it.
What an asshole, I said to my mom.
Just let it go, Norman, she said.
This will be good for you, Norman, Nick said with a grin as we drove away.
I wanted to slug him. It brought me back to those days on Topanga Beach when I wished I were bigger and stronger. I had always believed that I’d be able to whip him by the time I turned thirteen and now my thirteenth birthday was a month away and I wasn’t close.
Grandma’s silver curls were flat on one side and she had tubes in her arms and her eyes were sunken back in their sockets and colorless behind a glassy film. Eleanor was there with Lee and she cried when she saw me. An aunt or uncle offered me a seat and I collapsed into it. Grandpa sat on a rickety chair beside the hospital bed and watched Grandma. He was slouched and his face was haggard.
Somebody said, Little Norman’s here, and Grandma sat up. She found me and her eyebrows perked. Her pupils were so dilated that she looked blind. The rest of her face, apart from the eyebrows, was limp and expressionless. Then she shifted her attention across the room and spoke toward the empty corner. It was pure babble. Her arms rose and she gestured and babbled.
The morphine makes her hallucinate, explained Eleanor.
I watched her moan and talk to different imaginary things. Then she fell back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling, motionless. Grandpa put his hand on her arm and she stared at the ceiling with a clinched mouth and nobody spoke.
She’s kinda like Sandra was, I thought. Her body is there but her mind is gone.
When we left for the night I kissed and hugged Grandpa and he was all skin and bones. I waited with Eleanor outside the room while my mom and Nick said their good-byes. I asked her how Grandma could get lung cancer if she never smoked and was so healthy.
Grief, said Eleanor. If you push it down it can grow into something toxic like cancer. Your father was her masterpiece.
In our hotel room I thought about how it would have killed my dad if I had died and he had survived, just like it was killing Grandma. We were staying out by Rosarita Beach and I heard waves crashing in the distance and I wished I could escape out into them.
After a second day at the hospital it was time to say good-bye to Grandma. She had been lucid all morning and when I hugged her I felt her muscles and bones vised together and I knew she was in excruciating pain and that the moment I left they would shoot her up with morphine and she’d relax and hallucinate again. That was the last time I ever saw her.
On the drive home I decided there was no God and that we were all on our own here.
The following weekend I went to a party at a house in Brentwood with a big pool and a tennis court and its own movie theater. I kicked my skateboard onto the brick flower planter in the driveway and grinded my trucks along the edge, chipping off slivers of brick.
You totally thrashed their wall, said one of the guys I was rolling with.
I glanced back at the slivers on the ground.
Yep, I said, feeling that same sense of relief as when I broke the stall door.
The gang let out a nervous laugh. I led them around the back, through a gate and onto a lush green lawn with rolling mounds and flowers and roses along the edges. We marched around the corner and the entire party— maybe twenty-five kids—turned around to see us. Missy the hostess was lounging poolside with her set of rich girls on gigantic pink towels. She lifted her Ray-Bans and waved only her fingers, ambivalent about our presence.
Immediately I met each and every pair of male eyes staring at us. I wanted to punch someone again. Feel myself unload. It seduced me. I scowled at the boys, hoping for a scowl back. There were no takers and I strutted to the cooler and got a beer.
We sat on our skateboards, kicking aside the chairs and benches—a rebuke of civilization—and sipped our beers, commenting on the digs. Where a half-pipe skateboard ramp would go, or if we should drain the pool and skate it.
Missy stood up and straightened her bikini and waddled over.
You guys need to promise to be mellow, okay? said Missy.
Can we drain your pool? I said.
Norman. No way. I’ll call the rent-a-cops if you mess with the pool. I’m not kidding.
Where’re your parents? I said.
They’re out of town, but the housekeeper’s here, so…
So we can totally rage, I said.
That got a big laugh and some howls of enthusiasm.
One of the rich girls whom I had never seen before made a comment. I whipped around and confronted her.
What’d you say?
The girl was pretty. Hair perfect. Skin even and supple. She wore a ridiculous gold dress and swanky gold sandals and clutched a frilly handbag to her bosom. She spoke with an accent—English maybe—and tightened her mouth into a sphincter when I addressed her.
You’re rude and immature, she said with her nose literally in the air.
Fuck being mature, I said. That’s boring.
What’s wrong with you? she said.
I opened my mouth to respond and I saw all those kids staring at me. I stumbled on my words and it seemed like everyone could see how weird and sad I really was and it scared me.
I grabbed her arm, tugged her off the lounge chair and flung her into the pool.
She came up with her hair in her face and her dress billowed across the surface and her arms got caught in it and I thought I’d have to dive in and save her. Half the party was laughing.
Several girls and a boy went to her rescue and helped her out of the pool. Her eyes and nose were covered by wet limp hair and her mouth trembled. Her nipples were exposed through the wet gold material.
Missy and company took the girl inside and the party died. I was afraid to make eye contact with anyone so I opened another beer and skated onto the tennis court and did layback tail-slides on the smooth concrete. Thinking of that girl sobbing, her limp dress clinging to her like cellophane, triggered a strange emptying sensation in my face—it was eroding into a skull. My skin seemed to crawl off me, leaving the sinewy muscles and tendons of my entire body fully exposed. A grotesque, mutilated boy. I wondered what my dad would think of me now.
Missy appeared, trailing two rent-a-cops. It was time to leave. We gathered our boards and I flipped the cops off and we ran out the gate.
We rode the bus to Westwood and picked a fight with some Emerson Junior High kids. One of our crew got pinned in a telephone booth by three big Emerson guys. The rest of my crew was busy with their own battles. Again I found myself on the sidelines and I remembered a man at my dad’s funeral describing how a mob of Stanford football fans had jumped him at a game, and how my dad was the only guy that charged in there to help him. I charged headlong into the phone booth, ramming two big guys in the back with my skateboard. It broke them apart and somehow we scrambled away just as cop sirens were approaching.
The crew split up and I hid atop Makeout Mountain, then took the back streets to Sunset Boulevard and rode the bus home. I made it just before my curfew. Nick was up watching TV and asked me how I got the cut on my nose.
Fell skating, man, I said.
I went downstairs and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t remember getting hit in the nose. My eyes looked tired and the dark circles were like a sick boy’s and my body vibrated and I told myself that rich chick got what she deserved. Still, her quivering mouth and the way she stumbled toward the house in her wilted dress bothered me and I turned away from my reflection in the mirror.
When I awoke the next morning I was still on edge. I went to Topanga and paddled out, not saying hello to
