No 5: SOLEDAD
PHOTO BY CHARLOTTE LOKEY
CHARLOTTE LOKEY
“–Margie, I already said I am pulling through,” the girl said, gluing a plastic gemstone below her eye.
“I know you’re pulling through, Julia,” Margherita’s voice said through the receiver. “I know because I know you know if you don’t pull through and decide to dip out like last time I will effing rip your throat out.” Margherita’s voice sounded raspy through the corded motel phone.
“I’m literally walking out the door as we speak,” Julia said. She blotted her 99 cent lipstick and leaned back from the scummy mirror, taking inventory of herself.
Five foot two.
One hundred forty pounds.
32D.
A child psychologist suggested she do this exercise whenever she felt herself ‘spinning out of alignment.’ A grounding technique, the shrink had said. Julia thought the guy was a hack, but still couldn’t shirk the habit. Her cataloguing came passively now.
Hair, bleached.
Two pimples on left cheek, subdermal.
Seventeen, but can pass for twenty with enough eyeliner.
“Please try your best to be normal tonight,” Margherita said, breaking Julia out of her stillness.
“My dear sissy, when have I ever behaved poorly?” Julia said.
“You’re an asshole.”
Julia bit a piece of skin by her thumb. “I don’t know why you keep inviting me to these things if it’s such a pain.” Julia heard her sister sigh on the other end of the line. “Besides, I don’t even know when I’ll get there. I’m a really busy person, you know.”
“Knock and someone will let you in,” Margherita said.
“You changed the locks again?” Julia asked. She heard a shuffling on the other end.
“Julia, I have to go. See you in a minute, love you, bye.”
Julia slumped down to the lobby of the Soledad Inn Casino Resort to wait for her bus. The place was dingy and a pervasive stench of Marlboro Reds clung to the garnet-hued velvet that coated the walls and furniture. Sinewy elderly men in stained sweatpants sat in front of slot machines, vacantly pulling the levers until the beeps and jingles melded to a low droll. It was the type of place where people usually only stay by accident. But, it was safe and cheap enough to crash in for the time being.
By this point, it had been nearly a month since Julia checked-in to the Soledad. That is to say, it had also been nearly a month since she had gotten herself kicked out of the unregulated, purportedly therapeutic Ely School for Troubled Young Souls.
After Julia got kicked out of Reno High, her mother had wanted to send her to one of those cushy places in Malibu or Hawaii where rich Californian moms sent rowdy sons to curb Xanax habits. The woman, one of those spiritual types who wore a lot of turquoise jewelry and hung around farmers markets, frequently cited the rigidity of the traditional school system and fluoride in the tap water that was the root of her daughter’s behavior. Predictably, when Julia’s mother realized the cost of these establishments, she shifted her expectations.
Ultimately, Julia found herself at the economical Ely School. It was located somewhere deep along Highway 50, nestled within a barren valley almost three hours away from the next town. Julia had not known that type of nowhere had even still existed in America. Supposedly, the isolation was supposed to encourage its clients to heal.
That’s what the school was all about— healing. The staff, a mix of sadistic Mennonite social workers and homely, turtlenecked alumna of the program, reminded Julia and her peers constantly. It rang like a mantra through the white-washed walls.
After a semester of seemingly endless prayer circles and weepy group therapy sessions Julia was told by the staff that she would not be welcomed back after winter break. The circumstances behind her removal from the program were presented vaguely, but she predicted it was largely due to the animosity between herself and the other patients. The final straw, she landed, was when Ronni, a devoutly Baptist girl with stringy red hair and braces who was nearly seven months pregnant, cried to the head of school after she found out Julia had been calling her Little Whore-phan Annie.
When she returned to Reno, Julia discovered her mother had left to a remote spiritual community called Happy River Valley Camp near the California-Oregon border.
To do her own healing, Julia supposed.
It was collectively decided by Margherita, her boyfriend, and Julia’s mother that it would be best for her to have some time alone to gain a sense of independence. So, to the Soledad she went.
Julia often passed the time by observing the mysterious people who wandered into the lobby as if the whole thing was some avant garde play. Now, as she sat waiting for her bus, she watched one figure in particular: a huge man stood at the front desk, long abandoned by whatever underpaid employee was meant to be manning it. He tapped the bell with his index finger.
“Richardson, Hank,” the man called out to the back room. A southern inflection tinted his voice. “Checking into the Eureka Suite.” He rang the bell, waited a moment, then rang again.
Julia gave him an up-and-down. His shirt was at least three sizes too small, clinging to his overly bench-pressed torso like cling wrap. On the shirt, the word ZEUS was screen printed in capital letters above an image of the man himself flexing his muscles. Save for a thread-bare duffle, he carried no luggage.
Sad sack, Julia thought.
~
Margherita lived in a three bedroom nestled in a development they advertised on giant billboards along the I-80. Elegant living 15 minutes outside the heart of Reno, Nevada, the veneer-toothed real estate agents promised. And no income tax! Margherita, fresh out of a failed engagement, had found this offer appealing. She signed herself into a predatory mortgage agreement the following Sunday.
Julia avoided visiting whenever possible. Something about the house uneased her. A blandness so pertinent it gave the impression that the house could be in any other hastily-built development in any other part of America. A desperation to the faux-rustic TJ Maxx decor which tried so eagerly to convince you of the place’s homeyness. A flimsiness to the walls that made it feel one strong breeze away from collapse.
Besides, visiting Margherita meant Julia having to make small talk with her shit-brained boyfriend-slash-boss, Tucker.
The two had come together shortly after Margherita’s breakup from her previous shit-brained ex. At the time, she had been working as Tucker’s executive assistant at his mid-level construction management firm. He was divorced, and attractive enough.
So, when Tucker came into work one morning with a bouquet of grocery store roses, Margherita decided to settle. She knew the arrangement was somewhat a cliché, but couldn't help herself from finding comfort in the attention he so willingly gave.
Margherita enabled herself to overlook his less admirable qualities. How he spoke in a series of vaguely inspirational one-liners and misattributed quotes, painfully weaving his way from one pointless monologue to another. His thinning hair dyed a shoe-polish brown to match his filmy, dopey eyes. His discount suits, his poor treatment of service workers, his inability to read more than half of any given novel. Margherita let her boyfriend’s mediocrity wash over her with almost meditative grace.
Her sister, however, was not so generous. Tucker was an idiot. Julia did not respect him in the slightest.
Tonight, he answered the door with a velvety, onyx-black eyepatch. Julia was both horrified and delighted at this development.
“Well hello, Tucker,” she sneered. Margherita lunged at her sister with a hug.
“If you mention the eyepatch you’re dead,” Margherita whispered sharply in her sister’s ear as she wrapped her arms around her. Julia shrugged off her embrace.
“Got it.”
Margherita had not yet even set the Chicken Marsala on the table before Tucker had launched into his rendition of a New York Times article he had skimmed earlier that week. Something about labor unions and casinos.
“See, the real issue with some of these projects is that these damn workers show up expecting all these extra accommodations,” he explained, shoving a forkful of the overcooked chicken into his mouth. He wiped his fingers on the Moana themed napkins Margherita presumably bought on clearance at Costco. “I mean, listen, I get that these people work hard. And I get that their kids need braces, or whatever the hell they’re bitching about this week. But at the end of the day, these are businesses, not charities, y’know?”
“So true, Tucker. Anyway, what’s the deal with the eyepatch?” interrupted Julia.
“Unspecified conjunctivitis,” said Tucker firmly. “Or so the doctor says. It’s not contagious, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Duly noted,” Julia nodded thoughtfully. “You know, I never would have guessed pirates came this far inland.”
Margherita shot her sister a tight look from across the table. Knock it off, she mouthed.
Tucker sighed and patted Margherita on the arm, as if to say I'll handle this. She gave a perfunctory smile.
“Julia,” Tucker began. “I know you have been in a period of… crisis lately, but I don’t think it’s wise to alienate the people who have been here to support you.”
“Support me?” Julia asked. “I don’t know if I would put it in those terms.”
“Does ‘bankrolled’ work better for you then?” Tucker asked, droopy eyes narrowed into slits. “What about ‘enabled’? I mean, for Christ’s sake Julia, get a grip.”
Julia felt herself boiling over and excused herself from the table.
She locked the bathroom door behind her and opened up the medicine cabinet. Blood pressure meds and nicorette patches for Tucker, twenty milligrams of Fluoxetine and a small baggie of Mexican diet pills for Margherita. Julia knew her sister kept a stash of Adderall somewhere in her nightstand. But, her need for cash at the moment wasn't desperate enough to muster the energy to dig through drawers or deal with the anorexics and tweakers who she usually sold the stuff to.
Besides, Julia knew the real valuables were stored on top of the cabinet next to Tucker’s Rogaine and generic Viagra. There, as always, was a little russian nesting doll, ornately decorated with red paint and doey eyes. Ever since she was little, Margherita had hoarded away every spare cent she could get her hands on in the old thing.
The girls’ mother believed in what she generously called “a spirit of giving.”
“No point in holding onto things just for the sake of it,” she would lecture the girls growing up. “Especially when what you’re holding onto could be worth a whole lot in the hands of someone who might actually need it!”
The woman insisted that this ethos was a part of some grander, vaguely Eastern ideology— though she seemed to only ever bring it up as she negged her daughters into breaking open their tiny coin purses.
“You know, it might not seem like it right now, but I think your help right now will pay off in spades for you later. This yoga retreat I’m doing will be good for all of us, really,” their mother would say in her breathy voice when they finally obliged. “I don’t think I can truly care for someone else before I care for myself. Does that make sense?”
The stash had remained hidden from her mother for years,until the point Margherita had stored away enough to move out. Julia was always aware of the doll, though in all her years of scheming had never taken anything from it. The thing had a strange sanctity to it. As if taking from it would be a far more intimate betrayal to her sister than anything she could take from a cabinet or drawer.
It almost made her smile to see how her sister maintained the neurotic ritual even after all these years.
Almost.
Julia tore open the nicorette patches and patted two onto her stomach. She shoved the rest into her jean pocket. Then she flushed Tucker’s Viagra and turned on the tap, splashing her hands beneath the cool running water.
“I think you need to set boundaries, Margherita,” she could hear Tucker’s voice say from the dining room. “Give her an inch and she’ll take a mile.”
“I know, I know, I know,” her sister responded. “I feel like I've given her so much and she's blown it.”
“Tell her to get a life! You give her chance after chance, as if gonna make any difference. I don’t understand your obsession with coddling the kid.”
“Tucker.”
“Sometimes–” Tucker said, exasperated now “—people are born to be scumbags. You either accept it, or waste your life pissing away your– no, our— money on someone who has never had it in them in the first place.”
Julia looked at the nesting doll. She knew there must have been two or three grand at least. Based on the expenses she’d incurred so far at the Soledad, Julia estimated it would be enough to last her at least the next three months.
Serious money for a scumbag.
Julia stuck the doll in the front of her pants, smashed the bathroom window with the ceramic pot scented candle, and crept outside.
On her walk back, Julia counted $3,426 dollars in cash.
It would be wrong to say she didn’t feel a tinge of guilt about what she did.
It would also be wrong to say she didn’t feel a bit satisfied.
Mostly though, she did not feel anything particular at all. It was almost as if she had been taken over by a sort of monk-like zen. Thoughts came and went completely passively, drifting to and fro without any attention drawn to any one thing in particular.
Julia went to the convenience store and bought a Mountain Dew and a little thing of those styrofoamy circus peanuts. She ate the peanuts one by one and drank her soda in slow, methodical sips. Julia watched the hot dogs rotate on their little metal bed as she ate. She liked how they twirled over and over like petite, beefy ballerinas.
When she finished her first bag of circus peanuts, she bought a large cherry Coke and a Slim Jim to be saved for back at the Soledad.
The thought of going back to her room, barren except for a few crumpled Big Mac wrappers and a half-smoked joint, depressed Julia. So, she headed to the Sierra Lounge, the hotel bar.
The Sierra Lounge wasn’t what any discerning customer would call a fine establishment. The leather on the bar stools was peeling. The cocktails were undrinkable. The patrons were mostly run-of-the-mill Reno alcoholics looking for cheap drinks and a bartender to look the other way when they came in at nine am asking for a Long Island Iced Tea and a few stray cowboys who mostly kept to themselves. But being in a place where everyone was even more of a lowlife than herself was a comfort to Julia.
She slid into a seat near the back and unfurled her Teriyaki Heat-flavored Slim Jim. A Garth Brooks song was playing quietly over the speakers. Wanda, the nosy red-haired bartender who wore too much powder gave Julia a dirty look, so she shook her oversized cup of soda at her.
Julia turned and saw the man with the too-tight shirt at the other end of the bar sucking something fizzy and cherry-red through a little black straw. She slinked over to him.
“Julia,” she said, reaching out her hand. The man looked up.
“Hank,” he said, reaching out his hand in return. They shook, and Julia took a seat at the stool next to his.
“I like your shirt,” Julia heard herself say.
The man looked down and smiled sheepishly. “It’s part of the brand.”
“So you’re a performer?”
“I mean, sort of.”
“C’mon now, don’t be all Mr. Humble on me! Whatcha do?”
“I am a competitive eater,” he explained. “Some people would even call me world-class.”
Hank explained the dynamic of the business to her. He researches food challenges across the continental United States, scouring restaurants, casinos, and amusement parks in search of challenges. “Stuff you would earn a t-shirt for finishing, like ‘I conquered Knotts Berry Farm’s 14-Pound Berry Sundae!’ or what have you.” He calls them up, explains the premise of his business, and names his price. He records the challenges and uploads them onto his Facebook page. He’s his own manager and the venues usually provided the food for free, so aside from the cost of travel and the bi-annual purchase of his custom shirts everything he made was pretty much profit.
“Right now I am doing fifty challenges in fifty states. Nevada’s number fourty-three,” Hank said.
“Do you like it much?” Julia asked.
“I mean, the pay is good, but it gets a little lonely. Aside from the ladies,” Hank winked.
“The ladies?” Julia smiled.
“You know, I got a couple of groupies— or whatever you want to call it. Coupla chicks who will follow me around for a couple of stops to watch me go. Some of them ain’t too shabby.” Hanks' demeanor shifted slightly. “Sometimes I wonder if they’re just doing it for a laugh.”
Julia felt uncomfortable with the man’s sudden vulnerability, so decided to switch gears.
“And the shirt?”
“They say branding yourself is important. I mean, more people’ll book you if you’re Zeus than if you’re just regular old Hank, right?” Hank shook his head and took a long sip of his fizzy mixed drink. “Some competitors take it pretty far. There's this dude outta El Paso who named himself El Chupacabra... once seen him eat damn near 90 hotlink sausages without taking his luchador mask off.”
“You got a gig tonight?”
“Tomorrow night. Ten pounds of pancakes, with butter and syrup.”
Julia imagined this mass of food, the thick, starchy pancakes soggy with corn syrup and hydrogenized oil. “All by yourself?” she asked.
“All by myself,” the man responded. “The amount of food's not what gets you, honestly. It's the palette exhaustion that screws you over. I have a theory that every man on earth could eat about thirty hotdogs before his stomach truly gets to its max capacity, but his brain stops him before he can.”
Julia contemplated this for a moment, imagining the sheen of the rotating links in the convenience store. “I don’t think I could eat thirty hot dogs.”
“I think you could surprise yourself if you were willing to give it a shot.” An air of awkwardness fell between them.
“Well what the hell is a girl like you doing here on a Tuesday all alone?” Hank said, breaking the silence.
“I come here for the ambience.”
Hank looked at the line of crotchety, sallow men lining the bar. “I’m sure,” he murmured.
“I’m between places right now.”
“How the hell could you be between places at what… seventeen?”
Julia explained how, after she got caught selling dimebags at school, Trevor freaked her sister out and sent her away to a school ran by unhinged Mennonite zealots out in the Great Basin. How the girls there hated her and thought she was trash, so she found a way to get herself kicked out thinking she could just go back to her sister’s. How she landed at the Soledad when Margherita told her no. How, regardless of how grimy the place was, her low-grade drug dealing still was not enough to subsist on.
Without really knowing why, Julia continued. She told Hank about how Margherita had been quietly giving her sister envelopes full of cash each visit behind the back of Tucker.
“I’m done for good now though. Done with Nevada, done with my sister. Done with being an asshole. I’m headed to San Francisco. Staying with friends in Little Ecuador. I’m only here for a bit” Julia felt her phone buzz.
Margherita: WHERE TF R U???
Julia turned off her ringer and slid the phone back into her pocket. “I’m only here for a bit,” she repeated.
Hank smiled.
“What?” she asked.
“California’s number 44.”
~
The gig was downtown, in an Americana-themed diner attached to one of the smaller casinos on the main drag. The polish on the red booths gleamed, somehow unscuffed by years of abuse by its late-night patrons. Hank had driven Julia over a little early so she could help set up the camcorder he used to livestream.
“You didn’t think I would let you hang around without putting you to work, did you now?” he said, elbowing her gently.
By sunset, a small cluster of fans had accumulated around his table. A group of teenagers, at most high school freshmen, a frail, middle-aged nurse with a younger coworker, both still wearing scrubs, and a drunk who seemed to have wandered in by accident. Hank tried to make small talk. Their responses seemed stilted, as if they hadn’t really expected him to acknowledge them. Some of them didn’t even speak, just answering Hank’s benign questions with a sort of catatonic stare.
The manager, a child-sized Greek man dressed like he was about to take his first communion, brought the platter to the table. The stack of pancakes was almost as big as the manager himself. The mound of food wobbled, heaving under its own weight, as he slid the plate in front of Hank. Julia felt a pang of fear come over her.
“Thanks boss,” he said, not horrified in the slightest. Hank went into performance mode, rhythmically shaking out his neck like Rocky Balboa approaching the ring. Julia pressed the camcorder to record.
“Hello everybody, my name is Hank Richardson ay-kay-ay Atlas the Eater and I am here at Fat Andy’s Bar in Grill in Reno, Nevada doin’ the Fat Andy Death by Syrup challenge...” He continued on in a robotic candor, detailing the plate in front of him for the invisible fans behind the lens. Ten pounds of pancakes, thirty breakfast sausages, one cup of syrup, and a side of hashbrowns. Down the gullet in twenty minutes or less. After he finished his introduction, the Greek man brought out an oversized clock like they use at youth basketball games and pressed the button to start the countdown.
Hank wasted no time at all. The little sausages went first, slammed down in fistfulls of five at a time. The hashbrowns went next. Altogether, the sides went down in about four minutes and twelve seconds. The real challenge, Julia knew, would be the pancakes.
“It’s the bready stuff that always gets you,” Hank had explained on the ride over. “Rookie’s always think its the easiest thing to start with because it’s not that dense. So they start there. Dumb bastards don’t realize that as soon as that bun, or cake, or muffin, or what have you hits their stomach it’s gonna start expanding like a fuckin’ grenade.” He looked out the window towards the mountains, patchy with snow and pine. “Ninety percent of people fail eating challenges, y’know. Shit requires skill, man. Strategy.”
Hank rolled the pancakes one by one into little burritos. Then, he dunked the rolls he had made into a red plastic cup filled with water and shoved them down his throat. He used his spare hand to push the end of the roll downwards, forcing the pancake into his esophagus as if he was a human garbage disposal.
Julia tried to keep her gaze fixed to the lens of the camera, but could not stop herself from watching the beads of sweat percolating on Hank’s forehead and the line of maple syrup and saliva dribbling down his chin. A vein the size of a garden snake protruded along his temple, pulsating with every chew.
~
Hank and Julia left The Soledad Inn at dawn, when the sky was still a musky shade of purple. Julia gathered her slim belongings into an old Jansport and shoved them into Hank’s trunk. It saddened her to see how her whole livelihood could be gathered in such a small little package.
The ride was silent, save for the soft melodies of the “Best of Loretta Lynn” tape Hank had accidentally gotten lodged in his cassette player. They had almost made it out of county limits when Julia requested the two of them made a stop.
The car slowed in front of the house, made distinguishable from its identical neighbors only by a billowing trash bag taped to the bathroom window. Julia crossed her arms tightly across her chest when she noticed her hands begin to shake. Hank reached over and unlatched the car door.
She left the doll in the mailbox, settled in a nest of mortgage bills and catalogues.
They got to San Francisco just before noon. The city came into view through the fog as they crossed over the bridge. The only thing Julia could notice about the city across the bay was how small it looked compared to how she imagined. Hank was scheduled to eat ten pounds of Dungeness crab in under ten minutes at the wharf that evening, but nothing before then. So, the two sat for a long while in a diner in a miscellaneous part of town, sipping instant coffee and talking about nothing in particular.
When it came time, Hank dropped Julia at her friend’s apartment. Julia hugged him goodbye on the curb, and he hugged her back. The two did not exchange numbers.
In the evening, Julia excused herself from her friend’s incense-scented apartment to get some fresh air and a cherry Coke. She didn’t know the city well, but found her way to a 7-11 in a way that seemed almost innate. The door’s chime announced her arrival to the teenage boy with patchy facial hair standing behind the grimy register.
Julia got her drink and stood to watch the tiny hot dog dancers do their mechanical pirouettes.
“How many of those d’you think you could eat?” she asked without looking up. “At one time, I mean.”
He considered her question. “I dunno. What about you?”
“I think thirty,” she said, taking a sip of Coke. “You know, they say it’s not really the amount of food that stops you. It’s the palette exhaustion.”
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah,” she replied. “Neither did I.”
