How to Get Into the Twin Palms (7 page)

I fixed the sheets. They were still damp on his side. They felt sticky and I didn’t want to be in them anymore. Dried sweat layered with new sweat. His smell. I inhaled deeply. It started making me sick. I kept inhaling anyway. Till the nausea came. I got up and ran to the bathroom. Kneeled in front of the toilet and waited for it to come up and when I saw that he had left a ring of shit in my toilet… it did.

Afterward, I decided that washing the sheets would be the best idea. I pulled them off. I put them in a pile in my room and turned on the ceiling fan and turned it on full blast. I waited for the smell to rush out of the windows and into the alley. It didn’t. It clung to the mattress where he laid and labored. It clung to the mattress. It clung to the walls.

I tried my first attempt at leaving then.

THE LITTLE LIMB OF THE GAS GAUGE SAID MY
car had six gallons of gas in it. My rent was due in two days. My check from the government was already in the mail. It would probably come on the third day. I could hold everything off until then. If I took the 405 Freeway I would sit in traffic for hours and my car would overheat and I would be down to two gallons of gas. Minimum. It was 3 p.m. I pulled some clothes together. I had to rush. I left the sheets in the washer of my building. I didn’t have enough quarters for the dryer. Someone, maybe the fish man, would take pity on me. More likely I’d find them in a pile on the floor on the concrete, mildewy and dank, but I didn’t care.

 

I drove down Sunset Boulevard, through the winding of billboards. My favorite part was coming up. The Chateau Marmont was looming over the boulevard looking French. It negated the advertisements for slim jeans and elaborately rhinestoned pop-star fragrances and made things look stately.

The cars weren’t snaking back and forth yet. Heading back to their apartments from Century City assistant jobs and executive jobs and movie lot jobs. I knew this because I had placed temp candidates for them and I knew where the hot jobs were. Century City. Near Cheviot Hills and Beverlywood and Rancho Park and everything that sounded nice.

I kept driving through Bel Air. Stared at the gates, took the turns quickly on Sunset, where I always pretended to be a race car driver, past the Jacaranda trees, and pulled alongside the 405 and saw the jam. In both directions, the cars were slowly stalling and stuck. Traffic had started early so I would have to continue further.

When I came to the mouth of Sunset the ocean was in front of me. I pulled right onto PCH and drove alongside the water. The sun had burned through the fog. The sky looked endless and the houses were pouring down all around me. I pulled over and crawled down a dirt cliff onto the sand.

I sat on the beach and stared at the expanse of sky. The waves crashed down and the water wanting to smother me. The sun was too much so I wandered into an embankment next to a house. I hoped they weren’t home and wouldn’t come after me. The sheen on the water was making me sick, making my eyes hurt. I closed them but the flicker was still there. I touched my hands to my face and his smell was still on me. It smelled like dried saliva, it was sour and I didn’t want it on me anymore. If I went to the water I would throw up in it. I went down and sat in the embankment and covered my hands in the cool, damp sand hoping the salt would take away the smell and closed my eyes. I rubbed them deep in the sand in a frenzy, purposely taking off layers of my skin.

I rubbed them raw and then I fell asleep.

“Get up and get out.”

I opened one eye at a time. A middle-aged man in yellow swim trunks was kicking at me. He had gray chest hair rolling down his chest in white ripples. He saw me staring and got self-conscious. He stopped kicking, then collected himself and started nudging me with his toe.

“Stop kicking me.”

“Get up then.”

“Jesus, give me a second.”

I was slow to get up. He kept his foot near me and I swatted at it.

“Get out of here,” I said.

That made him incredulous. “I live here. You get out!”

“Goddamnit.” I tried getting up. My hands were caked with sand. I started rubbing off the sand and moaned. Remembering what I had done. My hands were pink like dead baby skin. Abrasions in between my fingers. On the prints.

“What’d you do to yourself?” He was staring at my hands as I was staring at his chest hair. Layers were falling on top of layers on top of his nipples. I hadn’t even reached his face yet. The fuzz covered his shoulders too. He was like a great big polar bear in yellow swim trunks. He started nudging me with his toe again.

“Do that again and I’ll break your toe.” I couldn’t swat at him this time. My hands were throbbing.

“You think you’re tough? Get up.”

I did what I was told but I didn’t like it. “I need a cigarette.”

“It’s fire season.”

I tried to stand up without using my hands. It was tough.

“What did you do to your hands?”

“None of your business. Do you have a cigarette or not?”

“No, I don’t.”

It was no use. I walked away from him and the beach. I didn’t want to feel nauseated anymore anyway. I turned toward the water one more time and stared real hard. It trembled under the weight of the shine and then it crashed into the sand.

 

Driving was a bitch. That fur ball man was right. What had I done? I had two skinned baby rabbits for hands and I was having trouble keeping them out of the sun. I put the visor down but that only obscured my vision driving down PCH. I needed salvation. Or Vaseline. Something. I pulled into the parking lot of CVS and walked in, holding my hands down. I found Vaseline. I slathered it on in the car. The sand that was still stuck
scraped deeper and deeper and mixed with the yellowish jelly and created a thick coat over my fingers. I clung to the steering wheel and sat in the traffic snaking down and around the glittering ocean.

IF THAT HAD TAUGHT ME ANYTHING AT ALL IT
was that I should never leave the house again. My sheets were gone. Not even in a heap on the concrete floor in the laundry room. One of the Russians had stolen them and put them on their own beds, no doubt. I thought about all the men who had been with me on those sheets. Not many, really.

Each one put his head on the pillowcase. Or pushed my face down into the pillowcase. We had all thrashed around between the same duvet and full-fitted sheet.

All but one.

I lay down on my bare mattress and watched the ceiling fan rotate. I held my Vaseline hands up to cool down, to stop the throbbing. His smell was still here. In the mattress. I felt it in my skin again. Old, turned milk. All men have that smell. It stays on the skin, settles in between the follicles. I kept smelling my arm, both arms. Repulsed and intoxicated. I wanted to erase him and keep him. What did I smell like on him? Was he smelling his hands as he drove? Did he try to erase me too?

THE FIRST TIME I SMELLED THE TURNED MILK
smell was in Poland. The tenements were fading and crumbling. The walls were stained with soot from passing Fiats and Volkswagens. The wallpaper in our apartment in Poland had yellowed. The plastic floral tablecloth had stayed the same, faded in new places. Food smells from the neighbors tumbled through the walls. Chicken fat from soup and dried sausages mixed with urine from the pipes in the bathroom. It accumulated from each bathroom and ran down the pipes in the apartment. The smells seeped into the beds, the sofa, and the carpet. I would hold my face down and inhale through my mouth. Inhale until I felt like bursting, and then hold my face up and gasp for air. My mother would open the windows and curse the neighbors. Curse the chicken fat smell. The smell was heavy in the air coming through the windows and from above. We couldn’t escape it.

I watched out the window as the starlings pulsed back and forth. Over the trees, TV antennas, and big gray
bloki
. They swirled over the park, once an old Jewish cemetery that the Communists tore through, ransacked the headstones and built walkways and planted trees. My mother used to walk us there, daily. There were no signs of headstones anymore. Everything wiped away. Only the birds kept watch. Swirling above and congregating in the trees. They didn’t fly anywhere else in the city.
Just here. Over the
bloki
, through the sky, over the old cemetery, and over the park.

 

In Poland, they do three kisses. Once per cheek and then another one. An extra one – the one that tripped me up. One cheek, next cheek, back to the first cheek. There was Polish. They spoke so fast and I tried to understand between the giggles. I stared and smiled and looked coy and they told me how pretty I looked and I smiled even more and then he came and he kissed me and I was confused and I kissed one cheek, another cheek, and then panicked and we both went for the mouth and then I switched to the cheek again and his wife and everyone around us laughed. He smiled and patted my back and I didn’t even know who he was. They set up a long table in their apartment and no one could move around it. The tablecloth was sticky and plastic and covered in burnt orange flowers and brown stems. Strictly Eastern Bloc fare. The
galaretka
of chicken pieces, carrots, and peas suspended in a yellow gelatin were served in dainty coffee cups with curved handles, and sat among bowls of cucumbers in sour cream and dill, pickle soup, tripe soup, borscht,
gołąbki
, potatoes with dill,
bigos
(hunter’s stew), kielbasa steaming and split open.

My plate was layered with food. Crowded in by it. Cherry cordial. Homemade wine from the village.
Sharlotka
for dessert. I ate everything. Swallowed the pickle soup, watched the sour cream separate and rise to the top, swelling and clouding in the bowl. I caught him staring once or twice. My one-armed auntie caught it too. She made the dinner all by herself. She circled the table and watched us eat. Listened to us slurp.

My mother had stopped making pickle soup long ago and she did not know how to make
sharlotka
.

They wanted to hear about America.

We used to send them blue jeans when we couldn’t get back into the country, before the Communists left in 1991.
Wranglers, Levis, sometimes Guess. They would send letters begging for blue jeans and my mother put together boxes for them. Everything American. Even things we didn’t have. Behind their backs she would call them vultures. When we came they were wearing our blue jeans. He was staring at me and he was wearing blue jeans my mother bought him. A 34-inch inseam. I remember. When he stared at me my face got hot. When he spoke to me I didn’t understand him. He asked about school and friends and I smiled and nodded. Yes. I had both. I averted my eyes and stared at the curtains. Billowing and lacy and yellowing. The adults were talking. Talking about who had died. Who had cancer. Who was next.

He asked me if I wanted to go see the
dzialka
behind the apartments. My mother pushed me out of my chair. She said yes for me, that I did want to see the garden. She told me to stop looking so bored, in English. They all smiled and couldn’t understand.

We climbed down the stairs of the apartment building. Crumbly, different from our
blok
. This was a town outside the city and the buildings were squat with red doors and barns nearby. There were cows walking around and Fiats broken down beside the buildings. We walked behind the apartments and there were the gardens each family had. They were fenced in with beets, cucumbers, and tomatoes growing untended. I could hear him breathing beside me. He stuttered a few words in English and said he was taking classes. He was wearing a sweater even though it was warm out. He walked me in between the rusting chicken wire, took me where no one could see, and I wanted to kiss him. I watched his mouth moving and I thought about it.

He stared at me and said, “You like here?”

“Here in Poland? Or here in the
dzialki
?” I said.

He smiled. Laughed. “I guess both.”

My back had started to sweat. Drips of sweat pooled at the waist of my pants. How could he be wearing a sweater? I gave
him a coy little smile, like I thought you were supposed to do and then I turned away and picked a tomato to play hard to get.

“That’s not our
pomidor
.”

He took it out of my hand and I smelled my fingers. The sour smell. The little hairs on the vines pulling away and covering my fingers as I pressed.

“Come over here.”

I followed through morning glories closed and fading and scraped past the chicken wire. Closer to the line of trees and further away from the apartment. I didn’t want to look at him but when I did I saw his eyes and I knew we were going to go deeper into the plots and why and I didn’t turn away and I didn’t go back. No one else was willing to do this for me.

 

He put his tongue into my mouth and I could taste the pickle soup all over again and I could taste that he had eaten herring. Even though I had been careful to avoid it.

I WENT TO BINGO BUT IT HAD BEEN CANCELED
without anyone telling me. I walked to my car, pissed about losing the $50 for the night. The cold, dry air made my hands sting. I had to walk uphill and realized I could walk a couple of blocks and see the lights of the city. Probably see my apartment from here. The lights of the Twin Palms. All of it was obscured by the lights of Hollywood Boulevard. I liked driving down Hollywood. On the east edge, near the border of Little Armenia and next to the old apartments. Some had spires. There were castles on Hayworth too, where I lived, but these were bigger, more foreboding. They weren’t like the two-story stuccos built in the ’70s with the tropically deceptive names. The buildings shot up and past the palm trees that lined the streets here. I drove past the Hollywood Downtowner motel and wondered what was going on in the rooms. I decided to pull into the parking lot. I opened the latched little gate and stared at the swimming pool that was up lit in the midst of the split-level stucco building. I sat down on a green plastic lawn chair and stared at the water quietly, waiting to hear sex sounds. The motel office was well lit and displayed signage stating that the establishment accepted AAA. Famous people headshots covered the walls, enticing tourists into believing that they too could see someone famous. They could sit and breathe famous air.