Another gifted friend alert!
I’ve known Gabrielle for years (we went to grad school at the University of Arkansas together). And if you meet a cool, hilarious, whip-smart writer chick…well, you make sure to keep in touch. I’ve always loved her writing…her stuff is raw and fearless…her stories burn themselves into your consciousness and stick with you. So of course I asked if I could have one for my site…’cause, ultimately, having talented friends make me look good!
and PS, she's a sexy bitch too!
Bars of Long Beach
by Gabrielle Idlet
“Ma said three,” I remind Slicker. “P.m.”
“What she here for anyway? Little thing.” The bartender doesn’t say “illegal.” I’m fourteen but short and flat so I look eleven, people say. Ugly enough to go without friends (sea urchin freckles splashed on my face, pink paper cut eyes). But I’m getting muscles, that’s one thing.
Slicker just taps his knuckles for another Coors and bends over the pool table.
“What if she takes off again, Slicker?”
The bartender slides a pink drink under my chin. “Go head. Low octane.”
“Give her beer nuts,” Slicker tells him. It’s so slow in here, smoky fog. The stringy-haired guy he plays against spits on the floor.
The bartender has a line dug in from his lip to his nose and when he smiles the pink stretches. He smiles at me.
“We need to go.”
“Stay there, Francy.” Slicker dips his head and breaks. The cue ball bounces off the green and hits the thigh of a thick man at the jukebox. The man jerks around. Slicker’s hands in the air – “Hey man, my mistake man.” Like they’re under water, everybody’s swaying. It always goes like this.
“Don’t swing at him,” the bartender says. “His daughter’s here.”
“I’m not his daughter,” I slide off the stool and run.
Outside the Low Tide the sun shocks my eyes. Slicker’s like a dog. You have to lead him.
Lucky the streets are empty since Slicker never pops out of second in his old pickup.
“Hurry up,” I tell him.
“Listen,” he huffs, foul in my hair. “Listen you thing . . .” but he doesn’t finish.
Shadows sharp, ocean hissing, Long Beach seems like those black and white movies Slicker likes, the ones with circus music. They’ve been running double features at the Vista.
“Kiddo,” he says, softer.
“Left here, Slicker!” He spins the wheel. We bump over a curb and onto the 405 onramp aiming for LA.
“Shift now.” Fucker. If I could reach the pedals.
Ma told Slicker what to do when, too. When she left six months ago she handed me over to him. If you asked her, the version would go: Francine needs to stay in school, Francine came when I was too young, that was before we had a choice. I can’t change who I am. Something like that. Thirty seconds with Ma would show you who she is. Her melted fingertips where she kept her hands in the fire for too long when she was on some drug that makes you not feel burning. Her no-bra, no-panties body under a dress that’s lacy or has holes. You would see her bare feet always revved, feet you can’t calm down. The only way she could relax was by lying naked at the beach in the sun. She knew the hidden places.
Slicker and Ma didn’t date. I figure they met in one of the East Hollywood bars, The Rustic or the Drawing Room or maybe the Dresden if it was the first or fifteenth when her Museum Shop check was fresh. Slicker started coming around to our house to fix the porch light, rig the garage door with a clicker, put up a new mailbox where the old one got smashed in Ma’s blind spot. When Slicker was there, Ma gave me things to do that would take an hour, like Mow and weed (both) or Clean the kitchen and I mean mop too, and they closed the door to her room. He didn’t always leave, either.
Ma had stopped wearing jewelry after she gave up trying to be an actress. She said decoration was for sluts. When she said sluts her s’s sprayed on me. She kept her figure the same by picking at food. She smoked and didn’t brush her hair and wore stained jeans and the same hiking boots she had in the sixties when she used to live outdoors, and men never stopped falling in love with her. Natural beauty. That’s what Slicker said.
Ma left after our big fake Christmas. She put Slicker in an elf costume from the Salvation Army, and he let her. You could see his greasy work pants hanging under the green smock. Ma crawled to the radio, turned up the tinny song. “Deck those halls, I said deck ‘em!” One speaker was out and it screeched along with her. Slicker down on his knees, putting fingers on her face. When Ma slapped him, he held on.
Soon enough she was staying away for half-weeks, guessing Slicker would watch me. She stepped out of a black Town Car once, tinted windows. She was in a long sleeveless Asian dress with one of those high collars, satin the blue the sky should have been. You could see a man’s hand not wanting to let go of hers. Slicker and I watched out the window and looked at each other like dopes in a sit-com.
“We’re on time, anyway,” Slicker cuts into my thoughts. He’s booming now, coming to. “Three thirty.”
“Three,” I say, and we’re pulling off the Hollywood Freeway, moms in aprons fanning themselves, men with beers in paper bags, ducks, a swan. “Pull over.”
“Don’t boss me. Shut up.”
“Here.”
I have Ma’s thin lips and the hair she calls auburn, the very same. I am wearing a gray silk blouse she left behind. It doesn’t matter. At the end of Echo Park Lake where the lotuses are starting to leaf and geese poke their bills for people to feed them, under the palm tree, on the bench facing the water, she isn’t waiting.
“She wasn’t here to start,” he says.
“It’s your fault.” My shouting rings. “It’s you.”
He lifts his hand. “Spoiled –” He gives up.
“You drunk ass!” I jump out, but he grabs my collar and wrestles me across the grass to a tree. Sun behind his head makes a greasy silhouette. He smells like a stray.
“Brat, blamer, lucky anybody gives a shit.” His k’s and t’s spray. A streamer from a finished party kicks around until a breeze drags it into the water. When a police cruiser rolls by Slicker steps back, smoothes his hair.
“She was here,” I say, following him.
On summer weekdays while Slicker handymans at his apartment jobs, I watch reruns on the black-and-white in what used to be Ma’s bedroom. When she left she just took money and clothes, so all her furniture’s still there but Slicker’s rearranged things. On the vanity where she used to keep art books and lotions, Slicker puts his ace bandages, sandbag ashtray, super-flashlight, jar of change, pull-tops from cans of whatever beer’s on sale at Safeway. I angle the fan on me and turn up the sound so the room crackles with “Put ‘em up”s and “Freeze”s. I pinch myself, rows of pink up my arm.
She calls once in a while.
“Hello.”
“Honey . . .”
“Oh Ma, Mama, hi, hi Mom! Please come I miss you I’m here I’ll make sandwiches please.” I am easy. Sluts? That’s me as a daughter.
Three times she’s arranged to meet me, and three times she hasn’t shown.
“We said two not three.”
“You had the wrong day. I’m so sorry you had the wrong day.”
“I was sick. Every time I called the phone was busy.”
This time, who knows?
Summer evenings when Slicker gets home he does pull-ups. He bolted a bar into the kitchen doorway. He lifts me so I can do sets with him. I’m at ten, up from zero. He squeezes my flex and admires. To clear his head Slicker uses gravity boots, and I watch his swaying face until the upside-down mouth doesn’t make any sense.
“Why don’t you play with anybody, have a friend over?” Slicker pops a beer and hands me a grape soda.
“Don’t want to talk about it.”
“Just saying.” Slicker crosses his legs like a professor. “I feel like I should say something.”
While he snores to Johnny Carson I pretend my pillow is a body and I kill it.
“Zampano, you take care of my daughter!” That’s what I yell out of the truck window after the movie. We’re driving to Long Beach but first we have to see Slicker’s mother. Slicker’s already loaded from the flask he brought into the theater.
“Sure, I even teach dogs,” he says, which is what Zampano says. He mugs the strongman from La Strada, puffs his shoulders.
“You know Anthony Quinn’s act, Zampano’s act, he’s playing that guy, Promefeus,” Slicker can’t stop. It’s like he’s trying to talk while he tumbles down a flight of stairs. “Zeus that rat bastard chained him to a rock, sent an eagle round to peck out his liffer. Every night, Prometheus had to re-grow the thing, re-grow his own liver like a baby, and the next day the whole thing would happen again.”
“Why?” I say.
“Who knows.”
I fit his beat-up sunglasses over my ears. Supposedly Roy Orbison used to own this pair. Slicker’s dad got them off the side of the stage at a dancehall concert in Downey. His dad gave them to Slicker when he left to bomb Korea. “Now you’re side by side with them free Orientals in school,” Slicker points out. “Little kids last name Kim. Thank Pops.”
“My father wore aviator glasses,” I tell Slicker.
“Yeah.”
“Man’s sunglasses.”
“Yeah, where’s the man now?” Slicker blurts, then squints like his sentence hurt him. I see my father on the curb with a falling sun outline, thumbs in his belt loops, brown lenses covering tired-of-us eyes.
“I was alright . . . for a while . . .” I belt out.
Slicker sings he could smile for a while. When he hits the high notes his purple gums show. Recently he has been teaching me how to harmonize. We twist our highs and lows around each other.
His mother has no teeth or hair. “Hair and nails are dead,” Slicker tells me when we pull into the dark garage of her seniors’ complex. “Teeth aren’t, but they can die. That’s when you carve them out with a Leatherman.”
“Puke.”
“When you’re my age, you’ll be grateful for the gas.” He makes a jack-o-lantern face so I can see the empty spaces. Most of his front teeth are still there. “Hers are in a tumbler.” He taps half a container of Tic-Tacs into his mouth.
We wait a long time at her door and when the knob turns he moves in front of me. Tiny, wrinkled fists go around him, wadded tissue in each one. When we step in, she stares.
“Daughter of a friend of mine.” Slicker waves over my head like we don’t live together.
The old woman gets close, stinking of concentrated band-aids. “Is something wrong with her skin?” Slicker’s mother asks.
“Freckles,” he says, and he rolls his eyes at me.
They talk, Slicker popping mints. She wants too much, you can tell from her rotted-apple mouth as it opens and closes. Then she has to go to the bathroom and I’m the one. Slicker steps onto the balcony over an ocean of pastel apartment houses. As he slides the glass door shut I can’t tell whether he’s sighing or it’s just freeway gusts. He shakes out a Pall Mall.
“Ronald said he was on the wagon,” she whispers.
“Ronald?”
“Bad knees, rejected. But he built airplane parts in San Pedro for the men like his father who was fighting.”
“He told me.”
“His wife made pastries at a four-star restaurant.”
She makes toilet noises she doesn’t seem to hear.
“Took his boys east.”
In the truck Slicker pulls the tab off a Bud.
“You were married before?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Ronald?”
“Leave it.”
His hand shakes, and I open and close my brain on the thought of him dying.
“I feel so bad, I got a worried mind,” I hum. He stays quiet.
He refuels at the Breakers, and we go to the Pier. I just stare at the stripe of gray ocean, the Ferris wheel rolling over with no one riding. After he’s had coffee no creamer, we don’t head for the freeway. We roll through a neighborhood with ragged lawns and black kids playing on the sidewalks.
“Used to be only Dustbowl transplants lived around here.” He idles across the street from a white bungalow. Small brown oranges hang off tree limbs. A boy runs sideways into the beak of a bird of paradise and wails.
“Used to be a palm tree thin as you and three stories high where that kid is crying.”
He drives us to a street I haven’t seen before, and the sun cuts through, and it’s like we’re in an empty foreign country. A long wall of arches stretches along one side. No cars. When we shut the truck doors, our shadows are sharp. The street could be beautiful, except it is abandoned.
Slicker cups his hands to look through the window of a closed bakery, and I look, too. All kinds of cakes topped with fantasy scenes are displayed on glass racks. It’s like a museum of tiny worlds. Slicker points at a white mountain with a bunch of snow-topped pine trees. Plastic poles the size of pencils hold up the chair lift, and a couple of eraser-size skiers look like they got frozen while zooming.
Another one looks like Echo Park Lake, if it was transported to a land without freeways. Water swirls blue-green around sparkling fish and floating lotuses. Around the edges there’s sand. Slicker says they toast sugar to get that effect.
In the corner there’s a Beatles cake. They got in trouble for claiming to be bigger than Jesus, Slicker says. “Unfortunately there’s a lot of things bigger than Jesus. Try to find something that isn’t.”
A cake on a low shelf is round and very smooth and glows the strong blue the sky becomes right before it goes black. You can almost see light through it, but mostly you want to dive into it.
Realistic stars are sprinkled through the middle like a Milky Way, and on the edge there’s a disk that looks like a real moon, marbled and with no cute face. There’s even a pale circle around the moon, which happens in real life once in a while.
“Space,” I say.
“They got it right with the icing,” Slicker says.
“That blue.”
“It’s the most beautiful color,” Slicker agrees. “You can’t deny it.”
When we get home he boils split pea soup and drinks while I eat. I am wondering what my original dad would have served me.
“This is good how you make it,” I tell Slicker.
“I open a can.”
He walks into Ma’s old room and unlaces his boots to lie down.
“Sweetheart, I wanted to –”
“Oh Ma, Mama, it was Slicker. Otherwise we would have been on time!”
“Honey.” There’s honking in the background.
“Mama, where are you, Ma?”
Go ahead take me, I might as well say. Anywhere.
“My little girl . . .”
“I’m so tired,” Ma says. Her voice is ragged and mostly made out of breath.
“I am so tired, too. Me, too.”
“Francy, I’m not –” But she doesn’t say what she’s not.
I listen to the traffic around her. There’s another sound, too. Gulls.
“Where are you?”
Slicker’s been watching. He pulls the phone away and takes it into the bedroom for six minutes on the clock-radio by the TV.
“What did she say?” I am at his door when he opens it.
“The hell with her,” he says. “But get dressed.”
“No.”
“She wants to see you. North side of the lake on the bench, on the usual bench.” He glances at the time. “Twenty minutes. That’s six thirty.”
“Does she want to see you, too?” I’m asking for it.
“You have five minutes. Then I will drag you by your hair.”
I have on the dress he made me wear, a yellow fucking sundress Ma bought in the spring. It cuts under my arms. Slicker’s cleaned up in a tucked-in midnight blue shirt and black slacks, no stains, no cigarette holes. He drops me at the corner of the park by the lotuses. “Good luck,” he says, but he doesn’t look at me. His dented bumper bounces into traffic.
This is the corner of the park next to Amy’s Temple. That white dome gets written over with graffiti all the time and guys with buckets come out and slap fresh paint over the spray-painted names and streets. An old man in white coveralls is on his knees getting ready to paint over a word that looks like Loser. When I focus my eyes, though, the word is Closer. Like he’s obeying, the old man has to lean close to cover up the word. But then Closer could also mean a person who closes. Closer of doors.
A toddler that can barely walk is racing to the water with a stick. No one stops him. I almost go after him but I won’t leave the bench. I yell hey, and he throws the stick in and stares.
“Hey,” I say. “Don’t fall in.”
His mother yells something at him in Spanish. He runs back to her knees and holds on.
Junker cars shriek down the boulevard from the Hollywood Freeway to the 5. The sun is ready to drop, but I can’t see it. Clouds closer to the ocean cluster thick, gold outlines, gray centers. Our weather comes from the west, Slicker says.
No gulls glide over the lake.
A dark-skinned woman with bleached hair pushes a stroller on the cement path around the lake. The wind picks up the layers around her face and gives her head the look of an undersea creature, a ray or something.
After the woman has passed four times and climbs the slope across the park and disappears toward Sunset, I’m still waiting. When I throw part of a thrown-away hamburger bun at a duck ten of them rush me so I have to jump up on the bench to keep their bills from stabbing me. “Leave me alone,” I tell them, like they can understand reasoning. “Get away from me. You are worthless. Get lost.”
There’s no one left on this side of the park, but I’m not leaving. Instead, I dig a nail into my wrist to cut through.
“Francy, Francy,” high and far away comes the call. “Francine!” My head snaps around and displays my hope and then I am a broken egg spilling because it’s Slicker running between the swing-set and the slide yelling my name. His arms are open and he’s not weaving, he’s running straight toward me. I stand up and he grabs my shoulders and he catches my face in the center of his blue shirt and his pulse knocks against my ear and the things he has to say rumble from under his ribcage.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Slicker says. He says it hot into the top of my head, the part that a long time ago was soft.
“I know,” I say.
