In bed, at night, you sweat. You dream in shades of pink and green of gin and burning hair. In the morning, you, your mom, your dad, all eat breakfast in boxer shorts and bulletproof vests. Dad has a VCR set up on the table and watches Clambake! while your mom stares at her cereal.
You had been thinking about it this way: there’s a ring around the thing that draws you near — the palms of Hector’s hands, say, or your reflection in Halverson’s glasses — and to cross that line is to be taken, swept, changed. But today you see it different. Today, standing in the empty AP classroom, not wanting to believe the rumors that Halverson’s fired, packed up in his rental car and gone, you wonder where is your event horizon, where is the line beyond which something will forever be drawn to you. His handwriting is still on the blackboard. Binary star homework due Tuesday, is all it says, and he can’t be gone, he can’t be. Stupidly waiting under the Styrofoam — coat hanger model of the solar system you reach up and set it in motion. But the hand-colored planets swing too smoothly it seems to you, too safely Halverson would say, and plucking Pluto from the mix sets the model wildly spinning.
So it’s not just anybody waiting for you in the Kmart after school, not just some boy grabbing you by the vest straps and pulling you to him, but Hector. It’s Hector’s drugstore heart thumping next to yours, Hector’s letterman chest against yours, Hector’s dive team hips gaining on yours and you want to believe, you want.
Hector has his father’s gun, you your mother’s, and you will ask the boy you love to break the plate guarding your heart. Hector has a Monte Carlo and you’ve seen the movie Bullitt enough times in your dad’s shop that there’s a California road map in your head as clear as the grooves around Steve McQueen’s eyes, deep as the veins in Hector’s arms, but it is not enough. The line must be crossed. He’s ten feet from you, a parking space away. You hand him your mother’s silver little number. It will knock you down, you know, there will be that smell, but soon there will be no more vests, no more fears, only Hector’s fingers on the bruise he’s made, on your sternum, and the line will be crossed, the event set in motion, at the highest of speeds.
CLIFF GODS OF ACAPULCO
My father is dying in Zaire, though I don’t necessarily know that yet as I drive to Vegas with Jimbo. I do know my dad is a Rover driver for Mobil geologists and, instead of seismic surveys, he carries two ammo clips and a military discharge that’s semiautomatic. This is 1985, and I’m going to Vegas because I’m still in those hazy couple years after high school when I read a lot of racing magazines, drink with secretaries at Bennigan’s every night, and take things at face value. I’m failing mythology, my lone course at Riverside Community College, and Jimbo and I test diodes all day for Futron, an electronics firm that makes black-market cable boxes and will shortly be shut down by the FCC. Between us, we have 244 TV channels.
My favorite viewing is always the live coverage on the Canadian Motorsports Network. Jimbo prefers the Playboy Channel, whose only movie I remember liking is The Black Box, a soft-core in which, following an emergency landing on a desert island, naughty stewardesses screw survivors on inflatable rafts, yellow escape slides, galley carts, and even a thirty-thousand-horse pulse-injector tail engine. What the crew doesn’t know is that the sex is being transmitted by the flight data recorders, which leads to hilarity when the Coast Guard comes to “rescue” them. Getting the Playboy Channel free for yourself is simple; just connect two parallax converters in tandem with a P-9 capacitor, then bridge the diode with an alligator clip.
Jimbo’s from Vegas, and we make the hop every couple weeks, though our thing is usually to get a United flight that leaves us about eighteen hours of solid bingo-bingo before we sleep on a flight home to six hundred transistors waiting for the green light. On United, I fly free. For Jimbo, the best I can do is drink coupons. Today we drive instead of fly because of FAA rules: you can’t take poisonous animals (scorpions) on commercial airliners. Jimbo has a whole box of them, a ridiculously large cardboard box for the dozen red scorpions the label says are within. They’re a special gift for a friend who has a “death thing,” Jimbo says. The box doesn’t have airholes, and is so light I don’t believe there’s anything in there — there can’t be. Jimbo’s excited to see what’s inside, keeps talking about opening it, though he wants me to do it. But the trick to life, it seems to me so far, is learning to tolerate the not knowing. I can take that box or leave it.
Jimbo’s big into thrills, and our hotfoot to Nevada is all him describing this new indoor skydiving attraction we’re going to try when we get there. I don’t tell him my mythology teacher says thrill rides are a mix of sky worship and disaster simulation, both primitive kinds of foreplay. I can’t explain it the way my teacher does, so outside the state line, I just tell Jimbo, “Let’s piss already.”
Detouring over Hoover Dam, Jimbo leans hard into the canyon curves, chuting the two-lane fast enough that the scorpion box slides back and forth in the hatch, cornering tight enough that we flirt with guardrails and great heights. Such driving does not appeal to me. The thrills I go for are more predictable — a pistol kick, a sudden loss of cabin pressure, the way a secretary or nurse at Houlihan’s will try to lay you by chewing ice from her drink and saying things like, “Grrr.” Thrilling driving takes place on oval tracks, especially thousand-lap endurance races that stretch late into night — tight, boxy circuits — spinning long after you turn off the TV and go to bed, races in which the victor is a mystery until the last lap, when you’re crashed already and dreaming.
Entering the shadows of great saguaros and graffiti-covered rock faces, we pull over to take a leak in the bluffs above Lake Mead. The outcrops are like lava, and we walk through the shoulder’s gravel and ground glass to stand among barrel-chested Joshua trees. “My old man used to take me up here when I was a kid, to see the bomb tests,” Jimbo says, unzipping. Jimbo keeps his dope in his Jockeys, so he holds the Baggie in his teeth as he points. I look up through outstretched cactus limbs to the bluffs, which are low and could not offer much of a view, then scan the distant scrub plains and tawny hills below.
“You’d need some L-5 optics for that,” I say, using a testing term from Futron.
“We’re talking about nukes,” Jimbo says, “which tend to be large events, and our binoculars were Bushnells, the best.” Speaking through the plastic bag, he goes on to describe how the military would build a little dummy city for every explosion, complete with town halls and fire stations. “My old man would flip. Some of the houses were two stories, with yards and barns. He’d look through those Bushnells and ask, ‘Is that a Cadillac in that driveway? Tell me that’s not a Caddy they’re gonna cook.’ But the white flash always shut him up.”