Baja Oklahoma

Chapter 3

Chapter Three M 0 STAM E RI C A N S , Juanita maintained, had been living in homes they couldn't afford since the Japs called it quits. She was no different. As she often said 10 friends: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. Meet me in the Personal Loan Depanmenl." On the other hand. Juanita's apartment was well situated for her. It was near Herb's Cafe, downtown, TCU Stadium, a Junior League resale shop, a grocery store where the check4 out line took less than thirty minutes, a dry cleaners that did not lose her belts and blouses. And it was near th ree excellent Tex-Mex restaurants, the kind where nobody had to ask a waiter to hold the chocolate on Ihe chili relleno, or go easy on the duck sauce over the tamales. or whoever heard of putting seafood in an enchilada, you pretentious asshole? All these things made it wOrlh the suspense of waiting to find oul every month whether she could pay the rent. The apartment was reasonably new, modern. It was IDeated in one of those complexes a male divorcee often searched out, hoping to find a tricky stewardess around the swimming pool who would wink at him and say, "Coffee? Tea? Tie me up?" Every unit in Juanita's complex- the Sans Su Southreatured two bedrooms, two baths, central air-conditioning, CHAPTER THREE 43 and wall-Io-wall carpet furnished by the builder, which meant the carpet was orange. Her apartment was on the second floor, the top floor. It had a balcony. By leaning over the railing. Juanita could see hackberry trees, scrub oaks, mesquite. By looking straight ahead, she could see other balconies where young executives drank beer in deck chairs while their overnight guests stood around in fringed-suede bikinis, brushing their hair and pouting. Juanita had taken the apartment three years before this, partly as a fortieth birthday present to herself, partly because her old place had become flanked by "the warehouse Riviera" and partly because Candy was coming home from the Oregon commune. She had wanted to provide a better place for Candy to live. It might give Candy a higher opinion of herself, might be a force in redirecting her daughter's life, Candy was barely out of high school when she went to Oregon. The daughter had gone to the same school as Juanita, Paschal High, but Candy had grown up in what was known to most bewildered parents as a period of dope-crazed hippie-scum revolution. This was in contrast to Iuanita's wonderful era in which kids stalked the elusive V. O. and 7-Up and got angrier at the results of football games than they did at politics. Candy's friends in high school dozed more often than they wrote book reports. Their arms and legs moved only when it seemed urgent for someone to change the movie on TV from Dracula's Nephew to Revenge of the Slime People. Juanita uscd to wonder from what source the flower children generated enough energy to protest against anything. The ones she met could barely get to their feet at the mention of cilOcolate chip ice cream, and even then they looked in need of life-support systems as they dry-fuckcd the chrome 44 PART ONE on her G. E. refrigerator. One afternoon Candy brought home a bleached-blonde girlfriend whose hair was longer than Cher's and whose blood had stopped circulating because of the tightness of her leather pants. Juanita talked to the girl for thirty minutes before she realized it was a boy. Candy was lured to Oregon by the promise of a religious experience. There was a "religious person" at the commune growing topless vegetables and thinking "oceanic." Candy learned this from Skylab, the skeleton with braided hair. Juanita had pondered the incongruity of a religious experience being described by someone whose entire vocabulary consisted of "Wow," "Far--out," "Really," and "Kick-in." Juanita made only three predictions about the "religious person" in Oregon who was enabling hundreds of young people to achieve a heightened consciousness: he would be a twenty-seven-year old dropout with surfing scars, his sermons would be as deeply meaningful as the dialogue on "Slar Trek," and he would. if he weren't watched closely, sneak a meatball into his tofu. Juanita loved her daughter sinfully. had...