Her father was Jewish. He was a trash
man. He drove a truck in which he accumulated garbage and then disposed of it
somewhere at the end of the day. He lived in the Valley, one or two cities from
Burbank. I forgot which one. There are many cities in the San Fernando Valley.
Her mother was Italian, and never worked outside the home. She was the mother of the kids, three of them, and she was the wife of the father. It was the mother’s idea to come live in Hollywood and the father agreed. They both loved movies—wanted to be in them too. They came from a town in New Jersey that has an American Indian name, but I have forgotten. They never liked rock and roll but they liked swing and danced a bit at home, with friends, and even went out to a few local clubs. The father had been a trash man in Jersey too, and when I met him, he was planning to retire from the trash. He loved the trash. This is not to put him down. He once said to me, “Where would I be without the trash?” He said “the” trash. He liked to kid around. And he once said to me, “Don’t ever call me ‘mister.’”
They owned the house in the Valley. There were apricot trees in the backyard and a pool. They first lived in the City of Hollywood, which was where Janie met Dawn a long time ago when they were kids. Dawn was an L.A. native and was as pretty as her name. She was a blonde and a contrast to Janie who was brown haired. Dawn was short and Janie tall. Dawn’s mother was Jewish but Dawn would tell you French. She was a French Jewess. “My mother’s from France.” She fought in the Resistance against the Nazis. Dawn’s mother normally would spend half the year in a mental institution. I met her only once and we smoked and had espresso coffee and while she spoke about everything, I tried to act much more sophisticated than I was by asking all kinds of complicated questions I couldn’t properly formulate; a form of nervous, failed tribute to her who knew so much and had endured.
Dawn and her mother lived together in an apartment in Hollywood. The apartment was large and the living room had lots of space. I liked the place right away. It was arranged with taste. I’m no good at describing this sort of thing. I was there and even slept there once. I’d like to say it had a European design and feel. But that’s just something that comes out of me by association; Europe, France, Dawn (who liked European movies and was very stylish, the opposite of Janie). Dawn’s mother had been a nurse for the Resistance and when the fascists came into Paris she had to be evacuated and ended up in London, or somewhere in England. Then she migrated to the US after the war was over and got a job in the L.A. Postal Service. She wished for Dawn to be a movie actress. Dawn thought she was a little too short to be one and worried about this her whole adult life. She spent a lot of time acting snooty in an antique shop on Melrose where she was the manager.
Of the three kids who came from Jersey, I met only Janie. Her brother and her sister lived in Del Mar where they worked with horses.
It was a crazy man, who passed himself off as a communist revolutionary, who introduced me to Janie. He had a trimmed full beard and longish hair and wore a black beret. He had been in junior college for six years and a semester. And he invited me to a party in Hollywood and introduced us. “This is Janie,” he said. And then he whispered to me, “She’s been in an institution.”
He wouldn’t have said that if she hadn’t rejected him in the past. She was pretty and that made it difficult for me to imagine her as loony. And if she were, it was okay with me. I was very lonely and had come to the party hoping I’d meet someone who would pay a little attention to me. The crazy guy, who worked as a stock clerk at the supermarket near where I lived, had told me he had been trying to get Janie to accept him as her boyfriend but she had refused many times. So that was okay with me too. Maybe she wouldn’t refuse me. I thought she looked fine and natural. Her teeth were bright and looked perfect to me. She looked like a cowgirl with jeans and a sleeveless blouse. A Hollywood cowgirl.
The crazy guy liked to be called “El Che” but I’m not going to do that. I called him “El Loco.” He loved Pink Floyd and thought they were revolutionary like him. He couldn’t stop talking about Pink Floyd. He was very proud of himself for knowing all about Pink Floyd’s musical work. I was not a fan but at the party I had to listen to him talk about them because I didn’t know anyone else. Luckily he found someone who was also a fan of the band and he went over to talk to him and left Janie and me alone.
“I clean people’s houses and I never went to college,” Janie said to me.
“I’m a shipping clerk.” I said, “And I live in a room in a rundown place called The Venice Hotel on Venice Blvd.”
She smiled nervously, but not really. I don’t really know. I was as nervous as I think she was.
“I don’t like parties,” she said. “I came because of him.” She pointed at El Loco who was not very far from us.
“Do you have a car?” I asked. The loco guy had given me a ride.
“Yeah,” she said. “Do you want a ride?”
“No. I was just asking.”
“I can give you a ride, if you want.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to go home,” she said, “to that fancy hotel?”
We both smiled. My smile was more like laughter, a release, I’m sure.
We left and didn’t say goodbye to El Loco.
She took me straight to the rooming house. The abruptness made me lose my sense of sequence. And then she said goodbye and drove away.
I used to sleep with books and it was the only thing I had to look forward to. But it was Saturday in the evening when I would normally look for human contact.
I sat on the bed and waited for my favorite program on the radio. What I was thinking about, loneliness and emptiness, gradually took a background to the good music coming out of the radio. The name of the show was the name of a song I liked very much, “Land of a Thousand Dances.” And I danced myself to sleep.
Janie came by with Dawn the next day and surprised me. No one had ever visited me. We were introduced and became inseparable, the three of us. Suddenly I was privileged, going around with two pretty chicks whose homes I could visit any time.
I met Dawn’s father. He was Italian and was a retired electrician who still walked around with his tools. He lived alone in an apartment but was soon moving to live with his Armenian girlfriend. He gave me some old LP’s of Italian crooners and lounge singers and Christmas songs. “You can throw them in the garbage later,” Dawn said to me. I did, but I felt guilty. Though I didn’t like the music, there was something authentically corny about it. But what could I do? I had educated myself, unknowingly, in an elitist hipness that took no prisoners and in the end I thought, “It does deserve to be in the trash.” And, besides, I didn’t own an LP player.
Every time the three of us met it took a while to decide in whose car we would all pile in and drive. Both girls were very practical, especially Janie, which is probably why we usually chose her car.
That guy, El Loco? Dawn accepted him as her boyfriend. That was terrible and difficult for me to accept. Dawn was coquettish and it didn't take me long to focus on her and not Janie, and Janie noticed and warned Dawn, “He’s mine.” I liked them both. Dawn was the more educated one and didn’t waste words and could talk about the contents of books. She was also interested in the history of L.A. and California and was dying to take a tour of the city to discover all the Mexican influences. They had thought I was Mexican but were not disappointed when I told them I knew enough of the history and culture to pull it off. And off we went on two consecutive weekends and I pointed out all I could. It was fun sitting next to two pretty and interesting white girls. I think they thought I was a little interesting too, maybe; Dawn constantly asking me about New York and the Dominican Republic. We enjoyed each other’s company. But Dawn going out with El Loco, I didn’t like it. How intelligent could she be if she enjoyed the company of a guy who could only talk about one rock band? In my car and in my room I almost always had Latin music playing and the girls loved it and wanted me to teach them to dance salsa.
On her birthday Dawn bought herself a pie. I don’t remember what kind. But she drove to my place and knocked on my door holding the pie in front of her. I let her in and immediately felt satisfied having her there. It was her birthday and she was bringing me a pie. I told her to set it on a pile of books on the floor. She said no and held the pie in front of her. “Get ready,” she said. “I came to get you. Everyone’s already in my apartment. You’re going to teach us how to salsa.”
Inside her European car I asked, “Why a pie and not a cake?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “A pie just felt right.” And then she said, “Do you love me?”
Just as Janie had done the first night, Dawn, with her question, had just tripped me and I was now suddenly out of my natural balance and inside a fog of silence until she broke it with, “Do you think Mexican women feel inferior?”
“To what?”
“You know... white women...”
“There are white women who feel inferior to other white women. And there are Mexican women who feel superior to other Mexican women and white women.”
Then the words “Janie was once institutionalized” glided out of her mouth and fell on my lap. I swept them away and looked straight ahead.
This was the night I slept at Dawn’s place. El Loco was there and again spoke of nothing but Pink Floyd and at some point in the night had Dawn, Janie, and me “shut up” so that we could listen to “the great Floyd.” He had brought some albums to Dawn’s apartment, got everybody high with marijuana, turned off the lights and put on one of the records. Dawn couldn’t stand it after two or three minutes. Janie said it wasn’t fair having to listen “to that.” I liked it but said nothing. El Loco couldn’t take the pressure from Dawn, who was very demanding, and stopped the music.
El Loco fancied himself an impersonator of some kind and began to mimic each of us. He did me and Janie and we laughed hysterically, but he made Dawn cry when he did her; and she ran into the bedroom. He followed her and they stayed inside the room for the rest of the night.
The pie and the salsa were not mentioned again.
With Janie the conversation had to go in the direction of movies and celebrities. I did the best I could but was more interested in getting inside of her. Her woman's instinct made her brace herself to push me back. We were on the sofa. I had kissed her before but this time was an open struggle. She sensed my intentions and fought back like a good “teenage” girl. Every tug was beautiful and brought me closer to her, emotionally closer. She was thin and I maneuvered well. She stood up as though she was desperately going to run from me but she didn’t. We embraced and she busied herself in pretending she was still fighting and I tugged at her jeans until they were down. She continued to “fight” me until I was all the way in and when she lost her balance I fell on top of her on the sofa. I was in deep now and she allowed me to finish without a struggle. She got up in a panic when she noticed the blood on both her thighs, and ran into the bathroom.
She and Dawn had kept their ages secret until El Loco, one day at the supermarket, exposed them and told me all three of them had been born the same year. Janie was thirty years old.
She came to my room the next day and asked me if I was going to marry her. “We should go to Tijuana,” she said.
“For our honeymoon?”
She laughed. She was shy and easy. Nature had been nice to her, her teeth sparkled, and she said she liked my smile. I wondered if it would work, me and her together.
She came to see me at work the next day. She had called first and said she was bringing lunch. She beeped the horn of her car. I had a tiny office next to the entrance and I heard her calling. I stepped out into a beautiful sight. Sun, her father’s very old Chevy, and her wholesome American smile. I slid gently inside the car. Her wardrobe consisted of jeans and sleeveless shirts. “I’m wearing a dress,” she said. But she looked the same to me except that now I could see the little girl from Jersey; the little girl who would become a cowgirl, a Hollywood cowgirl. I wondered how far I should go with her; how far did she want to go; how far could we go? She reached back and brought to my lap a tray covered with a striped heavy cloth. She lifted the cover with a flourish, “Ta-daa!” I saw and smelled fried chicken, mashed potatoes, carrots and peas; and of course lemonade in a thermos. “We don’t have to go to Tijuana if you don’t want to,” she said. “And if we do, do you think they’ll give you trouble coming back to America?”
Tijuana and marriage were quickly forgotten. More important to her was this one issue: she stared upfront as I began to eat and then she asked, “Do you hate your parents?”
She was disappointed when I said no. “Do you know you will never be free until you kill them?”
She meant figuratively and explained. Not enough to convince me, of course. She invited me to her house in the Valley that evening.
Her parents were not home and she forced herself on me, and I understood how women must feel when men do it to them. But she did not depart from her feminine role. I understood her aggression. She was making up for lost time. Because she was pretty and fragile, I managed to satisfy her. Something I probably had not done the first time.
And she came back for more. She appeared and reappeared at my room and at work and at the library. Sex was not important to her, and I cannot say I was a great lover. I was self-absorbed, projecting everything I had into an undefined future. She had no visions, no precedents; she lived in the immediate, always re-dreaming the same dreams. As she vehemently came at me, I desperately wanted to get away.
She called me at work two or three times a day. I stopped answering the phone. She used to come up to my room. I spoke to her and wanted to get inside her mind. But she wouldn’t let me in. She fixed her eyes at me and smiled. This scene repeated itself in my room constantly. She sat on the bed, I sat on the chair. As an experiment, one time I stared back at her for a while. Quietly and without moving much of my body, I lit a cigarette and blew smoke into her face. She jumped at me like a tigress and pinned me down on the floor. I put up no resistance. She laughed and said, “I saw that in a movie once!”
The next day, from work, I called Dawn.
“I told you she had been institutionalized.”
I don’t know why I felt Dawn had betrayed me.
Maybe two, maybe three months passed and Janie was not around. She stopped coming to my room, and she didn’t call me at work. I felt something for her but I was relieved.
One day the receptionist at work came over to me and said, “Someone is asking for you.” And then she added, “I don’t think you know this person.” But she left it up to me to go see who it was.
Janie was behind the door, too shy to dare go inside. She had lost weight. She looked older. Her face was dirtied and bruised. She looked as if she had spent weeks living in the streets. She was wearing the dress she wore that beautiful day we lunched in her father’s Chevy. She had a sack over her shoulder which she held with her right hand. Later, in the car, I noticed it was a pillow case.
“Janie... what happened?”
She was not coherent in her answer; I don’t think she wanted to be. But within her mumbling she said something very cute and almost smiled, “I hit myself with the door.”
She was obviously not driving so I asked her if she wanted me to drive her home. She was totally freaked out about her parents. She said they were after her and they had called the police on her. “Let’s go to Mexico,” she said, as if her life depended on it. I was out on the sidewalk with her and walking slowly, prodding her to follow me to the parking lot. “Take me to my sister’s in Del Mar.”
“Okay.”
I felt some relief when she entered the car. She held on tight to her sack. She was frightened. I tried my best to reassure her when she suspected I was taking her home to her parents.
On the freeway going down to the Valley, she was sure I was taking her home and she protested and threatened to jump out of the moving car. I took the right lane and slowed down. Her protest intensified and she demanded to be taken to her sister’s house in Del Mar. “I will,” I said. In this hyper state she was still shy and fragile like the make-believe cowgirl she seemed to want to be.
When we reached her street she panicked, screaming that her parents were going to send her to jail. She pushed the door open, I stepped on the breaks, and she jumped out of the car.
I parked on the curb and hurried towards her house. She was ahead of me, looking back as if being pursued by an enemy. For a second it looked like she was seeking refuge at her home. But she crossed the street and didn’t come near. I knocked on the door. She watched me and we both waited a very long time. From across the street Janie yelled, “They’re watching movies in the movie room.” That room was in the back of the house, her father had built it. The mother opened the door and said nothing. I said, “Janie seems to be ill.” The mother said nothing and I entered. The father was standing there. They looked like embarrassed children. The parents could see Janie standing across the street, holding her pillow case with some of her belongings over her shoulder, less frightened now. “Come home!” the mother yelled. I don’t remember what Janie answered but with few words the two seemed to have established a dialogue. I felt reassured and walked out of the house.
One year later I received a card from Janie. The card was the kind anyone could buy at Hollywood Blvd. A great Hollywood movie was illustrated on it. And she challenged me, with humor, to answer this question: What year in 1939 was this movie made?
Her mother was Italian, and never worked outside the home. She was the mother of the kids, three of them, and she was the wife of the father. It was the mother’s idea to come live in Hollywood and the father agreed. They both loved movies—wanted to be in them too. They came from a town in New Jersey that has an American Indian name, but I have forgotten. They never liked rock and roll but they liked swing and danced a bit at home, with friends, and even went out to a few local clubs. The father had been a trash man in Jersey too, and when I met him, he was planning to retire from the trash. He loved the trash. This is not to put him down. He once said to me, “Where would I be without the trash?” He said “the” trash. He liked to kid around. And he once said to me, “Don’t ever call me ‘mister.’”
They owned the house in the Valley. There were apricot trees in the backyard and a pool. They first lived in the City of Hollywood, which was where Janie met Dawn a long time ago when they were kids. Dawn was an L.A. native and was as pretty as her name. She was a blonde and a contrast to Janie who was brown haired. Dawn was short and Janie tall. Dawn’s mother was Jewish but Dawn would tell you French. She was a French Jewess. “My mother’s from France.” She fought in the Resistance against the Nazis. Dawn’s mother normally would spend half the year in a mental institution. I met her only once and we smoked and had espresso coffee and while she spoke about everything, I tried to act much more sophisticated than I was by asking all kinds of complicated questions I couldn’t properly formulate; a form of nervous, failed tribute to her who knew so much and had endured.
Dawn and her mother lived together in an apartment in Hollywood. The apartment was large and the living room had lots of space. I liked the place right away. It was arranged with taste. I’m no good at describing this sort of thing. I was there and even slept there once. I’d like to say it had a European design and feel. But that’s just something that comes out of me by association; Europe, France, Dawn (who liked European movies and was very stylish, the opposite of Janie). Dawn’s mother had been a nurse for the Resistance and when the fascists came into Paris she had to be evacuated and ended up in London, or somewhere in England. Then she migrated to the US after the war was over and got a job in the L.A. Postal Service. She wished for Dawn to be a movie actress. Dawn thought she was a little too short to be one and worried about this her whole adult life. She spent a lot of time acting snooty in an antique shop on Melrose where she was the manager.
Of the three kids who came from Jersey, I met only Janie. Her brother and her sister lived in Del Mar where they worked with horses.
It was a crazy man, who passed himself off as a communist revolutionary, who introduced me to Janie. He had a trimmed full beard and longish hair and wore a black beret. He had been in junior college for six years and a semester. And he invited me to a party in Hollywood and introduced us. “This is Janie,” he said. And then he whispered to me, “She’s been in an institution.”
He wouldn’t have said that if she hadn’t rejected him in the past. She was pretty and that made it difficult for me to imagine her as loony. And if she were, it was okay with me. I was very lonely and had come to the party hoping I’d meet someone who would pay a little attention to me. The crazy guy, who worked as a stock clerk at the supermarket near where I lived, had told me he had been trying to get Janie to accept him as her boyfriend but she had refused many times. So that was okay with me too. Maybe she wouldn’t refuse me. I thought she looked fine and natural. Her teeth were bright and looked perfect to me. She looked like a cowgirl with jeans and a sleeveless blouse. A Hollywood cowgirl.
The crazy guy liked to be called “El Che” but I’m not going to do that. I called him “El Loco.” He loved Pink Floyd and thought they were revolutionary like him. He couldn’t stop talking about Pink Floyd. He was very proud of himself for knowing all about Pink Floyd’s musical work. I was not a fan but at the party I had to listen to him talk about them because I didn’t know anyone else. Luckily he found someone who was also a fan of the band and he went over to talk to him and left Janie and me alone.
“I clean people’s houses and I never went to college,” Janie said to me.
“I’m a shipping clerk.” I said, “And I live in a room in a rundown place called The Venice Hotel on Venice Blvd.”
She smiled nervously, but not really. I don’t really know. I was as nervous as I think she was.
“I don’t like parties,” she said. “I came because of him.” She pointed at El Loco who was not very far from us.
“Do you have a car?” I asked. The loco guy had given me a ride.
“Yeah,” she said. “Do you want a ride?”
“No. I was just asking.”
“I can give you a ride, if you want.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to go home,” she said, “to that fancy hotel?”
We both smiled. My smile was more like laughter, a release, I’m sure.
We left and didn’t say goodbye to El Loco.
She took me straight to the rooming house. The abruptness made me lose my sense of sequence. And then she said goodbye and drove away.
I used to sleep with books and it was the only thing I had to look forward to. But it was Saturday in the evening when I would normally look for human contact.
I sat on the bed and waited for my favorite program on the radio. What I was thinking about, loneliness and emptiness, gradually took a background to the good music coming out of the radio. The name of the show was the name of a song I liked very much, “Land of a Thousand Dances.” And I danced myself to sleep.
Janie came by with Dawn the next day and surprised me. No one had ever visited me. We were introduced and became inseparable, the three of us. Suddenly I was privileged, going around with two pretty chicks whose homes I could visit any time.
I met Dawn’s father. He was Italian and was a retired electrician who still walked around with his tools. He lived alone in an apartment but was soon moving to live with his Armenian girlfriend. He gave me some old LP’s of Italian crooners and lounge singers and Christmas songs. “You can throw them in the garbage later,” Dawn said to me. I did, but I felt guilty. Though I didn’t like the music, there was something authentically corny about it. But what could I do? I had educated myself, unknowingly, in an elitist hipness that took no prisoners and in the end I thought, “It does deserve to be in the trash.” And, besides, I didn’t own an LP player.
Every time the three of us met it took a while to decide in whose car we would all pile in and drive. Both girls were very practical, especially Janie, which is probably why we usually chose her car.
That guy, El Loco? Dawn accepted him as her boyfriend. That was terrible and difficult for me to accept. Dawn was coquettish and it didn't take me long to focus on her and not Janie, and Janie noticed and warned Dawn, “He’s mine.” I liked them both. Dawn was the more educated one and didn’t waste words and could talk about the contents of books. She was also interested in the history of L.A. and California and was dying to take a tour of the city to discover all the Mexican influences. They had thought I was Mexican but were not disappointed when I told them I knew enough of the history and culture to pull it off. And off we went on two consecutive weekends and I pointed out all I could. It was fun sitting next to two pretty and interesting white girls. I think they thought I was a little interesting too, maybe; Dawn constantly asking me about New York and the Dominican Republic. We enjoyed each other’s company. But Dawn going out with El Loco, I didn’t like it. How intelligent could she be if she enjoyed the company of a guy who could only talk about one rock band? In my car and in my room I almost always had Latin music playing and the girls loved it and wanted me to teach them to dance salsa.
On her birthday Dawn bought herself a pie. I don’t remember what kind. But she drove to my place and knocked on my door holding the pie in front of her. I let her in and immediately felt satisfied having her there. It was her birthday and she was bringing me a pie. I told her to set it on a pile of books on the floor. She said no and held the pie in front of her. “Get ready,” she said. “I came to get you. Everyone’s already in my apartment. You’re going to teach us how to salsa.”
Inside her European car I asked, “Why a pie and not a cake?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “A pie just felt right.” And then she said, “Do you love me?”
Just as Janie had done the first night, Dawn, with her question, had just tripped me and I was now suddenly out of my natural balance and inside a fog of silence until she broke it with, “Do you think Mexican women feel inferior?”
“To what?”
“You know... white women...”
“There are white women who feel inferior to other white women. And there are Mexican women who feel superior to other Mexican women and white women.”
Then the words “Janie was once institutionalized” glided out of her mouth and fell on my lap. I swept them away and looked straight ahead.
This was the night I slept at Dawn’s place. El Loco was there and again spoke of nothing but Pink Floyd and at some point in the night had Dawn, Janie, and me “shut up” so that we could listen to “the great Floyd.” He had brought some albums to Dawn’s apartment, got everybody high with marijuana, turned off the lights and put on one of the records. Dawn couldn’t stand it after two or three minutes. Janie said it wasn’t fair having to listen “to that.” I liked it but said nothing. El Loco couldn’t take the pressure from Dawn, who was very demanding, and stopped the music.
El Loco fancied himself an impersonator of some kind and began to mimic each of us. He did me and Janie and we laughed hysterically, but he made Dawn cry when he did her; and she ran into the bedroom. He followed her and they stayed inside the room for the rest of the night.
The pie and the salsa were not mentioned again.
With Janie the conversation had to go in the direction of movies and celebrities. I did the best I could but was more interested in getting inside of her. Her woman's instinct made her brace herself to push me back. We were on the sofa. I had kissed her before but this time was an open struggle. She sensed my intentions and fought back like a good “teenage” girl. Every tug was beautiful and brought me closer to her, emotionally closer. She was thin and I maneuvered well. She stood up as though she was desperately going to run from me but she didn’t. We embraced and she busied herself in pretending she was still fighting and I tugged at her jeans until they were down. She continued to “fight” me until I was all the way in and when she lost her balance I fell on top of her on the sofa. I was in deep now and she allowed me to finish without a struggle. She got up in a panic when she noticed the blood on both her thighs, and ran into the bathroom.
She and Dawn had kept their ages secret until El Loco, one day at the supermarket, exposed them and told me all three of them had been born the same year. Janie was thirty years old.
She came to my room the next day and asked me if I was going to marry her. “We should go to Tijuana,” she said.
“For our honeymoon?”
She laughed. She was shy and easy. Nature had been nice to her, her teeth sparkled, and she said she liked my smile. I wondered if it would work, me and her together.
She came to see me at work the next day. She had called first and said she was bringing lunch. She beeped the horn of her car. I had a tiny office next to the entrance and I heard her calling. I stepped out into a beautiful sight. Sun, her father’s very old Chevy, and her wholesome American smile. I slid gently inside the car. Her wardrobe consisted of jeans and sleeveless shirts. “I’m wearing a dress,” she said. But she looked the same to me except that now I could see the little girl from Jersey; the little girl who would become a cowgirl, a Hollywood cowgirl. I wondered how far I should go with her; how far did she want to go; how far could we go? She reached back and brought to my lap a tray covered with a striped heavy cloth. She lifted the cover with a flourish, “Ta-daa!” I saw and smelled fried chicken, mashed potatoes, carrots and peas; and of course lemonade in a thermos. “We don’t have to go to Tijuana if you don’t want to,” she said. “And if we do, do you think they’ll give you trouble coming back to America?”
Tijuana and marriage were quickly forgotten. More important to her was this one issue: she stared upfront as I began to eat and then she asked, “Do you hate your parents?”
She was disappointed when I said no. “Do you know you will never be free until you kill them?”
She meant figuratively and explained. Not enough to convince me, of course. She invited me to her house in the Valley that evening.
Her parents were not home and she forced herself on me, and I understood how women must feel when men do it to them. But she did not depart from her feminine role. I understood her aggression. She was making up for lost time. Because she was pretty and fragile, I managed to satisfy her. Something I probably had not done the first time.
And she came back for more. She appeared and reappeared at my room and at work and at the library. Sex was not important to her, and I cannot say I was a great lover. I was self-absorbed, projecting everything I had into an undefined future. She had no visions, no precedents; she lived in the immediate, always re-dreaming the same dreams. As she vehemently came at me, I desperately wanted to get away.
She called me at work two or three times a day. I stopped answering the phone. She used to come up to my room. I spoke to her and wanted to get inside her mind. But she wouldn’t let me in. She fixed her eyes at me and smiled. This scene repeated itself in my room constantly. She sat on the bed, I sat on the chair. As an experiment, one time I stared back at her for a while. Quietly and without moving much of my body, I lit a cigarette and blew smoke into her face. She jumped at me like a tigress and pinned me down on the floor. I put up no resistance. She laughed and said, “I saw that in a movie once!”
The next day, from work, I called Dawn.
“I told you she had been institutionalized.”
I don’t know why I felt Dawn had betrayed me.
Maybe two, maybe three months passed and Janie was not around. She stopped coming to my room, and she didn’t call me at work. I felt something for her but I was relieved.
One day the receptionist at work came over to me and said, “Someone is asking for you.” And then she added, “I don’t think you know this person.” But she left it up to me to go see who it was.
Janie was behind the door, too shy to dare go inside. She had lost weight. She looked older. Her face was dirtied and bruised. She looked as if she had spent weeks living in the streets. She was wearing the dress she wore that beautiful day we lunched in her father’s Chevy. She had a sack over her shoulder which she held with her right hand. Later, in the car, I noticed it was a pillow case.
“Janie... what happened?”
She was not coherent in her answer; I don’t think she wanted to be. But within her mumbling she said something very cute and almost smiled, “I hit myself with the door.”
She was obviously not driving so I asked her if she wanted me to drive her home. She was totally freaked out about her parents. She said they were after her and they had called the police on her. “Let’s go to Mexico,” she said, as if her life depended on it. I was out on the sidewalk with her and walking slowly, prodding her to follow me to the parking lot. “Take me to my sister’s in Del Mar.”
“Okay.”
I felt some relief when she entered the car. She held on tight to her sack. She was frightened. I tried my best to reassure her when she suspected I was taking her home to her parents.
On the freeway going down to the Valley, she was sure I was taking her home and she protested and threatened to jump out of the moving car. I took the right lane and slowed down. Her protest intensified and she demanded to be taken to her sister’s house in Del Mar. “I will,” I said. In this hyper state she was still shy and fragile like the make-believe cowgirl she seemed to want to be.
When we reached her street she panicked, screaming that her parents were going to send her to jail. She pushed the door open, I stepped on the breaks, and she jumped out of the car.
I parked on the curb and hurried towards her house. She was ahead of me, looking back as if being pursued by an enemy. For a second it looked like she was seeking refuge at her home. But she crossed the street and didn’t come near. I knocked on the door. She watched me and we both waited a very long time. From across the street Janie yelled, “They’re watching movies in the movie room.” That room was in the back of the house, her father had built it. The mother opened the door and said nothing. I said, “Janie seems to be ill.” The mother said nothing and I entered. The father was standing there. They looked like embarrassed children. The parents could see Janie standing across the street, holding her pillow case with some of her belongings over her shoulder, less frightened now. “Come home!” the mother yelled. I don’t remember what Janie answered but with few words the two seemed to have established a dialogue. I felt reassured and walked out of the house.
One year later I received a card from Janie. The card was the kind anyone could buy at Hollywood Blvd. A great Hollywood movie was illustrated on it. And she challenged me, with humor, to answer this question: What year in 1939 was this movie made?
Author Bio:
Miguel Gardel lives in Massachusetts and attended the City College of New York and has worked at many things from janitorial to journalism. His stories and essays have appeared in Bilingual Review, Best Fiction, Red Fez, Pemmican, Subtle Fiction and other publications.
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