Destroy (5 page)

She starts laughing.

And I say, “I'm totally serious.”

“Give me a break, James.”

“Just say yes.”

“No.”

“Come on. Say yes.”

“It would be way too complicated, and you know this.” She pulls her hands out of mine. “I used to go out with one of your best friends. Way too many people would get butt sore and have their feelings hurt.”

“Fuck 'em,” I snort, a line of smoke spraying from my mouth. “We don't need any of those people. We could run away together and live a real life.” Leaning in closer so that our faces are only inches apart, I say, “Where nobody knows who we are. Anonymous. Invisible.”

Nina puts her hands on my chest, pushing me away slowly. Denying me. The same way she's been doing since the first time we ever met.

And she says, “As sweet as that all sounds, me and you lying around some Paris apartment all day drinking wine, smoking good cigarettes, reading each other poetry, and watching old black-and-white films on a projector—”

“Like in that movie
The Dreamers
,” I cut in.

“Yeah, just like that,” she says. “But that's not what you really want, James.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it's not. You don't want anonymity whatsoever. You like that people know who you are. You like being a big deal. You love the fact that there are people out there who absolutely adore you and treat you like some semi-god whenever you come to town or they see you out at a bar or a party. That's why you haven't been able to write a second book.”

“Don't say shit about my second book,” I snap.

“I have to, James. It's the truth. It's not that you're so busy agonizing over every word like you told the girl who interviewed you for
Esquire
. It's because you're afraid that people will brush you aside if the second one isn't as good as the first one.”

I shove Nina's hands off me and step back and go, “Fuck you. Don't you try cutting me down like that ever again, because I will fucking critique your bullshit life in a second and it won't be pretty.”

“Whoa, whoa, James. Settle down,” she says, her eyes getting big. “Just calm down. I wasn't trying to cut you down at all. So let's just drop it. Please. You live your life and I'll live mine.”

“Fine.” I finish my cigarette and drop the butt into an empty beer can sitting on the dresser beside me and let my attention get dragged briefly into a lively conversation being held in the hallway right outside the bedroom door about who would win in a fight between Hannibal Lecter and Leatherface. This goes on for, like, thirty seconds until both people arguing concede to a third person that Robert Mitchum's character in the movie
The Night of the Hunter
, the Reverend Harry Powell, would easily destroy both Lecter and Leatherface, and then there's like a minute of loud drug-snorting sounds.

Nina and I both laugh, and I light another cigarette.

“Okay.” She smiles. “Now about this birthday present.”

“Oh right.” I grin. “You mean this.” I reach into the inside pocket of my blazer and pull a white envelope from it.

Nina takes the envelope and opens it, and her face lights up. She yells, “Oh my god! Bowie,” and rips two tickets from the envelope. Two tickets to the David Bowie, Peaches, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah concert next week at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. “You got me David Bowie for my birthday!”

“And this, too,” I tell her, handing her another envelope, this one marked with a black
X
on the front of it.

“No way! No fucking way!” she screams, sliding out the two backstage passes to the same concert. “I'm gonna meet Bowie! Holy shit!” Jumping right at me, she throws her arms around my neck and squeezes me so hard that my cigarette pops out of my fingers. “Thank you so much, sweetheart! Thank you!”

I grab her shoulders and kiss her on the cheek and move her off me, tears running from her eyes, and I say, “Happy birthday, Nina,” then rub the cigarette out with my foot.

Nina wipes her eyes and goes, “How did you get these?”

“Come on,” I tell her, dumping the rest of my beer down my throat. “I know a lot of fucking people, darling. A lot of well-connected people.”

Nina wipes her eyes again and says, “You are amazing sometimes, James. Absolutely brilliant.”

“And feel free to take whoever you want.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I'm out of town that night, so go ahead and take anyone, just not Brian.”

She sticks out her tongue, and I dig out my coke and look for a surface to cut out a line. I end up grabbing a picture off a computer desk of some dude white-water rafting.

“You want some of this?” I ask her.

“You know I don't do that shit, darling.” She puts the tickets and passes into her purse and goes, “That's another reason why me and you would never work out. I hate watching you kill yourself with that shit.”

“Hey, ya know, I was actually thinking the other day about how much of this I do and came to the conclusion that it's really not that I love doing coke all that much anymore, it's more like I don't dislike it enough to quit.” Pause. “It's kinda like being a Rolling Stones fan still.”

“Right,” she laughs.

I take a seat on the edge of this messy bed and dump some coke on the picture and start grinding the chunks down when the bedroom door bursts open and in walks the same dude from the picture I'm using as a surface, wearing a PBR trucker hat and a NOFX T-shirt.

“What the fuck is going on in here?” he wants to know.

“We're having a private party,” I snort back. “Wanna join?”

“Fuck you, tweaker. I don't know you two.”

“So what, man? We don't know you, either.”

“So what made you think you could come into my room without permission and do drugs off my shit?”

I get to my feet and go, “Relax, man. We're not gonna take anything.” I look around the room. “It wouldn't even be worth our time.” Pause. “We didn't know the room was off-limits.”

“Bullshit. There was a huge sign on the door.”

“Yeah, but really, man,” I say with a grin. “What's in a sign, ya know?”

“Oh, shit. A smart-ass.” The dude swipes at the picture, knocking it and all the coke on it out of my hands. “I want you two out,” he says.

“Don't be a dick.”

“Don't tell me what to do in my own room,” he snorts, jabbing a finger into my chest.

“Dude.” I shove him back. “Don't ever touch me again.”

Nina jumps in between us. She shouts, “Stop it!” Then she turns to me. “James, let's just leave the room. It's not a big deal.”

“Hey, totally fine with me.”

“So go,” the dude rips.

Nina yanks me past him, me grinning at him the whole time. She pulls me out of the room and back up the stairs and into the living room, where I run right into Tim and Jessica, this rad married couple I met when my homies Sebastian, Lena, Chloe, and I took a road trip up to Seattle to see the Murder City Devils get back together for two last shows.

“Oh, shit,” I say. “What the hell are two well-put-together, smart, successful people doing at a party like this?”

“A friend told us about it,” says Tim. “Why are you here?”

“I was bound by the obligations of a goddamn birthday, but I'm about to split.”

“It's that bad?” Jessica presses.

“Duh. I mean, listen to the music being played right now. They're playing the new Rancid album for the second time since I got here.”

Tim lights a cigarette. “That is a pretty good point.”

Twisting the cap off the Beam, I say, “Thank you,” and then this dude with a thick head of curly hair and a Lagwagon hoodie gets up right next to me and goes, “You gotta problem with the music, man?”

“Actually, I do.”

“What's that?”

“Nobody listens to this shit except day-shift strippers and part-time Hot Topic employees.”

Tim busts up laughing, and the dude in the hoodie says, “And why should anyone care what you have to say?”

“Because I'm wearing a blazer, man.”

“Whatever, Captain Hipster,” the guy rips.

“Oh, nice one,” I shoot back. “Real original. But guess which one of us is actually going to be banging a chick tonight?”

Charging out of nowhere, the guy in the NOFX shirt pops right back into my face and says, “You don't listen too well, do you?”

“Dude, get the fuck out of my face,” I snap, shoving him again.

A small crowd of kids start surrounding us, and the dude I just shoved pushes me back and goes, “You're out. Now. Get out of my apartment.”

Then Nina gets back in between us and goes, “James, just leave before this gets out of hand.”

“Gladly, babe. I only came here to give you your amazing gift.”

“So go,” the Fat Mike fanboy rips back. “Before you get hurt.”

“Right,” I snort. “But just one more thing, man.”

“What's that?”

“I was wrong about something earlier. I do know you.”

“You think so, huh?”

“I do. You're the kid who moved here for art school because you couldn't hack it at a real college. You did your shit. You graduated from some drawing classes. You got your degree. And now you work some shitty customer service job because you're finding out that you're really not that good and that no one wants you to do anything for them except ask if they're finding everything all right in the store. But you gotta do it because you got some loans to pay off. I mean, shit, man. It's cool. All's I'm saying is that instead of prolonging it all, you should just save yourself the heartache and grow your ponytail out now and score that job at the camera store. And who knows, maybe by the time you've hit thirty, you'll be named assistant manager.”

“Fuck you!” the guy barks.

And I'm like, “That's cool, man.” Then I grab Nina and slam my mouth against hers, sliding my tongue inside it and around it, and when I let go, I look at Brian and say, “What's up, asshole?” Then I tell Jessica and Tim later and bolt back down the hallway.

• • •

Back outside, I straighten my blazer back out and decide to walk a few blocks and blow off some steam.

By the time I've reached Sixteenth and Folsom, my anger has, for the most part, subsided.

For a moment, I think about dropping down to the Arrow Bar on Sixth Street to get some free drinks from this bartender Morgan I bang every great once in a while, but then I remember that it closed its doors for good. So then I'm thinking about El Rio, where I can get free drinks from this babe Nicole, who won't fuck me but who is really rad, until I remember that there's some sorta fund-raiser for Cesar Estrada there tonight. So I'm back to thinking about what else I can fucking do when this thought gets interrupted by my friend Daniel, who is calling me.

“What up, dude? You back from LA yet?”

“I am. What's going on right now?”

“Just leaving the Hemlock. Vaz played there tonight.”

“Man.” I cringe. “I've been missing a ton of good shows lately. I missed High on Fire a few weeks ago. Then I missed Year Future with Comets on Fire, and now Vaz. Fuck.”

“Well, you can't do anything about it now,” he says.

“I know. Where are you going?”

“To some party at Fell and Fillmore, 2222 Fell. It's supposed to be rad. You should come over, dude.”

“That sounds cool. I will.”

“Late.”

I put my phone away and step off the corner to hail this approaching taxi when the semi-silence of the street is broken again, this time by the muzzled screeches of moped engines.

I spin around.

Cruising down a small hill all
Revenge of the Nerds
on wheels style are a gang of mopeders, four wide and five deep.

I jog quickly across the street, and right as I'm hopping into the back of the cab, the gang sputters by and I hear one of them shout, “The Ministry of Creatures will prowl forever!” Followed by a shower of loud cheers from the rest of the bikers, which carves a humongous smile into my face.

The Ministry of Creatures.

The MOC.

The once-fictional moped gang I wrote about in
PieGrinder
has thus far spawned twenty-seven chapters nationally, including two in SF and one in Oakland.

The gang was fictional in my novel, created by an eight-year-old girl, Simone, who turns in an assignment to her third-grade teacher in which she was told to write a two-page story about a fantasy of hers, only much to the distaste of Ms. Carlson, her teacher, Simone's fantasy was getting gangbanged by a group of high school boys who ride mopeds around a small town, terrorizing the residents with stink bombs and water balloons in their custom-made leather jackets with the MOC name and their logo, a wiener dog with wings and a tattoo of a naked girl on its belly, sewn onto the back of them.

Pulling the taxi door shut, I tell the cabbie to take me to Fell and Fillmore, and then I lean my head against the window and stare idly at the hovering masses of fog.

• • •

PieGrinder
, published almost three falls ago by Simon & Schuster, brought me instant critical and commercial success. I was hailed in some circles as a story genius. I was the new face of the medium. I had been summoned to this earth to bring young kids back into reading. I was the anointed savior of the entire new literary world.

The book centers around nineteen-year-old Billy Macavoy, who has come home to the place of his birth, a nameless coastal city, during the summer after a year away. Upon his arrival, Billy is determined to right his wrongs and set his past straight by attempting to reclaim what he feels are the decent parts of it. But the closer he gets to what he thinks he needs to be able to obtain this goal, things begin to crumble apart around him. Secrets are revealed, his family abandons him, and Billy and his friends are left reeling and spinning out of control all the way to the blood-boiling climax during one fateful night toward the end of the summer. Some lives are lost and all will be ruined.