Talk of the white flash, which I imagine too clearly, shuts me up as well. We do not go on to discuss either bombs or fathers here among the Joshua trees; we just piss into their hairy arms and leave.
What would I have to say anyway?
Actually, I will never know if my father is pulled from his Rover and shot in a sorghum field in West Africa. My only confirmation comes from a man who arrives out of nowhere one day and claims to be my father’s best friend, who begins seeing my mother, and finally convinces her to move from Michigan to Acapulco with him. His name is Ted, and all I know about the whole deal is the sketchy portrait he paints of guarding Mobil interests from tribal warlords, and the general fact that Acapulco is a place where, in long streaks of flashing skin, people throw themselves from cliff tops into the frothy abyss.
Before Ted takes my mom to Mexico, the only time we see her is in LAX on Sunday mornings. Ted and I both find ourselves at the SkyLounge cocktail rail, eating prepopped popcorn and watching people go by until my mother’s red-eye comes through, a point at which we have thirty-five minutes with her before she stows tray tables and passes out pillows all the way back to her base in Detroit. The first time we meet, Ted tells me he and my father really took some heat from the local screws in Africa. “Things are different on the continent,” he says, and I watch his teeth. Ted has knuckles for teeth. “Those screws were coming at us from all sides. There was no dealing with them.”
I have yet to watch enough cable movies to know “screw” is prison talk.
Ted is going to become a saga, but that’s not a concern right now. It has no bearing as Jimbo and I drive to Vegas. This story is about amputation.
For these couple of years I am unshakable, so the back roads through Vegas speak nothing to me. I do not think about the people who wander the edges of sidewalkless causeways, the cars that shift and float as if unused to daylight, or the particular strains of Vegas trash that string wire-lined gullies. The power lines simply sink and rise above us, the sky is only October blue, and it seems perfectly natural that people hitchhike in the dips, where freshly blacked streets wash over with sugar sand.
The plan is to get stoned and ride a new attraction called Fly Away, which basically consists of indoor skydiving in a room shaped like a padded tube. There’s a wire net at the bottom that keeps you from falling into the DC-3 engine below. Actually, it’s Jimbo’s plan. I don’t smoke dope, and I’m a big guy. I don’t believe I will fly.
Key to the plan is going to see Jimbo’s old friend Marty. He’s the one the scorpions are for. The whole ride out is Marty this and Marty that, an old-school parade of Marty memories, but what’s important is this: Marty’s girlfriend, Tasha, is the preflight girl at Fly Away, the one who suits you up, so we’re headed to Marty’s to get some good dope and the VIP from his girlfriend.
“Wait’ll you get a load of Tasha,” Jimbo says as we crest the foothills outside Vegas. He’s pretty stoned, and from his description of Tasha, I know she’s the kind of thank-God-it’s-Friday secretary I’d work at Bennigan’s.
“Tasha’s seen the other side,” he says.
“The other side of what?”
Jimbo just raises his eyebrows, and we drive for a while.
“Maybe I’ll show her the white flash,” I tell him.
Jimbo doesn’t quite know what I mean by this, but he likes the sound of it. He smiles and steps on the gas, sending us full tilt through the newly paved scrub desert leading to the suburbs. “White flash,” he repeats.
Closing my eyes, I let the road’s G-force take me. I feel this Tasha woman cinch me into a billowy nylon flight suit, her hands folding Velcro, running zippers, jerking my straps tight. I hear her knock my helmet twice, meaning A-okay, thumbs up, as I follow her into Fly Away’s engine room. It is a more modern version of this engine, the DC-9, that kills my mother’s best friend, Tammy, climbing out of Dulles International. You’ve seen the footage, the one that goes into the icy river. I say this because Tammy is a fox, too, a woman I stare at endlessly as she and my mother sit by our condo’s swimming pool in white bikinis.
Marty’s house is on a pie-shaped lot at the end of a cul-de-sac in west Vegas. It’s long and low, hard-lined and brown, the kind of house John Wayne would’ve lived in, if he’d never been famous. Beyond the sprawling roof rise two jagged outcrops of stone, one with a five-story radio tower that flashes red strobes bright enough to make us wince a bit, even at noon. The light’s glow pattern is two fast and one slow, which warns overhead airplanes that this particular hazard’s in the approach lane.
On the front steps, we stare into twin, rough-hewn doors and Jimbo rings the bell again. “Like I said, Marty’s a soap-opera case,” he whispers. “Don’t say anything about his face. He’s sensitive about his face.”
I’ll tell you this. Jimbo’s not a good friend. He’s shallow and deceptive, and there’s a hole in him that will make him say anything. I’m not a good friend either. I am asleep in an essential way, and I will not begin to wake up for several years, not until I learn the meaning of the word loss, until I am in Acapulco and Ted hands me his favorite pistol, a chrome Super-25.
A woman finally answers the door in a UNLV Runnin’ Rebels T-shirt she’s adorned with glitter and spangles. She is clearly not happy to see us. I’m six foot four. Jimbo has no neck, and he’s holding a box labeled LIVE ANIMALS POISONOUS.
It takes her three full seconds to place Jimbo, then she turns and walks away.
We let ourselves into a room carpeted in cream wall-towall, with a black pumice fireplace and a ranch-style bar made from dark wood and warbled green glass. There is an elaborate seventies intercom system, with talk stations on every wall. Jimbo heads straight for a Wurlitzer and works its silent keys. “We used to play Ozzy on this,” he says. The walls are covered with photos of Marty, blond-haired, blue-eyed: Marty in a football uniform, Marty in a powder-blue prom cravat, Marty midair in front of a white ‘66 Mustang, which it turns out is the crash vehicle in question.
The Marty that rounds the corner, though, is hard to look at. He is tall, slightly stooped, with long jet hair that curtains his face. One eye points down and in a bit, making him seem half interested in something just beyond the tip of his nose. He looks almost sad, which is not what I expected after all of Jimbo’s descriptions of the crash scene on our drive up—“They found the steering wheel in the tree, a fucking tree, man”—the amnesia’s peculiar effects—“He doesn’t even know his dad’s name but he walks right to his locker and wheels out the combo”—horrific surgeries—“The third time they sewed it on it stuck”—and high school dramas—“Tasha and I stood by him at the pep rallies; we were the only ones.”
Jimbo and Marty do an elaborate handshake that ends with a knuckle punch and slips into a last toke off an imaginary joint; “fff,” they inhale. There are a lot of “wow”s and “dude”s in their reunion, and after neither notices that I am standing right next to them, I imagine as sort of a joke that they walk off without speaking to me, which they do.
I follow clear carpet runners down the hall, where there are two white doors. I open the wrong one. Inside sits a boy of about fourteen. His swingarm desk lamp is on, and he leans back in a blue director’s chair, his feet up on the white laminated desk, reading a racing magazine. He looks at me, looks back at the page. But I know this chair, the way canvas webbing gathers under your shoulder blades after a certain amount of nothing. I know how long it takes your ankles to go numb from propping them on a desk like that. I see years of airplane models and electric cars, a thousand magazines read atop tiger print sheets, all the things anyone would see, if they’d just open the door.