“Mmm … zombie brain,” Aisha says while chewing, turning her zombie killer into an actual zombie cannibal by using a deep, funny voice, and it’s as good a time as any.
“And scene!” I yell from the ground where I’m lying. I leap up, and we turn and bow. There are about fifty people watching. Some of them applaud. A lot of them don’t. Many just walk away. A few of the applauders approach the tin can and throw in change. A few even give dollar bills. We thank everyone and soon everyone is done giving.
We count our money. $22.74. We worked our asses off for $22.74. That’s not even close to enough to pay for the car repair.
“Shit,” I say.
Aisha has a better attitude. “Hey. We do that eight times today, we have ourselves a car and a little bit of money for food.”
She’s right. Yeah. We can make this work.
We go again, and we start to fine-tune our skills. Aisha finds certain characters she can do really well — a domineering, hypocritical man of God who keeps making up stuff in the Bible, for one — and I work on a falsetto I use for a baby character who believes everything that is said to him. The baby accepts all the made-up stuff, and then adds insane details to the man of God’s crazy claims, saying, “It’s in the Bible.”
The money starts to roll in, and each show we do better than the last one. About the fourth time we do the scene, I remember we have the Porcupine of Truth just sitting there. I grab her and we start this improv where Aisha goes up to heaven and I’m the gatekeeper — the Porcupine of Truth. I make the porcupine male and give him a game show host’s voice, and I ask Aisha embarrassing questions. Then we riff on the audience, who we pretend are former child stars who are now dead. I point at random people and call them Michael Jackson and River Phoenix and things like that. People just eat it up, and after that show, we change our name to The Porcupines of Truth.
I keep a count of our cash, and by the time we’ve done our fifth show, we have enough money to get the Neon. But it’s only noon, and we can make more. And truly, we could use more money. So I ask Aisha if it’s okay if we keep going, and she’s game.
We’re both on an adrenaline high when we finish up our fifteenth and final performance of the day around six p.m. We count up our money.
Holy crap balls, Reno. We’ve made $467. I count it several times because I am so amazed. I take two hundred and put it in my pocket, and I give Aisha the rest, knowing she’ll have to pay for the car. She fans her face with the cash.
We find out how to get to the auto repair shop by bus, and when we get there, our car is ready. As Aisha pays the man, I’m glowing. I feel like a new person. From the extra bounce in Aisha’s step, I can tell she feels the same.
IT’S A THREE-AND-A-HALF-HOUR drive to San Francisco, so we spend the night in a trailer at the end of a goat path, thanks to Javy Sanchez and his girlfriend, Jenny Yang — twentysomethings who take us in through surfingsofas.com. They’re cool, but we’re exhausted, so we go to bed early.
The next morning, we’re back in the car, and we know we’re officially in California when we see actual trees. A smattering of pines are a welcome sight after so much brown in Nevada, and soon the hills are illuminated, golden. I think, Golden State. Yes.
There’s this palpable feeling of victory in the car. I think some of it is because we’re almost at our destination, and some of it is because we figured out how to solve a major problem and pay for car repairs on our own. It’s like I’ve just found out that I can take care of me, after seventeen years of wishing someone else would. And some of it is because, let’s face it: After barren Nevada, California looks so insanely beautiful.
Aisha must be enjoying the beauty too, because she says, “There’s a line in The Color Purple by Alice Walker that says, ‘I think it pisses God off if you walk past the color purple in a field somewhere without noticing it.’ ”
I snort. “Far be it for me to want to piss the Big Man in the Sky off.”
Aisha shrugs, and we go back to listening to Haley Reinhart on the stereo.
“You think it’s possible that there actually is a God?” she asks.
I laugh. “I think agnostic dyslexics lie awake at night, wondering if there is a dog.”
She laughs a little. Something about the way she asked the question makes me think about how far we’ve come since Montana. Because that isn’t even a possibility one of us would have considered four states ago. It takes me awhile to come up with a real answer rather than a snarky one.
“I don’t know, but if there is, I don’t think it’s a man in the sky or anything,” I say finally. “That doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t make sense that he knows all. I mean, how could God or whatever know all the data about each one of us, all seven billion humans on the planet?”
“True,” Aisha says. “But … I mean, I know I get pissed about religion and all. But it’s hard to imagine that everything comes down to chance. Like, if I didn’t meet you in the zoo that day — and how random was that — I wouldn’t be here.”
“So God decreed it? That we meet at the zoo?”
“I’m just saying,” she says. “Can you imagine your life if we didn’t meet?”
I pull my leg hair, hard. “No,” I say. “I can’t.”
We’re cruising through California toward the coast, possibly about to find my long-lost grandfather, who was barely on my radar two weeks ago. There’s no way I’m here if my mom didn’t take me to the zoo, if I didn’t say just the right thing to get Aisha’s attention. My mom had never, ever taken me to the zoo in New York. Why that day? I had never, ever managed to say an intelligent thing to a beautiful girl before. So what are the odds of all that?
And if I’m not here? Where would I be if I was not here? I shiver. It’s unimaginable. Being here with Aisha is everything.
“So? You think it’s possible? There actually is a God? Not like the judgmental one from the Bible. But — something?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I mean. I really, really don’t know.”
“Maybe people can’t know,” Aisha says after a lengthy silence.
I have to stop thinking about this, because it makes my brain hurt. “I guess I’d say it’s hard to know what’s true,” I say. “It’s complicated. But I still put my faith in the Porcupine of Truth.”
Aisha accelerates around a truck that is in the right lane, its blinkers on. “I’m no longer feeling the porcupine,” she says.
I say, “That sentence has never been said before, ever.”