Less Than Zero

If there’s a shittier feeling in the world than being in love with your best friend’s girl, I don’t know what it is. On the other hand, if there’s anything better than riding out on the trunk lid of a ‘79 Chevy Impala to hold it shut against the escape of its contents as you creep through an alleyway in Long Beach on a Friday night at one in the morning with the lights off, you’ll never convince me of it. I’m swept along at equilibrium between these two things at a daring three miles per hour, and this is the most perfect my life has ever been.

The trunk of the Impala is big enough to hold all of Noah’s animals, two by two, but it won’t shut when you stuff a sofa, a Safeway shopping cart, and a dozen road construction cones into it. So I’m out on the lid playing paperweight while my best friend Phillip inches his land-yacht through the alley that runs behind our target’s house. We have cause to be stealthy, but I’m lounging back against the rear window, fingers laced behind my head and legs splayed wide on the trunk like I’m chilling in a hammock, completely trusting that Phillip won’t swerve, accelerate, or brake in any way that would dislodge me. Just easy like Sunday morning.

Ol' Babyface Phil

It never even occurs to me to worry about anything he’s doing when he’s behind the wheel. It’s like he was born driving. He’s got the nerves and reflexes of a fighter pilot with ice-water in his veins, and there’s not a cop, gangster, or frat-boy douchebag in this town that’s been able to keep up with him. And that’s not for lack of trying on their part, either. You’d never guess any of this by looking at Phillip. He’s a little bit Lloyd Dobler and a lot Cameron Frye. Having grown up a bit closer to PCH than anyone should, Phillip had developed the semi-feral instincts needed for a pencil-necked whiteboy to survive in the wrong neighborhood while attending a crumbling Junior High that doubled as a gladiator academy for neophyte gangsters.  

And then there’s Amy, my best friend’s girl. Amy-Jo, we call her. My first love, and his, too. She has her head out the window, alternately calling to me to be sure I’m still secure, somewhere out in the warm darkness, and then taking shots at me about what a terrible hood ornament I make. “Don’tcha know they go on the front of the car, mister?” By turns, she’s also pointing out hazards to Phillip he might not be able to see with the lights down, guiding us along, as always. Like this kind of thing is just the most natural thing in the world. The funny thing is, for us it absolutely is.

Our Amy-Jo

I fell in love with Amy on Friday, October 28, 1988 around 11:30 in the evening. Which, unfortunately, was about forty-three days and an odd number of hours after Phillip did. I know, because I remember looking down at my watch the second I realized what was happening and saying aloud to no one, “Fuck. I am in so much trouble.” I’m sure it would have been even sooner but that was the first day I’d met her, because Phillip had kept her a secret for the first six weeks. When we swung by her place that October night to pick her up for the 7:45 showing of Mystic Pizza, I immediately saw why.

She’s a bohemian punk-rock girl as imagined by Tim Burton; the best parts of Winona Ryder and Wednesday Adams manifesting in horn-rimmed glasses and a threadbare Depeche Mode 101 concert shirt. A bundle of wide-eyed vulnerability wrapped up in a maze of defense mechanisms ranging from sardonic humor to piss and vinegar defiance, who had recently emerged from being a Jr. High Metal duckling into High School Goth swan with no idea what to do with her newfound appeal. But Phillip knew just what to do with it, and he got there first. Nothing to be done about it.

Poor Steph

We’re rolling up on Stephanie’s house, our favorite target for the puerile hijinks that pass for entertainment now that we’ve got the reins of our collective lives in hand for the first time. The only thing Stephanie’s ever done wrong is to come into our lives along with the whole constellation of friends in Amy’s orbit, who are all way cooler than the ones Phillip and I had amassed in the previous thousand days of our friendship as we’d matriculated from Washington Jr. High to Long Beach Poly. Seriously, it was like striking gold without even prospecting. The advent of Amy pretty much changed everything.

Before Amy, Phillip and I were the heart and soul of a Nerd-Herd that specialized in trips to the Richard Kyle Books for a weekly harvest of comics, and ripping off pinball machines with washers that we shaped on his grandpa’s grinder to fit into the quarter slots at the arcade in the Long Beach Mall. In the years preceding this, our Senior Year, we’d graduated from sleepovers and Star Wars Trilogy marathons to sly entrepreneurial ventures like selling tickets to fake raffles and charging admission to our classmates for bi-weekly porn showings of whatever pirated VHS tapes Phillip could kype from his cousin, Weird Randy. Despite how it sounds, we really were just dorks at heart, but living in a world where nature and nurture met and hustle was the only game in town.

The LBC, our Kingdom. Have license, will travel. 

When driver’s licenses and cars entered the picture, our little world had enlarged again to contain late-night adventures and shenanigans all over town. Midnight games of shopping-cart-joust in deserted supermarket parking lots, wherein we’d each face-off in our (parents’) vehicles, grab hold of a cart out the driver-side window, and then drive like madmen across the lot directly at one another, only to veer away last-second as we release the carts to watch them to collide at thirty miles an hour. Hilarity ensued. Then there were the borderline-suicidal toilet-papering sprees against ridiculously impossible targets like teachers’ homes, swanky chateaus inside the gated grounds of the Lakewood Country Club, or houses where parties were actively going on inside while we festooned the exterior with dozens upon dozens of TP streamers. 

More often than not though, we just cruised around the LBC like we owned it, six-pack of Cherry-Coke in hand and Pirate Radio 100.3 blaring Great White, Skid Row, and Warrant. From El Dorado Park to the Dominguez Channel, from Sunset to San Pedro, from Compton to the sea and everywhere in between, we roamed. Gas was measured in cents and we were just made of time, so we left no stone unturned, exploring every avenue, boulevard, frontage road, back-alley, traffic-circle, railroad trestle, dock, jetty, utility easement, freight delivery entrance, and parking garage. Meticulously cataloguing every inch until we’d amassed an intuitive command of our town that no one could hope to compete with. We had literally ditched cops and gangsters solely by virtue of our matchless knowledge of the city.

Nerd-Herd down front, West Side Islanders in the rear. At an otherwise harmless birthday party, attended by the gangster cousins of the birthday girl

For a couple of harmless dweebs, Phillip and I, along with our nerdly cast of regulars, had a surprising amount of genuine peril intersect with our lives. Guns pulled on us in anger on two separate occasions; pursued on foot and in vehicles by hardcore gangsters who took exception to Phillip’s egalitarian practice of dating pretty much any girl that would have him, including a lovely black girl named Jackie. She was sweet and funny, and I liked her a lot. Nonetheless, I was generally averse to taking a beating or a bullet over the objections of both the Crips and Bloods, who appeared to take a dim view of Jackie and Phillip’s love. It all seemed so unlikely for guys who just wanted to read Grendel, Dreadstar, and X-Men comics, listen to Bon Jovi, Salt-N-Pepa, and UB40, and go just as far as the goodly few girls who had deigned to let us into their pants would allow. But somehow, almost unnoticed by us, those waters began to calm when Amy came into our lives.

After quietly meeting Amy in his capacity as a Teacher’s Assistant for the Girls’ Softball coach, Phillip had slowly but inexorably wooed her with his inimitable blend of dry, subversive wit, and baby-faced charm. And so, somehow, two underdog outsiders found each other in a world of sports-sponsored competition and conformity. Go team! Without a word to the rest of the Nerd-Herd, he’d sequestered himself in a world of secret, tentative phone calls and clandestine meetings with Amy, like he feared that even speaking her name aloud would jinx the whole thing, or else wake him from some tenuous dream. 

So the guy that would always answer the phone midway through the first ring, even at the most ungodly hour of the night, was increasingly never home. At school, when questioned about his whereabouts and activities he was maddeningly evasive, occasionally disappearing at the tail-end of lunch to go off to where we knew not, clearly keeping something big under his hat. It’s hard to describe why this was so disquieting to me. Like some nameless paradigm had changed overnight, some subterranean shift in our plate tectonics had, unbeknownst to me, set Pangea adrift, never to be the same again.

Having weathered everything from towel-whipcracks in the locker room and jocks making time with our girls, to actually running for our lives, balls-out through service corridors behind the stores in the mall, barely half a step ahead of some gangster that had us on his radar, Phillip and I basically shared one brain. We could seamlessly begin and end each other’s sentences, know exactly what the other one was thinking at any given moment, and even pick up on the other guy’s lie and, with no cues or coaching, flesh it out with the most flawless improvisation. 


When his mom found the pirated porn tape we stupidly left in the VCR, she threatened to call my parents. Without a word passing between us we began to spin a yarn, with an almost telepathic spontaneity, about how the tape was actually part of a rotating library of porn circulating at school, and if we didn’t return it to the group of guys waiting for it, our asses would be in a sling. So please, call my parents, whatever, but give us back the tape so we won’t get in the kind of trouble we actually care about. In other words, whatever you do, please don’t throw me into the briar patch. She elected to destroy the tape, but not call my parents. Worked like a charm.

Being in that kind of wordless sync with somebody is a magical thing. It’s like nothing else in the world, and it can’t be bought for love or money. But you can certainly lose it. If you’re not careful you can set it down, just for a minute, and forget where you put it. Which is pretty much what I hated about Amy the first time I heard her name. Hadn’t even laid eyes on her, but I knew instantly what had changed when Phillip finally came clean with what he’d been doing with his life for a month and a half. I felt a strange jealousy, like I had when my elementary school friends came back from Summer Camp, which I never attended. They were all atwitter with stories of adventures I could never participate in, with mysterious friends I would never meet, who all sounded way cooler than I could ever hope to be. But this mysterious friend, Amy, I would be given a chance to meet if I wanted. I tried to sound blasé about it when I agreed.

I wanted to be supportive of this new axis that Phillip’s life was clearly revolving around, especially since he’d suffered through a couple of my ugly relationship meltdowns, as well as a helping me to hide my status as secret admirer from some of my more obsessive crushes over the years. But by that point, the legend of Amy was like a bizarre competitor for Phillip’s time and attention, so I viewed the prospect of meeting her with equal parts curiosity and anxiety. What if we didn’t hit it off? I’d been on solid terms with Jackie—minus the racial death threats—and Claire after her, but this was clearly a whole other animal. I’d never known Phillip to be the way he was about Amy, and if she and I didn’t hit it off I thought there was a real possibility that I would lose that fight. Turns out I needn’t have worried, we got on like gangbusters. Which was good because, unbeknownst to me, I’d already lost the battle before it even started, hands down. No two ways about it.

We pulled up to the Linden Terrace Apartments to pick Amy up, and there seemed to be something in the air not entirely commensurate with a showing of Mystic Pizza. Without being asked, I got out of the Impala to take the backseat for the first time ever, while Phillip buzzed at the complex doors. Amy was already waiting in the lobby and emerged before I could get into the backseat. So I waited, holding open the Impala’s open passenger door, to greet her.

“At last, the infamous Brien,” she began. “I’m so glad we’re finally meeting. Phillip’s told me everything about you.”

“Jeez, I sure hope not.” I felt like giving her a hug, just to see whether this phantasm that had been haunting the periphery of my life was real. I opted for a handshake though, because I could just feel Phillip observing us. She was about as pert as pert can be with her shake, and I immediately liked her for it, thus beginning the unfortunate countdown to zero. “You’re one up on me I guess, because I know pretty much nothing about you.”

“Well, the night is young,” she teased, getting into the front seat. Phillip closed her door after her and left me to mine. We weren’t even away from the curb before she stabbed at the radio with a burgundy lacquered nail. “That’ll be about enough of that,” she said, putting an end to whatever butt-rock power-ballad Pirate Radio had been serenading us with. Her familiarity with the controls, as well as the casual authority with which she just changed the station, spoke of a hundred times she’d rode shotgun in my absence. The evidence of a secret history unfolding in front of me. “I made you another tape,” she said, fishing it out of her back pocket.

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” Phillip said.

A moment of silence, please...

She popped the homemade cassette out of its plastic case, pulled the existing tape out of the player—tossing it blindly over her shoulder into the backseat without a care in the world—and jammed in her tape. The old cassette landed in my lap, and I picked it up to see what had been so casually disdained. It was labelled “Summer Jams.” An old standby we’d pop in whenever Pirate Radio was on commercial or just running through another tiresome lap of the standard Whitesnake-Poison-Winger hair-band rigmarole. 

Summer Jams was a monument to the likes of Robert Palmer, Heart, The Police, Madonna, Chicago, Bananrama, DJ Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince, Huey Lewis, Joan Jett, Air Supply, Cyndi Lauper, Duran Duran, Pat Benatar, Club Nouveau, The Go-Go’s, Hall & Oats, Michael Jackson, Bonnie Tyler, Whitney Houston, Roxette, and Wham. It was a kind of palette cleanser when we needed a break from the incessant cock-rock, and we’d just about worn it out with countless listens during our eternal circumnavigations of Long Beach. In a desperate attempt to keep it alive, I’d disassembled and performed scotch-tape surgical splices on it a hundred times, until the damn thing was practically a Franken-tape. Only to find it replaced by what?

“Can I see your song list?” I asked from the backseat.

Amy passed the case back to me and I scanned the contents that she’d scribed in her careful, almost childish block printing. I didn’t recognize the name of a single band. Seriously, The Dead Milkmen? Really? Elvis Costello, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, Patty Smith, The Psychedelic Furs, Roxy Music, The Cult, Fuzz Box, The Runaways, XTC, The Waterboys, The Primitives, The Plasmatics, The Damned, Leonard Cohen, The Cure, Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Violent Femmes, Stiff Little Fingers, Concrete Blonde, Ultravox, The Replacements, Yaz? Who were these fucking whack-jobs and what, exactly, was an Oingo-Boingo? The entire list was a catalogue of disaffected, shoe-gazing malcontents that had been circling popular culture’s fringes like a pack of sullen coyotes looking for a breach. At long last they’d found their in, as Summer Jams went into the dustbin, only to be displaced by an ominous sounding mix entitled “Less Than Zero.”

We headed to The Marina Pacifica Theater, down on the Alamitos Waterfront. Amy and Phillip talked in the front about people I didn’t know and things that had happened at the Summer Camp I never attended. I laid out across the spacious back seat bench, looking up at the street lights as they floated lazily past the rear window, listening intently to decipher a previously undreamt of musical language by way of this sonic Rosetta Stone. Angry young souls, lashing out at a world where everyone but them seemed to belong. Hyper punk-rockers having a comedic go at a love ballad, finding a winsome—if a tad dissonant—melody to bring it home in “Punk Rock Girl.”

Shoe-gazing malcontents.

The whole mix was a death-knell to overwrought sentiment and saccharine emoting; an affliction more specific and authentic than the generic, maudlin notions preferred by the masses. The difference between Less Than Zero and Summer Jams was the difference between PBS and an episode of Who’s the Boss? Or between pretty much any documentary ever made and, say… Mystic Pizza. The minute I heard the cockney bravado of Elvis Costello giving the world the finger in the mix’s title song, I should have known that meet-cute romantic comedies were a thing of the past for us. Nothing the pop-ingenue Julia Roberts could ever do would be welcome in this brave new world, where sentimentality and acid-washed jeans went to meet an untimely demise.

We were barely half-way through the movie when Amy leaned over and asked me, “Hey, you want some popcorn?” I nodded and was about to reach out blindly to take a handful from their jumbo bucket when an absolute hail of it came flying at me from the dark. I barked a short laugh, which earned me a withering look from over the shoulder of the good citizen seated in front of me. Phillip flicked Amy with a red vine in chastisement, and within a few minutes we were all snapping each other with those licorice lashes and engaging in a border-skirmish popcorn war, instead of being bowled over by Julia’s megawatt smile. I’d never been asked to leave a theater before, but the pimply-faced kid that came over to us had a flashlight, which meant that he was the boss of us and we had to go. It wasn’t the end of the world. 

Or maybe it was, and I just didn’t know it yet.

Because another world was born in that same moment which seamlessly took its place like some sleight of hand or twist of fate. The transition made right under our very noses, as we left the Marina Pacifica in search of food, which lead us to the only place to go when you’re in High School and living on fifteen bucks a week: Denny’s on PCH. Feeling a bit chastened in the wake of our collective shunning, we were fairly well-behaved the rest of the evening. We’d broken the ice between us and were getting along famously by that point.

Amy was engaging in conversation, and together Phillip and I were as good as any one normal guy, as we wove a yarn or spun a story with the best of them. Our various shenanigans and near-death experiences made for excellent fodder to riff on for Amy’s amusement, and it quickly became obvious that she had a way of playing conductor in a conversation. Either by setting you up for your story with slow-pitch softballs that cried out for snappy one-liners and comedic embellishment, or focusing on you like you were the most interesting person that ever lived. Kind of like Johnny Carson, if he and Robert Smith shared a hairdresser. It made you feel important, and it was genuinely addicting.

After a bit—eons for our poor waiter—Phillip looked at his watch and said, “Yikes, we’ve been here forever. We might should call it a night before we get kicked out of here, too.”

“No doubt,” I said. “Back to back ejections from reputable establishments on my Permanent Record wouldn’t be any too good for my rep.”

“Pretty sure that’s got nowhere to go but up, dude,” Phillip said.

“Oh, I don’t know. I think our man Jerry here might cut us some slack,” Amy chimed in. “Judging by how often he comes over to refill your iced tea, Brien, I think he might have a little thing for you,” she said, and gave with a wink.

“Yeah, I get that a lot. I’m told I have a certain… quality,” I said, stirring my well-attended iced tea. “Maybe that’s why I’m still single.”

“This could be the night that all changes,” she said, and then waved to Jerry, the waiter. He came over dutifully, wearing a painted-on expression of patience with the brats in his section. “Hey, Jer,” she began. “Can I call you Jer?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued, “You see our man Brien, here? He’s a good looking guy, right? A perfectly eligible bachelor.”

My cheeks began to burn, and Phillip wore a smirk that deserved to be framed and hung on a wall. What I wouldn’t have given for one of Jackie’s gangster paramours to come bursting in with an AK-47 to start spraying the joint right at that moment. But of course, when I actually needed them, they were nowhere to be found. So Amy just continued on.

“So he’s wondering why he’s still single. Any ideas?”

Dry as the Sahara he says, “Could be the company he’s keeping.” He added an eighth of an inch to my iced tea and turned an abrupt about-face.

“Yup. Definitely time to go,” Phillip said.

Like this, but with no dead Presidents. More like
assorted pocket-change and lint.

He pushed Amy out of the booth ahead of him and we all emptied whatever cash we had in our pockets onto the table and slunk out the door. In subsequent weeks, bottomless sodas and dollar refills on baskets of fries would turn us into epic loiterers at that Denny’s. A total nightmare for old Jer, whose section we always requested. Over time he became increasingly dry in his professional courtesy toward us, silently impugning us with excessive cordiality behind his prissy affect. 

We were deserving of no less, especially in light of the annoying pranks we pulled when dispensing the pittance tip we left after ninety minutes of taking up space and generally making asses of ourselves. Usually it involved the aquarium trick, where you trap an assorted handful change under an inverted glass of water, vacuum sealed to the table. And a lovely time was had by all.

On the way home Phillip drove right past Amy’s place in order to drop me at my car. I almost asked why he would go so far out of his way only to have to double-back again, and then I remembered that we weren’t three friends hanging out. We were more like two people on a date with a side-car on their motorcycle. When we got to Phillip’s house, where I’d left my car, Amy got out with me and gave me a hug.

“Well, you can’t say you don’t know anything about me now, Mr. Elliott.”

I laughed and said, “Well, that’s true. But I kind of wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

That earned me a toothy grin. “I’m not really sure how to take that, but I’m too sleepy to figure it all out tonight. Anyway, I’m glad we finally met. See you at school on Monday?” With that, she gave me another squeeze and then hopped back in the car.

Phillip powered down the window, waved and said, “Night, dude.”  

He put the car in drive and the Less Than Zero mix immediately came back up. A sleepy, impossibly deep baritone filtered out the open windows, trailing away with them into the night. I strained to follow that seductive voice as it crooned, “And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my lips but…” I missed the rest as it Dopplered away with them as they rounded the corner and were lost to sight. On to whatever the rest of night held for them, even as I was left standing alone under a street lamp, closer to PCH than anyone should be. Feeling the first pangs of real jealousy, I looked at my watch and realized I was out a half-hour past curfew as the countdown reached zero.

I said aloud to no one, “Fuck. I am in so much trouble.”

I did in fact see Amy at Poly on Monday for the very first time. It immediately struck me as bizarre that we’d been attending the same school for months and I had no idea she even existed. She and her group of friends were all members of PACE, the AP Magnet program that distinguished Poly as an award-winning school. As a school within our school, they ate lunch on the PACE lawn, where all the AP students hung out, while our Nerd-Herd ate behind the Admin building, not even fifty yards away. 

Phillip had been conducting his business literally right around the corner, like a magician with nothing up his sleeve. That Monday, I joined him over on the other side of the quad for the last ten minutes of lunch, by the end of which we had an invite to a party at a guy named Jay’s house. We’d also met the nucleus of what would become an entirely new group of friends that would supersede the Nerd-Herd as we segued painlessly into the second act of our High School career.

Long Beach Poly, home of scholars and champions. Enter to learn, go forth to serve.

First there was Jay, the deceptively laid-back guy with two moms. He would be our perpetual host for parties and Friday night get-togethers over the coming months. He seemed to have stepped right out of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” and in light of this, it was almost disconcerting to discover how ferociously intelligent he was under that ski-bum affect. He had a very sexy girlfriend, Stephanie, whose own intelligence was like a blowtorch burning, but a light hidden under a beautiful bushel. We met Dan and Mike, wry jesters and ladies’ men, both. There was Brandi, the maternal glue whose sweet diplomacy held them all together and smoothed over every rough spot, brooking no pessimism. Evyan, embodied pure ebullience and optimism with a risqué twist. Adam, the nerd’s nerd. The Mighty Quinn, a quiet ginger voted the most likely to rule the world. Marjorie the Wise, whose intellect and social acumen masked the soul of a sly little flirt. And finally there was Carrie the Good, whom we looked to to know where the line was drawn, so that we didn’t go too far over it.

The AP Crew. Top L-R: Jay, Brandy, Daniel, and Mike. Bottom L-R: Bryan, The Mighty Quinn, Adam, and Evyan.
End L-R: Marjorie the Wise and Carrie the Good.

The AP Crew, being a year or two behind us, and sheltered by the privileged bubble—not of affluence, but of high scholastic expectations—in which they lived, still had a lot of “gee-whizz” in them that Phillip and I had had knocked out of us in the trenches years previous. These young’uns were definitely going to college. They didn’t live in the fringe neighborhoods that we did, they practically went to an entirely different school than us, and none of them even had relatives or friends in gangs. 

So as we began to hang out with them more and more, our tumultuous, sometimes perilous pastimes were exchanged for quieter pursuits. Hell, I almost started to forget what the barrel of a gun pointing at me even looked like. In exchange, we injected their somewhat staid scholastic lives with some much needed impudence. Phillip and I may have been the gonna-be-going-to-community-college dummies in that group, but we were Senior dummies. With cars. And we could drive like Steve McQueen, which was good. Because we had to, way too often.

Drawing on our exhaustive catalogue of hijinks and shenanigans, we baptized them into the world of TP’ing people’s houses, sneaking into movies through the fire exit, ditching the occasional day of school for a trip to Magic Mountain, and of course midnight meals with Jer at Denny’s. Naturally, it wasn’t all painting the town red, because that costs money. So, much of the time was spent just hanging out, watching whatever movie Amy said was good. It turned out that she had an inerrant sense of The Cool. Didn’t matter if it was books, movies, or anything else, she could just tell somehow what was going to be good, and what would eventually blow up in popularity. If she said it was the book to read, the movie to watch, or the album to buy, it always was. She was our Oracle, and she declared unto us the future of the Bitchin’, the Rad, and the Gnarly.

As the weeks became months, we began to intertwine in the AP Crew’s lives and have standalone relationships with them. Sometimes I would intercept Jay or Mike on their way into school and call an audible on the field, resulting in an impromptu skip-day. Another time I figured out where their AP Chemistry teacher, Ms. Maben lived and Jay, The Mighty Quinn, Phillip, and I went and completely mummified her house in TP. Unfortunately, we failed to anticipate that Ms. Maben’s response would be absolutely nuclear, and the following Monday she laid into every one of her classes under threat of suspension to get somebody gave up the culprits. Thanks mostly to the genuine ignorance of the vast majority of her students, along with some airtight solidarity from among the few that knew, we sweated it out and no one got busted. Still, we learned our lesson and never went after a target like that again.

It wasn’t long before we started pranking each other instead, which eventually evolved into having our own sort of “lottery winner,” and somehow poor Stephanie became our favorite target. God knows why. Sometimes we’d hit her place two nights in a row, even. Her brothers certainly seemed to take it personally, but for reasons unknown to me she never dropped a dime, even though she knew full well it was us. Once it became obvious what our schedule and tactics were, her college-aged brothers would set traps for us; lying in wait on the outside of the house, or huddled low inside their cars, looking to corral us. The poor bastards never even had a chance. 

Poor Steph's house, our palette.

We’d pull up, leave the Impala running at the curb, already pointed in the direction of our escape route, all the windows down and lights off. The instant there was any sign of them, we’d dive through the open windows and be in the wind without so much as a turn of the key. The one time they tried to use their cars to cut us off from both sides, Phillip dropped it into reverse and did the old Starsky and Hutch one-eighty-power-slalom around the vehicle in the rear. He was a better driver in reverse than either of them in any gear, so we easily evaded them, while they were left just trying not to collide with each other.

In the midst of all of these goings on, we kind of fell into a pleasant routine as the seasons changed, the new school year passing languidly into the Holidays, like we had all the time in the world. Friday night we hung out with the AP Crew, Saturday night Amy, Phillip and I would do something together, just the three of us, and Sundays Amy and Phillip had to themselves while I did Church stuff. It worked well, and Saturdays became my absolute favorite night of the week. As often as not, the three of us would just drive aimlessly around town with a big communal bag of Taco Bell drive-thru, a six-pack of Cherry Coke, and the new mix tape Amy concocted for us that week. The new tapes came out on Friday and bore names like, “Wouldn’t Be Prudent,” “Could It Be… Satan?” and “Now That’s Sassy”.

The LBC from Shell Hill. A king's ransom in diamonds, every night.

They say you’ve truly learned a language when your thoughts come to you in the new tongue. Thanks to Amy’s tapes, I’d forgotten the syntax of The Bangles in favor of The Sugarcubes, the grammar of Phil Collins had been supplanted by The Talking Heads, and I no longer spoke Twisted Sister at all, but could easily translate for the Pixies-impaired. And in this new language Phillip and Amy would quiz me about my Dad retiring, my sister going off to join the Air Force, or about Church Youth Group, sometimes inquiring as to whether there might be some nice girl there that had caught my eye. Of course, there never was, because I couldn’t see anything past the total eclipse that was Amy. 

Still, I’d try to throw out some of the church-girls’ names as potential prospects, just so I wouldn’t seem like such a giant loser. Only the cute ones, of course. Just in case. Laura M, Danielle V, Aiko S. Uh, no…You wouldn’t know them, because they go to a different school. It was always taken at face value, and then Amy would go on to tell us all about the zany guy her mom was seeing, or update us on the string of nitwits that her sister was always hooking up with.

The traffic circle to end all traffic circles. Enter a boy, emerge a man. Or not at all.

All the while, the yellow lamps of the city would float by the Impala’s windows like a soft metronome counting our time, even as The Smiths called on the shoplifters of the world to unite and take over. We cruised the shore between Naples and Terminal Island, me hanging over the front seatback doing pitch-perfect Dana Carvey impressions of the Church Lady and George Bush. Or else laid out on the backseat, looking up through the rear window, watching the world unspool behind us as we turned indolent laps around the enormous traffic circle, just to be in endless motion. Depeche Mode could mostly drown out the soft murmurs from the front seat about whatever Amy and Phillip did at Summer Camp without me. The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift, all soothing me with subversive assurances that the stars were shining bright, and everything was alright tonight. Which were the only comforting words Martin Gore ever said to me.

The Vincent Thomas Bridge to San Pedro

Some nights when the gas gauge was high, we’d drive forty minutes one way and cross two bridges to San Pedro, just because there was a hill there with a sudden drop-off that made your stomach come up into your throat like on a roller coaster. We’d put the Impala through its paces, then we’d make a four-block loop to do it all over, again and again. Every time we went over the drop, we’d all close our eyes—even Phillip, who would take his hands off the wheel as well—right at that singular moment of null-gravity, when everything in the world was perfect, if only for that one second. I guess a moment is all you can expect from perfection in this life, because if we did it for very long usually somebody would call the cops to report a ghetto-looking hooptie circling the neighborhood like they were casing the joint. When the five-oh inevitably showed up, we would hightail it back to the land of full-time gravity where we belonged.

The Long Beach skyline.

Other nights we’d go up to Shell Hill, the highest spot in the LBC and local lover’s lane, to look out at the Queen Mary and across the lights of our beloved city, breathtaking as a field of scattered diamonds. In the darkness high above all those millions of souls, the ocean was an inky-black negative space sharply delineating the land’s-end along an implied ellipse. Sometimes we’d park in the gravel out by the water tower in the shadowy Barrens—the industrial wastes smack dab in the middle of the hilltop—immersed in the ghostly sighs of oil-derricks, trundling invisibly all around us. We’d lay out against the windshield, stargazing on the warmth of the Impala’s massive hood, Amy in the middle between Phillip and me. A whole side of one of her tapes could play through the open windows with hardly a word passing between us, until the chill of the marine air overcame the dissipating warmth of the engine block, and we’d retreat back to reality.

We’d park, we’d cruise, mooching tacos and gas money off each other, talking about everything, gossiping and arguing about nothing. When the mood struck us, we’d occasionally ascend the hill to pitch eggs at the cars with lovers in them behind all those steamed-up windows. Usually, at least one of those cars would come to life and give chase, and so we’d go barreling over the precipice of Shell Hill, catching Dukes of Hazard air and bottoming out on the frame when we touched down. With his foot all the way into it, Phillip would take us rocketing past a hundred and ten by the time we made the bottom off the hill, blowing through the stop sign like it wasn’t there, the three of us just hooting and hollering the whole time. No matter what, we always got away with it, and for a time there didn’t need to be any destination at all. Only the journey.

  

But whether we were with the AP Crew, at a movie, with Jer at Denny’s, or just out cruising around all Less Than Zero, the silent passenger always with us was the fact that I was in love with my best friend’s girl. It was like a shadow on me all of the time, and everyone knew it.

It wasn’t a lustful or wanton affection. Amy was pretty, but my two previous beaus had been absolutely smokin’ hot. Conversely, she was a Goth tomboy who pretty much disdained makeup, and paired striped Beetlejuice leggings with Doc Marten boots, the kind with the Pilgrim buckles on them. No, what I felt wasn’t lust or mere infatuation, but a love that blossomed from the discovery that a savvy, intelligent woman with a wry sense of humor was the pinnacle of sexiness. 

She was incisive as hell, instantly in on any gag requiring no explanation. She’d be teasing you mercilessly in one moment, and then turn to ferociously defend you, like a lioness over her cub the second anyone else tried to do the same. Often in the very next sentence. She was smart as a whip, funny, and tough in that tomboyish way. She had great compassion for the freaks and rejects that lived on the fringes and in the shadows, shunned by all the proper people. Yet, she was irreverent and quick to reject overt affection or cheap sentimentality. In the midst of the scoffing, probing, questioning, and challenges, she could be unexpectedly tender and kind. All her little barbs and sarcastic asides were endearing because they became a private history of inside jokes that formed a secret lexicon, growing day by day, and shared with no one else. She could take it as well as she dished it out, if not better, and she wielded the spotlight of her attention like the scepter of a queen. What’s not to love?

And then there was Phillip. As a Navy Brat, I had moved every thousand days of my life since birth, and had literally never had a single friend longer than that. But my Dad had retired that same year, so Phillip and I were across a threshold I didn’t even know existed: a fourth year of friendship. He’d almost single-handedly saved me from the slow death of a thousand cuts at Washington Junior High. He showed me the ropes, the nooks and crannies where dorks like us could not only survive in that kind of post-apocalyptic landscape, but actually thrive. We eked out a life and culture of our own, out on the edge where we were always only hanging on by our fingernails. 

In those thousand days of living on a prayer, I’d helped him bury things we shot with pellet guns, alibied him out countless times, played private investigator to help him catch a cheating girlfriend in the act, and even talked him down off the ledge once. We’d literally faced life and death together, threading that needle by our wits, dumb luck, and the providence of a God who loves fools and drunks. A couple of nerds turned grifters, we’d told a million lies and found at least that many truths together. I’d never had a longer or deeper friendship in my life.

So I was content to be in love with Amy forever, and just live with it. I mean, it wasn’t painful when I was with them, only when we were apart. More apt to say when they were off on their own, I suppose. Then it was like I was circling on autopilot, just waiting for my real life to resume. Everything else seemed like a copy of a copy of something that should matter, but didn’t quite. Or a million other maudlin descriptors of anguish that only teenaged boys can dream up in their ennui. 

Mind you, it might have been easier to bear if I could still have bought into the bourgeois lamentation of power-ballads by the likes of Bryan Adams, or Richard Marx, which had once been my go-to bread and butter in times of self-pity. But that schlock had gone from my life along with meet-cute romantic comedies and Pirate Radio. In spite of that, somehow the self-righteous martyr that lived in my heart found strange comfort in wearing my silent, unrequited love as a badge of honor. Hell, by seventeen, unrequited was practically my middle name.

But as it turns out, no one else was content with that.

Me and Ev at the Winter Formal

When it became clear what was happening, everybody got into the business of getting me out of that sidecar, and the setup attempts began. Amy tried to set me up with her best friend, Vernetta, who turned out to be too much car for me. She was a Heavy-Metal girl who drove a beat-up red Pontiac Fiero and had the exact same hairdo as James Hetfield of Metallica. It would have been a neat solution to the problem, but one blind-date was enough to see that the girl would have eaten me alive. 

Then Jay and Stephanie tried to hook me up with Evyan, but she and I wound up friend-zoning each other almost immediately, although we went on to have a ball hanging out, going to school dances, and talking on the phone all the time. I made an abortive stab at an Amy-lite clone named Brenda J, who may or may not have been able to levitate me with her crystals. I never had the heart to find out. 

Amy even made a last-ditch effort at fixing me up with old Jer, to no avail. Which didn’t stop it from being a running joke, naturally, but I could feel the unspoken tension building as the months progressed and each attempt petered out, while the school year changed from the Holidays into early Spring.

Brenda J, Me in the clutches of Vernetta, and Jer (close enough).

Eventually, even Phillip got in on the act when I grumbled about how long it had been since I was with anyone, almost nine months by that point. He suggested that I get a position as a Teacher’s Aid, like he had. It seemed like a great plan, and he said that he’d put in a good word for me with the Girls’ Softball Coach, who absolutely loved him. I liked the idea, even though it kind of felt like I was shopping for girls like a guy perusing suits on a rack. But I quickly dispensed with those qualms once I laid eyes on Molly O, and for the first time that year felt like something else might be dawning for me. Some way out from beyond that shadow. 

The unattainable Molly O.

Alas, it was not to be, for Ms. Maben—of AP Chemistry and nuclear TP fame—got ahold of me after less than a day in my new job as Girls’ Softball Teacher’s Aid. Turns out Ms. Maben wanted a TA of her own to grade papers and clean Erlenmeyer flasks for practicum, and she randomly (unless you believe in karma) chose me out of the entire pool of TA’s. She aced out the Softball Coach on the grounds that the Coach already had Phillip. Plus, I’d been in PACE for the first semester of school, Sophomore year. I guess that made me extra qualified to scrub beakers and feed multiple-choice tests through an auto-grading machine. Thus, the dream of Molly O was lost under the din of a hundred and twenty tests per week running through the Scantron.

As Ms. Maben’s TA, I mostly worked alone in an empty classroom during last period grading papers, or in an empty lab stocking beakers, mixing thimble-sized batches of gunpowder, and melting army men in the Bunsen burners. It was pretty dull, although I did make use of the autonomy and unlimited Hall Pass it afforded me to surreptitiously ferry notes from class to class between Amy and Brandy, as well as making funny faces at Carrie the Good through an open classroom door, trying to get her to crack up in the middle of AP-Whatever. She could never hold out long. 

Unbeknownst to them, I also used my powers to falsify test scores in Ms. Maben’s records for Jay and The Mighty Quinn, so they could get into a good college. They were smart guys, but Chemistry was not their strong suit. Even though I wasn’t in AP anything, I was still better at figuring molarity and calculating covalent bonds than they were, just from alleviating the mind-numbing boredom by reading one of the Chemistry textbooks. Which is also where I learned that Amy, Phillip, and I were doomed.

Ms. Maben of AP Chemistry.

While I was busy “accidentally” transposing 78’s into 87’s or 79’s into 97’s in the grade book for Jay and The Mighty Quinn, I also accidentally learned that the weakest of all chemical bonds is the 3c-2e, which is when three atoms share only two electrons. Their covalent orbits—the shared electron chains that glue them together—are unstable because there aren’t enough electrons to go around, so one of them eventually loses out and splits off on its own. It’s the most unstable combination in nature, and no one knows why it occurs in the first place, since it takes almost nothing to shatter it. So even though the bizarre mix of love, loyalty, and martyrdom in my wistful little heart should have allowed me to orbit in Amy-limbo pretty much forever, it only took a single blow to break the bonds. Because there’s no omen like a science omen. That shit always comes true, that’s why they call it science.

One gray night it happened, Jacky Paper came no more…

Phillip told me that he and Amy were going to be going out of town one weekend, so I was on my own. He wouldn’t say what they were up to, or where they were going, his evasiveness harkening back to the opening days of their relationship all those months—almost an eternity—previous. When they returned, I could tell that things were different somehow. Not between me and them, but between the two of them. Which made it different between me and them. It took a few days for Phillip to tell me what had happened, and he chose an incongruous moment in English class while we were clandestinely playing a game of Hangman when we should have been dissecting the Canterbury Tales. I was trying to decipher which “Top Gun” quote he’d used in the puzzle when, apropos of nothing, he just kind of blurts out, “Amy and I had sex.”

Of course, I was filled with jealousy, but maybe not the kind you’d expect. My feelings for Amy had a sexually ambivalent quality to them, quite unlike the wanton, prurient appetites that had driven my pursuit of Paulyne and Chrystina previously. The stabbing pains of jealousy arose from the clear and permanent declaration of Amy’s singular devotion to Phillip, which precluded me from an area in her heart that could only ever be occupied by him. And while I should have viewed Phillip as a sexual rival, instead I viewed myself with a strange sense of disappointment. 

Where Phillip had pursued a girl worth having, I had always chosen the path of least resistance. I’d never built anything with a girl, but settled instead for an unearned, instant intimacy that only satisfied base appetites, but left something else inside to starve. Where he’d waited to share something of value with the person he loved, I had opted for cheap, sticky fumblings in the backseat of a car parked in an alley. I suddenly felt like Esau, selling his birthright for a bowl of stew.

The weeks that followed were a slow-motion parting for the three of us, as my sidecar detached and drifted to a stop by the curb. They started spending Friday nights with each other, while I hung with the AP Crew. Then our Saturday night Less Than Zero drives became sporadic and finally stopped. By the close of the school year I barely saw them at all off campus, although Phillip and I still got together on random Wednesday nights after my Youth Group meetings. I would ask after Amy, he would say she was fine in that oblique way that he had, and we’d move on to other topics. Eventually I stopped asking.

We were going gently into the good night of busy lives and other pursuits without a word passing between us, until the day that our Senior yearbooks came out. As we were making the rounds to all our old friends, exchanging signatures and messages in those yearbook pages—essentially saying our last goodbyes to all the members of the Nerd-Herd—Amy decided that the three of us were going out again, one last time before everything had to change. The way she declared it was like fait accompli, and resistance was futile. She seemed surprised when she met with none at all. I was, too.

We went to the mall after school and she held my hand as I got my ear pierced, while Phillip made cracks from the peanut gallery about how much Jer would love it. We ate a double batch of the disgusting chili-cheese fries from the food court, then went to see “Dead Poets Society” at Marina Pacifica. We made it all the way through the movie with nary a blight on our Permanent Records. Afterward, we stayed extra-long at Jer’s table in Denny’s, which was really saying something. He was well used to us and our ways by then and had no compunctions at all about openly skewering us with his acerbic wit. On the way out, I turned my water glass over and put a ten under it. Empty, for once.

It was late, already way past curfew, but it was only a few days to graduation, and with my renegade bad-boy earring—or the tetanus from my throbbing lobe—going straight to my head, I was feeling brazen. Besides which, we were all swept along by the sense of permanent dissolution being held at bay by mere hours now, so no one even suggested calling it a night.

Steph and Amy

Instead Amy said, “Maybe we should go pay Stephanie a visit.”

“Good Lord, hasn’t that poor girl suffered enough?” Phillip responded.

“Okay, so maybe we don’t carpet-bomb the place,” she said. “Just a few rolls.”

“I put down the last of my cash as a tip for Jer-” I began

“I’ll just bet you did,” piped Amy.

Phillip chimed in, “You know, you can’t just buy his love. With ol’ Jer, you’re gonna have to earn it.”

Executing a practiced eye-roll, I finished, “-So maybe we should do something funny, instead of mean, for once.”

“Fair enough. But what?” Amy asked. I shrugged.

Phillip thought for a moment, nodded and said, “You know? I may have just the thing.”

So we headed out to Lakewoood, me sifting through the considerable pile of Amy’s accrued mix tapes in the center console, a veritable anthology of our year together, looking for one in particular. By the time Phillip eased the land-yacht to the curb I had found “Less Than Zero” and handed it to Amy to put in the deck.

“Whoah. Old school,” she said and popped it in.

As the music came up Phillip said, “Dude, give me a hand.”

I looked up and saw that we weren’t actually at Stephanie’s place, but nearby. I hopped out without question to see what the old trickster was up to. He unlocked the trunk and then marched right out into the middle of Bellflower Blvd. The streets were deserted and eerily quiet, but the early Summer air was warm as bathwater, even long past Midnight. Phillip started grabbing the construction cones from a lane-painting project in middle of the road and fired them back to me at the curb. Without needing to be told, I stuffed them into the trunk, all the while laughing at what I knew he had in mind. Even though we hadn’t bothered Stephanie’s house in a month or more, we were still cautious in the wake of the Starsky and Hutch incident, so we decided to do a quick perimeter sweep of the surrounding area. Lights down, just in case.

As we were circling back around through the alley, Amy looked up and said, “Stop, stop! More stuff. Oh, my Gosh, this is gonna be so great!”

She pointed to a sofa someone had put out in the alley alcove where the trashcans were left for collection. Stifling peals of laughter, Phillip and I got out and grabbed the thing and stuffed it into the trunk, mashing down the tall, flexible orange cones to make room. It wasn’t much further down the alley when we came across the completely random Safeway shopping cart and decided we would have to make room for it as well if our surreal lawn-sculpture gift to Stephanie were to be complete. Upon jamming the cart in, it was evident we could never transport it even the two blocks we needed to go without it falling out unless we could keep the lid shut somehow.

“No guts, no glory,” I said, then hopped up on the trunk without a word of caution passing between Phillip and me. He inched us toward Stephanie’s darkened house at a daring three miles an hour. I laid back against the glass, fingers laced behind my head, legs splayed wide on the trunk like a guy chilling in a hammock. Just easy like Sunday morning. From the open windows I could hear the faint strains of Leonard Cohen trying to seduce the world with his corrosive intimacy.

Amy called to me, “You all right back there, Mr. Elliott?”

Without looking back, I just smiled and said, “Turn it up, Amy-Jo.”

Any fool could’ve looked down the road and seen that this trifecta could do nothing but collapse into a black hole from which not even the light of reason would escape. A cautionary tale where I’d be left with neither the friend, nor the girl. Truly, so much less than zero. But creeping through that alley on the trunk lid of a ‘79 Impala at one in the morning with the lights off, I knew that for just one more moment we would be the most perfect thing that had ever existed on God’s green Earth. The music swelled and out in the warm darkness I looked up at the stars shining bright, and everything was alright, even as Cohen’s lament trailed away with us into the night like an elegy.

“And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my lips but… Hallelujah.”

I said aloud to no one, “Amen.”