She came back over and over to flirt with me, but could never get my name right.
“Rachel.”
“Not even close.”
“Bailey.”
“Bailey is a dog’s name.”
She demanded a nickname. I had lots of those.
“My brother used to call me Cupcake,” I said, and she promptly forgot that too.
“Cookie,” she said, five minutes later. In a way, she invented me. I could not have invented her, as I did not have the experience or the capacity. When I got to know her, the bit that she let me, sometimes I called her Loopy, sometimes Sloopy. Sometimes she answered. She and Mick would have been close to the same age, and something about the way she leaned on that wall wanted to remind me of him, but I didn’t let it. I could already see it would be complicated enough without that, and probably hurt.
• • •
A few years on, Lu and I are both still alive, for reasons maybe some god knows and maybe doesn’t. We are house-sitting in Oakland for one of the regulars, who’s gone off to Thailand for a few weeks. “Probably to molest little boys,” Lu says.
I shush her. “How come you always think the worst of everyone?” She just looks at me, her mouth pulled off to one side of her face, part of her lower lip between her teeth. I turn away, and she blows softly on my cheek, her breath black licorice-ish — she’s been eating it by the pound. Hardly drinking, no drugs for three weeks, the first two at Harbor Lights. Enough time to detox without dying, but not a chance in hell of even that first, let alone twelfth, step. I can’t believe she hasn’t jumped out the window yet. I hold her in place with my incredible will. She lets me. For now.
We are here because it is unfamiliar territory. Not perfect, but Lu doesn’t yet know any of the local kids, the ones on the streets a little farther east, hawking their powdered oblivion. Special. For you. Today.
• • •
Those first months at the bar, right before Wendy died, she and Lu were crashing at a friend’s place in Glen Park, maintaining: Lu still driving a cab sometimes, and Wendy cleaning a few houses, but they were not telling the whole truth. Wendy still looked like she’d just stepped off the porch at Tara — all girl all the time. She smelled exactly like magnolia blossoms, in memory if not in real time. They didn’t tell that she’d fallen backward, wrecked on rosé wine and Mexican Quaaludes, off the deck, and ruptured some critical organ. Too high, too scared to take care of business. Terrified of the emergency room at Generaclass="underline" the iodine smell, triage. People utterly ass-out, moaning and raging. Because once you went there, you were officially fucked. Wendy finally died of hoping it would all, somehow, sort of, like it always had, work itself out in the end. When she had gone, Lu came to me, and I tried like hell to figure out a way to keep her.
Pinball was one way, and the guy who came to collect the money usually left a bunch of credits for me. For us.
We had totally different styles. She bashed the hell out of the machine, tilting it and swearing at it, as though it had intentionally done her wrong. “Motherfucker. I oughta—”
“Oughta what?”
“Cut its legs off.”
“Then how would we play?”
“We would sit on the floor, like little children. You could teach me how.”
“Ha-ha. Out of the way. My turn.”
My action was all in the hips, and mentally coaxing the ball to within reach of the flippers. It was an old one, Spanish Eyes, the score racking up by tens in a little square window behind the back glass, the clacking noise like dominoes falling. The gunshot crack of a win or a match sent us into a minor frenzy. A double match: we were untouchable.
I rarely had many customers before three or four, so when we were all bashed out, we’d move to the pool table. Lu kicked my ass on a regular basis, but she taught me how to sink one or two on the break, how to leave the cue ball where I could make the next shot.
“Hit it low, Cook. Get under it but keep it on the table. Soft now, you’re not trying to kill anything.”
We never snookered each other, since that would have been cheating. When folks started filtering in, Lu faded out. I hardly ever saw her go.
I had surprised myself by making it to and past twenty-five, and thinking that made me a grown-up making a grown-up decision, fell for a guy who knew how to keep a girl on her toes: a freebasing Cajun bricklayer who wasn’t about to let me bring Lu home, or else I probably would have. As it was, I was on call. About the fourth time, I got the hang of it.
“Hey, Cookie. I need a ride.”
“Not going to the projects, Lu.”
“Cookie.”
“No.”
I picked her up and drove her across town, our destination the projects at Hayes and Buchanan — the same ones, as it turned out, the boyfriend frequented, though I never saw him there. Maybe they had a different entrance for the high that would fix whatever sickness ailed him.
“You worry too much,” Lu told me. “I’m not going to get you into anything I can’t get you out of.”
“That’s comforting.”
She opened the door and leaned out to puke. I pulled over, and she cussed me. “Goddamn it, Cook.” She dragged her sleeve across her mouth and pulled the door closed. “Drive like I taught you.”
Once she’d copped and eased back into herself, there was no one I’d rather have been around. When the ghosts were asleep or off somewhere playing poker, or even the rare weeks or months she was actually, comparatively, clean, she’d bust open the front door of the bar, light streaming in behind her, and wrap her arms around me. Hold me in a full body clench, drenched in Marlboro and brandy fumes, and just a tolerable touch of panic. She said she’d been born with that panic, spent a lifetime stuffing it. Slept with a.357 under the pillow, when there was a pillow.
Some days — the steadiest ones — she’d go to the zoo, draw the animals, capture their essence in a few stark lines. Wildflowers were another favorite, sprouting crazy-legged from stumpy, misshapen vases, the colors startling and otherworldly. Later on she did a series of her cat in various poses, on an assortment of perches around the only room she had in years she could call her own, and in each one he looked shocked to see her there, as if they’d never met or maybe only in a dream.
The Cajun also had some charming tendencies, and a peculiar schedule only he could fathom. Day one of the mystery rotation: beat me up, steal my money, disappear. Day two: stay gone. Day three: run out of drugs and money and come home. Expect soup. Homemade. Vegetarian.
In that town in those days, the odds of choosing a loser were pretty good if you were drawn to edgy like I’d turned out to be. I have no idea what I wanted that edge for. Maybe it’s just the way I was. Or maybe I thought it would give me a chance to fix something that had only the remotest chance of coming unbroken. Whatever it was, every time I showed up with a fat lip or a black eye or fingertip-shaped bruises on the backs of my arms, Lu would offer to shoot him for me. I always turned her down, out of some sense of irrevocability, or not wanting to have to drive all that way to visit her in San Quentin. “One of these days, Cookie, I’m just going to do it. I don’t need your fucking permission.” She’d stare me down, waiting for a sign of weakness, a sign I’d had enough, but I wouldn’t give it to her, not yet. Thought I could save him, is what I thought. Repair him, damaged as he was.