I showed up at Henry’s store with a bagful of flea-market finds I had been storing for him, hoping they might work as currency for a trade. The electronic store bell buzzed when I opened the door. The batteries were weak and they made a distorted sound. Henry had installed it to know when to put the pot away if someone came in. I looked around. He was hunched over Street Fighter, the usual cigarette burning on the control panel. I hadn’t been to the store in weeks. It looked like a dungeon again and I was instantly annoyed. I didn’t say hello and stormed to the back room. I took out cleaning products and began to dust picture frames.
“I can’t believe you let Diane Keaton get like this,” I scolded him.
Henry shrugged his shoulders. “I told you I needed you around more…motherfucker!” he screamed at T. Hawk, Street Fighter’s exiled Indian warrior.
“Okay, look. I’m going to clean up, but I need your help.”
“You don’t have to clean up. It’s fine. Oh shit!” he screamed again.
His middle and index fingers tapped violently over the control button—an obsessive clicking noise I now associated with his presence.
“I want to. And I also want your help. I need a ride on Saturday.”
“So that’s it, huh? You disappear for weeks and now you want a ride?”
“Yes, to the Mojave Desert,” I mumbled. “And I’m sorry if I was mean but you’d be mean to me too if all of a sudden I turned into your mother’s best friend. Plus my grandma died.”
He stopped playing. “The one that used to make out with you?”
“Yes. Not exactly make out.”
“Tongue to tongue counts as making out. Anyway, I’m sorry.” He gave me an awkward hug. “Why do you need to go to the desert?”
“My friend Deva and I want to go to a rave for her birthday. We need a car. We have to go to Hollywood first and pick up directions.”
Henry smirked. “Secret location? I hate that shit. Why can’t they just give you the fucking directions right away?”
“Because raves are illegal and you have to do things last-minute or you’ll get busted.”
Henry shook his head.
“I totally want you to meet Deva,” I said.
“Okay, first of all, I hate crowds. I hate people in general, but particularly when they are high in open spaces wearing bunny suits and tripping out on glow sticks. Second of all, you disappeared from my life and started practically living in the woods with this girl you’ve never even introduced me to, and now all of a sudden you totally want me to meet her? I’m totally sorry. I feel used,” he said, mocking my Valley girl tone.
“Please?”
Henry let T. Hawk fall to the ground, then turned to me.
“No way in hell I’m driving two and a half hours at night into the fucking desert with a bunch of meth heads. I hate driving and I hate driving at night. Plus I have agoraphobia.”
“Clearly.” I scowled, glaring at the crammed store. I walked to the back of the room and started pulling my clothes from the boxes and transferring them into the new arrivals bin.
I took my shirt off and tried on the softest, most fluorescent top I could find in front of the mirror. It was bright green and cropped just above my belly button. Henry lifted his gaze.
“Dude, what are you doing? You can’t get naked in the middle of the store.”
“I’m not naked. I’m topless. Nobody comes in here anyway.”
“That’s not true. We had seven customers yesterday. They bought your Nekromantic knife by the way. I owe you sixty bucks.”
“Just drive us to the desert and keep the money.”
“I’d rather give you the sixty bucks.”
I sighed and dug out more clothes from the boxes. “Deva said I have to wear soft, bright clothes.”
“I hate raver fashion. Did she tell you to buy pacifiers too?”
“No. What are pacifiers for anyway?” I tried to ask with nonchalance, breezing through a pile of anime-style schoolgirl dresses.
“They satiate the need to grind your teeth when you’re on MDMA…You’ll see, the girls are all going to be sucking on them, dancing like aliens. It’s just so silly.”
“Better than sitting here rotting away!”
I tried on a short bright pink dress over my pants, then pulled them out from underneath. It looked perfect. Henry walked up behind me.
“You have to do the high pigtail buns. It’s the style.” He parted my hair, twirled it into buns, and snickered at my reflection. “You’ll never be a raver, Eugenia. Italians can’t survive in the desert.”
I undid the buns, rolled up my jeans, stuffed them in my bag, and headed out in the pink dress.
“I’m taking it. You owe me sixty bucks.”
I left the store and crossed Ventura Boulevard.
Henry ran after me and screamed from across the street. “You can’t act like a spoiled brat just because I don’t feel like driving you to the freaking desert in the middle of the night!”
I was already on the other side, headed for Sav-On where I would discreetly buy the pacifiers. I turned around.
“You never want to do anything! I’m so bored with you!” I screamed back.
“Does that include wrapping up the costume department on your dad’s movie because you were stupid enough to get stuck in the middle of a canyon?”
“No. That’s not included!”
“No shit!” Henry screamed back.
The cars driving down the boulevard between us honked at our screams. A guy stuck his head out of the window and gave us a peace sign. “Make love, not war, guys!” Henry and I both flipped him off.
It angered me that he knew I was going to buy pacifiers, that he could see through me, that he noticed when I put on an American accent to fit in. He knew how vulnerable I felt with Deva and he knew these things because I had allowed him to live in my space, breathe my air, become part of my world like a second brother.
—
I shut my bedroom door and took my faded tie-dyed address book out. I started leafing through it, in search of someone who might own a car, realizing, on top of everything else, that I had no friends. Some Italian names, a few classmates I had called to get homework assignments, a couple of Latino anarchists I had smoked cigarettes with in the abandoned school field where the outcasts hung out. I didn’t have the guts to call them out of the blue and none of them had cars anyway. Before closing the address book, a small piece of crumpled paper fell out. When I opened it, I saw a scribble in violet pen. I could not make out the name, but I could see it was a California area code. I searched for 805 in the yellow pages: Ventura County. I began to hear drums play inside my head. Peyote, turkey beaks, loss of virginity, and trailer parks. Alo, the whiskey-drinking guy from Wounded Knee, had a car and he liked to drive it. I searched through my dresser and pulled out the leather jacket he’d given me, remembering his sweet gesture. The awkwardly romantic day-after he’d tried to conjure when we drove through the battered buttes. It had been more than a year since our Native American adventure in South Dakota. He’d written me a few letters but I had not replied. I had never called him. I never even bothered to copy his number into my phone book.
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