Dad
The
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rst thing I noticed about the pictures was that Sarah was not cute. She looked like a guppy. And why was Big Bill trying to set me up, anyway? Why did he keep mentioning girlfriends? Did he think I was gay? Lonely? Did he know I was in love with Lulu? Did he mind?
The second thing I noticed about the photographs was Big Bill’s new look. He was wearing a ponytail and a soft leather hat, a wilted, wide-brim thing that would’ve looked right at home on Duane All-man, or the father from
Hillbilly Bears
. But nothing personi
fi
ed the sad state of Big Bill’s nostalgia quite as vividly as his blue and orange tie-dyed T-shirt that probably came from the Gap. As for Willow, she must have been the photographer, because she didn’t appear in any of the pictures.
The image that sticks with me more than any of the photographs is the image of Big Bill on a skateboard. More speci
fi
cally, that very instant in which Big Bill
ceases
to be
on the skateboard, the instant in which the skateboard is shooting off down the street, and Big Bill, all two hundred rippling pounds of him, is about to fall on his ass, which is tightly packed into neoprene shorts. Most vivid of all are the expressions on the skater kids’ faces as they stand around in a group watching in their baggy shirts, baked out of their minds, with their braces glistening in the sun, as they laugh their asses off at Big Bill’s folly.
One Sunday morning in late May, 1991, when I hadn’t heard from Lulu in two weeks, and I was
fl
at broke, Eugene Gobernecki knocked on the door of my apartment. My blinds were closed. I was still in my bathrobe.
He was wearing coveralls and holding a wrench. “Will, how you doing, Will! Can I come in?” He pushed past me through the door.
He was nervous and excited, a little twitchy. He sat down at the kitchen table. “Sit down,” he said. “You have cup of coffee?”
“No.”
“Shit motherfuck. Oh, well. Sit down anyway.”
I sat down.
Eugene smiled. A slant of light through the blinds caught his gold tooth just right. “Now that you big radio guy, I have business proposition,” he said.
“Eugene, I produce overnights at the college station. Do you know what that means? I’m not even on the
air
. I answer telephones.
I stack pastries. I don’t even get paid! So if this is about venture capital or something, I—”
“Okay, okay,” he said, fashioning a yield gesture. He rubbed his Super Mario mustache thoughtfully for a moment and furrowed his brow. “Okay, okay. You know what is sweat equity?”
“Uhhh, sort of. I think.”
“It means you work for ownership of somesing.”
“Of what?”
“Zat’s what I’m getting to. But
fi
rst I say
zis
before I offer you great business opportunity: When I do wrestling, I always win. When I do business, the same. So. Now you know. You know where is Venice Beach?”
“Of course.”
“You know where is hot dog stand?”
“Maybe.”
“I have opportunity. Lease to own. No start-up cost. Steam table, cash box, coolers, napkin dispenser, all zose things it has already.
Permits, credit accounts, all zat. Some money we need to buy inventory, but not so much. I have money. Maybe not enough, maybe I sell bronze medal, or maybe Joe have money. Somehow we get. We start in June, second week. Tomorrow I quit Fatburger, Tuesday I sign lease.”
“So what are you asking me?”
“You work. Me, you, Joe, we work. We sell hot dogs, lease to own.
No down payment, no loan, low overhead. Zis makes great opportunity, Will! We make Hot Dog Heaven in Venice Beach! Some pro
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ts we split sree ways. You buy new car, not piece of shit Plymouth the color of old man’s pants. Other pro
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t we pay toward principal, until we own free and clear. You still have radio show, maybe you say,
“
Come on down young people, come to Venice Beach and eat hot dog at
Hot Dog Heaven!
”
“I told you, I don’t talk.”
He waved it off. “Bah. Radio advertising is not so good, anyway.
Nobody really listening. Word of mouth is best. All day long in summer, we get walks-ins, tourist, young people. We have markup of
fi
ve hundred percent! You know what is zat? Zat
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ve dollar for one dollar. Big margin. We keep simple, no bells, no whistles. Create cash
fl
ow, that is the key, generate revenue stream, branch out, you understand?”
“Yeah,” I lied, but if nothing else, the river-of-money metaphor was coming through loud and clear.
Having given voice to his excitement, Eugene settled back in his chair and kicked his feet up on the table.
“Zis is gonna be good, Will. You wait and see.”
He clasped his arms behind his head as though he were fashioning an abs-and-thighs pose and reclined even further. But before Eugene could meditate too long on Hot Dog Heaven, he lurched suddenly forward in his chair.
“Shit motherfuck. I forget to turn water on in 219!”
He was out the door in a matter of seconds.
Consummate professionals to the bitter end, Eugene and Acne Scar Joe issued Fatburger their two weeks’ notice the following day. I, in true Miller fashion, opted for the short ending. I didn’t show up for my Monday afternoon shift, leaving hamburgers behind forever. My destiny lay in hot dogs.
Still, there remained the question of short-term sustenance. And the matter of capital. I couldn’t bear to see Eugene sell his bronze medal, which, for the record, I’d never actually seen. So I wrote Big Bill and put the touch on him for
fi
ve hundred bucks. He sent a thousand. In the letter that came with the check, he said that he was
proud of my initiative
and took the opportunity to remind me that not only was I
a radio star
, I was soon to be
a restaurateur
.
By the way,
had I heard anything from Lulu?
I had not. A half dozen times I had phoned Lulu in Seattle, but she never answered the phone. I left messages on her machine.
“What’s the deal, Lu? What happened? I know you’re there, pick up. What’s wrong? Are you all right? Is this about what happened? Is this about Troy? Talk to me, Lu.”
But she never called. And so I called Troy and left messages.
“What’s up? Have you heard from Lulu? What’s the deal, why won’t you call me back?”
And when Troy never called me back either, I cursed them both as conspirators. My vexation was such that it threatened to become an af
fl
iction. I conjured a thousand scenarios, ranging from the improbably hopeful to the in
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nitely bleak, that might account for Lulu’s silence, and I believed every last one of them. I was lost. It was as though Lulu had gone to cheerleading camp all over again.
Mercifully, as the weeks progressed, the whirlwind of activity surrounding me kept Lulu off my mind, at least some of the time.
Mornings I went to classes.
None of my other instructors could match the billowy sleeves of Gerard Smith for pure passion, but some of it was pretty interesting.
I read Swift and Fielding, and they were both funny, but not as funny as that crazy Frog Rabelais, and not as funny as Voltaire. Nobody was as funny as Voltaire. In anthropolog
y, I learned such useful method
ological concepts as
cultural relativism,
an idea I liked because it was all about context, it was wide open, it made all the other ideas it came into contact with more complex. I also learned that every female anthropology major in Santa Monic
a in 1991 had the same hair—lus
terless brown, awkward in length, willful, confused, neglected, didn’t know whether it wanted to be long or short. I thought of it as
anthro
hair
—and like its distant cousin poodle hair, the women who wore it were inexplicably attracted to me. This was de
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nitely the case with Elaine Niemeyer. Though Elaine was an anthropology major, I met her in a sociology class. Her hair was completely con
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icted. One side of it would be tucked neatly behind an ear, while the other side would be hanging in frazzled disarray over her face. Sometimes she pulled the back up, and the front back. Other times she wore uneven ponytails.
Her hair seemed to set the tone for her whole personality.
Elaine never engaged in class discussions directly, but she always reacted to them—usually by furrowing her brow, or muttering
bullshit
under her breath. Sometimes she laughed out loud like a crazy person at nothing discernible, then, an instant later, retreated into frowning silence. There was something hard about Elaine Niemeyer, that much was clear—not hard in a cold way, but in a world-weary way—or at least that’s what her scowling manner projected. I caught Elaine stealing glances at me one afternoon during a lecture on symbolic interaction. The
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rst time I registered her gaze, I was certain she was looking at someone behind me, but soon realized I was sitting in a corner. After about twenty minutes, there ceased to be anything furtive about her glances. She was staring at me. There was nothing come-hither in her gaze—curious, perhaps, maybe even slightly annoyed. It was the gaze of an anthropologist—an unstable one. And I suppose it was this instability that I found attractive about Elaine Niemeyer. Between her instability, and her confused hair, and her gently sloping forehead with the little pockmark scars, there was just enough about Elaine Niemeyer to remind me dimly of Lulu Trudeau.
I started stealing glances back at Elaine. But I did nothing to actively pursue her. I was still sti
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ed by the awkward silence of my waning moments with Shelly Beach, still trying to get the daiquiri and pepperoni taste of Cheryl off my tongue—and, not least, still terri
fi
ed of exposing my wee soldier to the theater of battle.
One day as we
fi
led out of class, she fell into stride with me.
“What a load of bullshit,” she said. “I’m so fucking sick of the bullshit. Everywhere I look is bullshit. Every stinking text I read is just oozing the stuff. Don’t you just hate it?”
“Yeah.”
“Bullshit. You love it. I watch your face during lectures, you’re all lit up. You’re like the rest of them. But whatever—I don’t care. If that’s what
fl
oats your boat, more power to you.” Elaine swept one side of her hair back, and released the other. “I guess I just have a low bullshit threshold, that’s all. You wanna hang out sometime? You could buy me dinner or something.”
How could I refuse such an offer? I’d be lying if I said that ions didn’t prickle on the back of my neck, that a few slumbering possibilities weren’t awakened by Elaine’s invitation. But those stolen glances before we ever exchanged a word were as close as Elaine and I would ever come to romance. It wasn’t long before I was back on familiar turf. I can’t say whether Elaine’s erratic disposition was to blame, or whether my own bullshit quotient simply proved beyond her threshold. Whatever the case, Elaine got drunk at TGIF’s and started yelling about Catholics, espousing a theory of religious code-pendency between bitter exclamations of “bullshit!” I didn’t mind so much, I wasn’t Catholic, and my own bullshit threshold was apparently relatively high. At least she wasn’t dull. In fact, things seemed to be moving in the right direction. Elaine invited me back to her apartment, where she fumbled with her CD collection, and started making some gin and tonics. After about
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ve minutes, she forgot about the drinks and stretched out on the sofa with her bare feet in my lap. Her big toes were misshapen by knobby yellow calluses.
Had they been Lulu’s toes, I would have loved them. Instead, I didn’t know what to do with them. What kind of girl put her sweaty feet in your lap? Was I supposed to touch them? Before I could formulate any kind of conclusion, Elaine passed out with her face pressed against the arm of the sofa. She was soon sawing logs. What was it about me that inspired drunkenness in women? Not bubbly, effervescent drunkenness, or even sloppy, willing drunkenness, but the kind of drunkenness that drove women to vomit on dashboards, or lose consciousness.
I sat pinned to the sofa beneath the dead weight of Elaine’s feet for a while. I don’t know why I lingered. I guess because it made me feel like a stranger to myself, being in someone else’s space, and there was a certain comfort in such an estrangement. But also there was desola-tion and sadness—for her, for me, for all but the fortunate in love.
When I
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nally excavated myself from beneath Elaine’s feet, she did not awaken. I covered her with a dusty afghan, and still she did not stir. In spite of her snoring, Elaine looked softer and sweeter lying there than I’d ever seen her. Gravity had arranged her hair into some semblance of order. There was no scowl on her face, or any sign of the word
bullshit
on her lips. I wished that I could be whatever it was Elaine Niemeyer needed me to be, but at the same time knew that I could never be that thing. If only I had pursued that line of thought a little further—and seen that nobody could ever be that thing for anybody—I might have spared Lulu a lot of suffering.
After that night, Elaine and I stopped exchanging glances in class.
There was no unpleasantness between us—only a slight lingering discomfort born of embarrassment. Elaine cut her hair off and changed majors at the end of the semester. But I doubt that had anything to do with me.