Originally published in Sunshine/Noir II: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana.
Eastern Lights
It was like salvation when the Chaldeans started opening up hookah shops. They knew us all by name. I’d walk through the door and into a handshake, always someone’s friend, a title fairly purchased along with a little bit of tobacco and coal for the hookah at fifteen dollars a pop. Underage in a town full of nothing but utilitarian drinking bars, we needed a place to congregate or go crazy. At the Muslim hookahs, poor white offspring of dust bowl Oakies like us would send the Arabs and Somalis into a wild west silence before the screen door whacked shut behind us. So we’d happily scrape the money together and hand it over to the Chaldeans, like Mike, who welcomed rent payment for a table from whoever was offering it.
Mike’s place, The Zodiac, was wedged in a strip mall right between a Soup Plantation and a Chinese buffet, still within the East County Radiation Zone, as the more coastal people referred to our semi-rural side of the tracks. My friends and I were trash to plenty other folks, of that we were reminded often enough that we strayed into foreign territories only for notable reasons, but we banked our pride on knowing at least we weren’t the monster truck-driving twats, the self-branded Metal Mulisha, replete with WWII German death’s head as their emblem.
We were the ones old enough to start working on cancer but too young to start psoriasis— goths, middle-class punks, the young and struggling sober looking for a place between AA meetings, gay Christian kids who wouldn’t come out until they’d moved outside the reach of their parents’ evangelical damnation; the Zodiac was our clean, well-lit place and I thought I knew everybody in it until Jennifer arrived.
Almost as tall as me and my six feet. Ink-black hair all the way down to the top of her tailbone with about a half-inch of brown roots grown out. Pale the way you have to work at in Southern California. Skipped-meals skinny.
“I’m going to ask her out.”
That’s the first thing I said when I saw her.
Jennifer sat down at a table near enough that it wasn’t weird when I started talking to her. She’d just come from a concert by The Cure. This was 1999.
“They still sounded good,” she said. “But it was depressing to see Robert Smith so fat he could only squeeze into a hockey jersey.”
It wasn’t until the cafe closed that I worked myself up to ask for her number. She gave it to me without pause or ceremony and told me anytime, day or night, was as good a time to call as another.
Either her mom or Grandma answered. You never can tell age over the phone with a woman of a certain lifestyle. The line was passed to Jennifer who said I’d have to come pick her up if we wanted to go out. She’d never learned to drive.
She didn’t want me to know where she lived. I was to park and meet her at the Arco on the corner of Douglas and El Cajon Boulevard. Neither of us had cellphones, just an agreement on a time and place, so I showed up on time. She walked out of the dark in my rear-view mirror fifteen minutes later, just appearing all at once under the gas station’s corpse-blue, florescent lights wearing a backless shirt, mid-thigh black denim shorts, and two-dollar flip-flops. She got in the passenger side of my un-killable sedan, said hi, leaned back and put her feet up on the dashboard. Daring me, just daring me to say something about the jagged red weal of scar tissue, half a finger wide, that ran up alongside her egg-white calf.
So I asked, “What did you do that with?”
“Broken glass I’d heated up with a lighter.”
“Well, now you have to tell me the story.”
Jennifer must have thought I was a good listener because she went for it, told me all about how when she was fifteen, her upstairs neighbors would let her come over and hang out with them, two dudes in their twenties. They’d all get drunk and watch movies from the dudes’ VHS collection. One night she passed out and woke up to them raping her and videotaping it. It wasn’t hard for the DA to convict them. They’d kept the tape.
“The State set me up with some counseling and my therapist gave me some pills that made me tired all the time, but all that ended once I turned eighteen.”
She’d been to jail a few times. Public intoxication. Drunk and disorderly. Assault. Things had been going good for Jennifer recently though, she was starting to feel more in-control. No problems with the law for awhile. She’d never moved, still lived in the same apartment building. She hadn’t wanted me to see it. Too close to the county welfare office, and she said she was ashamed of it.
I parked in the Zodiac’s lot. We sat in the car while she finished her story, appearing as divorced from the harm it referenced as if it had happened to somebody else. The only part that felt weird was why she’d thought to tell me about it in the first place, as casual as beating dust out of a rug.
“You asked.”
“Do people not ask?”
“No, they just say, ‘that’s a hell of a scar.’ They point it out to me like I never noticed it and move on.”
Boy, did I feel flattered, I really did. I wanted to ask her loads of questions then, but Jennifer figured the best way to end her story was to smile, get out of my car and walk inside without looking to see if I was following.
By the time I’d caught up with her, she’d already recognized a troupe of three guys sitting at an outdoor table. All of them were in their late teens or early twenties, all of them wearing black the way guys like them do in Southern California: black shorts, black-death metal band t-shirts, black hoody, black shoes and black socks pulled up leaving a village idiot space of hairy white leg, their too-long wallet chains dangling off the chair seats. The worst combination of wannabe tough guys and Anne Rice fans.
Since I never got their names, I’ll make some up. The short & fat one who constantly found something to chuckle at but never with, we’ll call him The Great Pumpkin. He was referred to by his friends as, no shit, “Prospero,” but no one has a nickname like that unless they give it to themselves, so it doesn’t count. If it wasn’t for the little bit of goth in the room, he’d of never got away with it.
The little acne scarred twig with translucent white skin and a flap of yellow hair above sunken eyes, we’ll call him Scarecrow. The stand-out shit-kicker that ruled the roost in his big black Doc Martins, the edges of steel toes starting to wear through the leather, he just get’s to be Shit-Kicker.
Scarecrow invited Jennifer to a party back at a condo they were just on their way to. The Great Pumpkin thought that was a great idea. Shit-Kicker just stared, first at Jennifer, then at me.
“Do you want to go?” Jennifer was excited.
“Do you?” I was not excited.
She nodded and squeezed my hand. We went.
Our directions led to a complex that could have been designed by Soviets for a warmer climate: decomposition-green sameness with a legislated ugliness, like so many other apartment complexes scattered all over the El Cajon valley floor.
We parked right in front of the party and climbed the cracked slab stairs up to the front door. Jennifer stopped me before going inside, turned right around and put her hand on my chest.
“Don’t leave me, okay?”
In case she was flirting I smiled, but she sounded serious so I said, “Of course not.”
There were about thirty kids in their early twenties, some still in their teens milling around in a living room area and small kitchen. The ceiling was covered in spray-on stalactites of an off-white pallor that was shifting toward the yellow, like the skin of one of my friend’s mother who’d been diagnosed with lupis. Beige wall-to-wall carpeting showed the pockmarks of dropped weed embers. Blankets and pillows wadded up on an overstuffed brown couch suggested that one of the apartment’s renters slept there. And up to the real bedrooms, a tight staircase
Most everyone was cycling through to the apartment’s small “backyard”, a plot of cracked concrete gated by a prickly untreated wood fence. A couple of drink coolers sat leaking next to some dirty white plastic chairs, an ancient plastic patio table with a hole in the middle for an umbrella that wasn’t there, and a bicycle that had sat ignored longer than it had ever been ridden.
Scarecrow handed Jennifer a Budweiser upon our arrival. He wasn’t pointed about ignoring me, it just didn’t cross his mind to do otherwise.
Holding court beside the coolers, Shit-Kicker was instructing The Great Pumpkin how to do push-ups.
“You just keep bringing your hands closer together over time as you get stronger.”
Great Pumpkin said it didn’t matter, all he’d ever have were sausage tits.
“No, no you’ve just got to keep slowly moving your hands closer together and keep doing it every day.”
Jennifer set to knocking back beers and fast, reloaded by Scarecrow as soon as she clinked down an empty. She seemed to know everyone and paid me less of a mind with each familiar face that came around. Her voice, so soft and melodic during the ride over, fell away after her fourth beer and ninth cigarette to reveal that East County accent, one that some people acknowledge and some swear doesn’t exist, a kind of off-the-wagon dust-bowl gypsy drawl, or else the ghost of one who’d taken possession of her now.
“Hey Hooker, haven’t seen you in years!” she called to a girl who looked like every girl who worked behind the makeup counter of every lower-middle class Macy’s ever.
When Jennifer got up to sit in Scarecrow’s lap. I found an excuse to go for a walk. A Mexican kid named Angel announced he was going up the road for cigarettes and I just followed.
“She’s a strange girl,” he said.
“I don’t really know her.”
“None of us do. But some of those guys are dangerous around a girl like her.”
He looked at me like he wanted to make sure I understood what he was saying, and I looked at him in a way that said I did. I bought a pack of cigarettes even though I didn’t really smoke back then.
On the return trip, we stopped across the street from the apartment to smoke. Out here, all the street lights are a dim orange-yellow, of a shade like a dehydrated dialysis patient’s urine. It strains your eyes to look at anything they light for too long. The color kills your depth perception, but the cornea never stops trying to focus. They showed up when the astronomers on Mount Palomar discovered they could see the stars better through their telescope if our light wasn’t in their way.
Angel flicked his butt in the street and blew out a long lung full of air.
“Why do you hang out with them?” I asked.
“Don’t really know anybody else.”
“Got to know somebody.”
“Got to know somebody. Exactly.”
Nobody was in the back patio when we returned through the wooden gate, even though the beer was, which was a bad sign. There was a ruckus coming from the living room. I thought about turning and leaving, then I thought about how she made me promise not to, and I thought about whether or not that mattered any more, and I decided that it did. I pushed through a wall of youth clutching beers that were forgotten for the spectacle they’d surrounded in a circle: Jennifer, naked, dancing, whipping her long black hair around like a mad pony, no thought to cover the triangle of light brown hair between her legs.
“Oh man,” said Angel. “You should get out of here. Nobody has your back.”
Jennifer went down to her knees on the worn wall-to-wall carpet and crawled over to our host, this Great Pumpkin who wanted everyone to call him Prospero, who was the only one sitting down on the couch. He had a dumb nervous smile on his face and his affect said he found it all funny, but his eyes pled out-and-out panic.
“You want me to suck your dick?” she cooed to him.
And Shit-Kicker was yelling for him to stop being a pussy or get out of the way and lemme at her and such, all swelled up like there was nothing more to him than cock and a want to punish that combined announced, “dishonorable discharge.” My hand reached to take hold of her shoulder, but when she felt my fingers graze her skin she spun and raked her nails down my arm.
“Don’t you ever fucking touch me you fucking faggot! I’ll fucking kill you, motherfucker!”
A hand on my shoulder pulled me back into the obscurity of the circle’s outer ring.
“Don’t fucking try to do anything,” Angel said. “You’re going to get stabbed.”
Then Jennifer went right back to backing Prospero further and further up the couch. He was kind of swatting at her until she reared up over him, triumphant. There was nowhere left for him to go when her hand slid up onto his crotch.
And paused there, all of her did, confused at first then smiling. We all knew the poor guy was soft. It kind of endeared me to him. Nobody with a conscience wouldn’t be soft in that moment. But Shit-Kicker was the first to laugh, and Great Pumpkin shoved her off him, a little harder than he probably intended, yelled for her to fucking stop it and get off him.
It was like he’d let the air out of a balloon. She hit the ground ass-first. All the fight went right out of her. She managed to turn even paler. For a moment I thought she’d woken up from whatever trance she’d passed into and discovered herself, suddenly modest, but her eyes weren’t focused on anything happening in that room, not even in that year.
She seemed so small then, curling around and trying to disappear into herself, her hair almost covering her small pink nipples, murmuring, “You don’t think I’m attractive. You think I’m ugly. I’m disgusting.”
Shit-Kicker said he didn’t know about that faggot but thought she was looking just fine.
I shouldered around him and knelt down low, right in Jennifer’s ear where no one else could hear, and I asked real nice if she wouldn’t talk to me for a moment in the bathroom.
“Okay,” she said back like a sad little kid, exactly like a sad little kid, and she rose and led the way.
Shit-Kicker was not pleased. He moved to put himself in our way, but Angel stepped in front of him.
I locked the bathroom door behind us.
“Listen, if we don’t get out of here right now I know something really bad is going to happen. Please. Please come with me.”
She smiled like an older girl would at the nervous overtures of a younger suitor, like she was going to let me in on a secret, like she wasn’t naked and the priest at her own sacrifice.
“I’m glad you were here. Thank you for staying. But I think you should go now. I’ll be okay.”
I left.
I wasn’t raised to stay after a woman says to go and I wasn’t looking for a reason at that point. I walked out of that bathroom to the hallway, where most of the party had run back to the coolers to beer-up for round two. Angel said for me to move my ass because they were gathering even then to kick it, so I turned without saying goodbye and walked quickly but without panic, like how I think you’re supposed to do around untrusted dogs, past the landing where Jennifer had told me not leave her, down the concrete steps to my car across the street.
They were coming, spilling out of the living room through the open screen door. Silhouettes framed by an orange rectangle. Open doors out here can look like a keyhole in a wall of night. “That’s pretty,” I thought.
Back in my mother’s house, I locked myself in the bathroom, lay down on the cold tile and turned the faucets on to fill the tub. I never got in. I just laid with my ear to the floor and listened to the water rush through the pipes underneath.
One night, some skeeters drove by and shot up the Zodiac’s front patio with paintball guns. Then, after 9/11, the FBI dropped in on Mike to interrogate him because two of the hijackers had been his frequent customers. He gave up after that and closed shop. Thankfully, by then we’d all gotten old enough to start drinking.
Before he ended the Zodiac though, I saw Angel again. I had to ask him three times before he finally told me how after I left, Jennifer had taken two guys upstairs at the party and fucked them after finding a video camera, and she’d recorded herself doing it. He said people have that video. He said there was nothing I could have done about it. There wasn’t a point I could see in telling him the story about why it had all gone down the way it had. She’d told me her reasons before she’d done the act and I didn’t want to share. I never saw Jennifer again, but not for lack of trying.
Justin Hudnall received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He currently serves as the Executive Director of So Say We All, a San Diego-based literary arts and education non-profit. In a prior career, he served with the United Nations in South Sudan as an emergency response officer. He is a recipient of the San Diego Foundation’s Creative Catalyst Fellowship and Rising Arts Leader award, and is an alumni of the Vermont Studio Center. He is a two-time semi-finalist for the Fish Publishing international short story contest and winner of the 2014 In-Cahoots Collaborative Arts Contest. His stories have been published by The Quotable, Art Pulse, and Monologues for Men by Men. He produces and hosts the public radio series, Incoming.