Blazed (20 page)

“Right,” I say.

“What?”

I grin. “Nothing. Just sounds like something sorority girls make up their freshman year.”

“Christ,” my father says. “It does, actually.”

“Have fun.”

I start back up for the bathroom when he goes, “Hold on, Jaime.”

I sigh and turn around.

“Yeah. What?”

“Did you have fun last night?”

“Sure. I got to sit next to one of my heroes at dinner. It was awesome.”

The smile that appears on my father's face now seems forced. “What about everything else?” he asks.

“Everything else?”

“The party you guys went to. The food. The conversations.”

I make the okay sign with my right hand and nod. “Splendid,” I say. “All of it. Really splendid.”

“Now you're being sarcastic.”

Dropping my hand, I go, “Sorry. This is already really weird, though. I don't know you and you're trying to have this conversation with me about last night and you're only wearing a towel.”

“Right,” he says, looking down. Flipping his eyes back up to me, he goes, “Maybe I can throw on some clothes and me and you can go do something together.”

“Like what?”

He bunches his face and squeezes his forehead. “I don't know. Something. What do you want to do?”

“I'm gonna go see someone I met the other day.”

“Oh yeah?”

I nod. “So just keep doing your thing. Keep making Sunday a Funday.”

My father starts laughing. “All right. Just call me or text me and let me know you're all right if you plan on staying out late. Past dark.”

“Sure,” I say. “Totally.”

“Great.”

My father starts back toward the stairs, and I head into the bathroom and get into the shower.

While I'm in there, I think about Selena Gomez now, and start jacking off.

“Spring break, spring break, spring break forever . . .”

THE NUMBER 33 BUS PICKS
me up and winds its way through all these hills and then back down. It's on the way down that this big, beautiful portrait scape of the city and the Bay Bridge and the ocean fucking opens up.

My heart starts racing. It's sunny out and the sky is so clear and I can see everything. It devours me.

When the bus makes this awkward, like, 180-degree turn, I glance at all the people riding with me, and none of them are looking at this beautiful painting right in front of them.

Most of their faces are buried in their phones. Some of them are sleeping. None of them are reading. And the rest of them are looking the other way at a huge wall of brick.

It makes me angry. There's nothing like this in Joliet. Nothing. And if there was, I'd never take it for granted because I lived there and passed it every day.

No way.

This is so beautiful, so wonderful, and how the hell can you not choose to embrace something that's both of those things that you didn't even have to make.

It's just there for you.

It's amazing.

I don't get off in the Mission. Instead, I get off when the driver yells to me that we're on Market Street, cos I asked him to when I got on.

I'm so fucking nervous too. My palms are sweating again and my chest is tight and my breaths are short.

I shouldn't be feeling like this. I shouldn't even be in this situation. I don't know this girl. I don't know what she's about or what she wants or needs or what she likes.

I hate this.

I hate being around people I can't trust.

After popping my headphones on and playing Thee Oh Sees, I start moving up the sidewalk toward Squat & Gobble. This is the gay neighborhood of San Francisco. Dudes everywhere holding hands and laughing and minding their own business.

Stopping in front of a storefront window, I check myself out one last time. Make sure I look as good as I should.

I'm wearing a pair of skinny black jeans and this blue Modest Mouse T-shirt I found at a thrift store in downtown Joliet a few months ago when me and my mother went record shopping and thrifting. This is another thing me and her do a lot. We go to thrift stores. We even drive to Chicago to thrift sometimes.

The day I got this shirt, though, it was one of the most fun afternoons I'd had with her in a while. She was in such a great mood. She'd made me breakfast in the morning and was relatively sober. The day even started out
with her giving me the
Nirvana Live at the Paramount
DVD.

It was so cool to get that.

She said that she'd overheard me playing a lot of Nirvana songs on guitar and heard me sampling some for these beats I was making and she loved it.

My mother, she's always maintained that they're one of her favorite bands of all time, so she ordered me the DVD after she'd come across a great review of it online.

It's things like that, ya know, that have always helped to offset a lot of the bullshit she pulls. It meant the fucking world to me. Because she only bought it after she'd heard me devouring them for a few weeks and observed how much I loved them.

That really means something, ya know.

Later that night, we watched the DVD together after I played her the Modest Mouse albums
The Lonesome Crowded West
and
This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About
. She'd never listened to them before. She liked them a lot. It was a blast.

But three hours later I found her sitting on top of the car in the garage, crying hysterically, a bottle of wine in her hand.

When I asked her what was wrong, she looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You.”

We didn't talk for the next two days.

I'm also wearing my parka and my Nike Cortez and I've got a bandanna tied around my neck. I've got a backpack
stuffed full with six Coronas and a bottle of champagne I snaked from the house.

Basically, I look great, but I'm still so damn nervous and can't figure out why I fucking care so much. But I do.

And here I go.

EVERY SINGLE QUESTION I HAD
about why I'm doing this right now is annihilated when I see Dominique.

Man, she's so pretty. She's perfect. And she's always smiling. I've never seen anyone do that before. It's strange to me. It's awesome, too.

“Looking good and you're early,” she says, when I walk in.

She's standing behind the counter, working the register, and she's wearing a pair of super-short, supertight white cutoff jean shorts with black stockings covering the rest of her legs.

Her hair is the same as it was on Friday except for this wicked fucking pheasant tail feather that's been braided into it.

A large gold earring that says
Fila
dangles from her left ear and a black cross hangs from the right one.

But the best thing, besides her face, tits, and smile, is the dope sweater she's wearing. It's black with the face of a white wolf painted on the front. She also wearing a white collared shirt under the sweater with the collar tucked into it.

“How's your day?” I ask her.

“Pretty good,” she says. Man, her smile is contagious.
I can't help a grin as big as hers spreading across my face. “And yours?”

“Better now.” I can't believe I said that.

“Good,” she goes.

This older but really flamboyant gay dude with a shaved head, a goatee, and a gut comes up behind Dominique and grabs her shoulders.

“Is this him?” he says.

“It is,” she goes. “Jaime, Chuck. Chuck, Jaime.”

“Oh my,” he gasps, both his hands touching his cheeks. “It's such a pleasure to meet you. I've been listening to this princess going on and on and on about you all dang day. And believe me, sweetie, this girl rarely has anything nice to say about boys. Especially since Ricky.”

“Chuck,” Dominique snaps. For the first time, I see her smile disappear and turn into anger. “No,” she goes. “No.”

Chuck turns to her and puts a hand over his mouth. “I'm so sorry,” he gasps. “I pulled the Band-Aid right off of—”

“Hey,” she snaps, cutting him off and shaking her head. “Stop, please.”

Chuck tells her he's sorry again and then gives her a hug. She glances at me while he does this. There's hurt in her eyes and anger, too.

I'm curious, but it's none of my business. Clearly. And then Chuck tells Dominique she can leave.

She heads into the kitchen to grab her backpack, and then Chuck turns to me and says, “Don't be weirded out now, Jaime.”

“I'm not.”

“Good,” he goes. “She's an angel and deserves to be treated like one.”

“Whoa,” I say. “I'm a nice dude, so it's fine, but we're just kicking it for a couple of hours and that's it.”

Chuck starts laughing hysterically and says, “Oh please, Jaime. Please.”

“I'm serious.”

“Maybe you are.” He shrugs. “But just look at that girl. That's perfection.
Perfection
 . . . and what I've come to find out in my many years on this great place is that perfection often makes people do things they normally wouldn't do.”

I don't say anything.

“So many guys come after her, so many, Jaime.”

Pause.

“And she's picky.”

Another pause.

“Now you're here and she's floating.”

“So what?”

“I'm just saying, young man. She can have anyone and you're the one who's here.”

I look away.

“You,” he goes.

“And that's exactly why I'm so skeptical,” I mutter. “I still don't get it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” I tell him.

“Okay,” he goes.

Dominique rolls back out from the kitchen and around the counter and I race to the door and open it for her, and when she walks by me, my nostrils smell perfume, peaches and cream, and maybe even some strawberries.

So basically, they smell heaven as all those butterflies from the other day converge back in my stomach and start making some noise.

I IMMEDIATELY TELL DOMINIQUE ABOUT
the devil Feeder show or spectacle or whatever it's gonna end up being, and she's super down and we start walking toward the Mission.

“So tell me about Vicious Lips,” I say, as we stop at a crosswalk and wait for the light to change.

“We're vicious,” she says. “So fucking vicious.”

“I bet.”

“You tell me about us,” she goes. “Come on now, man. I know you Googled the fuck out of us once you heard the name.”

The light changes and we cross this wide, foresty street called Dolores.

“You're good,” I tell her. “And I did do exactly that.”

“So indulge me then. And when you're finished, I'll tell you a little bit about Tiger Stitches.”

“You found that?”

“It wasn't hard at all, man. And it's really, really damn good.”

“Thanks.”

“So Vicious Lips,” she goes.

“Right. That fucking band.”

Vicious Lips:

I smoked an Oxy last night around two in the morning, then started digging.

They're a three-piece band with Dominique on keyboards, percussion, and main vocals. This other black chick, Keisha California, plays guitar, and then this skinny white hipster, Mark Hopless, drums.

The girls are sixteen and Mark is eighteen, and they're pretty goddamn productive and ambitious. Kristen was right, too, they've got some decent cred.

Their EP, their only release so far, called
Songs About Kissing
, has three four-star reviews from some pretty dope music blogs that I respect, like the
MOJO
magazine website, which had this to say about the record.

Pulling inspiration from nearly every genre imaginable, Vicious Lips paints a gorgeous, dreamlike world on the surface, all the while creating an incredibly dark, edgy, and dare I say dangerous landscape just beneath the soft gleam. The combination is as sexy as it is unnerving, which almost feels like the same thing when you're listening to this wonderful debut. Obviously, the name of the EP pays homage to the great and seminal Big Black, which I personally found to be endearing and provoking, since I came up in Chicago during the rise of Touch and Go Records. Plain and simple, this music is stunning, original, and profound. Vicious Lips does an incredible job of controlling the chaos it openly invites into
every song. These fucking kids—yes, kids—are creating complex, thoughtful music most decent bands don't achieve until their fourth or fifth record, if they ever achieve it at all. That's fucking crazy to me. And it's so damn endearing. There is hope for this generation after all. Songs About Kissing is one of the best debuts in recent years, and easily one of the best records of the year. Like, all I want is some goddamn more right now. No pressure at all, kiddos.

The tracks are listed on their Bandcamp page like this:

1. Furry Forests

2. The Chocolate Balloon

3. Crushes

4. Wet Kisses

5. The Fury & the Night

Besides the awesome reviews, they've also got some great write-ups in the
SF Bay Guardian
and the
SF Weekly
. They've played over forty shows in the less than a year they've existed as a band, and they even went on a mini West Coast tour with this band from San Francisco that I fucking love called Social Studies.

“So pretty much,” I tell Dominique while we stand in front of this huge brick building on Fourteenth and Mission known as the Armory. “Pretty much you guys fucking rule. I personally loved all the songs, with ‘Crushes' probably being my favorite, I guess.”

Dominique is glowing, which she should be. She deserves the praise. The music is
that
good.