Using Toonies

CHAPTER 1

‘Don’t die on me,’ I told her.

What happened?

I shrugged my shoulders as if that explained it all.

What did you do? my new drinking companion asked.

What could I do? I tilted my nearly empty glass as if the world’s fate quivered on the edge. Sighing, I motioned for the bartender with the SAG card to bring me another drink. What could I do, I asked myself. I went home, was what I said.

::-----::

Late spring, smells like summer upon the white, shiny streets that leave the cold heart of Los Angeles. They streak through what a New Yorker calls boroughs until they are blinded into the Pacific Ocean. Olympic, Wilshire, Santa Monica, Pico. Orgiastic Heaven they are, and warmth and you can't find a bird who doesn't sing or know somebody famous. It's ridiculous, probably, but like a juicy rumor you're sucked into it regardless of its veracity or true worth.

I was alive in this city, trying to make it, not as an actor, thank God, but as a writer. What kind of writer, a girl across a glaring table of bar lights would ask. It’s for bathrooms and plane rides, I'd usually reply. Then she squeals as if I'm on the Inside, but like everyone else I only cling to the outside of famous streets, making my own minor league memories without a tomorrow.

I didn't have to go. I had a job writing columns at the Weekly about things that I only thought I knew about. I could make it sound witty and so the small-time money kept me afloat, barely. The city was my older brother; it overshadowed me and I was in awe of it. I loved it and revered it but I also knew it was a son of a bitch for letting some of those people in. I may have been one of those people and of the worst kind too, because I was from suburbia, the spiritual equivalent of purgatory. The irony was that my old roommate, a rambling speed freak of an actor (waiter) had told me the only time he liked Los Angeles was when he was away from it. Those were my thoughts as I contemplated the offer.

It was called a freelance job but it had been implied that a staff position would be available after I had proven myself. Toronto. It was another country. It was only Canada, but it had been one of Hemingway's first jobs. I fantasized about English nurses and cold Italian rivers, neither of which could be found in LA but maybe in Toronto the real thing was there. The real culture, the casual essence of a soul that shined like honey and tasted sweet and forbidden to those who wanted an easy life. I'd already had an easy life and I was mired with the apathy only a city can provide when you're riding in its undertow. It's true, LA is one of the best places to be miserable and unsatisfied but I was beginning to have my fill. There had been no deciding epiphany, or anything to claim as a breaking point. Stagnation, maybe--yes, that was probably it and leaving the red lanterns of the Formosa Café late one perfect Southern California night, a woman was strapped to my arm like a handbag. She was more than a momentary handbag; she was my girlfriend. Countless live-and-die generations of Hawaiian Polynesians and she was the first from her family who had left Hawaii to come to the mainland. To be with me. Glorious as her black hair was in a place like the Formosa, I felt stuck in the relationship out of consideration and what Woody Allan called, the illusion of permanence. For a woman, this illusion is an emotional bond that links to a past of courtship and promises of spiritual fidelity.

I guess you could say I loved Kamuela. We'd been together for two years and she believed in me. Love required a lot less in previous generations. Letters home from the war or from the new world and all that waiting between communiques must have kept the bonds together whereas today, we are all so connected so immediately that our attention can drift while waiting to receive a text message.

I could remember the important dates in Kamuela's life and her favorite color and how to touch her in that spot that would make her pray to her Polynesian path-makers. Warm sugarcane breath in her stuffy Silverlake apartment was her love while the lights of a Chinese restaurant sign outside flicked on and off with uncertainty. Sugar brown eyes were glazed by candlelight and her storytelling was a marvel of parallel and weaving. It was impossible not to be possessed by Kamuela when she walked into a room, or expressed one of her quick and true emotions. She was a woman who might have been carved centuries ago from Lahaina trees along the west coast of Maui that faced the quiet huge garden of Molokai at sunset. The wind would laugh into the torches and almost blow them out. She was beautiful but my heart was the wind and somehow it had extinguished those fires that were rapture and passion under the mask she called soul mates. It wasn't her fault. She made me happy but over time I had learned that I wasn't able to exist artistically when I was around her and it wasn't long before that would manifest into a bitterness. She had no clue and didn't even up until a week before I was leaving when she made the suggestion.

You have love right here, Charlie, she may have said from her brown sugar skin that was gold from the balcony of her apartment. The sun was passing the tips of palm trees and drowning in reds of oxygen and smog. Kamuela was my fool's gold and I would have never known until the thought of leaving LA had become real.

It's different for you and me. This is still exciting for you, I said, leaning over the railing.

How dare you! she screamed. A small gang of Dodger-hat wearing Hispanics moved towards Sunset Boulevard like a flock of grounded birds. They stopped traffic as they crossed the street. When she spoke next, it was calmer. Don’t forget what I did to be with you.

I know, I know, don't remind me. I'll be paying back that loan for awhile yet. The Latinos were gone. I wasn't able to look her in the eye, nor say the things I wanted.

Charlie, look at me. The girl grabbed me and her eyes were burning jewelry against the sun. Look at me. This can work. It's meant to be, don't you feel it?

I knew staying with her would hold me back and then I would never forgive her. At least this way we might still be friends one day. Of course, she’d have to be with a bigger, better-looking guy on her arm the next time we’d meet. That's the kind of person she was. We would see each other at a neutral, superficial bar. Too many people would be looking each other in the eye wondering, Are you somebody? Are you In? We’d exchange smiles of glass and time wouldn’t pass. I didn't want that. Plus, I argued internally, the city was still fun and intriguing for her, like finding a beautiful dog that was afraid to the touch. Kamuela was determined to stroke that dog until it licked her and I wasn't. I suppose that I wanted to be the discarded and soon-to-be cherished dog; now I was merely a refined house pet and disgustedly I wondered, where was the art in that?

Charlie, I love you, she told me from her balcony. Don't you love me?

I do, baby, I do but, I trailed off. My art, my urgent and silly need to express my innermost gushings for money overtook every sensible thought Kam was trying to instill in me.

Don't, she said, don't you do this to me. We were silent and the phone rang. She took the call from her hip and turned from me to the side of the balcony that had a slumping bike with a flat tire.

Belly button, breasts shaded promiscuously by her baby T-shirt, neck, glorious, ferocious-lipped mouth, light freckled nose and her golden eyes. All right, all right, I'll see you in an hour, she said to someone. Phone back at warm brown hip covered by tight jeans, and then it came. I have to go to work. Let me go with you to Canada, Charlie, will you? Will you think about it?

Kam, I don't know if that's a good idea.

Just think about it, ok? she said and pulled her shirt towards her belly button and smiled a hopeful, loving smile. I was going to hell for sure but maybe there was hope. After she left I drank cold beers and watched a Dodger game in her apartment. It was cluttered with things that decorated the new life she had created to be with me. Shaking my head, I drank and knew her coming along was going to be a mistake. For some reason, however, I never thought about in what way.

::-----::

We were putting some of our mementos she had into a moving box as if it were a time capsule we were saving. This is from the first beer I drank when I moved to California, Kam said, holding the Rolling Rock bottle cap with too much regard before placing it in an Altoids container that housed other fragments of our past. Somehow she'd convinced me to let her go to Toronto. We had a going away party scheduled but it began two nights earlier when Kam’s friends from the restaurant came by. The girls snatched us from a nearly empty one-bedroom apartment in colorful and diverse Silverlake just as Kamuela was about to reinvigorate my memory about a train ticket stub to San Francisco. Her friends had their own agenda.

If you hurt her, we'll find you, Susan said as the other waitress had shuffled Kamuela off to the jukebox. She was California pretty, which meant you always wondered what she looked like without makeup and I always figured that not too many guys got the chance to find out, at least not without a credit check having been done.

I withheld my initial response but not my second. Yeah, well, she's a big girl. She can take care of herself, Susan. Don't worry about her. I was sick of people treating me like I had Kamuela’s life in my hands. I barely had my own life in check. Susan and I acted like chums when Kam and Erica came back.

::-----::

The apartment, like my barely scratched life was empty and ready for its next occupant the Friday night of the party. Friends from the Weekly talked to me of their adventures on the road as if treasured confessions from a dirty elite. They were lucky shadows that followed the gods who walk our earth. It all sounded so sanctified and rehearsed in their recounts but it opened me.

I'd never been on the road before. The birds had always flocked nearby and I'd never gone anywhere with no care on how I got there. I had almost two weeks to get to Toronto and it didn't matter if I hitchhiked the whole way. There a new life, like spectacular, unearthed riches sat on a mound of unknown bones. The treasure was mine; I just had to get there. With Kamuela. She was so excited and I was becoming morbidly curious how it would all play out. How do you tell someone that they fit into one chapter of your life but not another, especially when they're successive moments?

::-----::

Saturday. Santa Monica at the beginning of June is a young god. It is pruned and proud and bright as if aging were for waiters and porn stars. The streets sprout with the tallest palm trees and the hidden bars become known to the passer-by. There is no real winter in this part of the world except for that June gloom but the appreciation for summer rivals any place in the Midwest.

The traffic toward the beach after work teems with German automobiles while leaving the Pacific it is a splotch of Japanese and American cars. You can miss the world so much you can't wait to leave and when the day comes your bags are packed and your lease is broken, it's only the car you drive that people will notice as you're leaving.

It's one of those things that no one will ever be able to relate to exactly. Yes, they've been on long, mysterious trips where they weren't sure how it was all going to go down, and they've started new lives in new places but for some reason every single one of these experiences are unique, precisely because we are. Even if you could have the same weather and the same cast of characters in the same towns, each time it would be a different trip because of you. Or me.

I couldn't turn back and I didn't want to. Toronto was an official chance; I couldn't hold out for it in LA anymore. It was beginning to seem to me that you have to make it somewhere else first and then bring that bulked up resume back with new clothes and a haircut that no one recognizes.

The going away party was my haircut leaving LA. People saw me change in a matter of hours and many of them had never known me before. Kamuela had only been in LA for a couple of years but she had more friends than I did. Mine were either making it somewhere or living with their parents an hour away in the ‘burbs and it had been ‘too far to come’. Kam's friends and coworkers were a hodgepodge of people she'd threatened to bring around if I didn't go out with them clubbin' every now and then.

The music squealed from the windows and there were summer color rafters along the balcony that were celebratory. Leaving was good. It gave people inspiration and made them jealous, two of the chief motivations to live. We drank and I was drunk and loud and friendly in an arbitrary sense. These people didn't know me. They only knew my girl so they thought they knew my story. I was in no mood to show them different. I was leaving. A new world sat like a comfortable couch three thousand miles away. There were all the things you didn't like about your hometown that served as a bland, comparative palate when you saw somewhere new. Los Angeles could not have been more kaleidoscopic and sun-filled in its outward appearance of happiness but it was only through the boob tube the elation was present. The city faced constant squashing if the young people working mindless jobs in the Industry didn't hold it up by driving over tapes from West LA to Burbank at four o'clock on a Thursday or making English muffins with organic peanut butter for the on-air talent. These are people who are appreciated like the toilet paper in a restaurant. No one ever thinks about what it would be like to use the restroom and have there be no toilet paper at all.

I didn't want to wipe any more assholes, at least not for awhile. I drank and laughed with men and women who struggled to hold LA up while trying to sneak out from underneath it at the same time. They were screwed but my car was gassed and pointed east and who was I to tell them different? We all have to discover our own follies, lest they end up becoming tragedies.

Kamuela was histrionic our last night in California. Her hair was in two thick black braids with flowers intertwined and she was flitted from clique to clique barefoot on the wooden floors. She hugged and danced wildly and confided in her friends as if it was her last night on earth.

Once people had left for bars where more of the Industry’s unappreciated released their energy, I sat on the floor of the balcony with a small army of beer cans and bottles standing watch at my side. I looked at the lights and the way how Sunset slithered doggedly towards Hollywood. This town is a personal friend of the devil, I thought, and not for the reasons one might think. It allures and enslaves, it's true, but it's been able to sell itself to every tourist on the planet as a place to see famous people. Interestingly enough, Hollywood had sold us not only the product but the factory as well and that’s what made it genius.

I was drunk and Kamuela joined me on the dirty floor with my glass and aluminum mercenaries. It was a warm night and she was beautiful.

It was a good party, she announced as soon as she was comfortable. Don’t you think so?

Are you going to miss them, Kam?

Yes, aren't you?

They're your friends, mostly. Mine were smart enough to know that they didn't need to come because either I'd be back soon or that I'd never be back. I'd probably be the same way.

Are you all right, Charlie?

Yeah, I replied tiredly. I'm pretty drunk.

Me too, she said happily but I had meant it differently. Now we have everything all set, right? What time are we leaving tomorrow?

Anytime is fine. Vegas is a twenty-four hour town.

Kamuela's excitement took over and ran through her body as she leaned over and hugged me. Oh Charlie, I'm so excited! I've never been to Las Vegas before. Are we going to gamble?

Sure, if you want to. You have to. It's almost impossible not to. I was melancholy and exhausted. I couldn’t tell her that her coming to Toronto was a gamble in itself. But with her exuberance, I should have known that Kam was well aware of life's extremities. After all, the girl had left her enclosed dream island for a city of heaven and hell to be with me. I often felt embittered when I thought about her. She was great but writing was my love. Once that was conquered then maybe an adventurous fruit like Kamuela could really be peeled.

What are you looking forward to most? she asked, staring past me with glazed happiness upon our small piece of the city.

I watched her and tried to feed off her energy but it was hard. There could only be so much enthusiasm in a relationship. And I didn't have a good answer to her question anyway. What do you mean? I said to stall.

She laughed and explained, Well Charlie, you're leaving the life you know for another country and a new life. You don’t know where anything is and we'll have to figure it out ourselves. Of all that, what excites you most?

The job, I guess. It's a great opportunity and I want someone to see I have what it takes.

I know you have it, she said softly.

I know, Kam, I told her and then stood slowly to lean over the balcony. I looked down into an empty weeded lot behind the apartment complex. We were three floors up and it was just high enough to make it interesting. I wished we were a few more stories higher so that I'd have to respect it. If I ever fell, I wanted to die. I didn't want to break a leg. I wanted to fly or I wanted death. A beer bottle dangled between two of my fingers and it swung like a pendulum, thick and slow. Kam, have you ever broken anything on purpose? Before she could answer, I dropped the half-empty bottle. It fell silently and then screamed in a shattering upon some wooden crates in the lot.

Charlie!

I wasn't surprised it had broken.

CHAPTER 2

The road. It only means something to those who have been on it. It is a path to God through the most urgent yet peaceful moments. Loneliness, unfamiliarity, and a sense of universal strangeness are constant but you can be an important addition to any small, dusty town. That's where your experience takes shape. Going from LA to Vegas isn't being on the road; it's a road trip. Fun nonetheless but not as integral to the traveler. The five-hour drive is a mere necessity to get from one place to another. The road continues long after Las Vegas although most don't realize it. That place breathes sin and there are no alarm clocks because the city doesn't sleep. Go there, go find out for yourself. It's like LA in the respect that leaving it is the only time you can have any perspective on it. It's too easy to be persuaded by its false face. The façade is meant to last only three days and when it extends into a week you are no longer a visitor. You're addicted. Hit the road, slide right through a town like Vegas and you can smile because you missed the vacuum that attracts the waitresses that end up serving you ham-n-egg specials at four in the morning or stripping off the Strip. The scenery is glamorous like a thirteen-year old girl's first attempts at using make up; it's too bright in the key spots.

Gratefully, Vegas was not my final stop. I had three thousand miles of paved highway and back roads, the kind that were enclosed by trees that had been planted by town founders on their ways out West. But the West was not like that. It was harsh and hot and dry and if a human skeleton lies next to the highway, it would barely phase you because you'd be moving too fast to really know what it was. That's how I wanted Vegas to be as Kam and I stopped there our first night on the road.

She was in awe appropriately enough but like any initial reaction, she didn't realize that it would wear off to the point where you could hear the word 'Vegas' and feel like you'd already gone without having to live it all over again.

The lights were on and flashing and they slid up and down vertical signs selling sins at a fair price. Kam loved it and I only watched her. I knew what its face really looked like and during the day it was a sleeping vampire. I showed her the big hotels up and down the drag and she loved that it was known as the Strip.

It was here long before us, she said as we walked along.

And long after us, I reminded her. It was hot and our cheap motel on the outskirts of the downtown area didn't have a pool. That's what I was thinking about. And I was thirsty. Let's get a drink, babe, I'll show you how to gamble.

Vegas' prime charm to me was the free drinks. The place was Satan's playground and it enticed even the kind-spirited. You had to admire it, I thought, as Kam and I walked the hideously bright carpet of one of the biggies and sat at some slot machines. We got two rolls of quarters and we sat and pulled the hammer for an hour before the money was gone and we had caught a buzz.

I think I like this town, Kamuela decided as we walked out of the hotel. It was cooler now and the sun was gone and the floor of the desert off in the distance was orange and darkening. We took a cab back to the motel and it was a couple of hours before she wanted to see it at night. The girl was snared.

The lights of Las Vegas at night are the devil's Christmas lights, colorful reminders of his prosperity. We were small, crazed ants among a drunken mob of gamblers. They went against us, and flowed up streets with feverish direction. Some were off to the cheap tables off the Strip and others knew where the strong drinks were made. People are not people when they are in Las Vegas. They've taken a time-out on reality and are checking into the possibilities of a new life. There are hardly ever happy endings but it's not important to those gathered around the campfire listening.

I showed Kam the glory of a Vegas buffet and afterward we walked slowly towards a taxi stand. Nothing was new to me yet but it would all be virginal starting tomorrow and I could feel it gnawing. To me, that was where the road started. Kamuela had gotten a head start and everything was a marvel to her. She bought ten postcards for a buck and laid on our bed for an hour filling them out before letting me in. For a passionate girl, she was at her own speed but we joked of a couple we had seen earlier in the night arguing at the buffet.

I'm so glad I'm not a white girl, tanned nakedness said, giggling about a near empty tray of shrimp that had been the cause of it all.

I'm just glad you weren't a crustacean, I joked but she was still thinking.

You'd probably forget that I'm not some ordinary girl. You'd think you could yell at me for taking the last of the shrimp and treat me like a chick instead of a woman.

I was flipping channels and out of the corner of my eye I could see a red nipple and I privately thanked the air conditioning. Between God and air conditioning, I'll take air conditioning, Woody Allen had said and I couldn't have agreed more.

Charlie, what are you smiling at?

I put the remote down.

She smirked satisfactorily and gave me what I wanted. I could hear her sleeping awhile later and it was during her naps and her showers that I wrote in my journal. Tomorrow was a new day and it consisted of vague promises that make the ages. The unknown is perhaps the last glorious thing we have. Everything else remotely fantastic is documented in three or four media and analyzed until it doesn't make sense anymore. The unknown is expressed in new variables and modes of explanation. It is exciting and to some a novel way out. For me it was the first link to an unexplored world and I knew that it would extend beyond the Rockies and be encapsulated in a memory I could carry with me always. Kam was asleep but I was the one dreaming.

::-----::

It was ninety-five degrees at nine in the morning when we left. We chose to eat breakfast past the downtown area so we could get on the open highway right away. I pulled off in East Vegas along a block of construction sites. Down the street a few desolate hot blocks we found an Irish pub that was serving breakfast. It was there that Kamuela finally got a glimpse of the real Las Vegas.

Inside was dark, very dark and the only lights it seemed were from the video poker at the bar. Our waitress was smoke-wrinkled and charming in a last call kind of way. A man sat at the bar playing poker and drinking a beer. Other than that, the place was empty.

This is it, isn't it? It never stops, does it?

Nope, I replied with a mouthful of pancakes.

Wow, she marveled and picked at her eggs.

Are you hungry, babe?

Not really, Charlie. All of a sudden the plate seems dirty to me. She pushed it away.

Don’t be ridiculous, I laughed. Just because there is gambling and our waitress hasn't been outside during the day in two years doesn't mean your eggs are infiltrated. Eat them, we have a long day ahead of us.

She pushed the plate away and reached into her purse for her lipstick.

::-----::

Highway 15 is a gray highway , and an hour or two after Vegas it was pristine, virginal concrete. This went on through Mesquite and a sliver of Arizona that didn't do the state justice and then into Utah, a place which had always seemed to be God's garden to me because of the numerous national parks that clung to the bottom of the state. A notoriously religious state, I had my eyes open for bible-thumping policemen but I never saw any. The dirt next to the road was red and crusted. It was all too perfect and with only slight urging from Kam, we took our first detour together. It was true. Our relationship, with the exception of Kamuela moving to LA, had always followed some quiet, expected path. The gesture of her suggesting we take Utah Highway 9 through Zion was a symbol of us creating our own path. I was all for it.

At first we swayed with the southern crest of a red plateau and hugged the base along smooth curves. The road itself was of a lesser quality but it was also less traveled. Soon we were in a small fertile valley on the east side of that first butte we had passed. Modest, hand-built homes lined the thin river at speckled intervals and the trees were like green parachutes that were sustained a hundred feet above the river's bottom. Kam and I smiled at each other after we had passed through the first town and were in the red desolation again. The next greenery could be seen a mile away amidst tall, throne-like burnt orange buttes.

It's just like postcards, Kam said and snapped a few shots of her own.

Don't take too many baby, this is just the first day. I held the wheel proudly and enjoyed the curves as they came.

We stopped in the town at the entrance of Zion National Park. As Kamuela was looking at turquoise jewelry and admiring it against her tan skin, the shopkeeper informed me about the twenty-dollar entrance fee into the park.

Twenty bucks? I whined.

Yep, she said and cleaned her glasses that had been hanging around her neck. It's worth it, rest assured.

I bet.

Outside, it was hot and behind the wood-slat stores were the high-reaching buttes. The small town was enclosed by these buttes; they were almost captured and cornered within the great orange stumps.

Kam, I said as she was walking out of the store and putting her sunglasses back on, I think we need to turn back.

But why, Charlie? I love it here! It's beautiful. She came over and kissed me against the car.

I know, baby, I know, but it costs twenty bucks to get into the park. I mean, we got the money but we are on a bit of a budget.

But we're just driving through, she argued.

I know, that's what I thought, too. We'll just turn back and catch up with the 15 again. She looked disappointed, it was obvious, but I could see her not wanting to make it harder than it was. I remembered why I loved her and I kissed her and playfully patted her on the ass to get back in the car.

Somehow that little green area near the river and the southern-crested butte weren't half as appealing on the way back along the uneven road. It was smooth sailing back on the 15, however, and it truly seemed as if the highway was ascending for hours but it may have seemed that way because we were heading due north towards the Great Salt Lake. Along our right were large green foothills that seemed to protect the secret red heavenly protrusions on the other side. There was no shortage of cows on either side of the highway and many of them sat in the thick green grass, barely noticing us pass. For a short time Kam and I thoroughly enjoyed a staunchly religious radio program on the AM. After coming from Las Vegas the previous day, this preacher's promises and warnings seemed ludicrous. If Las Vegas could possibly exist then this guy had no clue what he was up against