EPILOGUE: THE ABYSS
By: Aviva Rosenthal
Tags: Judaism, Oceans, True Love, Heroin, Nazis

A DARK WOOD, MIDWAY ON OUR JOURNEY THROUGH LIFE

I’m not blind, exactly. I just can’t see.

It’s hard to explain. My eyes register images, but my brain doesn’t know what to do with them. They say it’s the concussion, it’ll pass, but they say it in a tone that indicates that they have no idea if it’ll pass. Just my brain being my brain, demanding that things mean something, beginning to give up on that. And I’m tired. So tired that I wear dark shades all the time, letting nothing in or out. I’d like to think they make me look like a blues musician, but I probably look more like an insecure starlet.

Amazing grace, how sweet the song. I was lucky to have lived. Lucky old me, the survivor who can’t be killed. Tom the Immortal. Drowned, held at gunpoint, surrounded by sharks, still here. My just deserts for driving the people’s wagon. Everyone told me for years to get a decent car. For years, but I couldn’t give her up. My own beloved Mayhem. Who else would love her?

That hunk of junk, she’d said. I could crush it like a beer can, just with a stern look.

No atheists in foxholes. Chronos was my god. Tunneling when things got fraught, as they often did. A small woodland animal, burrowing, seeking shelter in any time but now.

She’s so close, and after centuries of longing, I can’t face her. Please, don’t. You’re really pretty, but please don’t. I can’t break you.

A case gone cold is heating up, warmth spreading through my bones as the sun goes down. I’m under a palm, marooned on a desert island, waiting to be rescued. Watching surfers shoot the pier as the calliope’s ragtime warble competes with ‘Walking in the Sand’ on the midway, and the lunatics frolic under the sun at Pacific Ocean Park.

What did we do for fun before amusement parks? There was always dancing, the ritual of stomp and shake hardwired into the human brain. Watched lions devour Christians. Brothels, taverns, festivals and wandering troupes of actors, Punch and Judy shows, the soap opera of Shakespeare. We’d die of the Plague, go to church to be screamed at, emerge unsure what to do with our terror and shame, then get wasted and murder women and Jews.

It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution’s conurbanatinon that people demanded more. Circuses, stadium tournaments, World’s Fairs with fantastic exhibits and experiences you couldn’t find anywhere else. Disneyland opened in 1957, and this park came along a year later, an upstart gull in Walt’s face. Twenty-eight acres of magic and fun, they called it. Pacific Ocean Park, your first stop on the way to heaven. Step right up, pay one price: ninety cents for Paradise.

Pop. Sweeter than candy on a stick, huckleberry, cherry or lime…

There is the Sea Serpent roller coaster, the Looff carousel with seahorses taking you in circles of nowhere, fountains shooting into the sky, performing seals and dolphins. Nautical-futuristic fantasia: Elektro the talking, smoking robot; diving bells to take you deep, then shoot up again. You get into a bubble to float 75 feet over the surface of the ocean. It’s fun once or twice, but then you think, is that all there is?, and go back to surfing.

Disney played it cool, but when our park outsold his fiefdom, he began to worry. He always was a zero-sum guy. Snow White and Goofy were a draw, sure, but who wants to drive out to Anaheim and pay too much for magic? POP was right here: cheap, easy, familiar. It held strong, averaging a million visitors a year until 1965, when the city of Santa Monica abruptly decided that Venice needed a long-overdue facelift. Overnight the streets were closed off, everywhere was demolition, construction, and you couldn’t find parking for love or money.

The bubble burst, and pop, it was gone.

Creditors came after them; they closed up shop, auctioned off the rides. Within a year it had become a ghost town where you went to shoot up, or to shoot ‘Mod Squad’ episodes about urban decay and despair, the sun beaming down on the dry fountains and the remains of Mr. Octopus. By ’74 it devolved into Dogtown, after a series of suspicious fires took the rest of it along with the pier, charred pilings poking from the tide. Left to the tender mercies of the Z-Boys, the skater revolutionaries of Venice who seemed to thrive on precisely this sort of tragic grit, breaking into houses to skate the drought-emptied pools. Sick transit, Gloria.

Disney won, in the end. This is America. Disney will always win.

A beachball misses a kid’s outstretched hand, rolls up to my feet. He races to retrieve it, panting, face warped in a grin, not glancing at me.

I may not actually be here after all.

Warm, warmer. A year, she’d said. I quailed, but thought, I can do that. Waited, wary as the world went on, tried not to watch the clock. Ate, slept, wrote letters to Mysto: words, words, words. Read the paper until I could no longer bear to. Painted, shaped, sold. Gave my mother away at City Hall. So much had happened, it was hard to tell how key a part I’d played in any of it. We’d started a thriving mail-order business with glib ads in ‘Surfer.’ I wasn’t wealthy by LA standards, but I had significantly more money than I did when we first met. A man of means, hanging onto my home like grim death, stubbornly staying put. When the landlord came by to raise my rent, I bought it off him, in cash.

It was a weird year, so weird it was fine to be numb. JFK, then LBJ, and no one knew what the fuck was going on and Ruby killed Oswald at which point isolated tribes in the Brazilian rainforest and even the Sentinelese are discussing the Zapruder film in depth and mostly what defined that year was that Everyone Had a Fucking Theory.

Beatings and bombings and buses full of Freedom Riders in the South, and LBJ had ’em all by the short ones and it was looking like the Civil Rights Act was going to pass and everyone was very excited about the Great Society, though it looked like there would be a trade-off: Vietnam. But really, how long could it take to subdue a bunch of peasants in black pajamas? Yeah, France had been at it for twenty years, but c’mon, France.

In January there was a 9.2 off the coast of Alaska. It was the second worst earthquake in recorded history, creating a tsunami that pretty much destroyed most of the west coast of North America. Anchorage was leveled, ships were sunk, Canada was buffeted and flooded all the way down to Crescent City, where the tsunami threw itself at the forest, picked up all the trees then hurled them at the shore, again and again, before moving on in search of more mayhem. I wish I could tell you that our happy little cabin survived, but that would be a lie. I didn’t go back there for over a decade, and then I went back to stay, rebuilding what I had come to think of as our home. There was a great deal of trial and error involved, and borrowing heavy machinery from kind people who had to be dissuaded from helping. This was something I had to do alone.

That’s the kind of year it was.

Warmer. The blood in my veins, surging in waves.

One of Pip’s teeth is embedded in my skull, neat as a puzzle piece. I’d asked which one. Probably an incisor, they said, and too dangerous to extract right now. My body would spit it out, or not. Wait and see.

One year. I know she’ll come. She promised, and she’s a girl who keeps her promises. My heart has had time to beat 42 million beats: stay safe. Ba-bum. Come home. Ba-bum.

The indefatigable bum. I’m on fire, can feel her eyes, infiltrating my soul.

Wait for her touch, for the world to become visible once more.

‘Tommy?’ I’m still breathing. ‘Are you awake?’

I don’t know how to answer that, afraid to open my eyes and find only an empty pillow. Feel her hand on my cheek, blink a little — and then she pulls off my shades.

Just a girl. Just another girl who isn’t her.

‘M’fine,’ I manage. My jaw is wired shut. Inter-maxillary fixation. They may have been right after all; the talkies were a fad. They said the same of surfing, the greedy golden dream of sun and sea and Neptune’s cowboys. I’m not to talk much, or eat solid food until it heals. Tell me when any of this will heal. I hide in the workshop so as not to scare away the customers. I’m fine, I’m fine, I reassure all these people who know perfectly well that I am not.

I know she’s coming. Just have to hang on till then. I have so much to tell her.

The sun is going down.

What was the last thing I’d said to her? I can’t remember. Me, who recalls it all. Not the faintest fucking clue. Watching the Dodgers kick Yankee ass, I let her share this moment with her dad, so precious to them both. The last thing Ira had said: you’re dead to me. I know he’s relived this a thousand times. We all have, every instant leading up to her becoming invisible, wondering how we might have headed it off. I’m not good with words, I’d told her when we met. But she knows that. She’s coming. We blamed ourselves, each other, the chaos of our nation. California is America squared, Los Angeles to the nth degree, the dream refuge of runaways who find it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, try to leave, only to find themselves trapped, knee-deep in tar. Who could blame her for running as far as she did?

Sheila had her baby that March, two weeks early. Mrs. Fallucci pooh-poohed her labor pains at first, on the grounds that all Fallucci babies came a month late cause they had to get their hair right (and it did seem to take them that long in the bathroom) but then panicked and threw her in the car, only to get rear-ended by some guy four blocks from the hospital. Neither of them was hurt, but Sheila’s water broke, and Mrs. Fallucci jumped out, ran back and cold-cocked the guy, and they carried on their merry way. Alexander Vittorio Fallucci was born six hours later, just as Fluke came flying through the door. He and Neddie had been booked for two weeks in Vegas, and Sheila had rather crabbily insisted that she wiz fine, he didnae need to hover so, just go make us some money. The nurses tried to kick him out, in vain, but the doctor was pretty decent about it, let him cut the cord after he’d scrubbed up, and this was the high point of his entire fucking life to date. We were all over the moon for them, but sometimes late at night there was a small part of me that wished that I’d gotten to have this too. I got to hold him a lot, though. Fluke saw to that.

We couldn’t ever get hold of U-Boy; they kept changing their number for reasons unclear, and Neddie just laughed and said too many fans when we asked, but she didn’t look happy about it. And then one night in May the phone rang at 3AM, and U wanted to know if I felt like coming over, no reason, and did I maybe have a shovel?

Pip and I buried Wayne Colliccio in a promising spot in Topanga Canyon, parked his car near a bar on Sunset, wiped it and walked home, Pip grumbling the whole way that we should’ve cut his head off so they’d never ID the body, me pointing out that there hadn’t been much of a head left after Neddie was through with the hairdryer (Hamilton Beach models were prone to overheating, but very sturdy and you couldn’t beat them for this sort of thing), and anyway no one’s ever going to find the motherfucker, so let’s just go home and forget this ever happened. Colliccio had been stalking them for months, calling constantly and breaking in when they weren’t home. I don’t know why they didn’t just tell us, but they didn’t, and this time he pulled a gun on U when he came down to investigate, and Neddie went a little overboard, certainly well beyond what any jury would buy as reasonable self-defense. But, y’know, it’d be fine. All resolved.

Except that six weeks later they broke ground for a new condo development in that exact spot, and there was enough of his head left to run dental. When they couldn’t find any ties to local mob, the LAPD started taking a harder look at Colliccio’s ex-wife and her new husband. Mysto was home for the summer and found them an excellent lawyer, but there were phone records and witnesses to him hanging around the place, and then they got a warrant and forensics turned up some of his blood on the underside of the dining room table. Which, frankly, was pretty unfair, cause they’d cleaned the living shit out of that room, but what’re you gonna do. Randy called me from a payphone to let me know they were coming with the cuffs, U and Neddie vamoosed, and that night two drunk and merry Mexicans were seen crossing the border in a car that was later found abandoned in the Tijuana International Airport parking lot.

A week later we got a card with a smiley face doodled on it,postmarked Morocco. Pretty clever, as it’s the only country with both decent surf and no extradition, and no one really wants to live in Iran or China. The letters came later: Neddie was singing at this one café, a big hit with the teens. U-Boy in time started a surf resort; he never learned much more French than Laissez les bon temps roulez, but really, how much more do you need?

I’d say that was the end of Neddie and Eddie, but there was a huge jump in sales for nearly a year, because people are nuts. Fluke tried to keep it going with her cousin Nita, but his heart wasn’t in it, and by 1966 he went back to singing country one night a week at Brodie’s, and that really was the end of Neddie and Eddie, but it was beautiful while it lasted.

And Pip…well, you know what happened to Pip.

Mary Weiss begins to wail again from the pier, seems like the other day, my baby went away.

Her absence is killing me; her presence will be worse. Time to go home, man. One foot in front of another. The door is ajar, a sliver of heimlich spilling out onto the porch. The secrets behind closed doors. Unschuld oder erfahrung. Do you really want to know where she’s been, what she’s done? Oh, what does it matter. She’s here.

By the couch lies her rucksack, aged with wandering through hilly lands and hollow lands, where all that mattered was that we were not there to stop her. Familiarity. She’s nowhere, not in the kitchen or my room. I hesitate, then open Pip’s door — and for a moment I could swear it’s him. Huddled under the covers, blond hair over his face. My heart leaps, struggles to recover. Fast asleep, exhausted with all that fleeing. What did it take from her, what did it take to bring her home? She could’ve stayed gone. She came back for him. I was the booby prize.

You’re my home, Tommy.

A shitty home, broken, fucked beyond repair. She should have stayed gone. I close the door again. I’m not ready for this. Let me think, let me think. What do I do? Oh, Mary Weiss. Patron saint of messes. Nice Jewish girl from Queens. A world full of nice Jewish girls who should be queens, and we are hell-bent on destroying them all.

I need, I need, I need everything to be beautiful, for nothing to hurt.

No, I need to be clear. I’ll take a bath.

Pull off my clothes, step into the tub, afraid the sound of water will wake her, though she sleeps like a stone when she gets around to it. Just risk it. If she busts me naked, bandaged, this mute dope in a bone-dry bathtub, she’ll be gone before you can say Jack Robinson. Plug in, water on. Relax, breathe. Turn the water off, lean back, let my mind drift away into thoughts of Mulholland and aqueducts, and then I’m asleep.

And then I’m awake; she’s looking down at me. She must know, she must. She would have felt his sudden absence in this world. I can’t meet her eyes.

‘Hey,’ she says, as if she’d just gone out for ice cream.

‘Hey,’ I say, as if she had.

‘Where is everyone?’

And if that ain’t the $64,000 question, I don’t know what is.

No. I can tell you what is. I don’t answer, just pull the plug, then get out and towel off, go into the bedroom to dress. She sees the way my eyes keep darting towards the bedside table drawer like a dumb fuck, and asks, almost too easily, ‘Are you holding?’

I realize then what that peculiar utensil was I saw on the kitchen table next to the box of Pip — yes, it was still there, I liked the company. It resembled a delicate ice cream scoop. A melon baller.

I look at her, and she at me, and we knew then how it was going to be.