October 2005 (Premiere Issue)
"David Lee Roth has the best cocaine," she said, her eyes at half mast, with the strings of dirty black yarn growing out of her head, in place of where her hair should have been, stuck to the inky mascara chunks congealed on her monster-sized, plastic eyelashes like a bad case of instant karma; "but he doesn’t share it unless he thinks you’ll fuck him."
It was the fall of ’72. I was living in a ’51 Chevy pick-up truck, on the bed of which I had built a wooden, cab-over camper with an A-frame roof to which a crooked, faux stovepipe was attached. My roommate, Atom, was a dog. Literally, a sixty pound, two-year-old mutt-part shepard, part lab-I had gotten as a pup. Curled up next to me in my sleeping bag in the camper, we kept each other warm while parked overnight on the streets of Monterey, where after dark it was already colder than any winter either one of us Southern California transplants had ever experienced.
Next thing I saw was his smilin’, sweaty face right beside me, the veins of his forehead protruding, pulsating, ready to burst, pert’ near poppin’ through the skin. The fierce effort of body and soul, straining; yet he was holding on, holding strong, carrying his weight. Making time. Nailin’ ‘er on the fly. Every second counted and he wasn’t about to let ‘er get away. ‘Cause this was his only chance. This was the chance of a lifetime and he wasn’t gonna blow it ‘cause life had always done him right and he was gonna do it right ‘ by making it right on time!
You awake feeling different. On your back, lying atop the bed sheets, you stare at the shadows animating the ceiling, then at the large sun-illuminated window on the opposite wall, its light heating your body, which you next examine, amazed at what you find: this is not your body. Rising to your elbows, you cup, gingerly, with hands that are not your hands, the breasts that were not here last night, except in your dreams, perhaps.
The younger man, Daniel Tilburn, is still new to this work having just replaced his deceased father at it a few months before. He's lean, almost emaciated, and naked to the waist despite the late fall's coolness. Daniel works behind the older man using a round-nosed shovel to collect the soil dislodged from the walls. He takes thin slices of dirt mingled with small stones from around their feet steadily taking them farther into the Earth a fraction of an inch deeper with each scoop.
So there it was, the entire rain of her life, splattered all over the hallway, smeared down a path that led nowhere. She reached for a glass of water, but she didn’t move. Every action she took was checked and deleted by her body, just like when she used to dream, and she’d try to wake up--she’d get up, again and again, while her corporeal body lay still. Alana took a deep breath and felt her lungs fill, assuring her that she was in fact living. She would have to move somehow... she had to clean up, put things in order.
"Rough-ass New York," he would always complain between jobs. But, he did try, he always tried. She could never quite figure out if it was the fault of society, him or a combination of both. Tonya’s father, well, he had a temper that simmered like the Hawaiian volcanoes and erupted unpredictably.
The orange trees lent their fragrance to the warm breeze. A car kicked up dust as it passed mine, and I drove further into the heart of Los Angeles. Up on the hills of Griffith Park, crews struggled the concrete troughs into place for the new observatory the city was building. I have always been fascinated with the stars, yet I’ve never been very good at astronomy. I have always needed someone to point out to me the shape of the swan and the dragon and the hunter in the sky.