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“Are they all love poems?” she asked suspiciously.

“No. I mean, they're mostly about me.”

“Why do you keep them under the bed?”

He laughed. “My mom's, like, the youth director of her church. She thinks I'm going to hell already.”

“I like the one you gave me,” she said, meeting his gaze.

He glanced away again. She could tell that he was going to give her another poem to read; perhaps, like “bones,” it would mirror her own erotic lunacy. He opened one of the notebooks and handed it to her. “The Piranhas of Time,” the poem was called. Her heart sank. It had all the dopey anguish of a heavy metal song. In growing desperation, she latched on to a couple lines near the end:

5 a.m., a circus in my brain

my juggler vein exposed to you

“I like how you use ‘juggler vein,'” she said. “After ‘circus.' That's really clever.”

“What?”

“Instead of ‘jugular.'”

He blushed crimson, grabbing the notebook from her. “I'm going to go to veterinary school. As soon as I get my bachelor's. I'm taking night classes at Harbor College.”

She hadn't meant to humiliate him: there was none of the dark thrill she'd felt watching him eat the ice cream cone at The Perfect Scoop. Something was happening to her. It had to do with the posters, with his pet chameleon, with the weird, touching fact that he'd wanted to show her his room to begin with. Hector wouldn't look at her. Lyle touched his leg, feeling the pleasant crease of his pants. Someone—his grandmother again—yelled crazily from the living room. They both stared at Raoul, who'd changed from his greenish, tie-dyed swirl into a deep, miraculous blue.

“He's jealous,” Hector said, clearing his throat.

“What are they going to do?” Biesty said. “Trash the place?”

Dustin smiled. “I wouldn't count it out.”

They were on their way to a party in San Pedro, one that a guy had told them about at an X show. Some girls were being evicted from their duplex apartment and so they'd decided to throw a farewell party. The “farewell” was for the apartment, not the girls. The guy had laughed when he explained this, flashing them a mischievous grin. Dustin had never met any kids his age who were living by themselves, in their own duplex. Let alone being evicted.

He was nervous but enthralled. The steering wheel of the Dart stuck to his hands. He generally felt like something great and exciting and revolutionary was taking place nearby, if only he knew the right people.

The duplex was down by the harbor, near a field of deserted loading bridges. Dustin parked at the curb, wondering if he'd dressed in a way that would make him look less surferlike. After some deliberation, he'd decided to wear the new octopus belt buckle he'd bought at a record store in Hollywood, even though it poked him in the stomach whenever he sat down. If you looked closely, you could see a bottle of whiskey in one of the tentacles. To shore up their courage, Dustin and Biesty shared a Corona in the car. They'd been friends since the first week of tenth grade, when Biesty had shown up to chemistry in a pair of enormous black glasses taped together at the bridge. Dustin had assumed he was special ed, one of those guys who wears shorts every day even in December, and so was astonished when he'd taken off his sweater to reveal a Ramones T-shirt. The next day he'd let
Dustin try on his glasses. No prescription. Even the tape, it turned out, was a hoax. Dustin had always been popular without trying; the idea of making it more difficult to attract friends had never occurred to him.

It wasn't until a week later, though, when Biesty played him a song on his Walkman, that Dustin knew they were going to hit it off. “TV Eye,” by the Stooges. Dustin had never heard such music: it was like someone had smashed Elvis's face with a hammer and told him to sing it off. It was a primitive thing, sound more than song, and it made you feel as cool as it was. Like you could destroy a girl's sleep. In line at the cafeteria, listening through Biesty's headphones, Dustin realized that his dick was hard. He'd confessed this to Biesty sometime afterward, when they were both drunk on Mr. Biesterman's liquor, and his new friend did not laugh at him or call him a faggot. He said, “I always want to fuck my favorite songs.” If ever asked to explain their friendship, why they were going to UCLA together in the fall, Dustin would point to this one canonical remark.

“Are you sure this is cool?” he said now, staring at the curtained windows of the apartment. There were shouts from inside, punctuated by a scream. Biesty grinned from behind his wire-rim glasses. Sometime last year he'd traded in his special-ed look for something brainier, perhaps to compensate for the amount of dope he was smoking.

“If anyone messes with us, I'll beat the knave into a twiggen bottle.”

“What the hell does that mean? ‘Twiggen'?”

Biesty shrugged. “Do I look like a Shakespeare scholar?”

“Yes.”

“Here. Have some more twiggen.”

Dustin gulped at the Corona. “When we get to college, you'll have to stop talking like this. I mean, if either of us are going to make friends.”

“Friends are overrated. Anyway, once Toxic Shock hits it big, we'll have hordes of groupies. Groupies are a hundred times better than friends.”

Biesty smiled, as if it were all a big joke. But it was not a joke to Dustin. Fame seemed as inevitable to him, as uniquely destined to be his, as a Christmas present he'd glimpsed in his parents' closet. His current life was merely the prelude before Christmas.
UCLA was a way for him and Biesty to get out of the house, to leave behind the petty distractions of family so they could focus on assembling the band that would make them famous—he had no intention of graduating. Their first step would be to find a bassist who could actually spell “syndrome.” Kira would become famous as well, a Yoko to his Lennon, someone to help him down the lonely path of stardom.

“Will we get vaporized tomorrow in a nuclear holocaust?” Biesty asked, shaking the Magic 8 Ball he'd found by his feet. It had been in the Dart since Dustin bought it. Biesty held the ball up to the window. “‘Outlook not so good.'”

“Jesus,” Dustin said.

“Better than ‘Without a doubt.'”

“Let's go find some more twiggen.”

They rang the doorbell of the apartment, a sour tang of beer creeping up Dustin's throat. The guy who greeted them was wearing suspenders without a shirt and an old top hat, green as the iridescent coat of a fly. He doffed the hat like a butler. His pants were cut off below the knees, one leg longer than the other.

“What's your, ahem, meager power?” he said to Dustin.

“Meager power?”

“Like a superpower. But not so super. Something you can use for daily things.” He put the top hat back on, twirling it once in his hands. “Mine's, ahem, always having the right change.”

“The power, ahem, to suck my own cock,” someone said behind him.

“Is this Suzie's place?” Biesty said. “Someone invited us last night.”

The man in the top hat stepped aside.
“Tu casa es Sue's casa.”

Dustin and Biesty squeezed past him into the apartment, which reeked woozily of Magic Marker. Crowded around the living room were people drawing on the walls, scribbling graffiti or obscene doodles or beautiful strange animals with human feet. A few of them were very good artists. Above the couch, on the far side of the room, someone had written
MANDY ROGERS PHONE HOME
. Dustin followed Biesty into the party, impressed by the general ugliness of the guests. In particular, he was impressed by the girls, who looked like refugees from a nursing home. They wore granny glasses and cardigans and witchy striped stockings pulled up to their knees. He found them sexy in a way he couldn't
explain. Contributing to this ugliness was the music, a swarm of noise and backward lyrics that made the Stooges seem like Donny and Marie.

There was a dead lobster in the middle of the floor. Dustin wondered if the music had killed it. The lobster appeared to move, infinitesimally, and he realized it was engaged in a catatonic crawl. Saddled to its back, like a rodeo rider, was a naked GI Joe, one arm raised in the air.

“What's this music?” Dustin asked loudly.

“Butthole Surfers, I think.”

“Wow.” He'd never heard them before, but the name had always filled him with a vague sense of awe. He felt weirdly like his father.

“I was hoping we'd get to sledgehammer some walls,” Biesty said, depressed. “Something more aerobic.”

Dustin nodded, though actually he liked the party better the way it was. Like some wonderfully deranged kindergarten.

Biesty perked up when he spied a girl in leopard-print creepers smoking by herself in the corner, the scorched, caramelly smell of hash drifting from her direction. He sniffed his armpits and went over to greet her. Dustin roamed off to see if he could find something to drink. He bumped through a knot of skinheads with homemade tattoos, asking them if they knew where the beer was. They paid no attention to him. He found this keenly attractive. He wandered into the kitchen, which was stripped of belongings except for a tower of boxes beside the refrigerator. Leaning against the wall was a poster-sized chart showing a black couple with Afros illustrating different sexual positions. It struck Dustin as racist, but then he decided he might not be hip enough to appreciate its irony. It was easy to be liked, but it had never made anyone famous.

He nodded at a group of people sitting across the room. One of them—a wasted-looking girl racooned in black eyeliner—seemed to have a wire sticking out of her mouth. She had her head against the wall, as if she were asleep. Sitting beside her was a boy in a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off, his arm thrown around a beautiful girl in a cowboy hat. The boy was wearing a dog tag around his neck. Dustin recognized immediately, the way you might see your own face in a dream, that he'd always wanted to be like him. The boy oozed the sort of coolness—predatory and smoke-
wreathed and as physical as breath—Dustin only felt in the garage with his guitar.

“It's deep in the night and I'm lost in love,” the girl with the wire sticking from her mouth said.

“Pay no attention,” the boy said. “She only speaks rock and roll.”

He introduced himself to Dustin, explaining with a straight face that his name was Breakfast. The way he said the word made it seem like the coolest name in the world. “And this sorry husk of a girl is Suzie, evictee.”

“What's up with the wire?” Dustin asked.

“You'll have to ask Miss Orthodontist over here.”

“It was her idea,” the girl in the cowboy hat said. “She's all, ‘Take them off! Right now!' Then I bring out the pliers and she's like, ‘Oooh, quit it, you're hurting me.'”

“Now I'm gonna be twenty-two,” Suzie said. “Oh my, and a boo-hoo.”

The girl in the cowboy hat scowled. “She's getting on my nerves.”

“Yeah, Suze. Shut up or we'll rape you.”

“Goody gumdrops,” Suzie said.

The other girl giggled. “You wouldn't even.”

Breakfast seemed to contemplate this. “I might make love to her by force,” he said thoughtfully.

“What about you?” the girl said, looking at Dustin. “Would you rape her?”

Dustin didn't know what to say. There was something witty or dangerous to express, but the exact words eluded him. “I have a girlfriend.”

The girl looked at Breakfast, and they both laughed. Dustin wanted to tell them that he'd rape her anyway, but it wasn't true and he felt conversationally out of his element. He'd been to some wild parties in Herradura Estates, but nobody ever tried to take off each other's braces. He walked over to the fridge and opened it: an old can of olives, the sag of an empty twelve-pack. On the inside of the door, someone had Magic Markered
REAGANOMICS MAKES ME HUNGRY
. The same person, perhaps, had drawn the picture of a lobster on the lone carton of milk, doodled under the words
HAVE YOU SEEN ME
? Dustin felt a surge of happiness. This was what people did if they didn't care about refrigerators:
they defaced them. They dropped out of the refrigerator game altogether. Lobsters, lost and unheeded, roamed their apartments.

A girl with a white streak dyed into her hair opened the back door, clutching the handle for balance. She looked familiar. She was wearing a plaid skirt and saddle shoes, which made her appear even younger than she was. After sliding the door shut again, a two-handed endeavor, she glanced up and caught Dustin's eye.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“What?” Breakfast said.

“It's my sister's boyfriend.”

“We were just talking about her,” the girl in the cowboy hat said.

“Fucking bitch,” Taz said. “I'm going to destroy her with voodoo.”

“What are you doing here?” Dustin asked, staring at Kira's little sister. The happiness he'd been feeling had evaporated.

“What am
I
doing here? Fuck. That's a good one.”

“You know these people?”

“We met at a Flag show,” Breakfast explained. “Greg Ginn was trying to get in her pants.”

“Actually,” the beautiful girl said, “he'd already taken them off.”

Taz looked at Dustin's belt buckle. “Yucko, bucko. That's one ugly belt.”

“She and Suze have been doing PAM snorts,” Breakfast said apologetically.

Dustin didn't ask what a PAM snort was. Taz wobbled over to the fridge, the lightning bolt in her hair bisecting her eyes; he was only beginning to figure out that the saddle shoes were an ironic gesture. Both of her ears were covered in little jewel-like scabs. Dustin frowned. Somehow, through no fault of his own, he'd gone from being a guest at this party to an unwitting accomplice in the drug use of his girlfriend's sister. His girlfriend's fifteen-year-old,
mentally disturbed
sister. He'd either have to risk getting in deep shit with Kira or call her and look hopelessly uncool in front of Breakfast and his friends.