We’re coaching Gus on his driving, me and Mike, our heads out the windows in the back seat, making sure he doesn’t go too far over the white line on either side of the lane.
“Is it coming on yet?” Mike’s talking. “Hey.” He punches my arm. “Danny Boy, is it coming on for you? Is it?”
“Yeah man.” I have a thought about streets and how much paint it takes to make all the white lines, but I keep my head down and watch a white line bend as we head up the freeway onramp. The road is slick after today’s rain, the air cool and the asphalt smells that good wet-asphalt-after-rain smell. Like earthy but without the dirt.
“Where we going?” Mike talking again.
“Cruising the city of angels,” Jenny says from shotgun. She’s leaning over Gus, watching the speedometer, telling him to slow down or speed up, you know, keep it even like. She’s my neighbor, a slip of a girl, Mom always says, though Mom doesn’t know about Jen slippin’ us a doobie or a tab. Tonight, tabs.
She’s wearing her thrift store finest, Jen is. Dangly stuff around her neck and from her ears. A long blue velvet skirt I’d like to pet, but she has a thing for Gus who has the car and the license. We bring Mike along to help with gas money.
Gus hunches over the steering wheel and says that he can see the angels now, they’re coming at us. “Whoa! Here they come.” He points to the oncoming cars. Jen grabs the steering wheel and the Chevy skids over two white lines back into the middle lane.
She cranks up the radio and we’re singing inside a yellow submarine, heading for the downtown lights. Then the sour piss smell of the brewery hits us and the big 102 sign comes into view with its witchy hats roof and no more submarine—we are on the Hollywood Freeway heading out and looking up at the lights of the giant Union Bank building hovering over us, twinkling blue and orange and green, like a giant space ship, and even Gus gets that this is too much and goes swerving over the white lines, crossing the freeway to get off.
“Where we going?” Mike again.
“Home,” Jen says. “If we can find it.” She giggles.
I have this other thought that rises up: Mike’s mom irons his tee-shirts. It’s a good thought, that one, funny somehow.
We drive through some Hendrix and Stones, Jen singing harmony to Ruby Tuesday. And it starts to look like my home stretch, driving past the blue waterfall stairs.
It’s always beautiful that sight, right in the middle of the strip malls with just a little green patch of park around it. But tonight, it’s so pretty I wanna cry as the water folds down those blue steps. I wanna walk right up them to the promised land though I’m not exactly sure what the promise is. We keep on driving, called by the Atlantic Blvd familiars. Newberry’s, A&P Grocery, and Joe’s Barber with its red, white, and blue pole where I get my hair cut. Brightwood Hill that I used to scream down on my bike when I was a kid.
Both sides of the street. My strip malls.
I see another thought come to me, like an understanding from the outside: those Danish things they sell in the Atlantic Square Bakery—angels make those.
The A&W gleams like a beacon. “Let’s go here.” Jen’s best idea yet. “Who’s got money?”
Cars are lined up in their little spaces, all neat like. Carhops in short orange skirts and little hats bringing trays of French fries and mugs of root beer. Kids hanging out of cars. Gus weaving through the parking lot to the furthest parking space. “We don’t wanna call attention to ourselves,” Jen says.
Suddenly the carhop is standing at Gus’s window, holding a latch-on tray with four floats. How that happened and who paid I’m not sure. A little time slippage there for me. It was probably Mike.
Someone in a car nearby is eating a hamburger and the smell comes over for a visit. Beef, ketchup, pickles. I am ravenous. I must not have eaten dinner, and I can’t remember lunch. Jen fiddles with Gus’s zipper, down up down, and I’m just a little jealous. All that wanting now comes to the surface in me, this ache rising up for a hamburger, for Jen’s hands, for this place. I eat the cold ice cream to push the wanting down and my head bursts with brain freeze.
But it’s all good. I don’t wanna ever go home, so I say we should stay here for a while, maybe till we come down, maybe forever, even if it means I have to watch Jen and Gus. There’s music blasting from another car, KRLA playing Country Joe and the Fish, so Jen turns our radio up and we join other cars, everyone singing Fixin to Die, the whole A&W singing what are we fightin’ for. I want to stay here forever in this town with my friends. And I don’t think ’bout that envelope at home holding my draft number. I don’t think about the hamburger. I don’t think about Jen’s hands. I just sing along and suck up that sweet root beer.
