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I DON’T EVEN GET OUT OF BED
before I light my first cigarette of the day. Light oozes through the louvered windows. Mexican light. It’s already hot. A faucet squeaks in the bathroom. The woman I was sent to find is in the shower. Water like silver moonlight pouring off her body. Well, I found her all right. I found her and I’m not taking her back to the United States or the Divided States or any other states. I’m taking her somewhere nobody can find us, ever.

“Benjamin?”

“What, Grandma?”

“Are you awake?”

I can hear her right outside my door now.

“I’m going to yoga,” she says. “Will you be all right?”

“You go five times a week, and when you come back, I’m always right here in one badly assembled piece.”

I listen to her pad away. I’ve perfected getting out of bed, but it’s still not easy. Thanks to cerebral palsy (aka C.P.), I’m pretty much half a kid. The right side is fine, the left not so good. I saw a tree once that’d been struck by lightning. Part of it was all shriveled up. The limbs were naked and gnarled. The other part was green and good to go. I’m that tree. Struck by lightning.

No wonder I want to be Robert Mitchum: big, strong, super-cool, with those Freon eyes of his. That’s who I was pretending to be a minute ago — Robert Mitchum in
Out of the Past.

But this is the present, where it takes me forever to get cleaned up, partly because I can’t stand to look at my naked self. That’s why I keep the TV on pretty much constantly. About a dozen physical therapists have told me to make friends with my body, but I just can’t.

Waiting for me in the kitchen is green tea and All-Bran. Grandma thinks there’d be world peace if everybody had regular bowel movements. Colleen and I cracked each other up once talking about the global power brokers meeting in their pajamas and passing the high-fiber cereal around while they chatted amicably.
The West Bank? It’s yours. Just make sure there’s an
ATM
. Pass the prunes, okay?

Colleen. Somebody I can’t think about. So once I’ve choked down the last bite of bran, I cross the street to my friend Marcie’s. It’s early and the neighborhood is quiet except for a gardener or two. One of them is sweeping with a big push broom because there’s a city ordinance about mowers or leaf blowers before eight a.m. South Pasadena is like that.

I’d be glad to push a broom if I could have two arms and two legs that worked. That’s what I tell Marcie right after she answers the door.

“Really?” she says, stepping back so I can get past.

“Absolutely. I’d have a pickup truck and a bunch of clients. I’d mow and rake all day, then go home and watch DVDs.”

“You should talk to them. Make another documentary.”

“About gardeners?”

“Why not? Your movie about high school killed the other night.” She points to the coffeepot. “Want some?”

I shake my head. “Grandma says I’m not old enough yet. And, anyway, it makes me jumpy.”

Marcie sits down beside me. The caftan she’s wearing this morning is blue, with gold birds on the sleeves. Her face is all angles but not hard-looking. Her life seems pretty sweet — nice house, enough money, time to do whatever she wants. But she’s had heart bypass surgery, a couple of divorces, and she goes to AA meetings.

“So you’re a bona fide storyteller now,” she says. “Part of a community of storytellers. What’s your next story? I think you ought to have a plan.” She stands up before I can argue.

Marcie takes batter out of her refrigerator and starts pouring perfect little circles on the griddle.

I get down a couple of plates, the ones she made when she was a potter and had a kiln of her own and a husband. On the bottom of each plate is a line from a poem, hers for all I know. The one I’m holding says,
Pleasure is permitted me.

“What happened to Colleen, anyway?” she asks. “She sure disappeared in a hurry.”

I sit down heavily. Like there’s any other way for me. “With Nick.”

Marcie turns away from the stove and points a spatula at me. “And this Nick is . . . ?”

“Just a guy with a couple of joints and a Pontiac Firebird. Can we not talk about it?”

“I thought she was going to twelve-step meetings.”

“She said she wasn’t having any fun. I said, ‘How much fun was it flat on your back in the hospital with IVs in your arm?’ And she said, ‘It’s just a little weed this time.’ How could she do that? Drive down there with us and then go home with somebody else?”

Marcie puts pancakes on my plate, then nudges the maple syrup my way.

“Besides being a card-carrying stoner, do you think she was jealous? People loved
High School Confidential.
So there you are with everybody shaking your hand, and there she is with a pin in her nose.”

“Everybody didn’t shake my hand, and she doesn’t actually have a pin in her nose.”

“I know you like her, Ben. And I’m not going to tell you girls are like buses and there’ll be a new one along in a minute. But you’re a talented filmmaker. You proved that at the Centrist Gallery. Concentrate on that.”

I take a bite of pancake. Colleen eats at McDonald’s. I’ve sat with her. I’ve paid for her coffee and McSkillet Burrito, first when she was groggy and wasted and couldn’t remember the night before, and then in rehab when she couldn’t shut up.

Never again, man. I’m not doing that ever again.

Marcie points her fork at me. “I’ve been thinking — for your next project, you need a camera of your own. You’re welcome to use mine again, but it’s from the Dark Ages. I’ll look around online.”

“Who’s going to pay for it?”

“Your grandma.”

I just look at her. “Grandma wants me to major in business, not film.”

“You can major in business and still make movies. You don’t have to be one thing; you can be a lot of things. Right now you’re in high school, so you’re really majoring in Getting Out with Your Frontal Lobe Intact. Anyway, all you really need is a nice little Flip Mino HD. Couple hundred bucks. Peanuts to somebody like Mrs. B.”

“I don’t know, Marcie.”

“Tell her you’ll never see Colleen again.”

“Colleen’s already history.”

“Maybe. But your grandmother doesn’t know that. And don’t say, ‘Oh, she was was at the gallery the other night, so she knows,’ because, yes, she was there, but she wasn’t thinking about Colleen.” Marcie narrows her eyes. “Negotiate, Benjamin. No Colleen, all As, and merit badges in Archery and Lifesaving.”

“Interesting sequence, given my skill with the bow and arrow.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. I’ll ask her. I will. At the gallery, she said she was proud of me.”

Marcie takes a sip of coffee. “For what it’s worth, I’m not so sure Colleen’s an ex-girlfriend. She likes you. I can see it when you guys are together.”

“Well, she’s sure got a funny way of showing it.”

Marcie picks up the small remote and aims it at the little flat-screen Sony. “Let’s see what’s on the movie channel.”

I take the bus to school. Not a regular school bus, not even the little bus, but a city bus, with real people going to real jobs. Or coming from real jobs, maybe, because about a third of my fellow passengers are crashed against the window or each other. If I had a little digital camera, I could take pictures of people sleeping. All kinds of people. Work up some kind of montage.

I look out the window. I look with intent. Kids walking to school, hoping they’re finally wearing the right outfit; people in their cars, putting on makeup, talking on their cells and eating bagels.

As we make the turn onto Glenarm, somebody’s lawn sprinklers are all out of whack. A big old geyser waters the concrete, and rich guys in their BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes weave around the downpour.

Yesterday, Marcie and I watched part of
Chinatown,
Roman Polanski’s great neo-noir thriller. It covers the whole William Mulholland/Owens Valley water scandal better than any history book I ever read. Without the aqueduct, L.A. would still be what the Chumash called it: “The valley of smoke.” And the pollution then wasn’t smog from cars and trucks, just smoke from their campfires.

I look at the buildings and the cars and the busy streets. It’s hard to believe people lived in tents and adobe shacks and walked around in moccasins and hunted and fished. Nobody went to an office or to school.

There was C.P. then, too, I’ll bet. There’s always bad stuff. What happened to a Chumash kid with C.P.? Did he sit around with the women and bitch about the maize?

In grade school, I did a report once on the Chumash, and they were hard-core about manhood. A kid gets to be fourteen or so, and it’s time for “fasting, hallucinogenic rituals, and trials of endurance.” And that last one means — I’m not kidding — lying on anthills. Anthills populated by red ants. Those big mothers.

The funny thing is, I could do that. Maybe, anyway. Probably. I’ve been through more than most kids, and I didn’t wimp out. Ever. Hospitals, tests, physical therapy, all of it.

So I could probably lie there while the ants bit me and some shaman chanted about the seven giants that held up the world, but when I got up, I’d limp. Courageous but crippled. The really cool guys would get the Minnie Ha Ha girls, with their little fringed skirts, and I’d get Moody Boo Hoo, Minnie’s bipolar sister.

Unless I could sit with the elders, the Old Ones, and listen. Native Americans have great origin myths. There are Sky Fathers and Earth Mothers and Grandmother Spiders. There are Rainbow Serpents and moon goddesses.

I’ll bet I could’ve been that kind of storyteller then, the way Marcie says I’m the kind of storyteller I am now. The kind with a camera and a computer. I don’t have to run fast or shoot straight to tell stories. I can do it sitting down.

At school, I can’t help myself. I look for Colleen. I want to see her and I don’t want to see her. I want to talk to her and I don’t. I want her to be sorry she took off with that guy, and if she is, it’ll just make me mad because she can never be sorry enough.

I sit through history and social studies, then hobble down to eat lunch. Colleen almost never eats at school. She and Ed used to climb in his car, fire up a joint, then inhale four orders of onion rings at Wolfies. And she still had beautiful skin. Once when we were alone at Marcie’s, she took off all her —