“I know, right? And you can pick up that can of Peekaboo Blue and you can deepen the center of those pollywogs right down by your knee.”
So that’s what she calls her shapes. Pollywogs. They really don’t look like pollywogs to Mateo. But more to the point: he’s never tagged before. Or “written”—that’s what the taggers call it. He grew up with a brush in his hand. So he tells her so.
“It’s okay,” she says. “The can’s already got the right tip on. Just shake it, hold it about eight inches, and deepen the centers.”
So he does it, shaking the can, feeling the ball bearing inside rattle around. He presses the nozzle and the spray of baby blue hits the center, deepening the existing hue.
“You’re a toy, man!” Charlice laughs. “Don’t fuck up my piece.”
He knows what a toy is, in tagger parlance. It’s an absolute beginner.
He’s back there the whole next day, Friday, then Saturday, too. He’s feeling so light, so happy. Then Sunday morning comes. He’s queasy as he eats his cereal down in the kitchen with the guys. He’s waiting for them to show up. He told Drew he’d rather just meet them at the Beverly Center, but Millimom really wanted to see where he was living. So he goes outside and waits on the front porch for them to pull up in Drew’s Prius. Finally, around eleven A.M., they do. And here they are, two rich, skinny white women looking totally out of place in the neighborhood, walking up the pathway, Drew with a bag from Trader Joe’s in one arm. From twenty-five feet away, he can see Millimom smiling toward him already, but he can already feel her strain, her sadness, burning through the smile, so obvious in the eyes. His heart is pounding out of his chest and he frantically starts saying the Serenity Prayer to himself. Please, please, please, he’s praying, just get me through this in a chill way. Just let me do this right. He stands up and takes a few steps forward, forcing on a smile.
“We come bearing gifts,” calls Drew cheerily.
“Hey!” Mateo calls back, pushing out the cheer. “Thank you!”
Suddenly they’re there right before him. For the first time in months, he locks eyes with Millimom, but what he sees there — the hurt, the fear, etched so much deeper than the last time he saw her — instantly diverts his eyes away toward — what? Anything. Drew will do.
“Heyyy,” he says again, stepping down. “Hey, Mom.” He embraces her. God, she feels so tiny, so thin, just a bag of bones.
“Hi, sweetheart!” She embraces him and won’t let go. Drew gives him a look behind her back that says, Please, honey, just be gentle with her.
Finally, Millimom pulls back. “Let me look at you. . You look okay,” she says, as though her worst fears have been allayed. “You look good. They feed you well here, right?”
“They do, they do!” he assures. He’s all sorts of smiling and nodding and even laughing, a bit maniacally. “I even cook. It’s part of my tasks.”
“You even cook?” Millimom echoes him. “Wow, I’d like to sample that.”
“Hey,” he says, “I make some mean burritos.”
“Mmm,” Drew says. “That sounds good.”
There, he thinks, his heart rate subsiding a bit. Maybe the worst is already over. In a second, they’re all inside and he’s giving them a tour of the first floor — the front TV parlor, the kitchen, the screened-in back porch, the rooms where they have meetings and groups. He introduces Drew and Millimom to the various guys in the house as he bumps into them, and it’s just as he expected, all warmth and cordiality.
“This old house is gorgeous, isn’t it, Mills?” Drew says. Mateo knew that was coming, he chuckles to himself. Drew and Milly have never seen a charming vintage anything they didn’t want to rehab, edit down, and curate.
After the house tour, after he’s stored away the bag of snacks they brought him under his bed, because he knows they’ll disappear in fifteen minutes if he leaves them in the kitchen, they load into the Prius and head off to the Pacific Design Center, that huge, chunky blue glass building designed by César Pelli, to see the solo show of an artist named Amanda Ross-Ho. That was Drew’s idea, that they all go and see some art, and he’d said he’d read about this show and wanted to catch it. Drew and Millimom are in the front and Mateo’s in the back as they head north on La Cienega. Drew’s got KPCC on the radio and is telling Millimom about some actor friend of theirs from a million years ago who moved to L.A. from New York recently, and in that moment, with the pressure off, Mateo thinks that he just might make it through this afternoon.
When they get to the Design Center, it occurs to him that this is virtually his first time in months being surrounded by art people, almost all of them white, including Drew and Millimom, instead of the ex-cons he now lives with. The sheer tone of the voices he hears around him — hushed, serious, considered, using vocabulary he usually only sees in print — feels a bit bizarre and off-putting. But even harder, perhaps what he hadn’t accounted for, is to be standing in the middle of an artist’s expensively produced solo show and to be reminded of the whole art-world machinery he’d once had at his fingertips, the world he’d thrown a bomb at and run away from. He keeps telling himself that, yes, Amanda Ross-Ho is nearly forty and he’s nineteen, but still, the exhibit starts to burn him up — a slow burn he can’t even fully put a name to — until his hands are fists shoved down deep in his jeans pockets. What’s frustrating is that it’s hard even to see the artist’s true hand in the work — it’s all installations and pastiches and collages of a bunch of random, everyday shit; half of it looks like something some crazy schizo guy in a cabin off the grid would spend days feverishly putting together. But then again, maybe that’s the point.
Drew, walking a few paces beside him while Millimom peruses the other side of the room, seems to sense this from him. “I admire the constructions but still I’m strangely underwhelmed, you know what I mean?” she asks.
Mateo sort of half nods.
“I mean, where’s the beauty?”
“It doesn’t look like she cares about beauty,” he says. “It’s all think-y.”
“Mmm,” goes Drew. “All think-y.” She and Mateo lock eyes for a second. Drew smirks, puts her hand on the back of his neck for a moment, and says, “Don’t be so think-y, ya hear me?”
Mateo’s caught off guard. “How can you be nice to me?” he asks her, looking down.
She puts her arm around him. “Because I’ve known you since you were a little boy and I love you,” she says. “And because I’ve been there, Mateo.” Her eyes flash with mischief. “I was a devious pathological little user when I was your age, too, you know.”
They laugh together, attracting a curious look across the room from Millimom. “You know who else loves you, Mateo?” Drew asks.
Mateo knows whom Drew’s referring to. He lowers his voice: “I just don’t know why she took me in,” he says. “Why didn’t she have her own kid?”
“What does it matter?” Drew asks, also sotto voce. “Stay clean,” she says. “You’ll get your answers.”
Mateo looks down, digs at one sneaker with the toe of the other. Drew is always saying slightly Yoda-ish stuff like that. She rubs his neck again and saunters across the room toward Millimom, whom Mateo watches. She’s standing in front of the one piece he really likes, which is a massive wall assemblage of white cutout shapes divided into nine square panels and anchored by a bunch of black bottles on the floor. It’s monumental and intricate and, if not exactly beautiful, certainly able to engage the eye for a long period of time. And it looks like it’s engaged Millimom, who’s standing before it.