L. Gamari
First Draft
Fiction II
February 21, 2012
The Quiet Things No One Ever Knows
by Magali Roze
Herrera
Franklin Forrest Foster: I
Las
Vegas, Nevada is no place for children. Less than ten miles off Flamingo Road,
you’ll find the same meth-lab-trailers and discarded-black-rubber-tires which
litter the rest of the state: nothing different here. The exception, of course,
being Vegas; sitting like the Hope Diamond on a pillow of orange dust. Either
way, they’re just damn rocks, cut and made pretty. Naivety is easier to come by and more
dangerous than any drug or itch you might pick up on the Strip. You’ve got to
be careful or you might as well live with your heart outside your chest;
running around just waiting to get tripped up. Let the ruby organs of you go splattering
across some inconsequential sidewalk – another mess for others to avoid. If you
want to survive, whatever you do: don’t be a fool and don’t fall in love with
strangers.
Bright
lights striking the black night. Spinning wheels of fortune. Warm, heady clubs
packed with sweating men and scattered rhinestones. Vegas is a promise it can’t
keep and has no intention of keeping. Vegas is a lie told to save face at any
cost. Vegas is where my father raised his son.
We
could have moved after my mother left. Gone East to Philly, or North to
Seattle. Packing then would have been lightest as I had no memories yet to take
with us. But he stayed and drove his unlicensed cab, selling narcotics out of
the trunk while I sat on benches watching the parades of feathers and jewelry
and heels and furs and wigs and jelly breasts like chicken cutlets, and once a
pair of false teeth, inspected quickly by their owner before being popped back
into place just in time to lay a wet kiss on some unwitting dope. Here,
everyone is a whore. Anything can be bought.
So
I grew hard and prickly as a cactus, surviving where flowery fragility has
failed in the dry, eternal sunshine of the Mojave. That is the secret of the city,
the mirage: beauty found where it shouldn’t be, where it doesn’t belong; it’s enough
to delude the freaks, the escapees, the idiots, the vagabonds, the romantics
who flock to a glammed up dump like this, but I know better.
Magali Roze Herrera: I
The
most interesting person I’ve ever met? On a bare wooden table
in Herrera’s Bar, Magali crushes out the end of an unlit cigarette, not watching
the white paper snap and scatter the tobacco as she reaches for her drink. Franklin Forrest Foster. Taking a sip, she
sets down the glass with an uneven thud-clang. What a stupid name.
She yawns and her lips
part, red with wine. Under the buzzing of yellow and blue neon, she’s been
drawing all morning, all through the previous night. Sketches fill three
notebooks, grey with graphite, and one that’s warped with spilt booze. Eyes clear. The lashes long. And his hair, shaggy
no matter what; golden even in low light. Oh and shoulders, arms - slim but
strong. And that damn flannel. Magali
opens a new pack of Menthols, letting the plastic film fall into the dark expanse
beneath the table. Smoke twirls up into ceiling fans, up into the rafters,
weaving and crossing in two snakes of white, like the shadow of a double helix.
Balls, something’s not right.
Magali! Her name comes
pouncing over the bar.
It’s
probably just Ted. Yeah? She calls back.
He’s howling: Mah-Gull-Eee-Get-Ohver-Herr-Nahow-Pleece.
In the kitchen, Ted is
snorting cocaine with his usual rolled up hundred dollar bill, perhaps the only
one he can hold onto, bleached white from daily use. Next to him is a woman
wearing too much make up and too little clothes; the strap of her dress falling
over her shoulder mirrors the smear of mascara arching down the side of her
face. No other details are necessary for Magali to register - a whore’s a
whore. First thing she learned working for Ted: don’t ask a question if you
don’t want to know the answer.
Ted stands, dusting off
his nose with the back of his hand. Without looking at them he says, Magali,
Sandra, Sandra, Magali. Play nice now.
Franklin Forrest Foster: II
Scared of the
cockroaches, I could lay awake for hours – parched – my breath turned to dust –
rather than flip on the kitchen light and watch them scatter. Instead of
dreaming, I look away from the naked window’s street lit glow and watch
squiggles play tricks in my eyes, my own personal kaleidoscope. I also listen,
can’t help but listen, to the nocturnal cantata of my neighbors. Their buzzing
fridges and blowing fans; voices low and high, back and forth; fucking,
fighting, sometimes both. Just before the world turns blue, my father comes
home; always keys first, then a thud, and then the bolt returning to its locked
position with a brassy ka-clunk. He will
knock on my door in a few hours to wake me for school, and to the closed door I
will say I’m sick, and he will let me stay home and sleep or read until noon. Then
we’ll go to the Strip.
The money he makes as a
cabbie is enough for rent. The money he makes selling drugs from the trunk of
his cab is enough for everything else, which is enough for me. Cushioned in
crushed velvet, not a burn or a stain in sight, the Oldsmobile is my father’s
life and everyday of it, he drives. On the East Coast, towns blur into one
another, overstepping their boundaries and crowding each other like desperate teenagers
on a dance floor. Here there are miles and miles of nothing and then, suddenly,
you’re somewhere.
Shots of music fire
from passing cars while giant palms scatter sunshine across wide avenues.
Surrounded by deliberate towers of glass, structures and idols and solid
stretches of concrete, I am already feeling claustrophobic. Pulling into Herrera’s, I can feel my hands sweat and I grip my wrists, tugging on the cuffs
of my flannel. My father calls the owner his friend, which means he sells him
coke. If you think it’s stupid to bring your son along on a deal, imagine how
stupid it’d be to bring one who doesn’t know jack shit; one who would get all bored
and curious. You can handle anything if you know what you’re dealing with, and
you can get out of anything so long as the other guy doesn’t.
My father returns, as
he always returns from every business in town, with a Styrofoam box. Herrera’s
always gives us the holy grail of sandwiches – layers of roast beef, sourdough,
melted cheese, and a pickle. Things have their benefits.
Magali Roze Herrera: II
Magali wipes down the
tables in three quick motions. Sandra watches, her dress returned to its proper
position, an apron now tied around her tiny waist and neck.
Whenever you’d like to
start would be great, Magali snaps.
Sandra looks sleepily
at the spread of cups and chairs askew throughout the bar room, as though they
might warm up to her and plea to be petted if only she stood there quiet enough
for long enough. Magali was ready to snap again when Sandra let out a little
squeal of delight.
Oh drawings! I love
art! Sandra says.
Magali picks up eight sticky beer glasses,
four in each hand, clamoring them down on the bar as a means of reply, but
Sandra clearly does not take hints easily. Bubbling, she asks, Did someone
leave these here? Are they yours? What were you drawing?
People I see around the
bar, mostly, says Magali.
Oh they all have
titles! Sandra points to the top of each page. Right? That’s what these are?
She hadn’t seen the
girl pick up them up, and now she was out of reach to snatch the drawings away.
Something about the girl’s fingertips near Franklin’s unfinished chest made
Magali’s stomach turn over.
Sandra chanted them aloud:
The saddest. The most beautiful. The smartest. You know all these people personally?
No, of course not.
Then how do you know if
they’re, like, the smartest?
I’m intuitive. Can’t
you just look at somebody and pretty much tell – I mean give or take…?
I
don’t know, not really, I always learned making assumptions is a bad idea. You
know what they say – an ass out of you and me, right?
Give
them back to me, please, Magali whispers. She hadn’t meant to whisper, but she
didn’t want to scream. She mustn’t lose her temper, not over something like
this.
Sandra
did not hear her, or pretended not to. Instead, she gaggled on, absorbed.
Magali
looked her over. She couldn’t be older than 18; probably dropped out at 16,
just like Franklin. Did she put on an
act, like him? Could she be anything like him? You’re from Vegas? She asked
her.
Naw, Utah. Mormons. Hell
of a place. She’s bubbling again. You
from here? You like it here?
She
says Hell like she doesn’t say it often enough. Sweetheart,
you’ve got a big streak of make-up on your face, Magali says, lifting a tray of
silver cutlery and clinking shot glasses, You should go take care of that.
Franklin Forrest Foster: III
My father isn’t home and
I can’t sleep. I find the box in the back of his closet, under a stack of old dirty
magazines. It might have been their hair, pushing the limits of gravity, or
their cartoonish appendages that produced more amusement than deep, groinal
yearnings, but I lost interest in that years ago. From the box, I put on the
glasses first. I wiggle my head to make them fall forward and then press them
back as she might have done; first up the middle, then from the side. Next, a
big, blue hat woven with straw or grass; it covers my ears and I feel like
Dumbo. Slippery and cool to the touch, silk, and light red, I wrap the scarf
around my neck and for a moment imagine there is something mysterious about me
– something I don’t even know. There are gloves, the Cinderella kind, pure
white and all the way to the elbow. A
dress, a wedding dress, my mother’s wedding dress; it fits me as if my own
mother had stood at the hem with water in her eyes, so happy that I was so
happy, and proud –
Keys.
Thud. Ka-clunk.
Stitches
split as the dress rips from my body pulling down with it the hat and scarf and
glasses and I stuff all of it violently under my bed. My heart pounds in my
ribs, my chest; like a fat, round lemming that’d be damned if they didn’t jump
out and off the cliff. Moments pass, and I am still standing in the
window-light, pale and bare, except for my boxers and those damn long, white
gloves.
Magali Roze Herrera: III
Herrera’s
is brimming over with patrons by five o’clock most Friday nights, but tonight
isn’t one of them. It’s seven-thirty, and no one has bothered to turn on the
jukebox; the TV set only shows closed captions. The few old men around, each
alone on stool or chair, don’t speak. Magali sits near the door, sketching. She
hasn’t seen Sandra in over a half an hour, and Ted is never around unless he
feels like it. She crosses her legs and lights a fresh cigarette.
Hi!
Sorry! I’m back! At Sandra’s appearance, Magali kills the smoke, but too fast,
burning the tips of her fingers. She bites down hard on the soft inner flesh of
her bottom lip, unwilling to let this girl see her at anything but her best.
Sandra
is oblivious. She’s wearing different clothes, but somehow the same amount of
fabric. You’ve got a hot date tonight? Magali asks.
Yeah,
actually – it’s okay if I leave early? I mean, it’s pretty dead, right?
No
problem. Just go when you need to.
Sandra
squishes up her face in false embarrassment and says, Uh, that would be now –
Magali
turns to find herself nose to nose with a familiar young man. Almost every
afternoon, he and his father come to Herrera’s. Magali is sure to take out the
trash every day at that time, so she can watch him sit in the Oldsmobile and
wait. Hey, she says, backing into a chair and sitting down though she hadn’t
deliberately meant to, but still graceful enough to pass.
He
nods to her, his blond hair – even in the low light –
You
know each other? Sandra asks, still full of nervous energy.
No.
I just see him – you – here a lot. With your dad? You’re usually out in the car.
His
voice is gruff, more so than she ever imagined it would be. Yeah, he says, my Dad’s
friend’s with yours.
Ted?
Well. Anyway, you know - I make those sandwiches.
What?
His eyes aren’t clear, they’re puzzled.
The
Styrofoam box?
Oh,
yeah, sure. I’m a vegetarian, so Dad usually eats them, but thanks, I guess.
Anytime,
Magali replies, but no one hears her. Imperceptibly inching toward the door,
Sandra has him by the sleeve and sings out, Thanks again, Magali! before pulling the young man with her into
the night.
****
This is meant to be a story within a story. My original intent was to portray the disconnect between perception and
reality - how reality is a manifestation of perceptions (as in: we all
exist in our own heads/writing itself is a reconstruction of
reality/"it's real to me" kind of ideology - hence the lack of quotation
marks). That concept lead to using the artist and her work as a vehicle
for this kind of philosophy I was trying to illustrate - which sounds a
little like a parable, but still, it's unclear. Then my failed attempt
at acute tension (between Magali and "Franklin") was mean to further
illustrate the space of one's mind/reality. It's really a silly, common
thing for a girl to have a crush and it's not returned, but that's what I
liked so much about it. Magali speaks like her life is an epic, but
really it's just all she has to hold onto.
For instance, in "real life" Magali's "normal" is routine, not just anywhere, but in a fantastical place. She longs for her mother and resents her father. She's smart, but alienating, skeptical, and judgmental. Magali works for her father, Ted, who owns the bar and buys coke from a guy who brings his son and leaves him in the car. Magali's amusements and hopes in life are drawn solely from the little stories in her head, and the only way she can connect to her true problems is by making up these stories. So she gets a simple crush, but in her mind it explodes. She feels closer to him - this stranger - because she forces her own circumstances on him, her own issues, as she's too preoccupied with being "tough" to deal with them directly.
For instance, in "real life" Magali's "normal" is routine, not just anywhere, but in a fantastical place. She longs for her mother and resents her father. She's smart, but alienating, skeptical, and judgmental. Magali works for her father, Ted, who owns the bar and buys coke from a guy who brings his son and leaves him in the car. Magali's amusements and hopes in life are drawn solely from the little stories in her head, and the only way she can connect to her true problems is by making up these stories. So she gets a simple crush, but in her mind it explodes. She feels closer to him - this stranger - because she forces her own circumstances on him, her own issues, as she's too preoccupied with being "tough" to deal with them directly.
Comments? Let me know what you think. Be cruel to be kind.
Thanks for reading!
- L.
- L.
