Adultescence: a novella

California

12.

"I booked the tickets," Nathe announced over the phone, a few days before their June departure. He'd waited until the next-to-last minute for a seat sale. But he was running on financial empty, and deep into the credit cards.

"Great. When do we leave?" Neil asked.

"Thursday night at 6:20, returning on the red-eye Tuesday morning."

"That's kind of awkward timing, no?" Neil worked 9:00 to 5:00 in the city's it department. It would require some finessing to get those days off at such short notice.

"Cheaper to fly on weekdays," Nathe reminded him, "and our absence is less likely to be noticed. We'll say we were out of town over the weekend."

"Right, right..." Without a pretext they could share with their friends, and an explanation of where the money was coming from, the less said the better. If not for Nathe's having a girlfriend again, it would look for all the world like some sort of gay vacation.

"Is Sabeena coming?" Neil felt bad for hoping the answer was—

"No."

Good. It was always supposed to be their trip. All Sabeena knew was that it was about the screenplay, but not who he had lined-up to buy it, nor how much they were going to pay.

"She'll be thrilled when I tell her what we've done," Nathe said, but he was not at all confident this was true. He was worried that the activist bent of her career and his more lucrative if juvenile ambitions—writing 'better' versions of the movies he loved as a six-year-old—might be the rocks against which their relationship would break.

"I'm counting on financial success to swaddle us in a nice, thick layer of bubble wrap."

"Uh-huh." 'Well, when you're living in a house of cards,' Neil thought, '$85,000 buys a lot of cards.'

The self-guided walking tour of Hollywood did not disappoint. Neil and Nathe had the eerie sensation of being inside a simulacrum of all their wildest pre-teen fantasies. Walking down Hollywood Boulevard everyone had the deluded but natural right to imagine him- or herself a celebrity. It was an equality not to be matched by the most successful of Socialist regimes. Everyone standing naked and ready before the promiscuous god of Fame, waiting to be anointed by that fickle yet ever so potent wand.

The next day, they hit the place that Walt built. Neil had been to Disneyworld in Florida as a child, and was hoping to recapture something of the wonderment with which he had enjoyed epcot, his older brother, Wayne, convincing him that the epcot sphere was a real spaceship that had touched down for refuelling. Disneyland delivered the expected rush of nostalgia, mixed with enough that was new and different to make it seem like a legitimate adult experience. It was still thrilling to hurl one's body down hills of steel, still decadent to consume mega-doses of sugar and fat in the form of $8.00 pizza slices, $6.00 cotton candy, and funnel cakes served with ice cream and strawberry syrup. The ultra-sanitary, over-restored and one-hundred percent plastic simulations of Europe and Asia still felt like 'real' travel experiences, and it was fun—if impure and ironic now—to take photos with macroencephalic cartoon characters.

But after lunch, once the sugar and nostalgia rushes wore off, when the willingness to wait an hour or more in line in ninety-degree heat for a two-minute ride began to wane, when the headache, the dehydration, and the emotional hangover of the clash between defeated, child-sized expectations and adult-sized reality set in, it all began to feel strangely hollow. As kids, these places had inspired dreams of their own brighter tomorrows. As adults, they served instead as reminders of how little they had accomplished in the intervening twenty years.