“Original.”
His smile went wide and his eyes blanked. I was tempted to raise my camera. Rattlesnake-mean was hard to capture, but this guy had it in spades. I stepped back into the crowd and shifted down into the heavier crush of people.
“Where you going? I’m talking to you.”
I didn’t answer him. While the boardwalk was full of fun and art, it was also full of creeps. I knew better than to smile at a guy unless I was definitely looking for conversation. He probably thought I’d given him a sign to come over to talk to me.
Rattlesnake forgotten, I wandered over to the beach side of the park. Where the skate ramps were curved concrete, their counterparts were the jagged monoliths that created benches for the spectators. The smooth, clean lines of the ramps were graffiti-free, but not here. No, this was all tags and mottled colors. Occasionally, someone painted it over, providing another blank canvas for us to make our mark.
My destination was the small corner that a stranger and I had been working on.
I crouched in front of what I considered my half wall. I grinned at the cartoonish figure R-41 had left for me. A bunny with lavender fur and disconcerting buttons for eyes was my starting point.
He was as big as I was.
I dropped my bag of spray paint. This was going to be fun.
Four
I shouldn’t be here.
When I’d awakened this morning to the spider web of cracks on my shitty motel ceiling, I hadn’t planned to do this. Not today. Bad enough I’d deflected a call from Jerry early on. I wasn’t ready to give my report yet. Mainly because for once, I’d been concerned with myself and not with the task at hand.
I had to contact Sabrina and get my career going, not confront old ghosts I had no business dealing with.
Well, forget contacting her. She hadn’t even given me long enough to do that. Instead, she’d been blowing up my mobile all day. I hadn’t even given her my number, but it was probably in my Ripper Records file, along with the circumference of my cock.
I understood the hard sell. Really, I did. But for someone who had supposedly turned in merely a good performance last night, why was she riding my jock like an amusement ride already? It didn’t seem to be Donovan Lewis’s typical MO to chase with such…vigor.
It hadn’t even been a day since we’d spoken. Not long in the scheme of things, but when it came to the record business, evidently everything moved at the speed of light. Fortunes were made and lost in the amount of time I’d spent sleeping away my problems.
A bottle of bourbon had helped. Well, only half. I had a couple surefire sleep elixirs, and one of them involved alcohol. The other I hadn’t had any energy for.
That had to be a first. Too tired to fuck. Coming to America had worked out better for Eddie Murphy in his movie than it was for me so far.
It wasn’t as if I knew any women in the States. Not that they were terribly hard to come by. Even after my only partially successful show last night, I’d had a few groupie-types hanging around outside when I ducked out of the club. More than I’d expected, truthfully. But none of them had interested me. My mind had been spinning from the show and what Sabrina had said. Still was. And those women hadn’t been able to compete with the one in my head anyway.
That real estate solely belonged to Zoe.
I’d spent my solo hours drinking Jim Beam and scrolling through her IG feed. I’d gone all the way back to the beginning of her posts. Three-plus years ago. Earlier on, she’d mixed in a few personal shots along with her work. No selfies. Didn’t seem to be her vibe. Candid shots with friends or family were, however. One was taken in the fall at some farm with hay bales all over the place and a bunch of homespun people smiling at the camera. Zoe was in front of the group, wearing a location-appropriate outfit of dark denim overalls and skin. I couldn’t see a shirt under them but maybe she’d had on a little tank top. Considering whether she’d been wearing a bra, never mind a shirt, had occupied a good ten minutes or so while I studied the snapshot from all angles.
And her smile. Her smile grabbed me as much or more than her top or lack thereof. She’d seemed genuinely happy. Surrounded by people she cared about and holding a fat pumpkin in her arms.
Such a bucolic scene.
I’d finished the bottle with that image behind my eyes, along with a few others. All involved Zoe. Her hugging a tall guy with dark hair while he pointed at a framed picture on the wall behind them. Hers, no doubt. There was some kind of ribbon on it like she’d won an award. Another of her at a concert where she and a friend had mugged for the camera, though Zoe had pulled back as if she didn’t want to be the focus of the shot.
Not as easy for her to step in front of the lens, apparently. Maybe she didn’t like the lack of control in being part of the photo. Or didn’t appreciate being the focus. Whatever the reason, she definitely appeared to enjoy attention being directed elsewhere.
Basically, she was my exact opposite, since I’d been trying like a monkey on a unicycle to get all eyes on me practically since I was in nappies. Trying and failing, mostly. But I’d never given up the pursuit.
Now I was here, about to step off the bus in Carson, California. Here to confront my roots.
If only wood and concrete could talk. Scratch that. It was probably better they couldn’t.
I got off at the stop I’d mapped and swallowed hard at the landscape around me. Modest homes, huddled close together. Relentless sun beating down on them all, wearing away strips of paint and turning lawns brown. Unless that was partly due to the lack of care. All the homes looked the same minus the little details they’d added to try to distinguish themselves. A plastic pink lawn flamingo with a spinning tuft of feathers that rotated on its rump seemed to mock me as I passed the first house on the block. The second had a crooked mailbox and plastic over the front windows. The third had a boarded-up second story.
The farther I walked, the harder it grew for me to breathe, and not because of the smog.