by Jonathan Schwarz • People are afraid of those little blue plastic things that are stuck into the ends of ballpolnt pens in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Cindy picks me up at LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp. She says, “People are afraid of the little blue plastic things that are stuck into the ends of ballpoint pens in Los Angeles.†Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I’m eighteen and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple across the aisle from me had gotten drunk. Not the mud that had splattered my blue jeans earlier at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the enormous gaping hole in the side of my body that exposes my soft internal organs, the hole that was caused by the debris from the plastic explosives that Syrian terrorists had used to blow up the World Trade Center in New York a week ago in an act of violence that could be an unstoppable chain of events bringing about nuclear apocalypse. All of this seems pretty irrelevant next to that one sentence. All it comes down to is that I’m a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven’t seen for four months and that people are afraid of those little blue plastic things that are stuck into the ends of ballpoint pens.
We’re driving along die freeway (not the highway) and I look across the seat at Cindy. She’s wearing clean tight blue jeans and a red Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and red leather shoes and a thin gold chain around her neck, a necklace, and she is tan, tanner man I am because I’ve been going to college in Vermont or shark fishing in Minnesota or midget scalping in Greenland, it doesn’t matter which because there’s not enough sun to get tan in any of those places. It just doesn’t matter.
We drive off the freeway (not the parkway) and come to Cindy’s house. She lives in the hills, that’s where she lives, that’s where her house is, and it’s big and the gate is open and there are three other cars in the driveway, that’s the price you pay for living in the hills. I get out of die car, surprised to feel how hot and dry it is, especially since it’s 25 degrees and snowing. Cindy gets out of the car too and grins at me and asks, “What’s wrong?†perhaps noticing the enormous gaping hole in the side of my body through which you can see my soft internal organs and I say, “Nothing,†and Cindy says, “You look pale,†which is perhaps due to the fact that I’ve lost almost eight pints of blood through the enormous gaping hole in the side of my body while the human body usually holds only ten pints and the loss of three is usually enough to cause immediate cardiac arrest and I shrug and Cindy gets in her car and drives away and then realizes that it is her house and drives back again.
