L.A. Trippin’

As I left Lucy’s room I really felt like hanging. It had taken her just over half an hour to rip my entire universe apart. She said she’d be leaving me, us – like that. WHAM!
I mean, do you get what that means? I’d finished school just over a month ago. Leaving me behind to sort things out with all the freaks is damned close to manslaughter. And all that cash, unbelievable! How come I never got that lucky? Man, she’d turned nineteen on the fifteenth. You can’t do that, not to your only brother!
The wind was taking up fallen leaves and sand and plastic shit lying around. Except for some lonely Mario Lanza singing fom my parents’ stereo everything was silent. Except for the banging in my head. Life was so unfair – turning my sister into some rich bitch.
Such desperate moments always drove me out onto the square. The fresh air made it easier for me to get over loneliness and sadness or whatever I had exploding in my mind. I was lucky – there wasn’t another frigging soul around. I climbed up the lamppost, the only source of light in the darkness. From up there, everything looked different, even the rathole some dumbass once named Midville. Shitville would have been a better fit. Midville, ha. Right in the middle of the world’s biggest emptiness. As if God forgot to fill out a blank on his map. Some two hundred people stuck in a village and a few Indians running around the surrounding reservations badly decorating the desert.
With the green light shining on my head and the mosquitos dancing around me, I finally felt free. I looked over at old George Washington’s rotting statue, the damn cash cow. I’d often thought about how in God’s name this piece of art-junk had found its way here, amidst this bunch of lost desert freaks. Nobody knew and of course nobody cared. So I kept on speculating. Maybe it got too heavy after three of the four horses on the wagon pulling George from Oklahoma to L.A. succumbed to the killing heat. Or the artist imagined, after having stared a little too long into the desert sun, his George being cross-eyed - which of course he wasn’t.
Over time I’d come to the conclusion that the most logical explanation for the presence of the mysterious piece of metal amidst our community is the following. When the artist discovered a fucked up melting process caused the thing to fall apart, he decided to dump it here, instead of after having endured desert’s burning hell, exposing himself to eternal damnation by his embittered customers in L.A. That’s why Midville’s George is probably the only one in the country which has birds peeking out of his eyeballs and flies nesting in his horse’s ass, swarming at you in giant flocks whenever you hit the copper.
I also thought a lot about what would have become of the real George if he’d had a sister like Lucy, which I guess he hadn’t. He would never have cared of becoming president.
I know she’s my sister and all, but man, she sure is one hot bitch. Her looks would instantly knock out any Hollywood talent scout. That is, if ever there would have been one so stupid as to lose his way here, which of course there hadn’t.
Here’s a short description, makes it easier to follow the story. Imagine a redhead – darkred that is - pretty face, full lips, a nice set of knockers, bowling ball size, eraserhead nipples shooting through the bra, as if pointing a twin barreled shotgun straight into your face. Legs? Natural beauty. You won’t find anything like those on ebay. In spring and later in summer, when you just don’t need anything over your T, she’d simply forget to put something underneath – which of course had any guy falling into instant coma.
One day I watched her through the bathroom keyhole as she turned her rack to the sunlight. She just adjusted the shades a little so that the sunrays strifing her nipples shot two pencil-sized shadows onto her flat belly. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, saw that it was good, smiled her little smile and put on some thin whatever with more than enough holes for her arms and head to pop through. Then she sprayed a dustcloud of perfume into her hair and walked out to welcome new fans. Needless to say the boys in school stuck to her like the flies sticking to my forehead. But she didn’t want any of that. She was waiting for someone better.
Breakfast’s peace often got disrupted by Dad shouting at Lucy’s outfit.
“Madre Mia!” - Dad’s shouts were often multilingual. “You look like some cheap tabledance slut. Where did you bury your decency? Ugh! I won’t allow you to go outside dressed like this!”
Not that anybody in our family ever would have cared about what Dad had to say …
Lucy knew what she wanted and how to get it. Especially on Wednesdays, when she was showing the tourists around town. But first let me tell you: these people usually didn’t come to Midville out of their own free will. Nobody ever did.
Being an attentive reader and all, by now the following question should have been surfing those mellow waves deep inside your brainpan: Why in God’s sake did anybody ever get stuck there in the first place? Nobody knew the answer to that one, least of all me.
I didn’t see no desert until I got to this godforsaken place, six years ago. We’re originally from Liège, Belgium. Got not much of that saved on my memory banks though. I was a loner most of my life so I didn’t shed too many tears as my parents told me we would move to the States. We had a small restaurant down there. That is until one day a drunken guest mistook Mama for his cigar and set first Ma and then the place on fire. Dad just barely managed to put out his smoking love, but he couldn’t stop the restaurant from burning to the ground. When my Dad’s uncle heard about the mishap, he asked my parents to come over to help out with his ice-cream parlor. The good fellow died the day we arrived in Midville.
With all their savings gone, my parents decided to stay – not that they had any other choice. But life wasn’t easy. People looked down on us from the start. They thought we were strange and said we’d speak funny, but I didn’t care. My sister and I made up a secret pact and swore we’d never give up. We were stronger than the rest and we would prove it. Mom and Dad were less fortunate. They had no friends even though they made great pizzas (Dad added the evening service to the parlor). Not that Midville treated us as outcasts or anything. People did visit the restaurant and all, but in the end we were more or less left out. My parents tried the best they could but still, over the years they changed. Dad got grumpy and Ma just shut up. Lucy and I did have a few friends though we mostly kept to ourselves.
Anyway, the tourists. On Wednesdays L.A.’s airport often couldn’t cope with the traffic and to avoid circling for hours, some of the smaller planes did a stopover near us, in the middle of the desert. They were a welcome bonus to my family’s irregular income. Whenever we got a call from Harry, the airport manager, telling us a plane was approaching, Lucy would slip into one of her tatters to instantly rip any dozed off businessman out of his deepest coma, and headed for the landing strip.
The moment she entered the tiny hall, the dried-out passengers immediately started sweating like pigs. Amazing how the body is able to suddenly produce that much fluid. After having finished her welcome speech and having sent the families and women straight over to the bar, she informed the remaining men about my parents’ ice-cream parlor and all the interesting historical sights Midville had to offer on the way there: Rotting George from the front, the back, the side and even from inside. That usually had them all suddenly rediscovering any deeply hidden and underfed historical interest which resulted in the guys following her every step like dogs on an invisible leash.
Obviously not one of them ever was interested in Ol’ George nor his damn’ horse, but who cared? They all had the priviledge to be close to Lucy for an hour or two and if they were lucky and she felt like it, some of them even got a close-up view of her jiggling breasts and the tiny pearls of perspiration which the burning sun had let come running down her neck, only to disappear like lucky surfers between the perfectly soft round curves of her boobs.
The moment we saw her standing next to George, bending over to better be able to explain the view one would enjoy if taking the trouble of looking into the horse’s rotten hole, straight through its gaping mouth and out again, at our ice-cream parlor, my parents and I – we’d just been waiting for the sign - put up the extra pots of coffee.
But business only came with the tourists. Without them Midville was dead. If we were lucky, during the day one of the town’s freaks would come by for an espresso, an ice-cream or a pizza and in the evening we sometimes had a family eating out. But all in all it barely covered the electricity costs. Although Mom and Dad worked their asses off, they just made enough to get us two through high school.
We would never have survived if not for Pisa Pops, Mom’s Dad. The day he stopped shouting at all the people ever to have been appointed sainthood simply because he felt he was about to join them, he decided to split the money he’d been sitting on for all of his life in five equal parts. Granny got one part and us the other four. Whereas my parents used most of it to settle debts and to refurbish the restaurant, Lucy and I saved it for the day we’d leave Midville to start a new life somewhere else, in some other less forgotten place.
Because of Pisa Pop’s sudden cashflow my family managed to hold on - like so often before. Over the years people had started getting jealous. It wasn’t that they’d have liked us to go bankrupt or anything. After all, where would they be getting their ice-cream? The Midvillains simply couldn’t stand that, thanks to the tourists, we were able to survive without turning into their slaves.
A couple of months ago, during break in school, the bomb exploded.
“Hey spaghetti, your sissi got some nice hams hanging there - mind if we nibble some?”
That was Tim. And man, he sure wouldn’t be doing any nibbling in the near future. Maybe Lucy wasn’t the brightest one - although she had all straight A’s in school (guess why) - but she was tough and knew how to kick ass. She went over to the dickhead, still staring through his uncertain laughs amidst his friends and pulled up her shirt. Can you believe that? Whoopie, there they were, staring him right in the face, Midville’s hit rack. Tim’s eyes popped out. He was in tittie heaven, if only for a very short while - until she hit. WHAM! I’d like to know where she’d gotten that fast. Tim just screamed and doubled over and watched in horror as a set of his teeth came flying back down to earth.
He screamed in pain and yelled: “You shupid sluh,” spitting blood all over.
Staying totally calm she whispered: “Remember Tim, wanna watch - gotta pay,” while passing him, wiggling her tiny behind in the air.
Now, Tim was the son of Mr. And Mrs. Bracket, owners of the one company where practically all Midville earned its living: Bracket’s Bolts. They produced all kinds of small parts for Boeing. The little factory was situated just outside town, so that at night, when everything was quiet, one could hear the mechanical rythm of the huge machines forming the tiny fasteners. “The Brackets rattle you to sleep,” was Pa Brackett’s favorite slogan.
Although almost all the other students in school secretly supported Lucy’s reaction to Tim’s humiliations, no one dared to speak out in her favor. After all the Brackets might one day refuse them the means to buy a house, a car or even a TV-set. So, over time Lucy and me found ourselves becoming even more isolated. Though by sending Tim Bracket on a fifteen mile drive just to get a new set of teeth drilled in, she had achieved a high level of respect in school. Lucy didn’t care.
People talked, though. Not just the kids in school. It was as if, hidden behind upheld handbags and closed doors, the women of Midville had decided to boycott her. At the butcher, while waiting for their steaks to be chopped, they turned their backs. The hairdresser’s wife even refused to cut her ponytail. When asked why, the bitch always thought of some new excuse like “Mrs.’ so and so perm is in the making,” or whatever.
People even started punishing me by ignoring my presence. Not that I felt sad for having lost my chances at dating Sandy or one of Midville’s other knockouts: Jennifer, dwarfing whole Midville with her height: one ninetyfive, Cindy, so cross-eyed you had to consider yourself lucky if at least one eyeball was visible in the proper socket while she was devouring you. Or Heather, said to be allergic to deodorants ….
I really hate it when people who care about nothing else but the birth of their neighbor’s child or the one hot night nine months earlier, suddenly start messing with one’s life. One of the butcher’s sons had picked up the torn condom from under the newlyweds’ open window which the next morning resulted in all Midville going over the act. They discussed it everywhere. While hanging over Dick’s cars, at the bank, while cleaning the windows: “Do you think she’s pregnant? You sure Chuck really did satisfy his Mary?” Or “Maybe his sperm didn’t reach her jackpot.” Best was Mrs. White, whose husband owned the grocery store: “I sure hope so, otherwise we’d have to endure the endless night of pleasure again.” Ugh! They almost made me throw up.
Apart from that, they also did care a lot about the weather.