A Visit From the Goon Squad (5 page)

“Should I put some on my tongue, like you did?” he asked his son.

“Yeah. But I get some too.”

“Sasha, you want to try a little medicine?” Bennie asked.

“Um, okay,” she said. “What’s it supposed to do?”

“Solve your problems,” Bennie said. “I mean, headaches. Not that you have any.”

“Never,” Sasha said, with that same wary smile.

They each took a pinch of gold flakes and placed them on their tongues. Bennie tried not to calculate the dollar value of what was inside their mouths. He concentrated on the taste: Was it metallic, or was that just his expectation? Coffee, or was that what was left in his mouth? He tongued the gold in a tight knot and sucked the juice from within it; sour, he thought. Bitter. Sweet? Each one seemed true for a second, but in the end Bennie had an impression of something mineral, like stone. Even earth. And then the lump melted away.

“I should go, Dad,” Chris said. Bennie let him out of the car and hugged him hard. As always, Chris went still in his embrace, but whether he was savoring it or enduring it Bennie could never tell.

He drew back and looked at his son. The baby he and Stephanie had nuzzled and kissed—now this painful, mysterious presence. Bennie was tempted to say,
Don’t tell your mother about the medicine
, craving an instant of connection with Chris before he went inside. But he hesitated, employing a mental calculation Dr. Beet had taught him: Did he really think the kid would tell Stephanie about the gold? No. And that was his alert: Betrayal Bonding. Bennie said nothing.

He got back in the car, but didn’t turn the key. He was watching Chris scale the undulating lawn toward his former house. The grass was fluorescently bright. His son seemed to buckle under his enormous backpack. What the hell was in it? Bennie had seen professional photographers carry less. As Chris neared the house he blurred a little, or maybe it was Bennie’s eyes watering. He found it excruciating, watching his son’s long journey to the front door. He worried Sasha would speak—say something like
He’s a great kid
, or
That was fun
—something that would require Bennie to turn and look at her. But Sasha knew better; she knew everything. She sat with Bennie in silence, watching Chris climb the fat, bright grass to the front door, then open it without turning and go inside.

They didn’t speak again until they’d passed from the Henry Hudson Parkway onto the West Side Highway, heading into Lower Manhattan. Bennie played some early Who, the Stooges, bands he’d listened to before he was even old enough to go to a concert. Then he got into Flipper, the Mutants, Eye Protection—seventies Bay Area groups he and his gang had slam-danced to at the Mabuhay Gardens when they weren’t practicing with their own unlistenable band, the Flaming Dildos. He sensed Sasha paying attention and toyed with the idea that he was confessing to her his disillusionment—his
hatred
for the industry he’d given his life to. He began weighing each musical choice, drawing out his argument through the songs themselves—Patti Smith’s ragged poetry (but why did she quit?), the jock hardcore of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks giving way to alternative, that great compromise, down, down, down to the singles he’d just today been petitioning radio stations to add, husks of music, lifeless and cold as the squares of office neon cutting the blue twilight.

“It’s incredible,” Sasha said, “how there’s just nothing there.”

Astounded, Bennie turned to her. Was it possible that she’d followed his musical rant to its grim conclusion? Sasha was looking downtown, and he followed her eyes to the empty space where the Twin Towers had been. “There should be
something
, you know?” she said, not looking at Bennie. “Like an echo. Or an outline.”

Bennie sighed. “They’ll put something up,” he said. “When they’re finally done squabbling.”

“I know.” But she kept looking south, as if it were a problem her mind couldn’t solve. Bennie was relieved she hadn’t understood. He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They’d been in Lou’s house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol’s famous face and thought,
You’re finished
. Nostalgia was the end—everyone knew that. Lou had died three months ago, after being paralyzed from a stroke.

At a stoplight, Bennie remembered his list. He took out the parking ticket and finished it off.

“What do you keep scribbling on that ticket?” Sasha asked. Bennie handed it to her, his reluctance to have the list seen by human eyes overwhelming him a half second late. To his horror, she began reading it aloud:

“Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.”

Bennie listened in agony, as if the words themselves might provoke a catastrophe. But they were neutralized the instant Sasha spoke them in her scratchy voice.

“Not bad,” she said. “They’re titles, right?”

“Sure,” Bennie said. “Can you read them one more time?” She did, and now they sounded like titles to him, too. He felt peaceful, cleansed.

“‘Kissing Mother Superior’ is my favorite,” Sasha said. “We’ve gotta find a way to use that one.”

They’d pulled up outside her building on Forsyth. The street felt desolate and underlit. Bennie wished she could live in a better place. Sasha gathered up her ubiquitous black bag, a shapeless wishing well from which she’d managed to wrest whatever file or number or slip of paper he’d needed for the past twelve years. Bennie seized her thin white hand. “Listen,” he said. “Listen, Sasha.”

She looked up. Bennie felt no lust at all—he wasn’t even hard. What he felt for Sasha was love, a safety and closeness like what he’d had with Stephanie before he’d let her down so many times that she couldn’t stop being mad. “I’m crazy for you, Sasha,” he said. “Crazy.”

“Come on, Bennie,” Sasha chided lightly. “None of that.”

He held her hand between both of his. Sasha’s fingers were trembly and cold. Her other hand was on the door.

“Wait,” Bennie said. “Please.”

She turned to him, somber now. “There’s no way, Bennie,” she said. “We need each other.”

They looked at one another in the failing light. The delicate bones of Sasha’s face were lightly freckled—it was a girl’s face, but she’d stopped being a girl when he wasn’t watching.

Sasha leaned over and kissed Bennie’s cheek: a chaste kiss, a kiss between brother and sister, mother and son, but Bennie felt the softness of her skin, the warm movement of her breath. Then she was out of the car. She waved to him through the window and said something he didn’t catch. Bennie lunged across the empty seat, his face near the glass, staring fixedly as she said it again. Still, he missed it. As he struggled to open the door, Sasha said it once more, mouthing the words extra slowly:

“See. You. Tomorrow.”

Ask Me If I Care

Late at night, when there’s nowhere left to go, we go to Alice’s house. Scotty drives his pickup, two of us squeezed in front with him, blasting bootleg tapes of the Stranglers, the Nuns, Negative Trend, the other two stuck in back where you freeze all year long, getting tossed in the actual air when Scotty tops the hills. Still, if it’s Bennie and me I hope for the back, so I can push against his shoulder in the cold, and hold him for a second when we hit a bump.

The first time we went to Sea Cliff, where Alice lives, she pointed up a hill at fog sneaking through the eucalyptus trees and said her old school was up there: an all-girls school where her little sisters go now. K through six you wear a green plaid jumper and brown shoes, after that a blue skirt and white sailor top, and you can pick your own shoes. Scotty goes, Can we see them? and Alice goes, My uniforms? but Scotty goes, No, your alleged sisters.

She leads the way upstairs, Scotty and Bennie right behind her. They’re both fascinated by Alice, but it’s Bennie who entirely loves her. And Alice loves Scotty, of course.

Bennie’s shoes are off, and I watch his brown heels sink into the white cotton-candy carpet, so thick it muffles every trace of us. Jocelyn and I come last. She leans close to me, and inside her whisper I smell cherry gum covering up the five hundred cigarettes we’ve smoked. I can’t smell the gin we drank from my dad’s hidden supply at the beginning of the night, pouring it into Coke cans so we can drink it on the street.

Jocelyn goes, Watch, Rhea. They’ll be blond, her sisters.

I go, According to?

Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

Believe me, I don’t mistake that for information. I know everyone Jocelyn knows.

The room is dark except for a pink night-light. I stop in the doorway and Bennie hangs back too, but the other three go crowding into the space between the beds. Alice’s little sisters are sleeping on their sides, covers tucked around their shoulders. One looks like Alice, with pale wavy hair, the other is dark, like Jocelyn. I’m afraid they’ll wake up and be scared of us in our dog collars and safety pins and shredded T-shirts. I think: We shouldn’t be here, Scotty shouldn’t have asked to come in, Alice shouldn’t have said yes, except she says yes to everything Scotty asks. I think: I want to lie down in one of those beds and go to sleep.

Ahem, I whisper to Jocelyn as we’re leaving the room. Dark hair.

She whispers back, Black sheep.

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they’re begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We’re sick of them.

At school, we spend every free minute in the Pit. It’s not a pit in the strictly speaking sense; it’s a strip of pavement above the playing fields. We inherited it from last year’s Pitters who graduated, but still we get nervous walking in if other Pitters are already there: Tatum, who wears a different color Danskin every day, or Wayne, who grows sinsemilla in his actual closet, or Boomer, who’s always hugging everyone since his family did EST. I’m nervous walking in unless Jocelyn is already there, or (for her) me. We stand in for each other.

On warm days, Scotty plays his guitar. Not the electric he uses for Flaming Dildos gigs, but a lap steel guitar that you hold a different way. Scotty actually built this instrument: bent the wood, glued it, painted on the shellac. Everyone gathers around, there’s no way not to when Scotty plays. One time the entire J.V. soccer team climbed up from the athletic field to listen, looking around in their jerseys and long red socks like they didn’t know how they got there. Scotty is magnetic. And I say this as someone who does not love him.

The Flaming Dildos have had a lot of names: the Crabs, the Croks, the Crimps, the Crunch, the Scrunch, the Gawks, the Gobs, the Flaming Spiders, the Black Widows. Every time Scotty and Bennie change the name, Scotty sprays black over his guitar case and Bennie’s bass case, and then he makes a stencil of the new name and sprays it on. We don’t know how they decide if they should keep a name, because Bennie and Scotty don’t actually talk. But they agree on everything, maybe through ESP. Jocelyn and I write all the lyrics and work out the tunes with Bennie and Scotty. We sing with them in rehearsal, but we don’t like being onstage. Alice doesn’t either—the only thing we have in common with her.

Bennie transferred last year from a high school in Daly City. We don’t know where he lives, but some days we visit him after school at Revolver Records, on Clement, where he works. If Alice comes with us, Bennie will take his break and share a pork bun in the Chinese bakery next door, while the fog gallops past the windows. Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record. He’s usually looking at Alice, so I can watch him as much as I want.

Down the path from the Pit is where the cholos hang out, with their black leather coats and clicky shoes and dark hair in almost invisible nets. Sometimes they talk to Bennie in Spanish, and he smiles at them but never answers. Why do they keep speaking Spanish to him? I go to Jocelyn, and she looks at me and goes, Rhea, Bennie’s a cholo. Isn’t that obvious?

That’s factually crazy, I go, and my face is getting hot. He has a Mohawk. And he’s not even friends with them.

Jocelyn goes, Not all cholos are friends. Then she says, The good news is, rich girls won’t go with cholos. So he’ll never get Alice, period-the-end.

Jocelyn knows I’m waiting for Bennie. But Bennie is waiting for Alice, who’s waiting for Scotty, who’s waiting for Jocelyn, who’s known Scotty the longest and makes him feel safe, I think, because even though Scotty is magnetic, with bleached hair and a studly chest that he likes to uncover when it’s sunny out, his mother died three years ago from sleeping pills. Scotty’s been quieter since then, and in cold weather he shivers like someone is shaking him.

Jocelyn loves Scotty back, but she isn’t
in love
with him. Jocelyn is waiting for Lou, an adult man who picked her up hitchhiking. Lou lives in LA, but he said he would call the next time he comes to San Francisco. That was weeks ago.

No one is waiting for me. In this story, I’m the girl no one is waiting for. Usually the girl is fat, but my problem is more rare, which is freckles: I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face. When I was little, my mom told me they were special. Thank God I’ll be able to remove them, when I’m old enough and can pay for it myself. Until that time I have my dog collar and green rinse, because how can anyone call me “the girl with freckles” when my hair is green?

Jocelyn has chopped black hair that looks permanently wet, and twelve ear piercings that I gave her with a pointed earring, not using ice. She has a beautiful half-Chinese face. It makes a difference.

Jocelyn and I have done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes. She’s seen my dad puking into the hedge outside our building, and I was with her on Polk Street the night she recognized one of the leather boys hugging outside the White Swallow and it was her dad, who was on a “business trip,” before he moved away. So I still can’t believe I missed the day she met the man, Lou. She was hitchhiking home from downtown and he pulled up in a red Mercedes and drove her to an apartment he uses on his trips to San Francisco. He unscrewed the bottom of a can of Right Guard, and a Baggie of cocaine dropped out. Lou did some lines off Jocelyn’s bare butt and they went all the way twice, not including when she went down on him. I made Jocelyn repeat each detail of this story until I knew everything she knew, so we could be equal again.