All About Lulu (19 page)

I piloted us to the Circle K parking lot, where we all
fi
shed around in our pockets for money. Dan climbed out of the Duster clutching a wad of rumpled bills, and soon returned with a half gallon of rum and a handful of change.

“Where to?” I said.

“Just drive,” said Lulu.

“Drive where?”

“Just start driving.”

“What, are you carjacking me? What does that mean? Where?

This was your idea.”

“Oh
, I don’t know,” she sighed. “
S
omewhere
. Get on the 10 and drive east.”

“To where?”

“East.”

I got on the 10, and started east. By the time we skirted downtown, Lulu had already hit the bottle two or three times, with Dan matching her slug for slug. I wasn’t drinking, just listening to the Dodgers on KWKW. Troy wasn’t drinking either, not yet. Nobody talked much, especially not Dan, who was morose in spite of a
killer
view of the skyline, though even in this state he was a bit
fi
dgety. The Dodgers were playing Houston. It was the bottom of the fourth, one–zero Astros. Jaime Jarrin was bantering about something, I’m not sure what, something about Gibson’s hands, or maybe his mother’s hands, when the jumping beans came leaping out of Jarrin’s mouth with the name Gibson right in the middle of them.

“What happened?” said Troy.

“Gibson homered, I think.”

“You think?” he said. “Jesus, why don’t we listen on KABC, so we can understand what’s happening?”

“It’s better this way,” I said, turning the volume up.

“I agree,” said Lulu, from the back, a sentiment she punctuated with yet another splash of spiced rum.

“Whatever,” said Troy, folding his arms and gazing out the side window.

As per Lulu’s instructions, we forged east through the basin and into the desert until the lights thinned out, and the stars burned brighter, and as far as I could decipher, Davis scored on Bell’s single, or maybe it was a double, or maybe a giant carnivorous rabbit chased Davis around third, but somehow Davis scored in Houston’s half of the seventh, and Lulu opened her window, and I opened mine, and hot air thundered through the car like a stampede of buffalo, and the desert seemed wild with possibilities.

The bottle paci
fi
ed Lulu, or maybe it was the desert air. She no longer gave any indication that a storm was imminent. Dan, too, seemed to be coming around with each slug of rum. He popped his window open and stuck his nose out into the hot wind, and when he pulled it back in, I could see, even in the dark, that he was smiling like a kid on a roller coaster. Indeed, he
was
on a roller coaster, the only question was how long until he chose to get off.

About twenty miles west of Palm Springs, our destination revealed itself on the horizon. A half mile ahead, two rather ominous concrete giants sprouted out of the arid plain against a backdrop of mountains.

“Whoa,” said Dan. “No way. Killer! Remember, from Pee Wee’s—?”

“Shhh,” said Lulu, as though Dan’s voice might startle the giants.

“Killer,” Dan repeated, in his indoor voice.

The Wheel Inn was closed, as was the gift shop in the belly of the brontosaurus. The parking lot lights, the footlights, the entire complex lay in darkness but for the beams of our headlights and a few queasy lights out back of the restaurant, illuminating a blue dump-ster. When I killed the engine, the silence of the desert enveloped us.

Only the distant guttural progress of a diesel truck somewhere on the interstate, and the drone of a billion chirping crickets, reached our ears. When we climbed out of the car, the stars
fl
ickered brighter and the crickets chirped louder, and the crickets seemed to give voice to the blinking stars.

We shuf
fl
ed across the gravel parking lot toward the concrete dinosaurs. Lulu, still clutching the bottle, shuf
fl
ed more than the rest of us. We paused beneath the b
rontosaurus to ponder its dimen
sions. Dan pressed his face to the glass and peered into the darkened gift shop. I surveyed the impressive length of the herbivore’s neck and gazed up into its face, which looked a bit like Michael Dukakis.

“Whoever built these was a total genius,” said Dan, with only a hint of sarcasm. “How awesome is this?”

“He died a few months ago,” said Troy. “I saw a thing on the news.”

“No,” said Lulu.

“Yeah,” said Troy. “I guess he was planning a woolly mammoth, too. And some other ones.”

“Awesome,” said Dan.

“He’s dead,” said Lulu, as though she couldn’t quite believe it.

“Lulu and I met him when we were kids,” I said. “His name was Clyde, I think.”

“Claude,” said Lulu.

“That was years before the tyrannosaurus was built,” I pursued.

“He was just planning it then. He had sketches and models.”

“They said on the news it cost him something like a half million dollars to build just the tyrannosaurus,” observed Troy.

“What a nut job,” said Dan.

“What’s wrong with that?” Lulu wanted to know.

“Well, if you had a million dollars, would you build two fucking cement dinosaurs in the middle of Bumfuck, Egypt?”

“I know
you
wouldn’t,” Lulu said. “You’d do something obvious. I suppose you’d buy some
cool
car and some
cool
house.”

“I’d save it,” Troy chimed in.

“Of
course
you would,” said Lulu. Gale warnings were of
fi
cially in effect. Lulu had another slug of rum.

Dan started battening down the hatches. “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with—”

But it was already too late.

“Have some respect,” said Lulu. “Just because somebody builds something doesn’t mean you have to tear it down. What have you ever built? Who here even
has
a woolly mammoth? Something we’ve charted out, worked for, something that if we died tomorrow, we couldn’t
fi
nish? If we had any guts, we’d be builders, not tearer-downers.”

“We all die with un
fi
nished business,” I said.

“That’s
not
what I mean. That’s not even
close
to what I mean! I’m not talking about
business
! I’m talking about actually
doing
something!
Building
something. Everything else is just pretending. We’re all just pretenders.”

“What about your painting?” said Troy.

“Pfff,” said Lulu. “That’s garbage. I don’t even
like
to paint. I’d rather clean houseboats. My paintings are terrible. Anyone who can’t see that is hopeless.”

With that, Lulu stumbled off toward the tyrannosaurus, crunch-ing gravel along the way. We followed her, as though she were towing us. Her muscular ass was amazing underneath that ladybug skirt. Her boobs had grown, so that you could almost see them from behind when they bounced. She was wearing boots that stopped just below the knee. Her legs had grown shapely. But that’s not why I followed her. I followed her because she was t
he spark, the catalyst, the ani
mator, the big bang. Because she was dangerous, and unpredictable, and passionate. Doubtless, Troy and Dan had their own reasons for following Lulu, and doubtless they were as compelling as my own. I suspect Dan followed her because she was brooding and mysterious and red hot, and because she looked good on his arm. I’m almost certain Troy followed Lulu because she was one of the few things in the world not within his grasp.

When Lulu reached the giant, she seated herself on its tail, which had a groove running down its length, so that if you let your butt slide back too far, you risked losing your balance. Inexplicably, there was cool jazz emanating faintly from the belly of the tyrannosaurus.

“Maybe he swallowed Kenny G,” I suggested.

Lulu laughed in spite of herself. So did Dan.

“You know,” I said. “It’s times like these that I’m absolutely certain God exists. The stars. The crickets. This fucking cement dinosaur playing cool jazz in the middle of the desert. That’s poetry.”

“Right on,” said Dan. “You’re funny, dude.”

I was starting to like Dan, just as I’d started liking Troy. That was my problem—that’s why I was destined to be a loser. Because I always liked the opponent.

“Screw the news,” said Lulu. “Screw anyone who thinks it’s silly. It was a sweet story, and you can’t ruin it.” Lulu straightened her skirt over her lap and looked away from the rest of us, out into the darkened
fl
ats. “When Claude Bell was just a little boy,” she said, “his father took him one Sunday to see a giant elephant statue in New Jersey. They drove halfway across the state in the rain to see the giant elephant, because the little boy wanted to see the giant elephant. You might think that’s stupid, a father taking his boy to see a big concrete elephant in the rain. But you’d be wrong, because there’s nothing stupid about it. And the whole time driving toward that elephant, the little boy imagined what it would be like—how big would it be compared to himself ? Was it bigger than a real elephant? Was it as tall as a building? He imagined and imagined, and he built up all these expectations. And when they
fi
nally got to the elephant, it wasn’t as big as little Claude imagined it might be, but it was still bigger than what he imagined a real elephant would be, or at least as big, and it was every bit as grand and exciting as all of the expectations he’d built up for it. So, in this way, little Claude built his dream before he ever started constructing it, before he’d ever realized it, in fact. He built it on expectations.” Lulu swiveled still farther away from us, until she was talking out into the desert, and we were looking squarely at her shoulder blades.

“The little boy and his father circled that elephant in the rain for almost an hour. They viewed it from every angle. The boy asked questions—how did they make it? Is there a real elephant inside?

The father hoisted the boy up on his shoulders so Claude could see into the eyes of the elephant. And the eyes of the elephant had little cement wrinkles around them. And the ears had little cement folds.

And Claude thought it was quite an amazing and unexpected thing, that something so big should have such little details. What the little boy felt was more than just awe, it was something else; he was
inspired
by what he saw. Looking at it, he dreamed his own dream—he imagined something even bigger than that elephant. He imagined a dinosaur. He imagined it with such force that he could see it. All the tiny wrinkled details. But that wasn’t enough. He needed to touch it, to climb up the neck, to peer into the belly of this thing he’d conceived. And there was only one way to do that, and that was to build it.” Lulu took a slug from the rum bottle. She
fi
shed a cigarette from her pocket. When she
fi
red it up, there was a halo of light around her head.

“But little boys don’t build giant dinosaurs,” Lulu observed. “At least not out of concrete and steel. So Claude had no choice but to hold on to that dream for a lot of years. He held on to it with the greatest strength of all, and that is the strength of holding on to something without being able to touch it.”

Lulu fell silent and puffed her cigarette. I thought she was
fi
nished with her story. But she resumed.

“Even before Claude became a man, he realized that men didn’t build giant dinosaurs either, not without a lot of money. And the young man had no money at all. So he did some
fi
guring, and what he
fi
gured was that it would take a young fellow of his prospects an awfully long time—and maybe a little luck—to ever amass the resources to make his dream happen. And Claude was discouraged, but not disheartened. He
fi
gured he could do it in ten years. So he got a job at Knott’s Berry Farm. And he saved every penny he could.”

Lulu dropped her cigarette and snuffed it out with her heel. “But Claude was all wrong. After ten years he was nowhere close. Building his dream just seemed to get more expensive as time went by. He was
fi
nally disheartened. He began to think that maybe his dream was a joke. Maybe he was wasting his time. Maybe he should buy a house with all the money he’d saved. But then he remembered the thing he’d been holding on to so long, he remembered all the wrinkled details, and the awe-inspiring size. And so he went back to work, and saving, and imagining. It took him twenty more years working at Knott’s Berry Farm to save the money to buy the gas station and the adjoining land. Thirty years total! And it took him
fi
ve more years to build his dream out of steel and concrete. Right here, in Bumfuck, Egypt.”

I remember thinking that Dan must have felt pretty stupid. I know I did. Because even the cool jazz seemed noble suddenly.

“And not only did he actually build his dream at last,” pursued Lulu. “Old Claude began building another. And when he
fi
nished that one, another. And the coolest part is that after all the work Claude put into them, and all the money he spent, all the time and the energy he invested, they aren’t even monuments to himself.” She took a slug of rum, and passed the bottle toward Dan’s outstretched hand, then
fi
shed in the pocket of her blouse for another cigarette. “It doesn’t matter who thinks they’re silly,” she said.

“Little kids love them.”

God, I would’ve given anything to be Claude Bell at that moment—if not to watch my dream rise out of the dust, then simply to have inspired Lulu Trudeau.

Dan toasted Claude Bell and his heroic dinosaurs. We passed the bottle, mostly in silence, as we sat on the tail of the tyrannosaurus under the stars, listening to cool jazz from the belly of the beast. Lulu sat on the end and I secured the space next to her, as close as I could get to her so that on those occasions when her balance faltered, she jostled me inadvertently. Troy occupied the space next to me, though only physically. Mentally, he was somewhere far out into the ether, or maybe deep down into himself. He’d given up on Lulu, that much was clear. He looked like a big white
fl
ag sitting there.

Dan the Man was restless, never sitting, forever climbing all over the dinosaur or hanging off the scaffold, always stirring gravel with his agitated feet, or vocalizing some bass line until,
fi
nally, he surrendered to the muse and went back to the Duster to fetch his bass.

I had to touch Lulu. It was not a matter of choice. And so I tried to put my arm around her waist, but she shrank from it. I tried to rest my hand on her knee, but she brushed it off. Troy bore silent witness to my rejection, while pretending not to notice. He sucked on the bottle with a gusto I hadn’t seen since his Bender days. He must have felt something coming as I persisted in my groping, because just as Lulu was about to unleash her thunder, he rose mechanically to his feet and ambled off toward the brontosaurus.

She seized my wrist
fi
ercely and clambered to her feet. She yanked me to my feet, and began dragging me out into the desert, gouging my wrist with her painted nails. I had no idea what was going to happen to me.