“Heavens no,” Blasé said. He took a deep breath. “But my mother is.”
Blasé’s mother was a fundamentalist Baptist from a small town in Georgia. When Isaiah confronted her, she told him she was going to use Blasé’s camera to take video of the rose garden and got the surprise of her life. After resting and drinking tea made from Valerian root she decided to blackmail her son into abandoning his life of sin and iniquity.
“I am who I am, Mother,” Blasé said. “But if I can’t accept myself, there’s no reason you should.”
Blasé was grateful to Isaiah for bringing him to that moment but Isaiah didn’t know what he’d done besides read a note. Blasé came out on The Shonda Simmons Show. His record sales suffered but the people who bought them also bought the sex tape available online for $39.95, half the profits going to his mother’s church.
“I need Blasé to help me with my career,” Deronda said. “He might be gay but he’s a celebrity and all I need is a leg up. I mean like, once I’m circulatin’ in that uppa level and the shot callers can check out my style up close and personal? I’m off to the big time.”
Isaiah could feel Deronda looking at him, waiting for him to say it’s only a matter of time or don’t give up or some other such nonsense, but he kept his eyes glued to the MacBook. Deronda sulked, this time not pretending. “I shoulda been gone from here a long time ago, much star quality as I got,” she said. “I’m an up-and-comer, you know what I’m sayin’? I was born to be a celebrity. I should have the spotlight all over me.”
“Spotlight all over you-for what?” Isaiah said.
“What do you mean for what? That Kardashian girl’s booty could fit inside my booty and you talking about for what. You know she made thirty million last year?”
Isaiah knew other girls who felt that way. Somehow believing a big booty was like owning real estate or having a college degree, something you could put on a job application.
Alejandro came bobbing and pecking his way out of the hall making little buck-buck sounds and giving Deronda the beady red eye. Alarmed, Deronda lifted her feet off the floor. “You let that thing just walk around in here?” she said.
“You leave him alone he’ll leave you alone,” Isaiah said.
Isaiah got Alejandro and a recipe for arroz con pollo as payment from Mrs. Marquez. Isaiah didn’t like cleaning up the chicken shit but the floor didn’t hold a stain and he felt bad about leaving the bird in the garage all day. The other morning he forgot to close the bedroom door and Alejandro roosted on the closet bar and crapped all over his clothes.
“Come on, Isaiah, help me out,” Deronda said. “All I need is a leg up.”
“A leg up is not what I do.”
“You wrong, Isaiah.”
“I’m wrong every day,” Isaiah said. He closed his laptop, grabbed the car keys and collapsible baton, put on the Harvard cap, and stood up.
“You taking me somewhere?” Deronda said.
“Uh-huh. I’m taking you home.”
Boyd parked his truck in the same place as yesterday. He was really nervous but felt ready. Everything he needed was in the lizard-green bowling bag on the seat beside him. Duct tape, rubber gloves, and a boning knife sharp enough to cut see-through slices off a mushy tomato. Also in the bag, a big blue sponge and a water bottle filled with his homemade chloroform.
Boyd worked at F &S Marine, a distributor of Chinese-made marine supplies. The cement-block building was in a bleak industrial zone next to a storage yard for propane tanks and a no-name warehouse with razor wire coiled on top of the fence. The LA River flowed past, the wide green watershed cutting through East Long Beach and emptying into Long Beach Harbor.
Nick Bangkowski, Boyd’s manager at F &S, had spiky hair and wore Hawaiian shirts stretched tight across his expanding bulk. Five years ago, Nick was drafted in the second round by the San Diego Chargers. He had a great training camp and was in the running for starting linebacker but a week before the first preseason game he blew out an ACL getting off the team bus.
“I was there,” Nick would say after his first six-pack. “I was right fucking there. I had my own locker. I had a jersey with my name on it. I was on the fucking team. I was on the fucking team.”
Nick gave Boyd all the shit work. Unplugging the filthy toilets, greasing the forklift chains, picking up the beer cans and used condoms in the parking lot, and inventorying the thousands of interlock switches, hex cap screws, piston pins, and crankshaft bearings. Boyd whined but never got mad, even when Nick kicked him off the bowling team. “I’ve got to cut you, Boyd,” Nick said. “Ron’s back from vacation and he averages what, one seventy-five? On a good night you barely break a hundred.”
“What about Maxine?” Boyd said. “She bowls worse than me.”
“Well, yeah, score-wise but she’s got tits out to here. She’s good for morale.”
“But I want to bowl too.”
Nick clapped Boyd on the shoulder, something he’d never done before. “I know you do but there’s a tournament coming up and you don’t want us to lose, do you? How about it, Boyd? Take one for the team? Everybody’ll love you for it, what do you say?”
The night of the league tournament Nick stayed at the office and had a few Budweisers before heading to the bowling alley. He was in the parking lot getting into his Altima when Boyd tiptoed up behind him like a cartoon cat and hit him with a six-and-a-half-pound boat anchor wrapped in a burlap bag.
“How about it, Nick, take one for the team?” Boyd said, whomping on him again and again.
Everybody at F &S thought it was a mistaken identity thing or a pissed-off husband. Nick was known to screw around with the housewives at the bowling alley. Nobody suspected Boyd. He was weird and semiretarded but he wouldn’t hurt anybody. Maxine went to visit Nick in the hospital. She said he looked like a bag of raw hamburger and didn’t remember who she was. Boyd signed the get-well card.
The bell rang. Boyd nearly jumped out of his skin, stretching his neck looking for the girl. Where are you, Carmela? Where ARE you? You better be here, you better be here. Come on, Carmela, BE HERE.
Carmela was with a group of her friends. She was wearing a short denim skirt and a white top, her hair in the long braid. Boyd was relieved, afraid she might have changed it. She took her time, sending a text, laughing as she read a text, laughing as she showed it to her friends, and laughing as she sent another text.
“Hurry up hurry UP!” Boyd shouted. “What are you DOING? Go home already. Jesus Christ, GO HOME.” Carmela finally broke away from the group, waved goodbye, and walked toward the street. “Okay,” Boyd said, “this is it.”
Isaiah lived in Hurston, a small neighborhood on the western edge of East Long Beach, two minutes from the LA River and two and a half from the 710 Freeway. He took Anaheim, driving through the area Snoop had rapped about in The Chronic, his rhymes the most notable thing about the area. Block after block of strip malls, liquor stores, auto body shops, beauty salons, discount dentists, and weedy empty lots.
“For real, Isaiah,” Deronda said. “I need to change my social standing. I need to change my cultural environment. I need to change my address.”
Deronda was eighteen when she was crowned Miss Big Meaty Burger at a BMB restaurant in Culver City. A TV reporter from Channel 5 was there and Deronda got seven seconds of screen time on the morning show. Her name and picture appeared in the Long Beach Press-Telegram and people came over to see the plastic tiara and the red-and-gold Big Meaty Burger sash.
She was interviewed on KHOP. The DJ asked her if she did anything special to keep her donk fresh and was she naturally thick or did she have to work at it and when was the last time she had some icing on that cake. The highlight of the whole experience was an actual photo shoot and getting her picture featured on the BMB advertisements. The ads showed a giant triple-decker burger dripping burger juice. Deronda was looking over her shoulder, her smile wide and inviting, her cheeks gleaming like polished mahogany and split down the middle by a DayGlo-pink bikini. The caption said: