"Kool Brother Rat," a semi-autobiographical teen tale, appeared in the indy print mag "Write Side Up" in January, 2007 but does not live online. Contains subterranean subversion, big brother worship, unibrow blockheaded bullies shaking kids down for pocket change, teens working on Camaros, Brady Bunch and Gloria Steinem references, older woman lust, and a smack of The Wonder Years. Carthay and J.B. alums, you will relate.

Kool Brother Rat

How cool, at thirteen, was my cool big brother, dubbed “Kool King Rat” by his cool-kid friends for his lucrative business selling Kool cigarettes behind the boys’ bathroom a la shrewd King Rat of the prison camp film? So cool that when he and his friends played department store ditch in the May Company, my bro had the brass to hide in a pallet of pillows near the basement loading dock where he was nabbed – but not before setting the all-time record for longest time hiding without being found, mind you – by a six-foot-four-inch security guard with a handlebar `stache and an Eastwood sneer who said these very words as he kicked my bro out with a pointed cowboy boot to the butt: “If you ever set foot in my shop again, I’ll kick your sweet ass back to Kalamazoo!” This was L.A. and no one knew where Kalamazoo was, but “I’ll kick your sweet ass back to Kalamazoo!” became the catch-phrase for my cool big bro and his friends that year.

How undeniably cool was my bro at thirteen? So cool that he personally invented rooftop mountaineering, the object of which was to climb atop Jerry Weinberg’s house at one end of the block and cross all the way to the Bartletts’ house at the other end without setting foot on the ground. To do this you had to step or jump from rooftop to rooftop, or swing yourself across from a tree-branch. Legend had it that my brother and Eddie Elsbree had spied Mr. Krieger, the eighth grade math teacher, smoking grass in his yard while sitting cross-legged and listening to Dylan.

How supremely cool was my bro at thirteen? So cool that he rigged a triple spy-mirror system which allowed him to look out our bedroom door, down the hall, and into our parents’ room to watch The Tonight Show long after bedtime. He’d made a rudimentary listening device with an amplifier and a lamp shade, and was able to enjoy three months’ worth of Johnny Carson’s monologues until Dad discovered the mirrors while dancing with Mom in his Valentine boxers. Hiii-yo!

How cool, in contrast, wasn’t I at thirteen? So uncool that I had earned an “excellent” in citizenship in every grade from first through seventh, and was recklessly heading for the honor roll with a month left in eighth grade. So uncool that when my mom complained to our next door neighbor over coffee that kids these days were so out of control she had sprouted a patch of premature gray, she hastened to pat my head and add, “I don’t mean you of course, honey,” as she took sugar from the bowl I was holding like a proper English butler. I was so uncool that when a bunch of us went to a birthday sleepover at the apartment of Rick De Leon, the undisputed hellion king of our old elementary school, I was one of the kids too scared to follow Rick down into the excavated construction site at the corner after midnight, and then had to spend half the night listening to Rick and Marcus Burgess talking about how cool–“Cool!”–it had been to climb up onto the steam shovel in the dark of night. How cool, in short, was I not at thirteen? So painfully uncool that I would have tried anything, with childhood fading, to claim my birthright as a red-blooded, hell-raising, All-American bad boy in the storied tradition of my cool big brother and his cigarette-sneaking, Playboy-peeking, shoplifting, rock-throwing, trespassing pals.

But first I needed a partner in crime. The logical choice was my best friend, Morty, who had always been my right hand man. When I had decided to start a humor magazine in the mold of Mad in sixth grade, Morty had created a teacher-baiting cartoon character named RatPuss who used mind control to make the principal’s hair fall out; we got detention when a copy found its way into the hands of our balding principal. And when I launched an I Hate The Brady Bunch anti-fan club at the start of eighth grade, it was Morty who had put together an ironic party featuring Monkees records, Cheese Whiz on Wonder Bread, Jello, and a mandatory dress code of bell bottoms and vests. The party–ironically–only harmed my stunted rep for coolness when two girls who didn’t get the joke spread tales at school of my “really neat” Brady Bunch party. No matter: Morty was my man.

“But why?” Morty asked, peering through black horned rims as I explained rooftop mountaineering. “I don’t get it.”

“What’s to get, man?

“The angle, Steiny, the ironic perspective. What are you after? A subversive glimpse into the banal private lives of the middle class? Something Warholesque, perhaps?” Uh oh. Morty was getting way too excited. He was rubbing his palms together just like he had when he got the idea of us running laps in P.E. shackled at the ankles by chains; naturally his cherished irony was lost on our Neanderthal gym coach, who took an instant and enduring dislike to the two of us which meant nothing to Morty but meant something to me, since it cost me any shot at playing in the Mission Bell football game. “Maybe we should take pictures of the yards from the rooftops, all those manicured little yards with their identical green lawns, and make a collage! Or drop Campbell’s soup cans into the yards!”

“Morty, you don’t get this! There’s nothing fancy about it. It’s just good old American boy stuff. Huck Finn stuff.”

“Huck Finn boy stuff?” Morty squinted. He really was trying to understand.

“Yes, Morty. Jesus, man, it’s a rite of passage. We’re supposed to do stuff like this.”

“Like Huck Finn?”

“Exactly! That’s exactly what we’re supposed to do. C’mon, man, it’ll grow hair on your chest.” I was not thinking of chest hair, however, but the precocious goatee Kool King Rat had grown at thirteen.

Morty cocked his head and grinned. The idea evidently struck him as so straight over-the-top that it went beyond irony into a whole new realm of cool. “Alright. I’ll do it! I’ll do your Huck Finn boy stuff!” So we started down the block towards Jerry Weinberg’s house. My brother was across the street, shooting the breeze with Ollie Wirtz and a couple other guys who were working under the hood of Ollie’s Camaro. He was looking our way, but Morty and I were as invisible to him as we always had been. Fine. Further down the block, Mrs. Jordan, whose pretty face and soft curves had of late begun to stir something wiggly in me, was looking for her lost cat in the bushes. Across the street, Susie Margolis was making drip candles in the shade of her front porch. Did I say Susie? I mean, Susie! Susie! The angel-faced brainiac whom we had all sensed throughout elementary school was years ahead of us in knowledge and wisdom, and whose Mona Lisa smile seemed to assure us that we shouldn’t worry so much about our future in the adult world, because she had seen it, and it wasn’t that bad. Susie! Mon cherie amour! Whose long brown hair and oversized wire-frames made her look like a little Gloria Steinem (who, my brother had told me in a conspiratorial whisper at the dinner table, was not just a big women’s libber, but a genuine former Playboy bunny!). Yes, Susie! Who had walked the block for McGovern, made her own tie-dyed shirts, and, most important of all, had given me hope for everlasting happiness by saying recently, “Maybe you’re not such a Neanderthal after all, Steinmetz,” after looking at my black magic peace sign during art class (she didn’t know it was the Mercedes emblem). Ah, Susie. If she knew of the daring exploits I was about to attempt–well, like all girls she was a mystery to me; but I guess I supposed she’d think I was cool.

We looked around as we reached the corner, then crept around to the alley behind Jerry Weinberg’s house. The back fence had a three-foot high masonry bottom topped by wood-framed corrugated plastic. Morty hummed the Mission Impossible theme and we both cracked up. Then we climbed to the top of the fence, and from there were able to get our arms over a corner of the garage and lift ourselves up, though it took every ounce of Gumby-armed Morty’s strength to do it. “You made it!” I told him. He made an elaborate comic pantomime like a commando to indicate our next move, but his wild permed hair, thick glasses, and deadpan expression only made me laugh more. “Stainers!” I cried. Stainers, a sort of purplish-reddish inedible berry that were great for ... staining. Dozens had fallen on the garage. I gathered a handful and crept to the edge of Jerry’s garage and knelt behind the backboard of the basketball set up. I took dead aim at Jerry’s room and–Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! The white walls surrounding his window were now decorated with dozens of purplish starbursts.

“It’s like, a tie-dyed house,” Morty marveled.

“Or that psychedelic poster on my brother’s wall,” I grinned.

The next house over was that of Mr. Kleinfeld, an infamous grouch with a grudge against our family. He always refused to give out candy on Halloween, and my big brother had fixed him one year with textbook execution of the old flaming paper bag full o’ mud trick. So I had to get out of there fast. The problem was, there was a several-foot gap between the Weinberg’s house and the Kleinfeld’s addition.

“Looks like Snake River Canyon,” Morty murmured, looking down at the concrete path far below. We sized up the jump. With a running start, if we planted our feet on the adobe tile on the edge of the Kleinfelds’ addition, we should be able to make the jump with a foot or two to spare. I was scared, I admit–which gave me a thrill as I charged the edge of the garage and flew a few feet in the air. I cleared the edge by an inch, landed in a clump, and looked back at Morty, who seemed a mile away from me now. Morty measured the jump in his mind, then without hesitation took three long strides and launched himself from the edge of the roof with one long arm stretched out like Astaire leaping (Morty had, in fact, taken ballroom dance, and this had given him grace as well as something less desirable–just cause to be punched in the belly by an eighth grade bully). Morty seemed weightless as he hung in the air like Dr. J; he looked, indeed, as if he might float up into the sky like Peter Pan (though he looked more like Pan’s nightshirted John with his thick black-framed glasses). As he sailed through the air–weightless, it seemed–a smile stretched his lips, and his long permed hair flapped in the breeze like Dumbo’s ears; when he came down at last, he spread his arms like a ski jumper landing, then bowed to me with a flourish. “Let’s push on, Robin,” said Morty as I stared at him with my mouth agape.

The next garage over was too far to jump; but I knew from the bedtime lore passed down by my big brother that there was a conveniently situated jacaranda tree spanning the gap. I reached for a friendly branch and swung onto a second branch situated just above the next garage; it snapped, and I tumbled onto the garage–along with a cat which fell into my lap with a shriek.

“You found Pepper!” cried Mrs. Jordan from down below. I had? I had!

“Yes, Mrs. Jordan! I found your cat!”

Mrs. Jordan looked more stirring than ever in her soft white blouse, her blue eyes glowing with joy. She leaned a ladder against the garage, and I clambered down with her scared little kitty. “What did big bad kitty do to you?” purred Mrs. Jordan as I handed Pepper down. Some big bad kitty had taken a bite out of Pepper’s flank, evidently, and Pepper had taken refuge in the tree. “I don’t know how to repay you,” Mrs. Jordan told me. I was just thirteen, and I had no idea either. But I learned the answer that night, when she brought a batch of homemade brownies to our door.

“Your little man’s quite the hero,” she told my mom. “Another gold star for Mr. Good Boy,” sneered my eleven year-old sister. I took a quick glance at my big brother, fearing he had heard, dreading the roll of disappointed eyes that would confirm my lingering lack of cool; ah, but he was just reading by the fire–a purloined copy of Playboy behind the covers of his chemistry book, no doubt–so I was spared. The brownies, of course, were yummy, and the unexpected proximity to the lilac-scented Mrs. Jordan was intoxicating–but I had set out to be a daring rogue, more cat burglar than cat-saver, and had failed miserably. I needed to act quickly to prove I was no Boy Scout–to earn, if you will, my merit badge in bad behavior.

So I talked Morty out of a trip to Hollywood to buy the new Fantastic Four that weekend, and talked him into a trip to the neighborhood coffee shop to duplicate some of the restaurant pranks my big brother had often told me about. The first, a mere warm-up, was a gag on the waitress. The coffee shop featured a huge breakfast special: eggs, hashed browns, sausages, toast, and juice for a buck-sixty-nine. When the waitress, a wax-faced gum-cracker named Betty, asked, “What’ll it be?”, I, like my brother before me, said: “Two breakfast specials, please.”

She jotted it down and turned to Morty. “How `bout you, hon?”

Uh oh. This was wrong. She was supposed to turn to go, and then Morty was supposed to call her back and say, “Excuse me, miss. I’ll have two breakfast specials, too.” Then she was supposed to be shocked. She hadn’t heard right. “Excuse me, miss. I said I’ll have two breakfast specials.”

“And I heard you,” she snapped. “Two breakfast specials.” She turned once more to Morty. “What’s yours?”

“Uh, I’ll just have some toast, please.” And off she went.

“Great joke,” said Morty, rolling his eyes. “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s get on with it.” We discreetly eased ourselves into some empty booths nearby, and, well, adjusted things. Then we sat back down, I in front of two huge plates of food, Morty in front of a slice of toasted white bread. I made sure the waitress wasn’t looking, then slid one of the plates across the table to Morty. I bowed my head to eat and heard a sweet familiar voice saying, “You may be due for another upward classification, Steinmetz. Your comment about The Old Man And The Sea Friday was surprisingly perceptive.” It was? I knew I had made a wisecrack in English the day before that had fallen flat, and that the teacher, deluded perhaps by the desperate desire to see an eighth grade boy take literature seriously, had misinterpreted it as a profundity; apparently Susie had, too. “Yes,” she said, sizing me up, “you definitely need to be reclassified as a Cro-Magnon, Steinmetz, with full Modern Man status maybe a year away.” “Cool,” I smiled, my mouth extruding scrambled egg. I stared up at the beneficently smiling Susie, and glanced at her mom and dad, both of whom wore thin wire frames like Susie, and smiled the same knowing smile as she.

“What kind of goddess do you have to be,” I asked Morty as Susie and her parents seated themselves, “to stop and talk to kids– with your parents right there?”

“It is a wonder,” he said. We stole a long look at Susie. She was chatting with her parents, who were listening intently and nodding their heads as if she were their equal. “Her dad’s an English teacher,” said Morty, as if to explain her unnatural comfort level with her parents. “And her mom plays classical piano.”

“She’s an only child,” I mused. “Maybe they feel sorry for her, like they’ve got to listen to her.” We gazed at Susie again. She said something with a grin, and her father threw his head back and laughed. Man, he was putting an act on for her. He shook the salt shaker. The cap, which I had loosened, fell off, and all the salt poured onto his eggs. Unfortunately, that idiot Morty gave out a shriek, and Susie looked back and saw us watching with open mouths. We knew Susie wouldn’t rat us out–she was a kid after all–but she stopped by our booth on her way out to gracefully trace a little circle on my scrambled eggs with a mouth-moistened finger, saying, with movie star cool: “On second thought, Steinmetz, you’re just a Homo Erectus ... at best.” Morty raised his head like a turtle peeking out of its shell; he liked Susie a lot, and no doubt felt embarrassed. “Et tu, Mor-tay?” Susie frowned, and Morty’s head sank beneath her judgment. Susie raised her head up like a proud pony and led her parents out the door.

One more egg laid on the road to true cool. So like Kool King Rat of a few years before, I went behind the thick bushes in the back of our yard to stimulate my thoughts with tobacco– my first cigarette. My first puff of Dad’s Kools. And my first volcanic cough, raising a startled gasp from the secluded spot on the other side of the bushes. It was a girl who had been in the arms of my brother, who gave me his “Thanks a lot, Beaver” stare as the girl straightened her sweater. Fine, lesson learned: Kools were the pits. “I’m goin’a Morty’s,” I muttered as the girl settled back into the weathered love seat. Mrs. Jordan hailed me as I walked past her house. “Oh, Bobby! I heard you won an award at school!” Ollie Wirtz, who’d stood lookout years before while Kool King Rat sold smokes in the schoolyard, looked up from under the hood of his Camaro. I smiled at Mrs. Jordan as if I just hadn’t heard. “What’d you win, Bobby?” she trilled. I shrugged as if I didn’t speak English. “Wha’d you win, kid?” Ollie said with a gleam. I ignored him too and walked on a bit. “The best essay award,” said Mr. Krieger, the math teacher, who was watering his lawn. I lowered my head and hastened my pace. “And the good citizenship medal!” added Mr. Krieger, may he rot in hell. My cheeks flushed at Ollie’s snicker as I hurried away ... coolly hurried.

“Morty,” I pleaded, “it’s time to get real.” I told him all about my latest brainstorm. His negativity was a kick to the gut. “But I don’t want to go shoplifting,” he said, removing my grip from his scarecrow arm. “Why not!” I asked. “I don’t know, Steiny. It’s just too non-ironic, I guess.” I looked hard into his eyes. “And I guess I’m just tired of Huck Finn boy stuff.” “Only the roof climbing was Huck Finn stuff, Morty!” I tried to explain how the restaurant pranks were something else entirely, and that shoplifting was a whole new realm of excitement that we owed it to ourselves to try. “You’ve gotta get beyond categories, Morty. Forget whether it’s Huck Finn stuff, or Marvel Comics stuff, or whatever–just do it because you’ve gotta do it, because it’s your destiny to do it.” But he was in his stubborn mood, and it’s no use reasoning with Morty in his stubborn mood. So he rode off on his Sting Ray, and I raced off on mine to Mike De Leon’s apartment.

Mike’s mom, a weathered Southern belle, greeted me at the door as if I were royalty. She lived alone with Mike and had her hands full with him, and I knew she considered me a good influence on him. “Oh, Mi–key!” she trilled. “It’s Bobby Stein-metz!” All the curtains in the living room were drawn, and the only light came from Divorce Court on the TV. Mike stepped into the room like a prisoner summoned by the warden, and stood there with his hands crossed before him. “Hi,” he said; he didn’t actually say “hi,” but slowly raised one eyebrow, which was his way of saying “hi.” “Hi,” I said (out loud). Mike raised one side of his mouth in an Elvis sneer. The thing about Mike was, he never raised both eyebrows at once, or both sides of his mouth at once to smile. There was always something off-center about him, some suggestion that he, like Susie Margolis, knew things beyond his years, but that the things he knew were things I wouldn’t want to know. “Want to go do stuff?” I asked. He thought about it for a moment, then pursed his lips and nodded. His mother had been standing between us with her hands clasped, anxiously following our exchange; but the uncertainty of our plan alarmed her, and she blurted, “Do what stuff, Bobby! What stuff?” “Just ride our bikes,” I shrugged, glancing at Mike, who nodded to indicate I’d done well. “Will you be needing any milk from the store, Mother?” Mike asked. His mom always said she was raising Mike to be a proper Southern gentleman, but she wasn’t buying that crap. “Just be home by supper,” she said tartly. Then she buttoned the top three buttons of Mike’s shirt and whispered something into his ear, and gave the ear a tug that made Mike wince.

“What’s up?” Mike asked as we rode our bikes down the street. He was flying from the house.

“I wanna go shoplifting,” I said. “Whoa,” said Mike, skidding to a stop. “You wanna lift?” Mike and I had been casual friends for a few years because we both liked regular boy stuff like tackle football and bike racing, but there was a gulf between us because I never went along with his wilder schemes. “Yeah,” I said. Mike’s blue eyes gleamed. “Well alright, Steinmetz! Follow me.” We rode our bikes to Pico Boulevard and parked them around the corner from the Dime Store. I’d been going there for years to buy baseball cards. “No need to pay today,” I joked. “You’re right about that, Steiny boy,” said Mike. There was a back door opening onto the parking lot, and a front door to the street. The register was by the back door, and since it was Sunday, there was a mob of kids buying candy and comics. Mike and I entered separately, and then, per his plan, we stood on opposite sides of the mob. Mike had said he’d start a diversion, but I was so shocked when he shoved a skinny kid with glasses that I just stood there while the woman behind the register watched events unfold: the shoved kid said “Hey!” with some trepidation, then Mike said “Sorry man, accident,” and started brushing off the shoved kid’s shirt; and he had the presence of mind to shoot me a look to remind me to do my job–he was a natural born leader, like a good quarterback. So I found my nerve and grabbed a handful of packs of baseball cards, and dropped my hand to my side and walked out, and kept walking without looking back until I reached our bikes around the corner. I rode as fast as I could all the way to the 76 Station two blocks down. Mike met me there next to the dumpster a few minutes later. “Man, that was cool!” I said, my heart still pounding from the excitement. Mike shook his head pitifully. I believe he agreed it was cool, but felt it was against his code to say so; or, maybe, shoplifting had just became a job to him. Whatever the reason, he just said: “Wha’d you get?” I showed him the five packs of cards I’d swiped, and told him I was dying to open them. He grabbed my arm. “Don’t,” he said. “We’ll sell `em and split the money.” Sell `em? Selling baseball cards was a concept I’d never heard of. Baseball cards were for gazing at, for putting in order, for loving; but selling? Never.

“What do you want to do now?” I sighed.

“Let’s go over to the school. There’s something there that’ll blow your mind.”

John Burroughs Junior High was, in a sense, the most well-known school in the country because TV producers used a stock shot of its brick facade to establish a school setting in every show from Room 222 to, yes, The Brady Bunch. I followed Mike on bike to the side of the school. We hid our bikes behind some bushes and edged along the side of the building behind the bushes. “You can’t tell anybody,” Mike said, and I knew I’d better not. Mike removed a grill from the wall that vented the crawl space beneath the school. He climbed feet-first halfway through and signaled me to follow. I lowered myself after him and–whoa. There was the glow of a bunch of candles, and a bunch of guys were sitting on crates playing cards. They were a rogue’s gallery of all the guys who used to get in trouble in elementary school. There were Rafi and Dirk Nimsky, oldest of the four Nimsky brothers, unibrow blockheaded bullies who were two years apart in age and who looked like an evil version of Russian nesting dolls when they lined up against the chain link fence in the playground waiting to shake down kids for pocket change; Marcus Burgess, a tall hyper-kinetic blond scarecrow who always got Fs and who was constantly suspended for reasons unknown; and Richard Horowitz, who reportedly bragged about torturing cats with pen knives, though no one knew if he really did. “Whoa,” I said. “What is this, Club Fire Trap?” I was trying to warn them in a humorous way that they could burn the school down–there must have been two dozen candles loosely set in melted wax atop crates. They looked up at me with expressions ranging from hostile to blank, and Mike assured them: “He’s cool. We were just lifting stuff at the Dime Store. Show `em what you kiped, Steiny.” So I placed the five packs of baseball cards on the crate they were using as a card table. They fingered the unopened packs like jewelers. “Hey,” I said, “it’s like the Artful Dodger down here, like that scene in Oliver where they go through the stolen stuff.”

Rafi Nimsky winced. “You saw Oliver?”

“No! I mean, a few scenes. I had to. My family went. You know how it is with family dragging you around, right? And hey, you’re right, man, it’s a really wimpy flick; but the cool thing is, all it is is just a fluffy Hollywood version of a really cool story by Dickens–Oliver Twist.” They were all wincing now, as if some stench was coming from me.

“Oliver Twist?” This time Marcus Burgess was peering at me.

“Yeah. I know it sounds like boring school stuff, but it was a really cool, subversive story about these pickpockets in London.” I thought I saw a glimmer of interest when I said “pickpockets,” so I kept going. “It was written by the same author-guy that wrote A Christmas Carol, which also had a great scene about thieves in London, and they all met in a dark cave or something–like this place–and they traded all the stuff they stole.” They traded glances, and I added, “They were drinking booze in that scene, too. It was cool.”

“You can be our librarian,” Richard Horowitz chortled, and Mike asked me to sit down: “Shut up and sit down,” was how he put it. So I sat down and decided to shut up and soak up the atmosphere. I’d always wondered what guys like this talked about among themselves. I sat on a crate while they played cards and smoked cigarettes, and no one said anything for quite some time. Finally Dirk Nimsky said to me, “You should have swiped some comics–then we could read `em.”

“Maybe next time,” I said. “Man, it was great. Mike created a diversion, and I was able to swipe these packs and sneak out.”

They weren’t impressed. “You should’ve swiped something we could sell,” Rafi Nimsky said. So Mike reached into the pocket of his black leather jacket and laid a shiny golden watch on the card table. It still had the price tag from the Dime Store on it. “Twenty bucks,” said Rafi with approval. Mike’s accomplishment and dramatic flair made me think of humming the song “Leader Of The Pack,” but I decided to keep my mouth shut.

“Right on,” said Richard Horowitz.

“For sure,” I said, which made Rafi grimace. “So, what do you guys do down here?” It was a dumb question, since I was seeing what they did down there; but I was getting sick of the silence.

“We read library books,” Richard Horowitz chortled.

“Well, it’s righteous down here,” I said. They went back to their cards. “Hey,” I said, “this is pretty ironic, all this talk about libraries, and we’re under the damned library right now!”

They all ignored that, except for Rafi Nimsky, who blew smoke near my face.

“This sure is subversive,” I said, “doing all these things you can’t do in school, like smoking and playing cards–right underneath the school.”

Marcus Burgess glared at me. “You know, we all know you think you’re really smart with your big words and all, but we all know subversive means underground, so stuff it.”

“I don’t think I’m smart,” I said. “I hate school. I hate algebra, and I hate the fascist way they teach history, and the gym teachers are totally fascist. Well, English is alright, I guess, at least when you get into Huck Finn and all his cutting up, and all that Dickens stuff about thieves and pickpockets and all–that’s pretty cool.” They didn’t even hear the last thing I’d said. They’d all turned away from me, and it was obvious they’d decided I didn’t exist. So I decided to just sit there and let them do the talking; but after about fifteen minutes during which there was no conversation except for a few words about what they would steal next, and Rafi saying, “The new Captain Crunch commercial stinks,” I nodded at Mike, who ignored me, and slunk away, knowing Mike would probably never make eye contact with me in school again.

“Your brother wants to see you,” my mom said that night. That made my heart leap. Ever since he had moved out of our bedroom and into the backyard playroom in tenth grade, the only times I saw him were the occasional family meal and when his TV was broken. And now that he was going away to college, the times would be fewer still.

“Like them?” he smiled. He’d noticed that I was staring at his new wire frames.

“Yeah! Definitely. Now all the people I like best wear glasses. Morty, Susie, and you. You look like John Boy Walton.”

“That’s strange,” he said, “since you’re the writer in the family. C’mere.” He reached for a stack of papers he’d pulled from his closet while packing. “It’s my copy of the mag you and Morty did in sixth grade. Damn, it’s funny! Autograph it for me?”

It was the most sentimental I’d seen him in all my thirteen years, but I guess you only go off to college once. “Sure!” I said. “Hey, speaking of stories, I’ve been up to some interesting stuff lately.” I told him about the rooftop mountaineering, and the accidental rescue of Mrs. Jordan’s cat, and the salt shaken all over Susie’s dad’s eggs. He looked at me with an expression which, I knew from long experience, meant bemused disapproval. “Isn’t that sort of a waste of time?” he said. Waste of time? Waste of time? Was this the guy whose footsteps I’d followed up onto those dangerous rooftops? Weren’t those his pranks I had pulled off with perfect fidelity, costing me Susie’s approval? Did I know this guy, this long, lean impersonator of my once-cool big brother? Who was this guy?

“Got a surprise,” this guy said.

“Yeah?” I said coldly. “What?” He flipped the tickets down on the desk. Monterey Jazz Fest, me and him, a three-day stop on his way up to college. “Hm, that’s alright,” I said, not knowing anything about jazz except that my big brother liked it, and that it was jazz sax wafting from his backyard room when his twelfth grade friends would stay past midnight playing poker and darts. “Yeah–that’s alright.” Three-hundred miles up the coast in his convertible two-seater, then two days in San Francisco. “Very alright.” Damn, I was giving in easy. `Waste of time,’ he’d said. `Waste of time.’ I fought to stay cool. Five days together, just me and my bro, cruising in the sunshine, blasting the radio, shooting the breeze–who knew what? “Yeah, that’s alright, bro–very alright. All right! All ... riiiight!”