The Last True Love Story Read online

  She cradled one of those acoustic guitars you can plug in if you want, and she had one foot up on her amp, hair down in front of her face, as she played a slow, meandering, bluesy melody. No matter the song, she gave in to it, let herself go and the music come first. It wasn’t theatrical, some fake-ass demonic possession that nobody buys anyway, it was like she joined the music, like something inside her danced along perfectly with each note. When she sang, her voice was warm and rich like the sunlight melting in the ocean behind her.

  When she finished her song, the crowd clapped, and some threw coins and bills into her guitar case. She thanked people as they walked away. It was hot and her hair hung in sweaty strands. She wiped her brow and perched her sunglasses back on her head as a hairband. I couldn’t understand how she wore black jeans and boots in that sun, and even in her loose checkered shirt with the ends tied in a knot by her belly button, aside from the sweat on her face, she looked cool.

  I knew her from class. We went to the same mammoth high school up the hill from the beach, and although we were the same age, she had just graduated. We’d both taken the Poetry Workshop elective that spring, but even though I remembered so many of her poems so clearly, intimate ones about her being adopted in Guatemala by a white couple from LA, that didn’t make us friends. We were just two people who recognized each other among a sea of thousands. So I didn’t really know her, I just knew I loved listening to her sing, and when you’re a junior in high school and your life feels like a whirlpool sucking you further and further down, and everything you thought you knew is cracking and falling apart and sinking with you, those little moments of beauty are the pockets of air that give you the energy to keep kicking up above it all.

  She’d been busking on the boardwalk all summer, and since it was on my way home from Calypso, I often stopped and listened to her, adding and organizing notes in the HFB, or letting my own mind stretch as I scribbled lines of poetry. When I stopped to listen to her play, we usually nodded what’s up to each other, or even said a few words, but I usually waited for her to notice me. But that day, Oh, what the hell, I thought. Be brave. I spoke up.

  “You threw in a little extra nasty on those last riffs today,” I said, hoping I’d used something close to the right lingo.

  She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Hendrix,” she said. “You crack me up, man.” Everyone called me Teddy or Ted, but not Corrina. To Corrina, I was Hendrix. I liked that.

  “Whatever. It was cool.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been listening to tons of Orianthi lately.”

  “Who?”

  “Yeah. Exactly. If she were a dude, everybody would know her.” She wiped sweat from her top lip. “Just check her out. She kicks ass.” She looked around. The crowd had dispersed and we were left to ourselves. “But I’ve been working on something new of my own,” she said. “Want to hear it?”

  I nodded. She dragged the amp closer to the tree and turned it low. Her copper bracelet tattoo glowed in the setting sun as she loosened her hands and fingers, closed her eyes, and began to play.

  Night fell over the boardwalk, and a mild intoxication swept through the people still scattered about, the drum circles on the beach got louder and rowdier, and fewer people stopped to listen to Corrina play. Clouds of marijuana drifted back from the beach. Corrina competed with the riot of voices that had replaced the boards and wheels slapping and rolling in the skate park.

  As she began another song, a group of kids from school, most of them recently graduated like Corrina, wandered toward her. They were a roving pack of the ultracool, wearing their thousand-dollar outfits to make them look like ravaged, exhausted party people, either sun-stoned neo-hippies or dark-eyed, sleep-deprived hard rockers who looked like they lived only at night. They were the crowd I’d see Corrina with in the halls or out on the steps at school. Kids who jumped into each other’s cars and shot off to parties I’d only imagined existed because I’d seen them in movies. On the boardwalk, they could have easily made a wide arc and steered clear of Corrina, but as soon as the guy at the front of the pack, Shawn Doogin, saw Corrina, he pulled them all over to her. He was impossible not to recognize. He was gigantic, and he stood there in his neon-bright sneakers and cutoff camo shorts, like he could have been one of the guys back there at Muscle Beach, doing military presses as easily as some people eat chocolate cake. He threw his arm around the shoulder of another guy and pointed to Corrina. They laughed, and then Shawn leaned back and shared his joke with the rest of the crowd.

  Corrina played a song with a soft, sad chorus, the low notes on the guitar tolling slowly like a bell out deep in a harbor. It was one of her own songs, but Shawn and the other kids didn’t care. They weren’t there to listen. “Our child doesn’t act that way,” Corrina sang.

  “I bet!” Shawn shouted.

  Corrina closed her eyes and pushed on with the song.

  “Oh, we know!” Shawn’s buddy followed.

  They kept at it, heckling Corrina all the way to the end of the song, talking loudly, one of them occasionally laughing when he looked back at Corrina. A couple of the girls started saying things too, and this all surprised me because these were the people I’d always assumed were her friends, like Dakota, a white girl, one of the neo-hippies in a loose blouse and denim shorts who stepped forward from behind Shawn.

  “Not going up to the O’Keefe party?” Dakota asked. “Miss your ride?” But even as she said it, she instantly blushed, red splotches burning an archipelago on her neck.

  I thought Corrina might crank up the volume on her amp and blow them all away with some fat power chords that exploded straight out of hell, but she didn’t. Instead she stopped playing altogether. She leaned the guitar against the amp and folded her hands over the head and the tuning knobs. “What are you talking about?” she asked, propping a heavy Doc Marten on the corner of her amp and waiting, staring Dakota down.

  “Are you serious?” another girl said, coming to Dakota’s defense. “You’re not up there drooling all over Toby?”

  “I’m not his girlfriend,” Corrina said. “I don’t keep tabs on where he is.”

  “Yeah,” Dakota said. “You sure aren’t.”

  “What about last week?” Shawn asked. “When you were in the backseat of his car?” He pumped and ground his hips and laughed.

  “What?” Corrina said. Her foot slipped from the amp and she tried to right herself quickly.

  “You think if you sleep with a guy, he’ll go out with you?” Dakota said.

  “I . . . What?” Corrina said, hesitating.

  “He doesn’t even like you, Corrina,” Dakota added.

  Corrina breathed heavily. “I didn’t sleep with him,” she said.

  “Yeah, right,” Shawn said.

  “No,” Corrina said.

  “Oh my God!” Dakota shouted. She stepped forward and pointed at Corrina. “Yes you did. Just ask Toby. Since he’s telling everyone.”

  “No, no,” Corrina said. “D, that’s not what happened. That’s not how it happened.”

  “See!” Dakota said, looking back at her friends. “See, she even admits it!”

  “No. D, seriously,” Corrina pleaded. “Let me explain.”

  “Oh, Toby’s explained it,” Shawn said, waving his hand in the air, rallying laughs from a couple of the guys.

  “Whatever,” Dakota said, dismissing Shawn and Corrina both. “Here’s the thing, Corrina. It’s like you only hang out with guys now. Ever since you picked up that guitar and thought you were some kind of Latina Patti Smith.”

  Corrina straightened. “What?” she repeated, her voice sounding strained and weak. “Why would you say that?”

  “Get over it. You think you’re so cool? Well, that’s probably why they all hang around you,” Dakota continued. “It’s obvious. You slut it up and they stick around.”

  “Oooohhh,” Shawn said, egging Dakota on.

  Corrina marched toward the group, her hands balled into tight fists. She headed straight
for Dakota, but Shawn stepped in front of her. He was enormous, and he dwarfed the already-short Corrina. “Hey,” he said. “Take it easy.”

  “Fuck out of my way, Shawn,” Corrina said. She tried to step around him, but he gripped her arm in one of his bear-claw fists.

  Whether the lights along the boardwalk were getting brighter, or the night was twisting and squeezing tighter around us, it felt like one of those moments where the heat of the mob rises and people start losing it: Corrina yelled at Dakota and girls shouted back at Corrina, and Shawn and some of the guys started laying into her too, and there was Corrina, still stuck in Shawn’s grip, leaning right into the mouth of the mob and roaring back, and I got up, and I was sure Old Humper could feel my pulse whacking a hundred miles an hour in my veins and vibrating through my hands and right down the leash to his neck, because he started barking and bouncing around in tight circles, and some of the kids in the group looked over, but most of them didn’t, and all I wanted to do was swat them up the beach to Santa Monica but Old Humper made the first move instead, and he shot forward, yanking the leash from my grip, toward Shawn.

  And while most dogs might dive into a melee with their teeth bared, salivating for a fight, that was not Old Humper. He leapt onto Shawn’s leg and began his very own slutty, eponymous deed.

  “What the hell?” Shawn yelled.

  Others screamed, because, naturally, they thought Old Humper was gnawing on Shawn’s shin, but when they realized Old Humper’s wet tongue was just panting along happily in the air, and that he had mistaken the brawl for an orgy, most of the kids started laughing.

  Even Corrina was caught off-guard. She watched amazed as Old Humper went to town on Shawn. Shawn let go of her as he tried to free his leg, but she didn’t chase down Dakota. “Looks like you finally found someone, Shawn,” she said.

  This got other people in the group laughing too, and Shawn looked like he might hit Corrina, but he was too busy with Old Humper. I didn’t want him to punch her or Old Humper, so I dove in and tried to get ahold of the leash, and after a little dancing around in a circle with Shawn, I finally got a grip on Old Humper’s collar and yanked him away.

  Everybody looked at me, or at least it felt like it, and I didn’t know if any of them knew me, or remembered me, but for a brief moment it seemed like everything had calmed down.

  But then Shawn shouted, “What the fuck is wrong with your dog?” He couldn’t stand still, and the current of fear probably still ripped through him because his hands and legs shook.

  “Sorry, man,” I said, glad I had a voice in my throat. “He’s a lover, not a fighter.”

  Shawn didn’t laugh at all. He swung so quickly I didn’t have time to move. I’d been in five fights in my life and had won exactly zero of them, and when Shawn slammed me in the gut, I continued my perfect record of losses.

  I crumpled to the ground and Old Humper growled and barked, but I collapsed with the leash wrapped tightly around my arm, so Old Humper leapt around uselessly, but before Shawn could do any more damage, Corrina called his name. He turned around. Her big black boot shot like an arrow and kicked him right in the balls. He fell to his knees. Everyone shouted at one another and Old Humper kept barking and I wanted to get the hell out of there, but Shawn had socked me square in the solar plexus and I wasn’t sure I was ever going to breathe again—so I couldn’t really move.

  As I fought to regain my breath, everyone else kept yelling and eventually some of them dragged Shawn away, some of the girls calling Corrina a slut and other names as they left—names that all too often are thrown at girls and not boys who do the same damn thing. Why wasn’t anyone calling Toby a slut? He was the one telling everyone.

  Corrina remained and helped me to the curb by the trees. I sandwiched Old Humper between my legs, trying to calm him down, but he wasn’t as dumb as he was horny, and I was sure he could feel my own explosive nervousness blasting out of me from the ends of my fingers as I dug into the beige folds of his neck and scratched.

  “Shawn’s a dick,” she said. “But your dog is hilarious. Is he always like that?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately. But I can’t keep him at home or he’ll ruin the furniture.”

  That got her to laugh again, and it came dancing out of her, free and easy. “Punched in the gut and still smiling,” she said. “That says something about you. Also,” she added, “cool band name: Punched in the Gut and Still Smiling.”

  “Thanks, by the way,” I said.

  “For saving you?”

  “My hero.” I smiled.

  She laughed again. “Yes. Yes.” She nodded, speaking as if an invisible audience huddled around us. “Yes, the boy is flirting. Punched in the Gut and Still Flirting—same band, years later, different bass player.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, Hendrix.”

  I still had trouble breathing, partly because of the punch, and also because I was sitting next to Corrina, the girl who set off explosions of nerves in my stomach whenever we spoke. A small, pale scar burst like a star by her left eye, and when she looked out of the corners of her eyes and smiled at me with a knowing kind of irony, she blew all the breath right out of me again.

  She looked away, across the beach, and squinted into the dark distance. “But you know who I’d like to punch in the gut? Toby ‘The Asshole’ Fuller.” She got up and paced in front of me. Her nostrils flared as she breathed, and I almost thought she was going to hit me, since Toby wasn’t around.

  “Corrina?” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Are you kidding? No. I’m not okay, Hendrix.” She stopped moving and glared at me.

  “I know,” I said. “You look pissed.”

  “I’m not pissed!” she yelled. “This is what I look like when I’m sad, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Okay. I’m not judging. I just wish there was something I could do to help.”

  “Ha. Yeah,” she said. “You know what would help right now? A car. I wish I had a car. I’m so frigging pissed off, I want to go find that guy, right now.” She kept pacing, swinging her hands in the air as she spoke, rapid-fire. “God! I wish I could use my parents’ car right now.” She made air quotes. “I’ve eroded their trust in me? Yeah, well, they can erode this,” she said, flashing me her middle finger. She waved her hand above her head and spun toward the beach. “This isn’t your problem, Hendrix. It’s mine. You don’t need to come.” Then she quickly turned back to me. “But what about you? You don’t have a car, do you?”

  “No. Mom’s? No, we can’t use hers,” I said. “Or, I can’t.”

  “Why?” she asked, but I could already see her face brightening, an idea forming.

  “I don’t have my license.”

  Corrina laughed. “Hendrix, you are killing me. Who the hell are you, man? Who in LA doesn’t have his license?”

  “Me.”

  “Okay, but does she have a car I can drive?” Corrina asked.

  This made me nervous as all hell, because (a) yes, she did have a car, the latest model of a little blue Volkswagen Beetle, and she was away so often she barely drove it, and it usually just sat in our driveway taunting the hell out of me, but also (b) I was not the kind of guy who blazed off into the night in my mother’s car, because I was not the kind of guy who ever got out and did anything, but there was also (c), and frankly (c) was impossible to ignore. (C) was Corrina. I’d spent the entire spring trying to imagine a reason Corrina might press her lips up against mine, and with everything that Gpa had told me about how important his memories were to him, I realized I wouldn’t have anything to look back on when I was his age, if I didn’t get out there now and go make some of my own. I had to do something worth remembering. So I chose (d).

  “Yes,” I said. “She does.”

  CHAPTER 3

  ESCAPE FROM O’KEEFE’S

  Half an hour later we were ripping up Centinela toward the 10 to find Toby. He was supposedly playing a gig at a house party in the hills
. Corrina found some music on the XM, and as it blasted from the speakers, every twelfth breath or so I thought, This must be what it’s like to live like Corrina, but the rest of the time I was worried we were going to smash into another car or a line of plastic trash barrels, or cross too quickly into the oncoming traffic, bust through the fence, and go crashing onto one of the rooftops down the slope on the other side of the street, because Corrina drove with gas pedal pressed to the floor, overtaking any car she could.

  “Where are we going?” I yelled.

  She didn’t answer. We shot past the Santa Monica Airport and got up on the 10, and she drove even faster.

  This was not my life. I was the type to sit at home alone in the semidarkness of the little bungalow reading poetry or contemplating the shifting shades of violet and blue on the walls as my eyes got adjusted to the night, and the silence of the empty house became a noise in my head. I wrote notes in the HFB so one day, there might be a record that the Hendrix family had actually existed, and that some of their story was a good one, because the one I otherwise knew, the one of the indigo-emptiness, of Mom’s life away in hotel rooms on business trips, Gpa’s exile to Calypso, and a Dead Dad whose face I only knew from the pictures I could find or steal from the old photo albums my mother left buried at the bottom of her closet, that life was beginning to feel lifeless, a nonpresence, a whisper in a city of nearly four million people shouting.

  But that night, as Corrina drove my mother’s car faster than it had ever been driven, growling along with some band named Flyleaf on the radio, she’d swept me into her life.

  We had the windows down and the air blasted my face. It felt good to shoot out into the city lights and scream a little.