Eye to Eye (2 page)

“Well, well, well,” he says, crossing his arms and leaning into the bar. “Cat dragged in something right pretty.”

“Hey, baby.” I lean into the bar, too, and give Earl a long kiss.

Tall Guy looks surprised—and disappointed. After all, Earl
did
take the blonde's hands off him.

“He's my boyfriend,” I say, wanting to show off Earl. I eye him up and down as if I want to eat him. Earl turns red and gives me a look that says
behave.

“Lucky girl,” Tall Guy says, and stands up with his drink. “I'm obviously wasting my time and money here.” He winks at Earl and walks off.

“Have a good night, buddy,” Earl calls after him sincerely, and that's why he's a hit with both sexes. Earl pours himself a glass of water and drinks it in three gulps. He puts the glass under the counter and then grins at me. “What're you drinking, trouble?”

“Who, me?” I ask, and blink dramatically. Then I grab him by the front of his T-shirt and kiss him long and hard again.

“Hey, dude,” a lanky guy says. He's been standing at the bar the whole time and we didn't even notice. He looks like Timothy Hutton. Hell, he could be Timothy Hutton for all I know—or care. I'm kissing Earl Lo Vecchio. “How about a drink?” he asks. “I mean, since we
are
in a bar. And since you
are
the bartender. Unless it's too much trouble, I mean.”

Earl gives him a serious look. The guy has no idea how deeply and swiftly Earl could imbed his foot in his ass if he felt moved to do so. But then he smiles at him. “You're right, buddy. I'm being rude. Not doin' my job. What'll it be?”

I narrow my eyes at Earl and tilt my head. In Langsdale, he would have had much more to say to this guy. He winks at me. “I'm taking it easy, being mellow here in California.”

“Who's the blonde?” I ask, when Earl's done getting the guy's Greyhound. “Your new girlfriend?” I smile. I've never worried about Earl wanting someone else. We haven't been together long enough for me to worry about that, especially with Earl being the solid, straightforward man that he is. Still, I don't like the
liberties
Blondie's taking, like the bar's her world, the world is her oyster, and she could slurp Earl down.

“Oh,” Earl says, sounding a bit weary. “That's Katie. Hey, Katie. Come on over here a minute.”

Katie laughs loudly at something her customer has said, takes his money and puts it in her tip jar. “What is it, honey,” she says to Earl. Up close I see that she looks barely legal.
Honey?

“Katie, I'd like you to meet my woman, Ronnie.”

Katie's eyes widen ever so slightly, but then she plays it off. She gives me a quick once over, pausing over my braids. “This is your girlfriend?” She blinks and extends a hand.

That's what the man said. In the words of my pain-in-the-ass tutee, Did he stutter? “Hi. Veronica. Nice to meet you.”

Katie nods. “It's only my third night. My first time working with Earl. He's made it so easy for me!”

Doesn't mean you have to
be
easy.
Honey.
“Yeah, Earl's that way,” I say, and then the small talk gets minuscule.

“Well, better go do my thing,” Katie says in a bright, babyish voice.

“Nice to meet you,” I reply, but she's already walking away. I smile at Earl. “She seems nice.”

“She's all right.” He takes my hands in his big warm ones. “I'm wondering about you, though. How you doing, sweetheart? How's that little boy treating you? Am I gone have to take him behind the toolshed?”

I laugh at the thought of a toolshed in Ian's palatial garden. “Oh, you know…” I don't want to complain to Earl, not right now. He's had to listen to me complain too much; me, the woman who says she's never one to complain. “Let's just say that I needed to come down the hill to see you, and that I can only drink Diet Coke tonight, in the interest of avoiding alcohol abuse.”

Earl holds his hand up. “‘Enough said, baby. Diet Coke, coming right up.”

Seeing Earl makes me feel better, but while he gets my drink, I get sad again all of a sudden. Earl calling me trouble gets me thinking about Doris, my best friend, and my former partner in misery at grad school in Langsdale, Indiana. If she were here, I'd definitely be having more than Diet Coke. I'm so proud of her that she's Dr. Weatherall.
Professor
Weatherall. She didn't let the academic crazies chase her away like I did. I was considering a Ph.D., too. But like one of those challenges on
Survivor,
I ran out of stamina, and gave up after trying to balance myself on a narrow pole. But Georgia—Professor Doris Weatherall in Georgia—tickles me, as they say in the South.

“Doris,” I'd said, tossing her shoes into a big box when we packed up her apartment a few weeks ago, “you're going to have to learn how to get the vapors.”

“Don't,” she'd said. “I'm going to kill myself.”

“C'mon. You've got a
great
gig. Atlanta's a cool town. And didn't you say there's all this hiking and pretty nature and stuff?”

“Listen to you.
Nature.
You break out in a cold sweat at the thought of grass. Now I know you're really trying to make me feel better.”

I shrugged.

“It's true, though. Atlanta's supposed to be a cool town.” Doris sighed. She suddenly flopped down on her couch. “I just wish you were coming with me. It'll suck not knowing anybody.”

“La-uh-dies don't say
suck,
Miss Weatherall. A true Southern lady does not, and I repeat, does
not,
use such coarse language.”

“But they give their friends the middle finger,” Doris said, demonstrating.

I covered my mouth daintily and fanned myself. “I do declare, I believe I might faint. Somebody give me a mint julep.”

“What
is
a julep, anyway?” Doris stood again, absently surveying her Langsdale apartment.

“Fuck if I know,” I said. “I barely know what mint looks like. It looks like green, right?”

“Oh, I see. La-uh-dies don't say
suck,
but they say
fuck.
” Doris shook her head. “Wow. You and Earl are a pair. The country boy and the city chick who's not even sure if mint is green. This just proves that there's someone for everyone.”

I held up a pair of black platform heels. “You should totally give me these. Southern Belles don't wear these kinds of shoes. They wear, like, white pumps or something, don't they? These are L.A. shoes.”

Doris clasped her hands together and pointed her index fingers at me like a gun. “Put the shoes in the box and step away from the collection,” she said.

“Jeez.” I held my hands up in surrender. “I'm a get Earl after you if you don't act right.”

Doris slapped her hands together, trying to get the dust off them. “Earl? He's a teddy bear. He'll be on
my
side.”

I smiled at that. Earl was crazy about Doris. He liked her mouth, that it was big, equally big as mine. Earl didn't get shrinking violets. One more reason to love him.

Earl and I were going to help Doris drive to Georgia the next day, but not before we tied one last one on that night. We all went to the Saloon, and for the first time Earl wasn't the bartender. He'd given notice two weeks before, and was a customer like everyone else.

“Until we meet again,” we all repeated.

“To Boozy and Floozy,” Earl said, raising his glass to me and Doris. Zach, Doris's guy, clinked Earl's glass enthusiastically. Doris and I glared at them both until they lowered their glasses. But then Earl clinked his glass with ours and flashed those dimples.

Driving on the interstate the next day, Doris seemed worried about Zach, didn't think it was going to last, especially since they were “taking a break” from each other.

“I don't know,” she said, tuning the radio. “I don't know if he has enough ambition.”

“But Earl's a bartender. You like
him,
” I tried to reason. Personally, I thought Doris and Zach had come too far to let ambition, or a lack thereof, get between them.

“A damn good bartender,” Earl said from the back of Doris's Toyota. He was laid out lengthwise, but curled up because he was too much man for a Toyota.

“Yes, but Earl wants to go to law school—”

“But not to make money,” I say.

Earl sang along to the Hank Williams tune coming from the radio. He sounded good. Real good. I hadn't ever heard him sing.

“It's
not
the money,” Doris said, but couldn't elaborate as to what
it
was exactly.

So it was only the four of us that night before we hit the road. All the way to Atlanta, we split the driving, and got Doris to Georgia faster than you could say Rhett Butler.

 

It's dusky outside and every so often the door to the Baseline swings open, and a warm breeze comes in, along with somebody covered in tattoos or still wearing sunglasses—indoors, at night. And what about the women walking through the door? Maybe it was because I was in graduate school in the Midwest far too long, where style and any attempt at fashion was frowned upon, got you labeled as a dum-dum, but looking around at the women, looking at Katie in her perfect, taut body, I feel dowdy. I thought I was looking effortlessly chic. Instead, my sundress feels too thrift store, a little too tight. My flip-flops are a little worn, I have to admit. Or maybe it's seeing how Ian lives, how a lot of people live or try to look like they're living in L.A. I knew all of this, saw all of this before I left, but because it wasn't
my
life, I didn't think about it so much, either way. Now I feel like a visitor, a tourist, being wowed and amazed by so many ordinary things. Coming back to a place that has changed so much, or being the person who went away, who has changed so much, has made me nutty, made Earl look at me with worry more than once since being here in L.A. I can get past this.

I've been through worse: the two most scarring experiences of my life were working at McDonald's in high school, and living five years in Langsdale, Indiana. I only lasted for one year at McDonald's and finally quit when I realized I couldn't take one more day of asking folks if they wanted an apple pie with that, only to hear them yell through the drive-through speaker exactly what I could do with that apple pie.

Sure, my hard time at Langsdale lasted much longer—you have no idea how much longer. Five years in small-town Midwest as a black woman in graduate school should be calculated more like dog years. I was only there five real-time years, yet my psyche aged ten years. I have souvenirs from both McDonald's and Langsdale. The not-faded-enough imprint of a kamikaze fry that somehow
jumped
out of boiling lard and landed on my forearm. I once nearly got into fisticuffs with some Shakespearean at a party, who blah, blah, blahed about an article he'd read about our “litigious” society, and how that one woman who sued McDonald's over spilled coffee on her thighs was “frivolous” and “greedy.” I
saw
the photos of that woman's thighs, which didn't look none too pretty after a cup full of hot-ass coffee settled on them, and they didn't look frivolous—they looked fucked up. And I showed the Shakespearean my fry tattoo. That shut him up.

It was the beginning of a long epiphany, really. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life: continue on with a Ph.D., or leave and do something that was a better fit for me? I took the MFA and ran with my second souvenir: Earl.

When I first met Earl, he looked like the lost member of ZZ Top—or Grizzly Adams—and I saw myself as a kind of Clair Huxtable—if she were more broke, showed
a lot
more skin, kept her hair in braids, never went to the gym and cussed like a sailor. If you try to think of these two kinds of people dating, and you feel your mind refusing to wrap itself around that image, think about how I must have felt about it. But God bless Earl. He only thought about what he wanted and how to go about getting it. He never worried about what anything
looked
like, this man who would never use the phrase “politicize.” He never even worried about what our life would be like in L.A. Before leaving Langsdale, Earl was already thinking about quitting bartending and studying labor law because he was tired of his family and friends—a long line of factory workers just like mine—getting screwed over. “I cain't bartend for all the rest of my days, Ronnie,” he'd said. But he decided to do it just a little bit longer in L.A. to save for school and get settled.

And so, in an anything-for-love gesture, my boyfriend, a man who cares nothing about the looks of things, moved with me to my hometown, a city that is obsessed with the looks of things. All the time packing up my life in Langsdale, Indiana, I thought about how Earl would adjust, fit in. Turns out that I'm the one having to
re
adjust. I'm a native Los Angelino who has had it up to here with loud, self-important cell-phone conversations about “project meetings” while I'm trying to eat my lunch. I'm one flip out away from the next Hummer I see taking up two parking spaces outside Starbucks. And don't get me started on the hipster uniform for the up-and-coming Hollywood set. For the guys, a hundred-dollar haircut so that one's hair looks effortlessly “I'm-too-cool-to-comb-my-hair messy,” faux Elvis sunglasses, ironic T-shirts of '70s and '80s icons. In general, it's the look of a fifteen-year-old skateboarder, even if you happen to be closer to thirty. The women have three looks: anything that makes one look like a thirteen-year-old, anything that makes one like a hooker
and
a thirteen year-old, and anything that looks like what Doris refers to as
the mask—
that is, at least four layers of makeup. I wanted to live in Echo Park because it used to have none of the things, none of the people, that made me nutty. Turns out they've migrated, crawling away from the west side, leaving a trail of dumb, money-making Hollywood scripts behind them. So, Earl and I are living in a neighborhood we can hardly afford to stay in and given first, last and deposit on any new place, we can't afford to leave.