American Girls (26 page)

Jeremy grabbed my hand and we snaked our way through the crowd. The side of a CD case hit me on the shoulder, and a laughing man in a rainbow Afro showered glitter over Jeremy.

“Thanks, man,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “Can you help me get this out, Anna?”

We found a space where there was enough room for me to comb through his hair and try to shake the glitter free, a losing battle if ever there was one. I imagined we looked like a pair of blinged-out zoo animals, huddled in some corner, one grooming the other. Freekmonkee left the stage, and for a second I was sure that I had destroyed my hearing; the echo in my skull throbbed almost as loudly as the music itself.

“This is not going to end well,” Jeremy said as more of the garbage made its way onto the stage. I could see what he meant, but I just didn't care. It might have been destructive but it was magic.

Backstage, Olivia Taylor had removed her moon boots and was curled catlike against Karl Marx. He rubbed his hand up her leg, almost into her crotch, and she opened a mirror and lined her lips silver-blue while he talked.

“It's all waste,” he said, his accent as perfectly beautiful as it sounded in the interviews I'd watched. “Waste and filth. Even these women, these perfect creatures.” Now his hand was in her crotch, but if I'd had my glasses on, I would have sworn he was looking at me. “They look like something off of God's top shelf, and you know they have their fingers in their underwear, smelling their own filth like the rest of us.”

Olivia grunted with what was either disgust or interest, I couldn't tell. She shifted her position and put a hand on Karl's knee. He brushed it aside.

“What happens when we've filled the oceans?” Karl continued, leaning forward. “Should we decorate our shit and send it to another galaxy? Is that our legacy? Is it so different from the trash we already send into the universe, the television programs that mean nothing, the endless, banal chatter?”

He wasn't looking at Jeremy, but I wondered if Jeremy took that kind of thing personally, even if Karl was right, which he probably was.

“Can we lose ourselves in space,” he asked, “if space is nothing but what we leave behind for the uglies to care for? Our garbage? The shows we've already seen? The pop star whose music has come and gone? Isn't that all now just part of the void?”

I was listening to him but watching the rest of the room as well. Leo Spark was in the corner, smoking a cigarette and tightening and loosening his guitar strings. He was taller than Karl Marx, and had on skintight jeans and a red silk shirt, his perfect, wavy brown hair falling over his perfect brown eyes. When Karl said something he agreed with, he would stop touching his guitar and point at him, then return to what he was doing. He had silver rings on three of his fingers, a band with diamonds, a skull, and the openmouthed screaming freekmonkee that each of the band members wore. If I squinted I could almost make them out, and I so wished that I could just put on my glasses, walk across the room, and gape.

The music coming through the walls changed, and the band members all stood up. Karl kissed Olivia full on the mouth, and then much to my horror, on his way back to the stage, Leo did the same. She kissed each of them back for at least as long as Delia had kissed Roger, and though I was trying not to stare, I couldn't help myself. As she was tonguing Leo Sparks, Olivia Taylor opened her eyes and looked straight at me. Even without my glasses, I couldn't miss it.

The band headed for the stage, and Olivia walked in my direction. Without shoes, she was exactly my height, and I scanned the room, looking for an exit.

“Anna,” she said, and threw both her arms around me, and kissed me on both cheeks, like I was her freaking iguana. “I love that you're here, Anna. You and my fucking brother. I love this kid.”

Then she turned to Jeremy and kissed him. He flinched like someone had scorched him with the end of a cigarette.

“Thank you for taking care of my babies,” she said.

Then she looked at both of us and said, “I love you both so much. Love is the only way to cut through the garbage.”

I wondered for a minute if she'd ever taken Leo or Karl back to her place, if maybe they'd gotten the idea for the waste-ridden moonscape after sitting for an afternoon in her bungalow.

Freekmonkee had begun their encore, and Olivia grabbed my hand and started to walk me back in the direction of the crowd.

“Do you love them as much as I do?” she asked, and she squeezed her fingers against my palm. When she pulled her hand away she'd left behind a small tab of paper. I held my hand close and squinted to get a better look at it.

Jeremy put his hand on my shoulder.

“Can you find a ride home?” Jeremy asked me, not even judgmental, but keys in his hand, like he was leaving either way. “I don't want to leave you, and I don't want to ruin your good time, but I can't take this scene.”

And for a minute, just a second, I seriously thought about staying. If there were one more thing to add to the long list of things I would do over if I could, not leaving that very instant would be on it. I should have dropped Olivia's hand and bolted for the door. Instead, I waited. I waited so long, in fact, that by the time I was running to catch him at the door, I had almost lost him.

 

18

We drove from the party through a series of winding roads up a mountain, and Jeremy was driving fast, like an actual person. I didn't ask where we were going. I should have been happy, but instead, I was starting to feel just the opposite. I had this sinking feeling that somehow I had done everything wrong this summer, made all the wrong choices. I shouldn't have been at a Freekmonkee concert tonight, or even at some stupid wrap party. I should have been alone somewhere writing Doon the longest, saddest, sorriest letter about how I'd never meant to hurt her feelings. There was no reason for me to be in LA, with people I barely knew and a sister who only tolerated me. I'd missed out on my brother, on my actual best friend, on my real if not glamorous life. The feeling was terrible, the kind I used to get at the end of summer camp, like I was losing the thing I was experiencing even while I was still in it, like life was beautiful and there and passing me by. I knew then that I was going to cry, and I didn't want to do it in front of Jeremy. I didn't want him to think that it was about his sister, and I didn't know how to explain what I was really feeling.

“You want to hear the crazy thing?” He paused a long time. “Just before the wrap party, Olivia called begging for me to go to the concert. She and Karl had some kind of fight, she was convinced that her house was bugged, she sounded crazy. And then we show up, and there's that scene.”

“Did you know she was DJing?”

“Is that what you call what she was doing? No, I didn't.”

“But she seemed so happy.”

“Happy?” He squeezed the steering wheel harder and leaned forward. “That's an interesting word for how she seemed. Probably not the first one I would pick.”

I remembered the tab she had put in my hand right before we left, a tiny monkey head on a hole-punch-size piece of paper, and then I felt even dumber than I had when we got in the car. “Sometimes I wish I could do this whole summer over again. I miss my brother, and my stupid mother, and even stupid, stupid Lynette. Do you ever feel like you make all the wrong choices?”

“Definitely,” he said, and then rounded a corner so sharp that the whole earth seemed to fall away. “Was this summer really that bad?”

For a minute I almost told him that the only thing good about my summer had been getting to know him. And that part was so good that it almost made up for the rest of the nonsense. He had little bits of glitter in his hair and he was so gorgeous that he all but glowed. No, my summer was not all that bad. Not by a long shot.

“It's not that,” I said. “I just wish I could have had this summer without missing the other summer I could have had.”

“I get that.”

We drove for a while in the night, and I loved the way in Los Angeles, no matter how miserable you were, you could disappear into something beautiful. The ocean. The mountains. The moon as wide and hypnotic as anything in the Freekmonkee landscape.

“Can I tell you something in confidence?”

“Sure.”

He waited another minute or two before continuing as we climbed higher and higher up darker and darker roads.

“I don't know if you're into that kind of gossip, but do you remember last year when there was a piece about Olivia being hospitalized while she was filming in Japan?”

“She was hospitalized for exhaustion,” I said. “I remember. What, was it drugs or something?”

Jeremy shook his head. “Her dad lives in Japan. We don't have the same dad, and I don't think Olivia had seen him in, like, ten years. So she wanted to meet him again, and it was this big thing because she's even more popular in Japan than she is here. There are girls who have plastic surgery just to get Olivia eyes. There are contact lenses in ‘Olivia gray.' It's freaky.”

“That must be weird.”

“It must have been, but it wasn't that. She arranged to meet her dad, who's now become this international businessman, at some super-exclusive restaurant. I guess that she wanted to impress him, to show him she'd done okay without him.”

“To make him love her,” I said. My arms felt chilled and I turned the air off.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm so used to sound stages. It's always cold.”

“No problem.”

He turned the heat on low and I wrapped my sweater over the ends of my hands.

“I don't know exactly what happened. I know that he made a pass at her. I don't think he tried to sleep with her, but he did something. My mom flew over and she told me not to go, but I should have. I was having problems of my own, and I didn't know exactly what was happening. Olivia's always been so dramatic. Even now I never know when she's really in trouble.”

My last mental snapshot had been of Olivia Taylor, practically spread-eagle next to Karl Marx, acting like some sad groupie and not like someone who used to be the world's biggest teen star. It reminded me a little of Squeaky Fromme, who got the nickname Squeaky because when the Manson family was living on the ranch, the owner was a blind old man who thought that Fromme squeaked when he was feeling her up. Which, evidently, was a frequent enough event to get a nickname out of the arrangement.

You couldn't have a favorite Manson girl—that would be like picking your favorite finger to start with as they ripped off your nails. But the one I thought about the most was Squeaky. Squeaky Fromme should never have been Squeaky Fromme, and not just the nickname, the whole deal. She should have grown up to become Lynette Fromme-Something-or-Other, veterinarian. Or dancer. Or poet. I'm not excusing her behavior. I don't think she was awesome. I still think she was a psycho who picked the dumbest hippie method possible to try to kill the president. Still.

Squeaky Fromme was a dancer as a child. She was on
The Lawrence Welk Show,
a program for the deeply old now—but big in its time—and performed in front of crowds of thousands at the Hollywood Bowl with a group called the Lariats. She loved animals and was voted best personality in junior high. But by high school she was shooting staple guns into her arms at work and begging her English teacher to take notice. She was covering black eyes and burning her arms with cigarettes. She pleaded with neighbors to take her in for a day, a week, the summer. She asked a friend's parents to adopt her. Any wild guesses as to why? Anyone? Anyone?

I know there's nothing worse than having your father molest you, but the problem is that you hear about it so much, it's like Roger talking about amnesia or past lives in his stupid script. It's just one of those stories, even though it's not. When I was reading about Squeaky Fromme, that her dad was probably a monster wasn't even a big reveal—it was like the “no, duh” of the book.

But the thing that stuck with me, that really bothered me even though it was about a million times less horrible, is that from the time she was a little girl, really little, he wouldn't let her eat dinner with the family. She had to sit somewhere separate while the rest of them ate Spam or whatever it was people ate in those days. That detail felt sad to me the same way Olivia Taylor's big, overstuffed, animal pit of a house felt sad. No wonder Squeaky Fromme found another family.

I read about a million reasons that the Manson murders took place. LSD. The sixties. Failed record deals. Racial unrest. Paranoid schizophrenia. And who knows? Who knows if they could have been stopped? I'm sure there's no simple way that everything could have been erased, made better. But if I had to write a memo to America on what to do to improve the future, on how to go back and correct the past, it would be simple:
Dear America: Please give your daughters sturdy bedroom doors that lock from the inside. And when they are hungry, give them a place at the table.

It wouldn't solve everything, but it would definitely be a start.

“That's really terrible,” I said, and it was almost like I meant Olivia and Squeaky Fromme together.

We kept driving and I thought about Olivia flying back and forth from Las Vegas, sitting alone with her sad dog and her iguana. Wondering if she was ever going to catch up to who she used to be, find a table where someone wanted her there just because.

“I think you have the coolest profile,” Jeremy said finally. “I like that when I look at you I can't think of anyone who looks quite like you. You have a great face. An interesting face.” It was the worst kind of compliment. Interesting, but not beautiful.

“Wonderful,” I said.

“I'm serious. You probably want to be pretty, because everyone here does. But pretty just winds up looking like a hundred girls who look like a hundred other girls who are all trying to look like the same person because they saw her in some stupid movie. That probably doesn't make sense, but after a while, pretty doesn't even register.”