She thinks she can get Mr. Ruffalo, the security chief, to leave the rear stairwell door unlocked for a ten-minute span right after lights-out on Friday. I would slip downstairs and out the emergency door where my mother would be waiting in a limousine. She would have packed a suitcase for me and we would go straight to the airport and fly to Italy to visit Rome and Naples. Two cities she’s always wanted to see. We’d tour the Vatican and the excavated city of Pompeii.
I didn’t want to burst her bubble but I reminded her that neither one of us had a passport and there was no way to leave the country without one. She suggested Miami as an alternative. I squeezed her tight and told her that if I escaped it would work against me and they would probably keep me here longer. And that it would be best to go to Miami or maybe even Italy after my release, which looks like it will be before the holidays.
I haven’t shaved since I’ve been here and I have a scraggly black beard. When I see myself in the mirror it doesn’t look like me. Not the me I remember as me. I look more like the man in the only postcard Veronica ever sent me. It was a self-portrait of Picasso as a young man. During his blue period, I think. She wrote on the back of it, Matt, you are so much more than you think you are, and so much less than me. Ha ha ha! Just kidding. Happy 17th. Veronica. P.S. If you grew a beard you might look like this. Think about it.
* * *
My best friend here is a girl named Nicole. She plays Bach and Brahms on the flute. They only allow her to play one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. The rest of the time they keep the flute locked up. God knows why a flute would need incarceration but those are the rules here at the Waldorf Hysteria.
When Nicole plays her face gets clear and quiet, like a serious child. But when she’s just hanging out she can be wicked and sarcastic in a very funny way. And she knows the filthiest jokes.
I think I might be in love.
I want to come clean. I really do. I have nothing left to hide.
afterwords
California, November 2013
I’m heading up the 101 with Los Angeles behind me. I think it’s autumn. It’s night so it’s hard to tell. It’s hard to tell in the daytime too. The sun has no seasons in Southern California. Or maybe it does and I just haven’t figured them out yet.
On the edge of Thousand Oaks I find myself at the top of the Conejo Grade. It’s a dizzying decline that twists down into the valley where Camarillo begins. If you didn’t know any better you could easily think you were about to fall off the edge of the world.
This stretch of Cali freeway is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a hitchhiking migrant farmworker who was run over by a drunken teenager who hung himself in his jail cell. Which I suppose makes two ghosts, though it’s only the farmhand who’s been seen in these parts.
And though I have no idea where in the Los Angeles area my father crashed and burned, something in my gut tells me it was here. I’m sure there are ways to research it and find out the truth, but I have yet to do so and probably never will. Sometimes the truth of imagination is easier to live with than the truth of fact.
By day you can see hills rolling on for miles, some of them strange and mysterious, like flattop pyramids grown over wild—too correct in angle and line to be a product of nature. At night it’s like sitting in the cockpit of an airplane as you slowly descend to a narrow landing strip between the mountains, hills, farmland, and the lights of the Camarillians. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, you might get a heady waft of peaty fertilizer or sugary strawberry if luck is with you.
But tonight the air is still. One of your songs comes on the radio. You are only a few days dead so a lot of your songs are being sent over the airwaves. It’s an old song, one of your earliest. A nugget that would spawn so many more of its kind as an unbroken chain of admirers fell under your influence.
It’s a tender tune. A sad, slow song, sweet and delicate. Something churns in my solar plexus and threatens release through the eyes. It catches me by surprise, then it breaks and the tears come. Big drops that fall out easy. They drip like wax, sealing all the oaths and pledges. It feels good.
I go from surprise to shock when I notice it’s raining. It hasn’t rained here in years but the sky doesn’t know that so it sends the water down as if it were common. It pours like the tropics and it’s very hard to see. Dangerous. West Coast drivers are unaccustomed to wet roads and impaired visibility. We all slow to a steady creep, some of us crying.
I cry as much for your passing as I do for the time unrecoverable that has passed me by. I cry for the boy I was, who became a man. For the city I loved, which has vanished like you have. For the beautiful, brilliant shooting starlet who left this earth while still a child. I cry for never having known you once I was old enough to understand who you really were and the magnitude of the art you made.
The story told here, closing with me on the edge of manhood, is as much yours as it is mine. Its
