Plus One (22 page)

Alex knew he shouldn't care what she thought—what did he expect from a mountain mystic with a LIVE SIMPLY SO OTHERS MAY SIMPLY LIVE bumper sticker on her guitar case and defiantly hairy legs and armpits (Jane apparently being the last lesbian alive still waging war against the hypocrisy of gender-based personal grooming)? He was a grown man with a life of his own—why did he physically flinch at the thought of her disapproval?

Jane ran a finger down the metal rack, and then swiveled around to face him. “All this space!”

Alex leaned up against the doorframe and hung his head.

“Every mother hopes her children find some security,” she said, sweeping her hand out with a regal wave. “But this—this is something else.”

“I know—it's way more than we need. But do you, you know… like it?”

She dropped her arms to her sides and released a big laugh. “What's not to like? It's a dream!”

“I thought you'd be, I don't know,
offended
. By the excess. I'm still kind of shocked I get to live here. I mean, this couldn't possibly be
my
house, right?”

“Oh sweetie,” she said. “Of course it's your house—yours and that marvelous woman of yours. Just look at her down there at the center of all that action.”

Alex went over to the window. The lighting guys were inflating a huge, white hot-air balloon that mimicked the effulgence of moonlight. He spotted Figgy back on her canvas chair, huddled with a costume guy.

His mom came over and stood beside him, her fingers cradling a turquoise amulet strung around her neck with a leather cord. “And just think how great this house is going to feel after a good cleansing.”

“We already had a service come in and do the floors—”

“No sweetie,” she said. “A
spiritual
cleansing. Deny it all you want, but Alex—you're sensitive to these things. You feel all the bottled-up energy in here, all that residual juju.”

“Oh, Ma.” There was no way he was going to pay some Ojai crackpot to come wave feathers around.

“I put together a bag of goodies—it's in my car,” she said, practically levitating with excitement. “Wild sage from the mountain. Vials of spring water blessed by a nephew of the Krishnamurti.
It'll be fun! The kids will love it—did you know that it's an ancient Native American rite to urinate on the perimeter of a new homestead?”

Alex smiled and agreed that yes, his kids would undoubtedly love that particular ritual. But he knew what he'd do with his mother's bag of mystical do-dads—the same thing he'd done with Joan's assortment of mezuzahs. Show it to Figgy for laughs, then stash it away in a junk drawer and forget about it.

Jane touched his shoulder. “It's a beautiful house, honey. It's even more beautiful because you and Figgy are in it. You have to understand, Alex, honey—never in my lifetime did I think that we'd make such tremendous gains so fast, that our daughters would achieve so much. We thought the movement would be a long, slow, gradual struggle. But look around—right here! We won!”

She smiled triumphantly, and then stepped around Alex toward the door. “The age of testosterone is over,” she said. “Now show me this solarium of yours.”

• • •

At the end of the tour, Jane went out to her car to fetch her bag of magical do-dads, and Alex marched over to the half-circle of canvas folding chairs where Figgy and Dani were huddled around a monitor playing back the Jacuzzi scene.

Alex was relieved to discover that Zev was nowhere to be seen. He watched a few seconds of Cliff's contorted face on the monitor and then hooked a finger under one of Figgy's headphones and popped them off.

“Footgasm? Really?”

“Oh, honey!” Figgy made a half-grimace, half-laugh. “I know—I forgot to tell you! It's just that I mentioned it in the room and everyone agreed it's the best first orgasm story ever.”

Alex didn't return the smile. “You might have checked. You know—before using the unbelievably embarrassing thing I told you privately… in your
TV show
!”

Figgy started to respond, but Dani came to her aid. “Oh, Alex, we
absolutely
had to use it. Obviously, we added the naked girls—no one would ever believe how it really happened, would they? Seriously, did you actually—
splooge
? Next to your grandmother?”

Alex coughed. “She was a very youthful eighty-year-old. And water pressure in the seventies was
entirely
different.”

Dani hopped up and down and clapped. “Oh, you are hi-larious,” she said. “He is, Figgy. Just like you're always saying. You really
are
the man behind the woman.”

Alex kept an accusing stare focused on Figgy.

She got up from her chair and wrapped her arms around him. “Oh shit honey,” she said. Alex could hear the concern in her voice—it hadn't occurred to her before this moment what a betrayal this was. “I'm sorry for not talking to you about it beforehand. But I've been so crazy. I haven't seen the kids in a week. I'm so exhausted I can barely walk. I just forgot. Don't be mad.”

Alex softened, his complaint now dwarfed by her upset. He knew the drill. They were back in the misery marathon—whoever had it worse earned the credit and forgiveness. And according to those rules, she'd just inched ahead. “It's okay,” he said. “I guess no one but us knows it's… true, right?”

Figgy made a quick—Alex thought a little too quick—pulling-it-together snuffle and then collected herself, looking up at the house. “So how was the tour? Jane give you grief?”

“No—not really,” he said. “Apparently she made it all possible.”

“What? How's that?”

“You know, by singlehandedly forging the way for you—and women everywhere? Kind of like how she invented lesbianism.”

“Oh right,” Figgy said. “Well, she
was
a dyke way before it was cool.”

Dani motioned to the yard, where Jane was barreling onto the grass, her battered guitar swinging at her side. She quickly surveyed the scene, fixing herself on a spot a few feet down a hill from where Zev was about to start the next scene. Jane made a theatrical toss of her pullover and then knelt down and unpacked her instrument.

Dani arched an eyebrow and smiled warily. “She's not going to—”

Alex felt his stomach turn.

Within a minute, Jane was crouched into a cross-legged position in the grass. She closed her eyes and locked her face in a beatific, rapt expression Alex recognized from a picture on her bathroom wall of Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival in 1966. And then she broke into the first chords of “If I Had a Hammer.”

Nine

I
'm out of my gourd on cough syrup and malt liquor the night I catch the Germs at the Starwood. I'm too young and fucked up to be out on my own, but so's everyone. We're all crazy, no-clue, wayward juvie punks, latchkey kids getting our ears blasted and our minds exploded. And for a glorious nanosecond, the sorry horde of us gets just what we're after: oblivion.

Alex punched the return key and looked out the window. He'd set up his office in a corner of the solarium when they'd moved in two months ago. Every day after dropping the kids at school, he'd head home, march to his desk, and plop down under an arched window with a panoramic view of the backyard. Framed by clumps of pink rhododendron, the scene was ridiculously pretty. A flagstone path rolled across the lawn to the guest cottage, nestled in a thicket of trees like something out of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Looking over the scene now, he felt a knot of anxiety coil up in his throat.

What was his problem? Was it the work, the house? It couldn't be the writing. He'd started working on his book the day after they moved in. Coming across his fanzine, he'd decided, had been a
sign.
He needed to write a balls-out account of the birth of SoCal punk, a hard-nosed, knockabout tour through the clubs and halls and garages where the scene took root. That's how he'd pitched it to Figgy:
Almost Famous
without the muttonchops or shitty classic rock.

Partly to compensate for the wrongness of writing his paean to punk in a fucking
solarium
, he'd decided to work on the same model typewriter he'd used to produce his 'zine way back when. It had been easy enough to locate an IBM Selectric on Craigslist. It came with three fresh, still-in-the-box ribbons and had the same chipped avocado-green frame as the typewriter he'd used to write
R.I.P
. It emitted a deep hum when switched on, vibrating the desktop. Unfortunately, the punk rock choice was turning out to be kind of a hassle. The keys were constantly getting jammed, and he kept smearing globs of Wite-Out on the plastic window that flattened the paper against the roller. Still, he soldiered on.

With my notebook tucked in the back pocket of my Dickies and my bodacious eighteen-year-old babysitter Dotti as a ride, I'm a wide-eyed waif among hardcore diehards from OC and the South Bay. Those fuckers will pound your face or unleash globs of mucus in your eye just for shits and giggles. I keep my back to the wall and stay busy noting detailed set lists. The music is sloppy and disgusting and unhealthy, like a chili dog dripping down your shirt. I gorge myself on the greasy mess of it.

Alex stopped typing and looked up, a mysterious thud emanating from upstairs. He felt like he spent half the day wandering from room to room, staring at the bare walls, trying to decipher the groans, creaks, and thuds that constituted the house's secret
vocabulary. He kept waiting for the tranquility of new ownership to kick in, the satisfaction he'd expected to take over once the initial shock of the move wore off. But so far, being here just made him feel like he was squatting while the real owners were away. Hoo boy, were they gonna be
pissed
when they got home.

Yesterday he'd barely written a word, getting up every five minutes to let Albert outside to pee or help Rosa with the washing machine or sign for FedEx. At a certain point he gave up entirely and decided what he really needed was a long soak in the big whirlpool tub upstairs. Because why not? He could do that. He'd while away an hour scrubbing and dozing and maybe even cracking one of Sammy's scented bath oils. He needed to enjoy the spoils a little, soak it up, stop worrying so much.

But of course, not three minutes after stripping down, pouring a half bottle of hibiscus-scented oil and lowering himself into the water—and feeling in a delicious rush how incredible it was that he was
here
and not, say, slaving in his old cubicle at BestSelf—right then, a metallic clank thudded down over his head. Just above the windowsill, not three feet away, appeared the ruddy, mustachioed face of Rudolfo the gardener. He scrambled out of the bath, bubbles flying, his penis flapping around in a horrific soapy scramble.

He wasn't sure how much Rudolfo had actually seen—he'd been busy trimming the ivy, and Alex had retrieved a towel with bionic quickness. But even if the particulars had been fuzzy, there was no mistaking the overall gestalt, which was that the new boss, the man of the house, El Jefe, was having a big frothy pink-hued bubble bath at eleven in the morning.

Why was it so difficult to get comfortable in a house built for comfort? Figgy still basically lived at work, and Alex, the kids, and the dog found themselves moving in a tight herd from room to room, still not quite knowing what to do with all the new space. Getting home from carpool each afternoon, the kids would turn
on the TV on the kitchen counter, and Alex would stand by their side chopping and slow roasting and arranging intricate bento boxes for the next day's lunches.

“You don't value what comes easy to you,” Figgy had said recently, home at midnight and biting into a corn fritter. “Maybe you're a cook, honey. Why don't you take some classes?”

Alex knew she was trying to be encouraging, but the suggestion landed with a sting. She obviously didn't appreciate how busy his days were, with the book and the kids' new school schedule and all the house repairs and the rest of it. She seemed to think he had vast, open chunks of the day free to formulate sauces. It also suggested Figgy wasn't really on board with his book project. He bore down on the typewriter.

I pay insane money for Cramps vinyl, get a pair of Creepers, shout and stomp and pogo in dark halls that reek of teen flop sweat. I'm caught up in the scrum, colliding and smashing and heaving. The pain is half the fun. I'm on the receiving end of an elbow to the ribs that leaves a fist-size purple welt. Think of all the chiropractors punk rock made rich! To say nothing of the manufacturers of hearing aids. I ask you: How many of my skinhead brothers are cuddled up on Tempurpedic pillows today?