Megan Abbott - Phoenix Noir

Pope’s room was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Tía Cuca had given him a detached single-car garage at the far end of the house. They’d put in a bathroom and made a bed loft on top of it. Pope had a king-size mattress up there, and a wall of CDs and a Bose iPod port, and everything was Wi-Fi’d to his laptop. There was a huge Bowie poster on the wall beside the door — in full Aladdin Sane glory, complete with the little shiny splash of come on his collarbone. It was so retro. My boy had satellite on a flat screen, and piles of DVDs around the slumpy little couch on the ground floor. I didn’t know why he was so crazy for the criminal stuff — Scarface and The Godfather . I was sick of Tony Montana and Michael Corleone! Elvis clock — you know the one, with the King’s legs dancing back and forth in place of a pendulum.

“Welcome,” Pope said on that first visit, “to Disgrace-land.”

He was comical like that when you got to know him. He turned me on to all that good classic stuff: Iggy, T. Rex, Roxy Music. He wasn’t really fond of new music, except for the darkwave guys. Anyway, there we’d be, blasting that glam as loud as possible, and it would get late and I’d just fall asleep on his big bed with him. No wonder they thought I was gay! Ha. We were drinking Buds and reading Hustler mags we’d stolen from his Uncle Abdullah or whatever his name was. Aunt Cuca once said, “Don’t you ever go home?” not mean like. Friendly banter, I’d say. But I told her, “Nah — since the divorce, my mom’s too busy to worry about it.” And in among all those excellent boys’ days and nights, I was puttering around his desk, looking at the Alien figures and the Godzillas, scoping out the new copy of El Topo he’d gotten by mail, checking his big crystals and his antique dagger, when I saw the picture of Amapola behind his stack of textbooks. Yes, she was a kid. But what a kid.

“Who’s this?” I said.

He took the framed picture out of my hand and put it back.

“Don’t worry about who that is,” he said.

Thanksgiving. Pope had planned a great big fiesta for all his homies and henchmen. Oh, yes. He took the goth-gansta thing seriously, and he had actual “hit men” (he called them that) who did errands for him, carried out security at his concerts. He played guitar for the New Nouveau Nuevos — you might remember them. One of his “soldiers” was a big Irish kid who’d been booted off the football team, Andy the Tank. Andy appeared at our apartment with an invitation to the fiesta — we were to celebrate the Nuevos’ upcoming year, and chart the course of the future. I was writing lyrics for Pope, cribbed from Roxy Music and Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World album. The invite was printed out on rolled parchment and tied with a red ribbon. Pope had style.

I went over to Tía Cuca’s early, and there she was — Amapola. She’d come up from Nogales for the fiesta, since Pope was by now refusing to go home for any reason. He wanted nothing to do with his dad, who had declared that only gay boys wore long hair or makeup or played in a band that wore feather boas and silver pants. Sang in English.

I was turning eighteen, and she was fifteen, almost sixteen. She was more pale than Popo. She had a frosting of freckles on her nose and cheeks, and her eyes were light brown, almost gold. Her hair was thick and straight and shone like some liquid. She was kind of quiet too, blushing when I talked to her, shying away from all us males.

The meal was righteous. They’d fixed a turkey in the Mexican style. It was stuffed not with bread or oysters, but with nuts, dried pineapple, dried papaya and mango slices, and raisins. Cuca and Amapola wore traditional Mexican dresses and, along with Cuca’s cook, served us the courses as we sat like members of the Corleone family around the long dining room table. Pope had seated Andy the Tank beside Fuckin’ Franc, the Nuevos’ drummer. Some guy I didn’t know but who apparently owned a Nine Inch Nails — type synth studio in his garage sat beside Franc. I was granted the seat at the end of the table, across its length from Pope. Down the left side were the rest of the Nuevos — losers all.

I was trying to keep my roving eye hidden from the Pope. I didn’t even have to guess what he’d do if he caught me checking her out. But she was so fine. It wasn’t even my perpetual state of horniness. Yes it was. But it was more. She was like a song. Her small smiles, her graciousness. The way she swung her hair over her shoulder. The way she lowered her eyes and spoke softly... then gave you a wry look that cut sideways and made savage fun of everyone there. You just wanted to be a part of everything she was doing.

“Thank you,” I said every time she refilled my water glass or dropped fresh tortillas by my plate. Not much, it’s true, but compared to the Tank or Fuckin’ Franc, I was as suave as Cary Grant.

“You are so welcome,” she’d say.

It started to feel like a dance. It’s in the way you say it, not what you say. We were saying more to each other than Cuca or Pope could hear.

And then, I was hit by a jolt that made me jump a little in my chair.

She stood behind me, resting her hands on the top of the chair. We were down to the cinnamon coffee and the red grape juice toasts. And Amapola put out one finger, where they couldn’t see it, and ran her fingernail up and down between my shoulder blades.

Suddenly, supper was over, and we were all saying goodnight, and she had disappeared somewhere in the big house and never came back out.

Soon, Christmas came, and Pope again refused to go home. I don’t know how Cuca took it, having the sullen King Nouveau lurking in her converted garage. He had a kitsch aluminum tree in there. Blue ornaments. “ Très Warhol,” he sighed.

My mom had given me some cool stuff — a vintage Who T-shirt, things like that. Pope’s dad had sent presents — running shoes, French sunglasses, a .22 target pistol. We snickered. I was way cooler than Poppa Popo. I had been over to Zia Records and bought him some obscure ’70s CDs: Captain Beyond, Curved Air, Amon Duul II, the Groundhogs. Things that looked cool, not that I’d ever heard them. Pope got me a vintage turntable and the first four Frank Zappa LPs; I couldn’t listen to that shit. But still. How cool is that?

Pope wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t blind either. He’d arranged a better gift for me than all that. He’d arranged for Amapola to come visit for a week. I found out later she had begged him.

“Keep it in your pants,” he warned me. “I’m watching you.”

Oh my God. I was flying. We went everywhere for those six days. The three of us, unfortunately. Pope took us to that fancy art deco hotel downtown — the Clarendon. That one with the crazy neon lights on the walls outside and the dark gourmet eatery on the ground-floor front corner. We went to movie matinees, never night movies. It took two movies to wrangle a spot sitting next to her, getting Pope to relinquish the middle seat to keep us apart. But he knew it was a powerful movement between us, like continental drift. She kept leaning over to watch me instead of the movies. She’d laugh at everything I said. She lagged when we walked so I would walk near her. I was trying to keep my cool, not set off the Hermano Grande alarms. And suddenly he let me sit beside her, and I could smell her. She was all clean hair and sweet skin. Our arms brushed on the armrest, and we let them linger, sweat against each other. Our skin forming a thin layer of wet between us, a little of her and a little of me mixing into something made of both of us. I was aching. I could have pole-vaulted right out of the theater.

She turned sixteen that week. At a 3 o’clock showing of The Dark Knight , she slipped her hand over the edge of the armrest and tangled her fingers in mine.