bigger picture. Maybe I’m always fooling myself.
Outside it was hot and bright with the end of June and someone was having car trouble in the alley. I walked down the stairs and thought for the thousandth time that someday I’m going to trip and fall down these stairs. My head will be crushed open on the cement with brains and blood pouring out and trickling down into the dirty flower bed, where we used to throw cigarette butts and beer caps before the neighbors yelled about it. They’ll call the police and say there’s a dead girl at the bottom of the stairs outside of their apartment. Jeremy will be questioned and will say he has no idea who she is. He’ll get his camera and take pictures of my gooey head and the ooze that’s seeping from the hole and he’ll hide them in a box with a lock and look at them sometimes with a guilty pleasure. Roman will wonder what I was doing there. He’ll find out. He’ll find out about me, like in that Gin Blossoms song I loved in high school.
I went into the mart next door. Figures they would be out of my cigarettes. I encountered two crazy homeless men on the way out. They were smelly and filthy and talking nonsense. They asked me for money and I lied and said I had none.
I drove home feeling gross. Raw and exposed. I usually don’t feel like that after being with Jeremy. I guess only when Roman’s coming to town later that day. It takes just a little time to adjust. Los Angeles looked exactly how I felt. Tarnished.
When I was a little girl, my mother would bring me down from the northern surf haven of my birth to shop at ritzy stores Ventura just doesn’t have. She wanted to expose me to all walks of life, despite the quasi-paradise existence of my seaside hometown that has made many a native never leave it. We would lunch in upscale cafés and swing glossy bags from swank boutiques as we walked on sparkling streets. L.A. was so nice to me then. She lured me to her. Now L.A. treats me like the grown woman I’m supposed to be. She refuses to give me guidance. Still she leads me on.
I told myself that any girl feels tarnished coming home still dressed from the night before—sequined jeans all wrong for day, sultry dark eye makeup a testimony to her underworld nocturnal activity. I said any girl would feel awful leaving her lover’s apartment with nothing but a seriously bad hangover.
I stopped at 7-Eleven for the cigarettes. I encountered Bruce Willis. He was coming out as I was going in. I wouldn’t have even noticed it was him if he hadn’t said, “Here you go,” in that Hudson Hawk/Butch Coolidge/John McClane voice of his as he held the door open for me. I was unfazed. He was wearing a baseball cap and dark sunglasses. I thought about busting out one of his movie lines on him to show my respect, but then thought he probably got that all the time so I didn’t say anything. I did have to wonder what Bruce was doing getting coffee at a convenience store east of Fairfax. It’s the heart of Hollywood, sure…but the Hollywood they only show in movies about snuff films and prep-school prostitutes.
There are some charming little pockets in this alarming neighborhood, though. Such as the blue-and-white cookie-cutter house where I live with my two roommates. It’s a nice house for three people. It even has a breakfast nook and a little backyard with a brick patio. I pulled into the driveway as Ava’s boyfriend came charging out the front door. He screamed something I didn’t hear over his shoulder. Ava chased him out onto the porch in silky pink pajamas, her white-blond hair fixed in two childish braids. She hurled an empty beer bottle at him and it shattered on the sidewalk.
“Jesus Christ, Ava!” he shouted. He stood there hitching up his cords as if he’d been without pants when this fight had begun.
She threw another bottle. There was a whole stash of empties lined up on the porch railing. She threw them all before storming back inside and slamming the door behind her.
“What’s going on?” I asked him. He looked funny, standing in a pile of broken glass on our sidewalk. I wanted to laugh at him.
He shook his head. “I just can’t handle this lunacy a second longer. See you later, hon. It’s been real.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose and ran to his Saab, peeling away from the curb and disappearing down the street. I knew he’d never be back.
Ava was in the kitchen fixing cereal when I went in. My other roommate, Electra, was sleeping on one of the couches in the living room. We really splurged on them but it was a good buy. They are both red with huge cushions and you’d think you’d get tired of red but it’s amazing what you can do with it. They face each other against opposite walls and there’s a big square coffee table in between them with a Zodiac wheel carved into it. The walls are painted cream, not white, and the floor is paneled in wood. We have posters around of our favorite movies like St. Elmo’s Fire and Legends of the Fall and the people we idolize like Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald.
Electra wasn’t alone. She was sleeping with a man. They were both naked from the looks of things, all arms and legs hanging out from beneath a lavender chenille throw.
“What’s with the random dude?” I asked Ava.
“Oh, Electra wanted it last night so we took her to Crazy Girls to pick it up. She figured a strip joint would be a good place to find a ready and willing male.”
“I see. So what was that scene with Tim just now?” I asked. She got out the milk. I knew it was bad but I didn’t tell her.
She looked wounded. “Oh…the usual. There’s always something wrong with me.”
“That’s not true.” I looked in the fridge to find something to drink. Electra’s Brita pitcher was labeled with a note that said if either one of us drank her cold water she was going to kill us.
“But they think so.” Her lip was quavering. “You know what he said? He said our house was so dirty that he always had to go home and take a shower after he left.”
I poured water from the tap and pretended that the metallic Hollywood taste of it was ambrosia. I took a look around the kitchen. Food-stained dishes were piling up in the sink. The trash was overflowing by the wall. There was an empty jar of spaghetti sauce on the counter, next to two dry stems of angel hair that had dropped out of the package. A handful of them had fallen onto the floor and been stepped on several times.
“And then he was looking at my books and saying I wasn’t intellectually literate and that I should read the classics—like I haven’t. I said, look, for your information, I went to just as many private schools as you did,” she went on. “Then I told him this is California, not Connecticut—and it’s more important to impress people with what I’m wearing than what I’m reading. The next thing I knew we were screaming at each other.”
I sagged against the fridge and packed my cigarettes. “Tim was an incredible snob, anyway. That Ivy League act he had going on was annoying. I never liked him.”
“Yes, but I did.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“I always do.” She looked all hurt again.
I thought of something to say while I watched her douse her Fruity Pebbles with the stinky milk. “Come on, Ava. Just think of the next girl he dates and how she’ll recoil with horror when he asks her to stick her finger up his ass while she’s giving him a blow job.”
She spit cereal into the sink she was laughing so hard. I had to laugh, too.
“How’s Jeremy? Where’d you guys go last night?” she asked.
“Ugh. The Liquid Kitty.”
“Oh, no. Did you drink Lolitas?”
“Lolitas and Low Lifes. How’d you know?”
“There’s some bluish puke on your sweater.”
“That’s got to be attractive.”
“Bewitching. Matches your shoes, too. Hey, those are my shoes!”
I glanced down. “Oh, yeah, sorry. Forgot to ask.”
“That’s okay. I wore your green glitter tank top last night.”
Everything is community property