The Front of the Freeway (2 page)

The door’s locked, but I know he’s in there; he always is. I don’t know if paranoia is a job requirement or something he picked up in training, but he keeps the house locked down like a four-room stucco jail cell. I slide the tip of the smooth brass key around the rusted keyhole, fumbling over the lock, the spring-loaded screen door shoving impatiently into my back. Inside, I can hear a dreary Harvard voice actor mocking me from the living room.
In 1837, the fusion of automatic calculation with programmability produced the first recognizable computers
… I like to think the narrator’s out there, somewhere, with a meth addiction and a penchant for prostitutes; it makes the programs more human. Finally, the key slides in, and I yank the door open.

“Hey, Dad.” I don’t have to look up. I know his eyes are fixed on the flashing black box on the shelf, his hand glued to a fork in a bowl of spaghetti. There will be a shot glass somewhere on the table, too.

“Hey, Julian.” The fork bounces off the hard plastic bowl with a metallic clank as he shovels more pasta into his mouth. His cheeks narrow to a thick, strong jaw, a sharp, diagonal frame to his sharp, bony face, all peppered with short grey hairs, his carved chin spotted with smears of scarlet tomato sauce. That jaw used to mean more to him when he was in sales, but gambling on products and personality was a risky way to live, and my father was never much of one for taking risks. It didn’t take him long to trade in his tie, coat, and smile for a badge, a paycheck, and a little bit of security. I don’t know if that’s my fault or his, or nobody’s at all. He wipes his chin and tips a foaming tin beer can against his lips for a couple seconds.

“You take out the trash this morning?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Do all the dishes?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Get to work on time?”

“Yes, Sir.” He loves that word, Sir. It’s short, Germanic—all military rigidness in a stiff oral spasm. That’s sort of how we communicate: stiff, predictable, straight to the point. I think we’re related less by blood and more by straight, tidy bones. “How was work?”

He sets the bowl down with a soft clatter and turns his eyes on me for the first time, two dark chestnut stones sagging in his wrinkled, tired cheeks. Mine are more like Mom’s.

“You know, it’s work.” Believe me, I know. If we have anything in common, it’s that we hate our work, but there’s a fundamental difference between a shitty day job and a miserable, endless career. “Miller made sergeant today,” he starts, tipping the brown, crystal nose of his Jack Daniels into a slender, clear shot glass next to the spaghetti. “After two years, he makes sergeant. And you know what, good for him. He’s a good kid, and I’m sure he’ll do well. But I’ve been there twenty-four years, Julian, and the Lieutenant still has me working the same beat. I’ve got enough trouble with the mortgage on this place, I don’t know how much longer I can hand out speeding tickets. ‘Sergeant Eddy Miller’…give me a fucking break.” Dad punctuates the toast with a raised shot glass and throws the whiskey back in a single, fluid stroke. He shoves a mouthful of pasta in after it, his regular Tuesday night chaser, and turns back to the TV, noodles hanging from his lips like a limp yellow beard. “But you know, Lieutenant Allan’s an old man, so who knows? Maybe he’ll retire or kick the bucket soon, if I’m lucky, you know. No one else has been there as long as me, so maybe, maybe there’s hope for me yet.” There’s a lot of waiting in my father’s line of work. It’s like climbing some massive tower, always waiting for someone above you to fall off so you can slot in. It’s all very neat, very systematic. I could never do that. But then again, I wash dishes, so what do I know? “What about you, Son, when are you going to get yourself together? Get back to school, get another job?”

“I don’t know, Dad. Not tonight. I got work again in the morning.” I have work again every morning. He doesn’t understand, that is my structure. It’s the blueprint and the scaffolds and the woodwork framing my static existence. Wake up, wash dishes, sleep, and repeat. I come home dizzy every night from chasing my tail every day, but there’s no slowing down. I walk to my room and toss my shirt in the corner, another soap-stained linen mountain hiding the dirt-stained mustard carpet. Then I hurdle a few piles of old notebooks and overdue library books, falling face first into my bed, an icy pool of chilled fabric washing against my bare skin, still simmering from Romeo’s oven. You work up a sweat running in place all day. But that’s why I’m going to go see Tony tonight. It’s something different, something off the schedule, and maybe it’s time to pull the scaffolding down and see if the walls cave in or if this cell was built to last.

“It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

Grand Central Liquor is the bombed-out skeleton of a 1945 Berliner’s home. From behind two cutouts in the decaying concrete walls drip a multicolored cascade of beer bottles and fifths of cheap liquor, leaving the display windows something like the stained glass eyes in the ruins of a macabre cathedral. I’m sitting outside like a drunken minister, baptizing myself in 40 ounces of Mickey’s, two gulps at a time, from a squat glass bottle of olive green. And maybe my holy water is toxic, but it’s beautiful, and it’s friendly, and I’m not going to have to wash it when I’m done.

Its 12:30 and a belt of street lights is the only constellation in the grey Los Angeles night. It’s 12:30 and Tony’s late. I tilt my head and squint at my watch out of my right eye, but thirty minutes pass and Godot’s a no show. Alright, Tony, if I’m going to be drunk in public, I’m going to do it somewhere more interesting than this wreck. I scoop myself off the cement and start staggering down Jefferson, but before I can wipe the beer from my lips, a charcoal grey Oldsmobile slips out of the night like an alley cat creeping from lamp post to lamp post, rolling slowly towards me. Before I can move, the grey four-door eases next to me on the curb, and a fog-glazed window sinks into the sleek machine’s purring frame. A dense cloud of smoke puffs out through the window. There in the driver’s seat is the Cheshire Cat—a, big dumb crescent of Tony’s teeth staring right back at me through the haze.

“What’s up JT?” Tony’s in a good mood. Actually, Tony’s jubilant. Sitting in a cloud of thick, syrupy smoke that scrap metal matchbox might as well be the Batmobile. “Come on man, we’re late.”
We’re
late?
We
are nothing.
I
am drunk.
You
are late. I slide into the car thinking inebriated daggers at Tony, but lately I’ve been about as outspoken as a mime.

But for now, that’s just fine with Tony. We slip silently into the starless night under the hum of his big grey cat, imagining pensive nothings onto the fog-kissed canvas around me. Tony turns up the radio, and I watch long white webs of light dance out from the street lamps to the deep, droning bass hammering through the smoke and haze.

Bump
. The rutted pavement of a concrete bridge shakes me awake. Suddenly, Tony and I both realize that I have no idea where I am. I sit up to check the world outside for a landmark, but find nothing except the black filth bubbling up through the dense, murky trail of the Los Angeles River.

“You lied to me, JT,” Tony coughs, coolly killing the machine’s melodic, pounding heartbeat with a brush of the volume dial. “When you told me it was alright. But it’s really not alright, is it?” Tony and I must be seeing different roads, because he’s winding between lanes in a short metal snake. “You work like a slave, man. How much are they paying you?”

“You know how much they’re paying me, Tony. Where are we going?”

“Come on, how much are they paying you, JT?”

“Eight an hour, same as you.”

“Eight an hour! Eight an hour, now ain’t that some shit?”

“Yeah, that’s some shit, Tony. Where are we?” Tony pinches the last of a white paper stem to his lips and lets it crackle to his fingertips, straining to hold his breath, before opening the window a slit and flicking it to the street.

“Eight dollars an hour… Doesn’t matter who you are, you can’t do shit with eight dollars an hour, man. No one can be happy with eight dollars an hour. What do you think, JT, do I look happy?” Tony looks like a dizzy black snowman with tomatoes for eyes.

“Sure, Tony. You look alright.” I can’t tell if Tony’s pulling over or swerving again, but in the last breaths of light pulsing meekly from a dying street lamp, I can see the sidewalk rippling like a mirage, crawling with the hustle of a trillion busy cockroaches. Then Tony is parking.

“Yeah…yeah, I’m alright. Yes sir, matter of fact, I got a second job.” I try to look surprised, but my suddenly enormously heavy head just rolls to my shoulder to give Tony a sideways look. But… “Yeah, I know, Romeo says we’re not supposed to work anywhere else or whatever. But, you know, I’m an entrepreneur. And an entrepreneur like myself needs a little room for maneuverability in my career. Diversify my bonds or some shit. So anyway, I started my own business. And if you’ll follow me,” Tony’s Cheshire smile is back, a toothy ghost haunting his lips, “I’d like to show you to my office.”

“A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessences… So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of unnameable?”

—Arthur Rimbaud

I can’t help staring at my feet, thinking about squashing a hundred crawling lives. A hundred forgettable, trivial, six-legged lives. If they are God’s children, they are God’s abortions, and if I stomped on the sidewalk right now, it wouldn’t change a thing.

“JT, let’s go.” Tony’s severed head is gabbing from the cement, his body submerged in a concrete pit where the sidewalk sinks beneath Karen Residence Complex and cascades into the decaying remnants of a basement stairwell. Ten feet below street level, a locked and barred archway outlines Tony’s silhouette, coolly tracing the frame above for a key. A blink later my guide wrestles two inches of serrated steel into a doorknob, and
Romeo’s Dissidents
descend into Karen’s labyrinth. I bet the chipped mustard walls were painted a sterile white when they dug out the bottom floors in the sixties, but now the rotting, yellow plaster drips seamlessly down into the sweating, molding carpet. Tony glides to a halt before B33 and, with a wink, raps four knuckles of sharp percussion against the frail wood door. I dry my palms down the front of my jeans.

A bear in blue sweats and navy slippers tears open the door and wades into the hallway, crouching to squeeze his hulking cotton shoulders through the narrow door-frame. He pauses for a second, staring down from the ceiling into the shadowed hollow of Tony’s hood, but after a long, quiet moment, the bear erupts with a laugh of familiarity and scoops Tony off the ground in a steel-trap hug, Tony’s legs floundering like two ropes from his belt.

“Hey! Get the hell off me, Pauly!” Pauly couldn’t hear a plane crash over his own hooting, but he drops his friend and turns his perfectly round face on me.

“Who’s the white boy?” White boy,
gringo
. Dark used to be the absence of color, but now I think white is. It’s the absence of culture, community, home, or identity, and the proper historical backing to hold it all together. But it’s rootless, too, and without a pedigree to adopt or defend I’m perfectly neutral, perfectly homeless, and I never minded the anonymity.

“This is Julian. It’s cool, Pauly, he’s with me.” Pauly turns and stares down two bulging round cheeks at me, a thick, wrinkled brow framing two swollen white eyes, big as plates.

“Whatever you say, boss. What’s up man, I’m Paul.” I shake hands with a baseball mitt, a mass of smooth leather and nails like claws. “Come on now, get in here. The girls are waiting.” I step into the friendly murk of a cloud-choked apartment, tinged the same hue of vomit as the hallway. I follow Tony through the fog, but suddenly a hungry, clenching jaw is gnashing at my knees. “Kujo! Cool it!” Pauly snatches hold of three aluminum tags chiming below the bulldog’s wrinkled throat and jerks him from my calf, now a frozen flesh stump rooted in the faux wood tile. “Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s mostly harmless. Watch the teeth, though. Here, throw him one of these.” Pauly hands me a broiled pork peace offering and suddenly Kujo is cordial.

“Pauly, quit messing with that dog and check this out.” Tony’s furnished a karesansui garden of forest green and Ziploc pouches on the tiled kitchen counter and Pauly’s mouth is wetter than Kujo’s. “You know the stock, man, help yourself.” Blue bear buries a paw in the seam of his sweats and draws a thick roll of faded green. Walking his fingers to Jackson, he counts off more than my last paycheck.

“There’s Michael… Tito… Janet…and all their fucking cousins, too. Here.” Tony the accountant is all smirking business. He rifles through the faded jade papers quietly and thrusts it deep in his denim thighs. Smiling, he brushes an ounce of counter moss into a cobalt Jansport.

“Alright, JT, let’s meet Jafar.” Jafar is a vegetarian. Jafar, coincidentally, is a hollow glass snake wound loosely on top of Paul’s living room table, gaping jaw flexed into a bowl, kernelled tail flicking wisps of smoke into the misty air. Jess, Paul’s neighbor, softly kisses the end of the smoking tail as her roommate, Melissa, holds a flame to his throat. Paul sags into a heavy, grey sofa chair and a brunette skeleton flutters into his lap. Hi, she’s Francie, and she’s pleased to meet you.

The tail spins clockwise while Jamaican drums hum somewhere in the background. Soon my lips are pressed tight to the warm serpentine rattle. I breathe deep while Melissa sets the little green forest ablaze, two fiery blue eyes fixed to mine under her rich, black eyelashes, fluttering gently across the table. After a few seconds, the green embers are burning holes through my ribs and I lean back, letting the fog roll off my lips. Melissa leans across the table and pulls the tail to her mouth, and, with a quick wink and half a smile, drags on the pipe until the bonsai bowl turns black.