Earth Angel (19 page)

“Haven’t you heard, size doesn’t matter.” David poured water on the briefcase. It puddled and spread toward the edges. “Keep
the van steady, Vernon,” he said. “This is the crucial part. Everybody, put your strand of hair at the edge of the water and
hold on to it.” We did so. Each pinned the end of the hair with the tip of a finger as if it were a mouse’s tail. “Nobody
knows why exactly, no scientist has been able to explain it, but when you let go of that hair, it will race for the center
of the puddle. The first one to reach center belongs to the smartest and bravest among you. That’s what the Thonga believe,
anyway. Ready? Lean closer.”

I leaned closer. I knew it was absurd, but I really wanted to win. I wanted my hair to reach the middle first and teach these
horny teenage boys a lesson about women.

“Everyone ready?”

“Yes,” we all replied, our voices edgy with competition.

“On the count of three. One… two…”

Splat!!!!

David spanked his hand into the puddle, splashing all of us in the face. We recoiled, wiping our eyes.

David laughed. “I can’t believe you fell for that. Racing of the hair?” He laughed again. “Too easy.”

We drove across the Mexican border into Tijuana.

“Stu,” Vernon called. “You’ve got the directions.”

Stu dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a folded piece of notebook paper. He crawled up into the front seat and the two
of them squinted at street signs and made numerous and seemingly random turns.

“Is this a brothel you’re going to?” I asked Kyle.

“I don’t think so. Not technically. It’s more like a hotel. Some of the guys from Edison High School went and told us about
it.”

David shouldered his camera and switched on the light. “What did they tell you?”

“That the girls were young and not fat. They’re all supposed to be cousins or something. Their family owns the hotel.”

A family business, I thought. Like my parents’ delicatessen.

“Do they give you a choice among the girls?” David asked.

“I think so.”

“What will you look for when you choose?”

Kyle looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“What will help you pick the girl you want to have sex with? Breast size? Her face? Her smile? Her ass? Are you going to talk
to them first?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. Looks, I guess. She has to be cute. Or at least not fat.”

“What if they don’t have any skinny ones left?” I asked.

“Jesus, who cares?” Vernon said. “Fat or thin, they’re guaranteed to have the one thing that counts.”

I smiled. As annoying as Vernon was, at least he was honest about what he was here for. No pretense. But I wanted Kyle to
admit that he would fuck anything, fat, fatter, or obese. He was hoping for Julia Roberts, he’d settle for Roseanne Arnold.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” I asked Kyle.

He wagged his head as if he wasn’t sure. “I date,” he said. “Nobody special.” I wondered if that wasn’t partly because of
his breath. Even from across the van, and despite the Breath Savers he’d been popping since we’d started the drive, I could
smell the strong scent of garlic.

“You have a job, Kyle?” I asked.

“I work at Angie’s Italian Restaurant in Tustin. I just got off a few hours ago.”

“You cook, right?”

He smiled. “Yeah, how’d you know?”

I shrugged. The garlic smell wasn’t from eating but from handling garlic. The smell enters the body through the pores in his
hands, then travels up the bloodstream until it’s released in his lungs and then is exhaled as bad breath. The Breath Savers
would help, but chewing parsley would work better, cleaning his breath for about twenty-four hours. The love potion that could
change his sex life was that little sprig he probably pushed aside at restaurants.

“How much does it cost?” I asked Kyle. “For a hooker.”

“Well, uh—”

“Depends on what you want,” Vernon answered, the apparent expert. “The basic slam-bam is twenty-five bucks. Cheaper than taking
a girl to dinner and the movies.”

I looked at Vernon’s face reflected in the rearview mirror. The corners of his mouth were a little red and irritated, probably
just getting over a bout of herpes. I wanted to tell him that the herpes simplex virus is jump-started by
amino acid arginine. He should stay away from beer, chocolate, cola, peas, peanuts, and cashews—all rich in arginine.

Stu sat with a slight hunch that might indicate a tender back. He wore cowboy boots, which doubled the amount of stress on
the back. The bulge in his shirt pocket looked like a pack of cigarettes. Smoking reduced the amount of oxygen that traveled
to the spinal discs. A pack of cigarettes a day doubles his risk of back pain.

I closed my eyes tightly. I was looking at three boys and all I could see were symptoms of decay. I wanted to doctor them,
cure their problems. Or maybe just mother them. What was the difference between those two impulses? From the moment of conception,
everyone is always in a stage of dying. A doctor used medicine to relieve the symptoms of that process; a mother used love
to make the process endurable. I didn’t even have a clue as to how to go about doing the latter. My species of love had only
hastened the deaths of my baby and of Tim. My love was part of the disease.

I turned my attention to David. I studied him for symptoms of something. But I found nothing. A good-looking man with a limp.
Period.

Suddenly the van squealed over to a curb and Vernon hollered, “Grab your wallets, guys. We have arrived at heaven’s gate.”

The boys were suddenly very quiet as they all climbed out of the van. Vernon grabbed his briefcase. David followed them, his
camera whirring. As I was about to get out, too, he turned to me, I thought to tell me to wait in the van or something. Instead,
he said, “Be careful you don’t walk on the left. You’ll cast a shadow on my filming.”

I hopped out and kept behind him as they walked toward the Asencion Hotel, a small, dirty building squeezed between a bar
and an appliance store. The atmosphere of the neighborhood wasn’t so much that it had gone to seed but that it
had been built that way: designed by incompetent architects, built by corrupt builders on the take, and inhabited by people
waiting for their phony ID to arrive so they could avoid the police. It smelled as if every dog in the city had made a holy
pilgrimage to urinate somewhere on the street.

We hadn’t even crossed the street, when two thin Mexican men approached. One wore a double-breasted suit and silk tie, the
other black jeans and a plain white T-shirt stretched over thick muscles. They were both in their early twenties. The one
in the suit waved his hands at David. “No television,” he said. “No television.”

David immediately began speaking Spanish with them. Stu, Kyle, and Vernon stood clumped together like scared kids. David spoke
rapidly but the men kept shaking their heads. David took out his wallet and pulled some bills out. The men hesitated, looked
back at the hotel, whispered to each other. Reluctantly, they shook their heads and backed away still saying, “No television.”

David turned to the boys. “They won’t let me take the camera inside so I guess this is far as I go. See you boys later. Good
luck in there.”

“You think it’s safe?” Kyle asked, blinking nervously.

Vernon didn’t have a wisecrack this time. He and Stu waited for David’s answer.

“What do you mean by safe?”

“Like, are those guys going to jump us and steal our money or something.”

David shrugged. “I don’t know. One of them told me they did a big business with American boys, so I can’t see why they’d do
something to jeopardize their business. They were nice enough fellows, but there are no guarantees. That’s what makes it an
adventure, right?”

The boys exchanged solemn looks. Kyle pointed at the bar next to the hotel. “We’re going to go into the bar and get a drink
first. You two want to join us?”

David looked to me for a decision.

I held my hand out in a fist. “Winner chooses.”

He laughed and held out a fist. I counted one-two-three-go! and we threw out our choice. I had scissors, he had rock. We did
it again. I did scissors again, he did rock. I shook my head. He packed his camera in the bag and we followed the boys across
the street to the bar.

“What if you’d won?” he asked.

“We’d be doing exactly the same thing.”

He shook his head. “You’re a very strange woman, Grace.”

We sat separate from the boys, letting them talk among themselves to build whatever courage they needed to face the women
next door. The bar was dark and hot and smoky. The place smelled like old bacon. There were plenty of other Americans here,
lots of them high-school and college age. And locals, most of them smoking. Everywhere I looked I saw symptoms of disease.
The middle-aged bartender occasionally grimaced and rubbed his chest between pouring drinks. Heartburn or indigestion. I glanced
down at his stomach. It was plump as a watermelon, reined in by a too-tight belt with a huge silver buckle. Many cases of
heartburn and stomach cramps in middle-aged men are caused by wearing their belts too tight.

“What’ll you have?” David asked as the waitress hovered.

I avoided looking at her, not wanting to diagnose anything. “Beer.”

He ordered in Spanish and she left. He held up his fist for another go at rock-scissors-paper.

“What for?” I asked.

“See who pays for the drinks.”

“Best out of three,” I said, trying to work the odds. He couldn’t win indefinitely.

I did rock, he did paper. I did paper, he did scissors. I pulled out a five-dollar bill and laid it on the table. “How do
you do that?”

“It’s a secret.”

“Come on, tell me.” It was impossible for him to always win, it went against the rules of physics, it defied the laws that
governed the entire universe. It had to be a trick, an illusion. Had to be. “Tell me,” I said.

“I could tell you,” he said, “but then I’d have to kill you.”

“Old joke.”

He shrugged. “I’m an old guy. Anyway, if I told you, you’d stop thinking of me as godlike.”

“I wasn’t aware I’d started.”

“Sure you did. Everyone needs a god. Otherwise, you’d end up a cappuccino addict turning tricks for just enough cash to have
tattooed on your thigh, ‘We all are born mad. Some remain so.’”

I laughed. “How do you stand yourself?”

“Don’t you want to know where that quote comes from? It’s the only quote I can remember from college. I have to pull it out
for all occasions. Birthdays, weddings, funerals. Try working it into a wedding toast sometimes. It’s not easy.”

“
Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989. Now tell me how you do it. Show me.”

He looked at me with awe. “You know that quote? Damn, now I’ll have to look at you as godlike.”

“Good, then I command you to tell me the secret of how you win at rock-scissors-paper.”

“No can do. It’s a secret. Everybody has secrets. Right, Grace?” He said my name in a funny way, like he knew it wasn’t really
my name. “You know how much I hate it that you knew my quote. I’m devastated here.”

“What makes you think I have a secret?”

“I
know
you do. For instance, your hair’s not really brown. When I iced your shin I saw the tiny blond hairs on your legs that go
with a natural blonde. It’s unusual for
a natural blonde to dye her hair dark, especially when so many women want to be blond.”

Was he toying with me? Had he seen through my disguise just as Jackie had? I shrugged as if the subject were too minor to
speak about. “It’s no big secret. It’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re blond. Like in those Tarzan movies when the
natives see a blond woman and they all want to worship ‘the golden-haired one.’ You laugh when you see that until you realize
that the supposed civilized world isn’t much different. They don’t want to worship you, but they do want you to conform to
some image they have.”

“I didn’t realize there was so much responsibility to being blond.”

“A shitload,” I said.

He burst out laughing. A few heads turned. Kyle, Vernon, and Stu looked over.

“What do you do? For a living.”

“Dentist,” I said. I had no idea where that came from.

“Hmm, that’s interesting.”

“Really? In what way?”

He started to say something, stopped, shrugged. “I have no idea. Actually, it gives me the willies, the idea of looking into
people’s mouths. Too intimate. Worse than gynecology.”

“I hadn’t made the connection before.”

“See, that’s another thing. I don’t see how a male gynecologist can be objective the way he’s supposed to be. I don’t care
how happily married he is, some beautiful woman comes into your office and spreads her legs, you’ve got to react. It’s only
human.”

“So, you think Christie Brinkley’s gynecologist goes into his private office and whacks off after she leaves?”

“Someone should do a study. See whether male gynecologists masturbate at work more than people in other professions.”

I laughed. “I bet you can get a university grant.”

“I am an anthropologist. Human behavior in cultural patterns is my specialty.”

“I thought whacking off might be.”

“Ouch,” he said. “Your aim is true and your blade sharp.”

The drinks arrived. The waitress took the five, said
Gracias
, and left without giving any change.

“Did you say you were on vacation? I forget.”

“In a way,” I said. “I sold my dental practice. Got tired of L.A. Looking for someplace new.”

“Thinking of moving back to Santa Barbara?”

“Trying not to think at all for a while. Just be.”

I expected some witty comeback, but he didn’t say anything. Just nodded agreement.

I looked at him closely, again searching for symptoms of some malady he might be suffering from. Ulcers, migraines, insomnia.
Where was that death bud waiting to blossom? The eyes were clear, the skin healthy. Nothing yet. “Rachel says you’re her godfather.”

“Yup. Her dad was my best friend since third grade when we both discovered a mutual hate for girls.”