Plaster City (A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco) (8 page)

“Thinking can’t be good,” Bobby said. “It ain’t our strongest suit.”

“Gabe said Julie was working for some rich dude in La Quinta, right?”

“Yeah, what Chucho told him.”

“And La Quinta isn’t that big.”

“Bigger than you think. Probably the size of Calexico. And it’s got all those golf courses, weird little nooks, crannies, dead-end streets, and some gated areas and shit.”

“Don’t fuck up my plan.”

“Sorry.” Bobby belched. “That tasted like shrimp. Weird.”

“How do you know so much about La Quinta?”

“Night golfing is free golfing.”

“Gabe said the dude drove a Humvee. A camouflage-painted Hummer.”

Bobby stood up quickly, a sway in his stance. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

“Let me finish. I was going to say that we should drive around La Quinta and look for a camo Hummer.”

“I know. I did the math. It was pluses and takeaways, not calculus.”

“Still. When a guy’s planning a plan, it’s polite to let him plan the plan. That’s all I’m saying.”

“My sincerest apologies. Now stand the fuck up.”

So at a quarter past hammered, we resumed our investigation. The booze had given us fresh insight and enough stupid to get us off our asses. We could have waited for daylight and sobriety, but that wasn’t our modus. And it was more likely for a person’s car to be parked in front of its owner’s house at midnight than if we waited for the next day.

Before we headed out, we made a drunk stratagem to stay on the residential streets and not drive over twenty-five miles per hour, because that’s the kind of elaborate preparations you construct when you’re drunk and have a stratagem.

“Should we bring the guns?” Bobby asked.

“What guns?”

“The just-in-case guns I brought.”

“Show me.”

Bobby went to the closet and pulled out a long gym bag.

“When did you put that in there?”

“When you were getting beer.”

Then, one at a time, Bobby pulled out four pistols, a rifle, and two shotguns. He spread them out on the bed like he was displaying them for sale. It was an impressive arsenal.

“Seven guns,” I said. “For two people.”

“Actually, I didn’t know you were coming. These were intended for my personal use.”

“Were you going to tie them all together and make a super-gun?”

“No, one at a time. If the opportunity arose. Although, let’s consider the super-gun idea. I never turn my back on awesome. Seven is stupid, though. But I could definitely do something with two shotguns. And if I had a sword and some duct tape—I should be writing this down.”

“Let’s leave the guns,” I said. “We’re drunk. They’re guns. I’m not loving the combo.”

“What if we run into trouble?”

“If we run into trouble, we’ll drive away at a safe twenty-five miles per hour, as per our stratagem. What kind of trouble can we get in? We’re looking for a car.”

Bobby shook his head. “It’s like you’ve never hung out with us before. Trouble finds us, bro. We’re shit magnets.”

“Exactly why the guns stay here. No reason to make big trouble out of standard-sized trouble.”

“Not even one of the small guns?”

“It’s not really about the size, Bobby.”

“Is that what Angie tells you?”

“Hilarious. Put the big bag of guns back in the closet.”

“You’re right. We’ll be fine with just my truck gun.”

“Then I’m driving. And you don’t drive a truck, it’s a car.”

“Don’t disrespect the Ranchero.”

Bobby packed the guns back into the gym bag and threw them in the closet. He tossed the bedspread on top for camouflage. Not exactly the hotel safe, but our neighbors were too busy breaking bad to lower themselves to petty theft.

FIVE

I don’t know if it was in spite of our advanced level of intoxication or because of it, but our search was shockingly efficient. Instead of driving around in a haphazard jumblefuck, we laid out a grid and never drove down the same street twice. Apparently, nothing focuses a drunk like a quest. Anyone who has ever yearned for rolled tacos at the end of a tequila binge knows what I’m talking about. The secret to accomplishing anything while drunk is to accept the limitations of one’s not-sober state. Denying drunkenness is exactly the kind of thinking that turns finding one’s car keys into the poorest man’s version of a scavenger hunt.

Bobby and I took my truck because—despite Bobby’s disappointment—it had no truck gun. I drove. Bobby studied a map and marked off the streets with a lavender crayon he found between the seats. We went up and down the north/south streets of La Quinta, back and forth, like tilling a field. It was all Calles and Avenidas with identical stucco and terra cotta tile houses. We kept our eyes open for a camouflage Hummer.

The first hour was boring, but we had enthusiasm on our side. The second hour was worse. Our dipping buzz and the lack of variety in the residential neighborhoods combined to test our stamina. We were losing faith in the stratagem. But the thought of being back in the soul-suck of a hotel room kept us going.

Before we switched to the east/west streets, we made a run through the looping lanes of the Palisades Golf Resort. There were at least a dozen golf courses in La Quinta. It was that kind of town. The country club houses were larger and tackier, the kind of new money monstrosities that the owner of a camo Hummer would consider classy. At least the nouveau riche, Disney-fake-European castles gave us visual variety.

“Look at these fucking houses,” Bobby said. “That one’s got those castle things.”

“Turrets.”

“I don’t know if that’s awesome or idiotic. I’m going to go with idiotic. Because if it’s something I would build, it’s probably stupid. I don’t even think those rocks in front are real. Are rocks expensive? Why would you use fake rocks? Are they easier to clean? All these houses look like an eight-year-old drew them on the back of his Pee Chee folder. Like Wayne Manor or Barbie’s fucking Dream House. With all the accessories. That one probably has a half-car, half-boat, half-airplane parked in the back.”

“Something can’t have three halves.”

“Exactly. The kind of person that builds that house wouldn’t know that.”

I forgot about the desert wealthy. Not exactly upper class. Different than rich farmers, who still worked. A whole different subspecies in these resort towns that’s all flashy and gross and big. Money can buy fake rocks, but it can’t buy class.

“Turn down this street. Calle Tlaxcala. We haven’t been down it.”

“I’m pretty sure you pronounced that wrong.”

“I’ll do you one better. I’m positive I said it wrong, but how else does
tl
sound?” Bobby said. “Where’d all the desert bros come from? Look at those douchebags and baguettes.”

As we turned the corner onto Calle Tlaxcala, Bobby pointed to a crowd of people spilling onto the driveway and lawn from a big, boxy structure, part Bauhaus/part World War II bunker. Loud hip-hop and bright lights emanated from the house. It had a big circular driveway with a trampoline inside the horseshoe. The trampoline: the white trash swimming pool. Couples and groups of men huddled outside, smoking, beers in their hands. I would say that someone’s parents went to Aruba for the week, leaving their kid at home to make sure nothing happened to their crystal egg, but most of the men were in their twenties or thirties.

They wore the uniform of the desert bro. Think frat boy who never went to college. Jersey Shore without the water. Farmer’s tans made by the sun instead of a cancer machine. Ed Hardy shirts and backward baseball caps. Oakley sunglasses, even at night. Goatees or shaped three-day growth. Essentially they all looked like middle relief pitchers on vacation. The kind of guys that thought they looked like MMA fighters, but really looked like assholes. Ending their night by picking a fight because none of the women got drunk enough to believe their bullshit or the roofies they bought were actually Pepcid. Whenever one of them laughed, it sounded cruel.

The desert bro was not defined by race. There were as many brown people at the party as white. Definitely not a race thing. It’s a desert thing.

I know that I sound judgmental and mean and that I’m generalizing. But I grew up here and know the desert. Believe whatever you want, but when you come out to the desert and one of these date rapes starts yelling “faggot” in the strip joint parking lot and kidney punches you as you try to walk away, you’ll remember what I said. I will, of course, graciously accept your apology.

The ladies were the female equivalent of the men, dressed to match. A lot of skin. A little wobbly on stripper heels. Navel piercings, tramp stamps, hair spray, and a few chola eyebrows. Dee Snider makeup over George Hamilton tans. And if you looked closely at their legs and arms, they always seemed to have bruises. Many of them might have been attractive under all that pancake, but it would take some serious excavating to find out.

We cruised by the partygoers. A smog of cologne, perfume, and body spray assaulted us through the open window. My eyes watered from the musky, desperate fumes.

“Holy shit,” Bobby said, waving his hand in front of his face. “How bad do those fuckers smell, they got to make themselves stink like that? It’s like getting pepper sprayed with eau de whorehouse.”

“Dead end. Story of our night.”

Calle Tlaxcala was two blocks long and ended in a cul-de-sac. Tlaxcala is the smallest state in Mexico, so it figures that the smallest street in La Quinta would be named after it. Sadly, my knowledge of Mexican geography gave me no added sense of triumph. Triumph came as I made the three-point turn and the headlights revealed camouflage.

“Well, I’ll be hornswoggled,” Bobby said.

We took a long look at the Hummer, the headlights blowing out the tans and browns. I’d been thinking green camouflage, but desert camo made more sense. There was no street parking, so I pulled my truck into the driveway of a house with a
F
OR
S
ALE
sign out front.

“What now?” I said. “You think the Hummer’s owner is at the party? Or maybe that’s his party? He could live on this street in one of the other houses. Do we wait for him to come out? Hang here?”

“Slow down, Mister Questions,” Bobby said. “From the looks of that crowd, those assholes are the kind of assholes to drive this asshole of a car.”

“Fair point. But how do we figure out which asshole among the gaggle?”

“I’m going to shake the car, make the alarm go off. Whoever turns it off, that’s our asshole.”

A simple, yet effective plan. Usually our plans were much more violent and caveman-esque in their execution. The fact that Bobby’s plan didn’t involve “fucking some motherfucker up” was a pleasant surprise. Though of course that part should always be implied in any of Bobby’s plans.

Bobby hopped out, looking both ways in an overexaggerated manner. He couldn’t have looked more conspicuously suspicious if he was twiddling his thumbs and whistling. I should have been watching him through eyeholes cut out of a newspaper. He pushed against the front fender. The body of the truck rocked back and forth. No alarm.

Bobby gave me a look. I shrugged and got out. The two of us violently shook the Hummer. Nothing.

“What the hell?” Bobby said. “What kind of asshole drives a monstrosity that most people would key on principle and doesn’t alarm it?”

“You got a Plan B?”

“I wish I had my Plan Bs, I’d just . . .” Bobby drifted off, looking at the front yard of the house. He found a good-sized, real rock and threw it through the driver’s side window of the Hummer. Pebbles of glass rained onto the ground, making surprisingly little sound. Still no alarm.

“Yeah, I guess we could do that,” I said, looking toward the party to see if anyone saw or heard. I could feel the music from the house thumping in my chest, so I doubted it.

Bobby popped the lock and jumped in the driver’s seat. I stayed on lookout duty, meaning that I stood where I was and did nothing. It was my first day as a lookout. You couldn’t expect much.

“Remember this name,” Bobby said. “Craig Driskell. That’s the name on the registration.”

“Craig Driskell. Got it.”

“Nothing else in the glove box. Some pens. Papers. Under the seats? Whoa-ho!”

Shirking my lookout duties, I glanced into the Hummer. Bobby held up a snubnose pistol.

“Craig ain’t playing,” Bobby said.

“Better put it back.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to do that.”

“You’re going to steal a gun?”

“You say that like I’m a criminal. This fuck might have something to do with Julie’s gone missing. He doesn’t get to have a gun. Anyways, it’d be irresponsible to leave a handgun in a car with a busted window. You don’t want a kindergartner to accidentally get his little hands on it, do you?”

“I don’t think a kindergartner is going to look under the seat of a Hummer at two in the morning.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“What kind of person feels the need to keep a gun in his car?”

“Driving this jerkoff-mobile is like picking a fight with civilization.” Bobby smiled, and then looked at me. “Oh, I see what you did. I’m that kind of person is what you’re saying. Very hilarious.”

Bobby turned on the Hummer’s headlights and hopped out. He put the pistol in his pants at the small of his back, covered it with his shirt, and walked toward the party. “Come on. We have to find the driver of this car. His lights are on. As good citizens, we can’t let his battery die, can we?”

“The window’s broke. Couldn’t we reach in and turn the lights off? And I don’t think anybody’d notice if we just crashed the party.”

Bobby shook his head, mumbled to himself, and walked away.

Bobby and I walked through the gauntlet in the driveway and let ourselves in the front door. We entered the giant living room, the far wall made entirely of windows looking out onto the swimming pool and the darkness of the golf course beyond it.

I would be the first to admit that I knew nothing about interior decoration. I was a mattress on the floor, milk cartons and one-by-sixes bookshelf kind of guy. But even in my ignorance, I knew that living room was a marvel of bad decisions and unfortunate combinations. A display that I could only describe as Powerball chic. The product of someone that all of sudden had money and then spent that money in one Jaeger-soaked Internet shopping binge.

In the center of the room sat a matching fuchsia cheetah-
print sofa, love seat, and lounge chair. The coffee table looked like an antique, beautiful and complex woodwork adorning the edges. In a different house, it would have been the room’s centerpiece. Currently it was covered in beer bottles and chipped at the edges. Those were the functional elements.

The rest was an insane mishmash. A life-size sculpture of a nude woman that might have been Venus—if Venus had gotten a tit job and ass implants based on a Boris Vallejo painting of Ice-T’s wife. Something that looked like a hamster maze, but I’m pretty sure was an elaborate stand-up bong. An old school, coin-op
Robotron: 2084
arcade game. A narwhal horn. An oil-on-leather painting of an Indian chief and a grizzly bear standing on a mesa looking at a distant sunrise. That “art” hung over a giant flat-screen playing a montage of gonzo porn, Russian dashcams, and street fights. There was an aquarium that only had jellyfish in it. And a Raiders flag was unevenly tacked to the wall.

Thirty more Tapout T-shirts and halter tops hovered throughout the room. Everyone was dressed so similarly, it felt like some kind of ironic costume party. Imagine a room full of off-the-clock general contractors and the girls that check your ID at the gym. The fug of aftershave and perfume was thicker indoors.

“You got any quarters?” I asked.

“You’re not playing
Robotron
. We’re investigating,” Bobby said. “Quit making me the voice of reason. It feels all wrong.”