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2.

MOUNTAIN IS A SAN DIEGO BOY—CLAIREMONT HIGH IS his alma mater—and I’m able to get him a summer job at the Del Mar racetrack, where I’ve worked the last two summers. It’s just a seven-week season, perfect for an academic interlude and a few extra bucks. Mountain and I toodle around in an electric cart and fill concession stands with hot dogs, relish, buns, candy bars, and the like, before the admission gates open at twelve. I usually drive so Moses can salute bystanders and say, “Smoke’em if you got ‘em,” or “Manga la puerta,” a phrase he believes is Italian for “Eat the door.” It’s a six-hour shift, and except for getting up early, it’s easy work. We’ve rented a small studio apartment in the barrio of Solana Beach, just down the street from the Blue Bird Mexican Restaurant, one of five Mexican restaurants on our street, about two miles from the track.

Throughout the day Mountain emits rarely explained chortles, snickers, and squeaks, his eyes crinkling and moist with mirth, as if talented mice have assembled privately in his brain to do special reenactments of Rogers and Hammerstein. Rarely, like most of my friends, can I predict what he will say. Sincere one moment, devil-may-care the next, he pronounces the anthem of his youth in a side-mouthed Hollywood gangster voice : “Get maaaxed, go on a triiiip, one WAY!” Midsentence he’ll strike one of a myriad of madcap action-photo poses: a cross-eyed racecar driver, a gay tap dancer, an inbred tobacco heir, a hapless prizefighter, Maria the flirtatious tortilla maker. He possesses a merry and absurd sweetness, a politeness bordering on sheepishness that, combined with a body mass that can block out the sun, endears him to most everyone. Except for the constant flux of women, towels on the bathroom floor, and an occasional nosebleed, Mountain is the perfect, but always delightful, roommate, spontaneous and easygoing as you please.

We eat hamburger and beans, party every night (one WAY!), and lose our money on the horses. None of the neighborhood bars ever asks us for our IDs (“Why do you think they call it a barrio?” says Mountain), and we both know a couple of other places where I can drink. Mountain drinks anywhere he wants. Despite his sorry excuse for a mustache, he looks twenty-eight, and even though he’s got a first-rate fake ID, he rarely has to show it. Everyone seems eager to accommodate the big man. America is all about the Big Man. One more point about Mountain Moses: despite his guilt, sensitivity, deeply marred Catholicism, and courteousness, he’s got a sadistic side. He loves to fight when he gets a little booze in him, and he’s very clever at stirring up trouble. For a while there, because of his size, I thought he was the type who innocently attracts violence, but more than once now, like that time with the Huns in Ocean Beach, when he was almost arrested for using a guy’s face to clear a row of trophies off a shelf, I’ve seen him throw an elbow, sit in the wrong chair, or deliberately spill someone’s drink just to get the ball rolling. If he likes you he’s inclined to call you “Johnny.” But if he calls you “Burt,” get ready to swallow some teeth.

When Mountain’s women appear, I have to disappear. I could stay if I liked, but the apartment is small, and he gets the strangest territorial jackass mating stupor in his eyes. For friendship and health reasons, I don’t want to get on the wrong side of Mountain Moses. I don’t ever want to be “Burt.” And given the choice, I’d rather not watch him melt into a lump of helpless jujubes. Maybe this is one of the reasons the women never stay long—he’s too easy, too lovey-dovey, too sweet. So I don’t mind taking a stroll while he gets the fructose out of his system. I’ll wander up to the Blue Bird for a margarita, borrow Mountain’s car and drive down to the beach to whump on a few waves, or if the horses are running I might fool around with a few bets since I can park and get in with my employee card for free.

On the evening of my twenty-first birthday, Mountain is off with one of his girlfriends. I couldn’t expect him to remember that today was my twenty-first. We haven’t been friends that long. Anyway, a twenty-first birthday isn’t that big a deal. Halfheartedly waiting for the phone to ring, I study his altar, a short bookcase at the head of his bed containing photographs including several mousy-looking girls I don’t know, his knockout sister, and his thenvery-young mother and father; a baseball signed by LA Dodger Maury Wills; two Rolling Stones ticket stubs; a glass doorknob; several treasure maps; some kind of weird washing machine spring; and his five “traveling classics”: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Brothers Karamazov, In Watermelon Sugar, The Principia Mathematica, and Smither’s Definitive Guide to Lost and Hidden Treasure.

I don’t know why I got all dressed up. Most of my friends don’t even know where I live. I wonder for a minute if I should call and tell them. It’s getting late. I’m certainly not going to go out by myself to celebrate my twenty-first. What could be sadder than that? Sitting on a park bench with an inflatable doll?

I switch on Mountain’s little black-and-white TV. A pretty face introduces her potbellied guests, who are proud to be unemployed. They brag of their affairs. America mocks her heroes, embraces her slobs. I switch over to the news: G M is on strike. There’s another oil embargo, long lines at the gas stations. A serial killer named Johnny Jumpup or something like that has popped up and if I’m not mistaken the journalists are thrilled.

I hate the 1970s. It’s the pimp rococo decade, dull-eyed complacency, endless consumption, and softheaded children in clown clothing finding an excuse to give each other gonorrhea in the park. The previous generation represented ideals such as love, equality, landing on the moon, and civil rights. My generation represents teen pregnancy, disco music, Sun Myung Moon, escalating crime rates, big gas-guzzling cars with wheel covers and chrome that falls off and doors that don’t close and all the people who make them out on strike and scratching their venereal sores. America is dying and no one cares.

I stick my head into the fridge. Along with many cartons of leftover Chinese food, I find a half-gallon carton of Tropicana, sniff cautiously, and sip. Carton in hand, I stare out the window. I wonder how many serial killers, glorified extortionists, and environmental criminals they have in India. But what’s this, headlights in the driveway? My heart soars. It’s Mountain Moses.

Mountain strolls in showing that big gap between his two front teeth. He’s dressed in tie and suit jacket and slacks. Everyone at school says he looks like Silly Stallone, but with those big chimp ears, that twinkle in his blue eyes, that bent honker, those pin-striped pleated slacks, and that faint excuse for a mustache, tonight he looks like a dead ringer for Clark Gable. Mountain, I’ve decided all at once, is the best friend I could ever have.

“Well, looka who’s here,” I say, turning off the television.

“Where is everyone?” he says, looking about with a tug at the sleeves of his jacket.

“You’re looking at them,” I say. “Where were you, at a costume party? You look like the maitre d’ on Leave It to Beaver.”

He glances at his wing tips, then holds out his arms, hands backward, as if he’s about to leap from a thirty-meter board. “Had to go to her parents’ house for dinner. Croquettes. No beaver. Begged off dessert to make it for your birthday.”

I smile and swirl my carton of Tropicana. “What did you get me?”

“I’m going to get you drunk,” he says in a John Wayne voice, hooking his finger at the air.

“How did you know?”

“Enough of this gay banter,” he says, glancing at his watch. “We’ve only got six hours.”

Mountain drives his father’s El Camino. His father and mother are divorced. He doesn’t talk much about his mom. Father, I gather, is the uncommunicative intellectual type who spends his evenings with vodka on the rocks under the reading lamp.

We argue about what place to go. Mountain likes crummy working-class bars where he can find fights. I like more-upscale places with the possibility of women. Mountain doesn’t go for bar women. He finds his girlfriends in grocery stores, dormitories, at beaches or ball games, anywhere he can exhibit his dimples, apple cheeks, and charming, gosh-golly befuddlement in good, clean, and wholesome light. Come to think of it, I have never seen him with a girl when he was drunk. We compromise by hitting alternate bars.

“No fights too early, Mountain,” I warn him at bar number one, a cement hole in Mission Beach called Murph’s, where a sprinkle of semibikers have gathered like moose around the mossy pool table. Mountain and I really stick out here, me in a floral pirate blouse, green cuffed bell-bottoms so tight you can see the breath mints in my pockets, platform shoes, glistening hair coiled artificially, eyes bloodshot from the vanity of hard contact lenses, a draping of gold at the neck—and Mountain arrayed like a senile father in a sixties sitcom. “All right? I don’t want to get blood all over this new shirt.”

“You’re not fighting,” he grumbles.

“Yes, but the guy will fall on me after you punch him,” I return. “Do you remember the last time? That shirt cost me twenty bucks.” I point a finger. My hands are so long they alarm me sometimes. “You see that donkey-headed guy down there by the dartboard?”

Mountain glowers down the way past a medium-hot blonde staring at him, who looks as if she’d enjoy a physical contest with Mountain, or failing that, between her boyfriend and this stranger who pleases her eye. “I see him,” he intones, his ears pricking. “Looks like a Burt to me.”

“He’s not staring at you.”

Mountain rolls his shoulders and cracks a malevolent grin. “Yes, he is.”

“No, he has a walleye. Strabismus, it’s a muscular disorder.”

“Maybe I can knock it back into place for him.”

“You don’t want to pick fights with the handicapped.”

“I don’t like people named Burt,” he says.

At Murph’s, even if it’s a biker haven, my incredible string begins. From here on out, regardless of the tavern we select, I am served for my free birthday drink a flaming asshole. I try not to take it personally. Don’t ask me what’s in a flaming asshole (floor wax?). All I know is that I present my ID and I am served this syrupy concoction on fire. Mountain thinks it’s funny, but he has one with me since we are brothers. You have to drink them quickly to keep from burning your face off. Even tossed back with expert quickness, these little pots of fire still crackle off the bottoms of your mustache hairs.

“Why don’t they call them Phantom of the Operas?” Mountain wonders aloud, licking his lips as if to feel if they are still there.

“They should serve them with extinguishers,” I agree.

Bar two on Seventieth Street is a bona fide disco with the mirror ball spinning over an acre of dance floor. I hate discos as much as the next guy, but where else are you going to find so many gorgeous chicks? I stand at the headland of the bay of dandies, admiring the tide. Mountain is bored, however, even if he knows how to dance—there isn’t the vaguest prospect of a fight—so we finish our drinks and head east down El Cajon Boulevard to a backwater part of town, littered and forgotten, as if a glacier pushed through a trailer park and came to rest here.

Mountain parks along the curb in front of a small closed grocery with salamis hanging in the window. Next door is a neon dive called The Mambo Lounge. The place has obviously been here for at least two wars, though this is the first I’ve noticed it. I follow Mountain through a gray curtain drenched in smoke and perfume, past a cigarette machine and into a purulent, velvet darkness, petite coin-sized tables arranged around a dance floor that looks like a bottomless pit. Mountain swivels his head as if he expects to recognize someone.

“Where are we?” I say. “Morocco, 1953?”

“About right,” he says, pointing toward an open table by the dance floor. An expiring couple draped over one another follows the wheezy inflections of a Tony Bennett song. The waitress, about forty, in black Danish S/M lace, sidles up with her tray. “See your IDs, boys?”

Mountain mutters, “How old do you gotta be to drink here, fifty?”

“Only twenty-one,” she drawls, dropping the cards on the table. “What’ll you boys have?”

“It’s my birthday,” I announce.

“Oh oh,” she says, and here come the liquid minibonfires.

“The place looks like a convalescent hospital,” I remark. “What time does the bingo start?”

Mountain rolls his big shoulders and plucks at the knot on his tie. He’s still looking around as if he expects to recognize someone. The drinks arrive. Mountain lifts his glass. “To the great state of ecstasy.”

We toss them back, eyes clenched against the inferno.

I brush at my lapel. “Is my shirt on fire?”

“Siss-KWAH!” Mountain says to the waitress, who is staring at him with less-than-professional curiosity. “Two more, dear.” He seems suddenly content here. I don’t know why. The patrons are too old to fight.

The moment the waitress is out of earshot Mountain cocks his jaw and belches. He’s a gifted belcher, able to articulate phrases such as “Buick Riviera” or “George Washington Carver.” Through eructation this evening, with a few drinks under his belt, he’s ambitious and tries: “The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”

I congratulate him, even if he did run out of gas on the last syllable.

He drops his head in modesty and begins an impression of Paul “Bear” Bryant, the legendary Alabama football coach, which consists of little but the word “Alabama” mumbled over and over. Then he cries suddenly, grimacing in pain, clutching an imaginary wheel. “Action photo!”

“What is it?”

“Kamikaze pilot spill hot coffee in lap.”

“Here’s one,” I say, left hand behind my head, right arm extended. “Shot putter with loose toupee.”

“Forgot my chute,” he says, arms flailing.

“Watch out for those Girl Scouts!”

“Marilyn Monroe!” he says, lifting the tails of his jacket and clapping his eyelids.

“Forgot to shave your legs!”

“So, big fella,” he says, shoving at imaginary goldilocks with the heel of his hand. “What’s new in the development of thought and the analysis of ideas?”

My coaster is stuck to my arm and I finally manage to shake it free. “Why is there no practical philosophical application to the problem of happiness?”

“What’s the problem?”

“Happiness.”

“Life is sad,” he says, his gaze swinging over my shoulder as someone enters the door. “Have another drink.”

“Would that I had one.”

He fiddles with his cuff links. “Where is that dame?”

“Probably reloading the balls in the bingo machine,” I say, fluffing the curls on my perm. “So what are your plans after you get your degree, Mountain?”

“Don’t like to think about it,” he says, pushing his empty shot glass to the edge of the table with an index finger. “Cal Tech, eventually. Not really ready for the grindstone yet.”

“How about travel?”

“Sure,” he says, lips sealed, eyes rolling up. “Don’t know where I’d go, though. Maybe Arizona, New Mexico. Spanish hid a lot of gold out there.”

“I’d like to get out of America,” I say, watching a pillar of red light behind the bar holding in its electromagnetic prison tight coils and marbles of tobacco smoke.

“What’s wrong with America?” he says, his forehead ridging.

“I’ve never fit well here,” I say.

“Why not?” He seems offended.

“People come here for one thing,” I say, hammering my shot glass down for emphasis. “To be rich. And they’ll do anything to get it—lie, cheat, kill, steal, poison a river. You ever been to Canada?”

“Nope. Had real maple syrup once.”

“It’s clean there. The people are nice. You know why?”

“Maple syrup?”

“Because nobody goes there to get rich.”

He tongues his bottom lip, then scratches his big chin. “Rich ain’t all that terrible of an idea.”

“A dream about money is a dream about shit.”

“Who said that?”

“Sigmund Freud.”

“Don’t tell me you wanna live in Canada.”

“I was thinking more like the coast of India, or maybe Africa, someplace with decent surf and no crowded freeways.”

He crooks an index finger and scratches the part in his hair. “How about an island?”

“Yeah,” I say. “That’d be good too.”

“With nekkid girls,” he says.

“And parakeets.”

“And buried treasure.” His eyes suddenly light. “Let’s go.”

“It wouldn’t be bad.”

“An island,” he says, tapping his nose. “Yeah. Jesus, pirate gold. Hey, where’s Inga?”

“Here she comes. See the woman behind the flames?”

The drinks are placed flickering in front of us. Mountain says—the blue lambency of blazing liqueurs playing on his eyes—that on our uninhabited island not far from Tahiti we will probably need a generator, a compressor, milking goats, and two topless house servants who speak no English. I add some laying hens and a still, and install a sunken Spanish caravel full of gold doubloons in the cove nearby to please his treasure-hunting instincts.

“We should leave now,” Mountain says, tossing back his pot of fire.

As I raise my asshole to my lips, a consumptive- looking rake in a black evening dress and tattered stole is limping toward me, her hands so thin they appear to be bone, her face lizardwhite, her cheeks collapsed. If I believed in zombies I would get up and run. I’m terrified for a moment and when she leans down suddenly into my face, the flaming asshole barbecues my nose.

“Hello, Mom,” says Mountain.

“Hi, Sullie,” she says in the charred, cement-mixer voice of the inveterate smoker. I’ve forgotten until now that his real name is Sullivan. “Where you been, baby?”

With sangfroid slowness he lights a cigarette. He smokes leaned back with the cigarette between his second and third fingers, covering the lower half of his face with his hand, as I imagine French aristocrats or Charles Boyer would do. “I’m going to college now, Ma,” he says.

“College?” she says, stifling a yawn. “Well, that’s nice. Who’s your friend?” She tips her skeleton head at me and her eyes are dancing now.

I toss off my extinguished drink, the tip of my nose thoroughly scorched. “I’m Edgar,” I falter.

Mishearing me, she unwittingly assigns me a new nickname. “Deadwood!” she cries, flipping back her stole in a blast of bug spray and cedar oil, moths flapping all around her head.

“I’m a friend of Mountain’s through college,” I explain, feeling for a blister. “Sit down, please, Mrs. Moses.”

“What kind of name is that, Deadwood? Are you a camp counselor?”

“It’s not really my—oh, never mind,” I say, wondering as she creaks into a chair, her eyes a frosted and moribund vacancy, how she could be related to the vital and venerable man sitting across from me. Her teeth are caked with lipstick and her hair is a whorl of mad licks, as if coiffed by the tongue of a cat.

“What are you boys doing here?” she asks, laying her chin on the back of an emaciated hand. “You like older women?”

“Ah, just drivin’ around, Ma,” says Mountain, slitty-eyed and finding sudden interest in the plumes of smoke rising from his cigarette.

“It’s my birthday,” I explain, gulping the last bit of residual syrup from my shot glass.

“No!” she says, regarding me with wonder. “We must dance.”

“No, Mrs. Moses,” I reply firmly, afraid she was going to say something like that. “Thank you, but I don’t dance.”

“Of course you do.” She swats the air.

“No, really I don’t.”

“No, we must.” She totters to her feet and extends a hand. “It’s your birthday.”

“I don’t dance,” I repeat.

“Come.”

It’s plain I won’t win. You can’t argue with the dead. The pickled hag that is somehow Mountain’s mother leads me to the black hole of a dance floor and we stride through the dingy, necrotic vapor with all the geezers nodding off into their diluted Smirnoffs. We don’t dance as much as we simply prop each other up. I have no concept of where to put my feet. I can feel her nipples and her hipbones jutting through her dress. She moans in my ear, “How old are you, honey, sixteen?”

“Forty-three,” I reply, my hand on her very palpable spine.

She cackles hotly into my ear.

Mountain watches us wistfully, hand in his hair.

“New York, New York” is finally over. You know I used to like that song. They must have played the long version. Mrs. Moses throws an arm around my waist and drags me back to her son. My plan if she asks me to dance again is to feign an epileptic seizure.

“I want you to meet Mel,” she wheezes, wiping a snake of hair from her eyes.

“We gotta go, Ma,” says Mountain.

“You can meet Mel, first,” she gurgles. “He’s right over here.”

Mel is poised on a stool at the bar, drumming his knee with three fingers. He’s a skinny guy about fifty with a barrel chest, big horn-rims, and a haircut like a Muppet. Everyone smiles and nods around except Mountain. Mrs. Moses is doing that blurry thing with her teeth and wagging her skull around airily, as if she is having the time of her life. “Mel is a contractor,” she says.

“So this is your son,” booms Mel cheerfully. “You’re a strapping one, aren’t you?” He’s trying to touch Mountain, slap his shoulder or grip his hand, but Mountain keeps his distance. “This your son too?”

Mrs. Moses tips her head in pride. “No, this is Deadwood, Mountain’s good friend from college.”

“Deadwood,” says Mel, pleased. “You must be a poker player.”

“We’re gonna go, Ma,” says Mountain.

“Don’t run off so soon. Stay for a drink.”

Mel is already signaling the bartender.

Mountain turns and, without another word, walks off. “Nice to meet you, Mel,” I call. “You too, Mrs. Moses.”

She waves as if from the prow of a ship, the SS DEATH, I think.

I catch up with Mountain and we break from that mummy rag of a curtain, cigarette smoke dangling from our clothes. Fresh air never felt so good. My nose still feels like it’s on fire.

“Thought she’d be here,” he says, and then adds with a sigh, “well, at least she’s still alive.”

“Forget it, man,” I say.

“Oh, I forgot it a long time ago,” he says, shoving hands down into his pockets. “Well, come on Deadwood, let’s go finish your birthday party.”