Melanie McGrath - Hard, Soft and Wet

‘It doesn’t even make sense,’ I protest, hurling the thing onto the coffee table, from where Nancy rescues it, saying in a firmer voice than ever she intends:

‘That’s why I thought you’d be interested in going, sweetie. Say, tomorrow ?’

The foyer of the ten-screen multiplex in Culver City, Los Angeles, is already full of teenagers just out of school, waiting for the late afternoon showing of Streetfighter – the Ultimate Battle.

I wander back into the mall, pick up a root beer and an apple pie in McDonald’s and sit myself next to an off-duty security guard with a face full of freckles and hands all knotted up like vine stems. We make awkward small talk for a while. He mentions that Culver City was recently voted the second most desirable neighbourhood inside Los Angeles city limits.

‘It just looks like a hatch of freeways joined by shopping malls to me.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ returns the guard, offended. ‘You should see this place for example, first thing in the morning. The folks from the Culver City senior citizens’ mall-walking club come in around ten. Perfect behaviour. It’s clean and quiet till lunchtime and then these mall rats –’ He gestures towards a group of teenagers lounging round McDonald’s drinking Coke. Two tough-eyed girls glower back – ‘begin drifting in and the whole atmosphere of the place …’ He holds his hands up to the heavens, then begins to twist a waxed burger paper into a candle, forcing it inside an empty carton of french fries. ‘I just wish they’d find someplace else to go.’

‘Like where?’ I say, trying to catch his eye. He looks up from his carton crunching and there’s meanness written on his face.

‘I don’t know, Tallahassee for all I care.’

I was seventeen when I first saw Los Angeles. Staying in a borrowed apartment in Venice, I spent my days boogie-boarding and watching TV and playing beach volleyball with Nancy. I thought everyone in California lived that way then. I was naive and I wanted to believe it.

A pay phone outside Footlocker.

‘Is Isaac there?’

‘Uh uh.’

I check my watch and see there is nearly an hour and a half before we’re due to meet. An almost inaudible sigh trickles down the phone line.

‘Are you his father by any chance?’

‘Stepfather, why?’ I explain that I’ve arranged to see Isaac later on.

‘That can’t be. Isaac had his mother drive him up to San Francisco last night on a business matter.’

I hang up. What the hell kind of fourteen-year-old makes last-minute twelve hundred mile round-trips on business?

Isaac mails to say he’s very sorry not to have kept our appointment, but if I’m ever down in the Los Angeles area again …

Nancy’s COMDEX friend Dave brings his brain machine and an ounce of crystal caffeine around. He says that crystal caff is the drug du jour among programming types, and I suppose he should know, since he is one, all the way from the Dead Kennedys T-shirt to the lightly sprinkled dandruff. After spending Sunday in his company, Nancy told him as sweetly as she could that in spite of the fact that his qualities were manifestly overwhelming, she wasn’t ready for a relationship just now (which is actually a bald-faced lie, albeit a tactful one), but she’d like to be ‘just friends’. I suspect the truth is she doesn’t think Dave is glamorous enough for her. Nancy is always chasing the unattainable at the expense of the possible, whether it be some greaseball zillionaire in a sta-prest suit, the state of permanent perfect happiness, or the latest must-have body-shape.

We set up the brain machine and toss a coin to see who goes first. The machine reprograms your moods by flashing a series of lights into your retina and changing the pathways of your neural impulses. I win the toss. Having selected my chosen mood – exhilaration – from the mood menu, I settle down on the sofa, cover my eyes with the special glasses and flip the on button.

At first nothing happens. Then, a few seconds later, some strange pulsing music starts up, followed by flashes of light which gather into a pattern of green helixes inside my eyelids. For a moment the whole thing feels like a bad trip, but the next I know, Nancy is tugging on my shoulder.

‘Sweetie, it’s time to get up.’

I remove the glasses from my eyes.

‘Did I fall asleep?’

Nancy nods. ‘Twenty-five minutes ago.’

‘That’s pretty amazing for an insomniac.’

‘Except you were supposed to be exhilarated.’

And then Nancy takes her turn, chooses ‘speed learning’, picks up a software manual and is asleep within seconds.

Later, we pipe a little caffeine while Dave tells us the story of his six-toed cat, Arnie, who is a direct descendant of an identical six-toed cat found stowed away on the Mayflower. After that we sit around in benign but awkward silence; then Dave, smiling, makes his excuses and gets up to go. He’s picked up the thought waves passing between me and Nance and feels excluded. Besides, there really is no follow-up to Arnie, the six-toed feline Pilgrim Father, is there?

Unwelcome thoughts of home crowd round the breakfast table.

Sorting through Nancy’s clippings box I find the following:

1980s see 19,346 US teen murders, 18,365 suicides.

150,000 young Americans on missing persons register

20% teenage unemployment rises to 40% for African Americans

One in four young African American males in prison, on probation, parole

At lunch, an uneasiness sets in, somehow connected to Dave’s visit.

‘Don’t all those gloomy statistics about kids get you down?’

‘Uh huh.’ My friend pushes aside a half-eaten pop tart, takes some ice cream out of the freezer. It occurs to me that Nancy’s clippings are as much a part of Nancy as her fragile insouciance, whereas for me they’re just statistics strings.

‘So why d’you keep them?’

A bottle of olives appears on the table, followed by some Oreo cookies. She tries a spoonful of ice cream, an olive, a bite of pop tart. Looks unsteady.

‘Pandora’s Box.’ A muffled sound as the other half of the pop tart follows an olive. She scrapes some Oreo filling onto her teeth.

‘It’s my only weapon against the bio-clock. Just to concentrate on what a shitty world it is out there for kids.’ I watch her removing an olive stone and inserting a spoonful of ice-cream.

‘Nancy. You’re not …?’

‘Are you insane?’ she looks at me with her eyes in that crepey position. ‘I don’t even know a friendly sperm bank.’

I remind her of Dave.

‘Oh yeah, like the world really needs another programmer geek in diapers.’

‘That’s harsh.’

Nancy pauses to think for a moment.

‘You’re right. And anyway, it’s untrue. The world needs all the programmer geeks in diapers it can get right now.’

Muir Woods has become a weekend routine. At Nancy’s request a Japanese tourist takes a photo of us marking off the start of the digital age on the slice of redwood trunk, at the very edge where the bark begins to flake away. Climbing up onto the plateau, a weight of sadness falls. I look out over the ocean towards Japan, trying to think myself back to the blue of that wide water. Almost before I’m aware of it, salt tears have begun to scratch at my contact lenses.