All About Lulu (23 page)

“That was my father. He died the next year.” The personage bore no resemblance to Big Bill, less, in fact, than I bore any resemblance to Big Bill.

“Do you remember him?”

“Sometimes, but I’m not sure. Sometimes I think I’m just remembering pictures.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“Do you remember this?” said Big Bill,
fi
shing another photo off the pile. “This was at Big Bear Lake, just before your mother died.

Ross had a terrible fever. Remember? Your mother ran the twins back to Redlands and they took Ross to the doctor and stayed in a hotel. You and I camped. Don’t you remember? A black bear ran right through our campsite in the middle of the night. He was splashing around in the lake after something. Hey, what about this one?”

A quick glance at the photo in question revealed the story of my life after my mother and before Lulu. There were the matching blue sweat suits, the twins dangling from Big Bill’s biceps, and me standing off to the side.

“Who took this picture?” I said.

“Nobody. Don’t you remember? You set the timer, but you could hardly reach the top of the tripod, so you stood on the coffee table.

You thought you didn’t get back in frame for the picture. That’s probably why you’re sulking. Ha! Look at this one!” It was a Polaroid of my mother, very pregnant in a blue bathrobe, shielding her face as though from the paparazzi. “Right before we bought this house, your mother and I lived in a one bedroom on Centinela, by the municipal airport. She was pregnant with you. There was a teenage kid a few doors down. His name was Tony, I think. He was
…
I guess you’d say he was retarded. Downs, maybe. He was a great big kid, and good-natured. Someone bought him an Instamatic camera and he’d knock on your door at six in the morning, and when you answered the door, he’d snap your picture, which of course was always terrible. Then he’d sell you the picture for
fi
fty cents. Sort of like blackmail. Your mother refused to pay it the
fi
rst half dozen times.”

“Why did you leave San Francisco?” I said.

“It was over. I was done with it. We were starting a family, we had to get out.”

“Why Santa Monica?”

“Because it was home. For me, at least. I’ve spent all but three and a half years of my life here.”

“Think you’ll ever come back? I mean, to live?”

“No, I think it’s over, Will. It could never be the same, it never
was
the same after your mother died. Different place. Different time.” Big Bill looked at the clock face and his wistfulness wore off instantly. He straightened up and patted the tabletop with both hands. “Well, better get moving on this mess.” And he stood up.

When I left Big Bill that night he was packing and stacking like a madman in the open garage. As I loaded up the Duster, he paused in his duties momentarily at the head of the driveway, under cover of the garage door, bathed in a rectangle of stale light.

“Still running, eh?” he said, indicating the car he’d bought me the summer of my junior year of high school.

“Still running,” I said.

“I’ll be darned.”

“Yep.”

“I wouldn’t take her too far.”

“Me neither,” I lied.

I told him goodbye, and left him to his work.

Among the relics I hauled back to the apartment with me that evening were my old radio, a leaky beanbag, and the cardboard box my fourteen-inch Toshiba black-and-white television came in, the television itself having long since given up the ghost when Doug, during the course of borrowing it, dropped it down the stairs. The box now contained eight and a half unmarked volumes of The Book of Lulu, rubber-banded in stacks of three.

Cartesian Dualism: A Short Overview
By Will Miller

Descartes was distinct among his peers and predecessors in being the
fi
rst one to distinguish the mind from the brain as the center of mental activity. This may seem like a no-brainer now, but consider that in 1630 Galileo still hadn’t
fi
gured out that the earth moves. They couldn’t even make ice, for godsakes. Barbers were treating gangrene. Frankly, I’m surprised they even knew what a brain was.

But it was the mind, not the brain, Descartes reasoned, that was the
res cogitans
, the thinking thing. The mind was the essence of self: the doubter and the believer, the hoper, and the dreamer. The brain was just a place to sit. So convinced was Descartes of the noncorporeal properties of the mind that, am
ong his considerable inventory
of doubts (indeed, he built a whole methodology on the basis of doubt), he discovered that he could easily doubt whether he really had a body—after all, he might well be imagining his body, dreaming it, hallucinating it—and yet he could not doubt for a single instant whether he had a mind. The mind was inescapable. Ponder that one too long over some doobage, and I guarantee you’ll start feeling a little cagey. I did.

It could be that Descartes never really overcame his doubt of the body being a distinct substance, because even his mustache looked a little dubious to me. At any rate, he stuck to the dualism model, staking his very reputation on
it. Mind and body—two ontologi
cally distinct substances, one of them immaterial. Where things got sticky was the causal interaction between the two. How can an immaterial mind cause anything in a material body? Beats the hell out of me. Descartes never had an answer, either. Poor guy.

Maybe what I like best about Descartes is that in Franz Hals’s famous portrait, he looks like one of the villains from Scooby Doo. Something about the black robe and tousled hair—as though he’d just been unmasked in the linen closet. You can almost see Velma, just out of frame. Her glasses are fogged up. Fred, Daphne, the whole gang’s there.

And there’s old Descartes—with his doubting mustache and tousled hair—unmasked, exposed.

“And if it weren’t for you meddling Newtonians,” Descartes seems to be saying, “I would’ve got away with it.”

Sounds like you’ve gleaned a basic understanding of the mind/body distinction, Will, although I think this one bears further investigation on your part. Also, I must say that I’m a little dubious about the Scooby Doo reenactment. Not sure Descartes would’ve approved of this type of grandstanding. You should really watch your reefer intake.

—G.S

Near the end of February, I found myself browsing in the adult bookstore around the corner when I spotted Mr. Pitts in the used aisle. He didn’t see me—or at least if he did, he didn’t let on. He was a little scruffy, still wearing a
fl
annel dress shirt, still wearing those desert boots. His ice cream hair had melted, and his bald patch was visible. He had a bag of donuts by his feet.

Had I spotted just about anybody else, I would have ducked out before he made me, but somehow it wasn’t that big of a deal running into Mr. Pitts. After all, I’d already laid my heart bare for the guy at least ten times over the course of a half-million lunch-hour Cheetos junior year. What did I care if he read
Barely
Legal
?

“Hey, Mr. Pitts.”

He recognized me instantly, and didn’t look embarrassed. In fact, he hardly looked up from his magazine.

“How goes it, Miller?”

I thought he smelled a little like gin. But it could’ve been his aftershave.

“Good, Mr. Pitts, real good.”

“Call me Larry. Christ, even Harry, I don’t care. Anything but Mr. Pitts.”

“So are you still a counselor at Santa Monica, or what?”

“Yep, still at it, for better or worse. A thankless racket, but it pays the bills.” He tapped his
Barely Legal
. “And of course it keeps me in a good supply of smut. What’s your poison, Miller? Let me guess, older women?”

Old Pitts hadn’t lost a step. “How’d you know?”

“Just a hunch. Twenty years ago, that was my thing, too. Funny how that works. And I’ll bet you like big natural gazongas, too, with a little bit of hang time.” He demonstrated as per size and hang time.

“Am I right, Miller?”

“You’re good, Mr. Pitts. Maybe not that big, though.”

“Larry, call me Larry. Let me ask you something, Miller. You ever get over that girl?”

“No.”

“Good for you.”

“I never got her back. How is that good?”

“Maybe you never got her back, Miller, but you had her once.

And if you had her once, you can have her always. Even if it does drive you bonkers. Nothing wrong with a healthy obsession, Miller.

Madness is always worth it. Trust me.”

I must say, I was a bit surprised. I’d never pegged Pitts for an agent of chaos. But looking at him now, with his melted ice cream hair and his issue of
Barely Legal
, I wasn’t sure what to think. There was a glimmer in his eye that I didn’t recognize from our former noontime association in his cramped of
fi
ce. I wasn’t sure I trusted his logic. I was even less sure just what course of action he was recommending I take, indeed, if he was recommending I take one at all. I guess I just wasn’t quite sure about Mr.

Pitts in general, anymore, but I still liked him.

He put his issue of
Barely Legal
back on the rack and started leaf-ing through another. “I know a thing or two about wanting, Miller.

Do you know where she lives? Have you kept in touch with her?

Or is she just a little hole in your heart, forever sixteen, that kind of thing? Which is it?”

“We keep in touch a little. She lives in Seattle.”

“Any restraining orders?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.”

“Well, you’ve got that going for you. I was married once, Miller.

Very much in love.”

“I didn’t know.”

“She died in a roller coaster accident in Orlando. Eight years ago.

Struck by lightning.”

I thought he was joking.

“On our anniversary,” he said.

He had to be joking.

“The universe is a perverse place, Miller.”

“You’re serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Geez, Mr. Pitts, I’m sorry. Nobody ever told me.”

“Shit happens,” he said. “Nobody knew. We were living in Chevy Chase then. I moved out west a year and a half after it happened. I never told a soul here, not even my colleagues know. So keep that one under your hat, eh Miller? That gets out and I’m forever stamped as the guy whose wife got struck by lightning on a roller coaster on their
fi
fth anniversary. And I’m not sure I could handle that.”

Poor Pitts. How do you even attempt to order the universe in the wake of such a thing? And on top of all that, how do you keep it a secret?

“My mom died when I was little,” I told him. “Cancer.”

“I know. It was in your
fi
le.”

“So, then, if you knew, how come we never talked about it?”

He shrugged, and turned the page. “You never brought it up.”

“I guess I didn’t know any better.”

“Apparently I didn’t either. Sorry, kid.”

“No big deal.”

“I
fi
gure everybody has a few secrets,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Say, Miller, you ever get yourself into anything like this?” He tilted his magazine to reveal the visage of a young, doe-eyed brunette woman in a prom queen tiara performing fellatio on a hairy fat guy.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Me neither.”

That was the last time I saw Pitts. I kept an eye out for him whenever I went to the bookstore, but he never resurfaced. I should have got a phone number. I should’ve dropped by the high school and paid him a visit. Maybe I could have comforted the guy, as he once comforted me. I guess I’ll just add that to my list of should haves.

Years later, I heard Pitts offed himself with a ri
fl
e one morning in his apartment. Poor guy. Maybe his secret
fi
nally caught up with him.

March 6, 1991

Dear Will,

I feel better since I gave up being a
fl
ighty soul-searcher and gave in to life. The highs are not as high, but the lows aren’t as low, and I think that’s a healthy trade-off for me. I don’t really miss
fl
ying high. Being a bird isn’t all sunshine and shitting from high places.