The Kings Of Cool

52

O goes into her bathroom, turns on the exhaust fan, and lights a roach.

She’ll make this small concession to her mother’s sensibilities, but Paqu’s hypocrisy on the subject of drugs is nothing short of epic, almost admirable in its bold two-facedness.

Paqu’s medicine cabinet behind the mirror mirror on the (bathroom) wall is a pharmacopoeia of prescribed mood-altering drugs a fact that O despises because it’s such a cliche, and all the more so because she becomes a part of the stereotype (hence the “stereo” if you think about it) by consistently running to the shelter of her mother’s little helper when the herb just won’t do the trick.

“Can’t you develop a blend,” she has asked Ben, “called ‘For Orange County Girls When Battlestar Galactica Isn’t Enough’?”

“Working on it,” Ben replied.

But so far to no result.

So O will occasionally raid CVS Paqu for

Valium

Oxy

Xanax or some other antidepressant which makes Paqu’s lectures about her marijuana-smoking more bearable, lectures that come with greater frequency in the weeks after Paqu returns from rehab with new material and a fresh flock of Twelve-Step buddies who hang around the patio and talk about their “programs” and before Paqu gets bored with the whole thing and decides that the real answer lies in yoga, bicycling, Jesus, or scrapbooking.

(The scrapbooking phase was especially excruciating, featuring as it did Paqu gluing endless pictures of herself taking pictures of O into volumes arranged by year.)

Actually, one of Paqu’s lovers was a sad-looking guy from her “Friday meeting,” whom a sixteen-year-old O asked, “Are you ‘in recovery,’ too?”

“I have thirty days,” the guy said.

“Well, you ain’t gonna have forty,” O said.

Which proved prophetic on about day thirty-six, when O came out of her room to find Paqu and Sadly Sober Guy slinging (empty) Stoli bottles at each other across the living room before each departed to (separate) detox facilities, leaving O alone in the house to hold epic parties on the rationale that she was thoughtfully cleansing the house of alcohol in anticipation of her mother’s return.

Anyway, like goaltenders and quarterbacks, Paqu is blessed with a short memory, so none of this history stops her from getting on O’s case about her marijuana habit.

O’s not in the mood tonight, so she sits on the toilet under the exhaust fan to get high and if Paqu comes nosing around she can just say she’s constipated, which will engender a suggestion about an organic remedy rather than a ball-busting.

Because she feels like she’s already had her balls, as it were, busted by Chon’s utter rejection of her blatant (and admittedly clumsy) come-on.

“I’m sort of Bambi-esque”?

Jesus.

I wouldn’t fuck me, either.