The Ruins of California (29 page)

“San Raphael?” said Ooee.

“Too far,” said my father.

“The parking lot of Ralph’s?”

“That hobo is there—shouting at the shrubs.”

“The Marina? At least it’s flat.”

“The Presidio,” my father said with great finality. But as soon as we’d crossed the bridge in the MG, he turned left toward the city, and not into the Presidio. He’d changed his mind. He had some coffee beans to pick up and wanted to “swing by” Walgreens pharmacy for some pills he needed.

In the parking lot of Walgreens, where I waited alone in the car, I looked at the dashboard—the gauges and switches, the black dials with white numbers and letters. “Hello,” I whispered out loud. “
Hello, MG.
Are you really coming home with me after all these years?” I ran my hand along the black leather seats and white piping, then gripped the glossy wooden steering wheel.

“Why not drive it now?” my father asked, opening the door.

“But…” I stammered. “We’re still in the city.”

“It’s not that congested,” he said. “You can pull out into the
street over there”—pointing to another entrance to the lot. “It’s a dead end.”

“Right now?”

“Once you get the hang of it, you’ll see how simple it is,” he said. “But let me take a few minutes to explain how the transmission of a car works and how the clutch operates. That’ll make things easier for you.”

He came by the side of the passenger door, waiting for me to switch places with him. I got out, walked around the small car, and sat down for the first time behind the wheel. How strange it felt, as if the world had gone lopsided.

“It’s all very simple,” my father said, oblivious to the momentousness of the occasion. And then, rather unsimply, he began to describe in agonizing detail the mechanical difference between an automatic and a manual shift and how an automobile clutch is designed to latch on to the various gears. “When you put your foot on the clutch pedal,” he explained, “you are releasing the clutch from all gear options. When your foot is off the pedal, you are allowing the clutch to latch again.” He cupped his hands and used his fingers to demonstrate a clutch that was “in gear” and “out of gear.”

I followed his description and even found parts of it illuminating, but when it came time to find first gear and drive onto the dead-end street, the car lurched ahead horribly. “Release the clutch!” my father called out.

Quickly I took my foot off the pedal. As I did, the jerking and lurching only increased—accompanied by a loud thunking sound. “Release the clutch!” my father called out again.

“I have!”

The car died.

“But your foot is off the pedal!”

I put my foot back on the clutch, returned the gearshift to neutral, and started the car again.

“Don’t hold the key on the starter!” he yelled. “You’re—
Hear that?
”

I looked over. His face was red—the color of cooked lobster—and for some reason this gave me enormous satisfaction. “You mean,” I said, holding the key on the starting position again, too long, until the screeching began, “
that
sound?”

“Stop it!” He reached over and tried to take the key. I grabbed it first. “Inez!” he exploded in a rage. “Have you been listening to me or not?”

“I heard every word.”

“Okay,” he said, taking a big breath. “Let’s try again.”

I turned the key gently until the car started and produced a wonderful low rumbling. It was a soothing sound, almost tranquilizing—and full of memories. I pressed down on the clutch pedal, put the car in first gear, and slowly began to lift my foot off the clutch. But again the car lurched forward in weird jumps and made a loud popping sound.

“Release the clutch!!” my father yelled.

“I have!”

“Release it!!”

“My foot is off the pedal!”

“YOU ARE ENGAGING THE CLUTCH, NOT RELEASING IT!”

Engaging the clutch? What was he talking about?

“Get out,” I said.

“What?”

“Get out of the car.”

I had troubled looking at him for the first few minutes. He seemed a forlorn figure in the middle of the parking lot—some
kind of artsy drifter with nowhere to go. I hated the way that his shirt collar rose up against his cheek. And his legs looked too long. His hair, overly considered. What a fop. What an idiot. After a few turns around the lot, I went out to the street. I began to get the hang of the thing—the way you have to take your left foot off the clutch while you put your right foot slowly on the gas.

My father was standing perfectly still in the middle of the parking lot, like a great heron, and I noticed that he was nodding his head. The next time I looked over, he smiled and waved. The next time he’d thrown his hands in the air and was applauding.

He ran alongside the car and knocked on the window. “You did it, Inez! You did it! You doped it out on your own! Good for you!”

M
y father hadn’t gone to El Bodega for a long time, it seemed. When we arrived for dinner, Hector looked stunned—not his usual fake surprise but something more honest. “Pablo, is it really you? I thought you’d died.”

“No, just moved over the bridge,” my father said stiffly. “But I’m back tonight.”

“Good to see you. And the señoritas. And you, Señor Lungo.”

But after all the buildup that I’d given Shelley, the paella didn’t taste as delicious as I remembered—the clams were rubbery and cold. Alegrías seemed seedier than ever, too. The red walls were shiny in some places, dull in others, as though several kinds of paint had been used to patch things up. The wooden stage was banged up and in need of a broom. It smelled like mold, and wine, and maybe urine. When the dancers came out, they were bleary-eyed and off—or drunk. The sparse crowd consisted of no real flamenco aficionados, as far as I could tell. Aside from my father’s old table in the
back, it was mostly tourists and retirees. “They’ve made us a stop on a bus tour,” Ricardo said dolefully at the break.

Shelley and I waited impatiently for Antonio to appear—I’d been telling her about him for two years already. As soon as the dancing started, we moved our chairs closer so we could talk. “Which one is he?” she asked. As each new guitarist emerged from behind the curtain and joined the ensemble of singers and dancers, I shook my head. “Not him either.” Halfway through the show, when Antonio hadn’t turned up, I finally leaned over to Ooee.

“What happened to Antonio?”

Ooee shrugged, then looked over at my father.

“Where is Antonio?” I said again.

My father shook his head. “Who? Forget about him,” he said with a scowl. “He’s into junk, not girls.”

T
here was a disagreement about what to do on our last night. It was our family tradition to see a movie together, but Ooee objected. “
Network
?” he groaned. “Jesus, Paul. The girls can see a movie anywhere. I think we should go out on the town.”

“Yeah,” said Shelley. Her face was kind of open, along with her mouth. She looked up at my father with a funny self-consciousness, keeping her chin down as if trying to appear blasé, but she wasn’t. “Come on, Paul. It’ll be fun.”

“Out on the town?” my father seemed incredulous. “What town?”

“Just a night out,” Ooee said. “Play it by ear. Maybe hit some of those punk clubs by the modern art museum.”

Shelley didn’t say anything right away, just stepped closer to my father, as though trying to convince him with her body or smell or something. “Let’s do it. Come on,
Paul.
”

He ignored her and spoke directly to Ooee. “No thank you. I’d rather see a movie. That’s what Inez and I are going to do. Right, Inez?”

I nodded. Shelley looked kind of disappointed, or rattled, but not for long. After spending twenty minutes in the bathroom, she emerged in tight pants, very high heels, and a slather of heavy lip gloss, and she headed off with Ooee for the city. As soon as they were gone, my father and I studied the movie listings in the newspaper and tried to guess how long we’d have to wait in line. We’d stood for two hours to see
The Godfather,
Part II
on its first weekend at the North Point and watched a joint being passed down the line until the roach got so small somebody ate it.

“Hey, the movie starts in ninety minutes,” my father said, pointing at the paper. “We better get going.”

A few minutes later, he was waiting for me in the driveway next to his Triumph and wearing a black leather jacket. He had a helmet under his arm. A smaller helmet was sitting on the seat of the motorcycle, along with a woman’s black leather jacket.

“Whose are these?” I asked, picking up the helmet and the jacket.

“Nobody’s. I just keep them around.”

I was putting on the jacket when he pulled from his breast pocket a small silver pipe that Justine had given him. I could see he’d already loaded it with a small pinch of grass. “Want some?”

“No thanks,” I said. “Don’t do that anymore.”

“No? Probably wise. I thought it would make the movie better and the wait a little more interesting. But you don’t need it.”

Just as he was tossing out that tepid approval, I extended my hand for the lit pipe and took a long drag, then passed it back. Then took another. After a third drag, he said, “That’s enough,” and put the pipe away.

He started up the bike with a few explosions of sound—so loud, unbearably loud—and we were off, down the paved driveway, onto the dirt road. I was on the back, hanging on to his waist, the seat rumbling under me and the sky hovering above. I began to notice the languid shapes of eucalyptus trees, the sound of the wind. The coolness on my neck and cheeks. When we got to the farm gate, my father pulled out his remote control. The gate lifted, and we sailed through.

Shelley and Ooee weren’t around when we got home from the movie. And in the morning, when I woke up in the living room, the smooth sheets and wool blanket on Shelley’s side of the sofa didn’t look touched. I stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, watched the bright sun coming in the windows. I heard the waves on the beach. And then I heard voices, some laughing.

I went to the window and stepped over to the glass door that led to the deck. Shelley was coming up the stone steps from the beach. She was wearing a sweatshirt and pair of short shorts. My father was behind her, but instead of noticing me at the door, his eyes had steadied themselves on Shelley’s rear end.

“Are those hot pants?” I heard him ask.

“No!” she laughed, and turned around to him.

“What buns you have, my dear! What buns!”

H
e gave us a road map of California, with directions carefully highlighted in yellow marker. He went over all his instructions again, and the eccentricities of the car. On a cold morning, I needed to pull out the choke. Sometimes on the freeway, the car might seem to be out of gas, but it was just a finicky fuel pump—“and you can take this wrench and just give it a few whacks right
here,” he said, bending over the side of the MG, “and it’ll work again.” He explained how the fog lamps operated and how to use a tire-pressure gauge. He wrote in the operating manual the fine grade of motor oil that he preferred and gave me a folder of receipts—a record of the MG’s every service call organized in chronological order. He handed me an AAA card and a gas card from Shell with
INEZ GARCIA RUIN
pressed into the plastic.

I started it up. The rumble of the engine was so deep and low that I could almost feel it in my blood. I waved and backed the car around, then looked over at him again. He was standing in the driveway waving—it was a Ruin family tradition to keep waving until the departing family member was out of sight. His hand was stopped in midair. And then I noticed his face. It was crumpling, his features squeezing into the middle and his eyes getting small. He was just beginning to cry.

I cranked down the window.

“What’s the matter?” I yelled out.

“Nothing!” he shouted back, with his hand still lingering over his head. He walked closer and bent down. “I’m just sad, that’s all. A beautiful kind of sadness. You look so damn wonderful in that car.”

FIFTEEN

Ooee’s Houseboat

I
wasn’t the only one who seemed skittish about sex. Whitman was twenty-one, and, as far as we knew, there’d never been a woman in his life. No talk of a woman. No signs of interest—aside from passing remarks and sometimes brutal criticisms about the girls my father brought home. They were “pathetic” or “way too young,” and he seemed utterly bewildered by the attraction these women had for our father, although this was never a mystery to me. “Dad always finds these sweet, passive women,” Whitman complained. “And then he trains them to become even sweeter and more passive. Don’t let him do that to you, Inez.”

Whitman hung out with other guys—surfers, mostly—who lived in ramshackle beach houses where the bedrooms were rented out weekly. From his descriptions of South Africa, and New Zealand before that, it seemed like a rugged but strangely romantic existence. They lived from storm to storm, drifted from surf spot to surf spot, eating mushrooms and smoking dope during the lulls. When they ran out of money, they took small jobs in town, or bought run-down
cars and got them going and sold them for a small profit. Maybe they sold some dope, too. God only knows. But Whitman didn’t work, as far as I could tell. Patricia’s family had left him with a trust, the amount of which was never discussed in precise terms. “It’s like Dad says,” Whitman had once explained to me. “It’s not enough to make my life and not enough to ruin it either.”

In the middle of my junior year of high school, he’d moved permanently to Hawaii. He’d found a little house to buy in Haleiwa, on a narrow road of shacks and rentals where the surf pros lived during the winter competitions. It was on the beach, he told me, and as close as anybody could be to the heart of Oahu Island’s famous North Shore. Waimea Bay was a short ride in one direction, Sunset and Pipeline in the other. It was emerging as a popular year-round resort and beginning to boom with new hotels and developments, and Whitman planned to set up a gardening business there.

“For all I know, he’s a fag,” my father joked a few times, but as soon as we’d laugh—because this couldn’t possibly be true—we’d grow silent, because maybe it was.