America the Beautiful - Softcover

Moon Unit Zappa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747273820 ISBN 13: 9780747273820

Publisher: Headline

Synopsis

America Throne is rebuilding her life after her father dies of cancer and her boyfriend unceremoniously dumps her - by fax. Her best friend, Sadie, helps kickstart her life with much Earl Grey tea, gratuitous sex and some home-made yoghurt. This is a trip to the wilder shores of the West Coast.

About this title

About the Author

Moon Unit Zappa is the daughter of legendary composer Frank Zappa. She won The Aspen Comedy Award for Best Alternative Comic and has written for Details and Harper's Bazaar. She lives in L.A.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter Twenty-Four: A Month of Sundays

"Close your eyes and try to sleep, close your eyes

and try to dream. We belong to the night, we belong

to each other. We belong, we belong,

we belong together."

-- Pat Benatar

Charlie and I met in Santa Monica at the mouth of an old fire road, which wound round a massive mountain to an overlook for a Technicolor view of mountains, sky, and sea. I had called Charlie up that morning and asked him to take a walk in nature with me. It felt good to have a no-pressure outing with a nice guy.

All the same, I chewed three pieces of wintergreen gum. Poor hygiene is just poor manners.

Charlie arrived dressed liked a trendy forest ranger in olive khakis with a vintage Boy Scout shirt with a patch that said 420, mirrored police officer sunglasses, and clunky mustard-colored lace-up boots. I was brave enough to pour myself into a pair of jean shorts and a long-sleeved ribbed purple cotton

T-shirt, even though my legs were wintry white and unshaven. I figured I needed to be utterly myself right away; that way I'd find out quick who stuck around.

"This is white sage," he said as we made our way to the first of several plateaus, and then told me its Latin name along with the names of about sixteen other neighboring green items. Of course, he knew about plants. It turned out Charlie had his own little herb garden. Mint and chocolate geranium were his favorites. I was so nervous about my breath and memorizing the plants and their corresponding names that at no time did I notice the ingrown hair on my leg the size of a small dog until we began to dig into our ascent. I panicked. Decided to hug the area closest to the fall so that he wouldn't see the red inflamed boil side of my leg; but Charlie was wily and crisscrossed back and forth in front of me to point out some type of succulent ground cover and tiny yellow wildflowers. "This is mustard!" He pulled the yellow blossoms off the slender green stalk for me to taste. Mustard, I thought. I had to laugh inwardly because of Spoonie's and my codeword for trouble...

"This is licorice and this one is yucca." I stayed low, unable to concentrate on a thing Charlie said because I was sweating so much and straining to hide the bump.

I touched IT compulsively now, with every other step. I was all bump and minimal forward motion.

"Are you OK?" he asked suddenly.

"What? Why?"

"Because you're walking kind of funny."

"Oh?" I said, a deer in the headlights.

"You're walking like this." He demonstrated it for me. "Like you have poopie trou or something," he said, grinning. I dropped to the ground and pulled my shirt over my bent knees, buried my face in my hands. "Dude, did I say something wrong?"

"No," I said to my navel, "it's just that you're so honest and I don't know you and...and..."

He crouched beside me, put a hand on my back. "Just say it."

I pointed to my leg, ran my hand over the fabric that hid it. "Bump!"

"Where?" He pulled at the end of my shirt trying to get a look.

"NOOOOOOOO!"

"Let me look at it." He bent down on all fours and leaned forward. Without lifting my face, I raised the shirt and revealed the lump. "Eeuwwww! It's huge! Can I pop it?"

"NOOOOOO!" I screamed again. I pulled my shirt back down and began to rock myself back and forth. "Go away!" I peered at him over my left kneecap. He was smiling devilishly.

"Let me pop it, can I?" His intentions seemed so pure, I let him lift up my shirt once more. Upon closer examination, he decided it wasn't ripe for picking and found some wild lavender, plucked a sprig, crushed the blossom and the stem, and applied it like a salve instead. Then we collected eucalyptus leaves and he told me to boil them with some gauze and apply it like a poultice. I had never heard the word poultice used in real life before, certainly not by a handsome, heterosexual twenty-six-year-old man.

The following Tuesday I asked Charlie if he wanted to hit the museum for the Cubist show that was still running. My dad's stuff had been up for weeks at LACMA and I kept promising myself I'd go. Charlie was dressed like a Salvador Dali painting complete with pocket watch. Before we piled into his giant dented blue flatbed truck with the sticky starter, he climbed my tree. My tree! The one the feng shui people told me prevented me from ever getting a man, that tree. Charlie climbed it. Climbed it. Climbed IT. I was so shocked I dropped my purse.

Strolling through the great halls and seeing the look of awe on Charlie's face as we stopped to examine a piece of my father's called If all else fails choose D, none of the above, a painting of pure sky, made me recall one of the only things I did like about seeing my father's work on display. I liked it best when the pieces belonged to us, before they had to pack their bags and travel to a gallery overseas: in our living room above the fireplace or propped up against a hall closet or blocking the door to a guest bathroom.

We paused at another from his book called Barely Mammal -- a Ku Klux Klan guy holding a gun to the head of a black Raggedy Andy doll, and then another, a favorite called Gargoyle, which is just a building gargoyle looking after some pigeons with a fountain and a roller-skating street scene in the distance.

Suddenly I'm five, and seven, and thirteen, sitting in my parents' kitchen late at night watching my father heat up a bowl of chili straight from the can. We make color jokes. It's one of my favorite things to do, to have quiet time alone with him like this. While he waits for the lugubrious brown stew to boil, we call out horrifying color combinations and laugh and laugh. I say something like "Apple green and orange plus brown." And he says something like "That's nothing. Beige, mildew, and Washington, D.C." or "Turquoise, leather, and tofu." If I try to argue leather isn't a color he tickles me. Sometimes if we are driving, Spoonie and my mother play, too. Car interiors have us peeing in our pants. Strip mall color schemes send us over the moon. The very idea of fabric stores flattens us.

When Charlie and I get to a piece from my father's Cubist period, our feet become cement. The piece is called From Russia with Glove. The image is the Statue of Liberty, barefoot in Central Park, wearing a crown of thorns made of splayed Barbie doll legs and an oven mitt. Charlie and I can do nothing except look at each other and know instinctively just how sad it is. The loss of a true humanitarian absurdist.

There was nothing to say.

Then I had an epiphany about Cubism. I had always despised Cubist art, but now I understood that it wanted us all to comprehend the full scope of things, to be able to see and know everything from wherever you stood. To see the back of the head of those you love and the inside of their heart at the same time as you look them directly in the eye. Inwardly, I thanked Charlie.

When I got home I decided to spruce the place up a little, so I picked wildflowers from all my neighbors' yards and hillsides. Daffodils in an old tea tin in my kitchen window near the sink, iris in a jelly jar by my bed, and a single white camellia in a mint-green-and-white chipped finger bowl by my father's easel.

The next day I was still feeling so inspired from our museum visit that I called Charlie and asked him if he wanted to paint pottery. In the clean little terra cotta-tiled shop on Main Street I was suddenly nervous. I felt the pressure of my father's artistic legacy, and picked out an inconspicuous unfinished soap dish, but Charlie wouldn't have it. He picked out a large white unfinished salad bowl, because he wanted something large he could paint with me. My courage surfaced: I wondered if it would stay at his place or mine or if we should just move in together to avoid an argument.

I let Charlie choose the colors. A girl in a navy apron squirted the paint onto a single square of glazed white tile, orange and ice blue and magenta, dark green and brown, pink and plum. I looked around the room. It was hard not to notice things differently with Charlie around. For example, the relationship between things in pairs: the edge of the table we sat at and the corner of his chair, the bottom of the clock and the door frame overhead, the way the viny plants in the window leaned in toward each other.

"What are you thinking about?" asked Charlie.

"Uh!" I said blushing, twirling my paintbrush in the water, watching it turn a milky blue, "um, things in pairs actually." Charlie jolted straight up in his seat, turned his side of the bowl around for me to see: a big fat PEAR next to a bunch of dancing bananas with top hats and faces, and a scruffy-looking creature with four legs and antlers that looked like it started out as a dog and then turned into a goat, maybe.

"OK, I know that's a pear, and those are dancing bananas, but what the hell is that?"

He contorted his body to my side of the table to examine it again and then sat up triumphantly. "It's a goatbear!" We erupted into peals of laughter. "What did you make?" He sat straight-spined in his seat now. His whole face softened. "Wow!"

I lightly smacked his arm. "Shut up!"

"I'm serious. It's really nice. Really...feminine." I crinkled my nose up. "You're like a real artist. I love the colors."

"Nah." I pulled a face.

"Really." He looked sad now. "Don't close off. See?" He turned the bowl back around for me to see. I looked at what I had done, trying to see it through Charlie's eyes: intertwining vines and roses and two birds and two dancing fairy ladies and some snakes with mosaic multicolored backs.

"Not SO bad," I said, brushing my hair behind my ear. Affectionately he conked me on the head.

Later that night we ended up in a carpeted piano bar at some divey hotel in West Hollywood. Charlie knew that no one was ever there, so we sat and played the piano even though I can't. We ended up singing all the Pat Benatar songs we knew at the top of our lungs to the dead drunk amusement of a few lingering lonelyhearts and some random staffe...

About this edition

• Publisher: Headline
• ISBN 10: 0747273820
• ISBN 13: 9780747273820
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English