Since I’d been back from Italy I’d started to spend my afternoons at Henry’s store playing Street Fighter on an arcade video game he had stolen from a doughnut store, smoking pot, and redecorating the shop. I was obsessed with Bargain Barn, a warehouse in Anaheim where furniture and clothes were sold by the pound. Bel Air sold rich people’s leftovers while Anaheim collected the dreams of society’s dropouts: desks from offices of failed businesses, corporate couches, synthetic orange armchairs from the seventies, and, since Disneyland was in the neighborhood, plenty of dated cartoon memorabilia. Once in a while a gem popped up: a Louis Vuitton handbag, a Chanel purse, or a velvet Valentino jacket.
I fixed up a set of glass cases for Henry’s store. I baptized them with the switchblade knife from Nekromantik that Robert had given me on our first and last date. I also got a set of matching rust-colored velvet chairs and an antique two-tier paper cutter. I spent close to nothing to refurbish the store. It happened naturally. I started off bringing him pieces I thought might look good, then I began to stick around in the afternoons, unpacking boxes of vintage clothes, dividing garments into different categories and labeling them by color and style. “We have customers,” Henry cheered one day after I sold a stack of moldy DeFranco Family records. And since that day they kept coming back. I reorganized stashes of old portfolio pictures that Henry had never even leafed through and pulled out the ones of actresses who had made it. The real prizes were the portfolio images of stars before they were famous. We called them PFCs—pre-fame celebrities—and sold them for twenty dollars apiece. Familiar faces: Julia Roberts at seventeen, Meg Ryan at twenty, an awkward post-teen image of Diane Keaton—my favorite. She presided over the store, hanging above the counter like an Italian patron saint. I put a constellation of anonymous angels from the seventies and eighties around her: Nina Sanchez, Elodie Verve, Tania Beloved—the incredible names of those who never made it. I wanted them to have a shot too, if not in a film, at least in a store.
—
Henry paused the game and looked at me with pinched brows.
“So how did you meet this Deva girl? Weird fucking name anyway. Are her parents hippies or something?”
“Maybe. The house looks kind of hippie. Her dad is a rock musician with a biker beard, but he’s super strict. Her mom lives in Utah and has a Christian coffee shop.”
Henry moaned, “Gross.”
“Have you ever been to Topanga?” I asked him. It was difficult to imagine Henry anywhere outside that store. “It’s another world from the Valley. I want to live there.”
“I don’t know. It reminds me of Twin Peaks.”
Henry lit himself another cigarette. I emptied the overflowing ashtray that was sitting on the dashboard and went back to play.
T. Hawk had floored me with his kicks.
“You asshole! I was dumping your disgusting ashtray!”
Henry butted me off the chair so he could go back to playing alone.
“Anyway, Topanga is, like, so not like Twin Peaks,” I squealed.
Henry gave me a complacent smirk. “Did you just say two likes in the same sentence? You’re starting to sound like a Valley girl, you know that?”
I blushed. I knew he was right.
“You’re worse, an Italian Valley girl. You’ve invented a new LA subculture.”
—
“Want some weed? It might make you feel better.”
Cinderella looked at us with a glimmer of hope. Her tiara was off and her hair was down.
“I’d love to get stoned, man.”
She scratched her scalp, relieved. The Disney goo on her face was coming apart.
We were in the smoking section at Disneyland and Cinderella had been crying and screaming at her boyfriend over the pay phone, telling him he was a motherfucker and she wished that he would die slowly.
Henry had agreed to take me to the Anaheim market with the promise that we could get stoned at Disneyland. I never imagined I’d end up getting high with Cinderella as well.
We took hits from Henry’s metal pipe.
Cinderella held the smoke in, then exhaled with a cough.
“I’m so pissed.” She sighed, drying tears from her eyes. “He fucked my best friend.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Some children walked by our designated area and got excited about seeing Cinderella. She got up with a grunt and walked toward them to pose for a photo.
She tried to smile benevolently—in character. The little girls looked up at her in awe, but the older ones could tell something was off. As soon as they moved on, her face returned to sullen and Cinderella sat back down next to us. She scratched her pale ankles aggressively. They were covered in blood and scratch marks.
“Fucking mosquitoes around here. I hate this place.”
“So what are you originally? An actress?” Henry asked, sneaking another hit off his pipe.
She raised her eyebrow at him. “Yeah…”
“Look, it’s not like I thought I’d end up working in a thrift shop. But there’s hope, right? We’re still young.”
Someone spoke back from the Dumbo-themed mini-golf course behind us.
“Not for you there ain’t…”
A squeaky voice joined our conversation. It was Mickey Mouse. Or rather an undercover cop dressed as the Walt Disney character. He approached Henry and me with a badge and asked us to follow him. Marijuana was illegal and this was a family-oriented park.
We looked at Cinderella, hoping she would intervene, but she betrayed us.
“I’m sorry, Mickey. I didn’t realize they were smoking or I would have tried to stop them myself.”
“She fucking smoked too!” Henry pulled away from Mickey’s grasp.
“Sure she did. Now please stop resisting or I’ll have to handcuff you,” said the mouse.
Henry turned to Cinderella and growled. He spat on the floor by her plastic glass slipper and told her he hoped all her boyfriends for the rest of her life would fuck her best friends for the rest of their lives.
We were guided through a series of underground corridors to Disneyland’s detox rooms, also known as the Mickey jails. We were to sit in silence until the effects of the drugs wore off. The rooms were mostly populated by teenagers on hallucinogenic drugs. Henry and I both got tickets and were not allowed to drive back home. On top of that I was a minor and needed someone to sign for me. It couldn’t be my parents. There was no way they would pick me up in Anaheim. I could already hear the deportation monologue on my father’s lips, how I should have been more careful, how his film was on the line. When he talked about his work now he put on a serious tone and threw around big terms: the business, majors, above-the-line expenses. He had accumulated an armory of new expressions we were required to respect. When we didn’t, he lost his temper or sulked, reiterating that if we wanted things to work we had to be in them together as a family. And I wanted things to work.