Magnificent Vibration (13 page)

Lexington Vargas opens his mouth and we instinctively flinch. Thankfully he does this to speak and not to sigh. “I don’t read English so well. I speak it but I never learned to read it,” he says. “I live in LA. There’s no real need.”

I have to ask. “Why would you buy a book written in a language you can’t understand?”

Our large new friend wears an expression that seems to suggest he hasn’t thought to ask himself this question. There is a perplexed beat, then:

“I don’t know. I liked the cover,” is his honest reply.

And I realize that’s the same reason I bought (sorry, stole) my copy. It seems like a staggeringly inconsequential rationale—because the cover isn’t really
that
great.

I look at Lexington Vargas’s book, which Alice is still holding aloft to make her previous point.

“Motherfucker,” I exclaim for the third time tonight. I really need to watch my language or at least curb it a bit. Then again, Alice did drop the very charged—and from her mouth, stunningly sexy—F-bomb a minute ago. “Damn it, focus, Cotton, focus!!! And damn you, too, accursed ADD. To hell with you and your petty distractions,” I think to myself.

But I am back on track, and I point to the copy of
Magnificent Vibration
she still holds. The title now reads
Magnifica Vibraciόn,
with the subtitle
“Descubre tu verdadero propόsito.”

The ample dude in the backseat emits a slight gasp, grabs his book from Alice’s hand, and begins flipping through the pages.

“It’s all in Spanish now,” he says with childlike wonder.

I am suddenly amped, “It’s a miracle. It’s a friggin’ miracle, right? Doesn’t that qualify as a
miracle?
” I turn to Alice. She is the resident expert after all. “Well, doesn’t it?”

Alice is stunned. “Wow. What’s going on here?”

“Read some of it. What’s it say?” I urge Lexington Vargas, having unfortunately left my own copy at home. He begins to scan it in silence, lips moving slowly. Apparently he’s not so good at reading Spanish either.

“Where did you get your copy?” asks a slightly dazed Alice while the big guy painfully peruses his text.

“Some bookstore on Melrose.”

“By the high school?” Alice again.

“Yeah, just across and up toward Fairfax. You know which store I mean?”

“That’s where I bought my copy,” is the not unexpected reply from the babe-nun. I don’t tell her I
stole
mine in a fit of pique at losing most of my financial power in the divorce, though why I would take that out on some poor guy trying to make a living selling books is beyond me. Kick the dog I guess. Terrible human trait.

“I too got mine at that store,” says Lexington V.

I jump the gun a bit and show what appears to be a little back-end racism. “What the heck were
you
doing on Melrose Avenue?” The question is out of my mouth before I can slap a hand over the offending orifice.

Lexington Vargas seems to take no offense.

“I work at the school there. Fairfax High. I’m a groundskeeper, janitor, handyman, anything they need.”

I babble to cover my faux pas, “I just meant since you live, like, what, forty miles away, wouldn’t you go to a bookstore a little closer to home—but I see your point . . . I didn’t mean anything about, y’know, you being ah, foreign or . . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Lexington Vargas. It truly seems not to have fazed him at all, and I’m beginning to like this guy who recently scared the piss out of me and whom I thought was bringing my doom by way of me being his late night snack.

“I’d really like to go home soon,” moans Lexington Vargas, but his lips move silently as he scans his copy of the book.

I’ve started up the gerbils or whatever they are in the Kia’s engine compartment that under-power this thing and am already heading in the direction of Glendale and its environ known as La Crescenta to drop off Big Boy.

It’s actually not as far as I’d first lamented. The traffic is pretty skinny this time of night, given the weather. I think Angelenos worry about melting in the rain.

“We should check out that bookstore tomorrow,” I opine, but Alice is lost in her own thoughts while we wait for Lexington Vargas to deliver his book report. I am already speeding (well, “speeding” is a bit of a misnomer considering what I’m driving) to the 101 freeway.

“What’s the gist of the book?” I ask as we barrel through the fairly deserted city, sending the odd, meager rooster-tail of water into the opposing lanes.

“What’s the
what
?” asks the Leviathan.

“What are you reading about? What’s it say?”

“It’s about me,” is his reply.

Wait . . . WHAT?!! I bark incredulously.

“The first few pages are about me growing up in Morelos. My home town in Mexico.”

“
Magnificent Vibration
is a book about YOU?!” I am flummoxed.

“I guess,” is Lexington Vargas nonchalant reply.

I slow the car. I can’t drive
and
process this kind of information. Multi-tasking has never been a strong suit.

Alice perks up and dives into her bag to retrieve her copy of the book as I pull over onto a side street near the Hollywood Boulevard on-ramp. The rain beats down like the ghost of Keith Moon is drumming away on the roof of the vulnerable Kia. Alice opens her pages. Silence. I am hoping she reads faster than Lexington V.

“Oh my God,” she says to no one in particular.

“So it’s a book about
this
guy?” I toss a dispirited and slightly disappointed thumb in the direction of the man mountain in the backseat.

She looks up at me, eyes like saucers. “
My
book is about
me
,” she says breathlessly.

My face betrays disbelief or some neighboring emotion. I don’t actually feel disbelief, but I am feeling something. Definitely feeling something.

She turns back down to her copy and there is a moment of restless quiet as she continues to peruse the pages. She raises her head and looks out into the rain, lost in a memory.

“I just read about,” she takes a sharp and shuddering breath, “when I was eight years old and I was in the kitchen of our old house in Ohio, and my father was angry and cursing and beating my mother. I jumped in between them screaming for him to stop and he hit me against a wall and knocked me out cold.” There are tears in her eyes
now. “I’d forgotten he did that. My father. Punched his eight-year-old daughter unconscious,” she sniffles. “My mom hid her bruises, black eye, and other damage from the neighbors but I had a concussion for three weeks. I’d completely erased that part from my memory. I didn’t . . . I . . .” she stumbles to a stop and hangs her head. Tears drip onto the open book, staining the pages. She looks again like she must have felt at that long-ago moment. Sad, frightened, pathetic, broken, lost. I put a hand on her shoulder. Lexington Vargas lays a meaty palm on her back and rubs gently. Her pain is palpable. We sit in tableau for a few moments, three strangers strangely connected. Then without a word, but my mind whirling like the growing storm outside, I kick-start the Kia’s gerbil and we head onto the freeway in the direction of La Crescenta, wherever the hell that is.

Ronan Bon Young.

Beloved Husband of Evelyn Beryl.

Friend of this land. Now in God’s hands.

April 24, 1941–January 14, 2013

is how the small, incarnadine headstone reads as a group of white-haired and bent figures shuffle away from the freshly filled grave. It is a marker only, his body having never been found. The handful of mourners and the priest who officiated agree it is unusual, but it’s how Ronan would have wanted it, such was his love of this place and in particular the Loch and her deep, dark, and restless spirit. His stone lies in tandem with his bride Evelyn’s own marker, which Ronan set in place himself not four years earlier.

At the “local” later that evening, all who knew Ronan Young toast his memory and agree to a man that the
Bonnie Bradana
should be mothballed in a museum, so much a part of the local culture and legend has she become. But no one has the means, the real inclination, or the time, and the shared desire is more of a nod to Ronan and his beloved vessel than anything that will be acted upon. Instead the
Bonnie Bradana
will be left to gather cobwebs in a boat shed until the money for the berth Ronan had always paid in advance runs out and she is broken up for her cured wood or torn apart and cannibalized for whatever is still salvageable within her. But there is a petite, well-loved home and a modest bank account that needs to find an heir. Devin, Ronan’s older brother, has been dead these many years, but there is talk of a child that Devin conceived, who may still live somewhere in America and who, if living, should be located and informed of the humble windfall, being the only surviving family member. Both a local lawyer and a family friend are sending out smoke signals to the west trying to locate this child. Good people doing good deeds.

But the yin and the yang of the universe must always be in
balance. There is no other way. Everything is a whole. A circle. Complete. With every gift comes something dark and with every misfortune comes the seed of an equal benefit. All seemingly opposite or contrary forces are interconnected and interrelated. There can be no front without a back. No up without a down. No zig without a zag. No black without white. No life without death.

And ten minutes’ journey from the hill on which Ronan Young’s memorial has just been placed, there is a gloomy and anonymous apartment in Inverness where a young man is piecing together, from homemade parts, a handgun that will be sold for one purpose. To take a life.

I
f I think that’s all I’m going to get from the horny, but possibly slightly nuts, Reverend’s nympho, I am very much mistaken. She keeps on keeping on. She extends her hours of service to my sister, and I make sure first that Josie is treated well, bathed, taken care of and read to: the Bible from the Rev’s wife;
Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray
, and
True Tales of the Loch Ness Monster
from me. Then we get down to business, Mrs. Whiting and I—and that feels just plain creepy calling her Mrs. Whiting. She has already suggested, mid-romp, that I call her “Virginia.” That’s disturbing, too, because she’s older than me by more than a decade and a half and it’s generally uncomfortable all round to even call her anything, so I don’t. She teaches me things about the female body that I never would have even considered were possibilities, let alone my task and duty to attend to as the male sex partner. I get better at it, too, and although I’m still racked with guilt and a feeling of absolute phantasmagoria pervades every encounter, Woody is having the time of his
young life. And he doesn’t jump the gun quite as much anymore, either. We (Woody and I) both learn about new and interesting coital positions as this wild sexual fruit-loop gives us both the instruction of a lifetime.

I feel a certain confidence as well, in social situations that previously intimidated me—at school and around the communal circles in general—now that I am actually having full-on, penis-to-vagina sex. And not just with some dopey girl from school, either, but with the genuine article: an adult, married woman! It just reeks of “grown-upness” to me. I do try, in my guilt, to talk myself out of the position I’m in, but Woody outsmarts me every time. He’s obviously better at debating than I am. At the end of every—dare I even call it “lovemaking”—session, she continually admonishes me to “keep it to ourselves,” and that “it’s our little secret.” Not sure why she keeps saying this, because I’m sure as hell not going to print up posters saying
I’M OFFICIALLY PORKING THE REVEREND’S WIFE, SO SUCK IT!
and hang them all around my school. I am a randy young boy/man and have since come to understand that most boys my age are open to screwing pretty much anything remotely female that shows them even the slightest affection of any kind whatsoever, but at this point I’m regrettably aware of the cuckolding nature of our trysts, and, sadly, I am also slightly in love. My mom would kill me. Then there’s the public shame to consider (though it would probably be mixed with a certain amount of bonhomie and back-slapping from my schoolmates).

So we, Virginia and I, continue to screw our brains out like teenagers on prom night. I even send her hackneyed “love” notes and pathetic little gifts through the mail. This is very dangerous behavior considering the situation, people involved, and ease with which the missives could fall into the wrong hands. She is quick to put a stop to it, hinting at possible embarrassing scenarios should we ever be “discovered.” My mind kicks
into overdrive concocting these “embarrassing scenarios” that ultimately culminate in me being publicly hoisted on a long pointy stick with the sharp business end shoved up my ass and protruding through my open mouth while neighbors and friends scream, cry, curse, and throw old, rotten fruit at my corpse as my poor mother beats her breast in shame and ruin and flicks boogers at me. Then mom comes home early.