They did not allow neon signs in Burbank. But there
was one, very small, so few people noticed. It hung above the dark
front doors of a small chapel at the end of her block. The sign was a
cross, bordered in green neon, and inside the cross, orange neon
letters announced, “Jesus Saves.”
Next to the chapel was a liquor store where she and
her friends used to buy cigarettes. It was owned by a middle-aged man
with bloodshot eyes who she occasionally saw at church. During the
week, he sat in a lawn chair outside on the sidewalk by the newspaper
stands until someone came in to make a purchase. He never looked drunk,
but there was always a bottle near the cash register. He closed the
store at fifty, moved the lawn-chair into his backyard, and sat down to
relax and enjoy his retirement. He died in that chair about six months
later. A few years after that, someone took down the neon cross.
Her first date had been at the little burger stand
on the other side of the store. She was ten and he was eleven. They
spent their allowances on greasy chiliburgers and French-fries served
in plastic baskets, and they sat on one of the faded outdoor tables.
Afterward, they walked to his house and listened to Beatle Records.
They were sitting side-by-side on the red beanbag chair when he
suddenly leaned over and kissed her. She kissed him back, giggled, and
then ran home crying to her mother, asking if she would have a baby now
that she had kissed a boy.
The chapel was gone now, replaced by the parking lot of a moving
company whose services she would probably not need. She pulled out a
pen and wrote down the number anyway, wondering why she had lived so
close to the little chapel but had never gone inside. Probably because
one a week at her parents’ church was more than enough. The sermons
were long and boring, and the preacher read from the Bible and said
things she didn’t understand, and so she would get restless and start
moving around too much, and when they got home, her father would spank
her for misbehaving.
It was hot tonight, hot like the summer evenings she
would walk down the streets with friends, talking about who they were
going to marry and how many children they were going to have, and then
later, who they had slept with and how good he was, or bad. Then they
would laugh, pretending they were lying because the only girls who did
things like that were sluts, and then they would continue talking about
what they didn’t do, even though they all knew they did.
Chris was her first love. He was
sixteen, an emancipated minor who had a small one-bedroom apartment on
the second story over a bicycle shop near the corner of Buena Vista and
Magnolia. The building had been torn down a long time ago and a new
brick one went up, and then that was torn down and they built another.
It sat right next to a taco stand where she had her second date, but
now where it stood was a gift shop, where yesterday she had bought
flowers for the funeral. The black iron bars on the windows and doors
were pulled closed for the night.
The evening was quiet, nothing to hear but the drone
of the streetlights. There were no sounds of children riding bicycles,
or of parents sitting on front porches laughing while their children
played hide-and-seek, and no sound of children crying over skinned
knees from roller-skates caught on unseen cracks in the sidewalk. Had
the night ever really sounded like that?
A white station wagon slowly drove by. She watched
its tail lights slowly recede down Magnolia Boulevard until they
disappeared at the bridge over the freeway where the rail bums lived.
Beyond the bridge were the foothills, empty lots now marking the grave
of the mall where she used to spend afternoons shopping. They were
building there now, next to the new Hilton on Restaurant Row where the
bowling alley used to be. Further down San Fernando Road, buried under
the foundation of a condominium complex, lay the remains of the old
Cornell Theater, where a double feature and a matinee were only fifty
cents. One summer they raised the admission to seventy-five cents, then
to a dollar, and then they knocked it down.
The city lights reflected orange
off the clouds resting on the foothills. Sometimes, after a rain had
washed away the smog, after her parents had said their prayers and gone
to sleep, she would sit on her bed and look out at the sky. Star light,
star bright, first start I see tonight. Could you see them from the
observatory tonight? The long winding road climbing the Griffith Park
Hills, past Travel Town and the L.A. Zoo, up to the observatory, had an
exit about half a mile from the top. She, David, and one of his friends
had gone there one night during her first semester of college. They
were all very drunk and very stoned. The pot and the whiskey had made
David more reckless than usual, and he was racing her Capri along the
dark twisting road, steering with one hand while grabbing at her
breasts with the other, despite her clumsy attempts at pushing him off.
She could not hold her liquor very well. They finally turned into the
deserted picnic arena and got out of the car for a walk. Then,
suddenly, David shoved her to the ground and offered to share her with
his friend. They took turns, pounding and pounding into her, their
breath smelling of Jim Beam, and the last thing she saw before passing
out was David sitting on a picnic table and laughing, her silver cross
on a broken chain lying in a pool of her own vomit.
They took her home after that.
David helped her to her parent’s front porch and kissed her goodnight
and told her that he loved her. It had taken her a long time to
remember that. When she finally did, it didn’t matter anymore, and
David had been found dead of an overdose on the steps of a church in
Hollywood, and she didn’t care about that either.
Back at her parents’ house, she sat on the couch and
drank a coffee, then went to her old room. It had long ago been painted
over, and there was a forest mural on one wall and furniture much nicer
than what she had grown up with. It was a guestroom now, but she had
never returned long enough to use it. The house was very quiet, but not
unusually so. Her parents had insisted on a quiet existence. There was
never a loud voice or a cry or laughter, just a long empty silence
broken only by the sound of TV or evening prayer.
Her father had repainted the entire house after
mother died, and then he reseeded the lawn and planted rosebushes, and
then he forgot about them. The outside grew brown and then yellow, and
then the yard was nothing more than dirt and a few weeds. The last time
she visited, she offered to get him a gardener. He refused. She tried
to get him to talk about mother, and when he would not, tried to get
him to talk about anything at all. She finally left him sitting in the
brown easy chair by the floor lamp with the dusty yellow shade, the
family Bible in his lap, staring blankly at the floor. That was where
they found him three days ago. They had to take the old recliner away
because they could not get out the smell. She was thankful it had been
taken care of before she arrived.
She left the guestroom and walked to the kitchen
where she fixed herself another coffee, sipping out of the familiar
chipped orange cup her father always used in the garage. Mother would
never let him take the good mugs out of there. A million little useless
details darted through her mind, some new, some old, all pointless: the
picture of Jesus praying in a garden, hanging crooked on a nail;
cobwebs in the corners that her mother might have swept away but her
father did not see; her graduation pictures collecting dust on the
mantle; tarnished baton twirling trophies; and the bloodstain they
couldn’t get out of the floor, where her brother, who had ceased being
a disappointment to their parents by killing himself at seventeen, long
ago carpeted over.
The decision was not difficult at all. She took the
empty cup and rinsed it out in the sink, then washed her hands and
walked outside, climbed into her car and headed back to the hotel.
After the funeral tomorrow, it would all be over. She would sell the
house, of course. There was nothing here she wanted, nothing here at
all. The only thing leaving with her tomorrow would be a vague regret
that she had not been there to watch them tear down that old neon cross.
Thanks for Visiting!