laura
burbank never changes. It’s one big plastic strip mall, run together through the base of the hills like a thread, Jamba Juice Bed Bath and Beyond and nail salons like whorehouses, buff and frost like blowjobs for the rich white lonely women. On Cahuenga the road hugs the freeway and the lanes narrow, squeezing you tight between hill and highway, birthing your car finally into wider lanes, the spit and grime of Hollywood, and no matter who you are or where you’ve been it always feels the same.
Six years ago I was here, speeding down Ventura with my feet on the dash of a clunky red truck, and now I’m here again inside some stranger’s Accord, and years have intervened giving my fingers their first faint wrinkles but it all looks the same out the window. When we drove through before, my mom pointed at the storefronts like they were somehow glamorous but I never believed her: sure, they were new and bigger than the things I’d seen, but even then I saw the grime around the plastic.
We were here for Disneyland. We drove down 40 then 15 from Ludlow till the desert turned to endless suburbs, six hours of traffic till we got to Anaheim and found out they raised the entrance fee. She got pissed off because we couldn’t afford it, and plus the motel rates were jacked up for the tourists—Motel 6 cost eighty bucks a night. So we went up to L.A. I didn’t mind, not really—I was ten, already too old for Mickey, Minnie, Dumbo, and all them. The whole thing had been my mom’s idea. I think she thought it was obligatory, proof of her maternal commitment and skill. I remember thinking it was kind of a crock. I knew she was more interested in L.A. than Disneyland anyway, the promise of the city, the way the letters stretched across mountains and it looked how it looked on TV.
It still looks like that up in those hills, and down at their feet it’s still plastic and dirty. It’s weird, the way so many things happen but the ground stays the same, how we turn inside out, molt, grow new cells while words endure: HAIR. CELEBRITY AUTO BODY. MEL’S. You could call them institutions but really it’s just that here in Los Angeles signs are built to withstand earthquakes, and we are not. I remember my mom told me what a fault line was while we were here and I thought every highway traced a place where the ground could open up and spill us all into the sea. I remember thinking that would still be better than going back to the desert. At least it would change something.
But now it’s been six years and I’m back here and nothing’s changed but me. I don’t think places are what make you change. My mom always talks about them like when we get there something will happen, but there’s always a reason we don’t get let in. And when you’re looking from the outside, everything is just itself, the way they’ve built it, not what you’ve built it up to be.
A few weeks ago I said fuck it. I didn’t mean to, not really: it wasn’t the kind of thing where I packed my bag and had it hidden in the closet, tracked my mom’s routine so I knew she’d be at the grocery store, plotted the escape. You always hear of kids running away like that, leaving notes, but that’s not what I did. It was more like this: one morning I got up at noon, took money from my mom’s secret coffee can, walked out the front door through the orange dust and crossed the blacktop to the 58. There was a truck. I put out my thumb. I’m sixteen and a girl so he stopped. I got in.
We drove toward Hinkley, not so much where I wanted to go, but then I wasn’t trying to go anywhere in particular. He looked at me like I was bait and tried to be my friend. I rolled my eyes and spat out the window. It wasn’t what he thought: me some little wounded hitcher girl and him the big sexy teacher or the bad guy. It was more like the times my mom’s boyfriends told me I was pretty. My skin was pasty and my hair was dull brown and my body was just medium. I knew I wasn’t pretty. They all thought I rolled my eyes and shut my mouth because my daddy had hit me my boyfriend had dumped me or something, but really I’d just had about enough. “Such a shame,” they’d say, and my mom would say “It is, isn’t it?” It was more like that.
It is, isn’t it. She had a few of those—phrases she used over and over, even if the people and places and rooms were different, even just with me. When I was little it was Disneyland she talked about over and over, and Someday; after that failed trip it was pretty much whatever the current boyfriend said. There were lots of those, boyfriends, and I got over trying to like them after I turned twelve or so. She liked them well enough for both of us.
She would’ve liked this guy, too, with his green truck, gritty grin, dirty hair. Around the truck stops I’d smile at him just enough so he wouldn’t get bored and drop me off. Other times I watched the desert through his bug-stained window. It was flat and June already, and my arms smelled like sweat, the kind that’s still faint enough to be sweet; no salt, just skin and heat.
We got to Hinkley, and he said “Here we are, end of the line. Unless you want to stay and ride around a little. . . .” My mom taught me how to say no thank you, so I hopped out at the BP, walked west like I was going somewhere and knew where it was.
The rest of it was pretty much the same. I got five rides, south and west; on the third one I figured out I was going to Los Angeles. It was past eleven and the stars stretched out wide, glinting in the empty, and they reminded me of nighttime city. I said it out loud, a mark on the big quiet blackness like a star. After that I’d tell them my destination and they all thought I was nursing some kind of dream.
None of those L.A. dreams are worth much, though. I figured that out back at ten years old when I watched my mom blink back the strip malls, drive around looking for things that sparkled till even the sky was grime, race toward Grauman’s Chinese to find the hooker standing in Gene Kelly’s footprints. Eventually she took me home. The city tries to feed those dreams, painting buildings pink and pasting posters everywhere, stars shining down on you bigger than your car, but the dirt gets in all the cracks like they’re creases in your hands and makes your palm prints filthy, and anything you were trying to find that was shiny gets dull fast.
I guess I came here looking for a different kind of dirty than the one I knew. I’d memorized every inch of Ludlow, the neon and the highway and the dust, and the thousand or so words that people used; I’d used them up. I’d burned through every book in my tiny school library, made straight A’s since seventh grade and no one noticed: not my mom, not my teachers even. Past twelve, if you were a girl, all anyone cared about was pretty. Words swarmed inside my head like bees, and everyone around me was afraid of getting stung. So I sat there silent, picking at my cuticles in English class, peeling my split ends apart at dinner. Heading out to the porch when my mom switched on the nightly parade of glossy packaged people through our tiny TV. Shy, people said, or Sullen, or Isn’t it a shame. It is, isn’t it. I had all these sentences in my brain, so many more than my mom ever used, and all anyone ever said was Too bad, she could be so pretty, when I knew I couldn’t.
I was bored I guess is what it was, and I wish I could say something more interesting like I had a goal or dream or there was something I was chasing but there it is. My mom could do without me, I was tired of TV, I came to L.A. by accident with a couple hundred bucks and a school I.D. from Ludlow High, hoping to find someone who at least knew how to talk.
He drops me off at Hollywood and Vine, by a big billboard that says “Angelyne” and has a picture of some blow-up doll with big tits swathed in pink. Down the street there’s one for Spearmint Rhino Gentlemen’s Club, and the first thing I think is that’s the most fucked up name for a strip bar I have ever heard. What happens with kids like me in Hollywood is they become strippers or do grainy porn on cheap videotape in some guy’s basement and then get killed. I’ve seen enough TV movies to know that. But seeing it blown up full size above my head is another thing entirely, because some guy said about those girls: She could be so pretty and then painted her and stuck her up there. It’s real, the fake of it and the glossed-over raw, and it makes my ribs feel dirty.
A couple blocks below that is the hostel. I asked my last ride, a puffy Honda-driving guy who worked in “the industry,” which he explained to me meant movies, where I should stay. I said it so pissy and mean that there was no way he could suggest his place. He said south on Vine there was a Vagabond Inn, and below that he thought he’d driven past a hostel once. Just when I’m starting to lose hope I find it. It’s eight bucks a night for a bunk bed. It’s like two in the morning and there’s nobody up. I climb in my bed in the girls’ room I’m assigned and look out the window. You can see HOLLYW stretched across the mountains and then a building cuts it off.
That first night there the screaming wakes me up. That sounds dramatic, doesn’t it, like some crime or sordid thing. Really it’s just Tracy, this girl about my age with bleached-out skin to match her hair, pale yellow, yelling at her gorgeous, sketchy boyfriend before he goes back to the guys’ room or the street. He keeps saying Tracy over and over, like her name would make her listen. But she’s really upset, enough to be scary; he was late to something or other and she’s determined to rip him a new one. I try not to let my eyes crack open; I don’t want her to turn that flood on me, and besides, it’s none of my business. But by the time he shuffles off to his side of the building I am definitely up.
Right before dawn has always been my favorite time. In Ludlow the sky is clear like glass above the gray-brown sand, the blue darker than daylight and lighter than night, the only deep, real color you ever see in the landscape around there. I used to wake up sometimes for no reason and lay in the sheets just to watch it. I could’ve snuck outside to see the sunrise, but it was so quiet I thought if I even rustled the bedspread I’d stir it all up. Sometimes a truck would roll through from Cleveland or Michigan or somewhere, but somehow their noise was part of the quiet too, like the tree in the forest with no one to hear. Except me, but I could keep the secret.
Here it’s different. The blue is the same but the sounds are louder, not like trees in forests. Here they’re starting their days already, the first wave of them, padding out to get newspapers, turn keys in ignitions, beat the traffic. Someone breaks a bottle on the sidewalk below us. When I look down later it’s still there, green like grass or emeralds, glinting on the gray of the pavement.
Tracy’s three beds over from me and she keeps trying to readjust her sheets like it’ll make her warmer, cover her up. She humphs and rolls onto one side, wiggles herself into the covers and stays still for twenty seconds, then starts it all again. I see her mid-roll, when she flails the sheets off before swaddling herself. She’s rat-faced and skinny and her hip bones poke through the thin synthetic blanket. She’s been crying. Her clothes are black and she has pins and patches everywhere, spikes around her neck like a too-tough dog. I’m scared of her. I fall back asleep.
By the time I open my eyes again it’s almost one. The sun is hot through the windows and I wake up sticky, filmed with gray like the haze on the mountains, blurred. All the other bunks are empty, and I’m relieved I won’t have to stand in line for the shower. For a minute I think of the bathroom at home, dingy roses on the shower curtain and how my mom would’ve been in there this morning, left the sink wet and her toothbrush out. I would’ve cleaned it up before school if I was there, but I’m not. Without me the mess will accumulate, a toothbrush here, a towel there, uncapped shampoo, a week before it gets big enough for her to notice anything is different or missing. I mean obviously she knows I’m gone, she probably even called the cops or some boyfriend, but it’ll take a while before she sees it makes a difference. As long as she still has her guys and dreams of Disneyland or something like it, it doesn’t really matter where I am.
Which by now is in a white tile bathroom halfway between bus-station bathroom and McDonald’s, anonymous, mildew smell barely camouflaged by bleach, walls lined with those fake mirrors you can’t really see yourself in. The shower is Quarters Only and all I’ve got left is bills and nickels, so I wash my face with paper towels and head to the front desk for change.
Whoever works it is apparently on lunch, and when I walk outside to find a 7-Eleven there’s this Tracy person squatted down and smoking beneath the Spearmint Rhino billboard. “Hey,” she says. “I saw you watching me last night.” The way she’s squinting I think she might hit me or something.
I pretend not to know what she’s talking about and chew my thumbnail. “What?” is what I muster.
“I saw you watching me. When I came in with Critter.”
“Critter?”
“Yeah, the guy I was with? Whatever. It’s rude to stare.”
It’s funny: there she is, squatted down, grimy-nailed, sucking ash through a filterless cigarette, patches on her black chained pants full of foul language—and she’s telling me about manners. “You don’t look like you care much about rude,” I say, and as soon as it’s out of my mouth I start thinking what I’d do if she gets mad. Really she’s not that different from all the dirtball bully boys in Ludlow, I tell myself, and I stand up for myself with them all right.
But she just grins at me. “Yeah,” she says. She looks like a wet rat when she smiles. “That’s true.” I just stand there, half smirking, not sure if it’s cool or not to smile back. “Got a buck twenty-nine? I could use a taco,” she says, and offers me a cigarette. I ask her for a light.
After that Tracy’s my de facto best friend in Los Angeles. I say de facto because there aren’t any others, which makes her automatically the best, but secretly even if there were she’d be my favorite. She’s not like anybody on TV or back in Ludlow. She doesn’t give a shit about my straight A’s either, but she cares even less about pretty, and she wants to know about the words that buzz around inside my head. She’s real, the first real thing I’ve ever met, and she scares me just a little. Nobody’s ever scared me before.
Tracy knows lots of people besides me, but they’re all guys with names like Critter and Squid who hang out on the sidewalk with a pit bull and spend their money on 40s. I’m pretty sure they all want to get in her pants, so none of them is really her friend.
Right away they start in asking who’s the goody-goody, meaning me. Tracy always keeps us out on the edge of the group, only talking to Critter, but I can still hear them. I don’t dress like them in black jeans and once-white-now-brown wifebeaters, rags and patches, spikes and bleach. My clothes come from Wal-Mart in Ludlow; it’s not like I’ve got money to spend looking punk. My hair is brown, not green or dreadlocked orange, and I don’t hustle or shoot up. They call me Country Girl and holler things at Tracy. She never says much to them except fuck off, and they always just keep talking.
But she goes back to Critter every couple days around sunset, finds him by the 7-Eleven or the alley, stands just in eyeshot till he leaves the pack and comes to her. I stick to her side till he pulls her over by the Dumpsters and I’m left there, shuffling, while Scabius yells shit at me from twenty feet away. When she comes back I breathe relief and take her to Benito’s Taco Shop, home of the famous rolled taco. She likes red beans or sometimes chicken.
Besides Benito’s, we spend a lot of time at the donut shops around Santa Monica and Vine. Twin Donut, Fancy Donut, Tang’s Donut, Winchell’s. Twin has the best coffee but they kick us out faster than the others; they have a one-hour limit. Sometimes when the cops come in and check her out Tracy gets antsy and tells me “Let’s get out of here,” and I follow her even though I don’t have any reason to be scared of cops. Nobody’s looking for me.
The day Tracy tells me about her dad, we’ve been kicked out of Twin Donut and cops have shown up at Tang’s to try and talk to her; we didn’t stick around long enough to find out what they wanted. So we’re reduced to hanging out at Winchell’s, the lowest rung on the donut ladder. They’ve got a special: two donuts and a jumbo coffee, and I eat the donuts while she drinks. I almost never see her hungry.
The thing that gets me is how matter-of-fact she is. I mean, it’s not like I expect her to cry or something; she never does and besides I know enough to know that after a while you dry up. But it’s more than not crying: she sounds like a news anchor, the way her voice loses its edges and she reports the facts. No details, just facts, like she’s telling the story of someone else and doesn’t know their insides, the way things smell and feel.
It started when she was ten. She never told her mom. First he just came in sometimes past bedtime; by six months later he split her open every other night. After five years she snuck out and didn’t leave a note. She had a sister, who’d be ten about now. Sometimes at night around bedtime she thought of hitching home, breaking a window and stealing her back.
I want to ask her why didn’t she do it. I’d go with her if she wanted, we could cut the screens together. I had a knife. I look at her looking down at the Formica table and I can see it, us up on Cahuenga by the on-ramp, thumbs out, headed east into too-bright sunrise, squinting it out till we hit the desert and dust got in our mouths. We’d plot out our plan of action like a couple of spies, get in and out of the house without even leaving handprints. I’d help her; I’d know how once we were there.
It’s quiet at our table for a minute, inside the sound of donut orders and where’s the sugar for the coffee and a drunk guy muttering in the back about new shoes and socks. Nobody’s ever told me something like that before. Something real. I watch Tracy pick at her fingernails, scrape dirt from under them like she knows they’ll never really be clean. I want to ask her why doesn’t she do it, go home, get her sister, and I try to think of how to say it without sounding like I think I know something, because I don’t. The quiet swells while I try to think of ways to say things till finally she drains her coffee and stands up. “I gotta go,” she says. “Critter’s waiting for me at Benito’s.” I want to tell her to wait, give me one more minute and I’ll have something to say, but I don’t. I just trail her out the door and back onto the street.
Somehow we never wind up at that Winchell’s again, and I never can bring up her dad. It makes that day a bubble, contained in itself and fragile. Sometimes I look at her and I can feel it: the Formica of the table, sick-sweet of coconut donuts, the bitter black of sludgy coffee and the glare of buzzing light, all tucked in a pocket inside me. In that bubble she’s still saying things nobody knows and I’m still wordless, not knowing how to fill the space she opened up, but wanting to and watching her and staying with her after, following her so she’ll know that I won’t leave. The bubble edge around that day makes it not just a memory but a secret, and I hold on to it like I could keep it safe. When the boys show up and Tracy switches seats to sit with Critter I roll it over in my mouth, rub it in my fingers like a stone and think: You guys will never touch this.
Critter isn’t Tracy’s boyfriend. I don’t know how I found that out really; I just know after a while, the way you know a place, the way it smells, the angles and the corners. Sometimes she goes and meets him or talks to him off on the edges where I can’t hear, but that’s all. She never talks about him when he isn’t there.
Still it makes me mad when she leaves me to meet him.
She always comes back quiet, neck stiff from slouching, and won’t look me in the eye. It takes me an hour of sitting there not asking questions before she’ll start talking again.
Once I tried to ask her where they’d gone and her eyes went slitty. Right then she reminded me of a coyote I’d seen in a petting zoo when I was nine. Everything else was baby goats and sheep and cows, and there was this coyote in a chicken-wire cage, trying to find a place to hide. But there was nowhere to go so it just stood there, backed into the corner of the cage it was trapped in, and watched the people point at it. Tracy was like that right then, and I felt like a kid with my fists full of petting-zoo food.
After that I never ask her where they’ve been or where she came from. It kind of makes it magic: she disappears and then shows up again like someone waved a wand. I still feel something knot up underneath my chest when she leaves, though. I guess it’s what people call jealous. I’ve never cared about anyone enough to be jealous before, and even though the inside of my chest is crawling, I also kind of love her more that she could make me feel that way.
To make the time she’s gone pass quicker, I start walking. I never get farther than Alameda on the north end or Olympic on the south, and other than Burbank I never leave Hollywood. I know there’s way more of the city spread out beyond those edges, enough to wear out three pairs of shoes if I tried to walk it all. But I kind of don’t want to. I like the feeling of knowing it goes beyond what I could see or touch or travel, always more out there somewhere. There are all these names I’ve heard but still can’t picture: Brentwood, Inglewood, Glendale, Echo Park. I want to keep the words inside my head and the places unfamiliar. It leaves open the possibility that one of the places inside the names is magic. Even if I know it isn’t true, at least then I can’t prove it isn’t.
Inside that cross-street box, though, I go everywhere: down Sunset, up Highland, on La Brea toward the fenced-off tar pits. I spend a lot of time on the tourist strip of Hollywood Boulevard, by the shops that sell pictures of celebrities left over from the ’80s. The falafel is cheap there and it’s one of two stretches of street I’ve found where people actually walk around. Tracy taught me to panhandle so I wouldn’t use up all my savings, and most places it’s pretty hopeless, with the strangers closed inside their air-conditioned cars. But that part of Hollywood is full of people, and Wisconsin Kansas Utah tourists all feel guilty when they see the TV-movie runaway out on the street begging for change. They think if they flip me a quarter they’ll stave off my descent into the naked grainy-video underbelly of the city, so they always drop their change and keep on walking.
Lots of people keep on walking in L.A. Or driving, but either way it’s the same: they look forward and keep moving past. The strip-mall signs draw your eye up and out, away from what’s happening at street level, near your own skin, and you just thread through it all, keep the blinders on, wind in your ears. Sitting on the sidewalks I see it over and over. One time I’m coming out of the 7-Eleven when a little girl falls on the concrete. She must be about six, just trips and falls like six-year-olds do, scrapes her grubby knees and starts crying. Her junkie-skinny dad just keeps on walking. But she won’t follow. She’s still little enough to know when something hurts you don’t get up and walk away from it, so she sits there till he comes back.
When he does he still won’t touch her, though, or talk. Just slouches over her scraped-knee sobs and lets her cry, staring at the sidewalk or I don’t know what. Finally I get in front of him, squat down and ask her “Are you okay?” She skitters behind his skeleton legs and clings to his acid-washed jeans, staring out at me through dirt and snot and tears. He doesn’t move. His eyes are like the wax museum. “Man, give your kid a hug,” I say. “She’s crying. Just hug her. It’ll fix it.” He looks through me like I’m only a voice, but bends down and puts his hand on the edge of her shoulder. He doesn’t even really touch her, just the air around her, like he thinks her skin will hurt him. It doesn’t make her stop crying at all.
He’s so skinny and his eyes are dead; it’d be so easy to shove him out of the way so I could grab that girl and hold her. But she cowers behind him like I’m a thing she needs to be protected from. Like he’ll protect her. After a while he pulls her up by the armpit and keeps on walking again. She stumbles to catch up to him, says “Daddy, Daddy,” still thinking he might hear her.
All day after I watch them walk away I hold that girl inside my head.
When Tracy comes back later I tell her about them. “Motherfucker,” she says. “We should go find that fucking guy and take his daughter and raise her ourselves.” And I know if we could find them that she’d do it. That’s why I love Tracy. I could never tell her but I know she’s just like that little girl, with her ratty hair and grimy weasel face and skittery eyes. But she quit clinging to the skeleton legs of the daddy that didn’t touch her right, wiped the snot off her cheeks and learned to look strangers straight in the face. That’s why I love her.
I want to say Well come on then, let’s go get a flashlight and troll through the streets till we find them, smoke out every house in L.A. so they’re forced into the outside where we can see them, take that girl and grab her in our arms and run. But I know that it can’t happen so I don’t. Instead I say “Let’s get a taco.”
When we’re a block from Benito’s I see that Critter and the guys are there. I want to tell her that I changed my mind, I want donuts instead. But they already saw us. As we walk the last few yards I hold my breath, hoping Tracy won’t get sucked into Critter-world and leave me waiting for our food. But when we get there Tracy just marches to the counter, orders red beans and rice, and asks me for two dollars. It’s only a dollar thirty-seven but I let her pocket the change.
We’re about to take off when Scabius asks me for a blowjob. Actually he doesn’t ask; he tells me to give him one or get off their piece of sidewalk. It rolls out of his mouth easy, like he’s asking for spare change, but then he lets it hang there, won’t let me pass it by. Critter laughs and no one else says anything and Scabius goes “Well, how about it, Country Girl?” I can feel the corner I’m backed into even in the open air of sidewalk and the seconds stretch out like they do when you’re stuck in fight-or-flight and can’t do either one. My face gets hot. I can’t look at Tracy. She could go either way, I think: leave me to fend for myself like her sister or search me out and save me like the scraped-knee sidewalk stranger girl. These guys have been there longer than me.
After just about forever Tracy says “Fuck you.” It comes out like ice, or glass, or steel. When I turn around her eyes aim past me like I’m not even there. “Don’t pull that shit, you fucking coward,” she says, and spits on the sidewalk at his feet. A little of it flies off and hits him. It looks like she’s not quite finished, like she wants to say something else; her jaw clenches and she’s pointing something at him sharper than any knife I’ve ever seen. His face turns pink through the orange of his freckles. She’s skinnier and stragglier than all those guys, a little dried-out weed against the wind of them, but there is something in her fierce enough to change her size. It whittles her down till she’s skeleton-small, swells her up till she fills the whole street, all at the same time like Alice, and her edge turns sharp and scary. Scabius stares at her and she stares back, so hard it seems like it could hurt him, her eyes bigger than themselves and drilling through the air. I’ve never seen Tracy talk to Scabius before, and I’ve never seen her look like this. Squid keeps his gaze on them but doesn’t say anything; Rusty can’t watch. The air’s thick and the silence is loud; it seems like someone might get hurt even though no one’s doing anything but talking. It’s enough to make Critter say “Yeah, come on, man, let it go,” and then the rest of them fall like dominoes and the air thins.
Nobody’s ever sworn for me before, let alone changed size. I want to say thank you, but she won’t look at me.
The rest of that day Tracy’s as silent as she is about her dad since that day that we talked, and I know not to ask if she’s going to still hang around with Critter and those guys or what. But part of me wonders if maybe that was it, if she took sides and now she’ll stick to her story. I want it to be true too much to ask.
But that night up on Hollywood her eyes start moving around again. She goes and gets me a falafel, looks at the sidewalk, and tells me she’s got an errand to run. I know what that means: Critter. It makes my stomach this weird yellow sort of sick, and I don’t know whose side it puts me on, but I breathe in and say “Okay,” and wait for her outside the Wax Museum.
An hour later, as sunset turns the sky orange and the buildings black, I spot Tracy headed up the block toward me, fast: head thrust up, eyes forced open. When she gets close to me I can see the blood. When she gets closer I can see her cheek is turning purple. He did that to her. “Oh shit,” I say, and run the rest of the way, and when I get to her I pull her into my chest without thinking, hard, a scraped-knee girl with nobody to hide behind. She stumbles, surprised, and for a second I get scared I’ve backed her in a corner and she’s about to bolt. I don’t want her to run, so I don’t ask her anything. I shut my mouth and close my eyes and she lets me hold her there, like that, as the sun sinks down behind us.
The next morning she says she’ll be right back and looks me straight in the face, no shifty eyes. I don’t ask where she’s going, but the way she looks at me I can tell she’ll come right back. She walks off south and half an hour later comes back grinning, grabs me by the arm, and says “I’m finished with that motherfucker. No more Critter. Take me someplace else.”
We walk north, away from Benito’s and the hostel, the donut shops on Santa Monica, to places she hasn’t been before: the Church of Scientology with its polished halls full of drones with weirdo glassy eyes, La Brea Tar Pits set up like Prehistoric Land with plastic mammoths, the L.A. River up in Burbank where you can scale the railings, drop down and walk the asphalt banks for miles. Two nights in a row we hike to the observatory and sleep where the hills open up, skyline blends into stars, and it glitters till the light lulls you to sleep. All the places I went while she was off with Critter I take her to, and all of them are better with her there.
The third morning she gets antsy, though, and calls it homesick. She starts smoking lots of cigarettes and says the city feels too big, like it could swallow her. She promises that she won’t talk to him, won’t leave again, but could we head back down there, just for a day or two, where the sidewalks are familiar? I’ve never figured her to be a small-town type like that, nervous when the world reminds you that it’s bigger than you’ll ever know, but I know what she means. Some nights I miss the strip of road outside my house in Ludlow, and I feel it too. I swallow the hot doubt clumped in my throat and say okay.
Over the next few days the antsy gets worse. She’s out of money, that’s part of it; but there’s something else too, an edge that keeps her broke because nobody will stop to give her anything. Even the trannie prostitutes turn their backs to her when she tries to go and talk to them. I start buying cigarettes so I’ll have some the second she runs out; when I don’t have any she starts pacing parking lots, looking to bum them from strangers. They get scared of the size-shifting glint in her eyes and she barks at them, swears at their backs as they walk away. It embarrasses me. She bites her nails till her fingers are bloody, and sometimes when she thinks I’m asleep I can hear her cry. She doesn’t want to leave our stretch of Sunset but she can’t sit still, won’t stay in one place; she seems like she’s looking for something but she’ll never say what.
She stays by my side, though. Every time she goes someplace new, which is about every ten minutes, she brings me with her. Come on, she’ll say. Let’s go to Winchell’s or Tang’s or the Dollar Chinese by El Centro. Never back to 7-Eleven, the alley, or Benito’s, though. Not back to those guys.
I follow her, of course. I think if I just stay near her and don’t talk too much I can see her through whatever tunnel she’s in, and be there at the end of it when she wants to be pulled out. I think maybe I could be some kind of light. It’s funny that I think that, considering what I’ve known since I was ten about the way the city grimes you, how the dirt dulls out anything you were trying to find that was shiny. I guess I must think we’re exempt.
We’re at a Winchell’s when I see that we’re not. It’s not the Winchell’s where she told me about her dad, but they all look the same inside, remind me of the bubble of that day. Somehow I figure if she trusted me once at those yellow tables, maybe she’ll do it again. She’s been shaking all morning but it’s starting to subside, and once I even say something that makes her laugh and snort black coffee out her nose. I’m eating crullers which I put between us on the table so she knows that she can have some if she wants.
In the middle of a sentence she stands up to hit the bathroom. That part is normal; she’s got a bad stomach, she says, and I’m used to her running off to deal with it. What isn’t normal is that on the way back, wiping water off her mouth, she bends down to talk to this comb-over guy at the back table who’s been watching us. She never talks to strangers. Lots of them try; guys mostly, all older. I always just ignore them but Tracy fends them off, makes clever cutting comments I always wish I thought of. But this guy tugs at her shirt as she passes him and when she turns around, ready to fight, he says something that makes her stop. I can see the conversation: she asks him something, he makes some kind of offer, she bites her lip and thinks. I squint to read their lips and frown hard straight at Tracy, try to pull her back to our table like a magnet.
She does, finally, but with a switch in her hips that looks weird against her skinny weasel body. He follows her. He takes Tracy’s seat across from me; she squeezes in next to him. He’s sweaty and yellow and smells like old grease. He picks up a cruller and eats it in about five seconds. I hate him.
Tracy is acting polite, which I’ve never seen. She’s like my mom around her boss, with the same sweet stilted way of talking my mom always calls Being Professional. It’s bizarre. Tracy introduces the comb-over guy as Rob-He’s-a-Director. She says he has a job for us, if we want it, and since we’re so broke she thought . . . He cuts in and says “I’m paying your friend Tracy in candy, but she said you wouldn’t want it so I’m prepared to give you cash. That way it works for both of you.” He smiles at me all slick and friendly in a way that’s not friendly at all. Tracy looks at her lap. I know what candy is.
I could tell you that all of a sudden it all makes sense, the bitten fingernails, the stomach, the shakes; the jumpy-eyed swearing at strangers and the way Critter wasn’t Tracy’s boyfriend but she always, always left with him. I could tell you that it all makes sense, but the truth is that it doesn’t. It comes together, sure, in a way that makes the facts line up, provides an explanation. But it doesn’t make sense at all.
I sit there while he keeps on talking, goes on and on describing the setup and how it would work, how little we’d actually have to do, how basically it’s just taking our clothes off and that’s not so bad now is it, and I’m up on the white tile ceiling, pressed up against the blackened mildew in the cracks and looking down at Tracy looking down, her face in her lap, and she won’t ever ever raise her eyes to look at me. I can see the whole room, everyone with their faces on their laps or hands or donuts, everyone just walking by, driving by, moving through, eyes like the wax museum, blinders on. All these people falling down and scraping knees and everyone just forging ahead, afraid to touch anything but the air around each other, and it isn’t enough, it doesn’t make anyone stop crying at all.
I tell Tracy I love her. In my periphery I see Rob the Director get cagey, calculate me as a risk. But he’s far away, out at the corners of things, unreal. I switch size like Alice, and as fast as my vision had spread to hold the whole room, now it shrinks like a pinned pupil tight on Tracy. I tell Tracy I love her and I tell her look at me, lift her chin up and look at my eyes. I’ll help you, I say, I know how and I’ll do it. I’ll come and get you like your sister or that girl on the sidewalk, take you, keep you safe, make you stop crying. I know how. I put my hand on hers and hold it, tight so I can feel the bones, the blood, the lines in her palm. She’s shaking again.
It would be so easy to lay into Rob, tell him to fuck off and spit at his feet, scare him away from both of us. But Tracy’s moved in so close to Rob she’s almost hidden behind his skinny greasy shoulder, like I’m a thing she needs to be protected from. Here I am saying that I love her, holding her hand past the air around her and down to the bones, and she’s cowering behind this stranger bearing candy.
“Tracy?” I say, finally asking for an answer. I know the risks of asking Tracy questions. I know she could point her caged-coyote face at me, turn quick and testy behind the eyes, swear at me or spit. I know I’m drawing a line down the middle and making her choose, risking that she’ll bolt and burst our bubble. But I don’t have a choice. She’s so far away right now that if I don’t ask she’ll slip out of sight. I ask her the question. She shakes her head at her lap, inches in closer to Rob. She’s taken sides; now she’ll stick to her story.
It’s funny how it all still looks the same out the car window. Somewhere in that tangle of city Tracy’s probably painted up in some grainy-video basement, playing out the TV-movie myth; and looking from the outside you’d think it was scary or sad enough to change the landscape, but it’s not. The signs are the same, MEL’S and HOLLYWOOD perched on the fault lines, withstanding the earthquakes of what can happen to one person here, and I’m watching from another set of windows in another car, and nothing looks much different.
I don’t think that places change you. They’re too fixed, too solid to do much of anything. The things that really change you are the things that change themselves: ground opening up along a fault and gulping down your house, people picking sides, their answers to your questions. Tracy changed me and I still don’t understand it. She’s land that split and swallowed parts of me; no matter how hard I press the sides together the crack won’t close, the pieces won’t click back into place.
I never say good-bye that day. I say I love you one more time and walk out of Winchell’s, keep walking till I hit Highland which turns into Cahuenga by the 101. It’s easier to get a ride this time: I can tell which cars to hold my thumb out for and which ones will just keep driving. I know how to spot the blinders now, and I don’t try to get the passersby to look my way. I just wait to see a set of eyes that’s still open, unfixed, who’ll stop and take me north, past home and out of Hollywood, beyond what I can see or touch or travel, toward names I’ve always heard but never seen.