4. September 1995, Part IIYou’re not your brother’s keeper.”Just be yourself.”
SEPTEMBER 1995, PART II
"YOU’RE NOT YOUR brOTHER’S KEEPER.”
W illiam had an exam on Wednesday morning, then worked the lunch shift at Dunphy’s. After that, he kept his word to rehearse with Act the Maggot. To his own surprise, he actually felt good about it all; but the end result was, he didn’t get the chance to try Haze’s product sample until Thursday.
That night, he picked up the phone and dialed Haze’s number, all the while convinced she couldn’t possibly be home. She was a cool girl; surely she would have found something cool to do, with someone cool, even if it was only a Thursday night. Something that didn’t involve sitting at home, selling weed to losers like him.
“Hello?”
“Oh. Hey. Uh… this is William. Quinn.”
“Oh, hey.” She said it at the same moment he said Quinn. She hadn’t needed the clarification.
“Hey. Um… can I meet you somewhere?”
“Sure. Come through.”
“Oh. Okay.” He scratched his nose. Felt a bit sweaty. “Where? ”
“My place.”
“Oh. Yeah, okay.”
He hung up, and opened his wallet to make sure he had enough cash. Checked his face in the mirror. She seemed to like him just fine last time, when he was scruffy. He took a whiff of his armpits. Doffed his clothes, and took the quickest shower of his life.
He scanned the few remaining clean clothes in his closet. Pulled on a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. Located a pair of jeans he hadn't worn more than once without laundering. Zipped his motorcycle jacket, and surveyed himself one last time in the bathroom mirror.
He drove across the city to the Mission District and parked in front of her house. Haze opened the front door even before he knocked, as if she had been watching for him.
But she shattered that misapprehension by saying, “I would have expected a noisy arrival from Mike, but not from you.”
“Oh.” He cringed inwardly at his own self-delusion. “It was Mike who tricked this bike out for me. I had no say in the matter.”
He crossed the threshold into her foyer, and without any further niceties, she led him into the living room. She gestured to the sofa, and he took a seat. Her black cropped tank top drew his eyes to her waistline. The tank top had a white coat of arms with a double-headed eagle, and Cyrillic writing: Россия. The hem of her red floral broomstick skirt brushed the tops of her Doc Martens.
She sat in the same chair as before, at right angles to him. She peered at him, matter-of-fact. All business.
“How did you like it?”
“Well,” he said, shrugging a shoulder. “I’m back.”
A scale, a wooden box, and some baggies sat on top of the coffee table. “How much, this time?”
He could easily go through a full ounce, but that would sustain him for too long in between visits. “A half-ounce?”
Without another word, she got down to business. With no sleeves on her shirt to impede his view, he had a clear view of the tattoos on her arms. Her left shoulder sported a bucking deer with a griffin's beak. Its head sprouted ram’s horns and what looked like a bouquet of flowers. A panther prowled across her right shoulder. Other hybrids of griffins with sheep, goats, and birds cascaded down both arms.
She caught him looking, so he quickly said, “Those are new since the last time I saw you. Three years ago, I mean – not on Tuesday. I saw them on Tuesday, of course.” He winced at his own rambling.
She said nothing, and her expression never changed. Cold. Totally different than Tuesday.
He tried again. “I always thought it was odd – a tattoo artist with no tattoos.”
“No visible ones,” she pointed out. Still aloof. But her eyes flitted to his briefly.
“True,” he conceded, his dick waking up a bit, rendering him mute. He sucked so hard at this. The only reason he had ever gotten laid was because Julia was happy to do most of the talking.
He reached into his jacket again and retrieved his wallet. Held out the cash to her. She looked at it and said, “It’s one-forty for a half-ounce of this.”
He felt his stomach drop at the price, but reached into his wallet for another forty dollars. She held the bag out to him, and he tucked it inside his jacket.
She rose from her chair then. He rose too, and without so much as another word, she led him to the foyer. Stepped aside, and held the door open for him.
Clearly, Mike had been completely wrong.
“I’m sorry about Mike,” he blurted.
Her eyes snapped up to his, widening. At least her expression had finally changed.
“He’s such an idiot,” he continued. “But… Well. I don’t have to tell you. You were there that day.”
The hardness in her gaze unfurled somewhat. He could tell she knew – he wasn’t talking about Tuesday.
“Yes, I was,” she acknowledged.
They peered at each other a moment longer. Then he patted his jacket, over the spot where he had concealed the weed.
“Well. Thanks,” he said, and turned to go .
“But that was six years ago.”
He turned again. “What?”
“You were just a kid. And Mike was just doing the right thing - protecting his little brother. But that was six years ago, and you’re not your brother’s keeper.”
“I know that. But I have no doubt he saved my life that day. So watching his back these days feels like the very least I can do.”
She put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry.”
Startled, he said, “For what?”
“I’ve had a really hard time forgiving myself for the part I played in what happened that day.”
He gaped at her in disbelief. “What are you talking about?”
“Letting you believe the wrong thing about what happened that day, for starters. I let you believe it because I didn’t want to go to prison, myself.”
Thoroughly confused, he arched his brows.
“He was trying to get more crystal off me,” she explained. “He didn’t believe I didn’t have more. He had already been awake for three days straight.”
William shifted his weight. “Oh.”
“I used it with him back then. Him and Mike. And I was the cook.”
So many things were falling into place now. He probably could put two and two together if it happened today, but his fourteen-year-old mind’s interpretation had long since become canon.
“I’m not involved in any of that anymore,” she added quickly. “I went to rehab right after that, like Mike did. I had really spiraled. You know – my mom died. But that doesn’t excuse anything. I fed their addiction, and by feeding it, I nearly got you killed.”
“No you didn’t. You were the one who went for help. Jimmy is the one who nearly got me killed, and who knows what he would have done to you.”
“Will.” She had never called him that before. Her hand was still on his arm, and his pulse quickened. “That day… did...”
“What? ”
Her hazel eyes flitted back and forth between his, and he saw her throat work with a swallow. “Did he hurt you?”
Bemused, he said, “Not really. I mean, a little… you were there.”
She peered at him a moment with those keen eyes of hers – brown, with flecks of green and amber. Then, apparently satisfied with his response, her face relaxed. Stepping backward, she withdrew her hand from his arm, and he immediately missed its anchoring presence.
“Mike isn’t the reason I was unfriendly in there a minute ago,” she admitted. “I just... I have a lot on my mind today. Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay.”
She gestured to his jacket. “Enjoy.”
He nodded, and turned to go.
"JUST BE YOURSELF.”
He liked to put on Pink Floyd when he was smoking his bong. Not exactly original, he knew; but as his visionary father would say: “Stick to what you know.”
There was what his body and brain knew, and then there was the little matter of his heart.
He glanced over to the corner of his room, where he kept his guitar case.
“Just be yourself,” Julia had told him after he played and sang Wish You Were Here to her. “You don’t need me or anyone else to give you permission.”
That was easy for her to say. Being himself had nearly destroyed him twice already.
Well. Since she wanted him to be himself, he would go right ahead and be himself. She wasn’t there to give or deny her permission, anyway. But maybe Haze could be there, if he wanted her to be.
Haze.
The bedroom in the in-law unit, where he had lost his virginity to Julia and where he now smoked Haze’s weed, was William’s space. But before all of that, Jimmy ruled the in-law unit .
And Haze. She was there.
The bowl was cashed, and all surreal twenty-three-and-a-half minutes of Echoes had unspooled. The needle bumped against the record label and popped back into the dead wax, again and again.
William set the bong on his bedside table and returned the record to its sleeve. He glanced again toward the guitar case in the corner of his room.
Against his better judgment, he dropped Wish You Were Here onto his turntable.
It was night-time now, but it had been early morning the day Julia resuscitated him. Maybe not from a literal, physical death, but certainly from a metaphorical one.
The December sun poured through his blinds, foiling their plans to sleep in together every morning of winter break. She had woken him up, as she nearly always did, with her hand wrapped around his morning wood.
Good times, for sure.
But that wasn’t what he remembered most about the day. Nor even the way he had later given her the mermaid necklace at the top of Turtle Hill.
What he remembered most was the way she sat up in his bed, utterly unashamed of her nakedness, like a pre-fallen Eve. He too sat on the edge of the bed, stark naked, and played Wish You Were Here on his guitar. It was the first time he had allowed her to hear his singing voice. He did it because she had threatened to never join him in his bed again. And even though he knew she was only teasing, he also knew it would make her smile. And God, what wouldn’t he have done?
“Just be yourself,” Julia had said afterward, as he traced the faint blue veins beneath her skin with his fingertips. “You don’t need me or anyone else to give you permission.”
That was Julia.
He liked Haze, a lot. He admired her keen spark of intelligence and her formidable life force. He liked her tattoo suit, the bump on the ridge of her nose, and her low, dark, heavy brows. He liked how it made him feel to know that he had pierced her armor of enigma and wariness.
But there wasn’t enough weed in the world to blunt the memory of Julia, sylphlike in his bed, smiling at him with her whole face, giving him permission to be himself for the first time in four years. Even if no one else gave him permission. Even if she didn’t.
He looked toward the closet. Considering. Resisting. Finally, he got up and opened the closet door. Pulled out an old shoe box. Set it on the bed beside him, and slowly lifted the lid.
He hadn’t looked in here for nearly a month. Not since shortly after he visited her in Santa Barbara and allowed his jealousy to hammer the final nail in the coffin of their relationship.
He reached inside. Pulled them out, one at a time. Poems and songs that he had written about her, chronicling his growing feelings over the entire two years they had known each other. In all that time, he had never once shown them to her.
One after another, he read them. There was no sap or sentimentality to them. An outsider reading them might never have guessed what they were about. But he knew.
Beneath the poems and songs were the photos. Copies of the ones he had given her when they were together, and ones that she had never seen before. The one he had taken of them together at A?o Nuevo. The ones she had snapped of him alone at Julia Burns State Park. The ones he had taken of her, just before he proposed.
“I’m not going to stalk you, Julie,” he told her when she broke up with him. “If you want me, I’m here. If you want me to come to you, just say the word.”
He hadn’t heard from her since.
Her sleep-mussed copper hair, her un-made-up freckled face, her stinky morning breath. Even in his memories, her entire being overthrew him.
The next morning, he retrieved some packing tape from the cabinet in the den and secured the lid firmly atop the shoebox. He walked down Taraval all the way to the post office, and addressed a shipping label to her at Anacapa Hall .
He wasn’t stalking her, he told himself. He was just returning what had always been meant for her, anyway.
He had to make one last Hail Mary pass. If he still didn’t hear from her, he’d have his answer.
He had his answer soon enough. Every day that the phone didn’t ring, that the mailbox revealed no letter from her, was another turn of the screw.