LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter One

      ONE SUMMER MORNING while I was still a virgin though my virginity was on its last legs, I woke up and didn’t want to go to New Jersey. It wasn’t fair that they wanted me to go to New Jersey; I didn’t want to go – I was seventeen and no seventeen-year-old L.A. woman would go to New Jersey if she could get out of it, especially a seventeen-year-old with a boyfriend like mine – a dreamboat who was twenty-five, was under contract to Fox as a leading man, black wavy hair and blue eyes, his father a French leading man who’d once starred in a tearjerker with my Great Aunt Golda and made a million dollars which he lost on a misadventure. Anybody who went to New Jersey just to visit Aunt Helen, I supposed with outraged sensibilities, would have to be nuts. Aunt Helen was nuts to have moved to New Jersey at all, and she was really insane inviting decent L.A. people to visit her on the fucking East Coast.

      But my father and mother kept up their demand, even if I did remain in L.A., about the people they would allow me to remain with. I refused hands down. Not my grandmother, period – I mean, staying with my grandmother would be like not being in L.A. at all. My Aunt Goldie’s place was big enough but my cousin Ophelia had been such a drag in those days and gone to such lengths to antagonize her new stepfather by leaving joints around in 1960 where he could see them that he’d become embittered against the entire younger generation of Lubins before my sister Bonnie or I even had a chance to try our hand. I wouldn’t stay with the people across the street who’d been there while I was growing up and whose daughter Shelly Craven was my age and with whom we have everything outwardly in common, because for one thing we didn’t forgive them – they were Stalinists and a line of blood was painted right down the middle of Foothill Drive once they moved in when I was six – and besides, they weren’t home, they were in Rome. Not that I myself wouldn’t have forgiven them for being Stalinists – what I didn’t forgive them for was playing Pablo Casals on the record player and having that melodrama going on in the middle of the afternoon as Molly Craven’s token of cultural refinement. And none of my friends, like Franny Blossom, were people whose families my family would put up with – although Franny’s house, God knows, was a rambling mansion and the whole guest wing was empty since Franny’s “uncle” – who wasn’t really an uncle but who drank as much as her father and mother and thus was a dear family friend – had gone down to Rosarito Beach fishing for three months. But ever since Franny’s father had taken a beebee gun out and begun shooting it at a brass Liberty Bell above the fireplace on the mantel, my mother declared they were “trash” and once she said that, spending even one night was asking for the moon. So it looked like I was going to New Jersey and going to have to spend an entire month on the fucking East Coast.

      But I knew I wasn’t even though the next morning was when the plane was leaving. I knew something would save me.

      I never would have imagined it would be Lola. Even though once before she slept on our living room couch when she and Luther had a fight and she drove straight down from San Francisco in six hours like a demon, back in the days when it took eight hours for any sane person to drive down.

      Yet the moment I saw that intensely dark red hair I knew it was Lola.

      Lola had come.

      And Lola would understand perfectly why a seventeen-year-old virgin going to summer school at Hollywood High would rather not go to the fucking East Coast for a month. Of all my parents’ friends, Lola was the only one who, even though she was almost beyond her fiftieth birthday, was still L.A. enough to realize that you don’t leave anyone with a smile like my new boyfriend Claude’s for a whole month and expect him to be there when you got back – especially once I showed her his picture, which I happened to have with me when I explained this to her at 6:45 A.M. – and especially when I wasn’t even fucking him before I left so he’d have something to remember me by. Bleaching my hair blond and looking like Sheena, the queen of the jungle, which was how I looked, wasn’t enough, tan or no tan. I simply had to stay in L.A. and learn how to go down on him. But I’d never learn to go down on anyone if Ophelia didn’t tear herself away from the Westlake School of Music and her junkie jazz musicians, which was her idea of fun. And Ophelia promised to tear herself away on Saturday but by Saturday I’d be in New Jersey. And it was something she had to explain in person. Every time she began even attempting to explain on the phone, we both cracked our heads on the floor from falling down and wept tears of depraved laughter. But I didn’t need to tell Lola about all of that, I knew, all I had to do was beg her. Keep it simple.

      “You’re here,” I said, waking Lola up.

      “Yes,” she agreed, painfully – she’d gotten to L.A. at 2:00 A.M.

      “Please, Lola,” I begged, at 6:47 A.M., “you’ve got to stay.”

      “Well, I—” She laughed. Since she never drank, she never woke up with hangovers and waking up was much easier for her than it was for Franny’s parents.

      “Stay with me,” I said, shooting my picture of Claude smiling straight into my pitch. “For a month, Lola. Oh, please. Please! Can’t you?”

      “A month, why I—” Lola said, her mouth dropping open – but smiling – still insane enough by her fiftieth birthday to think this was a good idea basically. Besides which, she could not resist begging.

      “They want me to go to the fucking East Coast!”

      “That’s right,” she said. “To visit Helen.”

      “But I don’t want to go,” I explained, “I want to stay here” – she looked at Claude’s picture, her eyes widening – “with Claude.”

      “He’s a doll,”

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