Homesick for Another World(46)
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A few weeks later, telling the story over dinner, John would explain that the storm had kept him cooped up for days. “It barely made a dent, that storm. But everything shut down. You know these poor countries—there’s no infrastructure. Even if you did try to intervene and make some order, the people are all so superstitious, it would take a hundred years, with all their spells and blessings.”
“Well, I think it’s beautiful of you,” Maureen said, “to go back there, with Marcia.”
“She said it was heaven, after all,” Barbara said. “Didn’t she say that? That it was heaven?”
“She did say that, yes,” Maureen answered.
John put a hand over his heart, which was now broken by something he found far more interesting than a dead wife. His drunken jaunt on the beach had ended strangely. The beach boy, though not the one who’d appeared in Marcia’s photograph, had indeed been young and beautiful, his eyes yellow, his lips thick and glossy. He’d spotted John flailing in the undertow, pulled him from the water, and dragged him to shore. John had rolled onto his side, sputtering and gagging on the salt water he’d swallowed. The boy stood over him, his strong brown legs just inches from John’s naked body. “You saved me,” John managed to say. As he reached a hand out to grip the boy’s ankle, his fingers trembled. Some kind of force field seemed to surround the boy. He couldn’t be touched. When John held his palm over the boy’s foot, he could feel heat rising up. The boy took a step away. Perhaps he isn’t even real, John thought. But there he was. “Come here,” John demanded. “I need to ask you something.” He got onto his hands and knees, tried to stand, but he was too exhausted. He was drunk. He collapsed on the sand. The boy stood and stared for a while, then yawned, turned, and walked away. It was clear to him and to the other beach boys watching from their perch in the dunes that the old man wasn’t carrying any money.
NOTHING EVER HAPPENS HERE
The house was white stucco, ranch style, with tall hedges and a large semicircular driveway. There was a crumbling pool out back full of rust stains and carcasses of squirrels that had fallen in and slowly starved to death. I used to tan out there on a lawn chair before auditions, fantasizing about getting rich and famous. My room had green shag carpeting and a twin-size bed on a plywood frame, a little nightstand with a child’s lamp in the shape of a clown. Above my bed hung an old framed poster of Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks. It would have done me well if I’d prayed to that poster, but I’d never even heard of Marlon Brando before. I was eighteen. I was living in an area of Los Angeles called Hancock Park: manicured lawns, big clean houses, expensive cars, a country club. Walking around those quiet streets, I felt like I was on the set of a soap opera about the private lives of business executives and their sexy wives. One day I’d star in something like that, I hoped. I had limited experience as an actor in high school, first as George in Our Town and then as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. People had told me I looked like a sandy-haired Pierce Brosnan. I was broke, and I was a nobody, but I was happy.
Those first few months in Los Angeles, I lived off powdered cinnamon doughnuts and orange soda, fries from Astro Burger, and occasional joints rolled with stale weed my stepdad had given me back in Utah as a graduation present. Most days I took the bus around Hollywood, listening to the Eagles on my Walkman and imagining what life was like for all those people way up in the hills. I’d walk up Rossmore, which turned into Vine once you hit Hollywood, and then I’d get on a crosstown local down Santa Monica Boulevard. I liked to sit with all the young kids in school uniforms, the teenage runaways in rags and leather jackets, the crazies, the drunks, housekeepers with their romance novels, old men with their spittle, whores with their hair spray. This was miraculous to me. I’d never seen people like that before. Sometimes I studied them like an actor would, noting their postures, their sneering or sleeping faces, but I wasn’t very gifted. I was observant, but I couldn’t act. When the bus reached the beach, I’d get off and run up and down the stairs that led from the street to the shoreline. I’d take off my shirt, lie out on the sand, catch some rays, look at the water for a minute, then take the bus back home.
In the evenings, I bused tables in a pizza parlor on Beverly Boulevard. Nobody important ever came in. Mostly I brought out baskets of bread and carafes of box wine, picked up pizza crusts and grease-soaked napkins. I never ate the food there. Somehow that felt beneath me. If I didn’t have to work and there was a game going on, I’d take the bus out to Dodger Stadium and walk around just to get a feel for the crowd, the excitement. Nearby, in Elysian Park, I found a spot on a little cliff where I could listen to the cheers from the crowd and watch the traffic on the freeway, the mountains, the pale gray and sandy terrain. With all those ugly little streets in the ravine down below, LA looked like anywhere. It made me miss Gunnison. Sometimes I’d smoke a joint and walk around the swaying eucalyptus, peek into the cars parked along the fire road. Sedate, unblinking Mexicans sat in jalopies in shadows under the trees. Middle-aged men in dark glasses flicked their cigarettes out their windows as I passed. I had some idea of what they were doing there. I did not return anyone’s leers. I stayed out of the woods. At home, alone, I concentrated on whatever was on television. I had a black-and-white mini Toshiba. It was the first big thing I’d ever bought with my own money back in Gunnison and the most expensive thing I owned.