Jonathan Evison

Each issue of KNOCK, we feature one or two new books that made a mark on us as we put the issue together. Books that are either just released or set for release within the next few months. Jonathan Evison’s new book, All About Lulu, will be released by Soft Skull Press in June, 2008.

"All About Lulu" is an exhilarating, wholly original and brave novel about obsession, love, and becoming. With Will Miller, Evison has created a thoroughly modern protagonist steeped in Dickensian complexity, pure yet conflicted, lost yet driven to find truth in the dysfunctional American abyss."

-James P. Othmer, author of The Futurist

- Pepperonni Sticks -

I knew I'd reached an all-time low once I started fraternizing with Acne Scar Joe outside of Fatburger. It wasn't that Acne Scar Joe was a terrible guy, though he was. He was the kind of guy that collected beer money from high school kids in the Circle K parking lot, then bought lotto tickets with their money, and told them "tough shit" when he came out empty handed, and then bragged about it the next day at work. It wasn't that Joe was a bigot, though he was that, too. He said things like, "Hey, I got nothin' against wetbacks. Shit, my neighbor's a wetback. They're better than Gooks." It wasn't that we didn't have anything in common, though we didn't. I liked to hole up in my bedroom and stare at the ceiling and listen to Ken Minyard on my headphones. Joe liked to have a few, and go to the firing range with his Glock. So, we did have one big thing in common; we were both losers.

Our initial foray into the social arena consisted of a movie at the Beverly Center one night after work. Some bad people seized an armored car. Lives were at stake. A gritty secret service dude kicked their asses. Pretty stirring stuff. Just the kind of human drama that roused Joe's slumbering moral imperative and sent his testosterone level through the roof. He was noticeably agitated afterward, like he was itching for the firing range. Joe's moral ceiling collapsed again within ten minutes. He bought us some beer at a convenience store near the high school, where he collected money from the usual suspects; two kids with identical Misfits t-shirts, driving a Honda Civic. Probably sophomores, maybe juniors.

One of the kids confronted Joe afterward outside the store. "Hey, we wanted bottles."

"Well, it just so happens that this beer ain't for you, dumbshit. It's for me and my buddy."

The kid looked to me for confirmation, and I shrugged sheepishly from the passenger seat.

"Give us the money back then."

"Pfff, right."

The kid looked more wounded than angry. "You can't do that. C'mon, dude. That's fucked."

"So, call the fucking cops, why don't you? Oh wait, you're a minor. Ha! Nice try, Skippy."

Joe climbed into the car and handed me the beer. The kid gave me one more pleading look. C'mon, he seemed to say, isn't there something you can do? But all I could do was shrug sheepishly again.

We drank the beer by the empty pool at Joe's apartment complex, where we sat in plastic chairs. The night was warm and windless, and a gritty residue of exhaust from the nearby 10 hung in the air. Indeed, the freeway was so close that you could spot the make of the cars. Whenever the flow of traffic subsided momentarily, you could hear the buzzing of the purplish patio lights. They sounded almost like crickets. The empty pool was littered with dead palm fronds and beer cans and an old bicycle with no wheels.

Joe kept throwing rocks at his neighbor's cat every time the poor beast slinked out onto the balcony. "Climbs all over the hood of my car, the fucking rat."

We talked about work a little; about the nuances of charbroiling and the dipshit delivery driver from Rykoff.

"That dude's been at Jackoff longer than I've been at Fats," he noted.

"What's wrong with his teeth, anyway? How come he never opens his mouth?"

"It ain't pretty, dude. He's got a gnarly-ass grill. Looks like lava rocks and shit."

After about a half hour of this, Joe finally cut to the chase. "Look, Miller, there's a reason why I had you over tonight."
I was terrified by the possibilities, and braced myself for the worst.

"I've got a proposition for you," he pursued.

My ass tightened.

"My girlfriend's cousin is coming to town," he said. "And I need somebody to go out with her. You know, like a double date or whatever."

"You don't have a girlfriend."

"We've gone out three times, Miller, so whaddaya call that?"

I took a long hit of my stale beer. "What does she look like?"

"She's a hottie."

"No, the cousin."

Joe didn't answer right off. He plucked a stone out the empty planter by his lawn chair, and winged it toward the balcony. It ricocheted off the rail and narrowly missed a window. "She's okay, I guess."

"Well, that doesn't sound too promising."

"She's fine, dude. From her picture it looks like she's got big tits."

"I don't know, Joe."

"Look, dude, she'll probably suck your chode if you get her drunk enough. And believe me, we'll get them drunk."

"Let me think about it."

"Miller, what's there to think about? When's the last time you got any pussy?"

"Couple months," I lied.

"Ha! Try never. Miller, you're gonna' get your knob polished. Trust me on this one."

God knows why, but I trusted Acne Scar Joe on that one. I figured a good knob polishing (or any knob polishing, for that matter) would only strengthen my resolve to forget Lulu. And so the four of us were to convene at Joe's apartment the following Friday night.

I was a wreck for three days beforehand. It took me twenty minutes to scrub the smell of Fatburger off of me after work that afternoon. I doused myself liberally with Big Bill's cologne, then promptly decided that I smelled like a freezer burned ham. It took another twenty minutes to scrub that off, and I wasn't altogether successful. I got rid of the freezer burned part, but the ham lingered. I wore a shirt I thought was cool.

Ironically, the prospect of failure was not the source of my anxiety that Friday night, so much as the prospect of success was-that is, the possibility of revealing my little breakfast link to a perfect stranger. Though my Netherlands were no longer hairless, my willie was hardly bigger than it had been when Lulu inspected it in the trophy room at thirteen.

I arrived at Joe's casually late, having spent fifteen casual minutes in my car outside his apartment complex, gazing at my watch, and listening to KMPC.

The three of them were in the kitchen when I got there, huddled around the blender, laughing. Joe was making strawberry daiquiris.
"For the ladies," he explained. "There's beer in the frig."

I grabbed a beer from the fridge.

Joe draped a proprietary arm around his lady right off the bat, lest there be any confusion. "This is Nicole," he said, just as Nicole was wriggling out from under his arm. "And this is her cousin Cheryl."

My first thought was that there's no accounting for taste, because Cheryl, whom Joe had deemed "Okay, I guess," was pretty damn hot when you looked past the makeup and the fog of perfume. Joe's date Nicole, on the other hand, looked like an ant-eater in tight pants and a halter top.

One look at me, and Cheryl started inhaling her daiquiri. Who could blame her? When I excused myself to take a leak in Joe's hair encrusted toilet, I could hear that Joe wasn't exactly helping my odds.

"Yeah, Miller's kind of a wuss," I heard him say. "But he's not a fag or anything."

I might have been a solar flare for all the eye contact Cheryl bestowed upon me that evening, although she did exhibit a refreshing candor on the subject of her boyfriend back in Muskegon, a certain red shirt freshman on the Michigan State offensive line named 'Bubby', who hailed from Arkansas.

"His name is Bubby?" I chortled. "C'mon, what's his real name?"

She looked me in the eye for the first time and pinched up her face. "Bubby is his real name."

I was the romantic equivalent of mustard gas. Where was my beautiful voice when the lights were low, and the music was soft, and some lovesick middle-American girl gooned on strawberry daiquiris presented herself? My voice had forsaken me-It seemed I was incapable of saying the right thing. And as a result, Bubby seemed only to draw nearer with each daiquiri.

Joe, meanwhile, was making headway. Relatively speaking. Nicole was fighting him off, but he was still managing an occasional grope. Two more daiquiris and he might've been in business.

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Jonathan Evison is the author of All About Lulu (Soft Skull Press, July '08), and West of Here (2010). He is also the founder and moderator of the Fiction Files, an online literature forum for book nerds. He lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Read an interview with Evison from KNOCK #9

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