Middle Men by Jim Gavin Page A

parking lot rat, an honorary boy, watching her skater friends filming their failed attempts to pull off moves. When she was fifteen she started sleeping with an older boy, and the rest of her comrades looked deeply betrayed. Their goofball demeanors vanished and they started treating her with unbearable deference. She moved on to guitar players and when she was twenty-two she snuck backstage at a Dinosaur Jr. show and gave a blow job to a member of one of the opening bands. She told me about this part of her life with rote precision, as if I were a stranger she would never see again. Once again, I got the sense that she was testing me, waiting for me to look disgusted and go away, but she had grossly overestimated her own depravity. Her exploits would’ve constituted a single weekend for some of the people who came through the castle. Instead, all I could think about were the later years, after the skaters and musicians, when she was alone in her hometown, heartbroken, paralyzed, her life drifting away, watching TV with her alcoholic father, and it was this pristine vision of spinsterhood that I wanted to save her from. I was twenty-three years old.
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    I wasn’t around the castle much. Javier and Gilbert were excited for me and wished me the best. Nathan didn’t seem tonotice that I was gone. One afternoon, as I was sitting on the couch, feeling dreamy and spent, Mark walked into the apartment and threw a lemon at my head.
    â€œWhen do we get to meet your crone?” he asked.
    I told him to fuck off and the next day he pawned my dulcimer. I miss those days. Nothing like that happens anymore.
    Karen needed money. She called her old music school and they were glad to hear from her. They had contacts in the L.A. area, and promised to keep her in the loop on any other opportunities. Because it was summer, she could tutor kids in the afternoons and still work her night shifts. I picked up extra shifts and registered for classes, once again, at Cal State Los Angeles. I started slowing down whenever I saw a “For Rent” sign in the window of a nice apartment. For a couple weeks we saw less of each other, and the less we saw of each other, the more we wanted to be together.
    â€œI miss you,” she said one night over the phone, sounding disappointed in herself.
    â€œLet’s get a place.”
    I was down at the liquor store. Sunset was choked with evening traffic; I could barely hear her, but I knew she was laughing at me. I didn’t care that we had only known each other for a couple months. I kept imagining us on a nice couch, listening to records.
    â€œYou wouldn’t want to live with me,” she said.
    â€œYes, I would.”
    â€œI’m a mess,” she said. “I’m better off living alone.”
    â€œNo one’s meant to live alone. I won’t let you.”
    Tired of the van, we took over Maria’s master bedroom, upstairs. Her husband had carved the four-poster bed himself. A giant crucifix hung over the dresser. We would spend hoursin bed, talking and staring at the bronze Christ. On some evenings, when Karen didn’t have to be anywhere, she would sit down and play the piano. This was the only time in my life that I listened to classical music. Nocturnes, she said, sounded best on a Bösendorfer. Maria always requested Chopin, which Karen played in a trance. Sometimes I’d take Maria out to the back patio to get some fresh air, and the music sounded even better from a distance. In those moments there was a shape to the summer heat; I felt like I was discovering something that had always been around me, but that I had never noticed before.
    Most of her clients were in Santa Monica. On my days off I drove Karen to her appointments. Usually I would drop her off and go to the beach or a record store, my two compass points, but one afternoon she asked me to come up and meet the family she was working for. The Teagues