Fade Into You Read online

  ×

  Chelo slides up to me in the hallway.

  “You baked?” I ask.

  “Naw, I wish. You got any?”

  “No but I can grab Dan.”

  “Oh yeah, grab Dan,” she says smiling.

  “And Jess?”

  “Ugh, no. I mean, Jess is cool but I can’t handle her rich-girl shit right now. It’s my moon time. Don’t feel like dealing with her, like fer sure, ya know?”

  “Come on,” I say, cocking my head. “I bet she’ll drive and take us to eat.” I bring my hands to my chest and bat my eyelashes.

  “No, man, you come on. You only like her cos you’re white.”

  “You’re majorly spaced out, man.”

  “Puta, don’t start with me, I mean it, I’ll pow pow you.”

  “Fine, chale, estúpida.” I slam my locker and we head out toward the courtyard. She’s wearing a short army skirt like Tank Girl, a vintage seventies Star Wars shirt with an authentic press-on Darth Vader, and has shaved her eyebrows and drawn them back on with sharpie. Her hair is candy-apple red and hangs long and parted down the middle like a hippie. Her combat boots lace all the way up her thigh. “Dude, you look sexy,” I say, glancing at her ensemble.

  “My ensamblay impresses you?” she says, imitating my voice, again.

  “Like, oh my gawd! It totally does! Like, it’s so spicy!” I say, imitating her imitating me. We make our way to F lot talking like spaced-out eighties chicks.

  “Like, what do you think his dick looks like?”

  “Oh my gawd, like I totally bought a tubular blouse at the Galleria! I wonder if it will match his wiener?”

  “Have a ’tude, wiener cock dude!”

  Jessica comes running out of music hall waving her arms and heading in our direction.

  “Oh my god, dudes,” she says, leaning on her side and trying to catch her breath. “I am so baked, I need to scarf. Carrows, South Pas? My treat? I totally need to inhale some chipotle chicken fingers like, stat.”

  Chelo and I burst into guffaws and Jess’s face gets all twisted and embarrassed and she looks down at herself trying to figure out what we’re laughing at.

  “How’s Encino?” asks Chelo, trying to control her laughter.

  “I live in Sherman Oaks,” she answers, not understanding she’s being made fun of, because who would ever make fun of her? “Come on, dudes, are we going to eat or what?” she whines, tugging on the bottom of her shirt. “I am like, totally famished and stuff.”

  “You’re baked?” asks Chelo.

  “Totally. Wanna blaze?”

  “For totes,” she quips, looping her arm in Jessica’s like they’re Laverne and Shirley and I can’t tell if she’s faking it or not.

  “Ándale, stupids!” she yells, turning her head in my direction. “Órale! I got some pancakes to scarf!” And she gives me an exaggerated wink. Jessica wraps her arms around Chelo and they hug and kiss each other’s cheeks, and they aren’t faking it anymore, it’s good times. Jess leans all her weight on Chelo and keeps trying to not fall over and their lunch boxes drag along the floor.

  “Stop it, loony toon!” yells Chelo, shoving Jess. “Come on slow poke!” she calls looking at me again where I’m trailing behind. Her face is bright and light and laughter leads our way.

  “Okay!” I call, picking up my feet and jogging after them. “I’m coming!”

  ×

  Chelo’s parents are at the wooden kitchen table, their backs to us. We walk in and her mom turns around, her front bangs a rolled-up swoop like my grandma’s in old photographs. She cocks her head back, eyebrows thin, her seventies plaid shirt tucked into denim bell-bottoms, her lips lined in thick brown eyeliner, her face packed in thick foundation, her lips a deep scarlet red. “Where you been at?” she says, pulling buds off a dried marijuana batch and stacking them on top of an even larger pile of naked stems. Chelo’s father, Dodgers shirt tucked into beige Dickies and wearing brown chanclas and white tube socks, stands and starts to push the weed into a large Vons paper bag rolled down at the top.

  “Let’s go in the back,” he says to Chelo’s mom. “You all make some food, hang out. Chelly, you need money for food?”

  “Yeah,” she says putting her hands on her hips. “You don’t have to go in the back.” She raises her eyebrows at him.

  “You wish, little fish. We’re going in the back.”

  “Don’t be getting no ideas, estúpida,” adds her mom, absentmindedly picking dirt from underneath her long lacquered red nails, glossier and shinier than any hot rod. My eyes wander to the counter and I see a small black handgun. My heart flutters and I avert my eyes.

  “Ah shit, mija,” says her dad watching me. He grabs a large T-shirt off the kitchen table and walks over to the counter and snatches it, walks it to the fridge and places it delicately, still shrouded, on top. “I’m sorry, shit, I’m sorry. Look, mija,” he takes his wallet out, hands Chelo twenty dollars, “Go get some food, anything. Get a video too,” he says, handing over the Blockbuster card.

  Chelo’s mom walks up to him and grabs the money. “Fuck, sit, I’ll make you guys dinner. What do you want?” she asks, tying an apron around her waist. “I can make cheeseburgers or fideo, how ’bout that?”

  “That sounds really good, actually,” I say looking at Chelo, who pulls a chair and sits.

  “We just had chicken fingers, fool,” she says looking at me.

  “Mary, them kids don’t need you to cook, they good with chips and snacks, they just ate, they wanna hang out.”

  “No, it’s cool,” says Chelo, looking at her mother’s face, which deflates softly at her father’s words. “Actually that does sound good. Thanks, Mom, I want a cheeseburger.”

  “Mija, I love you,” she says, grabbing Chelo’s mouth and squeezing. She walks to the fridge, pulls out pre-shaped hamburger patties, a block of cheddar cheese, a jar of pickles, and a container of tomato paste. She grabs a can of RO*TEL from the cupboard, a container of garlic salt, and red chili powder. “Get the hamburger buns from the pantry.” Chelo and I stand and walk toward the backdoor. On the couch is a small child, five years old, eating a Lucas chili candy pop and holding a can of Coke.

  “Where’s your mom at?” asks Chelo, stopping to look at the kid, her niece. “Hey, Flora, estúpida,” she says, tapping the girl on the side of her head, “where’s your puta mom at?”

  “Don’t call your sister fucking nasty names in front of her daughter!” yells her mom from the kitchen where she’s smashing the preformed hamburger patties into a large bowl with all the other ingredients, giving them new shapes.

  “Adelicia!” screams Chelo. “Your baby fell on its face! Get down here!”

  “Who are you?” demands her mom, walking toward us, hamburger meat on her hands. “What kind of nonsense are you even stirring? Shut up and get those patty buns.”

  “Adelicia!” she screams again.

  “What, puta?” screams Adel from upstairs.

  “Your baby’s ugly!”

  “Fuck you, stupid!” she shouts, flipping her long straight hair over her shoulder and walking back around the corner toward her room and slamming the door.

  “Momma, can we grab a joint?”

  “What?” she says, screwing up her face. She drops her hands in the bowl and looks at us like we’re strangers that walked into her house and started shouting demands. And then I realize that right now, to Mary, we are. Who are we? Who are we really except dumb stoned teenagers fucking up her rhythm?

  “I know you’re joking. Shit,” she says, rolling her eyes and massaging the patties.

  “Whatever, I’ll just grab one later.”

  “Nuh-uh, oh hell no!” yells her mom, walking into the living room ready to scream at Chelo, but we’ve already opened the side door to the pantry and are beyond her reach. The door swishes closed on her pissed-off face.

  “I got ’em!” yells Chelo, pulling the hamburger bun bag toward her. “It’s okay, Mommy, I got it. Got the buns
! Come on,” she says, tossing them on the washing machine and walking into the backyard instead of going back into the kitchen. Her father sits on a cinder block in the yellowed sea of weeds and old cars, engines missing and spilling guts into the dried earth. The hot yellow sun sets on the low flat city of Montebello. “Daddy, can we have a joint?” He shakes his head and laughs like she’s Wally Cleaver and just got caught sticking her finger in a pie. Incorrigible.

  “Yeah, yeah, okay, come on.”

  I try to navigate my way around the broken parts of the yard toward where he’s sitting with the money and the weed. Chelo struggles too, stepping on old tires and trying to avoid the sharp burs and stickers that reach up from the ground like claws.

  It’s not easy, but we make it, and he’s there with open arms, a big toothy smile on his face, the sun arching ever so beautifully like a ball of fire, a golden ring. “Mija, mija,” he says, pulling her into him, her feet lifting off the ground. “Come, come.”

  ×

  What if I set the house on fire? What if I turn into a bird and fly away, turquoise, purple, like the world of Sandra Cisneros and her Mango Streets? What if I stack these novels up in a corner and shoot them down like beer cans in a field? Sitting on the stumps of fir trees in the backwoods of New Mexico? What if I become a badger in Walden Pond? What if I watch Henry each morning gather water for his coffee? What if I stick my head in this speaker on a Wednesday night in the giant trashed-out banquet hall, former grand beauty of the Alexandria Hotel, downtown? Happy hardcore blasting my eardrums into outer space, kids dressed as anime characters doing bumps of K out of PEZ dispensers with Scooby-Doo heads? What if I tell you instead that I like to get fucked up? What if I tell you I like to hit my head on walls as hard as I can because the dizzy feeling is the most delicious thing I’ve found after fucking cucumbers in my room at night, staring at pictures of Marlon Brando I’ve ripped out of library books? What if I tell you I like to fall down? What if I told you that when I get stoned I spin in a circle till my legs drop out beneath me then beat my temples against my fist then stand again, to try and see how far I can walk? What if I told you about getting high? Would you believe me if I told you I get high all day? Even if you can’t see me, even if you try to talk to me, even if you ask me to stand at the chalkboard and read from my final, even if you ask me to stay after class, I have another eyelid, it’s invisible, it’s a film, and you’ll never see it, and it’s just enough to keep me shrouded and floating from this world to the next.

  Let me tiptoe around you on the highway of life. Every cigarette is a firecracker. Let me explode on my own.

  ×

  Jessie calls and asks if I want to spend the weekend at her place. “I can take you to school Monday no probs.”

  “Yeah, that would be cool, actually. My mom is gone till tomorrow.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. She just left,” I lie, because I don’t want to get into the Lyla thing and also I just don’t care. Jessica interprets this, however, as my needing her charity. My poor unfortunate soul.

  “Well, fuck, are you okay? Hold on. Mom!” she screams.

  “Jessie, Jessica, it’s cool, it’s not one of those situations.”

  “Situations? Well, fuck, Nikki, I never thought that you were like, that you needed …”

  “Like, what? Need what?” I ask, sitting up straight, my interest piqued. “Like, what?” I ask again, trying not to sound defensive or challenging. I must remain, even in this moment, racially ambiguous. Say it. I can hear Sparks’s “I Predict” playing in her bedroom.

  “Nothing, I just, where’s your mom?”

  “Up north.”

  “Up north where? Why?”

  “Half Moon Bay. Everything is fine. She had a work thing.”

  “Oh. Okay. Are you sure?”

  “Yeah dude, I’m sure.”

  “You live in Pasadena? I’ll come get you right now.”

  “It’s cool.”

  “You … do live in Pasadena, right?”

  “Yeah, man, a nice little white neighborhood.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “You know what, man? I’m sick of being accused of being racist. You guys don’t even know me. I’m Jewish, how can I be racist? Why are you guys always even talking about race? I mean, come on, who cares?”

  “I don’t think you’re racist, Jess,” I say calmly, turning one of my emerald-green pieces of costume jewelry over in my hand. I hold it up to my neck in front of the mirror. And I don’t think she’s racist. “I think you’re classist.”

  “What is your deal, weirdo?”

  I hang up and let the dial tone wipe my brain clean. Yes. Yes. Clean me through.

  I walk down the street to Sarah’s house smoking a cigarette, even though I know my neighbors can probably see me. Climb the brick wall that separates her street from mine and hop down into the backyard. Her lawn is green and overgrown and their trampoline, the one we jumped on as kids until our heads almost exploded, sits covered in red, yellow, and brown rotting autumn leaves. The ground is wet and I get mud on my combats. “Hey,” I say, leaning against the screen door to her family’s basement. “Fuck!” she shouts, jumping up and knocking a bowl of cereal off her lap. Luckily it’s dry. She’s watching Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, and I know that she’s probably been sitting here since eight a.m. drooling at Saturday morning cartoons. “You scared me,” she says. I pull the screen door open and walk inside. The Lefkowitzs have lived in the same house since 1974 and that was the last time they decorated. The brown shag carpet is matted like an old sheepdog and the basement, with her older brother Marc’s drums and old Rush and Led Zeppelin posters, makes it feel as if you’re stepping into a time machine. Only Sarah’s old Cabbage Patch Kids, My Little Ponies, and dirty Rainbow Brite, which she brought downstairs in junior high, offer some evidence of the progression of time. Any signs of the current decade, like Chris Cornell or Kathleen Hanna, remain upstairs, thumbtacked to her bedroom wall.

  “It smells like schwag down here,” I say, sniffing the air and helping her pick up Honey Smacks.

  “That’s because I got baked like an hour ago.”

  “Where’s your mom?” I ask, sitting next to her on the couch once the cereal has been collected and put back into its bowl.

  “Upstairs.”

  “Well, are you doing anything today?”

  “Like what?” she asks, looking back at the TV. Brain presses his hands together, an evil mastermind and shoots Pinky with a zap of red light.

  “Gee, I don’t know, something?” I pick up her pager. “How are you going to get a life if you never turn this thing on?”

  “I have a life,” she says, eating the cereal from the bowl. “I fucked Paul Kinsey last night. What did you do?” Paul Kinsey is a freshman at Occidental that she met at the Norton Simon Museum and now picks her up from school sometimes. He is, admittedly, hot.

  “Ew. That guy’s a scab.”

  Finally she looks at me, annoyed. “What is your problem, man? It’s like, eleven a.m.”

  I put the pager down. “Nothing, I just, I want to get out of here.”

  “Okay, like where?” she looks at my Siouxsie and the Banshees shirt. “Nice outfit. Your dream of becoming the next Exene Cervenka is almost complete. Is it real?” she pulls on the hem, which is ripped.

  “Yeah, got it at the Salvation Army store on Melrose, the boots too.”

  “What about the pants?” she asks, looking at the black skintight jeans.

  “Aaardvarks.”

  “The eyeliner’s cool.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “Hey! Let’s hike to the top of Echo Canyon and creep the abandoned hotel.”

  “I don’t know,” she says, watching Pinky. “That seems like a lot of work.”

  “Well I don’t want to spend all day in your basement getting stoned.”

  “No one asked you to come over.”

  “Don
’t make me leave.”

  “No one’s making you do anything.”

  “Let’s go to the Banana Museum!”

  “That place smells. I’ll go to Old Town.”

  “It’s full of babies.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s just a bunch of junior high kids. What about Poo-Bah’s?”

  Finally she looks at me and smiles, “Okay, that place is solid. Let me take a shower and change. Cash the pipe.” She jogs up the brown carpeted steps toward the upper part of the house, her long, shiny black hair bouncing as she goes, and I can’t help but notice that I like her navy blue flared corduroy pants with the sailor front. I lean forward and grab the sandwich bag of weed and load the one hitter. “You had sex last night?” I shout, looking for a lighter on the dirty coffee table. She pokes her head back downstairs and gives me a dirty look. “Shut up, man,” she says, shushing me. “My mom is, like, somewhere.”

  Poo-Bah’s, the old record store run by a couple of burned-out, long-white-haired hippies with yellow mustaches from years of nicotine and weed smoke, sits inside a dusty old bungalow in Pasadena and houses one of the finest collections in all of Los Angeles County. Half of it stapled to the old house’s walls. Every inch covered with master-works from Jim Morrison to Os Mutantes to the Police, Black Flag, Harry Belafonte, and Keely Shaye Smith. The ceiling is covered as well, a virtual time capsule of the last thirty years of hepcats and rockers, autographed head shots looking down on you like the smiling heads of gods. Hey, Grand Poo Bah, a real Honey! Love, Dolly P! Never close your doors, mate, Keef Richards.

  Sarah’s currently got half the store under her arm. I flip through the punk section looking for a Weirdos album Chelo told me about. I pretended like I knew who they were and now I’m under self-imposed pressure to catch up on my lie before I see her next. I can’t find it and Sarah walks up to the old wooden register, the front counter-top piled high with rock books, moldy LA Weeklys, chattering wind-up teeth, and a plastic chicken that hangs to the side of the counter, stapled by its feet. She opens her mouth to announce her presence, one foot on the small stool put in place so customers can step up and hand their purchases to one of the old hippies who sit hidden somewhere behind the piles of junk.