Dead Boys: Stories

Long Lost

THREE ASTRONAUTS ARE SIGNING AUTOGRAPHS AT THE mall, side by side at a long table next to Santa’s castle. A red, white, and blue banner behind them screams YOUR AMERICAN HEROES, but Santa is a bigger draw, with his fake snow and plywood candy canes. It’s Christmas, after all! Mommies in sweatpants and stained T-shirts drag their children past the table and into the castle, where an elf will snap a Polaroid to send to Grandma or maybe Daddy and his new wife, while the astronauts, ignored, sip from cans of soda and dream of Thai bar girls.

One of them cups his ear whenever anybody speaks to him, an old man with a face like the end of an orange. He once walked on the moon — the moon! I watched it on TV as a kid. Fucked me up for years. I couldn’t wait to blast off. He must have some answers, the ancient astronaut. If I could muster the energy, I’d get up off this bench and ask him why my hands sometimes feel like they belong to somebody else. I’d sing along to the Christmas carols and take the See’s candy lady dancing. Or maybe I’d fill a bottle with gasoline, stopper it with a sock, and set fire to this circus. I don’t know.

I MEET ANOTHER husband at the bar. He offers to buy me a drink, which is supposed to be a joke, because all the booze is free. He’s loosened his tie so that the knot hangs to the middle of his chest, and he can’t stop running his fingers through his hair.

“Which one’s yours?” he asks, and I point to Judy. She has a good job, management, and this is her company Christmas party. I tried every way I could to get out of coming, but she put her foot down. She has that right, I guess.

“Do you love her?” the other husband asks.

Of course I do.

“I love mine, too,” he says with a grin.

Judy is talking to her boss over at the buffet. I watch from across the room as she smiles one minute, nods seriously the next, the transition so smooth and professional it seems almost rehearsed. She’s lucky that way. The seams never show. “All you have to do is try,” she’ll say when I ask how she does it, and every time she says it, my spit turns to battery acid and my head hurts for days.

Mostly, though, we’re fine. We keep it simple. She likes strawberry daiquiris, silver jewelry, and anything with Gene Kelly in it. I know what kind of flowers to buy on her birthday, and we need about the same amount of sleep. I have heard her crying in the bathroom when she thinks the shower is drowning it out, but we’re still rolling along, and that’s better than most.

The other husband’s wife joins us at the bar. She’s wearing Frosty the Snowman earrings. “So you’re Mr. Judy,” she says. “You’re in publishing, right?”

“Is that how Judy puts it? I’m a proofreader.”

“Proofreader,” her husband says. “What the hell’s that?”

“A job. A bullshit job. Lots of people have them.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“So you’d rather be doing something else,” the wife says to me.

“Not really.”

She eyes me over the rim of her wineglass. I can tell she’s not going to back down. It’s these kinds of conversations that will kill me.

“What are you two doing for the holidays?” she asks.

“We’re not real big on the whole holiday thing.”

“What does that mean?”

I answer with a shrug.

“When you have kids it’ll be different,” she says. “They really make this time of year special.”

Judy finally motions for me to join her. I excuse myself and follow her out to the patio of the restaurant.

“Float me a smoke,” she says.

Two men, coworkers of hers, approach us with their arms around each other. They are singing “Silent Night” and try to get Judy to join in, but she pats them on their backs and steers them inside.

“Wash your hands,” I say. “This place is a hotbed of Yuletide cheer.”

“Best behavior. You promised,” she says.

People are dancing in the restaurant. The windows are beginning to fog. There’s a small black spot on my white shirt. I can’t figure out where it came from.

Judy takes her cell phone from her purse and dials our answering machine. After listening for a minute, she looks confused, then presses the code to replay the messages and holds the phone out to me.

“Your brother called,” she says.

“I don’t have a brother.”

“Merry Christmas.”

SPENCER WRIGHT, THIS is your life. No, really, hey, my name is Karl Wright, and I’m your brother, half-brother, Whatever. It’s a hell of a story, but I tracked our old man down and he gave me your name and they had computers at the library. He said he thought you were living in L.A., so it was pretty easy. Do you know about me? He married my momma after he married yours. Anyway, I’m gonna tell you right off the bat, I’ve been away for a time, and where I was locked down they had a shrink who said a lot of my anger and stuff comes from not having family ties and missing out on that, so I’m doing something about it, or trying to anyway. I said back off, nigger! Sorry about that. I bet this tape’s gonna run out, so let me get to it. I’m in town, I’ve got a room down here at the Hotel Cecil, and I’d love to hook up with you for a few minutes, lunch, Whatever you can spare. Seeing your face and hearing your voice is all that’s important. Leave a message at the desk for Karl Wright. If I don’t hear from you, don’t worry, I’ll get the hint. Love you, bro. Already. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

THE DESK CLERK sits behind bulletproof glass. All transactions are conducted via a sliding drawer, and one must be buzzed in through a security gate to get upstairs. The sign warning against drugs, prostitution, and firearms makes me smile. Have you never dreamed of such lodgings?

The clerk is Indian. Turban, the whole bit.

“I’m here to see Karl Wright,” I say.

He checks the register and then the cubbyholes where the keys are stored.

“Wright is out,” he says.

“He told me to meet him here.”

The clerk grabs a key and taps it three or four times against the thick Plexiglas separating us. “He is out, out, out. This is his key.”

“What’s that music you’re listening to?”

It’s a woman wailing over some kind of half-assed bagpipes and penny whistles dipped in mud.

“Indian music. From my country.”

“What’s she saying?”

The clerk shrugs. “She loves him. He has robbed her heart.”

I step back into the lobby. A few men are hunched on the spavined couches, rapt before a silent television chained to a shelf up near the ceiling. I take a seat and do my best to mimic their institutional quietude. These boys know how to wait, I think to myself while the audience on TV applauds us soundlessly. In one corner of the room, a small aluminum Christmas tree lists under its burden of twinkle lights and tinsel.

The old guy beside me is wearing a blue polyester suit coat, the cuffs of which hang past his knuckles. He smells like yeast and mothballs. For a while he stares openmouthed at the screen, his tongue worrying his dentures. Then he stands and faces me.

“Hit the road, punk,” he wheezes.

“Say what?”

“Time’s up.”

“Sit down, you crazy fuck,” one of the other men shouts.

“Yeah, asshole,” another chimes in.

The old man’s chin trembles; his eyes shine with tears. He returns to his spot on the couch and sits with his head in his hands. I’d trade any ten people I know for one of him. His desolation is as beautiful as a broken mirror.

My brother laughs. He’s been watching everything from an easy chair by the door. He’s handsomer than me, taller, more graceful as he strides across the lobby, muscular arms outstretched.

“Karl?” I ask, knowing full well.

He wraps himself around me. I feel his fists on my back, drawing me closer until my mouth and nose are pressed against his shoulder. I want to return the embrace, I should, but it’s awkward. I can’t figure out where to put my hands.

“My bro,” he whispers. “My big bro.”

We separate, and he wipes his eyes with the ball of his thumb. He’s wearing a denim shirt and a pair of tan chinos, and I wonder if these are the clothes the prison provided when they released him. Everyone in the lobby is smiling at us, as if our meeting has allowed hope to slice its way through the scar tissue surrounding their hearts. I don’t want to be responsible for that.

A siren screams past outside, and Karl doesn’t even flinch. I reach out and tousle his hair like an older brother would a younger brother’s. He grabs my hand and kisses it. It’s one of those moments when you wish you weren’t always watching yourself from across the room.

WE WALK TO a McDonald’s a couple of blocks off Skid Row. I suggest sushi in Little Tokyo or one of the Mexican places over the river, but Karl says no, no, McDonald’s is fine. The streets down here are something else. The sun never quite reaches them over the tops of the buildings, and those who have chosen to live in this constant twilight collide with those who have no choice and those who are simply, in one way or another, lost. On this cold, late December afternoon, it could be any miserable, man-eating place in the world. Cheap wine, crack, lies loudly told — these are the bonfires that keep the wolves at bay.

OH, MAN, YOU really want to get into that mess? It makes me look stupid. Like a real idiot. But okay. Me and this fucker Edgar I used to hang with, we were heavy into downers. I was staying away from smack, but anything else, bring it on. This was in OKC, before the bomb and whatnot, and Edgar knew this guy who knew this guy who. . well, if you were a serious pill popper and you got to thinking, “Hey, where do they keep all the drugs in this town?” you might come up with this, too — the hospital, right? So Edgar tells me about this buddy of his who shot himself in the hand with a twenty-two, then went to the hospital and told them it happened while he was cleaning the gun, and they set him up with a nice, fat scrip for Percodan or Darvon or some such wonder. We’re thinking right on, right. Voilà! You’ve got to be in pain to get painkillers! Neither of us had the balls to take a bullet, but we worked it out where we’d toss a coin and the winner would hit the loser in the head with a piece of pipe just hard enough to cut him and lump it up so it’d look like maybe he fell off a ladder, which is what we’d tell the doctor.

A few beers later, we do the toss, and I lose. Edgar gets the pipe from under his mattress and I sit at the kitchen table and he fuckin’ nails me. I mean, he knocks me the fuck OUT! I wake up on the floor, blood gushing, my ears ringing, and Edgar zips me over to the emergency. Well, first off they shave half my head to stitch me up, then there’s all kinds of X-rays and Y-rays and Z-rays. I must have been in there four or five hours, crying this hurts and that hurts and doc, you got to help me, and after all that, do you know what I walked out with? Tylenol. Fucking Tylenol. Long story short, we drive to this dealer’s house and bust down his door and steal his stash. He ratted us out, saying we took his TV, and me being on probation already for some other rinky-dink beef, that was that. Your little brother hit the big time.

THE MCDONALD’S IS all plastic and chrome and perfect and horrible. Karl lifts the bun of his hamburger to remove the pickles. He’s tattooed the letters of his name on the fingers of one hand, a sloppy, homemade job, the ink already faded to green. The one thing I see of myself in his face is its only imperfection, the bulbous tip of his nose. We can thank our father for that.

“How long’s it been?” Karl asks.

“Oh, hell, what, twenty-five years maybe. He dropped by on his way to Vegas once, when he still lived out here. He was with your mother then. She was pregnant with you, as a matter of fact. We’ve talked on the phone a few times since.”

“You never missed having a daddy?”

“My mom kept trying. There were always men around.”

“But not your daddy.”

I shift in my seat and fight off the exasperation his earnestness provokes in me.

“We never had pets, either. Should I feel bad about that, too?”

“You got an answer for everything,” Karl says, his smile a bit too knowing.

“So what’s your story?” I ask.

He shrugs, dips a fry in ketchup. “How old were you when he bailed?”

“Three.”

“I was barely a year.” His voice takes on a harsher tone, as if something inside him has suddenly cinched up tight and he has to force his words around it.

“Momma did her best, but it was hard in Texas. Different from here, the people and all, how they treated us. Especially her family. They were too cruel half the time, too kind the rest. By the time I was fourteen, she’d had enough, so she gave herself up to cancer. And I’m glad, you know, because look at me.”

He strikes himself in the chest with his fist and would do worse, I know — tear his guts out, take an ice pick to his skull. It’s the kind of self-immolating rage that drives men to decisive, if reckless, even destructive, acts, and I have often envied it in others, as the dead must surely envy the living.

I sip my coffee and watch him seethe. He closes his eyes and exhales loudly, then rotates his head from side to side, his neck cracking and popping.

“He had a house on a golf course out there in Florida, a boat in the driveway. A girl answered the door, looked like us, and there was a boy, too. Daddy wouldn’t let me in, though, didn’t want to upset his family, like I was somebody, I don’t know, nobody. So we walked out to the garage. What did I want, he wanted to know. I said, ‘Just to see you. You’re my daddy.’ ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. Are you sure? Can you believe that? I lost it. I got him by the throat and took him down to his knees.”

“I’ve dreamed this,” I say. “I’ve killed the fucker in my dreams.”

Karl pauses, derailed momentarily by my interruption — shocked, if that’s possible. He swirls his straw in his cup.

“I had a pistol,” he continues, “but it’s when I reached for it, when my fingers touched it, that I lost my nerve. I slapped his ass around until he gave up your name and that you were in California and all, and then I got the fuck out of Dodge. ‘Son,’ he called after me. ‘Son.’ But I didn’t look back. He put another notch on his going-to-hell belt that day, that’s for sure. And me, I haven’t had a mean spell since.”

Even if it had gone differently, if he’d confessed to murder, I don’t think I would have rejected him. He is everything I could have been, everything I am, except a coward.

He wrestles his anger back into its cell, and a wry sweetness returns to his eyes. There’s something of an eager child about him as he takes a bite of his burger.

“What did you do with the gun?” I ask.

“Pawned it. For traveling money.”

A black girl screams at the old Mexican man behind the counter. “I told you no tartar sauce, you motherfucker, and what is this?” She throws her fish sandwich at him and stands with her hands on her hips while a stray dog that has somehow slipped inside laps at a puddle of spilled Coke.

“I can’t help you,” I say.

Karl purses his lips and draws his head back. “I ask for anything?”

“I mean spiritually, philosophically.”

“I understand.”

“Something happens, you live through it, and then another thing happens. That’s all I can say.”

Karl grins. “You’re full of shit, bro.”

“Let’s go get your stuff.”

“I don’t want to ruin your Christmas.”

“It’s not a big deal. Really.”

I CALL THEM the gray men, my coworkers, though there are a few women in the bunch. We sit side by side in the basement of the building, ten of us, in shoulder-high cubicles the size of barnyard stalls. The others have decorated their workspaces with comic strips clipped from the newspaper and maps and photos of their cats, but not me. Except for my company-issued lamp, desk, and chair, my cubicle is empty. I’m ready to walk away at any time.

The gray men think I’m a snob because I make fun of the detective novels and spy thrillers they pass along to one another with rave reviews. Little do they know I haven’t read a book in years. I stopped because nobody was writing about me. For a while I had my screenplay to keep me occupied when I went home at night. It was about a man who killed his boss and got away with it. I let a friend read it, and he said I was crazy. “Don’t you understand the good guy has to win?” he asked. Now I watch old Westerns and dream of moving to the desert, and I’m not talking about Vegas, I’m talking about some lawless spot where it’s just me and rocks and the bluest blue sky. I will go months without hating my face in a mirror. I will learn to shoot a gun, set a trap, the art of ambush. My legend will deepen and spread. When I was a boy, I thought I would grow up to be some sort of poet. Now, when it’s ridiculous, my heroes are bank robbers and vengeful desperados. “Don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning and I’m gone,” I tell Judy. “If I just disappear.” God, does that make her laugh.

KARL STANDS IN front of our living room window, watching the sun set. I point out the landmarks — the Hollywood sign, the observatory, Capitol Records. It’s a view I like best at night, when, with a squint, I can transform the lights of the city into stars.

“If you stretch, and it’s not too smoggy, you can even see the ocean,” I say.

“No shit?” Karl asks with genuine wonderment. His duffel bag is on the couch, everything he owns in a bundle small enough to be carried under one arm. I do my best to get past the envy that triggers in me.

The downstairs neighbors are throwing a party; the nose ring and platform sneaker crowd. Their music seeps right up through the floor, and every time someone slams the front door, the whole building shakes. This place will come down in the next earthquake. And I will be here. Still.

In the kitchen Judy is taking stock of the refrigerator. We eat like birds when it’s just the two of us. The look she gives me when I reach around her for a beer lets me know I’d better step lightly.

“It’s only for a couple of days,” I say. “I’ll do the cooking and everything.”

“Turkey and all the fixings, huh?”

“The cleaning, Whatever.”

“You’d better pick up a tree, too, and some decorations.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you want a beer, Karl?” she calls out.

“Thanks, but I’m on the program.”

I make a horrified face, and this gets a smile out of her. We’ve been together for ten years now. It’s hard to believe. I never planned on knowing anyone as well as I know her. You get so comfortable after a while. You start to wonder if you could make it on your own. She grabs the beer out of my hand, snaps it open, and takes a sip, then goes back to writing the grocery list.

Karl is studying the old photos of Judy’s relatives that hang on the living room wall. He touches the faces with a tattooed finger.

“These were taken in Poland, before the war,” I say. I move up beside him. “This little girl, her uncle here, her great-grandmother — all of them died in the camps.”

“Hitler, you mean?”

I nod.

“I never was down with the Nazis. They kept at me in the joint.”

“Hey, I’ve got something to show you. Hold on.”

I go into the extra bedroom we call the office and dig out a photo of my grandfather from my desk drawer.

“My mom gave me this. It’s our dad’s dad when he was about twenty or so.”

Karl rests the photograph in the palm of his hand. It shows a young man in a hat and suit, smiling and squinting into the sun. Behind him, a dusty plain stretches to the horizon. I’ve always imagined that he’s come back to West Texas for a visit, that the suit is new and worn to impress the folks. He’s been to Dallas, Kansas City, Chicago, which is where he picked up the camera and the radio he’s brought for his mom and pop and little sister.

“All I really know about him is that his name was Karl, like yours, and that he used to box a little and make his own wine. I never met him. I think he came from Germany or maybe Ireland.”

Karl smiles and strokes his chin. “Well, you got his fucked-up nose,” he says.

“So did you.”

“And I guess that’ll do for history.”

The party downstairs is raging. The drugs must be kicking in. Someone yells, “I drink Dr. Pepper and I’m proud!” Judy comes in and asks Karl what he’d like for dinner. He ducks his head shyly and says anything’s okay.

Night falls so quickly in winter. The sun has barely dropped out of the sky. We sit together watching television, the three of us, nobody speaking. Karl is perched gingerly on the edge of the couch, like he’s afraid he’ll be asked to leave at any moment. He finally clears his throat and says almost too loudly, “I’ve been to prison. He tell you?”

“Yes,” Judy replies.

“So we’re cool, then?”

“We’re cool.”

Karl leans forward and rests his forearms on his thighs and stares out the window. At what? Thinking what? I’m joyfully at a loss.

HER NAME WAS Tiffany, and I knew from the start we were gonna fuck this up. Most of the dancers you meet, you get them outside the club, and it becomes pretty clear pretty quick that it isn’t really just a job, no matter what they want to believe. At least Tiffany was honest with herself. She’d been diddled by her stepdad, okay, and was born with one leg shorter than the other, which gave her a limp that made her feel ugly. There are reasons for everything, right?

I was doing a lot of speed back then but not having much fun. In fact, I was pretty desperate to crawl out of the hole I’d dug myself. Along comes Tiffany and her boy, and I don’t know what I was thinking when I thought, Hey, I can do this. He was about six, Jack, a cute little guy, tougher than shit. I’d let him punch me in the shoulder sometimes, and it fucking hurt! I got my act together, took a job as a mechanic, and she let me move into her condo, which was in a real decent part of town. You felt like a citizen there. Our neighbor was a chiropractor. The sprinklers were all on timers. I worked in the day and watched the kid while she danced at night. We had dinners, man, Kentucky Fried Chicken, went to the park and Little League on weekends. You want something like that to work out. You really do.

Our problem was Ed Landers, this old, rich bastard with a red Seville who started hanging around the club. Big, fat, white-haired fucker. Big tipper. Tiffany swears to me nothing’s going on, but it’s always Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. I’m a jealous man, I’ll admit it, and the whole thing started to wind me up after a while, soured all my good intentions. She invited Ed to supper one night so I could see what it was, but the two of them, I mean, what were they thinking? That they could play me like that? We were drinking some, and he was holding the kid in his lap, telling him to call him Uncle Eddie and shit, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I went off on him right there in the living room. Broken glass, the kid crying, a real fucking mess.

Needless to say, I was out on my ass with the clothes on my back and some righteously bruised knuckles. No good-bye, nothing. You know, sometimes what we call love is something else, but it’s just that there aren’t enough words for all the kinds of wanting in the world, and people, bro, people are fucking lazy.

WE HAVE A good time at the supermarket, even though it’s so crowded with people shopping for the holidays I can barely squeeze the cart down the aisles. I read the items off Judy’s list, and Karl retrieves them from the shelves. He’s wearing a red tasseled hat trimmed in fake white fur that he picked up from a display at the front of the store. “Here comes Santa Con,” I sing, and, “Santa Con is coming to town.”

“Ho ho ho,” he bellows. We deviate from the list whenever we feel like it, grabbing potato chips, ice cream, caramel corn, and cookies.

“You sure it’s okay?” Karl asks as he reaches for a box of graham crackers.

“Come on, man, it’s Christmas,” I reply.

He tries to give me money at the checkout counter, but I wave it off. While the clerk is ringing us up, I turn to the candy rack and casually slip five Hershey bars into my jacket pocket. It’s a silly habit that took hold a few months ago. Every time I pay for something, I look for something to steal. An odd compulsion to develop at my age, I know, but I kind of enjoy it. It worries and disgusts me and gives me a thrill all at the same time.

We walk over to examine the trees for sale in the parking lot after putting the bags in the car. The night has grown colder, and neither of us is really dressed for it. Karl raises his hands to his mouth and blows on them, and they disappear in the fog his breath makes. Colored lights hang above the sad forest of misshapen pines and scrawny firs, and the bulbs are reflected in the drops of water clinging to the needles of the freshly misted branches. A Mexican kid in a stocking cap follows us as we search for the least lopsided of the bunch.

Actually, I’m not all that particular. It’s Karl who seems to have some idea of what he wants. “How’s this?” I ask once or twice, but he shakes his head and moves on. After two circuits of the place, I’ve had enough. I stroll to the flocking tent, where a fire burns inside an oil drum. Standing over it, I let the flames lick my palms, then press them to my face and cup my icy ears. A few minutes later Karl joins me, and the kid.

“What a bunch of garbage,” Karl says. “Looks like they kept the best for themselves.” He points with his chin into the tent, indicating a five-foot tree caked with fake snow and swaddled in lights and blue glass ornaments. A golden angel is perched on top, a trumpet raised to its lips. It’s a nightmare. Really. Judy will fucking die.

“How much for that?” I ask the kid.

“It’s not for sale. It’s like the display.”

“Lights, decorations, everything, how much?”

The kid shrugs and goes off to consult the owner.

“Forget it, bro,” Karl says. “They’re gonna rip you off.”

I put my finger to my lips to shush him.

The kid returns and says, “Two hundred.”

Karl snorts. “Yeah, right. Let’s go.”

“We’ll take it,” I tell the kid.

“What’s up with you?” Karl asks, a shocked look on his face.

“Ho ho ho,” I reply.

I’m for tying the thing to the roof of the car, angel and all, but Karl insists upon removing the ornaments first. The kid finds an empty cardboard box, and I watch from the oil drum as the two of them gently stack the balls inside it.

“I SAW WHAT you did in the store,” Karl says on the drive home.

“So,” I reply.

“What’s the point?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“Well, I was stupid and drunk and on drugs.”

I feel myself blushing and hope he doesn’t notice. He does, though, I can tell by his smile when I glance over at him. “It’s just a game I play with myself,” I say.

“You ever see a shrink?”

“Should I?”

“It helped me.”

“Are you sure?”

If he answers that, I’m ready with more, but he doesn’t. He turns away from me and stares out the window at a little house with bars on its windows and a plastic Nativity scene in the yard. You don’t get a silence like this every day. I’d like to tear off a piece of it and keep it in my wallet for later.

I MADE A run for it once. It was before Judy and I were married, but we’d been living together for about a year, and I could see where things were headed. I was editing the employee newsletter for an aerospace firm at the time. Corporate propaganda interspersed with health tips, recipes, and announcements of promotions, anniversaries, and retirements. Every issue I’d set up the headlines so that the first letters of each of them read in sequence would spell out messages like FUCK THIS PLACE and KILL YOURSELF NOW. I waited to get caught, but never did.

It was a Monday afternoon in March, a day so bright and clear that the mountains looked close enough to walk to. I left work for lunch but kept driving right past Taco Bell to the freeway. West was the ocean and the end of everything, so I headed east, into the desert. Gradually the malls and gas stations fell away, the houses, the people. I found myself alone in a pitiless wasteland. It was lunar, perfect. The craggy hills in the distance stood firm against the sun and wind, but everything near me was well on its way to being worn down to dust. Here and there wiry plants clutched at the rocky ground for dear life.

I stopped the car and walked a few hundred feet off the road to a boulder that broke the flatness of the plain. I took off my clothes. The boulder was warm against my skin, almost silky, as I lay on top of it. A shy little lizard poked its head out of a crack, and a pair of hawks circled overhead. I held my breath, then exhaled slowly, and Whatever was bent almost to breaking inside me seemed to straighten itself out.

The wind picked up toward sundown, surprisingly cold. I drove on across the border into Nevada and stopped in a little town that wasn’t much more than a gas station, a motel, and a casino. “Car trouble?” the woman asked when she handed me the keys to my room, as if that was the only reason anybody would end up there. I could have kissed her.

Feeling reckless and lucky, I walked over to the casino. It was deserted except for a couple of snowbirds playing video poker. The bartender was a fat man with a handlebar mustache. When he asked me where I was from, I said, “tonight? Right here,” which got me a dirty look.

The blackjack and craps tables were dark, so I spent a few hours drinking and throwing money at the slots. What happened next has always been somewhat hazy — this was back in my hard liquor years. I hit a jackpot, fifty or sixty dollars, and tried to give it to the cocktail waitress. She wouldn’t take it, and that pissed me off. I got on the bartender’s bad side, too. My jokes went right over his head. “You must know where the whores are in this town,” I said, and he asked me to leave.

There was blood on my pillow when I came to in the morning. My lip was busted, my left eye swollen almost shut. I vomited all the way back to L.A., pulling over to the side of the road every twenty miles or so. What can I say but that I failed? I had a spark within me, but not enough fuel to break the bonds of gravity.

I WAKE UP at five a.m. and can’t get back to sleep. When it’s quiet like this, before the city revs up, you hear the strangest sounds. Roosters crowing, squirrels in the trees, distant trains. Nobody believes me, but it’s true. I roll over to put my arms around Judy. She shudders and pulls away, scooting to the edge of the bed.

The refrigerator is full of food. I’m not used to this. It takes me a while to notice the blood. The plastic the turkey is sealed in has a hole in it, and watery pink blood has leaked out and puddled on the bottom shelf. I take out all the beer and sodas and pickles and sour cream and clean everything off in the sink.

As the sun comes up on the morning of Christmas Eve day, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, eating the chocolate chip cookies we bought last night and drinking a glass of milk. Karl is asleep on the couch in the living room. I hear him breathing. I sense he doesn’t like me much. He thinks I’m weak and bizarre, and he’s right, but how do I make him understand that everyone here is weak and bizarre?

IT’S JUDY’S IDEA to drive to the beach. She suggests it after breakfast. Karl is washing the dishes, and I’m drying.

“We’ll go out there and laugh at the rest of the country,” she says. “Picture them shoveling snow.”

“That’d be something,” Karl replies.

Good. It’ll be good to get out of the apartment, all of us together. My wife is a genius. I rustle up a pair of shorts for Karl. We throw the snacks he and I bought into a bag, then some towels, a blanket, and we’re off.

What a day. The sky is a flawless blue, the sun a cheerful old friend. We take Judy’s car. She drives, Karl sits in back, and the radio plays all my favorite songs. I start up the license plate game. We alternate calling out the letters of the alphabet as we spot them on passing cars. Karl joins right in. “What am I?” he asks, and we switch to twenty questions.

The freeway dumps us out at the beach, which is almost empty at this time of the year. It’s a little colder than it was in Silver Lake, a little windier, but we tromp out and spread our blanket on the sand like it was the Fourth of July. Karl strips off his shirt, revealing a large tattoo on his chest. BROKEN-HEARTED, it reads, the letters arching over the face of a woman. “Momma,” he says before Judy or I have a chance to ask. “Prison shit.”

The waves are sluggish today, syrupy, breaking with only the greatest of effort. Propped on my elbows, I watch them struggle toward shore, while Judy, sitting beside me, flips through the pages of a magazine. I find that if I lie perfectly still, the sun eventually wins out over the breeze and provides a fragile warmth.

The high tide line is marked by a band of waterlogged debris, kelp mostly, driftwood, odd chunks of Styrofoam and plastic. Karl strolls along beside it, stirring up a cloud of flies every time he stops to poke around in the mess with a stick he found somewhere. In the distance, the pier stands black and skeletal against the sky, its burden of joyless fishermen and stoned teenagers placing entirely too much faith in the strength of its spindly pilings, or perhaps the possibility of collapse is all part of the fun.

“What are you thinking about?” Judy asks, her cold hand on my shoulder.

“Nothing.”

“Is your brother enjoying himself? Seems like it.”

“I’m doing my best.”

She reaches down to scratch her ankle. “That tree you guys got is something else.”

“I knew you’d like it.”

“We’re awful, aren’t we?”

The conversation has upset my delicate relationship with the sun. I sit up and hug myself for a quick fix of warmth. “We should have brought beer,” I say. “Or tequila. Tequila would have been great.”

Karl approaches the blanket, carrying something on the end of his stick.

“Check it out, a jellyfish,” he yells.

“That’s close enough. Those things can sting even when they’re dead,” I caution.

“Yeah, keep it away from here,” Judy chimes in.

Karl stops short, disappointed by our reaction. He examines the jellyfish up close once more, then drops it into a hole he kicks into the sand and buries it with his foot.

“I’m going swimming. Come on, bro,” he says.

Judy throws down her magazine. “I’m ready.”

“There’s shit in that water,” I scoff. “Big poisonous turds.”

They laugh at me before running down to the waves together. Judy advances slowly on stiffened legs and screams as the frigid water swirls around her calves, but Karl enters at a run and dives headfirst into the breakers. By the time she’s in up to her waist, he’s already bobbing in the swells, not touching bottom.

I turn away from them, from the sea, and lie on my stomach. In the parking lot two young lovers wrapped in one jacket lean against the hood of a car. The girl rests her head on the boy’s chest, and he strokes her hair. A thing like that isn’t supposed to make you angry, I know.

A CHRISTMAS STORY? I’ve got one. I was sixteen, thumbing my way out of trouble somewhere down in Louisiana, I believe, and this old boy picked me up on Christmas Eve. He asked was I hungry, and I was, so he told me there was a birthday cake in the backseat I was welcome to. He worked in a bakery, see, and got to take home the leftovers and mistakes. It was chocolate with white frosting and big blue flowers, and I dug right in with my fingers and ate it all up while the dude laughed and laughed. Afterward he sparked up a bomber, and I was like, well, here we are, man, here we are.

A few miles down the road he started in. “You like cock? You sure look like you would.” Ain’t nothing come for free, right? I don’t know what I was thinking. You gotta figure a guy must be packing if he’s talking like that, so plain to a stranger, and I’m not gonna lie but I was scared. I told him I had to piss, and he asked could he watch. “Sure,” I said. “Enjoy the show.” As soon as the car pulled over, I was out the door and up the hill into the woods as fast as I could get. I found a good hiding place and hunkered down where I could see him through the trees. He fired a few rounds from a little pistol up my way, then got back in his car and left.

After an hour or so I started walking. Didn’t even bother to stick my thumb out. It was so bitter cold and kind of sleety, and in the middle of the night with me looking such a mess, nobody was gonna stop. Up the road a ways I came upon a blanket I thought I could maybe use, but when I went to snatch it up, there was something wrapped inside it. A dog, I thought, or, I don’t know why, a monkey, but it was a baby, a little blue baby. It seemed dead till it started to cry. I can’t say I didn’t think about just moving on down the line, but it was a baby, man. A baby. On Christmas Eve.

I shoved it up under my shirt and jacket, and it was like carrying a block of ice. I could feel its heart beating right next to mine. Cars were passing all the while, and I waved like crazy, but they went right on by. First time I ever prayed to see a cop, I can tell you that. After a few miles of walking, the little guy warmed up a bit, and you know what he did? He went right for my tit, like I was his momma. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so hopeless, but my tears froze before they made it halfway down my face.

Finally I saw a house all lit up for the holidays. I banged on the door, and they let me in, real nice black folks, just sitting down to dinner. The lady of the family took the baby from me and set about making it comfortable till the ambulance could get there. They fixed me up with a plate, and their children sang Sunday school songs for me. The sheriff gave me an empty cell to sleep in that night and had me over to his house the next day. There was a present for me under the tree and everything, a new coat. It wasn’t until he put me on the bus to New Orleans after dinner that he told me the baby had died.

OH, LOOK! JUDY and Karl are friends now. They’ve crossed that line. I can see it at the dinner table over the takeout Chinese. They’re finally comfortable with each other, moving easily from joking to paying attention when it seems important, discovering common ground, that whole thing. This leaves me pretty much ignored. My contributions to the conversation earn a quick smile and nod, if that.

I take my beer into the living room and sit on the couch. The Christmas tree lights are on, twinkling stupidly. I think about those astronauts at the mall. What was it: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. If I went into space, I’d want to go alone, and if I made it as far as the moon, there would be no stopping me. Judy laughs, and I turn on the TV. Loud.

“What do you think, honey,” Judy shouts over it. “A tattoo.”

“That’s against your religion.”

“What about you, then?” Karl asks.

“Not my style.”

Karl stands and begins to clear the table, but Judy tells him to leave it, she’ll do it later. They join me on the couch, she on one end, he on the other. Judy grabs the remote and clicks off the television.

“If we’re going to do this, we might as well do it right. There have got to be some carols on the radio.”

“Now you’re thinking,” Karl says as he jumps up and goes to the stereo. A few twists of the dial, and “We Three Kings” fills the room.

“I can play this, you got a guitar,” he says.

“Nope. No guitar,” I reply.

Judy says, “That baby, if you don’t mind me asking, did they ever find its mother?”

Karl shakes his head and looks down at the carpet. “I’ve wondered about that, too, I really have.”

This guy could be full of it. That’s certainly something to consider. A good liar is a kind of genius. We may be playing right into his hands.

When I get up for another beer, Judy is explaining Hanukkah to him. I can see into the apartment next door through the kitchen window. A family is gathered there — old people, young people, babies. Everybody is talking at once. I don’t understand Spanish, but they seem to be happy. My mother is in Hawaii with her new husband. That’s where his children live. And that’s fine. It’s good for her to get away. Everybody should be able to enjoy themselves if they get the chance. I drink the beer, standing in the kitchen, the whole thing in three gulps, and open another.

“Come on, bro, let’s have a sing-along,” Karl calls.

I reclaim my spot between them on the couch. Judy has a slight sunburn from the beach. She looks healthy and happier than I’ve been able to make her in a long time. Karl stands and raises his arms like a choir director. He cocks an ear toward the radio.

“ ‘Little Drummer Boy.’ Let’s do it,” he says.

Nobody really knows how the song goes, but we give it our best shot, singing the parts we remember loudly and letting the radio carry the rest. Next up, though, is “Little Town of Bethlehem,” which loses us all.

“We’re pitiful,” Judy says.

Karl laughs. “Well, fuck it, then,” he says. “Let’s just sing the easy ones.”

We run through “Rudolph” and “Jingle Bells” and a few others, then give up on Christmas crap completely to serenade each other with anything that comes to mind. I do my Cub Scout cowboy repertoire — “Streets of Laredo,” “Darling Clementine,” “Polly Wolly Doodle” — and Judy offers something in Hebrew she memorized a thousand years ago and a few numbers from My Fair Lady.

When it’s Karl’s turn, he moves to the middle of the room and busts out with a creepy old song his grandfather taught him, something about a murdered child in a garden. He stands with his eyes closed, arms dangling at his sides, and his voice is a high graveyard whine that squeezes the breath out of me. It’s as beautiful as such a thing can be.

Judy watches and listens with trembling lips, her hands clapped to her cheeks. “Karl,” she exclaims when he finishes. “My God!”

He shakes himself out of his trance and smiles broadly. “Whew! That’s a goody, huh?”

“You fucking jailbird,” I say in a voice choked with anger and envy. “You don’t have a clue, do you?”

“Take it easy, bro,” he says. “Have another beer, why don’t you.”

I LIE QUIETLY beside Judy until I’m sure she’s asleep, then roll out of bed and dress in the hallway. The only thing I think to grab is my toothbrush before creeping through the living room, past Karl sprawled on the couch, and out the front door. I’m dizzy with excitement, tight in the belly, and I swear I can see in the dark as well as any cat. The streetlights are as bright as the sun and shadows hold no mystery. I try to work up some emotion when I turn at the bottom of the stairs for one last glance at the apartment, but all that comes is a smile. Perhaps I will change this to a tear in the retelling somewhere down the road. Perhaps not. Perhaps I will never speak of this life again.

My car is parked on the street half a block away. There is a 4-Runner in front of it, backed right onto the bumper, and a car has wedged itself in behind. I start the engine and shift into reverse, stomping on the accelerator in an attempt to gain enough space to maneuver away from the curb, but the car behind me won’t budge. Neither will the 4-Runner. I get out and check the doors of both vehicles and find they’re locked. And it’s cold. Really cold. I should have brought a jacket.

I scoop up my steering wheel lock and look both ways on the street. The incredible clarity of a few minutes ago has faded. I draw the steel bar back over my shoulder and move up next to the 4-Runner. It should be a simple matter to slip the vehicle into neutral and push it forward a few feet to facilitate my escape. I swing the lock as hard as I can, and the window shatters into a million tinkling pieces. This is followed by the piercing whoops of an alarm, which echo off the surrounding buildings and return twice as loud as when they left.

Gutless instinct takes over, sending me sprinting down the sidewalk and up the stairs to the apartment. Karl is standing in front of the window in the living room when I burst through the door. The alarm can be heard as clearly here as it could down in the street.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I say, passing through without stopping. “Happens all the time. Kids and shit.”

I undress in the dark. Judy doesn’t stir as I climb back into bed. I bury my face in the pillow while my heart slams itself against my ribs in frustration.

I MUST HAVE been drunk, because I now have a vicious hangover, or at least it feels like a hangover. On Christmas morning. If it wasn’t for Karl, that wouldn’t mean anything. It would be just another day for Judy and me. No hideous tree. No turkey and cranberry sauce to deal with. Judy’s up to her elbow in the bird, stuffing it. I offer to help, but she laughs and says, “No, no, go talk to your brother.”

Karl is on the couch, fresh out of the shower. He sits there all big and clean and shiny.

“Hey, bro. Good morning. Merry Christmas,” he says. He motions me closer with a finger, checks over my shoulder to make sure Judy’s busy.

“I want to get your old lady something,” he whispers. “You gotta drive me.”

A kind of sureness that infuriates me has appeared in his tone. “That’s not necessary. Forget it,” I reply.

“No, no, really.”

Judy and I should have worked out a signal beforehand. We should have been a lot smarter about this whole thing. Now it’s all up to me.

“Dear,” I call out. “Do we have time to go down to the Boulevard? Karl wants to see the footprints.”

Judy looks up from a cookbook, pushing away a strand of hair from her face with the palm of her hand. “Do you know how long these things have to roast?” she asks. “Stop at the store and pick up some whipped cream.”

Karl slaps me on the thigh and grins. My head starts throbbing again, the pain sneaking right past the aspirin.

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS COIL like red and green snakes around the streetlights on Hollywood, and Santa and his elves fly from one side of the Boulevard to the other on banners stretched between the buildings. We join the Mexican families dressed in church clothes who are strolling past the souvenir shops and lingerie stores and the cheap restaurants with menus in five languages taped to their windows. I point out one to Karl, a burger joint where all the homeless punks gather to preen and tweak, and tell him that rumor has it you can fuck them for a corn dog, but he’s more interested in the sidewalk stars, calling out the names he recognizes as we step over them.

“Lucille Ball! Bob Hope! Michael Jackson!”

A line of tour buses idles in front of the Chinese Theater. Despite the holiday, the forecourt is packed with tourists taking turns posing next to their favorite actors’ and actresses’ hand- and footprints. Japanese, Germans, Frenchies. Karl wades in among them, a white trash Gulliver. He stops at John Wayne’s slab and stares down at it like he’s all alone somewhere, in a church or a cemetery. With great solemnity, he places his tennis shoe over the impression left by Wayne’s boot. “Will you look at that,” he says, not to me, not to anyone, and I wish Judy were here to see him, although on second thought she’d probably find a way to twist it into something charming.

I walk out to the curb for a cigarette. I don’t know how people do it, live this life. It seems incredibly difficult to me today, incredibly annoying. A few years ago, when the city spruced up this neighborhood, they mixed something sparkly into the asphalt used to repave the street. When the sun hits it, it looks like broken glass, like you’d cut yourself if you stumbled. And they wonder why there are so many lunatics around here. Even the ground beneath their feet seems to have turned against them.

THERE WASN’T MUCH open because of the holiday and all. We went into this place that had like posters and T-shirts. Junk. It wasn’t what I had in mind, but my bro’s like, “Fuck it, man. I got a headache and she doesn’t give a fuck what you bring her, so just pick something.” Whatever, right? Merry Christmas. I found this teddy bear wearing a little shirt that said LOVE, and when I showed it to him, he just smirked. I didn’t care, though, because it wasn’t for him, it was for his old lady, and she was good people.

This is a weird one, dude, I warned you. As we were walking back to the car, he asked me if I’d stolen anything from the store. I thought he was fucking with me, you know, ’cause that’s how he was, so I said, “No, man, boosting’s your trip, remember?” giving it right back to him. “Well, I don’t know. Best check your pocket,” he said. So I reach into my coat, and I’ll be damned if there wasn’t one of those little plastic things that snows when you shake them. That cocksucker must have slipped it in when I wasn’t looking.

He started laughing, but I was pissed. Motherfucker was toying with my freedom. I say, “They could send me back for that, you know. I’m not even supposed to be in this state.” And out of nowhere he goes off about didn’t I want to go back because I missed my boyfriend so much, and by the way, how does it feel to take it up the ass? Without even thinking, I slammed him against a wall, whereupon he came at me, kicking and screaming that I was out to fuck his old lady. Dude had some serious problems. I mean, he was my bro, but for him to pull that shit. And he would not let up. He wanted to throw down right there on Hollywood Boulevard. I gave him a shot to the head to calm his ass, and he started yelling for the cops, so I gave him another that dropped him and took off running, just left him laying on the sidewalk. Broke my heart.

JUDY IS SETTING the table when I get home, with the good china, which has been buried in a closet for years. She’s such a sport. I forget to acknowledge that sometimes. The radio plays Christmas carols, and the smell of food cooking almost gags me. I put my hand over my split lip so it doesn’t startle her, but there’s not much I can do about the blood on my shirt, so I walk quickly into the living room.

“That’s that,” I announce.

She turns to me with a smile. “What?”

“We don’t have to do this anymore.”

I pick up the tree. Ornaments and fake snow go flying. As I’m carrying it to the front door, Judy moves to block my way, and I don’t understand the look on her face.

“Wait,” she says.

“He attacked me. I caught him stealing something from a store, and when I confronted him, he went crazy.”

I push past her and carry the tree out. More blue glass balls are dislodged, and they pop like balloons when they shatter against the stairs, collapsing into nothing. The cold yellow smear of sun in the sky is not even bright enough to give me a shadow. Down in the street, I toss the tree into the gutter. Maybe some poor family will drive by and pick it up. It might make their day.

Judy waits at the top of the stairs, arms crossed over her chest. She tenses as I climb toward her. I see all her muscles tighten at once.

“Spencer,” she says.

“I’m fine. He just grazed me. Gave me a bloody nose. It was nothing.”

“You’re not making sense.”

She follows me into the apartment, back to the kitchen. I snatch up a dish towel and open the oven. The turkey’s just turning brown on top.

“Where do you want to go to dinner?” I ask. “I’m buying.”

“Stop it,” she says.

I slide out the rack and lift the foil pan with the bird in it. The towel isn’t thick enough to stop the heat, though, and my fingers are on fire. I drop the pan onto the door of the stove, and it tips over onto the floor. The turkey hits the linoleum with a fleshy pop.

“Spencer!” Judy yells, retreating to the hallway.

“I’ll clean it up. Relax.”

I go to the refrigerator and grab a cold beer to stop the burning in my fingers. When I try to walk over to calm Judy down, I slip on something, turkey grease, and fall on my ass, my head smashing into the cupboards. There is a moment of glorious darkness before the pain begins. I’d like to lie here for a while, but Judy is freaking.

“Stop crying,” I snap as I struggle to my feet. We’ve somehow gone out of alignment. Things are rattling, shuddering, threatening to come apart. I pick up the turkey with the towel and stumble out the front door and down the stairs again. Steam is rising off the bird as I drop it into the blue recycling bin. An ice-cream truck passes by, playing “Jingle Bells.” I wave at the driver, and he just stares at me. What a mess I’ve made, trying to get everything back to normal. I almost laugh. The blisters rising on my fingertips begin to throb.

Judy is in our bedroom, stuffing clothes into a suitcase. There’s nothing hurried about it. It seems like part of a longstanding plan suddenly put into dogged motion.

“Hey, come on now,” I say.

“I’m going to Vince and Kylie’s,” she replies without looking at me. Her tears have stopped, and I want to touch her, but my arms can’t reach that far. I feel like I have to yell to be heard, though she’s standing right in front of me.

“Who?”

“Friends from work.”

I trail her down the hall, limping and dizzy. She pauses at the front door, and here it is, my last chance.

“It’s you and me again,” I say.

“I can’t. I can’t anymore.”

“Let’s celebrate.”

“I’m afraid of where you’re headed.”

“Karl, right? Am I fucking right?”

Her face flushes, and she holds her hand up, palm outward. “You are fucking crazy.”

“Shhh,” I say. “Not in front of the kids.” I gesture at the photos of her dead relatives over the couch.

The door slams in my face. I close my eyes and listen to her footsteps grow fainter as she walks down the stairs.

I SPREAD MY booty on the coffee table. The candy bars from the other night, three pine tree car deodorizers, assorted cigarette lighters and drink cozies, a can of Vienna sausages, Karl’s snow globe. Silly shit. Junk.

A football game plays on the muted television. Wherever it is, it’s snowing. Drifts are forming on the sidelines and flakes stick to the camera lens, blurring the action. I stand and draw a pair of six-shooters from imaginary holsters on my hips, empty them into the set. Then I pretend I’m on my way to the moon. I tiptoe around the living room in slow motion, holding my breath and feigning weightlessness.

The phone rings. It’s my father.

“I want to warn you that Karl may be on his way out there to look for you. Do you remember him? He’s just been released from prison, and he showed up here unannounced a while back.”

“Merry Christmas,” I say.

“What?”

“Fuck you.”

Karl’s duffel bag is under the magazine rack at the end of the couch. I unroll it and sort through his possessions. I put on one of his T-shirts and a pair of his socks. And Judy. Oh, Judy. Who knew you, too, had dreams of escape? And who knew yours would come true?