Palo Alto: Stories (19 page)

“If you were an Egyptian, what would you do?” I ask Joe.

“Don’t start this shit again, Michael.”

“Remember when you called me Manuel?”

“I never called you Manuel, idiot. I would be Pharaoh.”

“No, you’re too fat. Pharaohs are skinny,” I say.

“I don’t want to be an Egyptian: pyramids and mummies and shit, and sand, and all that, fuck it, it’s boring, man. I would be an Aztec, or a Mayan, like my peeps, and I’d cut your fucking heart out, homes.”

Joe is Mexican. His skin is an ashy light brown and his lashes are heavier than mine, and he has short, fat eyebrows and shit brown eyes, and thick hair that flops about his fat pumpkin head.

I wish I was Mexican, or Hebrew, I mean Jewish, I mean Israeli, or Mexican Jewish, or Mexican Jewish gay, because it
can be so boring being you sometimes, and if you were the most special thing like that, it could be really great, but maybe some people say the same thing about you, and you want to tell those people: “No, you’re stupid, it’s no fun being me.”

“Maybe we should try it,” I say.

“Michael, I’m serious, don’t do something crazy just because we’re talking about your olden-time things again. Just let me the fuck out if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No, man, I’m just saying that maybe those Mayans were onto something. Maybe if we take someone’s heart out and sacrifice it, then something special will happen.”

Joe looks at me like he wants to figure me out, and I know that he can’t figure me out because he isn’t laughing and he isn’t arguing, he is just staring.

“Maybe we could take
Hector’s
heart,” I say.

We are going to see Hector over at Foothill, the junior college. He lives near there and sells us shit, and we’re supposed to meet him in the corner of the parking lot. Hector isn’t a scary guy, he has a nice-guy face, but he could probably fuck somebody up if he wanted to.

“Hector would fuck you up,” says Joe.

“Not if I stabbed him in the stomach,” I say, and I’m reaching under my seat with my left hand as I say this, and I pull out a foot-long kitchen knife and then I point it at Joe while I’m still driving.

“Fuck you, Michael. Fuck you, Mike-
al
!” He screams and I laugh because he has funny inflections when he gets excited. “Why do you have to be like this?” he says. “Why do you have to be Jack the Ripper psycho? Why do you have to be
so crazy? I just want to buy some weed, I don’t want to kill anyone, and I don’t want to take their heart!”

“You said you wanted to,
puta,
so I’m just saying, then let’s
do
it!” I’m talking with a phony accent.

“Don’t call me
puta,
bitch! And put that fucking knife down! And watch the road!”

I poke the knife at him, at his fat stomach, lightly poking at it with the tip of the knife, but he’s wearing a puffy North Face jacket, so it doesn’t stab him.

“Stop it!” he says.

I love driving down an empty dark freeway, lit up intermittently by the lights at the side of the road, and when I see the lights, I think of all the little worlds out there, all the little animals living in their habitats out there, and how we could pull over and have an adventure at any one of these forgotten pockets of the world, just nothing zones, backwash refuse property in the wake of the great freeways, and I like passing all of them, racing down the freeway, like a tunnel into the night, and racing but still being able to carry on a whole action scene with Joe, and I think it is like life because I am racing, and time is pushing me forward and it’s not going to stop and I will have a few passengers in the vehicle with me, and it’s either enjoy the scenery together, or listen to some music we both like, or maybe just have a little poking knife game because you want to know if the other person is really there.

We smoke with Hector and get so high. Finally he has sold us some good shit. We smoke out of his mini dragon bong, out
in the lightless corner of the Foothill parking lot. It’s a pretty great spot—you just walk up the hill a little ways, and it’s under some weeping willows, and there is a small stream, and brick buildings, and a faux altar constructed out of stones.

We smoke more and we cough every time. I think about the little dragon that the bong is and I so wish that dragons were real, because it would mean that none of this shit was the end of everything, because this world sucks, and even if you are high it only lets you escape a little bit, it lets you escape enough that you know there could be something better, but it won’t let you
into
that place; like standing on the cloudy threshold of heaven and seeing something so bright and tantalizing and warmy-womby feeling but not being able to enter, just feeling the heat a little on your face, and you want to cry and smile, but instead you just stare and you can’t do anything.

“Hector,” I say. I am lying on the altar thing and staring up through one of the willows, whose drooping, arcing branches are like jagged fissures in the sky. Hector is sitting against the base of the willow’s trunk. “Would you rather be the pope or Pablo Escobar?”

Hector doesn’t think long.

“Escobar, bitch, he gets to have all the fun.”

“Pope gets to live in the Vatican, see Michelangelo all the time,” I say.

“Escobar,” says Joe. He is superhigh. He hogged more of the weed than Hector and me and he is hunched like a pile of trash against the base of the altar. His head hangs forward like a sleeping mule’s.

“Shut up, Joe,” I say. “We know what you want. You want the knife.”

“What knife?” says Hector.

“This
puta
wanted to cut out your heart with this knife,” I say, and hold up the knife for Hector to see. It reflects a little in the dark.

“If you try, I will fucking kill you, homes,” Hector says to Joe. It seems like he’s angry, but he’s too tired and high to get really angry.

“I didn’t say I wanted to… ,” says Joe, but he doesn’t finish.

“Fuck you, lard-ass,” says Hector, and Hector and I laugh, and Joe shifts a little because he is angry, but he is too lazy to get up, so he just shifts around.

He’s still looking at the ground, but he says, “No, Hector, this fucker is always asking me stupid questions and trying to kill me. He wanted to cut out your heart, homes. That’s how I lost my tooth.”

“No,” says Hector. “You lost that because you are Jack-O’ the jackoff.”

Me and Hector laugh.

Then we all sit for a while not saying anything. I can feel their mind-killing slime thought rubbing on me and corroding me, and killing me.

“Hector,” I say.

“Yes,” he says without looking up.

“Would you rather be gay or be a girl?”

He chuckles a little. Hector can be cool sometimes. Sometimes he is wise.

“Neither,” he says.

“Just saying,” I say. “If you had to choose because a genie said so, what would you choose?”

Joe, still looking at the dark dirt, says, “Both of ’em still have to suck dick.”

“Exactly,” says Hector. And Joe laughs a little. A chuckling pile of trash below me.

“Would that be so bad?” I say. “Don’t you ever get jealous of those girls in pornos that get to be on their knees in the middle of all those dicks?”

“Are you fucking serious?” says Hector.

“Don’t,” says Joe. “This faggot is always asking stupid questions and giving stupid answers; he don’t mean it.”

“No,” says Hector. “This faggot is serious.” He’s looking at me now, I can tell.

“Yeah,” I say. “Don’t you like the idea of an around-the-world blowbang?”

“I like to have a girl suck my dick, but I don’t want to
do
it,” says Hector.

“Me neither,” says Joe, but he is mumbling.

“Why not?” I say. “What’s the difference?”

“What’s the difference?” says Hector. “Because I am going in, and she is being got inside of.”

“And why is one better? Why does going inside make you better? Aren’t you, like, on her turf inside her, isn’t she in control of you? Like a mommy with her little baby making him feel good?”

“Because,” says Hector. But he doesn’t say anything else.

*   *   *

On the way home Joe and I are driving down the empty freeway. It’s like two thirty in the morning and we’re still pretty high, and if I look up, directly at the road lights above us, I can see kaleidoscopic rainbows building and turning on top of each other in the core of the bulbs.

And I feel like I’m remembering all this from somewhere, but I’m not sure where, and everything is a little hazy, and I remember that there is an angel named Michael, and he had a flaming sword, and…

And I say to Joe, “Let’s drive the wrong way down the other side of the freeway.”

Joe is almost asleep, but he says, “Wha?” and I can see the black gap just to the left of the center of his mouth.

“I’m going over to that side,” I say.

And I think of the olden times, when knights would aim huge lances at each other and you would
feel
that when it hit you,
feel
that force of the momentum of the horses’ pumping, channeled into the lance, and for a second you might know that you were really alive. And a little ways down the freeway there is a gap in the center barrier, and I turn the wheel and cross over.

The drive up to Yosemite was long. My father played Bach the whole first half. We drove through Milpitas, Pleasanton, Dublin, Manteca, Escalon, and Oakdale. We had been to Yosemite before with my mom, but that was when it was snowing. There wasn’t going to be snow this time and it was just me and my dad and my brother.

At the turnoff for the Old Yosemite Road, the sun turned tangerine and my dad took out the Bach and put in a tape of his meditation lady. My brother and I chanted with her using funny voices, but that lasted only a few minutes, then we were quiet again. My dad drove and hummed quietly to himself. My brother and I would trade the front seat at every rest stop. I
was two years older, but I got carsick more easily, so I got the front longer. I had been in the front since East Oakdale. The Old Yosemite Road was crooked and my dad drove slower. Soon the sky was getting gray, but there was purple above the mountains. My brother was asleep in the back. He was slanted over with his face in all the puffy jackets.

“Dad, can I turn the heat up?”

“Yup.” I did and cupped my hand over the grate until it was too hot and I pulled it away. I wasn’t tired even though it was dark outside and we’d been driving for hours. I leaned forward but my seat belt held me, so I undid it and leaned again and picked up my father’s old, thick Bible with pages falling out and a rubber band around it.

“Put your belt back on,” he said.

“I know,” I said. I clicked it in place. “I was just picking this up.”

“My Bible.”

“I know,” I said. “Why are the lines colored?” There was yellow, and pink, and green highlighter, all faded, all over the pages.

“Those are passages I like.”

I asked him why.

“Because they help me.” I read a little.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
It meant nothing. I closed it.

“You go to church?”

“No,” he said. The lady and the people on the meditation tape were chanting softly.

“Why do you have the Bible?”

“I just open it when I get in the car. Whatever page it opens to, I read.”

“Why?”

“I told you, it helps me.”

I put the rubber band back around the leather cover and held the thick thing in my lap. We went through a town with only a few lights and my dad slowed. The headlights bounced off some signs into my eyes. One said Yosemite thirty miles. Then we were on the windy part going up the mountain. The tape came to the end and my dad ejected it and left it sticking out of the player. It was white. The Bible tried to slip down my leg and I held on to it.

“Adam and Eve,” I said.

“Yup,” my dad said.

“Noah.”

“Yup.”

“Moses, Abraham. Jesus, David. The flood, killing the ram, the plagues, first there was light, then darkness, then water, then land, then the Garden of Eden.”

“Where did you learn all that?”

“At Sunday school, where Mom takes us.”

“Unity?”

“Yeah.” We got quiet as we wound up the mountain. The car went so close to the sides and there wasn’t always a barrier. Last time we did this part of the drive in the dark too and I hated it. I secretly held on to the side of the door with my right hand. There were pennies in the handle and I pushed them back and forth in the holder with my index finger. Dad’s AA medallion was in there too.

I hoisted up a little and tried to look over the side of the cliff but there were just trees and black, and there was too much back and forth, so I sat back. I tried to pretend we were going into the Misty Mountains and there were goblins around us, but I felt dizzy and I stopped. We kept going and I couldn’t sleep, all I could do was sit there.

“You want to know what my dad did with me when I was little?”

“What?” We were talking quietly because of my brother in the back.

“Nothing.” He laughed a little. “My dad was a son of a bitch.”

We were quiet for a while.

“Why do we go to Yosemite all the time?”

“We’ve only been a couple times. You don’t like it?”

“No, I do. I like the Ahwahnee. But why do we go?”

“I guess because nature makes me feel good. And I want to spend time with you and Alex.”

“Because you love us?”

“Yeah, because I love you, and I’ve missed you.”

At the Ahwahnee there was no one around. We parked and followed the footlights along the stone path. My dad carried Alex in one arm and his suitcase in his other hand. I followed with my heavy backpack. The lady at the desk gave my dad a card key and I followed his footsteps down the red carpet with the boxy Indian designs.

In the room, my dad lay Alex on one of the two beds and told me to get into my pajamas. He got some things from his
suitcase and went into the bathroom, then the water started running. I took off my shoes and socks and jeans and put on my gray sweatpants and took my toothbrush into the bathroom. I was barefoot and the floor was cold. My dad was in his T-shirt, sitting on the toilet in the corner.