Maps & Legends

Sitting next to Joh Padovan astride our trusty steeds, looking at the edge of World’s End, I could feel foreboding coming off of him in waves. I shared it, but couldn’t say why. We were awaiting the return of his older brother Andrew, who had gone off into that world beyond our own and was now fifteen minutes late. Andrew was never late. Despite our inability to explain the dread we both felt, we were right to dismay Andrew’s tardiness, we just didn’t know it yet. So John and I sat silently, staring across the boundary at the edge of our world, a line we could never cross. Andrew may have dared to venture out beyond that event horizon, but on our map it said, “Here be dragons…” And this was the day that the dragons came for him and he did not return to us.

It was the first time in my life I remember knowing at a gut-check level—for no reason and with no evidence—that something was terribly wrong. No matter that Andrew had done this many times, this time it had ended in disaster. We’d been waiting for him back at headquarters at the end of the day, as was our habit. Being four years older than both John and I, Andrew moved in different circles throughout his day, and we enjoyed being regaled with stories of the weird denizens he encountered out past World’s End. We’d spend a couple of hours hanging out at the end of each day, a pleasant routine that had rarely varied over the past two years. Not until that day, when Andrew was late. Andrew was never, ever late.

After waiting at headquarters for five agonizing minutes beyond the appointed time, John and I had mounted up to head out to World’s End. To do what, I know not. There was nothing we could do if Andrew didn’t return, because he was out past the boundary of our world. We couldn’t render aid, or even search for him, and we dared not alert anyone to his absence, lest the nature of his mission come to light. So we sat there in a wedge-shaped median painted on the asphalt, silently staring out at the relentless traffic, willing Andrew to appear from the vanishing point around the bend from whence the unending stream of cars appeared and disappeared. But he never did.

Absent our normal banter, the road noise where Cedar Avenue and Pacific Avenue bent so acutely to meet one another was a roar, ever-increasing as we waited into the Long Beach rush hour for our friend. At the unnatural place where two parallel avenues meet, no good thing can happen. Still, we sat in the imaginary protection of lines painted in the middle of the street, having never before ventured this far up Cedar Avenue. I’d previously believed that it came out of the sea and went on infinitely to the north, but not so. Looking out from the end of our tree-lined residential spur at the grim, utilitarian visage of a chain-link fence dividing the raised railroad berm from the dirty four-lane blacktop, it was easy to believe that this was indeed where the world ended.

Just sitting in that meridian, staring out at World’s End, filled me with awe that Andrew navigated this landscape daily. I’d known the Padovan brothers for two years, and without a doubt Andrew was the smartest dude I’d ever met. He was a gangly guy with jet-black hair and his nose was always in a book. He preferred the hard sci-fi of Asimov and Clarke, although his fondness for Star Wars knew no bounds, like every guy his age in 1982. He excelled at invention and improvising solutions out of materials on hand. The things I’d seen him do with fishing line and a Swiss army knife boggled the mind. He was MacGyver before there even was a MacGyver and, despite evidence to the contrary, it was impossible to believe that he’d run into a situation he couldn’t MacGyver his way out of.

John had a Fred Savage Wonder-Years quality about him, earnest and good humored. We’d had an instant affinity with each other from day one and had spent most days in the past two years together. We both looked up to Andrew to an almost fervent degree, but any blowback from this failed mission would land in their house, not mine. So although we usually chattered continuously about every possible thing, we sat together silently, magnifying the dread that had landed solidly on our young shoulders. When we hit the half-hour mark, John finally turned to me and said, “You should just go, dude. There’s nothing we can do. I’ll call you when I find out what happened.”

I agreed reluctantly, feeling guilty as hell when I turned my Huffy to go, while he returned to searching the horizon for his brother. I felt I was leaving a man behind and putting the weight of it all on my best friend while I slunk away. But by the time I was home, I was thinking only about myself and what consequences might reach my own door. It was two full days before John called and I learned of Andrew’s fate, which was exactly as we feared. They got him. Though he’d succeeded many times, that was the day they finally got him.

And by “they” I mean the security team at the Gemco Department Store in Bixby Knolls, where Andrew had been routinely shoplifting on his way home from school over the preceding months. The difference being that this time—in the face of the steady stream of highly-coveted Star Wars and GI Joe action figures that Andrew brought home—both John and I had forgotten all qualms about the dishonesty of the endeavor and had sent along a “shopping” list of our own. And the second we did, he immediately got caught. So what did that make us, accessories? Or was it racketeers? Some kind of RICO operation, maybe? Who the hell knows from all that?

Whatever the case, I just knew in my bones that my parents would certainly not be interested in technical distinctions about who was doing the actual stealing. I’d be up a creek, same as the Padovan brothers. I didn’t want to ask John the selfish question aloud—although after cursing the fact that my order for the GI Joe figures “Flash” and “Stalker” wasn’t going to be fulfilled as requested, my own culpability was forefront in my mind. I didn’t have to ask though, because John was just as worried as me. Apparently, Andrew’s Army-recruiter dad had gone down to Gemco and picked him up from their security office and spent the past two days stepping into him. But Andrew hadn’t rolled over on us. He took the weight himself.

No charges were filed, although the Padovan clan lost their Gemco membership for life. There was also a picture of Andrew up in the store, so security could make sure to deny him entry for the rest of time. Naturally, I assumed said picture was twenty feet on a side and plastered prominently throughout the store, such that my parents would surely see it and start grilling me about it on our next visit. As a result, I made some preposterous excuses to get out of going to Gemco for the next several months, which was usually my favorite destination in all the world because my allowance was constantly burning a hole in my pocket. In reality, the pic was actually just a shitty Polaroid on a dingy bulletin board by the door on your way out, as invisible as the FBI’s most-wanted sheets at the Post Office.  

I laid eyes on it once, months later, and saw that he was as unrecognizable in it as any perp in a mug-shot bound for big-boy jail, because his face was all puffy like he’d been crying. Not to mention that his was merely one amongst a dozen other Polaroids of those not welcome on the premises. No, there was no neon sign connecting me to the caper, my guilt and shame just made it feel that way. So despite the absolute certainty I placed in my mother’s omniscience, I’m guessing my parents are only just now learning of my profligate ways in a Facebook post. As per usual.

We didn’t hang out with Andrew much after that. His parents saw to it that he stayed too busy with chores and extracurriculars after school to be a “bad influence” on us. Besides, what was an eighth grader doing still playing with action figures? I never really knew why Andrew had taken to shoplifting to begin with. The Padovans seemed comfortable enough. Our “headquarters” was a two-car garage they’d converted into a kid’s playroom filled with toys, comic books, and model-making supplies. We even had our own AM transistor radio out there. It seemed like Nerdvana to me, and Andrew was King. It wasn’t until years later—after we’d left and then returned to Long Beach on the thousand-day cycle that the Navy moved us on—that I came to understand Andrew in a different light.

While we were away in Italy, the Padovans had moved as well, so we hadn’t seen each other in years. But once I had my driver’s license and was able to visit them in far-away Thousand Oaks, I made a pilgrimage to see my long-lost friends. I’d never been back to the same Navy post before, so seeing old friends was new to me. Usually, when they were gone, they were gone for good. Andrew made the trip home from the University he was attending so we could all be together during my visit. As the afternoon wore on, we turned a nostalgic eye to the good old days, although never once did we bring up the Gemco Incident. It had long-since become a Target anyway, and I’m sure they’d forgotten all about Andrew Padovan.

He did talk some about how much he’d hated living in Long Beach, and especially going to Hughes Junior High. I was surprised to hear it because he seemed like such a boss back in the day. But things are rarely as they seem, especially when viewed through the funhouse mirror of a fourth grader’s eyes. It turns out that Andrew was a wildly unpopular dork at Hughes, his sci-fi ways being compounded by his mixed Italian-Korean parentage. I’d never heard the term “half-breed” until that day in Thousand Oaks, but apparently Andrew had been hearing it all of his life, especially on the days his mom sent him to school with some of her home-made Kimchi. I well recalled her Kimchi being a force of nature, and viscerally understood the dread he must’ve felt opening a Tupperware of something so potent in the school cafeteria.

To me, he’d been a fucking legend. Everyday, sailing off the edge of my map, braving traffic lights, railroad tracks, and freeway overpasses to get to school. Using words like “geo-synchronous” conversationally, and knowing how to solder stuff. At school, those things landed firmly in the debit column and were worthy only of wedgies and scorn. So to go from being a reviled pariah to a King (and vice versa) in the span of twenty-two blocks must have been like passing into a parallel universe. Looking back, I wonder if he might have been wanting to impress us, his adoring acolytes. Perhaps even thank us for validating him in a way that we couldn’t understand he needed. Or maybe he just wanted to find some power in a world where he was otherwise so powerless. All I know for sure is that every life is a mélange of hidden motivations, buried longings, and unseen wounds. A secret history wrapped up in the appearance that everything is okay.

Sometimes the best you can do is take the weight yourself and not pass it on.