The Wonder Bread Summer (11 page)

“Yes. But don’t start paying for any haircuts. We’re on a budget now.” Allie thought it was interesting how different Jet’s tone was when he was trying to get a blow job from when he was trying to protect his money.

“Mom,” Allie said. “I really need to talk to you. I need to spend some time with you.”

“Honey, that lipstick is too orange for you,” Penny said, and Allie reflexively reached up and smeared it off onto the back of her hand.

The elevator landed on the first floor. “We have to be there now,” Jet said. He walked out of the elevator and inched Penny along by the elbow.

“Well, can I drive you there, Mom? We can talk in the car.” Allie was almost jogging to keep apace—there was a foggy panic in her head, as if this were the only chance she’d ever have again to spend time with her mother.

A
llie and her mother were in the Prelude, following a black limousine that held Jet. The other members of Mighty Zamboni had left earlier; Penny complained that they had all grown impatient in their middle age and never waited for her and Jet, even though Jet was the only star and she was the only girl and therefore they were the only ones worth looking at. Allie wondered if anyone was looking at any of them. She hadn’t seen Jet’s face in the
National Enquirer
for more than two years. And even that had been a picture of him looking dimpled and egg-shaped, wearing a Speedo on the beach in France, with the caption, “Guess who?” Allie had studied the picture while in line at the grocery store. A blurry image of a woman in a pink bikini stood behind Jet. It was impossible to tell if it was Penny.

“Did your father get you this car?” Penny stroked the seat. “Where did he get the money to buy you this car?”

“This is a friend’s car, Mom. I can’t even find Dad right now.”

“Did you drive here from Berkeley just to see me?”

“Yeah, well, sort of. Mom, what happened to Dad’s restaurant?”

“He closed it and is opening another one somewhere, I can’t remember where.” Penny played with the power-window button. “Who paid for the vanity plate? You’re not really a California girl, you know. You’re much too ethnic for that.”

“It’s not my car, Mom,” Allie said.

“Well, that’s good because the license plate is totally wrong for you.” Penny spoke as if Allie had escaped a near-tragedy.

“Why did Dad close the restaurant?” Allie asked, hoping to keep her mother on track.

“Everyone eats gourmet now. Also, the rent was getting too high.”

“Where’s he living? Do you have his phone number?”

“I don’t know where he is, Allie, but he did give me his number.” Penny took a pen from the glove box, then searched the floor for a piece of paper. “Why do you have a loaf of bread?” She jabbed the pen at the loose flap above where the twisty held the bag shut. From her leather-fringed purse, Penny plucked out an old receipt and a palm-size address book. She opened the book and copied a number from it onto the receipt, then put the pen and the phone number into the glove box.

“Do you frequently talk to Dad?” Allie asked.

“He calls maybe once or twice a year.” Penny pulled down the sun visor and looked at herself in the mirror. “He phoned me at the Hollywood Bowl a few days ago to wish me luck with the show. Sweetheart, tell me the truth, do I look older to you?”

“You look young as ever, Mom. You always look beautiful.” She did. Allie often had the urge to show new friends pictures of her mom so they could see how pretty she was.

“Oh, aren’t you the sweetest thing!” Penny smiled and ran her thin hand down Allie’s cheek. That small gesture felt way better than it should have. Allie wondered if it was instinct that made her long for her mother’s touch, or if she were particularly needy right now.

“I need to talk to you about that bread bag, Mom. It’s kinda connected to my tuition at school.” Allie sped up. The limo seemed to have forgotten she was following. There were now two cars separating them.

“Do you need money? I’m really sorry, but I don’t have any money. Jet handles the finances and the man is as tight as—” Penny stopped talking and shook her head.

“As tight as what?”

“I don’t know. There’s some saying,
tight as
, but I don’t know what the
as
is. But he’s that tight. He’s as tight as that thing that everyone says as tight as about.”

“In fact I do need money but you’ve never really given me money before so I didn’t even think to ask you for it.” Allie wasn’t bitter about this, or angry, it was simply how things had always been.

“Well sweetheart, what exactly do you need?” Penny squeezed Allie’s hand, which was resting on the stick shift.

“Will you pick up that bread bag and look inside?” Allie asked. “It’s full of pure cocaine that I stole from a dealer in Oakland.”

“This
whole bag
is full of coke?!” Penny asked, and she grabbed it from the floor.

“Yes, Mom. The whole bag. That’s why—”

Penny appeared to have stopped listening. She opened the bag, stuck in her curved, red pinky nail, pulled out a tiny pile, and shoved it up her nose. “Christ, that’s good!” Although Allie had been fairly certain her mother had done drugs, it was still somewhat shocking to see this person she called
Mom
snort a long fingernail full of cocaine.

“I didn’t mean to steal it. I was sort of whacked out of my mind on some coke that must have been—”

“This shit is great!” Penny said, and she dipped her nail into the bag again and poked around as if she was breaking up lumps.

“Well now this guy named Vice Versa is out looking for me, another guy named Rosie is holding my friend Beth hostage, and I have to figure out how to return the coke without being killed by Vice Versa, Rosie, or Jonas.”

“Who’s Jonah?” Penny took a hit up the other nostril. Allie cringed as if she’d just watched her mother slice open a vein.

“Jonas. The dealer I stole it from.” Allie put her hand on the bag and clasped it shut. “Mom, these are people with guns. You’ve gotta leave most of it in the bag, okay?”

“Why would you return it?”

“I’m not interested in stealing! I just took it to pay myself back the money Jonas owed me for working in his store!” Allie hit the brakes hard, stopping at a red light. The limousine cruised on ahead.

“Okay, okay, relax,” Penny said, and she watched a young family crossing the road in front of them. “Lotta Mexicans around here.”

“Yeah, well, they’re probably looking at you and saying
lotta Chinese around here
.”

Penny laughed and Allie smiled. She had forgotten how bubbly her mother’s laugh was, how fun it sounded.

The light changed and Allie caught up to the limo. Almost immediately, they turned into the windy, tree-lined road of the Santa Barbara County Bowl. Giant eucalyptus bows hung like heavy, weighted arms over the car. The air smelled like it had been wiped down with Mr. Clean.

“I still don’t see why you have to return it.”

“God, Mom! Wai Po must have had some saying about not stealing other people’s stuff.” Allie flipped through the words in her brain like songs in a jukebox. She wanted to find just the right Wai Poism for this moment.

“Well, Wai Po’s dead, so it doesn’t matter what she’d say.” Penny took another fingernail hit from the bag. Then she lifted the bag, dangled it in front of her face, and watched it swing back and forth. The bottom was starting to sag more, as if a baseball were sitting there. Allie pushed the bag down into her mother’s lap.

“I want to go back to school next semester,” she said. “I want to stay in Berkeley and graduate with honors. I want to return this car to my friend, Beth. I don’t want to be a coke-snorting thief. I want to be someone Wai Po would be proud of.”

“Wai Po didn’t go to school and you certainly don’t have to go to school,” Penny said. “I never went and I’m doing exactly what I always wanted.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re a tambourine girl. Dream come true.”

The limousine pulled into a hidden, roll-gated tunnel behind the stadium. Two guards, white guys who looked like weight lifters, approached Allie’s side of the car. They both wore combat boots. One had a shaved head and the other had hair that looked like a shar-pei puppy.

“Miss,” the shaved guy said into the window. “Do you have a pass?”

“This girl’s with me.” Penny held up a performer pass that was encased in a plastic shield. There was a shoelace-like string dangling from it. “She’s the medic.” Penny opened the Wonder Bread bag, dipped her pinky in, then leaned over Allie and out her window so she could put her finger under the guard’s nose. He sniffed, wiped his nose, then lifted a walkie-talkie and stepped away.

The dog-haired guard leaned his head in the window. “Some of that there for me, too?” He grinned, exposing missing molars. Penny obliged him, then sat back in her seat.

“Go on in.” Shaved Head waved his arms toward the dark opening of the tunnel.

“So you can get me a backstage pass now?” Allie tried to modulate her voice so it wasn’t as raw as she felt.

“Oh sweetie, you know I would have given you a pass if I had one! But since I don’t have one, why not use the coke to get you in?”

Allie parked behind the limousine in the tunnel. Penny pulled her purse up onto her shoulder, picked up the bread bag, and got out of the car.

“Mom.” Allie was whispering even though no one was nearby. “You can’t take the coke.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not mine!”

“Well, just let me have a little bit. Jet won’t spend money on drugs anymore. I told you. He’s as tight as . . . as whatever.”

“Yeah, I know. But you can’t take the coke. I need to return it. Or most of it. Or something.”

Penny huffed, “Oh, come on! There must be a couple kilos in here!” She marched off with the bread bag through the door that had the word
TALENT
in gray spray-painted block letters on it. Allie rushed after her.

Several people, mostly roadies, were milling around the talent area, which was a hallway with what Allie guessed were dressing rooms off of it. Penny seemed to know where she was going, so Allie followed behind, keeping an eye on the Wonder Bread bag. Penny was swinging it back and forth as if she were about to hurl it.

“Don’t drop the coke,” Allie whispered.

They turned into a large communal dressing room that appeared to have been decorated with cast-off seventies furniture. There were black leather belts with giant gold buckles holding the cushions to the orange plaid couch. And the club chair was made of orangy-red rubber—it looked inflated and cartoonish. No one was there but Penny and Allie.

“Wait here while I go to the sound check,” Penny said, and she walked out with the bag of coke.

“Don’t do any more of that!” Allie called after her mother, but Penny didn’t answer.

Allie sat on the couch and looked around the room. She had spent a lot of her life waiting for her mother. What difference did another twenty or thirty minutes make?

After an hour spent reading the three magazines from the three-legged coffee table (
Sassy
,
Rolling Stone
, and
Interview
), Allie got up and used the bathroom. The bathroom fan was so loud it sounded like there was a helicopter hovering in the room. When Allie emerged, she was startled to see everyone from Mighty Zamboni around her, mid-action, as if they’d been there all along.

Johnny and John-John, Mighty Zamboni’s guitarists, who were lovers and looked like twins, were sorting through a rolling rack of clothes debating what to wear. When the band was at its peak, Johnny and John-John had each had a wild spray of white hair. Now they both were bald.

The drummer, Tigger, was sitting in the oversize chair, reading
Hollywood Wives
. He still had the same mop of brown hair he’d had when Allie was a little girl. Tigger had always been Allie’s favorite. He was smiley. And fat enough that there was no point in trying to pretend he was one of the cool people of the world.

Jet was sitting on the end of the couch, a glass of what looked like scotch in one hand, one leg swung over the arm so his leather-bound crotch was neatly displayed. Penny sat beside him.

“Hey,” Allie said, to the room in general. Johnny and John-John looked at her and nodded their chins. Tigger lowered his book into his lap.

“We haven’t seen you in a while,” he said.

“Yeah, I’m in college now,” Allie said, and she went to the couch and sat beside her mother.

“Jet, remember Allie?” Penny said.

“Mom, I was just with him at the hotel.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot!” Penny laughed and bounced against the back of the couch.

Jet ignored them both, then lifted his glass and emptied it.

When she was younger, Penny used to tell Allie that she was the Yoko Ono of Mighty Zamboni and that’s why the band didn’t treat her or Allie very well. But Allie never took it personally. None of these guys had families, although Johnny had three kids with a Swedish woman who sometimes sent the kids on tour with him. Each of them, including Allie’s mother, seemed so far off from the world of families that it was impossible to imagine any of them having to think about others.

“I need the bathroom.” Penny stood up and left with the bag of coke. Allie took a deep breath. She hoped she could somehow reconcile the amount missing with the amount she was to return to Jonas when her mother was done with the bag.

“You know, you look totally different now than you did two years ago,” Jet said. “That’s why I was confused about who you were.”

“I look exactly the same,” Allie said, and turned her head away.

“No you don’t. You didn’t have boobs two years ago. You didn’t have hips. You were a skinny little kid. And now you’re a woman. Or womany-ish. You can’t blame me for not recognizing you. When Penny told me you were coming I was expecting this little girl.”

“Penny didn’t know I was coming. I was a surprise.”

“I mean
if
she had told me you were coming. If she had said,
Jet, Allie’s coming
, I would have been looking out for some skinny little kid with frizzy red hair.”