All About Lulu (20 page)

After about
fi
fty yards she stopped. She let go of my wrist, and stood at a distance of three or four feet, and looked me dead in the eye. It was the eye of the storm. She unbuttoned her blouse and tore it off and
fi
red it into a nearby creosote bush. Unclasping her bra, she ripped it free of her arms and
fl
ung it to the ground. Then she just stood there, tall and straight as a redwood, naked from the waist up, glaring at me with X-ray eyes. I tried with all my might not to look at her full breasts and her
fl
at tummy and the graceful curve of her hip, but I couldn’t stop myself. This was no gangly-legged teen with budding breasts, but a woman.

She all but threw herself on the ground. She rolled over on her back, and hiked her skirt up. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, and to my astonishment, her letter V was shorn. “Here I am,” she hissed.

“Fuck me! That’s what you want, so just get it over with! Go on, I won’t
fi
ght you. I won’t scratch you, I won’t bite you. Just fuck me and get it over with. Fuck me however you want to fuck me. Pretend I’m whoever you want me to be, whoever you think I am. Just get it over with.”

“Get up.”

“Fuck me. That’s what you want.”

“Get up, Lu!”

“C’mon, William. Show me how much you love me. Fuck me like I’m your sister!”

Finally, I turned and stomped away from her in the direction we’d come. I could hear Lulu scramble to her feet behind me, and for one instant I was fed up, sick of it all, Lulu, I mean, and I just wanted to climb in the Duster without her, without anyone, and keep heading east, and never look back, get a job in Albuquerque, marry a fat girl, die in the sun. But no sooner did I hear the crunch of Lulu’s footsteps in my wake than I longed to feel her nails gouging me again, and her words cutting me to the bone.

Lulu stormed right past me, clutching her blouse closed in front.

Up ahead I could just barely intimate the unsuspecting
fi
gure of Dan seated on the tail of the beast, plinging his bass guitar in concert with the cool jazz, as Lulu grabbed his arm and jerked him up, bass and all, and began dragging him out into the desert.

They were gone forever. Now and again I could hear the low drone of Dan’s voice, but not his words, and once I heard Lulu cackle, but whatever she was cackling about didn’t sound funny.

I wandered across the
fl
at until I came upon Troy, leaning against a back leg of the brontosaurus, staring out into the
fi
rmament. He didn’t acknowledge my arrival. He was drunk, and every time his weight shifted itself, he recovered with a start, like someone falling asleep at the wheel.

“What the fffffffuck am I doing here?” he said.

I didn’t venture to guess, because I felt certain that he wasn’t asking me, and even if he had been, I didn’t have an answer for him.

I left Troy to himself and ambled over to the Duster, where I lay down on the hood and listened to the crickets, and watched the stars, and tried to keep from asking myself the same question as Troy.

Time passed, but I had no measure by which to gauge it other than the timepiece my forebearers had been using for seventy thousand years or more, the stars, and I couldn’t even do that. But I’m guessing an hour or more passed, maybe even two, before Dan and Lulu returned, Dan looking a little sheepish, and Lulu looking a little less determined than usual. Troy straggled in not far behind them, still toting the bottle. The bottle was empty.

We piled into the car. Only Dan buckled up. Soon the dinosaurs of Cabazon were behind us, and the mountains lay ahead of us, and no sooner did we begin our ascent than everybody passed out: Troy with his face to the window, Dan, sitting erect as though he were still awake, and Lulu with her head on Dan’s shoulder. And as I guided the Duster west on the interstate toward home, I was bleary-eyed and unshaven, and the desert air, now cool, whistled through the window, and for the
fi
rst time in years, I truly didn’t care which way my hair fell.

Two months into fall semester, I
fi
nally moved out of the only room I’d ever known and into the real world, a one-bedroom apartment four and a half blocks from the Pico house.

I took three classes at SMCC that fall, one in Marine Ecology and two in Philosophy. Philosophy, I learned from Gerard Smith—a slight, bespectacled fellow who owned a pair of clogs and a billowy shirt for every day of the week—was an
activity
, not a doctrine. Of-tentimes class convened outdoors on a patch of brown grass punctuated by a few smog-choked palms, below a blue sky buzzing incessantly with air traf
fi
c. Here, Smith arranged his pupils in a circle and indoctrinated us with impassioned lectures on Pl
ato’s ethical solu
tions, Aristotle’s foundations of logic, and Bacon’s utopia of science.

It was hard to fathom what Gerard Smith was so impassioned about, but there he was, pacing madly about in his clogs, center circle, his billowy shirtsleeves gathering wind with each grand gesture. He had hair like Richard Simmons’s, which, unlike his sleeves, was impervious to wind.

As for the texts, I slogged through Plato wondering why, and limped through Aristotle asking the same question, before I caught my head in the spokes of Spinoza, which I felt was his fault, not mine, because it seemed pretty clear to me that quotidian reality had very little to do with mathematics—at least not my quotidian reality, in which one plus one didn’t even equal two. Now Wittgenstein, there was a guy who made sense. Old Ludwig believed in the power of words and, paradoxically, the complete unreliability of words, or at least that’s how I understood it.

It was silly and fascinating, this doctrine that was not a doctrine, these analogies about shadows and caves that sought to explain the nature of understanding. Each great thinker borrowed from the last, spinning the former’s hypothesis into some new and logical conclusion, until every so often some nut like Hume came along and said,
Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down here, let’s go back to where we started.

I liked Hume. He was skeptical. He made goofy connections, then denied they were connections. He took cause and effect and bound and gagged them in a broom closet. Hume proposed that one could not assume the conformity of the future with the past, a lesson I had already learned twice, once when my mother died, and once the day I met Lulu. Just because the sun had risen every morning since the beginning of recorded time, Hume reasoned, didn’t necessarily mean it would rise tomorrow or the next day.

I bluffed my way through Kant, stumbled through Hegel, and arrived senseless at the feet of Schopenhauer. According to Schopenhauer, the world was his idea. According to Schopenhauer, everybody and everything had a will of its own that enslaved intelligence.

A rock had a will of its own. A
fl
ea, a
fi
re hydrant, a bicycle pump, they all had wills of their own. The blood had a will to
fl
ow through the veins. The veins had a will to carry the blood. The bowels had a will to empty themselves. And the will, according to Schopenhauer, was inexhaustible.

And if, like the
fl
ea, the
fi
re hydrant, the bicycle pump, I had a will that enslaved my consciousness and my intellect, that will was only to possess the one thing that made me feel full, the one caress that set my whole being to vibrating like a tuning fork.

I kept on at Fatburger under the mentorship of Acne Scar Joe, who was once again hopelessly single. These days I was bringing in a cool eight hundred a month after taxes. The one bedroom I rented for three seventy-
fi
ve was in the Tidal View apartment complex, which offered me no such view, though it did offer close proximity to several strip malls and an adult bookstore.

My apartment was directly upstairs from the laundry room. Anytime two or more washers were on spin cycle my living room rocked like Jericho; glasses vibrated off of tables, pictures fell from the wall.

The vents for the dryer ducts were right below my window, and the smell was inescapable, like clean warm diapers. It penetrated the glass, leached its way through the stucco walls. The plumbing was temperamental, too. When those washers drained, they hissed and sucked and belched and rattled until you felt as though you were sleeping in the bowels of the USS
Nimitz
.

It wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton, but it wasn’t the Pico house, either.

That four and a half blocks was a lot farther than it sounds. Freedom is all what you make of it. My emancipation consisted mainly of a fourteen-inch Toshiba, my own bathroom, a few issues of
Juggs
, some textbooks, and a lot of udon noodles. I split my evenings between Schopenhauer and
Adara’s Dirty Diaries
. I bought a futon and a desk and a phone that never rang. Sometimes Troy came over with rum or a six-pack. I didn’t drink much, though I did buy my share of six-dollar half grams. Troy and I would sit at my kitchen table and smoke herb out of a tinfoil pipe. We’d talk about the Dodgers or school or Lulu, but more often than not, we’d end up talking about how we could get rid of that diaper smell.

I soon discovered that the apartment was haunted by a cat. I saw its shining eyes a couple of times in the dark, glimpsed its gray form slinking across the room in my peripheral vision, heard it gagging on hairballs and padding across counters. It seemed to go about its business just like a regular cat, except you didn’t have to feed it. I called the cat Frank. It never came when I called it. Maybe it was a girl.

My apartment manager was a little potato of a guy named Eugene Gobernecki, with a gold tooth and a Super Mario Bros. mustache.

Eugene was a Soviet defector, once an Olympic hopeful in Greco-Roman wrestling. Eugene jumped ship in ’84 at the summer games, whereupon he soon discovered the job market for Roman-Greco wrestlers to be even smaller in the United States than it was in the Soviet Union. So he started mowing lawns, washing windows, stealing grapefruit. He rented a one bedroom at the Tidal View. Within six months he was the manager.

For whatever reason, Eugene Gobernecki wanted desperately to be my friend, which probably said more about Eugene Gobernecki than about me.

“Come to my house,” he’d say. “We cook a duck.”

Thus he propositioned me for weeks every time I came upon him sweeping the parking lot, pruning the hedges, or cleaning the gutters. And it was always the same, always “we cook a duck.” Never

“we watch a game,” or “we drink vodka.” The duck was always part of the deal, as if the act were somehow symbolic. Eugene wanted to cook a duck with me—nay, he was determined to cook a duck with me, and I had no idea what that meant.

Eventually he began to extrapolate on the evening’s events as he envisioned them.

“I buy vodka. You bring chicks. Friends, whoever you want. You come to my house. We cook a duck.”

The truth is, whenever I encountered Eugene, I always wanted to say something about the cat haunting my apartment—
fi
le an of
fi
cial complaint, so to speak. But I didn’t want to encourage Eugene. And besides, Frank was kind of growing on me.

“Sure, sure, one of these nights,” I’d say. “After midterms, maybe.

Or maybe after the holidays or something.”

“Okay,
fi
ne. You have girlfriend? You have sister? You bring sister.

Maybe she have friends. I buy vodka. We play music. Footloose. All zat shit. Make sure you bring friends and chicks. We make a party. I even cook two ducks, maybe. And I know a bar—maybe later we go out.”

“Sure, sounds good. Let’s plan something. Yeah, listen, so I gotta run, I’ve got an ecology lab, let’s talk.”

Finally, one evening, Eugene cornered me in the laundry room.

“How come all the time you saying, okay, sure, we cook a duck, we make a party, zen you never make party. This Friday, we make party.

You bring friends, chicks, whoever.
Already I buy vodka. I rent por
nographic movie. I rent other movie, too. You know who is Rowdy Roddy Piper? Okay, so I take care of everything, you take care of chicks and friends.”

I took care of the chicks and friends. That is, I brought the only person I could get, which was Acne Scar Joe. Troy was in Malibu, and even Ross (Alistair, that is) didn’t want to come. Eugene met us at the door in his apron.

“Will! How you doing, Will? All day I been cooking ducks. Hello, yes, Joe, glad to be meeting you, come, come, sit down. We drink vodka, wait for others to come.”

We sat on plastic chairs around a Formica table. Eugene had the immigrant’s love of plastic. We drank vodka.
Eugene’s pad was ex
travagantly furnished in early
fl
ea market. The couch looked like something Leif Eriksen might have rowed over in. The
fl
oor lamp belonged in a brothel. The coffee table was a wagon wheel. A Rowdy Roddy Piper poster hung slightly askew next to a Mexican beer poster depicting four balloon-breasted brunettes in a red sports car. We drank from plastic tumblers.

“Yes, okay,
fi
nally now we make a party.”

We waited for the others to show up. And waited. And drank vodka. Eugene continued his preparations restlessly between shots of vodka. He changed the cat litter. He kept changing the music.

He played John Cougar Mellencamp and Wang Chung and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Glenn Campbell and something with a zither and a trumpet.

“So, who else is coming?” he said. “Who else you are inviting to our party?”

I shrugged. “Uh, you know, a few people. What about you?”

“Not so many,” he said. “I invite Derrick from 309, but he say he’s working.”

“Cleaning pools at night?”

“Crazy, I know, zat’s what I say. What about you, Joe? You have sister, friends, you know chicks?”

“Some,” lied Joe.

“You call up on phone, invite. Friends, chicks, no problem, we make big party at my house.”

“They’re out of town,” said Joe.

“Shit motherfuck. Oh, well, we drink vodka. Eat a duck. I know Russian hooker maybe I call. You ever been with Russian woman?

Oh shit. Zey fuck like forty-foot Amazon woman.”

“Let’s just eat some duck,” I said.

The ducks were kind of small for ducks. They looked more like pigeons to me. They were greasy as hell and threatened to squirt off the cutting board every time Eugene tried to carve them. He’d also prepared a beet salad, and tuna
fi
sh on crackers. While I had no intention whatsoever of eating duck, I didn’t want to risk offending Eugene, and so I did a serviceable job of pretending to eat duck, aided by sleight of hand and a half dozen felines mulling about under the table. We talked about chicks and money and hot cars. All the things we didn’t know squat about. Then we talked about cleaning gutters and making French fries and drinking vodka, and all the things we did know about.

Here, at last, was my suburban Bohemia, all the parlor talk and camaraderie I’d always yearned for without knowing it. Within the murky con
fi
nes of this shag-carpete
d apartment reeking of cool men
thols, cats, and vodka, eight long blocks from the Paci
fi
c Ocean and two short blocks from Thrifty, home of the ten-cent ice cream cone, I, William Miller Jr., bore witness to a summit meeting between two of the great minds of my generation: Eugene Gobernecki, a poultry-obsessed Russian free-market capitalist, and Acne Scar Joe, a rabid patriot and con
fi
rmed homophobe somewhere to the right of Jerry Falwell.

“Chinese, Japanese, whatever. They’re all a bunch of kung fu
fi
ghting commies. We should’ve blown their slant-eyed asses up in Vietnam.”

“Joe, you cannot stop democracy. These people are dying for democracy, Joe. They yearn for free-market system. Think of the hamburgers you will sell.”

“Dude, they don’t eat hamburgers. They eat cats.”

“Look, Joe, all I am saying is, Joe, communism doesn’t work.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“Yes, but what you are suggesting is not making sense. Zen why let the world’s biggest market toil in rice bogs, when you could be selling zem hamburgers!”

“They don’t
eat
burgers, dude. Don’t talk to me about markets. I sell thousands of burgers a month and I don’t sell more than a dozen to Orientals. And we’re talking about the ones living right here in friggin’ hamburger heaven. They’ve never even seen a hamburger over there! They don’t know a hamburger from a goddamn Frisbee!”

“You sell one in one thousand, you sell two million hamburgers. Zat’s what I’m talking about. You’ll see. Just you wait. I’ve seen zis all before in Soviet Union. If you smart, you see differently. Do you want to know what is great thing about capitalism? I will tell you great thing. Opportunity.
Zat
is great thing. You see opportunity, you make opportunity. Opportunity plus hard work equals big bucks, big success.”

In my lone contribution to the proceedings, I humbly pointed out the necessity of capital in such an equation.

“Yes, there is that. This one I am working on. Free rent, you see, zat’s a start. Apartment manager gets free rent. Soon I get other job painting houses, or maybe Joe, you get me job at Fatburger, where I learn business. One day I build hamburger house in China, and I hire you Will, and you Joe, to run Chinese hamburger house. I give you bene
fi
ts, stock options, big bucks.”

“You’re dreaming,” said Joe.

“Zat’s right, Joe. I am dreaming.”