl joined him, wobbling on high heels.

“Is Joe always such a horn dog?” Nicole wanted to know.

“I’m not sure.”

Nicole was leaning over the front seat reapplying her lipstick in the rearview mirror. Her face was about four inches from mine. I could smell the daiquiri on her breath. “He wasn’t like this the
fi
rst two times we went out.”

“He’s probably just buzzed,” I assured her.

Cheryl reemerged from the brilliant light of Circle K clutching a handful of pepperoni sticks, even as she gnawed on one. She offered them around once she got in the car, but ended up eating them all herself.

Snaking our way up the canyon was a dizzying affair. Switchback after switchback, Cheryl swooned wordlessly in the passenger seat.

Nicole did most of the talking, as I was intent on the spears of my headlights around each corner, and Joe was busy trying to cop a feel. For a girl who looked like an anteater, Nicole was blessed with con
fi
dence, and I admired that, although she was irritating as hell.

Where did self-con
fi
dence reside in people like us—the unattractive ones, the awkward ones? Mine had only
fl
ourished in the borrowed light of Lulu, and perhaps in comparison to my idiotic brothers. But Nicole seemed to have arrived at some equation by which she was impervious to the reality that she was unattractive and profoundly aggravating.

Cheryl, who continued to sway to and fro with each corner, looked peaked by the halfway mark.

“You want me to stop the car so you can get some air?” I offered on more than one occasion.

“No—
hic
—thanks,” she said. Or, “I’m all right.”

By the time she uttered, “I think—
hic
—you better pull—” it was too late. Up came the daiquiris and the pepperoni sticks, all over my wide, black dashboard. Immediately the car smelled like hot daiquiris and pepperoni sticks. The windows came down in a
fl
ash. It was another quarter mile—with everyone but Cheryl hanging out the windows—before I could
fi
nd a place to pull over. Cheryl spilled out of the car and staggered to the ditch. Nicole attended to her.

In an act of chivalry, or more likely convenience, Joe volunteered his Husqvarna T-shirt to clean up the mess, leaving him shirtless beneath his jean vest. Were it not for the jug of water I kept in the trunk for the radiator, it’s doubtful whether I could’ve cleaned that muck off the dashboard at all. Even as I swabbed it up, I knew I’d be
fi
nding little dried
fl
akes in the speaker grill for months. Needless to say, Joe’s T-shirt was a total loss.

We crested the hill without further incident, and parked in a little clearing off the west side of the road surrounded by long grass. After about ten minutes of this stunning vista, Joe
fi
nally wore Nicole down in the backseat. The guy was tenacious; you had to give him that. She seemed like she was pretty into it, actually. And about ten minutes later, my opportunity arrived, when Cheryl, who suddenly thought I was sweet for mopping up her vomit (I guess that’s one way of developing intimacy), threw caution to the wind, forgot about Bubby, and locked onto me like a succubus. Her tongue was doing unnatural things in my mouth. She tasted of vomit. There was grit on her teeth. My eyes watered under the strain. Finally, I pulled her off of me and tried to appear as though I were not gasping for breath.

“Wh—
hic
—what’s wrong?” she said.

“I just keep thinking of Bubby,” I said.

That seemed to stun Cheryl into sobriety, if only for an instant. I couldn’t tell what emotions were at work in her. Her eyes started loll-ing around in her head again almost immediately, as she did her best to stare me down. “You’re—
hic
—sweet,” she said at last. And then she came at me again with renewed vigor, and this time her tongue wasn’t quite so unnatural, but she still tasted like rotting fruit. On this occasion, when I pried her off of me, it was my crippling fear of success that got the best of me. There I was in spades, unable and unwilling to close the deal, hiding inside my sweetness like it was a foxhole, so that I didn’t have to put my ass on the line.

“But Bubby,” I said. “Don’t forget about Bubby.”

This did not produce the desired effect. “Bubby’s an asshole,” she said, and forced herself upon me once again.

“I can’t,” I said. And this time maybe I grabbed her wrist a little too hard. When I released my grip, she pulled away and sulked in the corner, gazing drunkenly out the window.

Joe popped his head up from the backseat. “For fuck’s sake, Miller, what’s wrong with you? You are a fag, aren’t you?”

“Just shut up,” I told him.

“Whatever,” he said, and popped his head back down. But this time Nicole pushed him away, and popped her own head up. “Are you all right, Cher?”

“F—
hic
—
fi
ne,” she said.