Free This Is Where We Live by Janelle Brown Page A

All these years on, Jeremy still felt a debt of gratitude to his old college friend for so trustingly handing him a job for which he was probably completely unqualified despite two years of figurative drawing courses in college. Jeremy had arrived back in LA bruised and gun-shy from the demise of This Invisible Spot; it had taken nearly two years to finally gather the initiative to form a new band, and this job had been the patch that filled the hole where the music had been. These days, of course, it patched the hole where the money wasn’t yet. Besides, who else but Edgar would put up with Jeremy’s band practice schedules, his somewhat erratic work ethic, his habit of scribbling down music fragments when he should have been designing decals? Jeremy often felt guilty knowing that he would eventually reward his friend’s loyalty by quitting this job when his band finally made it big. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to take full advantage while he could.
    Edgar rocked in his chair. “What if I took you out to lunch at Burrito King? Would that make you feel appreciated?”
    “Can’t,” Jeremy said. “Having lunch with my dad.”
    “Fun times.” Edgar lifted his legs and braced them against Jeremy’s desk, rumpling a pile of sketches. “Hey, is everything OK? Any reason you’re asking for another raise?”
    Jeremy paused, resisting the temptation to fill Edgar in on the current crisis at home. Not today, he decided. He didn’t want to be the honored guest at anybody else’s pity party. “No,” he said. “Nothing to get alarmed about.”
    “Whatever you say, my friend.” Edgar dropped his legs and leaned in, peering over Jeremy’s shoulder at the image on his computer monitor. “Hey, that’s a bit rudimentary for a genius, don’t you think? Stick people?”
    “It’s an ironic commentary on the American Dream.”
    “I thought we agreed the winter line was supposed to have an organic theme. Trees, birds, wildflowers, polar bears, that kind of stuff.”
    “Times are changing,” Jeremy said. “No one gives a damn about polar bears anymore.” But he hit the delete button, sending the stick family into trash-bin purgatory, before grabbing his wallet and heading out into the hot August noon to face his father.
    Jeremy had never known his father to hold down an actual job; certainly, not one that required him to get up at a certain hour, put on a tie, or go to an office. “Instead of a vocation,” Max Munger liked to say, “I prefer a vacation.” Over the last forty years, Max had spent time as a screenwriter, a chef on the yacht of a Russian robber baron, an importer of Balinese furniture, a pot farmer, the kept husband of a Norwegian heiress, and a member of the Rolling Stones’s entourage. He had never owned a home, although he had managed to father four children by three different wives in two different countries. At age sixty-one, he still wore the same military surplus army jacket that he had worn throughout the 1970s, now trendy with kids a third of his age, many of whom he still socialized with. His face was run across with crevasses, his watery blue eyes buried deep inside a canyon that had lodged itself between hairy eyebrows and bony cheeks. He peered out opaquely from there, and sometimes it was impossible to tell whether he was quietly judging the world around him or whether he was just so stoned he wasn’t paying attention.
    Max stuck out among the lunch crowd at this West Hollywood bistro, which primarily consisted of actresses sipping Arnold Palmers and frazzled production assistants wolfing down hamburgers between phone calls. The French Bistro was neither French nor a bistro, just a brunch joint with chopped salads and egg-white omelets. The aluminum tables on the covered patio were positioned exactly four feet away from a major east-west thoroughfare, a four-lane highway down which diesel buses and Navigators and Priuses hurtled at top speeds.
    Anyone who dared to sit at these