Tender Monster Destiny
Hope Street is a street just like any other in Los
Angeles, except that its name makes it seem promising. A useless person sitting in his or her car at
a stop light and seeing that they are about to intersect Hope would probably
think, Could this be a sign?
Are there plain white college boys hidden in apartments
on this street, writing screenplays for a movie they’re going to make someday
for Public Television about their L.A. experience?
The name makes this street sound full of action and
import, a street with a secret, a street that lives out its charm with the
clean bend of palm trees and Hopscotch formations drawn on its pavement.
It was on this street that Joe’s car passed Judy and John
Freshflower, the ex-proprietors of a Chinese restaurant that used to be next
door to Joe’s store. It’s Christmastime,
and these are Christmases lived covertly in the lives of our imaginings, our
imaginings being the sanctuary against what’s real down here.
From the age of seven, I knew I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be the Beatles, so that I
wouldn’t have to lay in bed listening to them on the radio, growing anxious
thinking of how I would never be able to express in words the way their songs
on the radio made me feel nostalgia even for the present moment. I wanted all
the other people who were listening to the radio at the same time as me to be
listening to songs sung by me, and I would sing songs about their favorite
memories, of a father wearing a Santa Claus beard, a hydrangea bush peeking out
from under a blanket of snow, going on a game show, drinking beer with a first
boyfriend.
I didn’t become famous. I became a typist in a mortuary. The antique shop Joe owned went out of
business, and he became an old man working at McDonald’s.
Tender.
Monster. Destiny. At night when the curve of a freeway overpass
moves your body closer to death and waitlessness, the lit-up McDonald’s seen
down below seems the perfect beacon.
I’ve been to McDonalds’ throughout the country but I was never an
adventurer. I was an agoraphobic who
would tell my hosts when they’d get home from work that I spent the whole day
feeling out the city, when really I’d spend the day sleeping the sleep of
store-bought pills I got in a 30%-off bin at the grocery store Nora and I used
to live near.
In college, my roommate Nora and I ended
up with two cats, Blackie and Rose White. The grass and wildflowers in our back
yard grazed the low slopes of hanging clotheslines. We mostly slept over at her
boyfriend’s house because our own house lacked panache and never had any food
in the fridge. She’d pull her car into
the space next to the trash bin, and Blackie and Rose White would gallop through
the weed jungle to greet us. Nora and I referred to the cats as our
family, though we often forgot to feed them.
Rose White ran away, and one morning I found Blackie curled up behind an
old paint can in the garage, dead.
Judy and John Freshflower owned the Chinese restaurant
near Joe’s old antique shop. What Joe
and I had was the surrogate father and daughter relationship that could only be
shared by a man who thought he drank too much to have his own family, and the
daughter of a woman abandoned by a man who’d said he was just going out for a
pack of cigarettes, just like all the fleeing husbands of the nineteen-fifties
are purported to have said to their wives.
What Joe and I had with Judy and John Freshflower was the kind of
friendship that people sharing the same small square of carpet in a giant city
develop. When Joe would babysit me at
his shop, he’d park in a lot overlooking the alley behind his and the
Freshflowers’ businesses. Often, exiting
the car, we’d find Judy sitting at the wire table she’d set up in the alley,
drinking tea from the blue kettle on the table’s yellow tablecloth.
One time, she let Joe pass ahead of me a little bit
before stopping me. “Young girl, I would
like to show you something.” This was
our first moment. Judy grinned a big,
Americanized grin. “Are you ready?” she
asked. She pulled back the yellow
tablecloth, and there, sitting under the table, was Blackie.
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I did not know who he was then. I didn’t yet know about time travel. Then, I was just a quiet eleven year old. I
wore my pink satin baseball-style jacket with the denim heart sewn on the back
and my name written in cursive letters with fabric paint in the middle of the
heart. Years later, I would go to
college in another town, where Kurt Cobain’s ghost never walked me to Planned
Parenthood but where the ghost of a happier rock star would tell me, “Hey, take
it easy. You’re young and life is so
cool!” and I would never listen. Years
later, I understood what Judy had revealed to me that day in the alley. Immortality.
Tender destiny.
The day mom realized dad was never coming back with his
cigarettes, she walked to Joe’s shop and invited him out for drinks, his
treat. She was pretty and complex. He remained her best friend through all of
the new boyfriends she met and walked away from. There was a schizophrenic with a beard, who
glued covers of mystery novels to pieces of cardboard and sent them through the
mail to our subdued apartment in the valley, where we dutifully threw them in
the trash and wished out loud that he would not stalk us. There was an artist with worn-through
long-sleeved shirts and silky hair, who jumped up and down on the Murphy bed
with me one night when I couldn’t get to sleep, and ruined holidays with his
moodiness. There was a Vietnam Vet who
was homeless when we first met him.
There was a lawyer who used to live in New York in the apartment where
Rosemary’s Baby was filmed.
Joe was the man who drove me to and from school when mom
was at work, and who drove me from school to her work, to pick her up. For awhile, Joe and I had a routine of
stopping every Tuesday morning before school at a small bakery, for cheese
danishes. “Does the woman who worked
there still remember us?” the little-girl-me who wanted to be famous asks. We also had a routine of going to a video
arcade after school on Fridays, and one of renting movies from the Central
Library.
Tender. Our
longest-running routine was of waiting in a park near mom’s office for her to
get off work. The drive there from my
school was a drive through Mexican neighborhoods with colorful tigers painted
on grocery store signs and baby girls dressed like morning glories. This was before mom started working at
home. Joe and I would sit together in
the park, not talking, the actual moments as quiet and poignant as memories.
Monster. I am now
the kind of young women who forgets to feed her cats, letting them run away or
die. When I moved back to L.A., I put my
Bachelor’s Degree in a desk drawer, and, not foreseeing any way to ever become
famous, became a typist. Joe’s antique
shop went out of business; eventually, the building was torn down. I dream of that place, but without its
electricity or walls, or its merchandise.
On the other side of the shop there used to be a bar called Nardi’s,
with a juke box that played lovelorn songs by Elvis Costello and the Pretenders
that we could hear through the wall as we sat in the shop, playing card games
or checkers. Now it feels like Elvis is
dead.
Destiny. At a red
light on Hope Street, on our way to a coffee shop where mom waits for us, Joe
spots the Freshflowers and decide to pull over.
“Joe. I haven’t
seen you since the store got torn down.
How are you? How have you been?”
“Not so bad, John.
I was selling things on E-Bay for awhile but I wasn’t making enough
money, so now I work at McDonald’s.
It’s…and you? You guys moved the
restaurant over to that marketplace across from the new Target, right?”
“Yeah, but we’ve been having some trouble. Actually, we’re closing down in a few
weeks. We’re going to have to find a
location with cheaper rent. But you have
to come to the restaurant before it closes, have a meal on us.”
