eyes. “Hurry man, we gotta get out of here!” He yelled as he flew by me. I pumped hard to catch up.
“What the fuck happened?”
“Maurice’s crazy, that’s what happened.” We turned down a residential street. “Did you hear that?”
“Everyone within a twenty mile radius heard that, what the fuck was it?”
He stopped and looked around nervously, he was still breathing hard. He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and produced a five inch long red tube with a fuse coming out the middle. “This.” He said. “It’s an M-1000. A quarter stick of dynamite. He brought back fifty of these big fuckers from Mexico. I told him I didn’t believe it was a quarter stick of dynamite, so he lit one and tossed it in his backyard. You think the cops will come now?”
“Yeah dude, that sounded like bomb. You could do some serious damage with one of those things. Did he just give you that?”
“Nah, I bought it.”
“Tell me you didn’t spend our weed money on dynamite.” I said.
“No, dude relax. I bought a dime bag and this. I thought it was too good to pass up.” He explained.
“You have done well. Let’s go twist one and figure out what we’re going to do with it.”
I opened the back door to Gram’s shop and turned on the light in the small storage room. Colin left his bike in the alley and crept in behind me. “Is this a break-and-enter?” He whispered.
“No, I have a key.” I said in full voice. “Don’t worry, I come in here after hours all the time, no one even notices. Relax.”
“So what is it? What’s the great idea?”
“It’s right next to you.” I said.
He stepped back and took a look. It was a five foot tall ceramic statue of the virgin Mary. It was hand painted and shiny with some sort of lacquer. The face had an exaggerated childlike quality, with big eyes and an angelic expression. I always hated it. “Holy shit, are you serious? That’s sacrilegious man, we can’t blow this up.” He said.
“No no, you’re looking at it all wrong. I don’t want to blow it up just for the hell of it. It’s for those astronauts who died three years ago on Challenger. It’s a sacrifice offered up to them, a kind of prayer. We’ll be sending this holy virgin to them the same way that they died.” I explained. Colin thought about this for a second.
“You don’t give a fuck about those astronauts, you just want to blow this thing up.” He said laughing.
“Yeah but if anyone asks, it was a prayer to the memory of Challenger.” I said.
“Alright.” He said. “Where we gonna do it?”
“I’ll show you, come on.” I opened the door to the alley. It took both of us to move the statue. It wasn’t heavy, but it was cumbersome and fragile. When we had it in the alley I turned off the lights in the shop and locked up. I put my skate near Colin’s bike and went to the back of the office building next door. I stood under the fire escape and jumped, trying to grab the ladder. I tried twice before I finally got hold of the bottom rung and pulled it down with a loud clanging. I climbed to the first landing and Colin passed the statue up carefully. From there, we carried the doomed statue up the stairs, each of us holding an end like it was a rolled up carpet. We got it to the roof and put it down in the corner closest to the street. We turned it so it was facing us and took a few steps back. There was a street light behind it, and the virgin cast a long shadow across the roof. It was a cool night, and there was a strong wind moving dark clouds across the sky. “This is beautiful up here.” I said, pulling the half smoked joint from my cigarette pack. I lit it and took a couple small hits. “I wish I had a camera.”
“It looks like the cover of a heavy metal record.” Colin said, taking the joint. “We’re gonna have to bail quick after she blows. We could roll up Diamond and cut behind the library to get back to my place.”
“Sounds good,” I said. He handed me the joint and I took a hit, feeling the sting of the cherry on my fingertips. I snuffed it out on the sole of my shoe and dropped the roach.
We walked over to the virgin and I tilted her back. Colin put the M-1000 right in the center of the circle her dress had made in the gravel on the rooftop. He held the flame of my lighter close to the fuse. “Point of no return.” He said. The fire jumped to the fuse with a sizzle. I put her back down on top of the bomb and we ran to the other side of the roof.
“It’s a super long fuse.” Colin said. “At Maurice’s we thought it was a dud. We were about to check it when that shit went off.”
“I wonder if she’ll crack or disintegrate.” I said.
We both looked at the statue in silence for a moment. “Hey man… Is this fucked up?” He asked me. “Maybe this was a bad idea. I’m not religious or anything, but I am catholic, and we’re blowing up the Holy Mother.” He looked down at his feet and then back up at me “We shouldn’t do this shit man, I’m going to get that thing out of there.”
I saw that he was serious so I put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “Are you crazy? It’ll blow your arm off. Leave it alone.”
“We have to do something. Quick, kneel down and say a prayer... I’m serious. I don’t want to disrespect Jesus’ mother.” He said. He looked panicked.
“Alright man, let’s kneel.” He actually got down on his knees, so I did too. “Dear Lord,” I began, “we hereby renounce you and all your teachings. Our souls are filled with the black hate of Satan’s power…”
“Shut up man. Do it right.” He said.
I continued, “WITH THIS DESTRUCTIVE ACT WE GIVE OUR SOULS TO SATAN. LEAD US INTO THE FIRE OF ETERNAL DAMNATION WHERE WE SHALL DO THY BIDDING…”
“You FUCKING ASSHOLE,” Colin hissed, “leave me out of that satanic shit!”
“HEAR US O SATAN AS WE CALL THY NAME.” I raised my arms to the sky “BRAND US WITH THE MARK OF THE BEAST! 6 6 6! PRAISE CAIN! PRAISE JUDAS! LET THY WILL BE DONE ON EARTH, AS IT IS IN HELL!”
I was screaming this when the statue exploded into a million pieces and we were hit with ceramic shrapnel. One piece hit me in the face just below my eye. I could hear the blast’s echo rolling up into the foothills and the sound of a thousand virgin fragments raining down on the street below. We must have sent pieces of that bitch five miles.
5
When I got off the bus at Topeka and Lake I could hear the siren again. It put me on edge. I looked at the people sitting in the Jack in the Box on the corner, but they didn’t look concerned. I dropped my skate and stepped on, rolling in the direction of my old street. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon, and my mom wouldn’t be home until after five, so I had no way of getting into the house.
Altadena is a little less than a city and a little more than a neighborhood. It sits on a long hill below the Sierra Madre mountain range and soaks up sunshine into it’s massive volumes of asphalt and concrete. Like any other part of Los Angeles, the air is usually thick with smog, which gives anything that is over a mile away a yellowish look. You might get used to the smog and forget that it’s even there, but then the rain comes and washes it away and the mountains look startlingly clear and vivid, and you notice details you’d never seen before. Lake Avenue is the commercial center where all the shops and restaurants are, and everything else spreads out from there in a more or less suburban grid.
The first person I saw was Mya. She was sitting on her porch, doing nothing in particular. Mya was okay when she wasn’t with Julie. Together, they united to form Super-Bitch, but separately Mya was cool. Her house sat at the corner of a bright street and was once a light blue color that had faded to gray. There were generous portions of crabgrass in her lawn, and beside the cement porch a wild looking bush had grown to half the height of the house. “Whoa,” she said as I walked across her yard, “blast from the motherfuckin’ past. What are you doing around here?”
“I have no idea.” I said, putting my skate down and sitting on her top step. “What’s up Mya? It’s been a long time… You changed-up your style.” She’d always had red hair
and bangs, now it was died black with white streaks down the front. The left side of her head was shaved. She was short and chubby with a prominent nose, and she was prone to acne so she usually wore lots of makeup to cover it. She wasn’t pretty, but her attitude was open and raw, which made her sexy in an unusual way.
“I just dyed it last week, ‘cause Julie and Eric and me went to the Circle Jerks show. We only saw half the show ‘cause some skinhead bashed Julie’s nose in with his elbow and we had to take her to the hospital. Now she’s got a bandage on her face and gauze stuffed up her nostrils.” She laughed.
“Sounds like a good show, I wish I’d been there.” I said. “Who’s Eric?”
“Oh, you never met Eric? He’s Julie’s retarded boyfriend. She thinks he’s some kind of genius because he does these really big paintings. They look like shit, but they’re really big so he must be a genius, right?” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Where’ve you been all this time? It’s been what? two years? Jeremy said your Mom kicked you out.”
“My mom kicked me out, so I went to live with my Grandmother, now my Grandmother just kicked me out, so I’m back here. I’m back where I started, only now all my stuff smells like old lady.”
“I know what you mean. I got the same thing with my grandma too. I know all about the old lady smell.” She said.
“Hey, I’ve never met your