Johnny Temple - USA Noir - Best of the Akashic Noir Series

Not Popo. The Pope. For one thing, he had more money than God. Well, his dad and his Aunt Cuca had all the money, but it drizzled upon him like the first rains of Christmas. He was always buying the beer, paying for gas and movie tickets and midnight runs to Taco Bell. “Good American food,” he called it.

He’d transferred in during my senior year. He called it his exile. I spied him for the first time in English. We were struggling to stay awake during the endless literary conversations about A Separate Peace . He didn’t say much about it. Just sat over there making sly eyes at the girls and laughing at the teacher’s jokes. I’d never seen a Beaner kid with such long hair. He looked like some kind of Apache warrior, to tell you the truth. He had double-loops in his left ear. He got drogy sometimes and wore eyeliner under one eye. Those little Born Again chicks went crazy for him when he was in his devil-boy mode.

And the day we connected, he was wearing a Cradle of Filth T-shirt. He was staring at me. We locked eyes for a second and he nodded once and we both started to laugh. I was wearing a Fields of the Nephilim shirt. We were the Pentagram Brothers that day, for sure. Everybody else must have been thinking we were goth school shooters. I guess it was a good thing Phoenix was too friggin’ hot for black trenchcoats.

Later, I was sitting outside the vice principal’s office. Ray Hulsebus, the nickelback on the football team, had called me “faggot” and we’d duked it out in the lunch court. Popo was sitting on the wooden bench in the hall.

“Good fight,” he said, nodding once.

I sat beside him.

“Wha’d you get busted for?” I asked.

He gestured at his shirt. It was originally black, but it had been laundered so often it was gray. In a circle were the purple letters, VU . Above them, in stark white, one word: HEROIN .

“Cool,” I said. “Velvet Underground.”

“My favorite song.”

We slapped hands.

“The admin’s not into classic rock,” he noted. “Think I’m… advocating substance abuse.”

We laughed.

“You like Berlin ?” he asked.

“Berlin? Like, the old VH1 band?”

“Hell no! Lou Reed’s best album, dude!”

They summoned him.

“I’ll play it for ya,” he said, and walked into the office.

And so it began.

Tía Cuca’s house was the bomb. She was hooked up with some kind of Lebanese merchant. Out in Paradise Valley. The whole place was cool floor tiles and suede couches. Their pool looked out on the city lights, and you could watch roadrunners on the deck cruising for rattlers at dusk. Honestly, I didn’t know why Pope wasn’t in some rich private school like Brophy or Phoenix Country Day, but apparently his scholastic history was “spotty,” as they say. I still don’t know how he ended up at poor ol’ Camelback, but I do know it must have taken a lot of maneuvering by his family. By the time we’d graduated, we were inseparable. He went to ASU. I didn’t have that kind of money. I went to community college.

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 Disgraceland.”

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.