Ettore met the kid through Max, who thought they were a perfect match. Robert had a fascination with World War II and was uninterested in most things except for Hitler’s biography and horror films, but this, according to Max, was his virtue. “He’s hyper-focused and completely ignorant. Like a street kid from a Pasolini film, but living in Los Angeles thirty years later.”
Our father devotedly listened to anything Max had to say. He was a big reason why we had moved to LA. We were in awe of his friendship with Phil Collins. He had written the lyrics to the semi-recent hit “Another Day in Paradise.” We felt proud to say we’d known him before he was famous. In the eighties he had produced horror films, including an American cult movie about android chameleons that was shot in the studios of Cinecittà in Rome. He and Ettore met on set in Rome and became close friends, carousing around town in search of remnants of La Dolce Vita. Every year since Max left Rome, he sent us Christmas cards and tried to lure my parents to Hollywood. He told us about working with the studios, writing for Phil Collins, and life in Beverly Hills. When we left for Los Angeles nobody knew whether Ettore and Max would be compatible. His last film, Devourandia, was a cannibalism tale about old Texas farmers in a small border town who discovered that the blood of drug addicts had the power to prolong lives. My father usually fainted at the sight of blood, but he was willing to take a chance because Max knew musicians, actors, and producers. He was the only person who seemed to know about the underground jazz club in the back of a Long Beach soul food restaurant. And one of the few who was allowed in. I always had a hard time finding a connection between producing horror movies about cannibals and writing humanitarian hit songs about homelessness like “Another Day in Paradise,” but we were all fascinated by his eclecticism.
—
“We don’t even have a pool. Everyone in LA has a pool.” My brother sighed, looking at our mother at the other end of the yard as she bathed in a pink inflatable pool from Pick ’n Save. It was half tilted on its side and water leaked out. We were allowed to refill it only once every three days. Our father said Los Angeles was a desert, and water in deserts cost more than gold. Right now the water was lukewarm and filled with insects and rancid lemons, but Serena did not care. She glistened topless in a layer of Johnson’s Baby Oil, squirting it on her eyes and breasts, ignoring the side effects the unfiltered California sun would have on her skin. Her new cat-eye sunglasses from the 99 Cent store slipped down her shiny nose. She pushed them up each time she turned the page of her book—her fourth Sitting Bull biography. The grass around the pool area was cluttered with newspaper clippings, cutouts, and books about Native Americans. If you asked her what she was doing, she glared at you and said she was working.
Her passions emerged in serial fashion. Each one entailed reclining on a bed or in a pool or tub, surrounded by piles of clippings and books. In Rome she went through a Gypsy phase. She read about Eastern Europe’s nomadic culture for months, forced my brother and me to watch documentaries about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and organized playdates with a group of children living in a Romany camp on the city outskirts. She had been lured by a Gypsy woman she met at a traffic light, whom she recognized as a sister from a past life. They hung out and became friends, then the woman hypnotized our mother. Ettore found her wandering the Piazza del Popolo in the center of Rome with no purse, no jewelry, and no car. We got picked up from the nomad camp and never saw our Gypsy friends again.
My brother put out his half-smoked cigarette and went rollerblading with Creedence, one of eight Mormon brothers who lived with their parents in the long shotgun house down the street. Creedence was his first and only friend. Not having a friend was worse than not having a pool, I thought. Three months had passed and I felt invisible. In school I was alone. At home I was alone. Robert was a breath of fresh air—or dead air since he looked like a corpse. But it didn’t matter. It was something. I pulled out my copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, hoping he might notice me through the window and be attracted by my intellectually committed reading. It didn’t work. Like my mother, I took off all my clothes except for a bathing-suit bottom and sat on a towel reading in the burning sun, eyeing him from under the lemon tree. It was hard to tell whether he could see me through the Terminator glasses, but he faced my general direction a few times. My eyebrows thickened and my cheeks swelled with the heat as I tried to delve into existentialist feminism. I fell asleep in the sun.
When I woke up an hour later, I was dripping with sweat. Serena was no longer in the pool. My grandmother ironed clothes on the fold-out board on the patio while humming Claudio Villa songs to herself. She also owned cat-eye sunglasses now. After helping us move, and disdaining Van Nuys and everything about America she could think of, she had decided to stick around a little longer. The California heat was good for her arthritis, she said, and Rome was already rainy and cold. She called Alitalia and befriended an airline representative from Torrance who changed her return ticket without charge in exchange for health tips.
I stumbled to the plastic pool and collapsed in the warm, oily water Serena had left behind. Inside, the house was empty. A television was turned on. I could hear it from the yard. I splashed around, did some lazy sit-ups, and came out. In the living room I found Robert sitting in darkness, sunglasses still on, staring at the screen.
“Your parents went to buy groceries. They invited me to lunch,” he said without looking at me.
I was wrapped in a white towel. The bottom of the bathing suit dripped dirty pool water on the hardwood floors.
“I don’t usually eat anything so I think it’ll be weird, but whatever. Your mom doesn’t take no for an answer.”
“Do you want a snack?” I asked him.
“A snack?” he asked with a vampire smirk.
“Yes, a snack.”
“No thanks. I said I don’t eat. Food is weird.”
I turned around, embarrassed, and headed for my bedroom.
“Hey!” he called after me. “I’m watching Nekromantik. You want to watch it with me?”
“Sure. Is it a comedy?”
“It’s a story of a couple that gets off on fucking corpses.”
“Oh, okay.”
“It’s the sexiest thing in the world.”
We sat side by side in the dark, never touching. I could smell him. My first American male smell. It wasn’t a great smell, a bit sickly, but I welcomed it. We could be friends, I thought. We had things in common. I didn’t know what they were, but I was sure they existed.
On screen the male protagonist unearthed a dead body from a cemetery and started to fuck it. Robert said that was so hot. I glanced at him from the corner of my eyes.
“Yeah, that is hot,” I said.