Things I Like About America. Poe BallantineЧитать онлайн книгу.
new in town and I haven’t made any friends yet. I’ll give you a ride.”
“I have a car.”
“Save the gas. I don’t live far ...”
Bonnie flew down A Street in the left lane in her ratty, little red canvas-top MGB. She didn’t know how to drive. I wanted to grab the wheel to keep her from taking us headfirst into a bridge pillar. “I’m superstitious!” she shouted over the Blue Öyster Cult song playing on KPRI. “I believe that the right lane is bad luck. Are you superstitious?”
“Not too much.”
“I’m also afraid of black cats,” she shouted, tearing down the darkness of Florida Canyon and skillfully evading a crate of lettuce that had tumbled off the back of a truck. “And nuns.”
“Nuns?” I looked back at the lettuce heads, scattered like money all over the road, with dodging headlights dancing all around them.
“I tried to be a nun once. I was too much of a rebel, though. I have a problem with authority.”
“You were in a convent?”
“That’s where my modeling career started.”
“How?”
At the top of the canyon, Bonnie ran a stop sign and as my head whirled around on my neck and my fingers sank into the armrest and the onslaught of traffic converged upon us in our final seconds on earth, she explained to me how her modeling career had begun at a nunnery. “One night me and five other girls sneaked out the window and drank wine and kissed with boys from the vo-tech down by the river. When they caught us, we had to dress this big, dead nun for penance. She was stiff as a board, and while we were lifting her from the table, the hoist snapped and she sat straight up and looked at us, and we all took off out the door. I ran away that night, hitchhiked south, and got picked up by a guy who wanted to take pictures of me.” She shook her head regretfully. “My granny never forgave me after that.”
“Why? Because you left the convent?”
“No, because she saw the pictures. It was a motorcycle magazine. You know, I showed my tits. Big deal. I think she was just jealous.” She glanced down at her prominent breasts. They seemed like two unknown worlds to me, crying out be explored.
“Where was this?”
“Minnesota.”
“Is that where you were born?”
“No, I was born here.”
“In San Diego?”
“My father was in the Navy.”
“You were born in Balboa Hospital?”
“I guess so. I don’t remember.”
She took a left on Landis Street, roared into a lot, and parked crookedly around the back of an apartment complex, which, through the shaggy silver silhouettes of eucalyptus trees, overlooked Balboa Park. I untangled myself from the seat belt and climbed out of her death trap of a sports car.
“This is a nice-looking place,” I said.
“I was lucky to find it.”
“Where were you before?”
“Topanga Canyon. I had some work up there...”
The rank, slow perfume of potted geraniums drifted up to my nostrils. The hairy eucalyptus trees smelled like cats in heat. Off to the east the Romano-colored moon was trapped behind a cloud for a moment before it finally broke and lifted free. Bonnie led me up a flight of concrete shelf stairs. Wind chimes tinkled and I almost kicked over a hibachi. She stopped for a moment to jingle a key and give the door a gentle shove, and I followed her into a hazy, green room veiled with the smell of Charlie perfume. The low pile carpet was chlorine blue, like a public swimming pool. A laundry basket sat on the floor, and feminine articles were laid over the back of the couch, pink and yellow bras, pink and yellow panties. Two cantaloupes on her oval dining room table sent up a musky fragrance, like a fruity version of the eucalyptus trees.
“Excuse the mess,” she said. “You’re my first visitor.” She indicated the panty-decorated couch. “Sit down.”
I took a seat amid all the heavenly underwear. On the floor across from me was a wooden needlepoint rocking chair and probably two hundred record albums arranged in milk crates under an impressive NASA-black Marantz stereo. From the opposite wall a large pastel of a woman in a broad sun hat—a print I think everyone owned in 1973—gazed down upon me with blithering Neil Diamond serenity.
“Why don’t you take your shoes off?” she said, kicking off her own. “I don’t know how anybody can stand to wear clothes. I think deep down I’m a nudist. When I was a little girl I used to go around naked all year—even in the winter.”
“In Minnesota?”
She bent over and showed me her ample white breasts. “Do you like apple wine?”
“Um, yeah.”
“It’s Annie Green Springs. My favorite. Put on an album if you want.”
Bonnie had what I considered to be good taste in music: Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Neil Young, Robin Trower, the older more obscure albums of Pink Floyd, all arranged alphabetically, a good sign in a person, I decided. I extracted Meddle from its sleeve and set the needle in the groove.
“Good choice!” she shouted from the kitchen.
“So,” I shouted back to her. “How did you end up at Pine Manor?”
“It was in the paper. What about you?”
I took a crotch sniff off a pair of her clean panties. “Took a class in high school.”
“How old are you anyway?”
I cleared my throat. “Seventeen.”
“I thought you were in your twenties,” she said, swinging around the corner with two glasses of wine. “Why, you’re just a baby!”
“How old are you?” I said.
“Twenty-two. That’s not too old, is it? I hope you like ice.”
I thought of Woodchuck and Goldie sitting at the table smoking their bong, pining over women, and wondering where I was. They wouldn’t believe it if they saw it. I took a gulp of the wine, good, cold, sweet, soda-pop wine.
We played a game of Scrabble and drank more wine. Bonnie was a poor speller and made up words: VOOGLE. I was out of Marlboros, so I smoked her True Menthol 100’s, which were so low in tar and nicotine I couldn’t tell if they were lit or not.
She passed me a folded note. I opened it and read: “Sometimes I have trubble comunicating with men.”
I wrote back: “Don’t feel like you have to be nervous around me.”
“I am so happy to be with you,” she returned.
We exchanged these notes that grew increasingly strange with poor spelling, like disturbing little special education valentines.
“I’m paralized inside.”
“I have never loved,” she wrote again.
“Why don’t you trust me? You think I’m going to hurt you?”
“Who am I?”
“How the hell would I know,” I wrote back. “I just met you.”
“Men have always treated me badly,” she said, crossing her arms and staring at me with her fuzzy black eyes that were either entirely pupil or no pupil at all. By all accounts she was attractive, but whenever I looked into those eyes all I could think of was Barney Rubble.
“Well, I won’t treat you badly,” I said gallantly.
“You don’t have to get back right