Rats Saw God (12 page)

Mom and Chuck cooked together. This was one of their less gross joint pursuits. Believe me, in my book, it ranked way above jogging together in matching sweat suits or French-kissing in public. This night they prepared a barbecued salmon and corn on the cob. After three years of microwaving my own meals, I tried not to miss much home cooking. I think I'm even starting to put on some significant weight. Anyway, we sat down to eat at the picnic table on the deck, and as with most discussions at home, Sarah and Mom did most, if not all, of the talking. Sarah had a new boyfriend and Mom was curious.

“But why haven't we met him?” she asked.

“He's got an internship at KPIX. He wants to get into radio after he graduates. He's always working,” Sarah answered.

“Well, he must make quite a bit of money as much as he works.”

“It's an internship, Mom. You don't make money at an internship; you work for free. It's the only way you can get experience in radio.”

“When do you ever get to see him?”

“That's something I wanted to talk to you about.”

Chuck snuck in a request for the butter, which I was happy to provide.

Sarah continued. “Danny's asked me to the Pearl Jam concert next month. He got free tickets through work.”

“That's terrific. Pearl Jam's huge,” said my mother, indicating the band must have made the cover of
People.

“Yeah, but the concert's in LA. At the Forum. And nobody wants to try to drive home afterward. The plan is to get a hotel
room and crash, then drive back in the morning. There are eight of us going.”

“Were you planning on asking permission?”

“That's what I'm doing now.”

“You expect me to let you get a hotel room with a boy? A boy I've never even met? I don't think so. Sometimes I think you think you're much older than you really are.”

Chuck and I continued eating, heads down.

“God, Mom, you make it sound like we'd be acting out
Caligula
in the room. There'd be eight of us in there. I don't think anybody will be parading around naked. We'll leave the vibrators and goats here at home.”

“Don't talk to me like I'm being a frump about this. Do parents today normally let their children go to concerts in the big city and stay in hotel rooms afterward?”

“No, Mom… just the smart ones.”

I sensed Sarah had just crossed some line with this one.

“Watch it, young lady.”

“It
is
smarter. Would you rather we drive back sleepy? Some people in the group might be drinking. It's just better that we stay in Los Angeles.”

“Will you be one of the ones drinking?”

“Mooommm, puhleeease! You wouldn't keep Steve from going… and he's been known to”—long pause—“drink occasionally.”

“He's eighteen, honey, and, besides, we're not talking about Steve right now.” Mom turned toward her husband. She touched his forearm. “Chuck, do you think this sounds like a good idea?”

Chuck looked up reluctantly. He wearily faced his stepdaughter. “Sarah, I think your mother has a point. It doesn't sound very proper to me.”

“Who cares what
you
think?” Sarah said. “
You
aren't my father.” My sister threw her napkin on her plate, left the table, and stormed out the front door. We listened to her Subaru squeal out onto Shoreline Drive.

“Is she going to eat that?” I said, pointing to her salmon.

Dub never did tell me yes. She just said to pick her up at nine. Neither of us spoke on the drive to my house. The silence forced me to consider what I had done. For the first time in my life, I had asked a girl on a date, a real date, none of this, “My friends will be there. Why don't you and your friends show up?” scammy bullshit. In doing so, I committed myself to attend a semiformal high school dance, one that, four hours ago, I had no desire to attend… and for good reason.

First of all, I don't dance. Outside of a couple feeble
Club MTV
imitations in front of the sliding mirror doors of my closet, I was lacking practical boogie experience. More important, to my employer, I was supposed to work homecoming night at the Cineplex. I had already alienated the other two projectionists by requesting so many nights off to work on
Get Hammered.
Third, I had not worn my suit since eighth grade. Sarah and I had been roughly the same size back then; I towered over her now. Fourth, the astronaut was home most Saturday nights, a six-hour gap each week he had, so far, been unable to fill. His married friends were locked into bridge
leagues, family nights, and whatnot. Dub may want classic dating rites, but I could do without the beaming old man slipping me a fiver while imparting fatherly dos and don'ts. Last, the El Camino was sufficient for tooling around, getting my books and me to school, and transporting me to work, but not for taking a girl, presumably in a dress, to a semiformal dance. As we turned left on Briar Cove, Missy broke the silence.

“Oh boy. You two should be the life of the party tomorrow,” Missy said. Still, neither of us spoke. She continued a bit more sympathetically. “From what I hear, no one stays at the dance very long. They show up. They get their pictures taken. That way they can prove to their parents that they made it and that all the money they had demanded was necessary. Then they go to parties where everyone does the cocaine and X they bought with embezzled mum and limo money.”

Missy stopped at the same spot in my driveway where she and Dub had viewed the seduction of Steve a week ago. I hoped the same image didn't flash in Dub's head. I reached for the door handle, prepared to depart without further notice, but Dub turned in her seat and told me her phone number.

“Call me tomorrow,” she told me. “Do you think you can remember the number? Do you want me to write it down?”

But of course I knew it by heart.

I found a postcard worthy of a missive to Doug at a trashy beachfront souvenir shop. The shop is next door to my latest haunt, Cap's. Cap's has cashed in on America's java mania. The hand-painted driftwood sign that hangs outside depicts a
squinting, pipe-smoking coffee bean wearing a skipper's cap and a yellow rain slicker. I'm not sure if “Cap” is a diminutive of
cappuccino
or an extension of the seafarin' motif established by the cartoon. A hybrid, I suppose.

I generally hit Cap's right after school. I see no one from school there. That's essential.

It's good for me to be out of the local misdemeanor-level drug ring in the late afternoon. More of us get high, or make plans to get high, at that time than any other. School just provides a convenient meeting ground. DeMouy must have made a mistake in assigning me all this writing. Instead of coming to terms with what happened back in Texas, I'm realizing how sorry my life is here. Or was this his intention? I'm more a hermit now than ever. I have to start being honest with myself. I have no friends in San Diego. I have people I party with… it's not the same thing.

Most of my afternoon co-sippers at Cap's are either professionals or grad students from UCSD. I made the mistake of coming in one night after ten. I was run out by college sophomores smoking clove cigarettes, strumming out-of-tune acoustic guitars, and reading free verse poetry heavy with metaphorical digressions.

I'm still a novice at my newest vice, coffee. I swallow three or four gulps of it, straight and black, barely hiding my grimace. Then I douse it with cream and thicken it with sugar. I do this when I believe no one is looking. The bottom of my mug becomes a tan sludge. Caffeine gives me such a different buzz than dope. By what factor I used to return home more mellow, I can't even begin to guess.

Anyway, back to the postcard I bought for Doug. Jason Priestley graced its front side. He looked into the camera earnestly. His chest was bare and glycerin spritzed, and his thumbs were hooked inside the waistband of his jeans. I felt dirty buying it, like I was picking up my monthly copy of
Sizzlin' Sir Loins
from Pleasure Tyme Newsstand. I didn't wuss out, though. I didn't tell the checkout guy that it was for my little sister or that it was a joke or anything like that. I modified the card by adding a balloon aimed at Priestley's thin lips. “Doug, we'll always have Lubbock,” Jason confessed. On the back I wrote . .

Ma mere n'est pas morte.

[We had both read Camus'
The Stranger
in Sky's class.]

And neither am I.

Texas is just a big black hole that I haven't allowed myself to get sucked back into. Unfortunately, you're not far from ground zero.

I'm glad to hear you're drumming. I hope Neil Young will remember, southern men don't need him around, anyhow.

Rock on!

Steve

The astronaut and I had effectively negated the preservational role of “family”—food gathering, predator thwarting, values establishing, weather dancing. As best as we could, we interacted through Post-it notes and paper-clipped currency.
We didn't sink to the clichéd line painted down the middle of the house, preferring to utilize a complicated schedule decreeing when the house could be considered our own. The elder York was welcome to the pre-8
A.M.
hours. He had my blessing to lord over the manor then as he saw fit. On school days my alarm clock jolt coincided with the old man's motorized bicycle chain wrenching open the garage doors to emancipate his Lincoln. Of course, I didn't get up with the first static/grunge of KTRU, Rice's weak-signaled alternative radio station. I allowed myself two blissful snooze button slaps.

Monday through Friday were so masterfully executed that we had managed complete five-day stretches without a single nonpenned word passing between us. Weekends were normally sticky; football season made it worse. The astronaut could park himself on one of our two practical chairs and watch State U battle Other State Tech all day. He would sit there with a bowl of grapes and a liter bottle of Evian, unconcerned with who was playing. There was a time I can remember when Saturday mornings meant a comfy denful of jet fighter pilots, swilling Budweiser and wolfing down fatty toothpicked hors d'oeuvres served by Mom. The room would erupt from time to time and I would spot the patriarch laughing and backslapping almost like he was human.

When the alarm buzzed for the third time, I made it up—8:30 on a Saturday morning, an hour that I hadn't experienced in a vertical position since Christmas morning sometime in the mid-eighties. I showered, didn't shave (it wasn't a full moon), and sat down at my desk with a notepad and pen. I jotted down a twenty-eight-item Things to Do list, before
adding as the twenty-ninth,
call Dub and cancel.
Then I crumpled up the list. I rocked back in my folding chair, tapping my nose with the pen cap suctioned to my tongue, and reconsidered. I could scratch
dance lessons
—not enough time. Eliminating
hot-wire convertible Beamer
was probably also a wise move from both a penal and scheduling perspective. Flattening the crumpled legal sheet, I rescanned my list and found more nonessential steps I could cross out.