Pink Smog (3 page)

I didn't find the boy. This is what I found:

Unit 1: Tom “Sunshine” Abernathy (33), Marilyn Monroe impersonator. I'd met him before. He let me try on his wig once.

Unit 2: Uncle Oz (75), retired set designer, currently a collector of antique toys and children's books. When I was younger my mom brought me over there and he read me fairy tales.

Unit 3: Mimi Jones (25), elementary schoolteacher and fashion plate. I liked to spy on her outfits every morning. She wore mini skirts, suede platforms, colored stockings, and false eyelashes and smoked like a very busy chimney.

Unit 4: Candy Red (20???), “professional.” She was not very friendly to me and told me I should do a report on someone else's building.

Unit 5: Dori Knight (19) and Elsie Capshaw (19). College girls with retail jobs.

Unit 6: Ben Hoopelson. I have no idea how old he is. He is a mime and won't talk.

Unit 7: Carla St. Clair (27), TV hair and makeup artist. A friend of Mimi Jones.

Unit 8: Arthur (39), Esther (30), Abe (10), and Rebecca (8) Steinberg. Orthodox Jews. Arthur is a teacher. Their apartment smelled like fresh baked bread and simmering meat.

Unit 9: Brandy-Lynn Bat (35), Weetzie Bat (13).

Unit 10: Bob (33) and Nancy (27) Levine, assistant professor and homemaker, lovey-dovey newlyweds. They answered the door with their arms around each other, wearing matching aprons.

Unit 11: Tim (30) and Andrea (29) Shore, movie grip and secretary. They fought almost as much as my mom and dad.

Unit 12: The Mendoza family—Jose (40), Teresa (37), Wendy and Mary (15). A very nice family. The twins went to my school.

Unit 13: ???

The only interesting new person I saw was a tall, lanky lady with a thick accent I didn't recognize, long black hair, and huge eyes that were such a dark shade of blue they were almost purple. Maybe they were just reflecting her pantsuit. She gave me a nasty look and shut the door of Unit 13 on me before I could even ask her anything. There was something vaguely familiar about her but I couldn't place it.

As soon as I got home, all the energy in my body just drained away. There were dirty dishes in the sink and empty bottles everywhere—the trash cans hadn't been emptied and bills were scattered all over the kitchen table. I hated our condo. It was like as soon as my dad stopped making money and we lost the cottage, my mom had to suddenly pretend we were rich and glamorous. She had to decorate with fake golden cupids and baby-blue velveteen and thick shag carpeting. I remembered the simple cottage with the wooden floors and the flowers everywhere. I remembered my mom dancing around in her cotton dresses.

My mom looked like she hadn't gotten out of bed all day. I brought her Brazil nuts and ginger ale and red licorice. I would have tried to cook but I always burned the grilled cheese sandwiches or let the rice bubble over. The only thing I could make was instant mac and cheese but she didn't want that and neither did I. I wished she had taught me to cook when I was littler and she was happy and loved to make dinner but now it was probably too late.

While we watched
Tony Orlando & Dawn
, I stared at Tony's huge mustache and his backup singers' glittery dresses wondering how they could have landed a whole show for themselves based on a song about a yellow ribbon around an oak tree. The music wasn't distracting enough—I thought about my dad and when he was going to call. When the program was over and my mom was asleep, passed out in front of a cop show, I went into my parents' bedroom, into the closet, and I put my face in my dad's shirts and sniffed his tobacco and woodsy-smelling aftershave and wished he would appear inside his suit and hold me and hug me and say that he loved us and would never leave again.

But my dad didn't even call that night.

I tucked my mom in and turned off the TV, wishing that
Cher
was on. There was nothing more beautiful to me than Cher in her sheer dresses with the strategic beading and her belly button showing. And the way she flicked her black Arabian horse mane off her bony shoulder and laughed like she didn't want to show her cute tiny vampire teeth but she couldn't help it and her shiny lips would part and her teeth would show. And her voice would crack. Sometimes she'd be an Indian American with feathers, straddling a horse, and sometimes she'd be a showgirl with feathers. No matter what she wore she was sexy and beautiful but she didn't look like anyone else on TV. I thought about Cher in her feathers because it was better than thinking about my dad and how he hadn't called and because it was easier to wish for a TV show than for the person you loved more than anyone else.

Then I realized that the new woman in our building looked a little like Cher and for some reason that took away the comfort I'd been feeling. Suddenly, even Cher made me sad.

I turned off the lights and went out onto the balcony and looked down at the pool. I remembered the boy crouching over my mother, his tense shoulders and his strong hands. Maybe he would come back? I put on my sweatshirt over my pajamas, pushed my bare feet into my Vans, and left the apartment.

I went downstairs and sat by the pool and stared at the ghostly blue water and thought about my dad. Was he gone forever? Would he call me? Would he come back? He'd gone away before, on a pretty regular basis, to do some writing or to see his sister, Goldy, in New York or after fights with my mom, but there had never been a fight like this. When he went away, he would always leave me a bottle of his aftershave to use when he was gone so that I would remember him. He also let me wear his shirts. The shirts smelled like cigarettes and the aftershave and if I wore one and closed my eyes and rubbed a piece of sandpaper, as scratchy and granular as his chin, it was like he was there with me.

I realized that I could go get one of my dad's shirts and wear the aftershave now—he hadn't had time to get anything when he left. But I knew it would upset my mom. I'd have to wear the shirt at night while I slept or sneak out in it in the morning. Plus, I didn't know if I could stand wearing that shirt. It would make me too sad, that smoky, leafy, cinnamon-tinged smell.

I was lying on a lounge chair and the plastic slats were cutting into my skin through my thin pajamas. I shifted my weight and looked up at the sky. You couldn't see any stars. I remember going back east with my dad, how he showed me the stars in upstate New York, above this old farmhouse with a creek where Goldy lived, and I was so surprised how many there were. In L.A. the stars look weak and forlorn like the people who come here to be famous and end up working as waiters. Except they are beautiful, too. Like this really cute guy who worked at the Great American Food & Beverage Company on Santa Monica Boulevard. My parents took me there on my twelfth birthday and the cute waiter sang me Cat Stevens songs and brought me a Cobb salad and a piece of birthday cake. And there were the cute, old waitresses at Du-Par's in the Valley who had probably been starlets once. They wore little, ruffled aprons and pink dresses and squeaky orthopedic shoes and they all reminded me not only of the faded stars in the sky but also of the pretty whipped-cream-covered pies reflected in tilted mirrors along the very top of the walls still hoping to be discovered, if only for a tiny part in a pie commercial.

All these thoughts made me hungry and I was getting sleepy so I decided to go back in because it didn't seem as if the boy was going to come. I could have jumped into the pool and pretended to be drowning but that seemed too dramatic so I got up and started toward the stairs.

I was standing at the bottom of the staircase going up to our unit when I heard this cackling laughter. It had a shockingly hollow sound.

There was a girl about my age sitting at my front door. She was thin and pale with long, black hair that hung almost to her waist, and large, tilted eyes that looked like the eyes of the woman in number 13. The girl was wearing a childlike, too-small dress with puffed sleeves and a smocked bodice that came to just below where her fairly large (at least compared to mine) breasts were. She also had on bobby socks and old-fashioned white saddle shoes. Her lips were bright red with lipstick.

“You can't go home again,” she told me sternly. “Don't even try it. Home is gone forever.” Then she laughed that hollow doll cackle.

I backed away and started running. I ran and ran into the night. It was dark and cold and empty, without even the comfort of a moon anywhere in sight, let alone stars. I thought about the cute waiter who would probably never get a record deal and how the feet of the waitresses at Du-Par's must hurt them a lot.

A man in a fancy, white Mercedes pulled up beside me, leaning out the window, and I ran faster, my heart calling uselessly for help inside me.

All I could make out clearly were his eyes, catching a reflection of the streetlights beneath the white turban he wore—they looked like they had seen everything there was to see.

“You must not be afraid,” he told me, then reached his hand out the window and tossed something onto the sidewalk before he sped away.

I stopped where I stood, breathing hard, looking at the something—it was a shiny silver envelope.

You must not be afraid
.

The man in the car, whoever he was, was right. I'd already lost what was most important to me—my dad. I didn't have anything to be afraid of except that he might not come back. I didn't have anything to care about and sometimes that makes you brave.

I picked up the envelope and opened it. There was a note inside. I unfolded it and a cascade of tiny glittery bits fell out. The words were written in cutout letters like a ransom note:

Mirror mirror on the wall, you're Factor's fairest of them all
.

What the heck? Fairest of them all? Factor's? I tucked the note in my pocket and walked home. Some of the glitter had clung to my arms like shiny freckles.

When I got back, determined to stand my ground against the cackling girl, she—just like the mysterious boy—was gone, if she had ever been there at all. In a way I was relieved: even with the encouraging words I wasn't brave enough to stand up to her anyway. Not yet.

That night I lay in bed staring at the note. What did it mean? It seemed like a clue of some sort but I had no idea how to read it. I wasn't anybody's fairest and who was Factor anyway? I tucked the note inside my pink ballerina music box and closed my eyes, hoping I'd dream about Charlie that night.

When my dad used to get upset and I asked him why, he didn't talk too much about my mom. He usually blamed Los Angeles.

He said, “Once there at least was noir and sorcerers and cults and jazz and poetry and citrus orchards, Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin. Now there are just cars and freeways and vapid teenagers who don't even know what noir means. And the music! No one has heard of the Stooges or the Velvet Underground. The singer/songwriters lock themselves up in their canyon mansions wishing for the sixties to come back. I'm sick of the heat. I'm sick of the lack of culture. I have to get out. Someday I'm moving back to N.Y.C.”

What he didn't say was L.A. had something else, something that didn't exist in New York City.

L.A. had his daughter, Weetzie. L.A. had me. In a way, L.A.
was
me. I hadn't known anything else and I didn't think I ever would.

Even with the smog alerts, L.A. had never seemed that bad to me. I liked the light. It was always filtered by smog but I didn't think about that. It was dull and golden. My dad said it made people lazy and passive, that light. It lulled you into a stupor. It made you dumb as a pink plastic flamingo, my dad said.

But there was Hollywood Boulevard, starred with the names of my idols. There was the Chinese Theater like a magic pagoda. There was the Sunset Strip winding beneath the giant billboards and lined with places like Tower Records, where I liked to find all the scariest or sexiest album covers in the bins. Along the Strip were restaurants like The Source and Carney's and Butterfield's. The Source was an old shack of a hippie place with wood-paneled walls and an outdoor patio. They served veggie burgers and sprouts and hibiscus lemonade. Carney's was a hot-dog place inside an old train car. Butterfield's was a sunken garden at the bottom of the stairs, like someone's run-down mansion where you could have elegant brunches with quiche, fresh fruit, and champagne among lacy trees. There was Jerry Pillar's, where you could get really cheap designer clothes—there were just rooms and rooms stuffed with piles of crazy jeans and embroidered T-shirts and racks of dresses and shelves of boxes filled with platform sandals and high-heeled suede boots.

And L.A. wasn't only a city. There were canyons and mountains and wonderful parks. On weekends we went to Ferndell in Griffith Park and I played in the shallow water that trickled among rocks down the side of the green hill. The lush plants made a canopy and I felt like I was exploring secret islands. We rode the carousel on top of the hill. The paint was peeling and the colors faded on the horses and murals. The calliope had a haunting sound as I went around and around, up and down, trying to catch sight of myself in the mirrors. Next were the pony rides where my pony would always stop on the dusty track and I refused to hit him with the whip. My dad had to come and lift me off when I started to cry. At Travel Town on the other side of the park we explored the old trains parked on the deserted tracks and rode the miniature one that went around two times while the conductor in the striped hat and overalls rang the bell. The little train passed an even tinier group of buildings half hidden in the grass. I wondered, at the time, if elves lived there.

L.A. had the beach! When I was younger we used to go to Malibu sometimes, to visit Irv Feingold, the producer my dad had worked with. Irv and his wife, Edie, lived in a big, glass and redwood house right on the sand. I thought at the time that the ocean was the best backyard anyone could ever have—so vast and alive and musical, always changing colors, always singing different songs. We ate little pieces of raw fish and candied ginger and my parents had cocktails and wine. We sat out on the deck watching the waves break and then shiver up the sand. I went down the wooden staircase to the beach and chased gulls and dug for sand crabs. Once I was stung by a jellyfish and the pain felt just like that thing looked—gelatinous and cold and veined with hurt. Once a crab caught hold of my toe and wouldn't let go. I felt the little pincers and I couldn't shake them off. My dad had to do it for me. It still hurt and he rinsed off my foot in the outdoor showers and took me back out to play in the water. He wore shorts and kept his shirt on. His skin looked very white—he wasn't used to the sun. My mom spent the whole time lying on a chaise lounge on the deck working on her tan. She told me that without a tan her skin looked green—I wondered if I looked green to her so I started tanning, too. We used Johnson's baby oil and then a few years later we switched to Bain de Soleil, which smelled like coconuts and was supposed to be better for you. When I came back up from the beach, there were thick, black tar stains on my feet. We needed to clean them off with rubbing alcohol in the producer's glamorous bathroom with the sunken pink marble tub. The producer's wife, Edie, wore hand-painted silk chiffon dresses with handkerchief hems. She was much younger than he was and my mom got really agitated around her, fussing with her hair and reapplying lipstick all the time. We drove home from the producer's house late at night and sometimes I think my dad had too much to drink but I still slept peacefully in the car, lulled by the dark and the cooling heat on my shoulders and the sound of my parents' voices gently arguing and the sound of the radio.