The Wagon Wheel Motel is probably my last stop before living on the street.  It’s a big dilapidated L-shaped building that hugs against barbed wire and a propane tank farm.  The sign out front is rust-streaked and features a giant wagon wheel that’s supposed to light up but doesn’t anymore.  Instead the curb is lined with hand-lettered plywood signs that announce VACANCY and $19.99 NIGHT and AMERICAN OWNED.  Past the office, a double-wide trailer with a flimsy portico, is a parking lot filled with two kinds of vehicles – semi tractors waiting for their next load, and cars that have no business still running.  The moon is beginning to rise through the old cottonwood with one side hacked off to make way for a power line.

I’m sitting on a plastic lawn chair outside my motel room, the foot tucked underneath me a dead limb, waiting on Nick like a pro.  Five years with Saman has trained me well.  My distraction is a copy of Charles Bukowski’s Post Office that I found in a cardboard box marked FREE outside a used bookstore.  The pages are rude with language that could be describing my pointless hamster wheel of a life.  I was holding down my marriage like Bukowski held down his lousy postal service job.

I can hear Nick coming before I see him. Even the tuners and low-riders that sometimes race up and down the street don’t sound as recklessly fast as his Ford Explorer – engine roaring, tires squealing around corners, horn honking in occasional frustration.  I turn my head, following the progress of his commotion down the highway exit and along the frontage road and into this neighborhood – until his headlights flash the plywood signboards and shoot right past the motel’s entrance.  Without an illuminated sign to announce the Wagon Wheel Motel, he couldn’t see it coming.  Brakes protest and the engine quiets to something more like normal driving.  His headlights make a U-turn and then melt into the garishly bright parking lot.

I stand up carefully, unsteady on my sleeping leg, eager to greet him.  I raise my hands to adjust my hijab and say – but my voice dies a quiet little death when Nick unfolds himself from the truck.  I forgot how icily handsome he is, an imposing figure even in his UCLA sweatshirt and baggy chinos.  His Kangol hat is pulled low over his eyes, gangster-style.  He’s wearing skateboarder Vans with fat laces, just like the kids breaking curfew on the street corner.

“Hey.  Sorry I got so fucking delayed.  I blundered into a dinner invitation I couldn’t refuse, and then me and half of Tijuana were trying to cross the border.”  Grinning ruefully, he slings his backpack over a shoulder and marches right up to me.  “It’s great to see you again.”

“Yeah, I – I’m, um…”  Up close I notice he shaved, if only around his panhandle sideburns and the royale beneath his bottom lip.  I turn away in shyness, fumbling with the door.

His gaze darts around the motel room, which is a cave of cheap almost-black veneer.  The few pieces of furniture have a similarly dark finish and seem to protrude from the walls.  A bolted-down TV faces the solitary queen-sized bed.  The bathroom door is halfway open, revealing a claw-foot tub ringed with a grimy shower curtain.  He drops his backpack on the shag carpet.  “Home sweet home, huh?”

I haven’t thought of it in those terms.  “I guess so.”

Nick is pointing at the tattered novel in my hand. “Since when were you a Bukowski fan?”

“Since I got this book for free.”

That makes him laugh.  “You couldn’t pay me to be a Bukowski fan!”  I expect him to keep chuckling, but the mirth blows through him like a gust of wind.

I settle on the edge of the bed, since there’s nowhere else to sit.  “How did it go today? Did you find your research assistant?”

“Everything went great, except the part about the research assistant.”  Nick sits down next to me, almost tipping us into each other.  It’s not a very good mattress.  “Hercules hooked me up with a friend of his who teaches at the COLEF – ”

“Colef?”

“Sorry.  Colegio de la Frontera Norte.  Everybody just calls it the COLEF for short.  Anyway, his professor friend was really cool.  But the candidates this dude was pimping, shit…”  He stretches out the word, sheeeee-it.  “I interviewed three grad students, and none of them was hungry for it.  They were all take-it-or-leave-it, basically.”

I watch my left Nike and his right Vans touch as we sit splay-legged, fighting the tilt toward each other.  “I bet they didn’t need the money.”

“Bingo.  They’re from well-off families – most Mexican grad students are – and they take money for granted.  Making some extra on the side doesn’t really interest them, not for somebody else’s dissertation.  I even offered to pay them in dollars instead of pesos.  It was, like, check for a goddamn pulse.”

The look on his face tells me it’s time to change the subject.  “So are we really going to spend the weekend in LA?”

Nick immediately brightens.  “Why not?  That way you can crash at my place.  Save you some money you don’t have.”  He pauses for a moment, checking if I’m okay with that.  “I figure we can take it easy tomorrow, maybe see the sights on campus.  Then we can go camping Tuesday.  I’ll drive you back down afterward – hey, are those job applications?”

His weight vanishes from the bed so suddenly that I almost tip over in the opposite direction. “Yeah,” I sigh, rebalancing myself.  “I went down to Horton Plaza today.  Some stores gave me applications, even though they’re not hiring right now.”

He’s flipping through the sheaf of applications, a blur of corporate logos and my neat block printing and lots of white space.  Something is rearranging the sharp angles and flat planes of his face.  I feel a jolt when I realize what it is – disgust.  He quickly hides away the emotion, but not before it pierces me.  He’s disgusted.

“What is it?” I ask in alarm.

Nick begins pacing, wearing footprints into the shag.  “I thought you were at least making up an employment history, not leaving it blank.  Filling in the years since you graduated from high school. You know, like…most recently you worked as Saman’s personal assistant in Kansas City, and prior to that you were a secretary in Indianapolis, and whatever.  We can work on it – ”

“But Nick, that’s lying!  You can’t lie on a job application.  They call your previous employers and ask about you.”

“Not all the time, and not if you get creative.  Obviously they can’t call Saman because you’re getting divorced from him, and that secretary job back in Indianapolis, the company went out of business.  See how easy it comes together?”

“If I lie…”  My hands are tying themselves into knots in my lap.  “Maybe no one else will know, but I will.  I’ll always know.  I have to be honest for me.”

“Nooshin.”

I look up and see Nick and most of the cave-dark motel room at the same time.  My right eye is jerking almost sideways in its socket.  “What?”

“You don’t have Farsi on here as a language.”  He flips past the big red bulls-eye of the Target application, checking the others.  “Not on any of them.”

“Well, it says you have to be fluent, and I’m not very good at reading it – ”

“Jesus fucking Christ.  Of course you’re fluent in Farsi!  And you need to put Spanish on here too.  You speak some Spanish, right?  That’s the other national language.  Employers eat that Spanish-speaking shit up.”  Nick towers over me, the applications seized in one hand, the other a balled-up fist.  “There are millions of unemployed Californians looking for a job just like you.  You need every advantage you can get.  I know being 100% honest is important to you, but that’s a good way to starve to death.  I mean, dude – do you want to get out of this shithole or not?”

“Of course I want to get out of here!  Do you think this is what I want?  I’m trying, Nick.  I’m trying the hardest I can…”  My voice is sinking through me and into the floor.

His Vans move a step closer.  “Hey.  Sorry.  I didn’t mean to get pissed at you.  I mean, I’m not pissed at you.  I was just trying to, uh…”

Nick seems to hang in the murk, waiting for me to release him.  Out in the parking lot a car is trying to start and failing.  The unmistakable sounds of sex begin drifting through the wall – a bed’s rhythmic creaking, a man’s grunts, a woman’s silence.  My watch says it’s time for another sleepless night.  Suddenly I’m so tired of holding it together that I’m falling apart.  This is me, a girl shattering into pieces.  This is me this is me this is me.