Chapter 21 — Second Death

At the start of the year, it was too cold to go out at night, so I spent a lot of time in my room. Betty would come over on Tuesdays and Thursdays and help me organize all of my things, then we’d go out for lunch. Sometimes she’d take me into a store where we’d look at gowns for when her and my father got married. She would try one on then go back to the rack and try on another, attempting to find the one that was perfect. Each time I told her that she looked beautiful, but she just laughed and told me it was because I still couldn’t see very well.

One night, after one of my classes, I stopped to eat at a Mexican place on the corner of Holder and Ball. As I sat alone at one of the tables, waiting for my food to arrive, a man walked over, sat down beside me, and asked if he could join me for dinner. He introduced himself as Bobby then told me that it pained him to see “such a beautiful girl eating alone.” So, I moved over, and we shared a bowl of chips and salsa, a taco salad, and a pitcher of unsweetened tea.

“So, do you come here often?” he asked me.

“Now that’s original,” I answered. “Do you say that to every strange girl you meet in a restaurant?”

He laughed for a minute, then we just sat there and talked. When I told him I had to get going, he motioned over to the waiter and told me “I got this,” then asked for my number. Soon after that we started dating and he’d come over to see me at the house that I shared with Don and Veronica.

“Who’s that?” she asked me one day as he walked out the door when she got home from work.

“Oh, that’s my boyfriend, Bobby,” I told her.

“Your boyfriend? So now he’s your boyfriend?”

“That’s what he said,” I answered back. “He said that he was my boyfriend, and I was his girlfriend. And then he told me he loved me.”

She stopped and stared at me for a second then walked away shaking her head. “That’s what every man tells you at first.”

Throughout that spring, Bobby and I were always together. He’d pick me up after school and on the days when I volunteered to work at St. Jude. Then one day he had an idea that I should just move in with him.

“It makes perfect sense,” he said. “Come on, are you really happy living there with your sister and all of her children and her husband who when he’s not in rehab, he’s there with his friends drinking and partying?”

“But I love those kids,” I told him, recalling the times when I told them stories at night before bed and when their grandma would drop them off after school. “Who’s going to tell them what happened to ‘Fluffy’ and ‘Meow Meow?’”

“Fluffy and who?”

“It’s a long story.”

Veronica wasn’t too happy when I told her I was leaving, but my dad set everything up so that my estate would still be paying her rent. Then everything changed when Don was transferred out to the desert and she put in her own transfer shortly thereafter. In the meantime, I had soon come to realize that my sister was right, every man tells you “I love you” at first.

One morning, I was on the phone, when Bobby came home from work. He waited for me to hang up then he asked me “who in the hell were you talking to?”

“Oh, that was my friend Trey,” I answered. “We’ve been friends ever since middle school.”

“Well tell him not to call here anymore!” he commanded. “Same goes for any other of your male friends.”

One day, he walked into our room when I was on the phone with Daniella. She had called me at Veronica’s house, but my sister told her I had moved and then gave her this number. He walked right past me then he reached for the nightstand and hit the receiver.

“You bastard!” I shouted. “That was Daniella.”

“Didn’t I tell you no male friends?” he warned me again.

“Daniella! Her name is Daniella! My God, you’re an asshole!”

It went on like that for over two months, then one day, when he was at work, the telephone rang and there was a female voice on the other end asking for him.

“Bobby’s not home. Can I take a message?”

“Yeah, tell him that his girlfriend called.”

“His girlfriend?” I said, “but I’m Bobby’s girlfriend.”

“Oh, I thought you were his roommate,” she said.

From the sound of her voice, she couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and as I found out later, I was only off by a year. She told me that he’d go there each morning, shower at her place, then get dressed for work. When I confronted him about it, he told me that she was just some old friend whom he had been comforting while she was dealing with a death in the family.

“Comforting her how? With your penis?” I screamed. “Listen, Bobby, you are so full of shit! But I’m on to you now, in fact, we’re both on to you!”

“Look, Pam, you know that I love you,” he pleaded. “What do you want me to say? I’m sorry? Okay then, I’m sorry.”

“No, I want you to get the hell out of here! Pack all your shit and get the fuck out!”

“But my name is on the lease. I can’t just pick up and go.”

“Your name is on the lease, but I’m still paying most of the rent! Hey, I got an idea,” I snarled. “Why don’t you ask your little whore to move in?”

The next morning, I called my dad and asked him if he could find me a place. So, he called up Regional Center and told me about this program where I’d be living alone but someone would come over to help me. Bobby stayed at our place for a while then moved back in with his parents. For the next two weeks, each of us came and went on our own without ever saying a word to each other.

I finally ended up moving into an apartment on Ball and Gilbert not too far from where I was living. The place was small, only one bedroom, but after so many years of sharing a room, then living in programs, then with my sister, not to mention all the drama with Bobby, it was nice to have a place of my own. Of course, every morning, someone from Regional Center would spend a few hours with me and try to teach me what they referred to as “independent living skills.” But for the most part they all just seemed to annoy me and before too long it was starting to remind me of Neurocare.

And speaking of Neurocare, I wondered how things were going with Rick. So, one night I tried calling his number, but I got no answer. I tried again the following day, but his roommate answered and told me was going to UCSD and living on campus. I decided that I would just leave it at that then I told his roommate to tell him “hello” and “wish him the best” and if he should ever see him again, “to give him my number.”

One morning when I got out of the shower I walked to my bedroom and turned on the radio. As the closing strains of Enjoy the Silence blared through the steam in one final spoken invocation, my attention turned to the commercial that followed. KROQ night at Oscar’s West?

Swedish Egil? Friday at eight? Sign me up! So, when the doorbell rang a little later and some girl from Regional showed up, I asked her if she could help me do laundry. “Not all of it,” I said. “Only a few pairs of jeans and my lacy black tops.”

“Well, Pamela, it says today were working on meal prep,” she said as she walked over into my kitchen and slapped a fully skinned chicken down on the sink.

“So, what the fuck do you expect me to do with it?” I demanded.

“Now, now, such language!” she scolded. “I expect you to wash it and cook it for dinner.”

After a while it became like some sort of joke—meal prep, meal prep—they’d say, but instead of raw chickens they began resorting to frozen meals that I only had to put in the microwave. It wasn’t that they refused to do laundry, but instead, they insisted on standing around while I washed and folded all of my clothes. “So, I’m actually paying you guys for this?” I’d tell them as I put my clothes into the washer, selected the temperature, and added the soap.

“Well, Pamela, this is independent living skills,” the girl would remind me.

When the night finally came, I was all decked out in denim and lace. I got there early and ordered a produce platter and a cup of coffee, since my program decided to test me for alcohol, and waited until the DJ went on. Then all the lights in the room went down and a spotlight shone down in the corner over the “Corona” and “Budweiser” signs and black light posters of 80’s musicians. Then an old familiar voice rang out through the club that sounded more like a middle-aged uncle than a world-famous DJ. Yet, his mixing skills were everything I remembered. When I wasn’t dancing, I hung out near the booth watching his hands the best that I could as they skillfully moved over the boards.

“Pamela!” He looked up and said when he got to a break. “What have you been up to these days?”

“Learning from the best,” I told him. “You don’t mind if I watch while you mix?”

“Of course not,” he said. “Why don’t you come on and join me back here?”

The next few weeks, I went to see him on Friday at Oscars and on Saturday nights when he was at Fashions. Then sometime in October, the Crystal Cathedral called and asked if I’d do the Glory of Christmas again. Now I had my job at St. Jude’s, my classes at Cypress College, my nights at the club, and the Glory shows. I rarely got any sleep, I never had time. “I’m sure that Dr. Katz would be proud,” I’d tell myself. “After all, I’m keeping myself busy.”

One night, I was walking back from one of the clubs when a voice called out to me in the dark, then a shadow emerged and started walking beside me. “Pam. Pam!” It began calling out after me. I remembered the voice. In fact, it sounded just like the one who had lied to me.

“Bobby? Bobby, is that you?”

“Pam, I haven’t stopped thinking about you,” he pleaded. “Please, can we talk?”

“No, Bobby. Just leave me alone!”

“Please, honey? I miss you so much,” he groveled, putting his hand against one of my arms.

I yanked away, then slid my headphones over my ears, reaching down to my waist for my Walkman. There was a brief moment of crackling static and a thunderous boom that rang out in my head—the screeching of tires screamed through the night as the world went black all around.

“Some light-colored car,” Bobby frantically told the police. “Shit I don’t know! Yellow, white, maybe tan? I didn’t really get a good look. My God, my girlfriend’s been shot! Oh my God! Oh my God!”

They took Bobby over to the station and had him answer some questions, but every time they would ask, he just started crying. Finally, they decided that he really didn’t know anything, so they let him go home. For me there was no dark tunnel or bright shining light—no riverbanks or shallow green waters, or lost souls crying out for one more chance. Now it was only a still small voice that spoke in my head like a thundering whisper. When my time came, I would be alright. No more waiting by the banks of a stream in a small wooden cottage, a whisper of oaks and a cool sullen fog hiding my face from all those who loved me. This time the voice smiled back through a mirror and told me that it was not yet my time.

After a week at Anaheim Memorial, I finally woke up, this time with a half-shaved head. I heard a policeman talking to my father as he stood outside of my room in the hall.

“We’re pretty sure it was only a pellet gun.” The officer told him. “Probably doctored. Most likely some sort of initiation.”

“Initiation?” my dad asked, nonplussed. “Initiation for what?”

“To get into a gang. You know, to see if some punk had the balls to actually shoot someone.” The officer then took a sip of his coffee and exhaled deeply into the air. “Then next time they give them the real McCoy and instead of an ambulance, we’re calling a hearse.”

My dad just stood there in silence, now and then looking back in my room.

“Mr. Vasquez,” the officer said to my dad. “your daughter is one lucky woman.”

“Tell me about it,” my father said shaking his head.