Spur of the Moment (7 page)

“I like it!” Ana said. It was disgusting how Ramiro could take a beginning to a sketch and give it a rough middle and an end in eleven seconds flat.

“So what are we going to call our show?” Marin asked.

“I know,” Chelsey said. “I had this dream the other night, involving Britney Spears, Scooby Doo—not the cartoon one, the movie digitally created one—and Satan. Satan traveled in Scooby Doo's body, but we knew he was there, and it was our job to protect Britney. I think I was like one of her bodyguards or something, I can't remember. But don't you think that would make a good name for a show, ‘Britney Spears, Scooby Doo, and Satan'?”

Her friends just looked at her like she was a strange foreign creature they'd never encountered before. “I'm pretty sure we'd get our asses royally sued off,” Marin said. “I think we'd be breaking a jillion libel laws.”

“How about ‘The Comedy Hootenanny'?” Ana offered.

“You can't use something that uses words like ‘comedy,' ‘wit,' or ‘humor,' ” Ramiro said, rolling in his eyes at the obviousness of his point, like he was trying to educate a country bumpkin on basic concepts such as not wearing white pants before Easter. “Look at the shows Second City puts on or the stuff the Upright Citizen's Brigade does. They do shows with names like, ‘Curious George Goes to War' or ‘The Ice Cream Man Cometh.' ”

“How about ‘Shangri-Ha,' ” Scott said.

“You know what I think a step above that, Scott, would be ‘Don't Come See This Show,' ” Ramiro said.

“What are you saying, that you don't like my title?”

“In summary: yes, that's what I'm saying.”

“How about, ‘The Pirates of Pete's Pants,' ” Chelsey offered.

“But there is nobody named Pete in this group,” Ana said.

“It's a play on ‘The Pirates of Penzance.' Ana, for someone so smart, sometimes you're a little loopy in the head. I think it's best you hear it from a friend.”

“Yeah, I get that part, but I don't see what it has to our show or us.”

“How about ‘Fried Peanut Butter Sandwiches.' You know going for an abstract—” Scott began.

“That. Is. The. Stupidest name I've ever heard,” Ramiro said.

Ana started laughing. “It is pretty bad.”

The others joined in, and when Chelsey snorted, Ana fell right off her chair, collapsing with laughter. Scott pretended to be hurt, but soon he was laughing, too. Teasing and tormenting one another was their primary form of communication.

When they finally recovered, Chelsey wiped the tears from her eyes and said, “I'm going to get a Stallion. Anybody want anything?”

“Bullsy, just say no,” Ramiro said.

“Admitting you have a problem is the first step,” Marin said.

“Actually Bullsy, the reason we've called you here tonight is: You have a problem. We've come together to perform an intervention,” Scott said.

“I don't have a problem! I don't! I don't!”

“You do! You do!” the others chanted. They swarmed in on her and ended up in a group tickle fight, the usual conclusion to their “interventions.”

They laughed until their stomachs hurt and they were so tired they could barely peel themselves off the floor. And so they went home to bed, ideas for the show tumbling through their minds like pebbles in an ocean.

8

Quality Family Time

A
na thought that if she and her four roommates had been around in Renaissance times, Marin would have been the lovely, charming, fabulously wealthy queen, universally loved by all. Scott would have been, of course, the court jester. Jason would have been the king and queen's children's tutor, a simple but respectable role. Ramiro would have been the king's advisor, able to come up with brilliant war-winning, destiny-changing strategies over pints of mead. Ana herself would be a scullery maid, working tirelessly for starvation rations and the first one to die off in a bout of bubonic plague.

Still, she loved her friends, though it wasn't always easy. Living with Marin, Scott, and Ramiro meant that no matter how hard Ana tried, the house was in a perpetual state of chaos. It was like living with the kid from the
Sixth Sense.
You know when the Mom leaves the room for like a second and then comes back to find all the drawers and cabinet doors open? That was what Ana faced every day of her life. With the exception of Jason, her roommates were absolutely incapable of closing a drawer or door. Ana would dutifully close all the cabinets, and then in the span of time it took to blink, the kitchen would become a minefield of bruises and concussions waiting to happen—one quick turn into an outstretched cabinet door and you'd be flat on your back with a bump the size of shot glass on your forehead. Her roommates had never once replaced an empty roll of toilet paper with a full one, and they certainly never did their dishes. In the beginning, Ana had yelled and cried and cajoled, but it was useless. It was easier just to clean up after them.

She and Jason had become the de facto Mom and Dad of this family. Jason loved to garden, and that's what he spent all his weekend days doing in the growing season. He took care of mowing the lawn, and he was the only person in the house who ever cooked. He would cook enormous vats of ratatouille or pasta primavera and salads with fresh vegetables from his garden.

Ana did all of the cleaning. If she left it up to the others, their bathtub would resemble a swamp and the rest of the house would look like it had been ransacked by Russian mafia members looking for the microchip that could destroy the world or what have you. But while Ana was bitter and resentful every moment she spent cleaning up after her roommates, she also loved them, and the good things outweighed the many bad sides of living with them.

Take this morning for instance. Ana made coffee, poured herself a milky, sugary cup and made one for Scott too, then padded barefooted along the hardwood floors to Scott's room.

She noiselessly pushed the door open. He opened his eyes and looked at her.

“You awake?” she asked.

“Yeah, I'm just laying here until I work up the energy to get up.”

“I brought you some coffee. That should help.”

Ana brought him the cup. “Scooch,” she commanded. He scooched. She put her coffee on the bedside table and lay next to him, so their arms touched. Scott, being the giant he was, had the largest bed in the house, and it had become the informal meeting place for the family.

“Thanks, but it's too hot for coffee. It's too hot for anything.” Between the sound of the fan in the window and the mini-swamp cooler on the floor, it was hard to hear him.

“You're from Texas. You should be used to the heat.”

“Yeah, but in Texas they wouldn't have even considered building a house without air conditioning. What's wrong with these people in Denver?” Scott didn't speak with a southern accent, though if you dared to say that he was from the south, or was in any way southern, smoke would come out of his ears and his head would spin around a few times. “I'm not from the south, I'm from Texas!” he'd yell, as if Texas was its own sovereign nation, which Ana suspected it might actually secretly be. He was fiercely proud of Texas. On the other hand, he'd moved from there at the first available opportunity, and Ana thought this spoke well of him.

Scott's walls were adorned with paintings he'd done himself. He preferred oils and his work often had a surrealist, tongue-in-cheek theme. One of Ana's favorites was of a family of four sitting at the dinner table. A mother, a father, a little girl, and a little boy—all of whom are naked. The girl is grumpily refusing to eat. She has her elbow on the table and her chin resting in her hand, her expression is beleaguered and long-suffering. The younger brother is making a mess, and the Mom is trying to clean him up. The father is looking absently out the window at the sunset red sky.

Scott didn't paint as much today as he had in college, but he still had an easel in the corner for when he wanted a way to relax.

“What are you guys doing?” It was Marin, who scuffled toward them. Scott and Ana dutifully moved over to make room for her. She lay down next to Ana.

“We are being lazy slugs, mostly,” Ana said. “I think we need a theme song for our show. We can do it to the music of the
Beverly Hillbillies.”

“I can't believe it's daytime already.” Ramiro walked into the room and took his place on the bed. “I'm so tired. I need a nap.”

“You just woke up.”

“But getting out of bed proved to be exhausting, and I need a nap to recuperate.”

“We're thinking of a theme song for our show,” Ana said. “Hey, do we know anyone who can play the fiddle? A fiddle is really what we need. Maybe we can get the music from
Deliverance.”

“Are you guys having fun without me?” Jason said, joining them on the bed. It was a cozy fit, but they could do it.

“We're coming up with the theme song for our sketch comedy show,” Ana said. “Help us.”

“Let's think of the great theme songs through the ages, and decide what qualities lead to theme-song greatness,” Jason said.
“The Love Boat
is clearly up there, in the top ten maybe.”

Marin got as far as “the” before the rest of them joined in, singing
The Love Boat
at the top of their lungs. They proceeded to sing every theme song they knew, moving through
Cheers, The Facts of Life, Greatest American Hero,
and the
Fresh Prince of Bel Air,
among others. Amid much laughter and discussion over important matters like whether the
L
that Laverne always wore on her shirts really stood for “lesbian” (come on, Laverne and Shirley were just a little
too
close) they whiled away a very large portion of their day. Ana loved it, being wedged in with the people she loved most in the world, singing songs, laughing, and feeling absolutely loved.

9

A Proper Date

S
unday morning, Chelsey went to Rob's apartment, arriving at eleven
A.M.
exactly. He lived three blocks away from the rest of the Spur of the Moment gang in Capitol Hill, near the library. She had been to his place the other night, but they'd been far too busy tearing each other's clothes off for her to properly inspect the place.

This time, after he hugged her and gave her a long, sensuous kiss, she asked him to show her around.

“It's only a one-bedroom apartment, so it's not like there's much to see, but I'll give you the tour.”

His home was sparsely decorated, but clean. She wondered if he was always this neat, or if he was trying to impress her. She couldn't remember if it had been neat the first night she was here or not (she hadn't been concerned with his house-keeping skills at the time). In any case, he wouldn't have had much time to clean between Friday night, working a 24-hour shift on Saturday, and now, so it couldn't have been that bad to start with.

There were only two pictures on the wall, and both were sketches of women. One was an old woman in profile, the other was a younger, though not young, woman, her dark eyes intense yet friendly.

“Did you draw these?” Chelsey asked. He nodded. “Are they of anybody in particular?”

“This is my mom, and this is my grandmother. They are both amazing women. They're very strong women. You'd like them.”

Chelsey liked how he spoke of such reverence for his mother and grandmother. Maybe it was an Indian thing. She seemed to remember that Native American culture was more matrilineal than European culture. Then again, her knowledge of things Native American was rather rusty. Or more accurately, nonexistent.

The sketches were beautiful. She told him so. “Any other family?”

“I've got two younger sisters, a few aunts. They're still on the reservation.”

“In southern Colorado? New Mexico?”

“South Dakota.”

“What brought you out here?”

“My dad got me a job fighting fires in Aspen about eight years ago. Then I got a full-time job at the fire station in Denver a year later and I started taking classes at the Art Institute, so I've been here ever since. I visit my mom and sisters a lot though. I try to go to every sun dance and powwow. It's only twelve hours away. It's a nice drive. Are you ready for breakfast?”

“Sure.”

“Mimosa?”

“Sure.”

After drinks he brought out the rest of the meal. Eggs benedict plus hash browns and toast. Oh Christ, Chelsey thought, more calories than she usually ate in two days. She just smiled and ate slowly. She tried to let herself enjoy it. She'd just work out a little harder tomorrow and restrict her calories for the next few days. Being a personal trainer meant Chelsey was incapable of not counting calories and fat grams of everything she put into her body. She told her clients that the occasional break from calorie counting was okay, but she herself had a hard time shutting off the habit.

After breakfast, they drove over to Chelsey's side of town and walked along Broadway, going into the used books stores and art galleries and furniture stores, which ranged from gross-used, to cool-used, to super-expensive cool-new.

Chelsey sat on a lime green couch in one of the super swanky furniture stores and Rob sat next to her. The couch's back and arms swooped in a wave. The store managers had decorated the area around the couch to give customers a feel for how they could arrange their own living rooms, so beside the couch was a purple divan, and on the floor was a carpet with shapes of circles, triangles, and squares in black, red, lime green, and purple. A funky glass coffee table was in the center of the rug.

“I would love this look for my house,” Chelsey said.

“It's okay. I like classic stuff that never goes out of style.”

“I mean if I were rich.”

“If you were rich you'd blow $3,000 on a couch?”

“Yeah, wouldn't you?”

“Nah. Do you know how under-funded schools on reservations are?”

“No. I thought the casinos were taking care of that stuff.”

He let out a laugh. “Yeah, casinos—the solution to all our problems.”

“They're not?”

“Only a few casinos make any money. And yeah, those reservations are doing great now. Employment rates are up, all that good stuff. But most reservations are way off in the boonies and aren't easy to get to. They're not enough of a draw to get people out there. Most just barely break even.”

“Oh.” Chelsey felt like an idiot. “So you'd give all your money to reservations?”

“Absolutely. I'd love it if I could do that.”

“What, um, kind of Indian are you?”

“Oglala Lakota Sioux. Pine Ridge Reservation. You've heard of that, right?”

“It sounds familiar.” It didn't.

“Wounded Knee?”

“Um, I can't quite remember, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say a bunch of Indians got slaughtered.”

He laughed again. “Pretty good guess.”

“Hey, so how come your last name is Night instead of Walking Bear or Eagle Feather or something?”

“My dad's white.”

“Your dad's white?”

He nodded. “My parents separated a long time ago. I'm not close to my dad, but he did get me the job out here, so that was cool. I needed to get off the rez, so I'm grateful to him for that.”

It explained his lightish skin, but the way he talked and dressed (the long hair, the brightly beaded bracelet) he seemed very into being Indian and didn't seem at all into being part white. Then again, how did one celebrate being a white male? Dressing in camouflage, buying truckloads of semi-automatic weapons, and hiding out in a compound in Montana? Having short hair and wearing suits and ties?

“Why did you need to get off the rez-
er
-vation?” She'd started to say “rez,” but then felt like she sounded like some poseur, pretending to be familiar with a world she knew nothing about.

“There's nothing to do there but drink.”

“Oh.” This line of conversation was making her uncomfortable. “Do you want to come to my place and check out my digs?”

“Sure.”

They went back to her place and she showed him around. She saved her bedroom for last, which was good, because once they entered that room, they didn't come out again for several hours.