All About Lulu (7 page)

I’ll admit that I never gave the twins much credit. I always regarded them as one person. The notion that Doug and Ross somehow shared a brain between them, or at least the better part of one, helped account for the fact that they were largely controlled by their ids. There wasn’t enough brain to go around. Something had to move all that
fl
esh. The notion that their brain was spread thin also made it easier to forgive the twins for their Neanderthal ways. Who could blame them for wrestling in stairwells and farting in libraries, when they had only half a brain?

As I saw it, not only did Doug and Ross share a brain, but they shared a will and a common destiny. I always imagined them at
fi
fty, still living together in a one-bedroom apartment with bunk beds in Glendale or Cerritos. Maybe they’d own a gym together, or a carpet cleaning business. They’d still punch each other and call each other faggots. But they would always exist as one. Ross was no more separable from Doug, in my mind, than the holes were separable from a block of Swiss cheese, or the skin was separable from a hot dog. Even if Doug stood alone in front of me, Ross was there like a phantom appendage.

Among the 118 words Lulu and I invented for the number two, we assigned a speci
fi
c word to describe the oneness that is two, or the twoness that is one—that is, the particular togetherness that characterizes identical twins and, in rare instances, lovers. Loosely translated, the word was:
it
. And Doug and Ross had
it
, which meant they were never alone. Maybe it was impossible for me to conceive of separating
it
, because I’d always wanted it, as long as I could remember, and when I found Lulu, I wanted to be absorbed by her, whether to free myself from the responsibility of being myself, or just to bask snuggly inside her Luluness. Being driven from that garden was hell.

To walk away from such a state, I reasoned, would be insanity.

One afternoon I came home and found Ross in the living room, alone, just sitting. No television, no Atari, no steak sandwich.

“What are you doing home? Aren’t you supposed to be at the gym?”

“I don’t feel good.”

“No pain, no gain,” I observed dryly.

“Screw you. Why don’t you go have some alone time with your notebook?”

Ross had me there. That’s when I
fi
rst knew there was hope for him. But I was determined to thwart him anyway.

He had quit doing his lower-body work on Tuesdays and Saturdays. “Better be careful,” I warned. “If you let your legs get too skinny, you’re gonna have a hard time lugging that head around.”

“It’s not as big as it looks. It’s just those binoculars you’re wearing.”

Who was this guy? Certainly not Doug’s better half. Doug could never have conjured something so original. Doug would have called me
ass-bait
, and left it at that. Was it possible that Ross’s brain was suddenly developing after years of atrophy? By the time he cut Thursday’s ab session out of his regimen, he had even resorted to reading, for lack of occupation.

“Givin’ the old lips a workout, eh?”

“Very funny. Shouldn’t you be jerkin’ your gherkin?”

“Do you even know what a gherkin is?” I said.

“Duh.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

“Screw you. I don’t have to tell you crap.”

Eventually, Ross abandoned the gym altogether, and in doing so cut himself off not only from Doug, but from Big Bill. The remarkable part was that neither of them chastised Ross for quitting. Doug seemed a little afraid of Ross. At the very least, he was a little suspicious.

“What’s the deal with Ross, do you think?” he asked me one day in the kitchen.

“Got me.”

“You don’t think
…
?”

“What?”

“You don’t think he’s, you know
…
?”

“Depressed?”

“No. I mean
…
you don’t think he’s an ass clown, do you?”

Was I wrong to despise my brother Doug? Can you blame me?

Have you any idea what it’s like to look at your own
fl
esh and blood and wonder what happened? How you awoke in the lair of your mortal enemy?

After Ross quit pumping iron completely, he moped around the house for a few weeks, a little dazedly, not really knowing which direction to turn. More often than not he parked himself on the couch and gazed at the television set, or turned toward the kitchen and the curative powers of meat, devouring entire hams in a sitting, picking at cold chickens until nothing remained but a greasy cage. And when the miracle of meat failed Ross, and he had nowhere else to turn, he turned to me.

“What are you doing?” he said, from the doorway.

“Sitting on the bed.”

“Oh,” he said. “You care if—?”

“Whatever.”

He sat down on the foot of my bed and started gazing, like me, in the general direction of Lulu’s door.

“What are we staring at?” he said.

“Nothing,” I told him. “Or what’s left of something.”

“Oh,” he said again, and kept staring at nothing.

We stared at nothing for a long time.

“Where’s Doug?” I said, just to be cruel.

“At the gym.”

“So, why aren’t you?”

“Didn’t feel like it.”

There was a hard little lump inside my chest. I wanted to laugh at him. I wanted to hate Ross for walking away from Doug like Lulu had walked away from me. Nobody should ever walk away from anyone.

“Remember when we used to go to World Gym?” I said. “When Mom was still alive?”

“I remember. Of course I remember.”

“You were only
fi
ve.”

“I know,” he said defensively. “But I still remember it.”

“You guys were working out even then.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Big Bill was proud of you. He used to tell Kenny Waller that you guys would win the Olympia before him.”

“Waller,” said Ross. “Yeah, I remember.”

“He used to make you pose for Arnold and Franco. ‘Show them the triceps! Let’s see the crab, show Uncle Arnie the crab.’ And you guys would perform like little monkeys.”

Ross smiled faintly, as though it were his duty to smile.

“Goddamn, I hated it,” I told him. “The gym, I mean. I hated every last second of it. I would’ve rather been at the hospital, that’s how much I hated it.”

“So you quit. So what?”

“I just couldn’t give two shits. Big Bill knew it, and it really bugged him. It bugged him that I sat outside in the car and read comic books.

Especially because they weren’t even the superhero kind. They were just Archies.”

“I can’t remember,” said Ross.

“He never really had much to do with me.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Dad’s weird sometimes.”

“Why did you come in, anyway?” I said.

“No reason. I just saw you sitting there, so
…
I don’t know.”

“So, what is it?”

“It’s nothing.” Then, after a pause, Ross said, “You want to know something?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t ever tell Doug, and especially don’t tell Big Bill.”

“I won’t.”

He still wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell me.

“I promise,” I said.

“I hated it, too. I’ve always hated it, from then until now, I’ve hated it. I would’ve been happier if Dad were a professional roller skater or a fucking dentist.”

For the
fi
rst time in my life I wanted to hug Ross, I suppose for having endured something I never gave him credit for. “Why did you do it?” I said.

He paused to wonder at this himself, and shrugged. “No pain, no gain, I guess. Or maybe I was just scared.”

Ross stared out into the hallway. I started picking fuzz balls off my bedspread.

“I miss her,” I said.

“Yeah.”

A dense silence settled in, the kind that makes your ears ring.

“Well,” I said,
fi
nally. “I guess I better get busy on my—”

“Yeah,” said Ross, and he stood to leave.

“You okay?”

“Sure, I’m okay. But you won’t tell, right?”

“Why would I?”

“That’s cool.” He turned to leave, but then he turned back again. “So, I’m just wondering, what do you write in all those books, anyway?”

I almost wanted to tell him. It might have been a relief. “Nothing,” I said.

“Can I read some?”

“Nah. It’s just stuff.”

“That’s cool. I draw stuff sometimes. Doug thinks it’s gay.”

“Screw Doug,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. So, I guess I’ll see you.”

“Yeah.”

He turned and left.

Within a few months, Ross discovered his new self, and it couldn’t have been newer or more unexpected. While Doug and Big Bill spent their afternoons paining and gaining, Ross started smoking clove cigarettes and hanging out with a kid named Regan and listening to Duran Duran. Regan became his mentor: oft quoted, perpetually emulated, but always shrouded in mystery.

“Where’s your imaginary friend Regan?” I’d ask.

“Why don’t you look in your little notebook?”

He grew his hair out and fashioned it after the lead singer of Flock of Seagulls.

“Looks like somebody parked the Batmobile on top of your head,” I observed.

“Looks like they parked it on your face and left in a hurry.”

There was hope for the kid.

Much to the chagrin of Big Bill, Ross soon started wearing eyeliner.

“For Pete’s sake, you look like a raccoon. Take that off ! Why do you wanna go around looking like Boy Georgie?”

“You look like a dill-hole,” said Doug.

We were hard on him, it was the Miller way, but I envied Ross for
fi
nding his new self. I wished I could
fi
nd a new self, or even an old self, or any self that didn’t require Lulu as the main ingredient. I wished I had the guts to wear eyeliner, or swagger around with overgrown muscles. I wished I had some goal, some
thing
or ideal besides Lulu to drive me forward all of my days. I wished I had the desire or passion or vision to build something,
anything
—a rippling body, a body of knowledge, a goddamn brontosaurus in the middle of the desert.

Something bigger than myself. But I had only one crippling desire.

The ripples of change brought about by Ross’s transformation soon set the geography of our household in motion again. Ross moved into the trophy room, and everything from the trophy room—that is, everything from our former lives—was moved into a corner of the garage, where it soon hosted black widows. Doug, haunted perhaps by a phantom top bunk, yearned for new surroundings, and soon traded rooms with Lulu, who could never resist change.

Thus deprived of my precious swath of light, I turned instead to my radio, always mindful of the fact that it had once been a gift from Lulu. The radio became my bridge to the outside world. I lay on my bed, gazing at the walls of my prison, while Ken Minyard on KABC spoke to me like a best friend about life, the universe, and Mexican food. About history, politics, and current events. And like a best friend, I listened. That was my role in the relationship, to listen.

I had other radio friends: Casey Kasem, Rick Dees, Shadoe Stevens.

The radio was never about the music for me, it was always about the voices, the power of those invisible supercharged voices to lift me out of the morass, to open windows of possibility and understanding, to conjure by the force of incantation and verbal charm any image, idea, or opinion, and also their amazing power to persuade. Ken Minyard made a Bobby Kennedy liberal out of me and I didn’t even know who Bobby Kennedy was. Casey Kasem taught me the
fi
ne line between sincerity and schmaltz, by dancing that line with the cascading polyrhythms of his voice. But more than anything else, it was the companionship these voices afforded me in my solitude that kept me tuning in.

While I had many friends, I had but one god, and that was Vin Scully. His voice rode crackling upon invisible wavelengths from St. Louis and Chicago and New York, arriving in Santa Monica to transform my bedroom into someplace altogether grander. And when Vin’s voice streamed out of my radio, the words were no longer weightless and invisible; they expanded like paper
fl
owers until they had form and weight and color, and they smelled like pretzels and green grass and some place far away. Vin Scully spoke to me like a father. Sometimes I wished he
were
my father. I know that sounds weird. But I’m just telling you how it was.