Metro (2 page)

“I
t's all shot to hell,” Jollie says to the thin platinum-haired lesbian in overalls, who leans against the open doorway to her room, smoking a joint, her foot lightly tapping in time to the party music, which is a Bob Marley CD that never seems to end. Jollie watches the lesbian's foot tap, pausing for a perfect beat, and then she hammers the thought home with a hoarse squeak that accelerates her low baritone voice into Kathleen Turner overdrive: “The world is
ending
and the tragedy isn't that nobody made plans—it's that everyone was an asshole to begin with.”

“That's real deep, honey,” the platinum lesbian says.

“I'm serious. It's a statistical fact.”

“What, that nobody plans for disaster or that everyone's an asshole?”

As the platinum lesbian hands her the joint, Jollie squeaks: “Both, really. Most people are more worried about looking good and upgrading their toys rather than helping out. But
some people
can choose a higher path, especially when they're street level like us.”

“I don't even vote. The president always turns out to be a crook.”

Jollie smirks. “That's like blaming Ronald McDonald when you get a bad cheeseburger.”

Thank you, Bobcat Goldthwait
, she thinks.

Then she catches up with the monotone relay race of the Bob Marley music in her bones again, swaying a moment as the sweet electric rush of it surges through her extra-love-size body, the fabric of her big blue blouse like shimmering mist over goosebumped skin. And she tunes in to the party, sensing so many disparate sensibilities so close and so far. Laughter up and down the hallway. Giggling and screaming and yodeling. Plumes of reefer smoke and the faint, thick scent of bourbon sour on the air, like the smell of the witching hour, which has already come and gone, leaving only the faithful. Jollie loves it when this many people show up at on a moment's notice at the Kingdom. Makes her feel safe and loved and popular. The sweet rush of the Molly washes in again—pure undiluted ecstasy, rare and wonderful, special treats tonight from Mark, who always wants her to feel good because he's in love with her. That makes her feel safe also. Their place is always the last stop after last call for everyone. Tucked in on the south side of Austin at the bottom of a hill on Montclaire Street and surrounded by trees, just blocks from South Lamar, which is a main drag for the bohemian set. The house has high ceilings, three bedrooms, a big living room annexed to a kitchen and a dining area. And there's always a party, always a celebration. Jollie will look back as an older, wiser woman and say
Those were the good old days
.

“Not everyone has ambitions to save the world,” says the platinum lesbian, whose name Jollie will probably never know.

Jollie's already dubbed her Platinum Lizzie in her own head.

You know, just
because
.

“Some of us
totally
have ambitions to save the world,” Jollie says, almost squealing. “Do you know why we threw this party tonight?”

“Um, no.”

“Do you watch much news? Do you know what's going on right now in Congress?”

“Oh yeah, isn't there a protest or something?”

“They call it a filibuster. When a senator won't sit down after he's recognized.”

“Yeah, yeah. He's been, like, standing up for a couple of days, right?”

“Twenty-seven hours just now. Senator Bob Wilson.”

“Yeah, it was all over Google and CNN this morning.”

“It still is. Biggest goddamn news item of two thousand and fucking fifteen.”

“Okay, so what about it?”

Jollie smiles like a proud parent. “Well, those are my guys.”

“What do you mean
your guys
?”

“I mean the people behind that filibuster protest are
my guys
—my friends in Philadelphia. They organized the whole thing in advance. I'm not really sure how Peanut managed to pull it off, but he's been in Senator Bob's ear for months now. It's all about a bill before Congress that was really a front for toll-road kickbacks in New York.”

“
Peanut?
”

“That's my boy in Philly.”

“Sounds like a rapper.”

“He might as well be. He's kinda this crazy rich kid who came out of the suburbs when he was sixteen, took it to the street, and rapidly became known as the Eminem of the political blog scene. A scary zeitgeist activist who makes scary moves that require big money and brass blackmail balls. One of those virtual information terrorists who usually gets groomed early to work freelance for government subagencies run by the CIA. He's just that awesome at what he does. But he's one of the good guys.”

“Wait a second,” Platinum Lizzie says. “So you're telling me some twentysomething civil-rights protestor with a trust fund bought a senator somewhere and got him to stand up in the House of Representatives?”

“That's exactly what I'm telling you.”

“That's crazy. How is something like that even
done
?”

“It's easier than you might think. We learned it from a Billy Jack movie.”

“Who's Billy Jack?”

“A cool dude,” Jollie says, laughing. Then she dismisses it with a silly wave. Like
If you gotta have it explained, you don't need to know, baby
.

“I don't know any dudes that are cool,” Platinum Lizzie says.

“I'm sure you don't,” Jollie giggles. “Anyway, Senator Bob has the floor as we speak. He's just been reading off hundreds of pages of names and dates and more names—all provided to him and verified by our people. The seventeen members of Congress who were bought off, the five major above-the-line corporations involved in the conspiracy, the two million stockholders who profited illegally from the scam. I was one of the fact finders. It's all a part of the Wildcat River mission.”

“Is that a blog or something?”

“Something.”

“Sounds like you're playing with fire,” Platinum Lizzie says, her tongue planted firmly in cheek, not exactly believing any of this, but sort of believing some of it. “I mean, it's a pretty impressive thing in terms of organizational skills, I guess . . . but what are you people really hoping to achieve by kicking the hornet's nest like that?”

Jollie almost laughs again.

Whaddaya mean
“
you people”?

Jollie shivers just a bit from the cool air wafting through the open window of her room, sharp dampness and the muddy smell of autumn leaves a vague comfort, hovering at the edge of the party. Then, just like a politician's aide giving a quote to the media, she pauses, checks herself, and carefully selects her next answer. It flows sweetly from her full lips, and Jollie instantly radars that Platinum Lizzie wants to have her in the sack more than ever when the words hit home:

“Robin Hood once stood on a mountain and asked his personal god why it was necessary to keep hammering the Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin said he was tired and outnumbered and beaten down and his quest was like shooting arrows at the moon. And Robin's god, who was Herne the Hunter, replied to him:
It is enough to aim
.”

Platinum Lizzie leans forward to kiss Jollie in the doorway, and Jollie pushes past her.

“Keep aiming, pretty,” Jollie says, and melts into the dim hallway, ducking under plumes of smoke and streams of spirited conversation, homing toward the living room music. She's thinking about her boys. Thinking about Robin Hood.

Thinking that the moon isn't so far away after all.

55 minutes and COUNTING . . .

S
he's the girl everyone in Austin wants, but her beauty comes from being smart, and being smart isn't just about books or experience or street savvy—it's about being
beautiful
. She explains a lot to Andy what she means by that, and Andy doesn't really get it most of the time. It's too complicated for him. And then Andy will say something stupid and twentysomething like
The beautiful people rule us all
, and she'll pretend not to understand what he means for a second or two before she busts him on being a two-dimensional thinker, and he'll sincerely apologize and come at her a different way. Then she'll tell him that he'll never really understand because he doesn't have to work for these things, he's never lived through any of it. See, Andy is one of the
beautiful people
. He might be a sweet guy under all that silly surface posturing, but he's been beautiful all his life—obvious, mainstream,
outside
beautiful, the kind that most people run straight for. She's just as guilty as the next lady of seeing him as a piece of boy meat, but old-school humanity dies real hard, even for the intellectuals.

Still, Andy desires her more than any woman he's ever known.

And Jollie Meeker ain't beautiful on the outside—not like he is.

But she's the girl you want because she's smarter than everyone, short and sassy, lives to stick it to the man, sways like a flower child at hip-hop shows, dresses like a plump, sexy 1970s time-warp experiment, and her poetry is actually damn good. Ask her what she does for a living and you might get any number of answers, but when you Google her, you'll get a lot of hits, mostly tied to her political blogs, which she runs in a network with three other guys in Alaska, New York, and Philly. But Jollie is also smart enough to realize you gotta pay the rent before the revolution hits, so there's the three other websites devoted to entertainment news, which she runs under aliases. That's where most of her money comes from. The horror movie site is her favorite—a gothy, pop-up-crazy abomination called Dripping Fangs of Doom, where she stirs a melting pot of super nerds who blog out about the latest thing in splatter porn or how much ice the new found-footage Freddy flick sucks on. She logs on as Scary Mary once a week, gets quarterly checks from online advertisers, clocks regular wait shifts slinging pancakes at Kerbey Lane Cafe South, and saves her pennies to get on planes and protest at Capitol Hill during budget hearings. She sees a lot of dumb, beautiful people at those gatherings.

Jollie would rather be fat and smart.

She was twelve when she noticed her baby rolls for the first time, when she realized her nose was round and cute in a puggy sort of way, not sharp and upturned in a bitchy sort of way. Realized she liked ladies
and
men, but not equally. She aced high school in a few fast eyeblinks. Her mom was dead just a year after. Jollie tells the story now with detached amusement—the kind worn through years of denial, and you don't have to ask her about it either. She'll tell you right off any number of triggers. Mark thinks that's a sign that she's deeply depressed.

Mom blew herself away, you see.

Aimed a gun right for her own head with a .45 Magnum purchased just for the occasion and unloaded the one bullet in the chamber.
Instant mommy hash
, Jollie calls it now. Jollie was looking right in Mommy's eyes when the hash happened. She was seventeen and still a virgin. She's still a virgin now, at twenty-six.

She'll tell you all about that when you first meet her. She told it to Mark when she first met him, in so many words. That was five years ago. They've been living with Andy in this house ever since then.

The Kingdom.

The House of JAM.

(That's Jollie, Andy, and Mark, silly you.)

Her own social scene.

Mark says he's in love with her, Andy says he can't imagine a world without her, and everybody else in Austin wants her.

She smiles and lets it ride, knowing this is her time, that 2015 is
her year
, because she is still young and beautiful—the right kind of beautiful. Sometimes, in those weird midnight moments, when she sits in the dining room nook pounding at the truth, the party long over, her angelic cherub face awash in the dreamy blue glow of the laptop screen, she wonders how long that beauty will last. How long will it take to break me? How long can I survive in a world filled with so many people who see things so differently? And then she'll see her thick smile reflected in the screen and she'll shift her great weight in the comfy chair, and she'll realize how lucky she is. Lucky that she never gave a shit about those cheerleaders in high school. Lucky that she never understood why men chase after ideals they don't even comprehend. Lucky that she knows—like most people don't—that the world is ending and she has to do something about it.

And still she wonders.

How long will it take to break me?

52 minutes and COUNTING . . .

“I
have no clue,” Andy says, and he really means it, on multiple levels.

He's answering a question posed by a dazzling young teenage girl in a Spider-Man T-shirt, and his voice is gentle and pretty and even understanding in a way she wouldn't have expected. He emphasizes the word
clue
with an upturned sense of wonder, like he really wants to know what's on her mind in this moment, and he leans slightly forward, moving toward her on the couch in a way that isn't exactly practiced, and not exactly insincere. He can tell she wants to say back off, buddy, but he disarms her, tilting his head with a gentle smile, as if to say
Please explain it to me.
And he comes off like a fucking saint.

Her question was this:

Can you tell how old I am in dog years?

Andy doesn't even know what the heck a dog year is.

(Does anyone?)

He thinks she may have been talking about her dog when she brought that up, in the middle of some weird tangent he can piece together now if he really works on it. The peak of the Molly is so strong on him and the party has gotten so loud on that endless Bob Marley loop that each moment blurs forward into the moment after it very quickly, coloring his ADD in beautiful waves. He focuses on her pretty eyes and her hard chin and her white hair as she speaks again: “A dog sees time differently than we do because they only have a fifth of our brain capacity.”