Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (19 page)

I stopped right outside our door. I paused a moment, deep in thought.

“What?” Carlos said.

“Okay, I'm just trying to plan this. So our bunk bed is on your immediate right once we get in the door. Aimee's stuff is in a little suitcase on the top left-hand side of the bed. I'll grab my stuff below. Got it?” I nodded, gave him a thumbs-up, then patted him on the shoulder. I was like James Bond and Fred Rogers rolled into one.

The door creaked open. We both shot to the bunk bed and started fumbling around in the dark. Then,
wham
, I cracked my knee on the ladder.

A light flew on. It was Gary Coleman.

“YOU FUCKING STUPID-ASS BITCHES!”

She jumped out of her bunk on the far side of the room, eyes wild.

I grabbed my suitcase and looked at Carlos, who'd found Aimee's suitcase. Then we
ran.

I don't think I've ever run that fast in my life. I was outrunning a six-foot-tall black girl, and I was
just
out of her reach when I dove into the car. Jonathan hit the gas before I could swing my door shut.

“We did it! WE DID IT!!!” I shouted to no one in particular.

Carlos turned around from the passenger seat. “Oh my God!” he said. “She did look like Gary Coleman!!!”

“I KNOW!” I shouted back in a frenzy of adrenaline. “SEE? I'M NOT A RACIST!!”

On the road to Vegas, our excitement dwindled—from a 1:30
A.M.
chant of “VEGAS!! VEGAS!!” to a bleary “Are we in Vegas?” to finally, a few miles out, a hearty “JONATHAN, ARE YOU ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL??”

Now it was 5:30
A.M.
and the sun was up, and we were driving down the Strip. None of us had ever seen it in person before.

Aimee suggested that we use the convertible like a convertible. Jonathan hit a button and the top came down, revealing four exhausted people in a Celica.

Carlos turned on the radio.

The drums. That opening drum line. I knew those drums.

“Carlos!” I sat forward. “Turn it up!”

It was Stevie Wonder's “Superstition.” I knew it!
This
was the reason I'd taken this trip. For that moment. Driving down the Strip in Vegas with my best friend and two strangers from Long Island in a convertible with Stevie Wonder playing. That was why I was there.

“Guys? I need something.”

Aimee wanted a toothbrush. We'd forgotten ours in the hostel bathroom. (Thankfully, they were our only casualties.) We pulled into the CVS parking lot and opened the doors to stretch our legs. Aimee and Carlos went inside the CVS.

“GET
AGUA
!!” I shouted.

Jonathan lay down on the pavement of the CVS parking lot, propping his legs up on his driver's seat, and sighed. I sat down on the pavement beside his head, avoiding a fresh piece of gum.

“Tired?” I said stupidly. “You have a case of the LA sighs. They're very contagious.”

“Yeah, I just—I'm trying to decide whether I should give up and go back to Long Island or not. I've been thinking about it for pretty much the entire drive. Except for the part where I fell asleep.”

I lit a cigarette. It burned my throat.

“Jonathan, you should do whatever your gut tells you to do. Do whatever your senior citizen self would want you to do.”

He sat up and looked at me, shielding the sun from his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Look.” I tapped my ash. “Life is so random. It's a fucking miracle that you're even alive and your body works minute to minute. You just have to do what makes you happy and try not to fuck with a lot of other people along the way. You know, so that when you're an old man you can look back and feel good about things.”

“That's what
you
do?”

“Yeah, that's what I do. I might not have a lot to show for myself.”

He laughed. “You're seventeen.”

“Yeah, I'm seventeen, and I barely graduated high school because I thought it was so boring that I basically stopped going. I'm not in college, and I don't have a trust fund, so I can't intern. I write—I love writing—but I haven't figured out a way to make money at it. But I
always
follow my gut and say yes to everything I can. Anything that doesn't fuck with someone else's existence. I just try to live, because as far as I know my whole life is a blip. This whole thing about DiCaprio was just a diversion. I still think he needs me, but more important, I needed some excitement. I need to survive and be thrilled and be happy.”

“LA does that for me,” he said.

“There you go.”

Aimee and Carlos came back, brushing their teeth as they walked through the parking lot, foaming at the lips like rabid beasts.

“Here,” Carlos said with the toothbrush in his mouth. He passed Jonathan and me a bag holding two bottles of water, two toothbrushes (pink and blue), and the toothpaste. Jonathan reached in and took the pink toothbrush. We all stood in the lot at six
A.M.
and brushed our teeth.

A looked up and saw a plane flying overhead. I wondered how many people up there were looking down at us, thinking how much we looked like a computer chip.

The four of us got a hotel room with two queen-sized beds and slept for five hours. No raping, no Chinese whispering. Later that afternoon we turned twenty dollars into quarters, fed them all into losing machines, called Johnny to ask for a ride, and drove back to LA.

Aimee and I waved good-bye to Carlos and Jonathan from a street corner in Hollywood, my orange suitcase in hand.

“Crazy,” I heard behind me. “I can't believe you're here.”

I turned around and saw Johnny.

“I'm parked up the hill.”

“So did you find him?” he asked as we sped down the 405.

I sighed. “No, but I tried.”

“It went beyond Leo.” Aimee exhaled a mouthful of smoke. “It was a magical trip.”

“It was,” I agreed. “Thanks, Johnny. You've been really cool.”

Johnny blushed. “You gave me something weird to do and say I've done. So thank you.”

 

I didn't even need to see the cockpit on the flight home—I was exhausted. The cab stopped at my house first.

“What was your favorite thing?” I asked Aimee before shutting the door.

“I love that we never found Leo.”

Hours later, I woke up in my own bed, my house still empty. I opened my window and smoked a little pot, noticing how much quieter my city was, my life was.

I looked at my bag at the end of my bed, reached over, and pulled out my phone.

“Hello?”

“Steven? It's me, Kelly.”

“You're calling?”

“I know, don't worry. I'm not about to get raped or anything. I just felt like I had to call you and tell you I'm really glad we met and I think we're going to be bona fide friends.”

“When are you coming back?”

“I know I will, but I don't know when. Probably when I have a life. Write me a letter, promise?”

“Promise.”

THE TERRIBLE
HORRIBLE

Have you ever done something so terrible, so horrible, that you were simultaneously transfixed by your ability to come up with the plan and totally appalled by what you were capable of? Something so terrible horrible that just the thought of it makes your armpits tingle and sweat, and in the middle of the night you wake up just to Google charities to throw money at? This is one of those fantastic and terrible, horrible somethings.

It starts like a Seth Rogen movie. (I'm Seth in this story, because I'm the leader and I love weird voices.) We have a camper van, a crapload of weed, and a Canadian journey. Sounds sweet? Innocent, right? Maybe even ends with a high-five. WRONG. It ends with my actual terrible horrible. Usually when people tell you their terrible horrible, they are lying. Maybe it's their
second
-worst terrible horrible. Maybe they're confusing their terrible horrible with their worst terrible humiliation, like the time they peed their pants in a gas station.

Nope. Not me. This is it: I'm telling you my truest terrible horrible.

Imagine this: There we were, Aimee and me, standing in the middle of an Eastern European woman's oniony kitchen during a lightning storm. We were nineteen. We were stoned. We were looking to buy a camper van. The steam was bubbling from silver cauldrons on the woman's electric stovetop as she secured her bandana on top of her seemingly hairless head. The smell of the soup reminded me of my Ukrainian Baba—only Baba was a cute little lady in 1960s brocade shift dresses and had candy dishes full of those chocolate-like pastel mints in the corners of her rooms. This woman was wearing dirty chinos and had two sweaty middle-aged sons in the corner of her room.

Aimee and I locked bloodshot eyes, and she nodded. I reached out to pass the woman the largest wad of cash I'd ever held.

“Is nine hundred?” She wiped her downy mustache with the back of her left hand and snatched the money with her right. She counted it quickly, then stuffed the cash into her deep cleavage, the kind of cleavage you want to swipe with a debit card. With our exchange complete, we now owned a white Dodge van, complete with a kitchen, a bed, and tiny blacked-out diamond windows in the back—100 percent rapey.

“I hope you enjoy it the way my sons did!” I barely managed to contain a shudder. “My sons are mechanic. They keep in tip-top shape,” she continued, tucking her single coil of pubic-thick gray hair back under the bandana.

Thunder rolled through the greasy wallpapered kitchen, leaving vibration rings hanging atop the soup. I should have seen it as an omen warning of the terrible horrible, but I was too mesmerized by her cleavage. She wiped her sweaty red face and began to cut cabbage with a giant cleaver, her long tits swaying back and forth over the yellow-and-brown linoleum. I worried the money would fall out, but then realized it would have a long way to travel in that crevasse.

I glanced over at her sons. They looked like really poor, greasy Guy Ritchies. We'd found the van in an ad in the paper, so based on that alone, I had already decided they were trouble. Aimee thought I was overreacting, but I laid out the math for her: greasy Guy Ritchies + white van with a bed + tinted windows = probably rapists.

“Can we get the keys?”

Her boobs stopped swaying and she looked up at me. I could actually see one of my hundred-dollar bills peeking out, like it was gasping for a final breath before drowning in tits. “Keys are in the van. I had boys clean their stuff out.”

I made a mental note to burn some sage in that van to get all of their terrible horribles out.

Aimee and I were two blocks away, still reeking of onions, when we heard a
pop
and steam shot out from under the hood.

“This is unbelievable,” I deadpanned. “We just drove away from their house. We had it inspected. This kind of thing doesn't really happen.”

Aimee pulled into a gas station. We parked, hopped out of the van, and ran through the downpour into the station to call Baba Knockers back.

“Uh, yeah. I'm, like, two blocks away from your house and the van just broke down . . . Yes . . . Steam from the hood . . . Yes . . . Send one of your sons over, or bring us our money back.”

I imagined her arriving and reaching deep between those long tits to fish out our nine sweaty hundreds. Maybe she'd pull out a kitten or a curling iron before she got to the money, like Mary Poppins with her carpetbag. But deep down I knew that money would never escape her magic-carpetbag boobs, that she'd send her creepy old sons over to “help.”

 

“Just a hose. This will do it. No problem.” Erno, the creepiest son, reached under the hood, pulled out a short black hose with a hole in it, and replaced it with a new, holeless hose. Aimee and I stood under the gas station awning, watching him from a safe distance, as the rain poured onto the ground like a rich person's powerful showerhead.

“There, she'll run as good as new.” Erno shook his black rain slicker, shut the hood, and turned to us. Then, laughing, he stuck his cigarette in his mouth, grabbed the broken hose, and waved it in front of his crotch at us.

“You were right,” Aimee whispered. “Total rapist.”

Aimee and I had decided to buy the van on a stoned whim. We'd spent a week drinking mushroom tea and mall walking with psychedelic eyes. We ended the week inside the mouth of a whale statue that sat in the middle of West Edmonton Mall, scaring the children who dared looked inside.

“THE WHALE ATE ME! GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN!” I shouted at one six-year-old who ran away screaming. I turned to Aimee in the echoey darkness of the whale's mouth. Her face was half-Aimee, half-Colonel Sanders. “What are we doing with our lives? I need a sign!”

“Hey!” It was the child's mother. She leaned into the mouth of the metal whale. “What is WRONG with you two?”

“That's what I want to know, lady!”

And then it happened. She threw her newspaper at me—and it opened to a photo of our van.
FOR SALE
. It was actually glowing, actually surrounded by a halo—maybe just because of the mushrooms—and I knew. That was my sign.

“This is IT,” I said to Aimee. “We're supposed to buy. This. Van.” I poked at the paper to punctuate every word, rainbow ripples bouncing off the paper and around my new friend, 100 percent full Colonel Sanders face.

We chose Hornby Island as our destination because it sounded like “Horny Island.” We pictured ourselves living among artists and other stoner teens, going to an endless string of van parties and beach parties. As it turned out, Hornby was really small, and only a hundred or so people lived there off-season. It wasn't
just
an island either. It was an island off an island off a larger island. All this remoteness helped explain why most of the residents were Vietnam War draft dodgers, convicts-turned-painters, or loggers. Some were all three. There was only one bar/restaurant at the ferry dock, one grocery store, one liquor store, one “corner” store, one outdoor restaurant/café.