25. In the months before Brokeback Mountain opened — my final months in town — Christian protesters outside the theater carried signs complaining of obscenity. In the parking lot, I counted three pairs of chrome testicles and a set of mud flaps bearing naked cartoon women.
26. Condescension didn’t necessarily make you wrong, but in the Antelope Valley, it seemed to help convince people you were right. For all I knew, Dad was right about Mom. Maybe finding out I was queer would have killed her. Still, his using her as an excuse to avoid talking to me was a kind of cowardice that, because I recognized it as a trait I’d inherited myself, broke my heart.
27. Jean and I had to pay for our SATs and college applications ourselves, so we got jobs every summer. I’d worked as a neighborhood landscaper, an ice cream parlor boy, and a driving range ball-retriever. The summer before moving away to college, my dad set me up to deliver furniture. The store had a yellow Penske truck with its name plastered on the side — MAVEN’S. I lugged mattresses and box springs and entertainment hutches and curio cabinets from the store’s loading zone — a curb painted green in the small lot — to the houses of people who, seeing me struggle so thoroughly, either offered a tip or offered to help. No one did both.
One week in, I quit. I told my dad I’d tweaked a shoulder, but the truth was I’d nearly tipped the truck over and died on Avenue N. I was driving past an open stretch of desert — one of the last this deep into town — and a tumbleweed the size of a bear bounded into my lane. Thinking it was an animal, I jacked the steering wheel, and the whole truck — freshly unpacked and flimsy — wobbled behind me. The right-side wheels lifted off the pavement, hollowing my chest. By the time the wheels landed, I’d taken the truck into a trench along the side of the road.
While I waited for AAA to free the truck, I watched other tumbleweeds scamper across the road like the severed heads of Gorgons. The screaming wind slapped ropes of sand against my face. I thought, This place hates me just as much as I hate it.
28. The faces of missing girls appeared in the newspaper only to show up again six months later, when their bodies had been found in the desert. Violence, the threat of it, was the desert’s language, and like a student in Spanish unable to roll his r’s, I felt unequipped to join the conversation. But, God, I wanted to. I scanned the inky faces of the raped and murdered girls and was filled with an enormous, unforgivable envy.
29. The day my acceptance letter to Berkeley arrived, Robert Karinger enlisted in the marines. Dad said both were noble endeavors. “He can fight the current threat, and you can help prevent the next one.” But no one could agree on which threats were current, and which were still to come.
30. Just as the war was beginning to lose national support, and as I was packing to move, the local newspaper ran a front-page story under the headline, 31 REASONS WE SHOULD BE IN IRAQ. I remember thinking that if you needed thirty-one reasons to defend a position, you were probably wrong.
HABIBI
The day was warm and tedious, as it usually is when the weather’s gray and dull, when clouds have been hanging overhead for a long time, and you’re waiting for the rain that doesn’t come. My sister and I were already tired of walking, and Brooklyn seemed endless. Across the East River peered the Midtown skyline, chalky and plain under the gray sky. On our side of the river lay an empty stretch of unmown grass that — on sunnier days, according to Jean — served as a place for people to read books or to picnic. At one point, Jean said she could imagine a version of her life in which this day were set on repeat, with me in from California and nature still and pensive. In the past, I’d have made fun of her for a sentence like that, but this was the first time I’d visited since Mom died, so I nodded along in agreement.
Jean wiped her nose with the long bone of her thumb and cleared her throat into her thin orange scarf. Then it started to rain. And a minute later there was a downpour, and we couldn’t tell when it would be over. The two of us hopped from puddle to muddy puddle, amazed and then laughing at the sheer volume of rainwater coming down on us. We ducked into a small corner restaurant whose windows advertised falafel and yogurt sandwiches.
Other shelter seekers, a dozen of us, gathered in the little place. Most stayed at the windows, keeping an eye on the weather, waiting to push back out into the world. But Jean and I took stools at the counter and picked up menus.
The restaurant was called Habibi. At every wedding reception or party on our Armenian side of the family, a song by that name was played toward the end of the night, when the only people around to hear it were too drunk or happy or both to take offense at the word “Allah.” Habibi means “beloved.”
As Jean was talking, a disheveled man in his forties with graying shoulder-length hair and thick black eyebrows came out from the kitchen.
He had heard us, and now was looking us over: Jean, dark haired, tan skinned, large nosed like Mom; me, pale and blond, like Dad, with pink, chapped nostrils from an ongoing bout with a cold. The man wore a small gold crucifix that fell gently against his white polo. At his throat, three tattooed bars: red, blue, and orange, the Armenian flag.
His name was Simon. He told us that the owner—“a Turk, but a good one”—had the day off, leaving him in charge. Simon took our order, suggesting items along the way. “You don’t eat meat?” he asked Jean when she’d turned down three of his suggestions. Then, to me: “She doesn’t eat meat.”
He lopped generous scoops of hummus into a Styrofoam container and included two extra grape-leaf dolmas at no cost.
The storm outside began to look staged; rain and wind beat furiously against the windows. Through the steam in the glass you couldn’t see the rain, exactly, but you got an impression of it, its wild gray intensity. That blurring reminded me of Whistler’s painting Sea and Rain. Jean let me say this and, with the same leniency I’d given her earlier, didn’t call me pretentious.
Simon returned with two large folded white towels, one in each hand. He offered them to Jean and me. “Never eat wet,” he said. We rubbed the towels over our heads.
And when the lights flickered and the backup generator kicked in with a whir, and when the line cooks, bored, emerged from the kitchen and leaned against the counter facing the front windows, and when Simon took our towels and flung them to dry over two cheap stained-glass chandeliers — that’s when Jean began her story, and it was as if not only Simon and I were listening but also the line cooks and the shelter seekers who, even as they ignored us, looked back every now and again to distract themselves from the rain.
Since she was five years old, my sister said, she had a best friend named Emily Goodson. I knew Emily, but I didn’t know her well, so this would mostly be news to me.
After high school, when Jean left for college at UCLA, Emily stayed on in the Antelope Valley. UCLA was only an hour away, so Jean would come home some weekends, and she spent a lot of her summers back in the AV with Emily. They’d get into their bikinis and splay out in Emily’s backyard and act as if nothing were different from when they’d been bored teenagers so desperate for change that even a tan line made them feel like they had control, at least, over something. Only, things were different, of course, namely that Jean was only playacting as though she was happy to be home, and Emily wasn’t. For Emily, life in the Antelope Valley wasn’t something to escape. She was serving tables at Chili’s and taking classes here and there at the community college. With tips and a promotion, Emily was making decent money for a single woman in town, and the way she saw it, with Jean’s student loans piling up, she’d made the better choice by skipping university and staying home with her mother.