This story is absolutely preposterous, and when I realized that I decided to give up on it and no longer devote any working time to it. That was about four years ago, when I added to the story that already existed the details of Jack and Leo building a spaceship and taking off from the crest of the hilltop between Monterey and Pacific Grove at the story’s end.

The skeleton of the story — of the failed relationship between the narrator and a Panamanian girl he meets through his roommate — was a story I’ve had sitting around for fifteen years. As with a lot of the stuff I write, this story came from someplace true, and the initial story was completely autobiographical. When I was a sophomore in college I met and dated a Panamanian woman a few years older than I was. She was gorgeous, exotic, fun in bed — and I was a sophomore in college. But I might as well have been a sophomore in high school. As such things go, there never could have been any real kind of relationship between us, and after her father kicked me out of his and the girl’s apartment when he found me lying naked on her mattress that sat on the floor of her bedroom one weekday morning (yes, that part of the story actually did happen, like something out of an episode of Three’s Company), well, after that the magic between us dissipated over a month or two. I tried writing and revising the written version of this story multiple times. People read it in the very first workshop I participated in as an undergrad. I submitted it to a few places and it never went anywhere.

Four years ago I found an old floppy disk with “Writing” scribbled on the label sticker, and my wife had an old laptop that retained a floppy disk drive. Finding that story I gave it a read and found that it wasn’t all that bad. It needed some attention to the language of each sentence, and it needed, well, something. The skeleton story was too trite to really care about. I mean, who really cares about some college dude’s failed summertime fling? So, apparently, what I decided would be a brilliant thing to do was to make the first person narrator a more grown-up Holden Caulfield and to make Holden’s roommates amateur physicists/engineers, working to build a nuclear craft that would carry them into space. It appears that I did not bother to look at the authenticity of Holden Caulfield’s voice and hold my character to it. And, for all I know, plausible or not, the science behind these guys’ spaceship is all wrong. On top of all of this, let’s make these characters very American college students (even though one of them is an exchange student) complete with budding drug and alcohol abuse issues. Genius.

I think I let the story sit for a while and when I went back and re-read what I’d done with it I shelved it yet again, wondering why I’d even bothered to do the stupid revision in the first place, since the story’s so ridiculous. But when Steve asked about our oldest material we’d never published, I decided to bestow this gem on you, Necessary Fiction readers. Afterall, who doesn’t want to read a story about an impossible 1990s drug- and alcohol-abusing Holden Caulfield living in Monterey, California, and hooking up with some Panamanian chick then watching his roommates blast off into space?

+

I had just unpacked boxes in a four-bedroom down the hill from the Presidio in Monterey. This town slides into sunsets and the Pacific, so the rent loomed like a cliff. I shared the house with two others that helped me climb it. Jack and Leo were friends, but they were so busy building their spaceship that I spent most my time alone. They used the fourth room as a workshop.

Times I was not alone: Leo and I matched Jaeger shots Wednesdays at Sly McFly’s on Cannery Row. Leo was a Russian who studied at the International Institute. His long black hair looked pasted on and his nose curved like a claw. He had the biggest brown eyes I’ve ever seen. Wednesdays Leo and Jack took a break from their work. Jack’s girlfriend would kill him if he didn’t spend a few hours a week with her. Leo, like me, didn’t have a girlfriend, so he and I got drunk. Other times when I was not alone: we threw parties.

Jack was a punk from the gold foothills near Sacramento. He dyed his hair bright green, and had cut it as a flattop. He had kept up an amateur’s interest in quantum mechanics, and wore T-shirts with Che Guevarra’s face on them. Jack’s girlfriend was a cute dirty blonde, with a tight little butt she showed off by wearing skin-sticking jeans. I don’t remember her name.

I first met Mári when I loped home after work with beer and cigarettes, anxious to loosen my head. It was a Monday, a work night for Jack and Leo, but from behind the closed door to their workshop swooned out a female voice — an utter impossibility, with the absolute secrecy Jack and Leo had sworn me to. So I cantered into the room, still in my suit, a paper bag filled with Miller High-Life under one arm.

Apparently, Mári and Leo had shared a class at the Institute a semester back, where she had — also apparently — learned of Leo and Jack’s project. She sat on a folding chair overlooking the mold for the nuclear reactor’s containment unit, talking about her boyfriend. “He’s a chef at the Doubletree,” she was saying.

Leo introduced us. “This is Hol-den,” Leo said, with his funny accent.

Her dark brown skin was like soil, and her hair — which probably would have been black without the light brown highlights — dripped like molasses. She was very polite, for a jagger, which was what I assumed her to be, since there were jaggers all over Monterey, washing cars at the carwash, mopping the floors of every Taco Bell. She, too, talked with an accent, saying “Panamá” when I asked where she came from. I didn’t know if Panamanians counted as jaggers, but — at the time — they might as well have.

“Nice meeting you,” I said. She looked at me over her shoulder as she left, and smiled without showing her teeth. “She seemed nice,” I said to Leo, who ignored me. He was testing the hydraulics for the retracting landing gears.

I thought Mári was hot, of course — jagger or not, a hot chick’s a hot chick. But I forgot about her, and downed a beer. Jack returned from work and, after a few fuck yous, told his girlfriend to get lost over the telephone. Jack then did not feel like joining Leo in the workshop, so Leo, too, called it quits, and we all drank beer together. Briefly, before I passed out, I remember thinking of Mári as a girl who might love me and spoon me in bed, and other cheesy shit like that.

Weeks of waking up around noon, showering, dressing in a suit, then selling suits for eight hours passed. I hated having to be nice to asshole customers. At home I had a bong-load, a few beers, and fell asleep. Jack made up with his hot girlfriend. I hadn’t looked into the workshop and didn’t care what the status on the spaceship was. On Wednesdays at Sly’s Leo said nothing about it.

We threw a party, and Leo invited Mári. She walked into the living room like a superstar. People bent over the balcony outside smoking long white cigarettes, a girl rushed past Mári, hand over her mouth to hold back what looked like was going to be puke. I chuckled, knowing the bathroom situation: door locked, people snorting stuff off the counter. Through this mayhem Mári stood in the living room’s center, like a model out of a catalogue picture labeled “Little Black Dress.” Her hair she had bunned.

Because Leo was Russian, he helped Mári off with her coat, and brought her a drink. Russians are like that. He led her to a spot on the couch next to me. She was polite, as I remembered from our first meeting. She smiled when some kid with spiked hair stumbled past her on his way to the balcony, nearly drooling on her shoes. She laughed when a blonde in jeans and a bra hollered and lifted Mári’s shirt, then disappeared into a bedroom with some collar-popped frat asshole. I liked the way Mári talked and smiled at the same time, with her teeth really white against her dark skin.

That night I talked to Mári for fifteen full minutes. You realize, of course, that I already knew that I liked her. Why be coy about the stupid story? So I’m shy around girls and mutter and stutter. I usually avoid direct conversation and say, “well . . . see you later,” or something equally lame. So I’m always screwed when it comes to the opposite sex. Or not, as it were.

This night, though, I felt rather comfortable with Mári. What fucking sucked was that she talked incessantly about her chef boyfriend — who was also Panamanian. Fucking great.

+

But you know what? I gave Mári my phone number. My memory of this wasn’t helped by the ecstasy I’d been taking (did I forget to mention that?), or the fact that I didn’t hear from her for over two weeks. I fell into routine again — work, inebriation, fantasyland.

Mári called late on a weeknight. I had pulled off the suit I’d been wearing for eight hours while standing around the store, waiting for fat, sweaty old men to come in and ask why their pants didn’t fit right. I changed into sweats and a T-shirt. Then I cracked a beer and sat while Jack’s music blasted from behind the workshop’s closed doors.

Jack liked alternative music, which was the hot shit at this time. While I spent my time in the past, idly slugging my beers and listening to dead people like Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, or The Doors, Jack would nod down the mask and arc-weld the pieces of frame to house his and Leo’s spaceship’s body. Even while Jack welded, his head bounced to Nirvana or Soundgarden that wailed away.

The phone rang at 11:30 and I picked it up wondering who could be calling so late, because this was before caller ID or cell phones. Mári’s voice soothed from the receiver, but I hesitated, nervous for a second, and then tried to play it cool.

“Mári who?”

“Come on, you know, Leo’s friend? I’m at the library. At the college. I was wondering if you could give me a ride home. I don’t have a car.”

I didn’t say anything to Jack and Leo, but they were no doubt going back over their schematics, and Leo was gesturing for Jack to turn down the music because he had to ask about the particle accelerator, and Jack was likely getting frustrated because Leo didn’t understand a goddamn thing about that, even if he did have that Soviet degree in mechanical engineering.

I found Mári at the stairs leading to the college library. She wore a bright green sweater so was easy to pick out. I asked so many questions on the ride to her apartment that at first I thought I scared her. But then she started in: “My major is international business. I hope to get my degree and use my language to work with Latin American countries and companies. I want to bring money back to the people over there. Do you know that the American imperialist capitalist machine has been raping Latin American countries and their people for decades?”

She directed me along the roads, too. She lived in an apartment complex in Seaside, a couple blocks from the beach. When we got there I said that she should kiss me for the ride. These were not my words, although they came out of my mouth. There was another guy who’d suddenly grown a pair and who had taken over my body while I — me, the me I’ve always been — sat trapped in my head, sweating.

“Yeah right!” she laughed. She slammed the door and ran up the stairs into her apartment. I watched her Panamanian legs pump like pistons all the way, and by now the real me was back in control and I slapped myself a few times.

As I drove home, my thoughts fixed on Mári. I hadn’t thought of her like this ever. She was really smart, once I got past how hot she was. Other than that, I knew nothing about her. She had a boyfriend. Why wasn’t he picking her up from the library? Maybe I was closer to the college, or something. But, it didn’t really matter; to be around her I was glad to do it.

+

For three weeks I drove Mári home from the library. Like mine, her life was wrapped in routine. She studied all the time. I had dropped out of college the year before because I spent my studying time drinking beer. My bills piled on the kitchen counter. Money came in as if through a vent clogged with beer and cigarettes. I wanted to return to college, but couldn’t afford to. I made less money because I didn’t have a degree. I was in a cycle like this commercial I saw the other day for an Internet college: no money because no degree, no degree because of no money. But I can’t bring myself to the indignity of taking classes over the Internet. So I kept going to work, which is exactly what I do now.

Mári’s boyfriend didn’t have a car. Neither did Jack, his girlfriend, Leo, or anyone else in my house. They were all college students and with Nob Hill groceries right down the street there was little need for a car. I’d bought my car after I’d been working and taking the bus for six months, and I was sick of getting on the bus with eight million jaggers that had taken up all the seats. This is all a long way of getting to the reason why I drove Mári home every night. If I didn’t mind, that is, which as you know I did not. If she kept looking the way she did, and kept making the man inside me who had the guts to talk to her come out whenever she was around, I’d drive her anywhere she wanted.

Each night when we arrived at Mari’s apartment that man inside me asked for a kiss. And each night Mári shrugged it off as a joke. Then the me who had been me for so many years already would come back and drive away thinking of how I was being used for a ride home, a fucking taxi. Then I’d think of how beautiful, how smart, Mári was. I lay in bed awake and dreamt about her being my girlfriend. I am not joking. This is who you’re listening to.

But one night she actually did kiss me — a little peck on the cheek. “What was that for?” I asked.

“For being so good to me,” she said.

+

For a while I didn’t hear from Mári at all, which was weird, after the last three weeks and all. I’d gotten used to her 11:30 nightly call. I asked Leo if he’d seen or heard from her. I found him and Jack behind a blast shield when I poked my head around the workshop door. “Jesus! You can’t just open the door like that! Not when we’re dealing with fusion, man!” Leo yelled. Even through the glass of his radiation helmet I could see Jack shaking his head. Leo calmed and said he hadn’t seen or talked to her for some time now.

I thought about just driving over to the college but I didn’t want to look like a stalker. Finally, she called, asking for help. I drove her to the clinic, of course. I understood the situation. The boyfriend’s a deadbeat, they’re all Panamanian jaggers, she’s got to get married and get fat. That’s the way they all do it. But Mári, she was different. She wasn’t a jagger.

Mári didn’t talk much during the ride to the clinic. When she did she talked about how her boyfriend was an asshole who wouldn’t help pay for this procedure.

At the clinic Mári stepped from the car and looked over her shoulders as if someone might see her and she’d be caught. She leaned into the car and said, “Come back at 1:30.” She pointed to the front door of the clinic. It sat in a strip mall. There were real estate and dentists’ offices in the same shopping center. I was glad she’d pointed it out.

When I picked Mári up she was quiet. They’d given her a local

anaesthetic, so she was a bit uneasy. I helped her into the car then we drove back to my house, where she asked me to take her, because she felt she was going to get sick, and her father would be coming home from work.

As soon as we got there, she ran to the bathroom and threw up. Leo poked his head out from behind the workshop door, dusty eye-protecting goggles perched atop his oily head.

“Sick, I guess,” I said.

Leo nodded, wiped his enormous sweaty nose with a rubber-gloved finger, and disappeared again behind the closed door.

I put Mári to sleep in my bed and returned to the living room. I drank a beer and tried to watch television, but my mind was on Mári and this situation: I think I was realizing that I sat on the cusp of more than liking Mári, and now she was getting knocked up by another dude, yet I’m the dude dealing with it. I kind of wanted to talk to someone else about what was going on — despite the promise I’d made to Mári not to — but Jack and Leo were “getting very very close” in a grave sort of way that made me unsure of whether success or failure was imminent.

Mári stayed the night. She spent the afternoon making runs for the bathroom and sleeping. She stayed in my room, in my bed. I slept on the living room couch. Jack or Leo would sometimes slink past me on the way to the kitchen for the dry ice in the freezer, or for a premade sandwich — all that they would eat, now that it was “only a matter of time before testing the craft itself.” That’s what I got for living with spaceship-builders. I didn’t sleep at all and I had to take Mári home early in the morning.

+

A few days later Mári called as I came in from work, saying she felt better. “Thanks for your help. I couldn’t have gotten through that without you,” she said.

I said, “Sure.”

“Can I take make you dinner?” she asked. “To thank you?”

At this point I might have thought, I’m taking her home from the library, I drive her to get an abortion, and nurse her afterwards, knowing that her father will kill her if he finds out, and what am I getting out of this? Dinner, probably at some Denny’s downtown? I could’ve said no. I could’ve refused her, stopped dealing with her altogether, and saved myself a lot of trouble. But the thought of seeing the dark sparkle of her eyes. “Why not,” I said.

When I picked her up she wore the same “Little Black Dress” black dress that she had worn at our party. She’d curled her hair so it fell in muddy waves over her shoulders. She carried bags of groceries that I helped load into the car.

Back at our apartment, Mári set to work on the spaghetti and salad with garlic bread she was cooking up as my reward. Jack and Leo, drawn out of the workshop by the smell of actual food — I never cooked, ate fast food — took to the bathroom for a wash. Mári said she’d expected that and came prepared. She still reminded me of that second time I saw her, at our party. She was the center of my attention. It seemed a light spotted her at all times, which it did, since she was in the kitchen where the Coleman lantern that served as a light swung overhead. All power had been directed to the workshop, for the “120,000,000,000 jigawatts of electricity” Jack and Leo needed, or something that sounded equally like a line from Back to the Future. Mári glowed — and I only now think that this could have been an effect of the enriched uranium — and laughed at Jack, and sometimes at one of Leo’s sad attempts at a joke. In his version of English, Leo said, “How many tourists it take to change the lightbulb?” We all said, “How many?” Leo laughed so hard he almost couldn’t answer. Finally, he said, “Six. One to hold bulb, five for to ask directions.” He bent over laughing again and we laughed at his laughing. 
I pulled out a few bottles of red wine. Mári talked about Carlos Salinas’s illegal election in Mexico and his privatizing of public enterprise, which she of course knew everything about. Then about American support of the Pinochet regime in Chile during the 70s and 80s, simply because he wanted to fight communists. Then she got excited over what was currently being called the “golden period.” We were making bank off Latin America, she said, because no one else could provide any support, militarily, agriculturally, any way whatsoever, now that the Soviet Union had fallen, that China was becoming more capitalistic. By now we were all drunk and decided to walk to the beach. Mári clung to me on the walk down the hill. We didn’t talk. It was foggy, but not too chilly, since it was mid-May. Jack and Leo talked incessantly of initial liftoff variables, of exit velocity. The crush to nearing lightspeed. Jack said that that wouldn’t matter with the relative force of gravity in lunar orbit. Then Leo walked into a corner liquor store near Alvarado Street and bought another bottle of wine.

But we didn’t have a corkscrew. I went back into the liquor store and found a basket full of wine keys, all stamped with Made in Mexico. “You have any other bottle openers?” I asked the clerk. He sold me a Swiss Army knife, which cost ten fucking dollars.

We made it to the beach and above us the lights of Monterey reflected off the fog, turning it gold. The waves crashed against the shore and hissed back out to sea. We walked along the beach and sucked at the bottle.

By the time we finished the bottle Leo was slurring. “Let’s go home,” Mári said. We walked back up the hill. I carried Leo over my shoulder for four grueling blocks. He would owe me big, I thought, but he had already paid me back by introducing me to Mári. For the first time, Mári and I did what I had dreamed of for so many lonely nights. She lay atop me in my bed, kissing my neck. “I’ve never been with a white man before,” she whispered.

“Lucky me,” I said.

+

In the morning, I drove Mári to her apartment. She invited me up, saying her father was at work, so we wouldn’t have to worry about him. We made love and napped. We hadn’t slept much the night before and I passed out so hard that I don’t know how much later it was, but I was awakened by a steel-toed work boot. This would prove to be the first meeting and only “conversation” with Mári’s father, and the only time I would see the inside of their apartment. There’s no way a story that begins like this one is going to turn out all right for the narrator, and that you already know.

I looked into a short man’s angry brown face. “_Va!_” he yelled. He attempted some English. “What fuck you do in my house? Huh?” He stalked out of the bedroom. Mári no longer lay beside me. Her father yelled at her in Spanish from outside the bathroom door. I couldn’t understand what he said, but it didn’t sound good. From behind the closed door Mári stifled sobs. Then her father came back into the bedroom.

“Get fuck out my house!” he screamed.

I stumbled out of bed and pulled on my pants and shoes. He followed me out the door, screaming in Spanish and his broken English. When I reached the bottom of the stairs he said, “You come here again, I kick ass!” Then he turned back to his apartment, yelling at Mári. I had forgotten my shirt.

+

I tried to persuade Mári that it would be okay. I told her to forget about her father. We held out for a while and spent a few more wonderful nights together. But the thought of her father kicking me out of her house always hung over us.

Mári never wanted to talk about the Papá Fiasco, as I called it. But I knew it had been a big deal. Rumors of Mári’s white lover had probably spread all the way to Boston where her mother lived and to her extended family back in Panama. I guess it was bad for a Panamanian girl to have a white boyfriend. It was bad for her father, anyway.

The details of this “breakup” are uneventful. I heard this sentence: “This just isn’t going to work out.” And this one: “I feel like I’m treating you unfairly.” To top all these off I heard, “I could never devote to this the way you want me to.” There was a last kiss, and all that crap. I said, “We’ll keep in touch.”

What matters is that I had to go homeless not long after this. I was driving home from work, just turning off the freeway onto Lighthouse, and then I was driving straight for the cypress trees lining the road side, and nothing I tried could stop me from pummeling into them. The car came to a jolting stop, the earth rumbling. I thought that this has to be the big one, the big quake everyone’s been waiting for since 08’. Then, along Lighthouse, shooting past me like an endless freight train: a spume of exhaust, a blast of steam, then white white light that muted and disappeared behind the veil of fog covering the sky.

Needless to say, when Jack and Leo took off, they destroyed the entire house. Fortunately the neighbors on the other side of the duplex were soldiers at Fort Ord, and had been hauled in for PT that night. The building was a leaning blackened collection of oversized popsicle sticks. I looked at the sky and thought about the security deposit Jack and Leo had just kissed away for the three of us.