Already Dead: A California Gothic Read Online Free PDF

to light her cigarettes and in the match-glow examine her as closely as a lover would. It’s all exactly there. The punished child in the stolen makeup. Eyes that are never going to look at anyone again. And then she leans back, receding into that wonderful posture, her left hand in her lap. Sometimes she wilts, and sits hunched over a drink drumming her fingers on the bar, and then she looks like a whore. She’s capable of sneering. A woman this vulnerable and perverse is usually taking time out from being tortured to death slowly by a man who looks exactly like her father. Things come to me in images. I see the image of a man strangling an orchid. Oh, flowers!
    Up and down the Coast Highway you drift, orchids and azaleas, your petals smeared underfoot.
    She was looking too hard at the busboy—blue-eyed, ponytailed, shirt open wide under his strong Adam’s apple. His music was Asian flute and hollow sticks knocked together. Ah, she probably knew Already Dead / 23

    him. He’d had her, probably, on the wood table of his shack with orange crates full of garbage stinking by the windows, had her on the sand at Schooner Gulch in a chilly wind, he’d torn at her gooseflesh with his beautiful teeth.
    “What’s the matter?” she asked me.
    “Did you screw that guy? No”—I ran over her sudden, fearful laughter—“but you’re going to. Before your life is over you’ll have every last one.” The tequila was mixing badly, my brain glinted like a knife, I wanted to make a famous speech now, to tell her how much I hated her for being a woman, for being able to open up and receive , but all that came out was, “The whole world will be inside you, you’re like the ocean— ”
    And then I’m driving fast in the open, yellow Porsche, head clearing in the blasting atmosphere, searching my heart for apologetic words while beside me Melissa cries, “Burst apart, explode, fly, galactic, starburst, asunder!…”
    For three generations my family has belonged to Northern California, living in the shadow of its ways—nature’s big moves, the colossal, twisted gestures of cypresses along the bluffs—bluffs, there’s something about that word that rings right, you can hear the grunts of God shoving these massive cliffs into place.
    And to this natural grandness the best, the finest people are drawn, people just trying to touch life with awareness and kindness.
    But it’s also a land of interminable rains, baffling droughts, and, in July and August, the thick, cloying fog banks. For twenty-one successive days they clung to the North Coast this summer, like…like the American Dream plowed up against the freezing sea. Now we mean to set up oil rigs out there and dig our dreams from under the ocean’s bed, our black, dripping dreams, so that we’ll remain at liberty to drive our dream-deals faster and faster along these tight roads. I myself drive not only the secondhand Porsche but also an open jeep with a high-speed rear end, both very fast. Or I did. Winona’s got the jeep now.
    We do what we have to do in order to make it all come true. A few years back a man in our area paid a seedy character to kill his wife so that he could collect her insurance and live with his mistress. The supposed assassin, it turned out, was an undercover agent. The husband was charged with conspiracy and spent three years in prison.
    24 / Denis Johnson

    After a few months his mistress forgot him. During the third year his wife paid him several visits. They’re back together now.
    Melissa’s been my mistress since October. She’s Austrian, this beautiful hippie. I believe she’s anorexic; she’s like a bird; when we make love I try to break her bones. I met her at the high school play last year.
    It was a piece of shit, and I was embarrassed to see my wife, Winona, involved in it. Winona worked backstage. Melissa sat right under the lip of the stage, on the floor, with the smallest children. I watched her all night.
    I want to lock eyes