Kalifornia Read Online Free PDF Page A

toys!”
    Sandy couldn’t bear a return to his own wretched POV.
He watched his younger self fumble with the straps for a moment longer, then
drop his hands in exasperation. “I give up,” that Sandy said, his adolescent voice still brittle. “I thought it was a Chinese
puzzle-suit .”
    A warm hand fell on his father’s shoulder, and a warmer voice
said, “He certainly takes after you, Alfredo.”
    Sandy , startled by the voice, slipped back into his
tangled, gawky point of view. From this vantage, which fit him about as well as
a child’s neoprene wet suit, he saw his mother for the first time in years.
    “Mom . . .”/“Mom . . .”
    Both of them spoke, Sandy-then and Sandy-now. She came forward
carrying the key to the manacles. His eyes brimmed with tears as she knelt to
release him. Her own eyes were dark brown, for she was the only Figueroa to
have shunned the orange iridic implants.
    “Mom,” he murmured. “Mommy . . .”
    He couldn’t take any more. The initial zee’d confusion passed,
leaving him enough control to detune. He jerked himself free of the broadcast
and lay breathing heavily. Every now and then, his inhalations caught on the
ragged edges of a sob.
    Mom. Seeing her alive again was the crudest sort of torture,
worse than being devoured by insects. No spray can of psychic balm could heal
that pain.
    He couldn’t bear to ride the wires again tonight, though there
were a million other shows that might have cheered him. He didn’t want false
cheer right now. If he’d really wanted that, he wouldn’t be sitting alone in
his apartment, smoking dope and riding the wires while the rest of California celebrated its two-hundredth birthday.
    He checked the antique Kit-Kat clock above the futon, next to the
old signed photograph of Danny Bonaduce. Rhinestone eyes and a switching fur
tail—the clock’s, not Danny’s—told him it was well past midnight.
    Happy birthday, California. From me and Danny.
    The faded picture had been his father’s— “Hey,
Alf! Roll with the punches! Danny B !”—but even over the gulf of
years, Sandy felt a spiritual kinship there. They were sitcom brothers,
separated by nearly a century, but still, without “The Partridge Family,” would
there have been a “Figueroa Show”?
    It was hard for you, too, wasn’t it, Danny boy? Hard when the
lights shut off and the wires went dead and everybody thought of you forever in
that frozen zone of rerun adolescence. You were out raising hell and divorcing
that Japanese babe and teaching karate, and people meeting you years later
(even the cops taking your DNA prints, I suppose) would do a double take and
say, “Hey, you’re that brat from ‘The Partridge Family’!” Was, you
asshole. I was that brat.
    Yeah, Danny. Like me. I’ll never get older than seventeen. Except
in real life, of course—but what does that count for?
    He got up and raised the bamboo blinds a fraction of an inch to
peer out the window. By day, he would have had a view of fields, tractors, and
towering redwood-marijuana hybrids, a dense forest of mighty, smokable trees.
Tonight he saw lights in the field, heard music and laughter. The mulch hands
and trimmers sure knew how to party. They banged out odd, percussive rhythms on
steel drums and played their band saws like dangerous kazoos.
    It was stupid of him to sit here all night when his employees
were out there having a good time. They would think him pale indeed if he didn’t
put in an appearance.
    So, out the door and down the creaky stairs he went. From the
porch, the smell of pine, pot, and fresh-trampled earth was invigorating. He
watched the workers dancing outside their long, low quondos, whooping and
hollering, leaping high. Rather than break the festive mood, he sank down on
the porch of the two-story shack he called home, and simply watched. It was
like gazing at another planet. No matter how dirty he got, no matter that he
dressed in blues and grew his hair long and snarly and talked