Russian Spring (43 page)

By then, Bobby was beginning to get the idea. Huge as it was, the campus still seemed crowded, something like sixty thousand people went to school here, Eileen told him, the majority of them Asians and Chicanos, clean-cut in pressed jeans, walking shorts, Trojan T-shirts, short, functional haircuts, with an air of grim earnestness as they marched in squads from class to class. There were an amazing number of men in military uniform; four years of free tuition in return for four years as cannon fodder was how a lot of people financed their education here.

“It’s not exactly like I thought it would be,” Bobby muttered.

“Which was . . . ?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “The Sorbonne with palm trees . . . This feels more like some kind of
factory
than a real university campus.”

“That’s
just
what it
is!
” Eileen told him. “A factory for turning out engineers and technicians and soldiers and general gringo jingo spare parts for the Big Green Money Machine!”

They took the subway back to the Sparrows’ house; Tawny Sparrow was out shopping or something, so they were able to enjoy a long love-making session in Eileen’s room, which brightened up the rest of the afternoon. But the thought of another dinner like last night’s filled Bobby with dread.

“Well then, let’s do the town, such as it is,” Eileen said when he voiced his trepidations.

And they more or less did.

They drove down to Chinatown, a vast sprawl of souvenir shops, oriental boutiques, kitschy art galleries, holoshows, and Chinese restaurants, where they had quite a good meal in a place that looked like a fast-food joint from the outside and a Chinese palace straight out of Disney World on the inside.

They drove to the world-famous corner of Hollywood and Vine, and walked the length of Hollywood Boulevard, looking at the stars on the sidewalks. The Chinese Theater, the Egyptian one across the street, the Kyoto and the Angkor Wat down the block, Brown’s Famous ice-cream parlor, the Hollywood Wax Museum, and the rest of the old landmarks were now built into the ground floors of immense high-rise office blocks, like the old Coupole on the Boulevard Montparnasse. Bobby got the eerie feeling that a whole section of the city had been turned into a Disney version of itself.

“No grand tour of la-la land would be complete without a session on Mulholland Drive,” Eileen told him as she drove up Laurel Canyon Boulevard into the Hollywood Hills, a low range of mountains completely overgrown with weird houses and free-form apartment blocks that hung from every nook and cranny, many of them actually hanging out from the hillsides on frail-looking stilts.

Mulholland Drive, however, was something else again, a ridgeline road that ran all the way along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains from east of here to the sea, Eileen told him, and one of the few areas in Los Angeles that the developers had been prevented from festooning with ticky-tacky, though she was sure Daddy was working on it.

Here, the houses were far apart and large, and they were set back off the road amid the rough natural chaparral, and when the car rounded a curve, Bobby was treated to a sight that quite blew him away. Eileen parked the car on a shelf of wheel-beaten earth that
seemed as if it had seen generations of use, and they got out, and she just let him gape without saying a word.

The shadowy shoulders of the mountains tumbled down toward a long broad valley floor jeweled with millions of lights, a huge man-made star field that filled the valley completely and oozed up the slopes of the mountain range on the other side like a scintillant amoeba. Gridworks of glowing streetlights checkerboarded the vista, and rivers of red and white neon freeway traffic flowed through it. A golden aura seemed to hover over it, quite washing out the night sky, except for the running lights of airplanes and helicopters flitting above it like fireflies. It glowed, it shimmered, it wriggled with electronic motion, it seemed like some kind of huge man-made organism—vast and energetic and pulsating, and somehow eerily alive.

“Merde . . . ,” Bobby whispered.

“And that’s only
the Valley,
” Eileen said behind him.

Bobby stood there gaping in wonder. And then he heard the sound.

Compounded of the chatter of passing helicopters and the drone of light planes and the far-off rushing roar of all the distant traffic echoing up the mountain slopes, and the bustle of all those millions of lives, the triumphantly artificial landscape seemed to be singing an electronic song that thrummed in his bones. Waves of energy pulsed up at him, sweeping him away on their electronic tide, into a place he had never been before.

In that moment, looking down from the roof of the world on what Americans had wrought on the edge of the continent, and feeling the artificial life’s breath of Los Angeles surging up at him, Bobby felt himself awash in the sheer glorious unbridled crazy
power
of it all.

In that moment, Bobby somehow knew what it really meant to be an American, felt for the first time inextricably a part of this land’s collective destiny, for better or worse, of the unknown future still unfolding in this once-lost homeland, where, however tormented, however twisted, some grand and mysterious spirit had not yet vanished from the Earth.

“Well,
come on,
” Eileen said impatiently, tugging him by the hand toward the car.

“Huh?” Bobby muttered in a daze.

“We’re on
Mulholland Drive,
we’re supposed to have the Mulholland
experience!
”

“What . . . ?”

“We’re supposed to
screw
in the car, of course!”

“In
there?
” Bobby muttered, looking at the cramped interior of the two-seater. “I don’t think we can really—”

“Of course we can!” Eileen insisted. “People have been doing it up here for at least
a hundred years!
”

As it turned out, she was right. It was uncomfortable, and difficult, and quick, but he managed to get it up, and get it in, and get her off, and he even managed to come himself. Nevertheless, it was an anticlimax.

“Well, now you’ve had the Mulholland experience,” Eileen said afterward. “Something
else
, isn’t it?”

In a way that Bobby doubted she could ever understand, she was right.

Saturday, Bobby talked Eileen into taking him to a ball game; they were leaving on Monday for Berkeley, and it was going to be the only chance he would have to see Dodger Stadium.

It was another endless crawl through traffic down to Venice to the ball park built out on pilings and completely surrounded by ocean under a clear azure sky, but, to Bobby, at least, it was worth it. It was one of only three parks left in the majors where the game was played on natural grass, and the Dodgers beat the Mets 8 to 6 in a wild slugfest that ended dramatically with a bases-loaded triple in the bottom of the ninth by Hiro Yamagawa, who last year had become the first .400 hitter in the majors in decades.

The crowd was something else too. In the prime lower-deck seats behind the plate that Bobby had sprung for, remembering Duke, there were well-dressed Anglos, stunning starlets, and actual TV stars, or so Eileen said excitedly as she pointed them out. Out in the bleachers, which were done up as a hillside park without seats, Chicanos and blacks, who seemed to have their own self-segregated sections, whooped and hollered with every hit. A whole section of upper-deck grandstand was filled with military personnel in uniform, who got in for half price. Another part of the upper deck was an organized cheering section, where thousands of people held up cards forming pictures—the Dodgers emblem, company logos, the American flag, even a stylized wing-flapping American eagle—on cues from the P.A. announcer.

There were vendors selling curried popcorn, burritos, beer, sushi, and steamed hot dogs, and all in all, it was the perfect American experience, the essence somehow, of
LA
.

Some guy she had gone to high school with had invited Eileen to a beach party out near Malibu on Sunday, and early that afternoon, they fought the freeway traffic for an hour and a half, managed to find a parking space, stripped down to the bathing suits they wore under their clothing in the car, and made their way down the jam-packed
sand to where a big red helium balloon floating high above the acres of bare flesh marked the scene of the party.

“Now remember, Bobby, not a
word
about Paris or Europe,” she warned him. “I went to Beverly Hills High with most of these doofs, they’re all a bunch of gringo jingos, and I don’t want you to end up starting a
fistfight
.”

About twenty people were sitting on beach towels around a metal beer keg, sunning themselves, drinking, making out, eating take-out junk food, while awful martial-sounding max-metal music muttered unheard at medium volume from a portable chip deck.

A big blond surfer type with the ridiculous name of Tab greeted Eileen with a hug and a goose, got them beers, and he and Eileen introduced Bobby around while Bobby stuck to his well-rehearsed road story about returning to Berkeley from a visit back home to his folks in Akron.

And thus began a long lazy sunny afternoon that quite fulfilled Bobby’s image of the archetypal Southern California beach party. He swam. He made a fool of himself trying to ride a motorized surfboard, falling off over and over again, until he had finally swallowed enough of the Pacific to give it up. He necked with Eileen. He played a spaced-out slow-motion netless version of impromptu volleyball with a big balloon filled with a mixture of air and helium.

And, like everyone else, he drank. By the time the sun started crawling down the perfect California sky toward the mirror of the Pacific, everyone was pretty well blotted, a few people had actually puked, no one was inclined toward further athletics, and the drunken bullshit began.

There was a lot of techtalk that bored Bobby speechless, as well as a good deal of pissing and moaning about teachers he didn’t know. There was also a good deal of obscene banter about who was and was not fucking whom, about which he couldn’t care less. It was all a lot of blather by people he didn’t know or care about, and for the most part he just lay there on a beach towel next to Eileen, drinking whatever was passed to him, and zoning out into the deepening blue of the Malibu sky.

“. . . hear Billy’s goin’ in with the 82nd . . .”

“. . . get his dumb ass shot off!”

“Naw, my dad says the beaners’ll go without firing a shot. . . .”

“Bullshit! Gonna be a duster. . . .”

“My ass!”

“
My
dad says they’re gonna give Baja veterans forty acres, he’s pissed at me for not joining up.”

“Are you for real? The Big Boys got title on everything worth anything down there already!”

“Gonna be a duster!”

“Bullshit! Beaners can’t last a week, and they know it.”

“It’s a Commie gov, ain’t it?”

“So fucking what?”

“So they gotta be figuring the Rooshians—”

“Rooshians won’t do dick, buncha pussies. Didn’t save the Cubans’ asses, did they? Didn’t lift a missile! Too busy corning the Peens!”

“
We’re
the ones that just corned the Peens!”

“Haw! Haw! Haw!”

“I
still
say gonna be a duster, war’ll last at least six weeks!”

“Crappo!”

“Economics.”

“What the fuck
you
know about economics, Butch?”

“
My
dad works for Zynodyne, he says the fix is already in. They won’t
let
the beaners go without a fight.”

“They?”

“Defense industry, asshole. Resupply contracts are already out. Biggo buckso. They’re planning on using up a hundred bills’ worth of ordnance on the beaners, min. Lots of overtime already, and they’re looking to hire.”

“Yeah? Short term?”

“Week to week. Hundred an hour, usual double time,
triple
for weekends. . . .”

“Hey, not a bad deal. . . .”

Bobby’s appalled attention was slowly captured by this drift in the conversation. He had certainly heard enough of this cynical imperialist merde from Dick Sparrow and elsewhere, but to hear it coming out of the mouths of mecs his own age whom he had swum with, played volleyball with, drunk with, was somehow much, much worse.

“Think your dad could do me something?”

“Maybe. . . .”

“Hey, Eddie, your dad works for Collins, don’t he? They hiring short-termers too?”

“Could find out. . . .”

“You guys can’t really be serious!” Bobby finally blurted.

Butch, a big burly guy with short black hair, gave him an open friendly smile. “ ’Course I’m serious,” he said pleasantly enough. “You want, I suppose I could put in a word for you too. . . .”

“La merde!” Bobby snapped without thinking. Eileen, lying beside him, punched him in the small of the back.

“What?”

“You can’t really be serious about going to work in
munitions plants!
”

“Bobby!”
Eileen hissed in his ear.

“Why the fuck not? Hey,
hundred an hour
, that’s biggo buckso!”

“Making weapons to kill people who just want to be left alone!”

“
Left alone!
Hey, they ain’t leaving the Americans who bought land in Baja fair and square alone, now are they?”

“It’s their country, isn’t it?”

“Bullshit! Everybody knows Mexico ripped off Baja during the Civil War, what’s his face, Pancho Villa and his frito banditos! We got a right to take back what was ours, like it says inna Monroe Doctrine.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?”

“What are
you
supposed to be, some kind of Communist?”

“Hey, Eileen, your boyfriend some kind of Berkeley Red?”

“Beaner-lover!”

There was a long moment of silence. People who had been lolling back and not paying much attention suddenly had their eyes on him. Oh shit, Bobby thought.

“Bobby’s just a little
blotted
, that’s all,” Eileen said. “You’re drunk, aren’t you, Bobby?”

Bobby sat up, a little woozily. He tried a little smile and a shrug. “I’m not the only one,” he said lightly.