All About Lulu by Jonathan Evison Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t want to talk about it, but—I’m sorry about that, honey … Yes, I know, please don’t—I understand you’re angry, sweetheart. There’s just so much to expl—just let me expl—I understand … Yes, I’d feel the same way, I don’t blame you. I blame myself. But there’s a lot more to this than … Oh, sweetheart, please try to understand.
    I know this sounds—I know it sounds like—I will make this up to you, but you’ve got to let me, honey, you’ve got to under—Lulu, honey, stop. Please just tell me what happened … ”
    The bed creaked again as Big Bill got to his feet. I could hear him pacing the fl oor. “It is a big deal,” he said. When his pacing brought him closer to the door, I pulled back a half foot and swiveled my shoulders around to avoid detection.
    “You’re damn right it’s a—Well, that’s not what your mother said.
    Now, damnit, I want the straight stuff here, I wanna know just what exactly … ” Then he closed the door, and his voice went muf fl ed, and his pacing carried him toward the farthest corner of the room.
    In the morning I confronted him again in the breakfast nook.
    “Nothing’s the matter. You’re blowing this out of proportion. Lulu quit cheerleading camp, that’s all. Just some growing pains, teenage girl stuff,” he assured me.
    I had no choice, really, but to toe the Miller party line—that is, to act like a traf fi c cop at the scene of a grizzly accident. But just because I toed the line didn’t mean I believed it for a minute—not when words like blame and complicit were being whispered behind closed doors. I rounded up the usual teenage suspects—shoplifting, drugs, alcohol, sex, vandalism. But none of them quite suited Lulu.
    Maybe she really did quit cheerleading camp. Maybe she lied about it. Maybe she was skipping out on camp and Willow found out.
    Whatever it was, it would pass. Lulu would probably get grounded
    when she returned. Big Bill would go soft on her. Everything would return to normal. The important thing was just getting Lulu back to Santa Monica before I went out of my mind.
    The longer Lulu was away, the harder it became to summon her face, her smell, her touch. At night I dreamed of her, or fell asleep trying. I pursued her down dark corridors, through vast labyrinthine cities of my own invention. But I could no sooner catch her than I could roll over and touch her.
    In the waking hours I summoned her image with the help of photographs. I sat on her bed and buried my face in her bras, inhaling her scent and leaving spots of drool on the cloth. I lay belly down on her bedspread straddling her pillow with my loins on fi re, caressing her breasts, sucking her nipples. And when I took my relief from the unbearable pressure of Lulu, it felt altogether different than when I thought of anyone else, and the fruit of my labors sprang from some deeper well.
     
    July 16, 1984
    She still hasn’t written. I felt so bad today that I ate a hot dog. Then I puked in the van. The twins called me a wuss. I called them faggots. They said no, you’re a faggot. I said no, you are. Something’s happening to me.
    Something was indeed happening to me. After three weeks without Lulu, without so much as a phone call or a postcard, I’d lost my voice.
    My beautiful velvet thunder, like everything else, had forsaken me, and nobody seemed to notice. When I opened my mouth to speak, the positively charged ions did not crackle out like fairy dust. Instead, negative space streamed out of my mouth, swallowing anything in its path, and then it collapsed back inside itself and fi lled me with nothingness.
    For two weeks my hair stopped growing, my nails stopped growing.
    My dream cities disappeared without a trace. No thought, no smell, no image could arouse my erotic life force. My young manhood wilted, and the seeds of my possibilities dried up before I could ever sow them.
    Then the postcard came. I gazed upon its beauty without ever looking at the