“She’s an old soul,” the mother countered. Her psychic had told her that her daughter had had many previous incarnations and that her astral age wasn’t four, but four thousand, which made her older than her mother by a good seven hundred years. “In very real ways, I’m actually her daughter.”
The principal decided that Ophelia would probably benefit from getting out of the house for a few hours a day, and besides, the little girl was such a darling, already so beautiful, and so smart.
“I think we made a huge mistake sending you to that school,” Paqu would say years later when O was flunking virtually every class at Laguna High.
By that time, Paqu was in one of her conservative phases. And, by that time, Ophelia had changed her name to O and had started calling her mother Paqu.
But that was all later, and right then O was watching the boy water the flowers. At first she thought it was just like the gardener at home, but then she observed that the boy wasn’t holding a hose, but something else; then she heard a short, sharp shriek and a teacher ran over and grabbed the boy.
“John,” the teacher said. “Our private parts are what?”
John didn’t answer.
“ Private, ” the teacher answered for him. “Now zip up your jeans and go play.”
“I was just watering the flowers,” John said.
O thought that was very fun, that this magical boy could water the plants all by himself.
“What’s that boy’s name?” she asked when the teacher came over to her.
“That’s John.”
“Chon,” O mispronounced, and then got up to go look for the magical boy who, penis safely returned to his jeans, had wandered around toward the back fence searching for an escape route.
“Chon! Chon! Chon!” O hollered, wandering around in search of him. “Chon, play with me!”
The other kids quickly picked up the chant.
“Chon! Chon! Chon!”
The name stuck.
O became his shadow, followed him around like a baby duckling, a real pest, but it wasn’t long before Chon learned to put up with her, to become her protector, even to like her a little. Chon wasn’t particularly social, he didn’t “play well with others,” preferred to be alone, so the teachers were glad to see him make a connection.
O adored him.
The problem was that he disappeared from time to time-sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week-and then he’d be back at school again.
“Where you been, Chon?” she’d ask him.
Chon would make up fantastic stories for her:
He was out fishing and had been captured by pirates; elves who lived in the canyon took him for a trip to their secret world; aliens from another galaxy flew him into outer space and back again. Chon took the girl to China, to Africa, to Mars and the Mountains of the Moon, and he was her magic boy.
Then, one day, he disappeared for good.
When she realized that he wasn’t coming back, O cried all night.
Her mother consoled her with the words “Men don’t stay.”
O already knew that.
33
“So you’re saying, what?” she asks Chon now. “No?”
“No, I’m saying not now.”
“What a totally wussy answer,” she says.
“I’m a total wuss.”
She backs off.
“Okay,” she says, “you missed your chance, Chonny boy. That was it.”
Chon smiles. “Got it.”
34
It’s funny Chon doesn’t talk much, because he loves words and word origins.
He even knows the etymology of the word “etymology.”
(Google it.)
But O gets that you protect what you love and hold it close. Defending his reticence one day, Chon posited a question to them “Words,” he said, “are:
(a) A means of communication
(b) A means of mis communication
(c) Tools
(d) Weapons
(e) All of the above.”
Ben answered (a), O answered (d)
(she is her mother’s daughter),
Chon answered
(f) It doesn’t matter.
Because there are things he will not talk about. Things he has seen, things he has done in IraqandAfghanistan. Things you don’t burden other people with, memories that you try to prevent from overwhelming your brain and your nervous system, but that you can still feel on your skin. Movies that your mind privately screens on the inside of your eyelids.
These are things that you do not put into words.
They are ineffable.
Therefore, to fill the sad silence — underscored by O’s chant of I hate this trip I hate this trip I hate this trip — on the ride to John Wayne-Orange County Airport (you cannot make this shit up) Chon goes neo-Spiro Agnew on the subject of neo-hippies.
35
Chon thinks that neo-hippies are grungy, pasty-faced-from-vegan-diets (“Eat a fucking cheeseburger, Casper”), patchouli-oil-stinking, Birkenstock-wearing, clogging up sidewalks playing hacky sack (why don’t they save syllables and just call it a dirtbag), leaning their crappy single-gear bicycles against the doors of Starbucks, where they order Tazo green tea and borrow other people’s laptops to check their e-mail, sitting there for hours and never leave a freaking tip, doing semi-naked yoga in parks so other people have to look at their pale, emaciated bodies, parasites.
Chon wishes Southern California would secede from the rest of the state so it could pass a law sending any white guy with dreadlocks to a concentration camp.
“Where would the camp be?” Ben asks him.
This is known as “egging him on.”
“I don’t know,” Chon mutters, still pissed. “Somewhere off the fifteen.”
The problem (okay, one problem) with building concentration camps in Southern California, Ben thinks, is that contractors would trip all over each other trying to rig the barbed-wire bid. Also that you have a governor whose accent is, well…
… uhhhh…
“Of course,” Chon mumbles, “I suppose liberals would block it.”
Chon also hates liberals.
The only liberal he doesn’t hate is Ben.
(This is known as the Ben Exemption.)
Liberals, Chon will opine when he’s on a rant-and he’s on one now — are people who love their enemies more than their friends, prefer anyone else’s culture to their own, are guilty of success but unashamed of failure, despise profit and punish achievement.
The men are dickless, sackless, self-castrated eunuchs cowed into shame of their own masculinity by joyless, anger-filled shrews consumed with bitter envy at the material possessions,
not to mention multiple orgasms, of their conservative sisters (“You should have stopped him buying The Fountainhead, ” Ben tells O.
“Who knew he was in the fiction section?”)
Liberals took a pretty decent country and
Fucked It Up to the point where kids can’t read Huckleberry Finn or play dodgeball — dodgeball, that perfectly Darwinian game meant to ensure the survival of the fittest because the others are too perpetually concussed to propagate — and any dune surfer with a grudge feels he can fly planes into our buildings without fear of the Big One being dropped on Mecca like it should have been five seconds after the towers came down (Nancy Reagan would have pressed her husband’s finger on the button for him and turned the Saudi peninsula into the glass factory it deserves to be)
— except that liberals want to be loved.
Ben disagrees The liberals in the California State Legislature would not block a bill creating concentration camps as long as they got campaign contributions from the concrete manufacturers, the drivers hauling the inmates through the gates were unionized, and their trucks had the requisite minimum MPG standards and used the commuter lanes.
Ben knows California would be zapping guys at the pace of the Texas Versus Florida Bush Brothers Sibling Rivalry if the electric chair were solar powered.
“They don’t use Sparky anymore,” Chon tells him. “It’s lethal injection.”