The Tragic Age (14 page)

“There's ice cream if you want,” Gretchen says. “Chocolate.”

“I'm fine,” I say. “Dinner was really good,” I say.

Gretchen sits down next to me. “We talk too much,” she says. You can tell she's talking about her family and she doesn't sound happy about it. “I think it's because we were together so much,” says Gretchen. “You know. When we were gone?”

I realize she's talking about Africa.

“What was it like?” I say.

“We were on the Eastern Cape,” Gretchen says. “We lived in Port Elizabeth. It's on the ocean. The beaches are beautiful but the city is really ugly. Almost thirty-five percent of the people have HIV. Mom and Dad would go out into the country, going from township to township. A lot of times they'd take us with them. They thought it'd give us perspective.”

“Cool,” I say. And it sounds like it might be.

“I hated it,” says Gretchen. The quiet anger in her voice surprises me. “I hated them for bringing us there and making us stay so long. It was so dirty and sad. Children with
sores
played in the dirt. I mean, maybe they can't help it, they have
nothing
but…”

“But what?” I say.

“I couldn't wait to get home,” Gretchen says softly. “Pretty bad, huh?”

“Pretty honest, if you ask me.”

“We don't know how lucky we are, Billy,” says Gretchen, looking away. “We really don't.”

I could tell her that there are those who think you make your own luck, that there are those who believe that good luck is a gift for benevolent works done in past lives. Better I should tell it to a little girl with sores, dying of AIDS in Africa.

Fate. Inevitable destiny.

“But now you do know,” I say. “And if you hadn't gone to Africa maybe you wouldn't. Maybe there's a lot of people who should go to Africa,” I say. “Me, for instance. Maybe I should go to Africa.”

“No,” says Gretchen, giggling. “I like you here.” For a moment she doesn't say anything else. And then she does. “I think
we're
lucky,” Gretchen says. “Because we've met each other again.”

I kiss her.

It's easier this time. It's better than the first time, if it possibly can be. Her mouth is slightly open. Her lips and tongue taste faintly of ice cream. I savor it.

Fact.

Love releases the same chemicals in the brain as chocolate.

 

36

One of the most truly Edvard Munch's
The Scream
moments of the year has got to be Halloween. Halloween is the most horribly misinterpreted holiday in the history of the entire world.

It's also my favorite.

Partly this is because every year as long as I can remember, Mrs. Mirrens, of the broken tennis foot, throws this annual costume party, and if there is anything more stupidly hysterical than adult men and women dressing up as pirates, mermaids, lobsters, and aluminum beer cans, I don't want to know about it.

One can only laugh so much.

Mom—
Linda—
always dresses as a fair damsel or a Roman noblewoman, and I have to admit, she usually looks pretty good. Her favorite costume, though, is when she puts on slippers, silk harem pants, veils, and a little top that shows the top of her breasts. Even the fake one. She calls this costume “I Dream of Jeannie.”

Historical footnote.

I Dream of Jeannie
was this sitcom in the 1960s about an astronaut who finds a bottle that contains this beautiful, sexy, two-thousand-year-old magical genie. The premise of the show is that the genie keeps sticking her breasts and butt in the astronaut's face, wanting to grant him wishes that obviously include having frantic sex with him while calling him master. Amazingly, he keeps saying no. The show can be found on Hulu, under “censored” and “unbelievable.”

Actually when Mom dresses up in costumes that are kind of sexy she
is
kind of sexy, and because she is, I try not to look at her. It's undoubtedly an Oedipal thing. This, according to Freudian psychology, is the repressed desire of a guy to sexually possess his mother and kill his father. And even though the thought of having sex with Mom freaks me out completely, I must admit that every year at Halloween the thought of killing Dad does raise its head. This is because every year
Gordon
dresses as the same moron thing.

Abraham Lincoln.

Only Dad doesn't even bother to wear a costume. He puts on the same old loafers, slacks, golf shirt, and sports jacket he pretty much wears all the time and then just sticks a fake-looking black beard onto his face and chin. Not even a stovepipe hat or a mole.

“Oh, get in the spirit of things,” says Mom.

“I'm not going out looking like some asshole,” says Dad, not realizing that this is the whole point of an adult costume party, and besides, he already does.

Off they finally go in the Maserati, Jeannie and Mr. Lincoln, Jeannie no doubt wishing they could stop at the Ford Theatre for an assassination before going on to the party. They'll come home after midnight spectacularly hammered and you just know questionable things have happened.

“An astronaut came on to your mother,” Dad will say, trying to explain a black eye.

“Honest Abe got punched by Napoleon for trying to kiss Josephine,” Mom will tell someone on the phone.

Whatever it is, they'll sleep in separate bedrooms and won't be talking to each other for several days.

Another thing I like about Halloween is that the year before she died, Dorie dressed up as the wicked, wicked witch from Oz. She painted her face green. She put on a dark dress and she put a pointed witch's hat on her head. She wore a bandana underneath it because she was bald. She grabbed a broom.

“I'll get you, my pretty! And your little dog too!”

We laughed.

And then she insisted I dress up as the Scarecrow. She told me this was typecasting because I didn't have a brain. Only straw. Out we went, me just walking with her and looking out for her, making sure she didn't get too tired as she collected candy. Then, just before going home, saving one piece for her and one piece for me, she handed all her candy out to other kids.

I still have my piece.

One of the things I don't like at Halloween is how older kids go out of their way to ruin everything. Guys go around throwing toilet paper into trees and eggs at houses, cars, and each other. Girls use it as an opportunity to dress up as whores. It's really sort of insulting because Halloween is historically a festival honoring the dead. It's a time to pray for the souls that have recently departed purgatory but have yet to reach heaven. In fact, trick-or-treating started when poor people would go door-to-door and, in exchange for food, they'd say prayers for those who'd died and passed on.

Food for prayers sounds like a good deal to me and so every Halloween I go to the store and buy huge bags of Snickers and Reese's and Jolly Ranchers, and after Mom and Dad leave, I'll turn on the yard lights and stick a chair in the driveway with the front gate open and the little kids will come in.

If the kids are too old, I ignore them.

Our neighborhood, which isn't really a neighborhood, just a collection of fancy houses, always gets a lot of poor Latino families who come from somewhere else to trick-or-treat. I guess they think our streets are a safe place to walk with their families. They'll come to the edge of the driveway and look in. The kids are shy. “Go on,” the parents will say.
“Sigue.”

Their costumes are great. The little girls are almost always dressed as angels or princesses, all wings and sparkles and glitter in their dark hair. The boys are vampires and ghosts and lucha libre wrestlers.

“Wow,” I'll say. “You're beautiful.”

Or cool. Or scary. I'll hold out the candy bowl. And even though it bothers me that a lot of the little Latino kids have bad teeth, some already rimmed with metal, some not even real ones, I let everyone take as much as they want.

“Go ahead.
Todo lo que quieras
.”

I do this because in return for candy I want their prayers.
Quiero tus oraciones.

For Dorie.

 

37

Only this year at Halloween it rains.

 

38

“This is crazy!” screams Gretchen.

The smile on her face says it's not crazy at all.

With no possibility of trick-or-treaters, Gretchen has come over to the house and we have, of all things, done homework together. Which means, of course, we've accomplished absolutely nothing. The fascinating discussion of what's your favorite flavor of frozen yogurt has taken us a good hour and a half alone. The only conclusion we come to is that yogurt would not be a bad idea. We take the Jaguar and Gretchen drives. We go to Bogart Yogurt and I get something orange and Gretchen gets something pink. We trade licks.

This, of course, gives me a hard-on.

“Where to now, James?” Gretchen says, when we get back in the car. She's looking down her nose at me as if she's totally in charge. It kills me, it really does, and so I make a sort of spontaneous decision. Playing it close to the vest, I only tell her the general directions. An hour later we're only halfway there and it begins to rain harder. I ask Gretchen if she wants to turn back.

“Uh-uh,” she says. I can tell she's busting with curiosity about where we're going but I keep my mouth shut. I want it to be a surprise. And it is.

“A Ferris wheel!?”

The Pacific Wheel sits at the end of Santa Monica Pier. It's the world's only solar-powered Ferris wheel, is ninety feet tall, can move eight hundred people an hour, and contains 160,000 lights.

“If you'd gone a little faster than fifty miles an hour, we might have got here yesterday,” I say. I've become quite the comedian. Along with hard-ons, it seems to have come with the territory.

As I lead Gretchen by the hand down the deserted pier, it's like looking at color trails in the falling rain. Gretchen's hair and clothes are soaked. I've given her my hoodie but she's left it unzipped. She's wearing no bra and I can see her nipples poking out beneath her thin, wet top.

It
is
crazy.

I pay for the tickets. There's no line. We move up the ramp toward the spinning baskets. The attendant, wearing a rain-slick green poncho, shakes his head.

“Getting ready to shut it down,” he says.

“Twenty bucks for five more minutes?” I say, and I hold out the bill. The operator takes the money. He brings the slowly spinning wheel to a halt. He opens the side door to the basket.

“Oh, I don't like heights,” says Gretchen. You can tell she's thrilled.

The attendant pulls the bar down, locking us in. He releases the gear. In a stomach-dropping surge, we move back and then up, the pier dropping away, the lights of Santa Monica coming to eye level, then dropping away as we move up toward the peak of the enormous wheel. Gretchen shrieks and buries her face in the hollow of my shoulder. Her hair is wet against my cheek and I put my arm around her shoulders. I'm laughing so hard. And then we're falling, out and down, the pier rushing up at us, only to swing in and under, past the bored attendant, past the ramp, up again and on, touched by gravity and, a moment later, weightless. As we approach the top of the wheel Gretchen looks at me in a certain way and we kiss. She tastes of rain.

A wheel is a circle. A circle is a set of points in a plane set at a fixed distance from the center. A circle is a symbol of God, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. A circle is a ring that symbolizes love and hope. The hope is that love will take on the characteristics of the circle and capture eternity.

On pace for the world's longest kiss, Gretchen and I come down and around and up for the third time and as we do, I reach beneath the hoodie. My fingertips lightly touch Gretchen's breasts and erect nipples. Gretchen puts her hand just beneath the junction of my thighs and presses. The moment, the world, my entire life, is a sensual blur of touch, taste, rain, and light.

 

39

Unlike Halloween, Thanksgiving is truly a ridiculous holiday. The world is barely tolerable and getting worse. Why give thanks? This is especially true in High School Highville where anybody who has anything thinks they deserve it and those that don't, think they deserve more.

However.

Thanksgiving is when my grandmother, Dad's mother, Beatrix, arrives for her annual visit. Beatrix is a widow, probably a lesbian, and possibly a high-functioning autistic. Her deceased husband—Dad's father, Larry—was a postman who was walking his route one day when he got run over by a garbage truck. The truck was backing up and didn't see Larry. Larry was reading someone's mail and didn't see the truck. Beatrix never remarried. She trained and then took a job as a clerk to a judge in Fresno, California, which is where Dad grew up. She refers to the judge as the judicial train wreck, the pinheaded halfwit, and the alcoholic slug. She's been writing his decisions now for over twenty years.

Beatrix is tall and thin with short white hair, never wears makeup, and is totally oblivious to what she wears. She speaks in a flat voice devoid of inflection, rarely smiles and if she does it's this tiny, sort of self-amused little wrinkle. I've never seen her laugh. She doesn't give a crap about what people think, she'll say exactly what she thinks about anything and anyone at a moment's notice, and she's always leaving the room for no apparent reason, usually when somebody else is talking.

She's just great.

“Your idea of clean,” she'll say to the housekeeper, “would make a zookeeper blanch.”

“Your father was a complacent boob,” she'll say to Dad. “Try not to take after him
too
much.”

Beatrix does try to be nice to Mom. I think she knows that Mom has been through a lot. “You're a lovely, well-meaning woman,” she'll say. “But unless you want to live the rest of your life as a borderline hysteric, you should be in therapy twice a week.” She's not being critical. She just calls it the way she sees it.