5
“I’m pretty sure that’s illegal,” Ben says, lacing his fingers behind his head and tilting his face to the sun.
“To have sex with a deer, or with a cartoon character?” Chon asks.
“Both,” Ben says. “And may I point out that Bambi is an underage animated ungulate? Not to mention a male?”
“Bambi is a boy?” O asks.
“Again, Bambi is a deer, ” Ben clarifies, “but, yes, he’s a boy deer.”
“Then why are so many girls in Playboy named Bambi?” O asks.
She likes Playboy and is grateful that Stepfather Number Four keeps them in his “home office” desk drawer so Paqu Paqu is what O calls her mother, the
Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe — doesn’t see them and get pissy because she is an older version of the centerfolds who is constantly attempting to airbrush herself via expensive cosmetics and more expensive cosmetic surgery.
O is pretty sure that the National Geographic Channel is going to do an archaeological dig on her mother in a futile quest to find a single original body part, a private joke that explains why O gave Four a pith helmet for his last birthday.
(“Why, thank you, Ophelia,” a puzzled Four said.
“You’re welcome.”
“What’s it for?” Paqu asked, icily.
“To keep the sun off your vagina,” O answered.)
“Girls are named Bambi,” Ben says now, “because we are culturally ignorant, of even pop culture, and because we crave the archetype of childlike innocence combined with adult sexuality.”
His parents are both psychotherapists.
Ben, oh Ben, O thinks.
Hard body, soft heart.
Long brown hair, warm brown eyes.
“But that’s me, ” O tells him. “Childlike innocence combined with adult sexuality.”
Short blonde hair, thin hips, no rack to speak of, tiny butt on her petite frame. And yes, big eyes-albeit blue, not brown.
“No,” Ben says. “You’re more adult innocence combined with childlike sexuality.”
He has a point, O thinks. She does view sex mostly as play-a fun thing-not a job to be performed to prove one’s love. This is why, she has opined, they’re called sex “toys” instead of sex “tools.”
“ Bambi is a proto-fascist piece of work,” Chon snarls. “It might as well have been shot by Leni Riefenstahl.”
Chon reads books-Chon reads the dictionary — and also hits the Foreign Films/Classics section of Netflix. He could explain 8 ^1 / 2 to you, except he won’t.
“Speaking of gender ambiguity,” O says, “I told Paqu that I’m thinking of becoming bisexual.”
“What did she say?” Ben asks.
“She said, ‘What?’” O answers. “Then I wussed out and said, ‘I think I want a bicycle.’”
“To pedal to your girlfriend’s house?” Ben asks.
“To pedal to your girlfriend’s house,” O counters.
She could play for either or both teams and would be heavily recruited because, at nineteen, she’s drop-dead gorgeous.
But she doesn’t know that yet.
O describes herself as “poly-sexual.”
“Like Pollyanna, only way happier,” she explains.
She would consider going LTG Lesbian Till Graduation — except she isn’t in school, a fact that Paqu points out to her on a near daily basis. She tried junior college for a semester (okay, the first three weeks of a semester), but it was, well… junior college.
Right now she’s just glad to have her guys here. As for ODB, they can have any women they want, as long as one of them is her.
Check that, she thinks They can have any woman they want as long as I’m the one they love.
The pain of it is
The pain of it is
Chon flies out tonight
This is his last day on the beach.
6
Specifically, Laguna Beach, California.
The brightest pearl in the SoCal necklace of coastal towns that stretches down that lovely neck from Newport Beach to Mexico.
Going along the strand (pun intended) — Newport Beach, Corona del Mar, Laguna Beach, Capistrano Beach, San Clemente (interrupt for Camp Pendleton), Oceanside, Carlsbad, Leucadia, Encinitas, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Solana Beach, Del Mar, Torrey Pines, La Jolla Shores, La Jolla, Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, Ocean Beach, Coronado, Silver Strand, Imperial Beach.
All beautiful, all fine, but the best one is Lagoona — which was the name officially given to the town by the State of California until someone explained that there was no actual “lagoon,” but that the name derived from “ canada de las lagunas, ” which in Spanish means “canyon of the lakes.” There are two lakes, up in the hills above said canyon, but Laguna isn’t known for its lakes, it’s known for its beaches and its beauty.
About which Ben, Chon, and O are a little blase, because they grew up here and take it for granted.
Yeah, except Chon doesn’t right now because his leave is up and he’s about to go back to Afghanistan, aka Stanland.
Or, in the spirit of things Afgoonistan.
7
Chon tells Ben and O that he literally has to get packing.
He goes back to his efficiency apartment on Glenneyre and packs a baseball bat into his ’68 green Mustang — in honor of Steve McQueen — the King of Cool — and drives down to San Clemente, not far from Richard Nixon’s version of Elba and hence known in the latter half of the 1970s as
Sans Clemency.
(Nixon, poor Nixon, the only truly tragic hero in the American political theater; the only recent president more Aeschylus than Rodgers and Hammerstein. First there was Camelot, then The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, then Richard?)
Chon drives not to the old Western White House
The real name of which was, with presumably unintended irony,
La Casa Pacifica
“Peaceful House.”
There was Nixon in Exile, prowling around the Peaceful House chatting with paintings, while down on the actual Pacific, Secret Service agents chased surfers away from the nearby famous break at Upper Trestles lest they organize an assassination attempt, which is, it should be noted, probably the first time that the words “surfers” and “organize” have been used in the same paragraph.
