What I now know of Errol I know from a postcard he sent our mother twenty-five years ago, which was postmarked Virginia City, N.T., and said only that the lode had a hold of him.
VIRGINIA CITY
We were at a house party last night, Danny, Jules, and me, leaning over a low, sticky coffee table playing Texas Hold ’Em like always, when Danny mentioned that his parents got married in secret up in Virginia City, in the back room of some casino, to escape the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He’d never told me this in all the years we’ve been friends. Jules got stuck on it, saying over and over again, “What? That’s so fucking crazy!”
Danny leaned back and got all quiet and smug the way he does when he knows he has something you want. “You can still see the room.”
And Jules said, “You guys, we have to see this place. This means something. Iris?”
And I was drunk or high or both by then, so I said, “Yeah, sure. We’ll drive up there.”
I meant it then but didn’t this morning, when I woke up to the underwater thuds of a fist pounding on the window of the only bedroom I’ve ever had. I cracked my blinds to see Jules straddling a furrow of my mom’s failed vegetable garden, her fingers folded into metal horns, yelling, “Virginia City! Fuck, yeah!” Danny stood behind her bleary-eyed, holding a Mountain Dew. When Jules gets stuck on something she doesn’t let it go. I used to love that about her.
I drive—I always drive. Jules and Danny sip road beers, him in the front seat of my car, her in the back. Danny turns the music down and asks Jules what’s become of Drew.
I have to strain to pull a memory of Drew—the scene trash Jules went home with last night—to this side of my hangover. Jules mashed into the couch with a skinny boy in tight pants, hibiscus flowers and sparrows and bug-eyed koi creeping up his forearms. Or later, her arm looped through mine, nodding indiscreetly to where the guy stood by the door with his coat on, drinking a tallboy, waiting. Jules yelling over the music to Danny, saying she didn’t need a ride home. Drew is a ghost. A placeholder in a parade. Like all of Jules’s boys, Drew is real only to Danny.
“Working,” Jules says. “He’s in that band, the Satellites. You know them.” She gestures with her Coors Light, part of a twelve-pack she stole from the party. “We saw them at XOXO. They opened for that emcee from Sacramento. They’re like indie slash electro slash power pop.”
“Keep that can down,” I say.
“Which one?” asks Danny. “What does he play?”
“I don’t know. Synth? I think there was a keyboard in his room.”
“If I get a ticket you guys are paying it.”
“Synth,” says Danny. “You sure? Where does he work?”
He’s trying to make her admit something. He should know better. Jules has never been ashamed of sleeping around. That would defeat the purpose. She shrugs and sips her beer, looking out her window at the gnarled piñon pines clinging to the mountainside, or Reno down beyond the guardrail, shrinking away from us.
Danny takes a drink. “You don’t even know where he works?”
She smirks at me in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t have a chance to ask.”
“How was it?” Danny’s only ever been with one girl. He’s twenty-four years old and still fascinated by the fact that people sometimes fuck people with whom they aren’t in love. This is what he likes to hear—the anonymity, the baseness, how a person can do what Jules does. A good friend, she is always willing to oblige.
“Not bad,” she says. “Oral, oral, missionary, doggie-style, money shot. Nothing flashy.”
Poor Danny. He lives with his parents and Jules is the kind of girl who makes sure every man she meets falls in love with her, in case he comes in handy later. She tilts her beer on end, finishing it. Danny does the same.
“Keep that shit down,” I say. Then, because I sound, just for a moment, like the me I was before Jules, I say, “The Satellites are basically a sloppy Joy Division cover band.”
She shrugs and looks out the window. “They are what they are.”
I met Jules in our capstone seminar the fall before we graduated. She was a BFA student, a painter. Even though the seminar is basic humanities, you’re supposed to take it within your college. The nursing seminar was full and I didn’t want to wait for the next semester, so I’d begged my adviser to let me into another section. It wasn’t until I got into the art auditorium that I realized how much I hated the other girls in nursing, their white shoes, the face-framing layers in their hair, their gel pens and highlighted, color-coded note cards.
On the first day of class, Jules called to me from the aisle of the auditorium like she knew me. I remember her ugly brown boots unlaced and splattered with paint, her short, bleached-out hair. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know her; I didn’t know anyone like her. She made her way over and sat beside me and gave me a flyer for a show downtown where her friend was deejaying.
“I thought you might be into this,” she said. “Last time he was in town he absolutely killed.” I didn’t know it then, but I’d been sitting in lecture halls for three years, staring straight ahead, rounding out the bell curve, waiting for someone like her.
She sat beside me whenever she came to class. I missed her when she didn’t, and she often didn’t. She invited me to more shows and gallery openings, showed me the flyers she’d redesigned herself because the bourgies at the gallery had used some bullshit motel art on theirs. I always went. One day she came into class and convinced me to leave with her before our professor arrived. We took the Spirit bus downtown to the Eldorado and spent the afternoon drinking gimlets and playing the penny slots. She taught me how to smoke. It was the best day I’d ever had.
Jules liked that I was a local. I made her feel authentic, which is especially important to Californians. Soon she was taking me along with her to after-parties and all-night diners with whichever guy had orbited into her life. Nick who worked at Sundance Books, Brady from the co-op, her Life Drawing TA, Corbett, a visiting “electronic installation artist” from Ireland, with his insufferable chronic irony. They asked me stupid questions, like did I come here when I was a kid, and did I know the Heimlich, and what would I do if they started choking. One time I said, “Nothing,” and Jules laughed like a dream I had of her once where she laughed so long and hard that her laugh lifted us both above the city and over the mountains, hand in hand, flying.
That was three years ago. Later, Jules got drunk and told me that she’d only called out to me that first day because she’d thought I was some girl from her sculpture class.
In the car we pass billboards advertising casinos and tourist attractions. One says The World-Famous Suicide Table and another says Virginia City: A Town of Relics and Memories and Ghosts of the Past and another says Bonanza or Bust. Danny says, “That’s it. The Bonanza.” He looks so pleased with himself that I wonder if he’s making this whole thing up.