ORANGE MESSIAHS by Scott A. Sonders (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

current was the slowest. It was easier for me to make the swim in the shallower part of the river.
But anyway, sometimes it is so difficult to get one point across to you. Will you just sit for a minute or two?”

I nodded.

“So, for one reason or another, Elisa never wanted to believe that story. She always seemed distant, like she was never 100% there when we talked. I think Elisa spent a lot of hours lost in a sort of waking reverie. She was searching the sky and her dream for that legendary pot of gold that they say is at the end of rainbows. But for Elisa, it was not just another tall tale, for her there was an actual and physical end to the rainbow. It could be reached. The legend was possible. For her the fantasy crossed out of the shadows and into the light of reality. For her, just over the horizon, a real father and mother waited. For her, there was second set of parents and a second chance at life that the rest of us would never get.”

Mama stopped for a moment, looked at the watch she always wore on her right wrist even though she was right-handed. She looked at her watch a lot, but I don’t think it was less to check the time then to verify that life was still in order.

Mama continued, “Elisa poked around endlessly. Intruding into other people’s lives like she was on a divinely inspired mission. Like she had special dispensation from the Pope. It was strange and beautiful to be in her company, to be her friend, for as long as she never reached the truth, she was driven by a hope that was not to be fully fathomed by me until after I met Raymond (Mama always referred to my estranged father as Raymond, not Ray). It was her hope that someday she would find the treasure, a family rich and beautiful, a family eager to open their heart and home.”

“That’s a beautiful story, but where does Donna come into this?” I said.

“Well, that’s just it. Elisa was a deeply beautiful and deeply misunderstood girl. In the short time that I knew your friend, Donna, it seems to me that she and Elisa are cut from the same cloth. They could be the same person. I miss Elisa, and now I miss Donna.”

Somehow, Mama managed to segue from her recital on adoption to explaining that a major cause for people being so deluded is television and that she thinks that Gabby is watching too much TV, and that maybe I should talk to her because I’m the only one she’ll listen to, etc. etc. I’ve been told by more than one person that I’m a lot like my mama, that I’m too opinionated and tend to preach from soapboxes. My next appointment to see my therapist is this Wednesday. I think I’ll ask her what she thinks.


December 17th:

I’d be ashamed to admit this to my friends, but I think I’m beginning to like keeping a journal. It feels so... important, as if I’m participating in history. There’s this silly fantasy of mine that a long time after I’m dead, someone will find this and publish it and make me famous. I’m usually pretty skeptical of things, but I’m never a pessimist. I think some people from the future reading this would be really great. After all, they won’t be around to put me down or anything.

Of course my journal has started out to be more like a dissertation than a diary. Which is what my brother might have sarcastically predicted. He’s such the opposite of me. He always thinks that his glass his half empty rather than half full. He also thinks keeping a journal is “a total waste of time.” But maybe that’s because I think I’m going somewhere better after this life is over, and Carlos thinks he’s going nowhere at all.

Anyway, I missed making yet another entry last night because I went to a really far-out party with Vicki Fuller, this girl from work. At the Broadway, I’m in Women’s Casual wear and she’s in Cosmetics, but our registers are only about twenty feet apart. From her counter she can actually see me, as large as life, when I’m ringing up a sale. If she catches my eye, she’ll usually crack me up by making faces or flipping the bird at some customer when they’re not looking. She’s such a cut-up. If I ever get pink-slipped, it’ll be one of the floor managers who has caught me laughing at one of Vicki’s crazy antics.

Carlos thinks “Victoria” is, as he puts it, “the kind of woman (yeah, she’s about two years older than me, his girl sister) who has the looks and style that gets both sexes’ attention, the kind so sexually mesmerizing that she makes hetero chicks think about becoming dykes and makes fags think about going straight.” He’s such a typical guy in this respect. He can’t see past a girl’s boobs if she’s wearing a tight sweater.

But I think Vicki is brilliant and probably a very old soul. On one hand she’ll be saying something really clever and funny, and on the other hand she’ll come out of left field and say something deep and profound. She says, not too bashfully, that she likes me because looking at me is like looking in the mirror for her. She says she sees “the face of a pagan goddess, the smarts of Madame Curie, and the passion of Joan of Arc. And like Joan of Arc, we’re both just as misunderstood.”

I drove over to her place a little before 7 P.M. to have dinner with her and her parents before getting ready to go to the party. She lives in a detached one-bedroom guest quarters on the grounds of a huge estate on Bellagio Way in the best part of Bel Air. It’s only about a mile north of my apartment, though. According to Vicki, her mother’s father had invented NO-DOZ and had made a fortune.

He first built the guesthouse with his own hands, then after making an even bigger fortune in the booze business, he had Frank Lloyd Wright design the main house. It’s this sort of gorgeous but weird combination of an old Southern plantation house and a Southwestern adobe rancho. Something you’d see in Gone With The Wind Meets Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. Just inside the front door, there’s a huge spiral staircase in an entry hall bigger than my whole apartment, where you could just dream of seeing Clark Gable or Paul Newman sweeping you into their arms and... well, I guess anyone would love the place. All the windows are French-paned and double-covered with white Irish lace curtains and blue velvet brocade drapes.

Her parents, could anyone believe their names are actually George and Martha, are the most genteel people. Vicki, lucky girl, is an only child and could have anything she ever desires for the rest of her life, but still wants to be “independent,” so she works at the Broadway with me for $1.75 an hour. Maybe I’ll get lucky soon. There’s been talk that the Local 770 branch of the Retail Clerks Union is going to start organizing the department store cashiers. Then we’d get a pay hike to about $2.25 an hour. That wouldn’t mean diddly to Vicki, but it could help me get a better car. Carlos already makes enough from the self-park to drive an almost new BMW, but I drive 44 miles for my round-trip school commute, and with no 8-track or radio in my old Microbus, it gets pretty boring. Just last week ago I had to get a new clutch for Casper, that’s what I call my VW because it was once flawlessly white. Thank God V-Dubs are cheap and easy to fix; but I’d still like to be able to afford some new curtains for the windows, a sound system, and maybe even four new tires that all match and aren’t retreads.

Oh yeah, the party with Vicki. After dinner with her parents – the food was all vegetarian, which I think is so cool, especially for rich people – we went back to her “own little house,” took a few tokes off some Panama Red and listened to the Beatles White Album. The music hummed in my head as the reefer smoke rolled deep into my lungs. I could hear John Lennon singing, I am you/ as you are me/ and we are all together/ Sitting on a cornflake/ waiting for the band to come.

I looked at Vicki and asked, “Didn’t you say something today at lunch about that “waiting for the band to come” had more than one meaning?”

“Of course, silly goose. It’s so obvious. Besides, it says so in the latest edition of Rolling Stone.” She waved with her hand to a slightly crumpled copy that had been carelessly tossed into one corner of the room by her desk. “The point is that the Beatles are very heavy and practically never say anything that doesn’t have a message. So, in this case, it’s about s-e-x. So when they say to c-o-m-e, they really mean to c-u-m, like in having an orgasm. They don’t mean to come as in to arrive.

I nodded in a way that was meant for her to understand that this new insight was really an old story. I hated feeling stupid. I know Vicki didn’t mean to make me feel that way.
It’s just a part of me that feels like I’ve betrayed myself, somehow, by not seeing the simple truth, the obvious facts, the easy method.

Vicki continued without a break. “So, get it? It’s about the groupies that follow famous rock stars from place to place and throw things on-stage like panties, bras, and room keys. And I’ve heard that sometimes those groupies will give every member of the group a blow job – or fuck someone in the band – just to say they did it, just…”

“You mean,” I interrupted, “as if the band’s fame would rub off on them? Wow, so that’s how cheap sex can make you feel important!”

Vicki ignored my sarcasm. She squealed, “Exactly! And can you just see it? There you are, laying on your back with your lover. And just when you’re about to cum, you yell, Oh my God, I’m arriving, I’m arriving.”

When I finally caught my breath from laughing too hard, I asked Vicki where she got such mighty fine weed. She told me she has a really great connection but that she can’t tell me about the guy because his father publicly works for the Bank of America in Beverly Hills but privately is a honcho with the West Coast Mafia. He sells her a clean lid of Red for the righteous price of only ten bucks, which is what everyone else pays for an ounce of the regular shit that’s filled with seeds and stems. And Vicki says that “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” is really about tripping on acid because the initials of the song are LSD.

I don’t tell my brother about getting loaded because he was a big stoner a few years ago, but after he got sent to the Youth Authority he put down. He says that all the guys doing time were high while they were committing the crimes they got busted for. He doesn’t distinguish the difference between any drugs anymore. But I think smoking a little weed now and then is okay.

Vicki has a