Infandous (2 page)

Her hair, for one thing. I read somewhere that guys notice hair first—before they look at tits or legs or even faces. Hair’s the first thing that raises a guy’s “ardor.” My mom’s hair is spun copper. Goldish-reddish, wavy, and gorgeous. That, combined with the fact that her name is Rebecca
Golding
, combined with her modeling and her better-than-average surfing abilities and her willingness to say yes to pretty much any party, at any time, raised her pedestal to break-your-neck-if-you-fall heights.

By the way, who the fuck names her daughter
Sephora
? I’ll tell you who. My mother. Golden girl. Fallen angel. Knocked-up model. Unwed mother. She claims she gave me the name because it means “beautiful bird” and “independent,” but bullshit. I maintain that she named me after the makeup store. (And another thing … about
her
name: Rebecca. I’d bet my ass her parents didn’t know its meaning—“beautiful snare”—when they chose it. They probably just thought it was a nice Bible name.)

Anyway, the fairy tale didn’t really turn out the way Mom had hoped. The tourist-prince who spread her petals wasn’t quite ready for happily ever after, and so he left my mother to bloat and birth all on her own. Her psycho-religious parents disowned her too, kicking her out of the respectable Marina del Rey home where she’d grown up. So she moved down the road to Venice Beach, not far from the break where she’d met my father. When I arrived, it was just the two of us, Rebecca and Sephora, in the first of a string of shitty apartments.

And the rent? (Because shitty apartments aren’t free, even for princesses.) No, we’re not getting monthly guilt checks from the grandparents. (Though Venice Beach is a convenient place to stash family embarrassments.) Since the last of the bikini modeling jobs ended where the stretch marks began, our life has been decidedly month-to-month. But this is Venice Beach. The math works a little differently here.

***

Right now it’s close to midnight on the fifth of June. Yesterday was the last day of school, and that makes me officially a senior now, though the promotion doesn’t feel all that thrilling.

But summer is here at least, and I have a week before I have to report to my first day of summer school. Geometry bested me, and now it will return to mock me in the form of six weeks of forced math labor. I decide not to waste another moment of this week thinking about it.

I skate through the mostly sleepy streets of Venice, not the main drag or any of the canal streets, but just through the maze of shitty apartments, a part of town that most of my friends and I call home.

These aren’t the streets that Venice is known for. Most people know Venice for its boardwalk, the long stretch of pot pharmacies and pizza joints and tourist traps. They know about the Venice Beach Weight Pen, though most of them call it Muscle Beach, where bizarre, blissed-out steroid junkies pump iron in their tighty-whities, pretending to ignore the steady click of tourists’ cameras and cell phones. A few tourists might know a little more—about the three remaining canal streets where the really rich people live. And maybe they know about the web of canals that used to be here, about the ghost pier and torn-down roller coasters and maybe even the camel rides. But our neighborhood—our cheap stucco apartment buildings and dingy drywall caves? Why would anyone want to know about that?

I was planning to sleep over with Marissa, but she got a text from her boyfriend, Sal, that his mom was going to spend the night at her boyfriend’s house, so he had the apartment to himself. Marissa and I told her dad that we’d decided to cruise over to my place, and then we parted ways in front of Sal’s, her heading inside—petals already spreading, no doubt—and me wheeling solo the rest of the way home.

I have the hood of my sweatshirt pulled up, my ponytail tucked inside. In my loose jeans and black sweatshirt, riding my skateboard, I can pass for a boy. Just in case someone isn’t fooled, inside the pocket of my sweatshirt my fingers wind around a can of pepper spray. I flip the safety cap on and off and on again, a habit I’ve developed.

Lately, I spend as much time as possible away from the apartment, away from its yellowed walls and stained neutral carpet. My mom does her best to make it “homey,” as she calls it, but there’s only so much you can do with a few well-placed scarves and candles. (Nothing too permanent—like paint or shelves attached to the walls. There’s a security deposit to think about, after all.) So my backpack is my home away from home, filled with its usual assortment of supplies: a sketchbook, some charcoals, random food I’ve scrounged, and, clanking together at the bottom, my water bottle and some things I’ve collected throughout the day—a few pop-tops, a translucent orange lighter (empty), and a crushed fake-gold earring I found in the gutter outside Sal’s house.

It’s like this. Sometimes things call to me. Not all things, just some things. And not the things you’d think. Marissa likes to say the things that call to
her
are almost always inside the display cases of overpriced stores, and sometimes she counts on me to distract the salesgirl while she worms her way inside to answer their cries. The things that call to me don’t always shine. I do like metal, though, and wood, but I don’t consider myself too good for plastic. I’ve been known to pull things out of trash cans. I’ve lifted things here and there that had price tags attached to them, but I’m not proud of it the way Marissa is.

Half a moon winks in the sky, providing a little light to skate by but not so much that I feel safe taking my finger off the trigger of the pepper spray. I skate hard in the stretches between streetlamps and cruise in the curved circles of light that they cast. Light to dark to light. And within that rhythm, the regular click of each section of the sidewalk. My mind is everywhere else.

I’m thinking about what I’m going to do with the things I’ve found. And I’m thinking about Marissa and the way she hooks her index fingers in the front belt loops of Sal’s jeans, how he crashes into her when she pulls him by those loops. I’m thinking about something I started that isn’t finished yet. All day long I’ve thought about it—first as I headed to the coffee shop where Carson works (he’s always good for a free mocha), and then later as I changed into my bikini to meet Marissa and some other kids for a few hours of R & R. And again as Marissa and I headed back to her place to raid her dad’s fridge and sock drawer (beer and pot). I think of the mini blinds on her dad’s bedroom window, the way they were angled and the shadow lines they cast. Black bars of shadow slashed across the bed. I think about the shit I had to paw through—some gross porno DVDs, among other things—to find his baggie of pot. Ever since Marissa came across a couple of pretty raunchy girlie magazines one time when she was foraging through his socks and skivvies (“The girls in those pictures don’t look any older than us, Seph,” she’d said), she’s put me in charge of the marijuana-plundering detail. Then we’d headed over to Carson’s place with the beer and pot (I owed him after all the early-morning mochas), along with a pizza Darrin gave us out of the back door at the place he works, and the night had ended—I’d thought—back at Marissa’s place. Just the two of us again. But stories—and nights—don’t always end where they should, so here I am, thinking.

***

Fairy tales are like that. The real ones, the originals, before Disney raped them. The story gets to what you think will be the end—say, Sleeping Beauty wakes up—but that’s not the end at all. It’s just a reprieve. There’s more in store for her, farther to travel, heavier burdens to bear.

But there’s my apartment building just up ahead, a dingy, gray-blue rectangular box of stucco and windows and doors and lives all stacked up one atop another. Like it or not, I’m home.

Two

The apartment is dark. I shut the door carefully, not wanting to wake up my mom. The air still holds the scent of the candle she likes to burn. She hasn’t been asleep very long.

She has left the door to the bedroom open, of course, though the streetlights outside bathe the room in half-light, even at night. We keep meaning to buy better curtains but haven’t yet. When we moved in, there were these mini blinds in the bedroom, but even though they’d blocked out the streetlight, Mom had taken them down. Because they were ugly.

That’s my mom. Beauty first, then substance.

That sounds really harsh. I don’t mean it that way; actually, it’s one of the things about my mother that I find endearing, her love of beauty. But it can be annoying when it manifests in Indian scarves repurposed into curtains that don’t work for shit to block out the annoying yellow glow of the street outside.

My beat-to-hell laptop is right where I left it, on the far end of our brownish-yellowish Formica kitchen countertop. This guy Tom, who my mom dated briefly last year, gave it to me when he upgraded. It isn’t much, but it’s mine.

I flip it open and spend a few minutes clicking on random articles that I don’t read—I know what I’m doing and that it’s a waste of time and that I’m still going to do it—and then a few more minutes scrolling through comments on this art site I like. There’s this one duo of artists I think is really amazing. They build these sculptures and then light them so that the sculptures’ shadows are thrown on a wall behind them. The sculptures are amazing, but even more incredible is that each shadow is like a whole other piece of art—each shadow image totally different from its sculpture. Like a sculpture of piled-up junk can cast a shadow of a man and a woman embracing. I like what they do, a lot. I’ve been on this site dozens of times. I’ll probably be back tomorrow.

Finally, I go to my art page and scan through some of the images I’ve uploaded—pictures of my own stuff, a couple things I’ve built over the last month or so, just the pieces that didn’t turn out disappointingly lame. (I hate that artists call their creations
pieces
. It’s such a presumptuous word, corny and full of shit. I mean, can’t they just call them what they are …
products?)

The worst thing about having a shitty laptop and a crappy connection isn’t the laptop or the connection. It’s the knowledge that better technology exists. It’s the comparison—what I don’t have versus what other people
do
have.

I see there’s a comment on one of the images I’ve uploaded, but the photo renders slowly, from the top to the bottom, obscuring the comment itself. I shouldn’t care about the comment. Right? I hate that I do, but I force myself to wait while the picture loads, pixel by pixel practically, inch by inch. It’s a photo of my latest mermaid sculpture. The core of this mermaid is clay, cheap stuff that self-hardens so I didn’t need access to a kiln. She lies on her back, seaweed hair all around her like it’s floating. The hair loads first, before her face, before her closed eyes and parted lips. Then comes her neck and then her shoulders and breasts, and I am forced to look at each part separately, my computer stalling out several times. Her arms are spread, palms up. She’s a compilation of parts, my mermaid, and as I watch each part appear on the screen, I remember crafting it—the hair, which took three days of gathering, washing, pressing, and arranging, each piece of seaweed spiraled into a separate curl, little pieces of sea glass and shells tucked here and there, like jewels.

The face, which took the longest. Each eyelash is a bristle pulled from a toothbrush I found near the Venice Public Art Walls. I ran the toothbrush through Marissa’s dishwasher first, to sanitize it. Then I painted the bristles—one at a time, with the aid of a magnifying glass—all shades of gold. They glisten.

The lips are red wax, molded from an especially lucky find, one of those round wax cheese wrappers. This I plucked from the sand just after Marissa threw it there.

The mermaid’s bra is my favorite part, made from over a thousand tiny plastic pellets. They’re the number-one source of beach trash, these omnipresent little things, and they’re used for manufacturing of all kinds of shit—toys and household stuff and office supplies—and they’re terrible, birds mistake them for food and swallow them and then they starve to death. But pressed gently one by one into the receptive breasts of my mermaid, they form an iridescent shimmery bikini.

Everything that adorns this latest mermaid sculpture I collected on the beach. I even incorporated the plastic casing of a hypodermic needle as part of her tail.

At last the bottom edge of her fin loads, the entirety of it uneven bits of sea glass, and with it the new comment.

The comment is just one word—“
Nice”
—and I don’t recognize the user name: Joaquin.

Around me, the apartment settles into the next phase of night. I am tired. My eyes burn and my feet ache. Dropping to the couch, I untie the laces of my gray Converse high-tops and kick them off. There is a double bed in the bedroom, but usually either my mom or I crash on the couch. I spread a blanket across it before I head to the bathroom to pee.

I abandon my black jeans on the floor of the bathroom and zip out my hoodie. Dressed just in a tank and my undies, I feel the sharp chill of the beach air through the bathroom’s open window, and I hurry to my makeshift bed, pull the quilt up over my shoulder, and press into the back of the couch. That’s how I like to sleep—on my side with my back up against something or someone. Until I was twelve or so, I slept with my mom every night, her arms wrapped around me, the perfume of her hair reminding me all night long, even while I slept, that I wasn’t alone.

I know most twelve-year-olds don’t sleep with their moms. I guess that’s why I started sleeping on the couch more often or leaving my mom there if she fell asleep watching TV. But I miss the warmth of her, the way her arm across my body gets heavier when she falls into her deepest sleep.

It’s not natural, I think, sleeping alone. I mean, I know most people put their babies in cribs and lots of kids have their own rooms from the time they’re born, rooms with doors and locks and skinny single beds. And I’m not saying that I wouldn’t like a room of my own—I’ve actually gone to pretty great lengths to secure a shitty little storage room on the first floor of our apartment building as a place where I can work on my projects—but come on. Do you think cavemen stuck their babies in a separate cave? Of course not. That would practically be
inviting
the wolves—or worse—to come and snack on them.