Chapter 4.
1982 – Before the night of the Quaalude
It was the era of the deLorean with a car phone the size of a loaf of bread. The era of payphones and beepers. Reagan, E.T., Rocky III, poisoned Tylenol, and Love Canal.
I lived all of it and none of it. I looked at the world through a peephole in the front door, outside to inside. Everything was tiny, far away, and in full focus.
My friend Lynn was the lens. She was a card-carrying groupie. She’d gone to Carlton Prep, same as me, and she was, unfortunately, dumb as a box of rocks. The product of two beautiful, stupid people who made a ton of money for being beautiful despite their stupidity.
She was entertaining as hell though. Connected. Older. Fully-sexed. I didn’t want to be her, but I knew I had to go through her stage in life. And she needed me because she had a habit of getting her ass in trouble, and I had a habit of creating ways to get her out of it.
The Breakwater Club used to be stuffy and traditional but had changed to a venue for hip Hollywood parties on weekends. They let you smoke anywhere outdoors, but not inside. Which was annoying, especially on March nights when it could get down to fifty degrees by the beach.
Lynn struck a wooden match, hands shaking. She leaned on a concrete planter and cupped her hands over the flame. The corner of her cigarette lit. She sucked hard to pull the cherry. Behind her, the ocean crashed and the sand darkened close to the waterline.
“So fucking annoying,” she said. “Like second-hand smoke ever killed anyone.”
The guy smoking next to her checked her out with a smart smile. She wore a tube top and a skirt so short that her underwear showed when the wind blew.
I took the lit cigarette from her and pressed the tip to my own, filling my lungs with delicious nicotine. Yoni and Fred were inside.
“Are they both in there?” I asked.
“Yeah. The two of them. The hot ones.”
That would be Strat and Indiana. Vocals and guitar, respectively.
And hot, for sure. Lynn and Yoni had been chasing them around for a week. Lynn had taught me so much about how to get through doors. How to ask person A for a favor because they knew person B.
I took it all back. She wasn’t dumb as a box of rocks. She was dumb as a box of fox.
“I think tonight’s the night,” she said softly, leaning into me. She held up three fingers and twisted them around in a bastardization of “fingers crossed.” Code for a threesome, which the two boys were famous for and what she had been trying to get herself involved in for a week.
“It’s, like, fifty percent more romantic,” I said.
She blinked. Didn’t get it. I sighed.
“Yoni’s in for girl-on-girl,” she said. “I’d ask you but—”
“No thanks. Not tonight.”
Not yet. I wasn’t ready for that kind of thing. I’d done some low-level groping, but nothing close to the intensity of what Lynn chased after.
Yoni poked her head out. Her furry blond bob was held up with a big lace bow, and she wore fingerless, elbow-length gloves with dozens of silver bracelets at the wrist.
“Lynn,” she said sotto.
Half the people on the smoking deck turned at the sound, then back to what they were doing.
“What?” Lynn asked.
We stepped to the door, and Yoni came out.
“They have a suite upstairs. Talking about a poker game. You got cash?”
“Yeah,” Lynn answered.
“I’m in,” I said.
Yoni’s gaze sizzled over me, and I realized my error. I was going to be a buzzkilling interloper.
I stamped my cigarette out under my short boot. “Never mind. I’m going to take a walk. See you guys later.”
I didn’t wait for a response. If Lynn wanted to screw one or both of those guys, I could get a cab home. I didn’t go to the street though. I went down the wooden steps to the beach. My feet felt the cold of the sand even through my boots. It had rained earlier in the day, and my steps made half moons of darker sand visible in the floodlights. I walked to the waterline out of reach of the light, not looking back, and sat with my knees to my chest, hugging myself against the cold.
The light disappeared and the night took over a few feet from the line where the sand got flat and wet, streaked with the movement of the tide and punctuated with intestinal piles of seaweed.
I didn’t have any feelings one way or the other about the orgy. I wasn’t interested. But I liked poker.
I dug my heels in the sand. Fuck this. I didn’t know what to do with my body, with my place in the world, with my family. I was trapped in all of it. The water broke, foaming and hissing, a few feet from me. I didn’t know if the tide was rising or receding. Didn’t matter.
I didn’t know what I believed in.
Desperation defined the lives of my friends. They were desperate to fit in, to make their families happy, or to decide who they were immediately. I didn’t understand the hunger for approval or validation. The backstabbing and garment-rending over people with dicks made me uncomfortable. Men motivated tears and anguish that seemed unjustifiable. Weird. Out of character. I had friends who were normal one minute then started to have a freaking embolism when their bodies changed.
I felt it too. But we all took the same courses in school. We’d all known it was coming. Why act as if it was a shock?
I’d backed away slowly until I didn’t have friends who couldn’t cope. No one knew what to do with me. I didn’t even know what to do with me. I knew I didn’t fit in, and I didn’t care. Maybe it was my version of rich girl ennui. Maybe I was just too smart, too good at too many things. Or too acerbic to make those warm girly relationships. I depended on no one. Didn’t feel useful.
I felt as though I had more going on in my head than most people, then I thought I was out of my mind for believing that. So I reached out, trying to make more friends. Then I realized how empty relationships were. I realized I really did have more going on in my head than most people, and I started the cycle over.
Lynn had disappeared into the club, on her way to the suite to have a threesome or foursome, and I was left on the beach. I could have made it a fivesome, and why not? What would be the difference either way?
Screwing one or ten people didn’t need to be an earth-shatteringly meaningful experience, but I should know why I wanted to besides boredom.
“It’s not ennui then,” I said to myself.
My face squeezed tight, reacting to having sand thrown in it before my brain fully registered that two shirtless men had run past me, kicking up sand. They dove into the freezing surf.
God damn. Los Angeles was pretty warm in March, all things being equal, but the water was fucking cold.
They swam to the place where the waves rose cleanly and treaded water, looking toward the horizon. When a big one rolled in, curling at the top at just the right moment, they flattened their bodies and rode it in. They got lost in the white froth, then they came up sitting. They high fived. The wave they had ridden continued past them, past the boundary of wet sand, to the dry line six inches from my boots.
Tide was coming in.
One of the men came toward me, pants heavy with water, hair dripping, short beard glistening in the lights of the boardwalk. “Got a towel?”
“No.”
“Fucking cold.”
“Shoulda thought of that before you went in.”
Behind me, the other guy snapped a white hotel towel off the sand and gave it a shake before putting it around his shoulders. He had music tattooed all over his chest. That would be Stratford Gilliam. Unbelievable in person. Even in the dark.
“She’s got a point,” he said and darted back to the club.
The guy with the ginger beard was Indiana McCaffrey, and he was supposed to be fucking Lynn and Yoni. Instead, he was standing over me, shivering.
“I have fire,” I said, handing him my cigarettes and lighter.
He took them and sat next to me. “Thanks.” He pulled out two cigarettes, handed me one, and lit both with trembling hands.
“You should probably get inside.”
“I like being cold.”
“Sure. That’s why people move here.”
He blew out a stream of smoke. It took a hairpin turn two inches from his lips when the sea breeze sent it behind him.
“You from here?” he asked.
“Los Angeles born and raised. Fermented in Pacific brine and air-dried in the California sun.” I flipped my hair so the wind blew it out of my face. He was more beautiful in person than in any magazine. I didn’t know how I got to be sitting on the beach with Indiana McCaffrey, but once the cigarette was done, he was probably going to split. Every second counted. “Your Southern accent’s mostly gone. You could be a newscaster.”
He nodded, or he could have been shivering. “My father didn’t like me sounding like a hick, so he beat the accent out of me.”
“What else did he beat out of you?”
He glanced at me. “Besides the shit?”
His pupils were dilated eight-balls with blue rings. He was on some sensory-enhancing drug. Quaaludes maybe. Supposedly the blue capsules made you horny and happy enough to melt the awkwardness out of the threesomes. That’s what Lynn said. She got blued whenever she could. I kept away from blues. I didn’t need to be any hornier or happier.
The top layer of his hair had dried, and it fluttered in the wind as he looked down, rolling the tip of his cigarette against the edge of the sand.
“Shit’s the first thing to go,” I said.
He smiled, looking up at me with a cutting appreciation. As if I’d touched him in a way I hadn’t even tried. Asked him something real. I’d just been fucking around, but I’d hit a nerve, so I didn’t shrug it off and ask something different or dismiss the question.
“Came a day,” he said, putting the filter to his lips. “Came a day I stopped feeling anything good or bad. He’d beaten that out of me good. I like or don't like things. But everything else?” He flattened his hand and cut the air straight across our eyeline.
“I get it,” I said. “I have the same thing. No beatings though.”
“Everything’s better with a beating.”
I laughed, and he laughed with me. For a guy who had no feelings, I kind of liked him.
“I saw you play the KitKat Lounge the other night,” I said. “And the party after.”
He twisted his body to face me and looked me in the eye. “I knew I’d seen you somewhere.”
“I didn’t want you to think I was pretending to not know who you were.”
“Fair enough.”
“But you don’t have to stay here to be polite. It’s cold.”
He shrugged. The shivering had slowed, and his skin had dried. “My friend’s upstairs with a couple of girls, and I’m not in the mood tonight.”
“I think those girls might be friends of mine.”
He turned back to the ocean, mimicking my posture: knees bent, elbows wrapped around the peaks of his legs, shoulders hunched. “You want to go up there, it’s room 432.”
“I was on the beach to avoid that scene.”
“Why’s that?”
“Wanted to see if you two idiots would get hypothermia.”
He turned to me again, chin at his bicep, hair bending over one dilated blue eye. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen. Why?”
“We’re getting a poker game together at midnight. You in?”
I had nowhere to be until morning. And because I didn’t give away my hand with my voice or body, I was very good at poker.
“I’m in.”