Jon Sindell copyright 2008
This is a favorite story in part because of its social commentary. Your comments, as always, are most welcome.
"Lawrence"
In Lawrence’s soft smile were sculpted the loving acceptance of parents resigned to a slow-thinking son, and the loving support of a brilliant big sister who’d passed up the chance to live with college friends to guide her one-year-younger brother through one last perilous year of high school.
It had always been thus. Walking to school on Lawrence’s first day of first grade, Mercy had cheered her brother with the promise of a flying saucer at recess. Smiling sweetly to the classmates nearest him as the kids tromped giddy and nervous out to the playground, Lawrence tumbled out the news that his sister was bringing a spaceship to him–and they could ride on it! Jasmine–tall, pretty, and bursting with confidence–tittered at Lawrence when Mercy arrived with a saucer-shaped cookie; a pair of tentative girls behind Jasmine stood like wee ladies-in-waiting, observing the scene with slowly dawning grins. Mercy comprehended her brother’s plight and marched back to the cafeteria to spend her allowance plus two borrowed bucks on flying saucers for all three girls. When she returned, the girls were perched atop the monkey bars while Lawrence munched below them and gazed up as if they were high wire angels. When the tribute cookies were eaten and the sated angels floated down to ground, Mercy extended her arms into Buzz Lightyear wings and led the three girls, with Lawrence in the rear, on a soaring, banking, careening space caravan to the outer reaches of the little kids’ yard, the other kids gaping with envy and awe. The three girls adopted Lawrence that day, and kept him all year.
Lawrence was Mercy’s living doll, and she cherished him suchly. In their yard, at the park, at the playground he was her wind-up doll. She’d crank the oversized key in his back and send him on a tottering, high-stepping march towards thorny bushes, hard benches, the model boat pond, a wheeling, snarling frenzy of dogs, or the basketball court where the rough kids played, she chasing after to alter his course with a turn of his shoulders to avoid disaster. Slowly the game evolved: How close to the hazard before she would turn him? Close, very close, and he never slowed and never shed character, and she never failed to turn him at the last. Indoors he was her dress-up doll: a pirate, Cowboy Woody, Gandalf, Mulan. In her precocious fourth grade psychology phase, she dressed him in their mother’s white nightgown and studied his reaction with notepad in hand: “It’s so comfortable, Mercy. I feel like a queen!” The sweetness of his smile overwhelmed her clinical curiosity and the mischievous impulse which it disguised. She flung the notepad onto the floor and pulled the nightgown up over his head. “I’ll get you some king clothes, Laurie, complete with a crown.” She kissed the squeaky-clean hair atop his head. Never again did she mess with his mind.
Instead she was straight with him, straight with him always. “Is Santa Claus real?” he asked her at eight. She shook her head no, and he smiled like a scientist who’s just had a rebel theory confirmed. Because she was straight, his trust in her grew. “Where do babies come from, Merse?” he asked at age nine. She pulled the anatomy book from the reference shelf and showed him a womb in all its wondrous intricacy. He furrowed his brow and spent hours sketching a longitudinal section of the uterus and ovaries with such faithful detail that his impressed teacher posted his “smiling cobra” on the classroom wall. Two days later Lawrence asked, “How do the babies get in there, Mercy?” She showed him the page of male anatomy. “I’ve got those!” “Do you?” she deadpanned, forgetting his lack of irony until she saw him innocently reaching for his zipper. “Laurie, I’m joking! Of course you’ve got those.” “So you don’t want to see them?” he rejoined, confused by her uncharacteristic rejection of his offer to share. Ennobled by a sudden appreciation for the enormity of her role, Mercy intoned in her best grown-up voice, “No, Laurie, you don’t show `em to anyone. They’re your own private jewels.”
“Mmm, jewels,” he drawled like Homer Simpson. Then he stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth and set to drawing a cross-section of male gonads, which he decorated with
ruby-red and emerald-green glitter gel.
In fifth grade he came home full of doubt. “Am I slow, Mercy?”
“Sure you’re slow, Laurie. You’re like the Internet when we had dial-up.”
Lawrence savored this image as he poured orange soda down his gullet. “I’m slow, like a snail. I’m slow, like a sponge. I’m slow, like SpongeBob!”
“Your slow, like Heinz ketchup. You’re slow, like home cooking ... like Dad’s stew, and how good is that! There’s a whole slow food movement thing, Laurie, and do you know why? Because fast food sucks.”
“I’m slow like slow food. My mind’s like beef stew.”
“Yep. Yummy and warm, with great stuff bubbling.”
She was always pouring new things in the pot. Tidbits, arcana, the trivial facts that made school more fun: headless chickens and roaches that lived, the details of strange celebrity deaths, the peccadillos of puerile kings. She served up weighty matter, too, savvy observations about how the world worked: “The principal’s only mean because she’s got a boss, called The Superintendent. And she’s only mean because her boss is the governor, and he used to harass women. Groped `em, in fact.” Or: “They only sell soda to make money for the school, Laurie. They don’t care if it makes kids fat.” Or: “Sure it’s a great country, but some of the guys who started it had slaves–and women couldn’t vote until nineteen-something.” He received these facts always with his head bowed over some manual task–building Legos, practicing knots for Boy Scouts, stringing beads, folding origami–with skill derived from entire days devoted to craft. He employed the head down strategy in school as well to avoid the sting of the teacher’s disappointed gaze when he lacked comprehension. Mercy knew not to ask him questions and besides didn’t need to, for she could intuit the gaps in his knowledge. “You’re not supposed to talk about this stuff for some reason, but the Bible is totally against Harry Potter–it says you’re supposed to kill wizards with stones! And gay people, too, that’s Dumbledore two ways. I can show you the chapter, bro–chapter and verse.”
He widened his mouth as if punched in the gut.
“Lawrence my man, half of what they tell you is great in life ... isn’t.”
He rotated his head like a dog trying to understand the master’s odd behavior.
“But hey, half of what they tell you is bad ... is good!”
“So you tell me.”
She did. How ads couldn’t be trusted, how “Happy Meals” were unhappy for people who got fat and sick, how teachers got fired if kids didn’t do well on the standardized tests they both hated so much–this was the reason teachers made him cry, why they’d given her the medal she’d flung into the tree. She told him how Dad made his cuticles bleed because he was scared about losing his job, how Mom needed their sweet hugs when her blood sugar was low, how 9/11 was not our fault, sure, but we too had done bad things, had attacked Iraq for no good reason, put leashes on their men, killed thousands of regular people with bombs, not soldiers only Lawrence, but old woman and kids–
“Wha?” He had just put his remote controlled battleship in the pond, but turned to her with narrowed eyes that wished not to see.
“They act like only American dead people matter, L, but the bombs we drop kill innocent people along with the bad guys. And everyone acts like it doesn’t matter! And do you know why? Because they’re not us!”
He scrunched his face to dam up the tears, bent for a huge rock which he raised overhead and brought crashing down upon his ship.
“All those so-called great civilizations they tell you about, Lawrence, they hardly even mention they all had slaves. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans all had `em. And we had `em, too. They were cool in ways, sure–but slaves, little brother!”
“Show me,” he said, so she took him to the museum to see a painting of a pyramid beneath which straining slaves pulled massive blocks of granite beneath the eyes of muscled overseers with whips; then she rode him on her bike to the library where she showed him a photograph she had found of a fugitive American slave with lash marks on his back as thick as rope-cords. She could see the distress in his rounded eyes and mouth, so she checked out Spartacus to lighten his mood. He gazed in awe when dozens of slaves doomed themselves by stepping forward to proclaim: “I’m Spartacus. No, I’m Spartacus!”
“I’m Spartacus,” Lawrence mouthed in wide wonder.
Years later in high school a tenth grader named Wieder was cornered against his locker in the hall. “Say, Wieder Man, is it true that you’re gay?” It was Boyce, the leader of a four-jock pack that formed a semicircle around Wieder. Wieder lowered his reddening face, which Boyce took as confirmation of the obvious. Wieder was in fact gay; worse for him, he was fighting a terrible crush on Boyce, who was tall, blond, and lean, and spent hours in the weight room as Wiederman covertly watched his desperate efforts to bulk himself up against teasing jocks who said he looked gay. “Hey, that’s alright,” said Boyce in a honeyed voice laden with sympathy. “We all need to be who we are, you know,” words lifted verbatim from a recent assembly lecture on tolerance. Boyce rested his hand on Wieder’s shoulder, raised his thumb and brazenly stroked Wieder’s cheek while one of his pals chortled and another faked retching. Wieder raised his
blue-eyed gaze to Boyce’s in tremulous stages till at last he gazed directly up into eyes shining with the knowledge of their own seductive power. “Just admit it,” cooed Boyce, leaning close to allow Wieder to feel his warm breath and see his lips pucker. “Just say the word, dude. Come on. Be yourself.” It was the seminal moment of young Wieder’s existence, terrifying and wonderful. “Say you’re gay,” murmured Boyce. “Say it. Come on.” Wieder blinked, and tears flushed from his eyes onto Boyce’s hand. Boyce disgustedly flung the drops. “Say it!” he snapped. “Say it! Say you’re gay!”
“I’m gay,” said Lawrence, who had grown tall and thin and had slid through a gap to stand next to Wieder. His hands were passively clasped at his groin and he gazed at Boyce with a sad-eyed, fatalistic frown as Boyce’s face froze at first then rebooted, the boys behind Boyce jockeying like hounds awaiting the alpha’s signal to attack. It would not have been the first such attack: Lawrence had been beaten in ninth grade by a different pack for “hating America!” after saying in class that slavery was evil and that we killed, too. But then in slid Tina, Lawrence’s combative, plump, short Chinese pal from Origami Club. “I’m gay,” she said, thrusting her chin up at Boyce as she grasped Wieder’s hand.
“I’m gay, too.” This was Kayley, whom Boyce had long lusted after in vain. Kayley knew that her dating record belied the assertion, so she pressed against Lawrence’s flank, twined her viney arm in his, and cooed in a precociously smokey voice, “Well I’m bi, anyway,” breathing warmth into Lawrence’s ear.
Foaming, fuming, red-faced and shamed, Boyce managed a feeble “I’ll see you later” at Lawrence, to which Kaley laughed, “Hands off him, he’s mine,” thus perfecting Boyce’s disgrace.
Lawrence dreamed of Kayley through sweat-stained nights, but managed only a bright, shy smile when they passed in the hall. She honored the remembrance of their stand with a smile, but did not stop to talk. He daydreamed too of Tina, lowing at her as they and two other girls folded origami like pioneer girls in a knitting circle, Lawrence unselfconsciously gazing at the lustrous black hair that curled sharply around Tina’s square jaw, gazing at her thick neck full of power and the soft curves beneath her red cable-knit sweater and the skillful hands that turned out flocks of cranes as she chatted of things Lawrence followed but dimly, detecting his interest but protecting his feelings by looking away from his dimly comprehending gaze, unsure how to fill his wide-open eyes. For prolonged eye contact with women there was still only Mercy, and when they locked eyes a circuit of trust flowed between them in alternating currents of question and answer, call and response.
“Is evolution true?” he asked during homework help, looking up from an illustration of the stages of human evolution in his bio book.
“Of course,” she smiled. She could tell from the way he sucked on his lip that more questions were coming, and she gave him time to formulate them.
“So we didn’t start as humans?”
“Nothing started like what it is now, L. Dogs came from wolves, and humans came from these guys–just like chimps and gorillas. We all come from the same primitive ancestors, and became different over millions of years.”
“So we’re cannibals.”
She marveled at his pure simple logic.
“Is that why you don’t eat meat, Merse?”
“I don’t eat animals, Laurie–meat is just a phony word for the animals people murder for food.”
“Murder? How?”
He had opened the spigot, and she let the facts flow. She told him about “Cattle–that means cows and steers, which are bulls who’ve had their testicles cut off–without anesthesia!–and they’re shot in the head with steel bolts and hung from chains, and while some of them are still conscious, they slash `em in the throat and hack `em into pieces with long knives.” She spoke of chickens, shackled, dipped in electrified water and then passed before buzzing rotary blades meant to slit their throats, some birds still conscious when the blade slices their throat, some dodging the blade only to die when submerged in a “scalding tank” thick with boiling water, feathers, and blood. Lawrence choked out the words, “That’s evil, Mercy” with his hand on his stomach, and she said the animals way they lived was even worse. With quiet reverence for the grim truth, she played for him an undercover film of a feedlot where steers stood hide-to-hide in an inches-high sludge of manure, mud, and urine, then showed a film of a factory egg farm where birds stuffed into battery cages lacked the room to even turn around. The camera closed in on a bird’s vacant eyes. Lawrence lowered his head towards the computer screen, his lip hanging low as if he lacked the will to stiffen it, his eyes mirroring the bird’s helpless gaze, his cupped hands unconsciously reaching for the screen as if to succor the hen.
He ate no bite of stewed chicken that night, for he saw in the bones that stretched the blanched skin no meal, but a friend. The next night he would not touch his ground beef. The night after that he picked at the veggies in Dad’s famous beef stew, but would not touch the meat until the anguish in his mom’s voice moved him to do so. He took a spoonful into his mouth; the meat had the tang of death to him now, and he disgorged it back into the bowl on a vile stomach acid tsunami.
“Dead animals,” he murmured with a sorrowful gaze as his mom wiped his mouth.
“Dead animals,” he reported with sincere helpfulness in The Chefs Club, an
after-school class for kids behind in their graduation requirements. “Meat’s just a nice word for murder.”
Mercy, who bodyguarded her eleventh grade brother from a discreet distance as if he were the president’s son, glided to the cooking table and positioned herself between Lawrence and a meat-loving, thick-necked boy named Mark who was unaccustomed to being contradicted.
“You’re calling me a murderer?”
“No,” said Mercy with a disarming smile. “He’s just trying to help.”
Mark grinned down at Mercy through narrowed eyes. “Hey, I like brainy girls.”
“I’ve got glasses, so I’m brainy?”
Mark shook his head and smiled, turned to the counter and pressed a glob of raw ground beef with the heels of his hands, then rolled hunks of the beef into balls with occasional lascivious grins at Mercy. She stayed in position between Mark and Lawrence the rest of the day and the rest of the year, and rebuffed Mark’s frequent advances with subtle wit and grace.
In twelfth grade Lawrence was back in the Chefs Club, as was Mark, as was Boyce, as were two dozen kids who needed one more credit to graduate. “So you want to be a cook when you grow up, Lawrence boy?”
“Oh yeah,” Lawrence said dreamily. “It makes me happy to serve people food.”
Mark snickered ostentatiously at that, and Boyce, who had dropped out of sports and grown a jawline beard to go with his red-rimmed, lunchtime beer drinker’s eyes, snickered too. “I bet decorating cupcakes makes you happy too,” Mark said.
“Oh, yeah,” agreed Lawrence. “I love sprinkles the most.”
“Sprinkles,” Mark snickered. “Lawrence Man, where’s your sister?”
Lawrence rolled his tongue around the corner of his mouth in reflexive synch with his rolling of the pizza dough, much as a dog kicks when his paddle point is petted. As with all repetitive manual tasks, he rolled dough expertly. “She was accepted at Cal,” he said with
a strained effort to talk while rolling. “But she wanted to live at home, with me.”
“Who wouldn’t want to live at home, with you?” sniggered Boyce.
“Tell her hi from me,” said Mark with an anaconda arm around Lawrence’s shoulder.
They left him alone for the day and the week.
“Did you tell your sister hi from me?” Mark asked.
Lawrence was intent on shaping the tail of a croissant, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Mark backhanded him hard on the arm. “Did you?”
“Huh?” asked Lawrence. “Yeah. I said hi.”
“And?” The demand in Mark’s stare would have been understood by most guys but was wasted on Lawrence. “What’d she say?”
“She said not to get too close to that guy. But I don’t think the cooking table’s too crowded.”
Snickers erupted from Boyce and from Boyce’s pal Hank, who always wore a down-grin of mocking disdain. Mark raised his voice to tamp down theirs. “Is your sister a lezzie or what, Lawrence Man? I mean come on, that short hair.”
Lawrence smiled, visibly at a loss.
“He means,” said Boyce, leaning in on Lawrence’s face, “does she like boys?”
“Oh, sure,” Lawrence brightened. “She goes out with Draco.” Then, as if explaining: “He doesn’t eat meat.”
“Which is what matters,” Mark snorted.
Lawrence earnestly nodded.
Mark, Boyce, and Hank dubbed themselves The Three Musketeers and settled in for the rest of the school year. Lawrence, who had been raised to give, bought a frozen Three Musketeers bar for each. They caucused privately and invited him to be the Fourth Musketeer. He proudly accepted. His status as Fourth Musketeer involved fixing the subpar results of their lackadaisical cooking efforts, wearing Mouseketeer ears for their amusement, and keeping his mouth shut when they chatted. They chatted about things he did not understand–hos and drugs and Grand Theft Auto and bad ass pits and how crappy school was–and they spoke with regret in coded terms of things they hadn’t done in high school, and how they had better do them while they could.
One of the things was making a film–a cooking show, they told Lawrence one day–and it would star him, the best cook in the class. Mark held the camera and Boyce held the mike as Lawrence proudly laid out the cooking table with tools and ingredients for his favorite recipe, his father’s beef stew, subbing soy meat for beef.
“You like wearing that apron, don’t you, Lawrence?”
Lawrence smiled at the camera’s friendly eye. “Oh yeah,” he replied. “It makes me feel like a real chef.”
“So remember the chef’s hat.” Hank presented the puffy white chef’s hat to Lawrence on a tray. Lawrence placed the hat on and flushed with pride.
Mark peered through the camera as if through the sight of a sniper’s rifle.
Smiling angelically down upon his domain, Lawrence diced carrots, celery, and onions; sauted the veggies and built up a sauce; tossed pearl onions, potatoes, mushrooms, peas, and soy meat into the pot; seasoned the simmering pot with herbs; inhaled the intoxicating aroma; stirred the pot lovingly, gently, sweetly. Occasionally he looked up shyly at the camera, as for years he’d looked up at loving parents and sister when taking on a new challenge. When the stew was ready, Mark led a giddy Lawrence by the arm to a seat of honor at a well-set table to receive the first bowl. Boyce behind them slid a mob of red, fatty beef chunks into the pot and filled Lawrence’s bowl, taking care to load it with extra meat which he submerged with care.
“Time for the chef to take the first bite,” said Boyce with the hushed anticipation of a golf announcer on the eighteenth hole. “Take a big bite, L.”
Mark took dead aim at the Lawrence’s face with the camcorder as he raised a spoonful of stew thick with beef chunks, potato chunks, carrot, and peas, all brown from the sauce. Through the viewfinder Mark observed Lawrence placing the spoon in his mouth and closing his eyes with sensuous joy as he chewed the stew well, as his parents had taught him; then he suddenly stopped, like one realizing he’s unwittingly entered a dangerous room. “Something’s wrong,” Lawrence hushed, pulling a half-chewed chunk of stringy meat from his mouth in tweezering fingers. He recognized the chunk as meat and his face swelled with horror and then the dam burst, the contents of his mouth and gut spewing wildly into and all over the table, slime and chunks and steam everywhere. With a sickly voice he told the camera, as if telling a friend: “There’s meat in there” as slime dripped from his mouth.
“There’s meat in there” was the tag on the clip on YouTube the next day, and it was also the caption beneath a close-up of Lawrence with bulging cheeks and imploding eyes a moment before the surge burst through his lips. The clip garnered two dozen views the first day, three hundred-plus the next, and well over a thousand by the afternoon of the third day when Lawrence learned of it and showed it to Mercy.
“Oh, my baby,” she murmured, draping her arm across his shoulders, leaning her head against his, kissing the hair atop his head as she’d done when he was beaten up in ninth grade. He did not turn to her, but stared ahead and clicked play again. “You don’t have to do this to yourself,” Mercy hushed. He forwarded to the part when Mark led him to the table. “I’m gonna get that monster thrown out of school,” she said with a tear in her voice. “First I’m gonna get YouTube to take that trash down, then I’m gonna see the principal tomorrow and get all those guys thrown right out of school!” The clip was at the moment when Lawrence realized he was a cannibal eating a fellow creature; now the spewing, now the aftermath–the clammy skin, the viscous drool, the horror that Lawrence summed up like so: “There’s meat in there.” “I should have been there with you somehow. I’m so sorry, baby.” Lawrence was hunched forward in a world of his own; her words couldn’t reach him. “I’m sorry, so sorry.” Again he played the regurgitation ... the close-up of the vomit all over the table ... the close up of the sickened boy with shiny, slimy lips. The boy turned to his sister:
“They’ll never eat meat again, Mercy. One-thousand three-hundred and fifty-five people. They won’t.”
She relaxed now, choked out a quivering laugh of relief and kissed her brother on the nose. An impulse led her to place on his head the king’s crown she’d bought for him many years before. She leapt to her feet and curtsied to the king and swept out the door to make plans to move in with her friends.
- end -
June 2, 2010
April 27, 2010
"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!”
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!”
April 20, 2010
Woodsmen
A divorced father takes his estranged teen son camping in "Woodsmen," which appeared in 2010 in the handsome Berkeley-based zine Riverbabble. Wordsworth plays a part. The story begins:
“It was your idea to go camping,” snapped the dad on a winding backroad in search of the campground. He wiped perspiration from heat and embarrassment, braced for the retort.
“No it wasn’t.” The boy’s sour glare darted the man’s chest.
The dad smiled grimly with comprehension that consoled little for his foolish reliance on a sketchy downloaded road map. “Your mother said you wanted to go camping.”
“She was wrong,” son declared as if flicking a gnat.
Years before, with a plastic bat fresh from Toys R Us, the boy had swatted ball after ball while his dad “attaboy!-ed” at the machinelike consistency of his son: fifteen now, he still murdered the fat ones. His set his chin on a grasshopper knee, gazed at the sunlight that strobed through the redwoods.
“No she wasn’t wrong,” the dad brayed. “I said, ‘What’s Danny into these days?,’ and she said, `Camping, the boy loves the outdoors.’ So we’re camping.’”
“We are?” the boy chortled as they rounded yet another shady bend.
“Yes,” the dad crowed. “There’s the sign, behind that huge redwood. Nice job they did of hiding it, no?” He looked over. “Congrats, Danny, you’ve perfected your smirk.”
“It’s Daniel now. No one calls me Danny.”
“Daniel,” said the father, wincing as if tasting dust in his mouth. “These trees are hundreds of years old ... Daniel. Some are over a thousand, maybe.”
Beneath the tires, gravel crunched and twigs snapped. On each side giant redwoods peered down at a father and son going thankfully silent. The dad slowed the car to take in the scene, and mentioned the one other camping trip they had taken. In wonder he squinted up at the trees. “Coast redwoods: sequoia sempervirens.”
“Latin. Wow.”
“Yeah, Latin, wow. I sure wowed `em at the bowling alley with my Latin. Gutter ballus. ...
“It was your idea to go camping,” snapped the dad on a winding backroad in search of the campground. He wiped perspiration from heat and embarrassment, braced for the retort.
“No it wasn’t.” The boy’s sour glare darted the man’s chest.
The dad smiled grimly with comprehension that consoled little for his foolish reliance on a sketchy downloaded road map. “Your mother said you wanted to go camping.”
“She was wrong,” son declared as if flicking a gnat.
Years before, with a plastic bat fresh from Toys R Us, the boy had swatted ball after ball while his dad “attaboy!-ed” at the machinelike consistency of his son: fifteen now, he still murdered the fat ones. His set his chin on a grasshopper knee, gazed at the sunlight that strobed through the redwoods.
“No she wasn’t wrong,” the dad brayed. “I said, ‘What’s Danny into these days?,’ and she said, `Camping, the boy loves the outdoors.’ So we’re camping.’”
“We are?” the boy chortled as they rounded yet another shady bend.
“Yes,” the dad crowed. “There’s the sign, behind that huge redwood. Nice job they did of hiding it, no?” He looked over. “Congrats, Danny, you’ve perfected your smirk.”
“It’s Daniel now. No one calls me Danny.”
“Daniel,” said the father, wincing as if tasting dust in his mouth. “These trees are hundreds of years old ... Daniel. Some are over a thousand, maybe.”
Beneath the tires, gravel crunched and twigs snapped. On each side giant redwoods peered down at a father and son going thankfully silent. The dad slowed the car to take in the scene, and mentioned the one other camping trip they had taken. In wonder he squinted up at the trees. “Coast redwoods: sequoia sempervirens.”
“Latin. Wow.”
“Yeah, Latin, wow. I sure wowed `em at the bowling alley with my Latin. Gutter ballus. ...
April 19, 2010
"Ryan's Catch"
"Ryan's Catch," which appears in the baseball-loving zine Slow Trains, was inspired by the play of my nephew Brian at the age of 11. The story also appeared in print in Oasis. One of my prized possessions is a copy of Oasis signed by the great announcer Vin Scully, who is fondly imitated at two points in the story. The tale leads off like so ...
Tonight in Madison I made a diving catch of a sinking liner to center by Teddy Blackman with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the tying run on third, and the winning run on second. I broke in right away, not thinking about where the ball would go, but knowing where it would, `cause I had to know; but I admit, my heart leaped into my throat when the ball took air halfway to the outfield and disappeared into the low bank of lights behind home plate. But the topspin brought the ball down from the lights, and man what a feeling, sliding on my belly on the glistening grass with the ball in my glove! After the play everyone mobbed me, and not one guy asked “How could you reach the ball?” with those short arms of mine; and our pitcher, Frankie Pearl– my roomie, the first I’ve ever had–told me to keep the ball. Ordered me to keep it, actually. But the ball was Frankie’s. He was the one that had gutted out a complete game on a muggy August night, and he was the one that crossed-up that big Valentine with a 2-2 change and the game on the line. And we needed that win big-time, `cause we'd already lost three in a row, and Madison was threatening to run away with the division. Damned Muskeys. They're the A's Midwest League affiliate, and I'll tell you, there are some future Canseco’s and Rickey Henderson’s on that team, and Teddy Blackman's a dead ringer for Mark McGwire. Seriously, if these guys are as good as I think they are, in a few years The A's could have their best teams since the McGwire-Canseco-Eckersley A's of my Little League days.
I also have to admit, the catch came at a great time from a personal standpoint, since Jefferson Kasmer was in the stands; I’d spotted his straw hat behind home plate in the first. Kazzie's a roving scout for the Brewers, and he was in town to look at our players and give a report to the front office in Milwaukee. ...
Tonight in Madison I made a diving catch of a sinking liner to center by Teddy Blackman with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the tying run on third, and the winning run on second. I broke in right away, not thinking about where the ball would go, but knowing where it would, `cause I had to know; but I admit, my heart leaped into my throat when the ball took air halfway to the outfield and disappeared into the low bank of lights behind home plate. But the topspin brought the ball down from the lights, and man what a feeling, sliding on my belly on the glistening grass with the ball in my glove! After the play everyone mobbed me, and not one guy asked “How could you reach the ball?” with those short arms of mine; and our pitcher, Frankie Pearl– my roomie, the first I’ve ever had–told me to keep the ball. Ordered me to keep it, actually. But the ball was Frankie’s. He was the one that had gutted out a complete game on a muggy August night, and he was the one that crossed-up that big Valentine with a 2-2 change and the game on the line. And we needed that win big-time, `cause we'd already lost three in a row, and Madison was threatening to run away with the division. Damned Muskeys. They're the A's Midwest League affiliate, and I'll tell you, there are some future Canseco’s and Rickey Henderson’s on that team, and Teddy Blackman's a dead ringer for Mark McGwire. Seriously, if these guys are as good as I think they are, in a few years The A's could have their best teams since the McGwire-Canseco-Eckersley A's of my Little League days.
I also have to admit, the catch came at a great time from a personal standpoint, since Jefferson Kasmer was in the stands; I’d spotted his straw hat behind home plate in the first. Kazzie's a roving scout for the Brewers, and he was in town to look at our players and give a report to the front office in Milwaukee. ...
"Sherman Zahd"
One of my favorite self-written stories is "Sherman Zahd," an Iraq War satire in which an immigrant Iranian schoolboy tries to avoid a beating in the manner of the fabled soundalike tale-weaver Scheherazade from The Arabian Nights. This has appeared in print in the Madison-based politically-oriented lit mag Mobius and in The Write Side Up, but I've always wanted it to reach a wider audience. Tell me what you think.
Crazy little Sherman Zahd!”
It was inevitable, perhaps, kids being kids, at all times in all places–even enlightened times such as these, in ultra-tolerant places such as San Francisco–that Sherman Zahd would be known to his fourth grade classmates as “Sherman’s Odd” by virtue of his name alone, without regard to any Middle Eastern “oddness” in his appearance or demeanor, just as surely as Uriah Peckinpaugh III would be dubbed “You Pee” despite a total lack of evidence that his bladder control was at all deficient, and Mary Wong would be known as “Very Wrong” despite the fact that she rarely volunteered in class, and was very rarely wrong when she did. These incongruent facts meant nothing in the schoolyard, for kids, being kids, have a marvelous talent for manufacturing evidence supporting the derisive nicknames they love to use when genuine evidence cannot be found. Thus was it said, and the false rumor spread, that Uriah Peckinpaugh III had peed in his pants in the locker room of the San Francisco Giants–in front of Barry Bonds’ locker, no less!–during the fourth grade field trip to Pac Bell Park (“That is slanderous, scalawag!” the round-faced boy yelled, thrusting a finger in the air in the manner of his namesake grandfather, a bond lawyer); and it was also said, and believed by everyone other than two loyal friends, that Mary Wong had once told Miss Wright ... that turtles can fly. It was much the same with poor Sherman Zahd, who was dubbed “Sherman’s Odd” within mere days of his arrival at Franklin Elementary, and whose every brief utterance (the only kind of utterance he ever made), every gesture, every physical trait–from his bird beak nose, the small, bony body, the single caterpillar eyebrow, the deep black eyes, the uncertain ancestry, the mysterious smile–confirmed that he had been nicknamed justly.
“He’s a spy,” muttered one boy, mindful of the suspicious fact that Sherman had arrived at the school just two weeks before 9/11 (i.e., the start of the school year).
“He’s a terrorist!” said a second more loudly, drawing the conclusion which was percolating in many kids’ minds.
“But he’s Iranian,” said Mary Wong, who knew that Sherman’s mother was from Iran because Miss Wright had told her so, and also knew that: (1) Iran–which she could find on the map, and proudly pointed to at Miss Wright’s behest–used to be the fabled kingdom of Persia; (2) Iran produces caviar, dates, and oil; (3) the majority of Iranians are of Persian, not Arab, descent; and (4) all of the suspected hijackers were believed to be Arabs, and none were thought to be from Iran. Mary’s timid pronouncement was immediately jeered as “Very wrong, Mary Wong!” by the cadre of boys who were leading the inquisition; and, as Sherman himself did not reject the charges, but rather smiled at his accusers in his darkly mysterious, indeed, odd way, it was clear as glass that the charges were true. “But he doesn’t speak English,” sighed Uriah Peckinpaugh in lawyerly exasperation. “How do you expect him to deny your charges?” “He could be pretending not to,” said the chief inquisitor, a blocky boy named Dick Saunders, known by his friends as “Duck” for his bristly blond flattop; Duck’s cohorts, however, sensing possible merit in Uriah’s point, pondered it; and as they did so, Sherman, guided by the elbow by his schoolyard lawyer, slipped through the crowd and out of the school, thus avoiding further trouble. And so it remained for the next two years, lonely years during which Sherman spent much of his time hunched over a journal, or working in the computer lab, both of which activities added to the sense that the kid was strange; and, what was worse, fueled suspicion that he was a terrorist, a spy, or both. Sherman’s other main activities, so far as anyone could tell, included huddling in private with his teachers and speaking as little as possible. This laconic tendency, of course, made Duck Saunders and his cronies ever more suspicious of Sherman’s intentions–“Everyone knows you’re guilty if you take the Fifth Commandment,” Duck said–but the brevity of Sherman’s utterances, which never addressed controversial subjects, kept everyone guessing as to the thoughts veiled behind his mysterious smile. And it might have stayed that way had Ms. Costanza, the sixth grade teacher, not decided that it was her duty, as the shepherd of the future voting citizens of the republic, to elicit their participation in the great public debate leading up to the war in Iraq.
“Well,” Sherman began with great hesitation, reading the essay which would imperil him, “Saddam Hussein is a very bad man.” This was no different from the view expressed in two dozen other essays, of course, and raised not an eyebrow. “He used weapons of mass destruction to kill many thousands of his own people,” continued Sherman, “and thousands of Iranians, too.” This too echoed the view of most of the kids in the class, though few knew, as Sherman did, that WMDs had also been used against Iran. Nor was there much ado about Sherman’s assertion that the U.S. should only attack if the United Nations voted for it, for Ms. Costanza herself had let it be known that this was her view, and it was one with which a small majority of the class, mostly girls, agreed. No, what got Sherman in trouble, what caused his blocky nemesis to wrench the essay from his hand and hold it aloft in the manner of a prosecuting attorney–of an attorney general, even–was the following: “Still, I don’t think any of this justifies killing innocent people. After all,” he said brightly, “this is America!”
“See!” said Duck Saunders, armed at last with the evidence he craved. “He hates America, man! He hates us because we’re free!”
“That’s enough, Duck!” said Ms. Costanza, angrier than anyone had ever seen her. She tugged poor Duck by his ear, and though he cried out in pain, she knew from past performances that his cries were fake, and dragged him to the principal’s office for a stern lecture on political and ethnic tolerance. The result was that Duck and company left Sherman in relative peace–save for a few ambiguous incidents on the playground in which sharp elbows found his ribs–until the day Sherman ruined the class’s celebration of Jessica Lynch’s rescue.
“But it’s just not true,” Sherman said in class, eliciting a collective gasp that sucked the air right out of the room. “What do you mean, Sherman?” asked Ms. Costanza, fully as bewildered as the kids in the room. Perhaps she had not heard right; perhaps the boy had misspoken. “Do you mean there are some uncertain details?” she suggested, offering Sherman a chance to retreat. Ah, but it was too late for that. It was as if Sherman, having been irrevocably outed as a terrorist sympathizer in the eyes of a sizeable faction of the class, had no choice but to breathe freely now, to ventilate his long-suppressed thoughts and opinions just as a genie, if you will, breathes deeply, greedily, of the hot desert air when freed at last from the confines of the imprisoning lamp. “I mean, it is not true,” said Sherman, “it is not a true telling of the story. The real hero was a man from Iraq. He discovered the Jessica Lynch prisoner in the hospital, and he had the courage to cross the battle lines to tell the American officials where she was at. But that was not all. The American officials asked him to go back to the hospital to make a map for the rescue operation. And this he did, crossing the lines of fire twice more, risking his life on the line. And that is how they knew where to find her. And that is why no shot was fired.”
Ms. Costanza stood hands on hip, her mouth agape. “That’s–that’s astonishing, Sherman. I didn’t read that in the Chronicle.”
“No, you did not,” said Sherman, indulging the impulse to sneer a bit. “It was reported on Arab television. Aljazeera. ”
“He’s ours,” murmured Duck Saunders to his gang, pounding his fist in the palm of his hand. But when Sherman Zahd walked out of school that day, he walked taller and prouder than he ever had in the past two years, feeling for the first time like a freedom-loving American; and the inward smile was outward now, a close-mouthed amalgam of smile and sneer. So good did he feel that he stopped off at 7-Eleven to celebrate with a Slurpee, which he slurped with glee as he stepped out of the store and rounded the corner. There he was intercepted by Duck Saunders and his two man crew, who, rumor had it, had roughed up kids for money at that very spot.
“Can I have a sip,” sneered Duck, backing Sherman against the wall.
“I don’t think so,” said Sherman, taking another sip.
“You don’t want to give him a sip!” said Oddis Rankin, Duck’s right hand man.
“I don’t think so,” said Sherman. “He didn’t say please.”
“You–!” Oddis raised his hand, but Duck stayed it and told Sherman: “You hate America, man! And you hate Private Lynch. She’s a hero!”
“And you dissed her!” said Albert Chu, leaning his perpetually scowling face into Sherman’s.
Sherman shook his head like a teacher bemused by the confusion of his students. “You guys are so funny. You don’t even know how great a hero she truly was.”
“What are you talkin’ about!” The circle was tight against Sherman, his back to the wall.
“I mean, allow me to tell you the real true story of this great war hero, the story you are not allowed to hear. You think she went down fighting, don’t you? You think the Iraqis killed her comrades and captured her alive? Stop for a minute and think–could Iraqi combat troops kill a whole platoon of our American soldiers in battle? It’s ridiculous! We kill them! Look at the numbers–there’s always, I should say, approximately eighty or a hundred of them killed for every one of us! Right?”
“Right. But, they shot her, didn’t they?” Duck glowered, still suspicious.
“No! They didn’t! That was just a story to fool the terrorists! Look, I’ll let you in on a top secret–if you promise to keep it quiet. Can I trust you?” They nodded. “My Uncle Abdul”–here Sherman lowered his voice so that they had to lean right into his face–“my Uncle Abdul is a CIA spy, working for us in the CIA bureau in Baghdad–and he tells my father everything. The secret is, the Private Lynch is a spy, too! They sent her in there in order to be captured, so that she could take pictures of the Iraqi weapons, and make audiotapes to give the CIA! She had a camera implanted in her forehead, and a microphone in her neck.”
“Okay,” said Albert Chu, leaning in on Sherman. “But if she didn’t get shot, then how’d she get hurt?”
“She fake hurt herself, so they would take her to the hospital! Think about it: What would she learn chilling with other American prisoners in a rat-filled dungeon? But in an Iraqi hospital, she could talk to real Iraqi people, the ones who hate Saddam as much as we do, and want to be liberated from him. The soldiers didn’t even try to hurt her–in fact, they were under strict orders not to shoot her, or anyone like her. And do you know why? Can you guess? It was so they could put her in Saddam’s harem! You’ve seen pictures of her, haven’t you? She’s beautiful!” They nodded. “She was recruited from the set of American Idol. She was standing in line to audition, and the CIA recruited her on the spot. They knew she was so beautiful, Saddam was sure to want her for his harem. After spying everything she could in the hospital, she would pretend to recover from her fake injuries and go to his harem–and if he wasn’t already assassinated by another agent, or killed by our smart bombs, she would kill him with poison lipstick!”
“And how’d your cousin find all this out?” said Duck Saunders through narrowed eyes. “And how’d he tell your father?”
“Nanotechnology,” said Sherman with a wink. He pointed to his forehead. “Uncle Abdul very clever.” And as they already knew that Arabs are sly, they nodded knowingly and chattered among themselves as Sherman Zahd walked off down the street.
“Wait a minute!” they said the next day, pushing Sherman against the wall of the 7-Eleven once more. “If we wanted her to infilterate Saddam’s harem, then how come we rescued her from the hospital?”
Sherman was sipping an even larger Slurpee this time. “The incredible reason is–you’re not going to believe this–Saddam didn’t want her for his harem! He sent a posse of his toughest punks to the hospital to check her out, and they took her picture in different attractive poses, and sent it to him over the internet. And guess what! You can’t! He said she wasn’t pretty enough! His exact words–it’s unbelievable–were, “She looks too American.”
“That bastard!” A bubble of froth from Duck Saunders’ moth floated over Sherman’s shoulder. “He’s crazy! American babes are the hottest in the world!”
“I know!” said Sherman. “Saddam knows American babes are the hottest in the world. He just said it to insult us because he hates us so much!”
“Yeah! What’s he want anyway, some Arab girl with a big black beard?”
“Hey,” said Oddis, “Sherman’s got a little sister, man. No need to diss her.”
“Oh, no,” said Sherman with a little laugh, “we’re Iranians, not Arabs. No problem.”
“What happened next, Sherm?” asked Oddis.
“What happened next is, she had to figure out a way out, because she knew they were going to kill her since she wasn’t going to be in the harem! But first, they decided to torture her for espionage. But since she was CIA-trained, she wouldn’t talk! So they drugged her and hypnotized her, and she pretended to be hypnotized. Then she gave them all this great top secret espionage, like how many soldiers we had, and where they were, and what kind of guns they were using, and where and when we were going to attack next. The only problem was, it was fake! She was making it up! And they bought it! They all called Saddam on their cell phones, thinking they were going to get a bunch of medals; but the next day, when he sent his soldiers to where he thought he was going to take our troops by surprise, it was an ambush! And we slaughtered them!”
“Sweet!” they all said. “I bet my uncle shot a few A-rabs,” said Duck.
“Yeah! The only problem for Jessica was, she was running out of stuff to make up, and she knew when she did, they’d kill her with biological weapons! So she started up the best story of all, to get them interested. She told them that George Bush himself was going to fly in to Baghdad secretly on a Blackhawk to run the war. She said he was mad at the way the general was running things, and that he wanted to call all the shots from now on–and drop a few bombs himself! They all started getting excited, and writing things down in Arabic, and talking to each other really fast with their hands! They thought they were going to win huge promotions when they told the big news to Saddam, maybe even get an oil well or two! But then, right before she was going to tell them where President Bush was going to land and when, she froze! Like a computer! She just sat there staring off into space like a zombie! And they were freaking out, dudes! They were totally scared that if Saddam found out they had frozen her right before she was going to tell them when Bush was coming, he’d gas them for sure! What they didn’t know was, Jessica was just faking being frozen!”
“Those chumps!”
“I know! Their best hypnotizers tried everything to start her up again, but she just kept staring off into space. Finally they smoked some cigarettes and decided to go home for the night to avoid arousing suspicion. And that’s when she made her daring escape plan, the one you know about already.”
“Awesome!” they agreed, slapping hands as Sherman walked off down the street.
“Hey, Sherm,” they said, waiting outside the 7-Eleven the next day, “give us some more inside stuff on Iraq.” So he told them the latest, the stuff they wouldn’t get on t.v.. How, after the “abortion” of the Jessica Lynch spy mission, they decided to use her rescue to boost morale instead; how Saddam always carried a suicide pill because he was scared of being captured by George Bush himself, and how, since he couldn’t sleep without pills now due to worry, they had two guys assigned to him just to make sure he didn’t accidentally take his suicide pill instead of his sleeping pill; how weapons of mass destruction were being shipped to other countries every day through underground tunnels and given to underground terrorists to use against us. And so it went, day after day, meeting at the 7-Eleven for Slurpees and chips (“good ol’ American junk food,” they joked, taking turns rubbing Sherman’s head with their knuckles), Sherman mesmerizing them with insider’s tales, they rewarding him with nachos which he pretended to like. The association carried over to school before long. After two years as a loner, Sherman now had a crew; and, considering the bad-boy make-up of the crew, cries of “Sherman’s odd”–muted cries, out of earshot of Duck, Oddis, and Albert–were renewed by those who knew Sherman back in the fourth grade. Suddenly, to the amazement of all, it was three bad boys and that odd little Sherman Zahd: Sherman, helping them in the computer lab, where they spent most of their assigned time harassing kids who were trying to work; Sherman, finding books in the library for their reports; Sherman, regaling them in the playground with all sorts of stories, tales which, he told them, he made up on the spot–and not just stories about the war, but stories about pygmies intoxicated by rare African berries, riding lions bareback; about ancient Persian astronomers tortured on the rack for claiming asteroids were heading towards the earth; about secret government plans to develop IQ pills to cut schooling from 12 years to 1. “How can you make this stuff up!” they said in awe. “It’s called writing,” said Sherman with a wink. And now the young writer was completely uncorked, for he had what he had long craved, an audience of his peers. He also had what he had long needed–schoolyard muscle to protect him from harassment. And if, from time to time, his new friends would toss out vile slurs against Arabs, it didn’t seem to bother him much, for he laughed it off and called the slurs “spice for your speech.” Besides, he knew that they meant nothing personal against him, for they had declared him to be an “honorary American” in respect of his uncle the spy; and, also, he had convinced them that Very Wrong was right, Iranians are not even Arabs to begin with. Not that there wasn’t always an undercurrent of tension, for there was: a lingering sense that perhaps Sherman was not really the ardent patriot that he seemed, that maybe an Iranian really is just a different kind of Arab after all (“Iraq is almost the same word as Iran,” Albert noted). Nor was Sherman senseless to this, for when they’d ask him for help with yet another computer project–“C’mon, Sherman, I’m no nerd, man, just use my password and knock out that report for me”–it seemed that the friendly arms wound around his neck were just a bit tighter than friendly arms should be.
Yet if Sherman seemed pleased with his new lot, his father was not. “Why do you join with such riff raff!” scolded the man, an Iraqi-born physician. But Sherman just smiled the mysterious smile he’d shown his classmates for two years and shrugged. “At least he has friends now,” said his mother, the beautiful daughter of an Iranian banker who had fled before the fall of the Shah. She stroked her son’s raven hair. “I think it’s wonderful he has playmates.”
“Such playmates can make big trouble,” said the father. But Sherman refused to go back to the playground without protection, and besides, he figured, it was just a few weeks until the end of the school year, and then he could make a clean break with Duck’s crew. He just had to keep it cool until then, and he had lots to occupy his time, for he was working on a project–a top secret one, like all his endeavors–in the computer lab, where he was already spending inordinate amounts of time writing term history reports for Duck’s gang. Not that he minded doing so, for it kept him in their good graces, and out from under their thumbs. By delaying the completion of the reports until the morning they were due, which was two days before commencement, Sherman managed to reduce his face time with the gang to about twenty minutes a week. Naturally they were thrilled with the reports he produced, all perfectly formatted and spiral-bound, yet riddled with the copious quantity of spelling errors the teacher would expect from them (Sherman had even cribbed the errors from the gang’s own spelling tests to ensure authenticity): Victury Of The West. The New American Millenium. The Impereel Eagle. “What do we owe you?” they asked. Nothing, Sherman insisted. But you deserve something, they said. “I will get it,” he replied.
The day before commencement, Sherman was two hours late coming home. His father, having read that lawlessness among juveniles increases near the end of the school year, feared the worst. He set out in his car to trace Sherman’s usual route home. Near the 7-Eleven, he saw Duck and his gang in a semicircle around the wall, and he could see fragments of a figure pinned up against the wall. It was Uriah Peckinpaugh, his eyes wide with fright, clutching his briefcase to keep Albert Chu from snatching it. Sherman’s dad, who was called “Dr. Zahd” by everyone who knew him despite the fact that he hadn’t practiced medicine since fleeing Iraq, pulled up alongside and blew his horn. “What are you doing!” he thundered.
“Just talking with our lawyer,” Duck grinned. Uriah seized the opportunity to reclaim his briefcase and scurry away.
“Have you seen my son?” said Dr. Zahd.
“Could you describe him?” chortled Duck.
Dr. Zahd had been an army medic during the war with Iran. He had seen men holding their intestines in place, and had learned to see such things clinically, dispassionately, else he could not have functioned. He looked at Duck and company in just this way. “Tell him I’m looking for him if you see him.”
But Sherman was already back home, pacing in anticipation of the next day’s commencement activities. He was up for an award, and he wanted it badly.
The awards for the most part went to the expected recipients, including Mary Wong, who won the Biology Award. At 11:15, Sherman Zahd strode to the podium to accept the Creative Writing Award. “Not bad for a boy who spoke little English when he came to this country from France,” said the presenting teacher. At about the same time, the answering machines and voice mail boxes of Ms. Elizabeth Saunders, Mr. and Mrs. Oswald Rankin, and Mr. and Mrs. Simon Chu reached their limits, filled to capacity with irate messages from callers who had read the flyers posted on walls and utility poles all over the neighborhood the night before. “Death to America the fashist viper,” the flyers said, repeating a phrase–“the fashist viper”–employed in the history reports authored, but never read by, Duck Saunders, Oddis Rankin, and Albert Chu (Duck had in fact glanced through his paper on the way to class, but didn’t know what either “fashist” or “viper” meant). Only a few of the hundreds of callers seemed intent on accepting the invitation at the bottom of the flyer to “Join our Def Underground Heros call to action to defeat the impereel beast! Break windows! Smash windsheelds! Slash tires! Go crazy!” And while the FBI didn’t really believe that three 12 year-old boys would be dumb enough to put their phone numbers on flyers as incendiary as this (or to form a group called DUH), the fact that the flyers were written in the school computer lab on password-protected computers used by the very kids whose phone numbers appeared on the flyers would cause the agency to keep its files open for quite some time; this thought consoled Sherman Zahd as he sipped a Slurpee and contemplated the lonely summer ahead.
Sherman Zahd
“Oh, god, Sherman’s oddCrazy little Sherman Zahd!”
It was inevitable, perhaps, kids being kids, at all times in all places–even enlightened times such as these, in ultra-tolerant places such as San Francisco–that Sherman Zahd would be known to his fourth grade classmates as “Sherman’s Odd” by virtue of his name alone, without regard to any Middle Eastern “oddness” in his appearance or demeanor, just as surely as Uriah Peckinpaugh III would be dubbed “You Pee” despite a total lack of evidence that his bladder control was at all deficient, and Mary Wong would be known as “Very Wrong” despite the fact that she rarely volunteered in class, and was very rarely wrong when she did. These incongruent facts meant nothing in the schoolyard, for kids, being kids, have a marvelous talent for manufacturing evidence supporting the derisive nicknames they love to use when genuine evidence cannot be found. Thus was it said, and the false rumor spread, that Uriah Peckinpaugh III had peed in his pants in the locker room of the San Francisco Giants–in front of Barry Bonds’ locker, no less!–during the fourth grade field trip to Pac Bell Park (“That is slanderous, scalawag!” the round-faced boy yelled, thrusting a finger in the air in the manner of his namesake grandfather, a bond lawyer); and it was also said, and believed by everyone other than two loyal friends, that Mary Wong had once told Miss Wright ... that turtles can fly. It was much the same with poor Sherman Zahd, who was dubbed “Sherman’s Odd” within mere days of his arrival at Franklin Elementary, and whose every brief utterance (the only kind of utterance he ever made), every gesture, every physical trait–from his bird beak nose, the small, bony body, the single caterpillar eyebrow, the deep black eyes, the uncertain ancestry, the mysterious smile–confirmed that he had been nicknamed justly.
“He’s a spy,” muttered one boy, mindful of the suspicious fact that Sherman had arrived at the school just two weeks before 9/11 (i.e., the start of the school year).
“He’s a terrorist!” said a second more loudly, drawing the conclusion which was percolating in many kids’ minds.
“But he’s Iranian,” said Mary Wong, who knew that Sherman’s mother was from Iran because Miss Wright had told her so, and also knew that: (1) Iran–which she could find on the map, and proudly pointed to at Miss Wright’s behest–used to be the fabled kingdom of Persia; (2) Iran produces caviar, dates, and oil; (3) the majority of Iranians are of Persian, not Arab, descent; and (4) all of the suspected hijackers were believed to be Arabs, and none were thought to be from Iran. Mary’s timid pronouncement was immediately jeered as “Very wrong, Mary Wong!” by the cadre of boys who were leading the inquisition; and, as Sherman himself did not reject the charges, but rather smiled at his accusers in his darkly mysterious, indeed, odd way, it was clear as glass that the charges were true. “But he doesn’t speak English,” sighed Uriah Peckinpaugh in lawyerly exasperation. “How do you expect him to deny your charges?” “He could be pretending not to,” said the chief inquisitor, a blocky boy named Dick Saunders, known by his friends as “Duck” for his bristly blond flattop; Duck’s cohorts, however, sensing possible merit in Uriah’s point, pondered it; and as they did so, Sherman, guided by the elbow by his schoolyard lawyer, slipped through the crowd and out of the school, thus avoiding further trouble. And so it remained for the next two years, lonely years during which Sherman spent much of his time hunched over a journal, or working in the computer lab, both of which activities added to the sense that the kid was strange; and, what was worse, fueled suspicion that he was a terrorist, a spy, or both. Sherman’s other main activities, so far as anyone could tell, included huddling in private with his teachers and speaking as little as possible. This laconic tendency, of course, made Duck Saunders and his cronies ever more suspicious of Sherman’s intentions–“Everyone knows you’re guilty if you take the Fifth Commandment,” Duck said–but the brevity of Sherman’s utterances, which never addressed controversial subjects, kept everyone guessing as to the thoughts veiled behind his mysterious smile. And it might have stayed that way had Ms. Costanza, the sixth grade teacher, not decided that it was her duty, as the shepherd of the future voting citizens of the republic, to elicit their participation in the great public debate leading up to the war in Iraq.
“Well,” Sherman began with great hesitation, reading the essay which would imperil him, “Saddam Hussein is a very bad man.” This was no different from the view expressed in two dozen other essays, of course, and raised not an eyebrow. “He used weapons of mass destruction to kill many thousands of his own people,” continued Sherman, “and thousands of Iranians, too.” This too echoed the view of most of the kids in the class, though few knew, as Sherman did, that WMDs had also been used against Iran. Nor was there much ado about Sherman’s assertion that the U.S. should only attack if the United Nations voted for it, for Ms. Costanza herself had let it be known that this was her view, and it was one with which a small majority of the class, mostly girls, agreed. No, what got Sherman in trouble, what caused his blocky nemesis to wrench the essay from his hand and hold it aloft in the manner of a prosecuting attorney–of an attorney general, even–was the following: “Still, I don’t think any of this justifies killing innocent people. After all,” he said brightly, “this is America!”
“See!” said Duck Saunders, armed at last with the evidence he craved. “He hates America, man! He hates us because we’re free!”
“That’s enough, Duck!” said Ms. Costanza, angrier than anyone had ever seen her. She tugged poor Duck by his ear, and though he cried out in pain, she knew from past performances that his cries were fake, and dragged him to the principal’s office for a stern lecture on political and ethnic tolerance. The result was that Duck and company left Sherman in relative peace–save for a few ambiguous incidents on the playground in which sharp elbows found his ribs–until the day Sherman ruined the class’s celebration of Jessica Lynch’s rescue.
“But it’s just not true,” Sherman said in class, eliciting a collective gasp that sucked the air right out of the room. “What do you mean, Sherman?” asked Ms. Costanza, fully as bewildered as the kids in the room. Perhaps she had not heard right; perhaps the boy had misspoken. “Do you mean there are some uncertain details?” she suggested, offering Sherman a chance to retreat. Ah, but it was too late for that. It was as if Sherman, having been irrevocably outed as a terrorist sympathizer in the eyes of a sizeable faction of the class, had no choice but to breathe freely now, to ventilate his long-suppressed thoughts and opinions just as a genie, if you will, breathes deeply, greedily, of the hot desert air when freed at last from the confines of the imprisoning lamp. “I mean, it is not true,” said Sherman, “it is not a true telling of the story. The real hero was a man from Iraq. He discovered the Jessica Lynch prisoner in the hospital, and he had the courage to cross the battle lines to tell the American officials where she was at. But that was not all. The American officials asked him to go back to the hospital to make a map for the rescue operation. And this he did, crossing the lines of fire twice more, risking his life on the line. And that is how they knew where to find her. And that is why no shot was fired.”
Ms. Costanza stood hands on hip, her mouth agape. “That’s–that’s astonishing, Sherman. I didn’t read that in the Chronicle.”
“No, you did not,” said Sherman, indulging the impulse to sneer a bit. “It was reported on Arab television. Aljazeera. ”
“He’s ours,” murmured Duck Saunders to his gang, pounding his fist in the palm of his hand. But when Sherman Zahd walked out of school that day, he walked taller and prouder than he ever had in the past two years, feeling for the first time like a freedom-loving American; and the inward smile was outward now, a close-mouthed amalgam of smile and sneer. So good did he feel that he stopped off at 7-Eleven to celebrate with a Slurpee, which he slurped with glee as he stepped out of the store and rounded the corner. There he was intercepted by Duck Saunders and his two man crew, who, rumor had it, had roughed up kids for money at that very spot.
“Can I have a sip,” sneered Duck, backing Sherman against the wall.
“I don’t think so,” said Sherman, taking another sip.
“You don’t want to give him a sip!” said Oddis Rankin, Duck’s right hand man.
“I don’t think so,” said Sherman. “He didn’t say please.”
“You–!” Oddis raised his hand, but Duck stayed it and told Sherman: “You hate America, man! And you hate Private Lynch. She’s a hero!”
“And you dissed her!” said Albert Chu, leaning his perpetually scowling face into Sherman’s.
Sherman shook his head like a teacher bemused by the confusion of his students. “You guys are so funny. You don’t even know how great a hero she truly was.”
“What are you talkin’ about!” The circle was tight against Sherman, his back to the wall.
“I mean, allow me to tell you the real true story of this great war hero, the story you are not allowed to hear. You think she went down fighting, don’t you? You think the Iraqis killed her comrades and captured her alive? Stop for a minute and think–could Iraqi combat troops kill a whole platoon of our American soldiers in battle? It’s ridiculous! We kill them! Look at the numbers–there’s always, I should say, approximately eighty or a hundred of them killed for every one of us! Right?”
“Right. But, they shot her, didn’t they?” Duck glowered, still suspicious.
“No! They didn’t! That was just a story to fool the terrorists! Look, I’ll let you in on a top secret–if you promise to keep it quiet. Can I trust you?” They nodded. “My Uncle Abdul”–here Sherman lowered his voice so that they had to lean right into his face–“my Uncle Abdul is a CIA spy, working for us in the CIA bureau in Baghdad–and he tells my father everything. The secret is, the Private Lynch is a spy, too! They sent her in there in order to be captured, so that she could take pictures of the Iraqi weapons, and make audiotapes to give the CIA! She had a camera implanted in her forehead, and a microphone in her neck.”
“Okay,” said Albert Chu, leaning in on Sherman. “But if she didn’t get shot, then how’d she get hurt?”
“She fake hurt herself, so they would take her to the hospital! Think about it: What would she learn chilling with other American prisoners in a rat-filled dungeon? But in an Iraqi hospital, she could talk to real Iraqi people, the ones who hate Saddam as much as we do, and want to be liberated from him. The soldiers didn’t even try to hurt her–in fact, they were under strict orders not to shoot her, or anyone like her. And do you know why? Can you guess? It was so they could put her in Saddam’s harem! You’ve seen pictures of her, haven’t you? She’s beautiful!” They nodded. “She was recruited from the set of American Idol. She was standing in line to audition, and the CIA recruited her on the spot. They knew she was so beautiful, Saddam was sure to want her for his harem. After spying everything she could in the hospital, she would pretend to recover from her fake injuries and go to his harem–and if he wasn’t already assassinated by another agent, or killed by our smart bombs, she would kill him with poison lipstick!”
“And how’d your cousin find all this out?” said Duck Saunders through narrowed eyes. “And how’d he tell your father?”
“Nanotechnology,” said Sherman with a wink. He pointed to his forehead. “Uncle Abdul very clever.” And as they already knew that Arabs are sly, they nodded knowingly and chattered among themselves as Sherman Zahd walked off down the street.
“Wait a minute!” they said the next day, pushing Sherman against the wall of the 7-Eleven once more. “If we wanted her to infilterate Saddam’s harem, then how come we rescued her from the hospital?”
Sherman was sipping an even larger Slurpee this time. “The incredible reason is–you’re not going to believe this–Saddam didn’t want her for his harem! He sent a posse of his toughest punks to the hospital to check her out, and they took her picture in different attractive poses, and sent it to him over the internet. And guess what! You can’t! He said she wasn’t pretty enough! His exact words–it’s unbelievable–were, “She looks too American.”
“That bastard!” A bubble of froth from Duck Saunders’ moth floated over Sherman’s shoulder. “He’s crazy! American babes are the hottest in the world!”
“I know!” said Sherman. “Saddam knows American babes are the hottest in the world. He just said it to insult us because he hates us so much!”
“Yeah! What’s he want anyway, some Arab girl with a big black beard?”
“Hey,” said Oddis, “Sherman’s got a little sister, man. No need to diss her.”
“Oh, no,” said Sherman with a little laugh, “we’re Iranians, not Arabs. No problem.”
“What happened next, Sherm?” asked Oddis.
“What happened next is, she had to figure out a way out, because she knew they were going to kill her since she wasn’t going to be in the harem! But first, they decided to torture her for espionage. But since she was CIA-trained, she wouldn’t talk! So they drugged her and hypnotized her, and she pretended to be hypnotized. Then she gave them all this great top secret espionage, like how many soldiers we had, and where they were, and what kind of guns they were using, and where and when we were going to attack next. The only problem was, it was fake! She was making it up! And they bought it! They all called Saddam on their cell phones, thinking they were going to get a bunch of medals; but the next day, when he sent his soldiers to where he thought he was going to take our troops by surprise, it was an ambush! And we slaughtered them!”
“Sweet!” they all said. “I bet my uncle shot a few A-rabs,” said Duck.
“Yeah! The only problem for Jessica was, she was running out of stuff to make up, and she knew when she did, they’d kill her with biological weapons! So she started up the best story of all, to get them interested. She told them that George Bush himself was going to fly in to Baghdad secretly on a Blackhawk to run the war. She said he was mad at the way the general was running things, and that he wanted to call all the shots from now on–and drop a few bombs himself! They all started getting excited, and writing things down in Arabic, and talking to each other really fast with their hands! They thought they were going to win huge promotions when they told the big news to Saddam, maybe even get an oil well or two! But then, right before she was going to tell them where President Bush was going to land and when, she froze! Like a computer! She just sat there staring off into space like a zombie! And they were freaking out, dudes! They were totally scared that if Saddam found out they had frozen her right before she was going to tell them when Bush was coming, he’d gas them for sure! What they didn’t know was, Jessica was just faking being frozen!”
“Those chumps!”
“I know! Their best hypnotizers tried everything to start her up again, but she just kept staring off into space. Finally they smoked some cigarettes and decided to go home for the night to avoid arousing suspicion. And that’s when she made her daring escape plan, the one you know about already.”
“Awesome!” they agreed, slapping hands as Sherman walked off down the street.
“Hey, Sherm,” they said, waiting outside the 7-Eleven the next day, “give us some more inside stuff on Iraq.” So he told them the latest, the stuff they wouldn’t get on t.v.. How, after the “abortion” of the Jessica Lynch spy mission, they decided to use her rescue to boost morale instead; how Saddam always carried a suicide pill because he was scared of being captured by George Bush himself, and how, since he couldn’t sleep without pills now due to worry, they had two guys assigned to him just to make sure he didn’t accidentally take his suicide pill instead of his sleeping pill; how weapons of mass destruction were being shipped to other countries every day through underground tunnels and given to underground terrorists to use against us. And so it went, day after day, meeting at the 7-Eleven for Slurpees and chips (“good ol’ American junk food,” they joked, taking turns rubbing Sherman’s head with their knuckles), Sherman mesmerizing them with insider’s tales, they rewarding him with nachos which he pretended to like. The association carried over to school before long. After two years as a loner, Sherman now had a crew; and, considering the bad-boy make-up of the crew, cries of “Sherman’s odd”–muted cries, out of earshot of Duck, Oddis, and Albert–were renewed by those who knew Sherman back in the fourth grade. Suddenly, to the amazement of all, it was three bad boys and that odd little Sherman Zahd: Sherman, helping them in the computer lab, where they spent most of their assigned time harassing kids who were trying to work; Sherman, finding books in the library for their reports; Sherman, regaling them in the playground with all sorts of stories, tales which, he told them, he made up on the spot–and not just stories about the war, but stories about pygmies intoxicated by rare African berries, riding lions bareback; about ancient Persian astronomers tortured on the rack for claiming asteroids were heading towards the earth; about secret government plans to develop IQ pills to cut schooling from 12 years to 1. “How can you make this stuff up!” they said in awe. “It’s called writing,” said Sherman with a wink. And now the young writer was completely uncorked, for he had what he had long craved, an audience of his peers. He also had what he had long needed–schoolyard muscle to protect him from harassment. And if, from time to time, his new friends would toss out vile slurs against Arabs, it didn’t seem to bother him much, for he laughed it off and called the slurs “spice for your speech.” Besides, he knew that they meant nothing personal against him, for they had declared him to be an “honorary American” in respect of his uncle the spy; and, also, he had convinced them that Very Wrong was right, Iranians are not even Arabs to begin with. Not that there wasn’t always an undercurrent of tension, for there was: a lingering sense that perhaps Sherman was not really the ardent patriot that he seemed, that maybe an Iranian really is just a different kind of Arab after all (“Iraq is almost the same word as Iran,” Albert noted). Nor was Sherman senseless to this, for when they’d ask him for help with yet another computer project–“C’mon, Sherman, I’m no nerd, man, just use my password and knock out that report for me”–it seemed that the friendly arms wound around his neck were just a bit tighter than friendly arms should be.
Yet if Sherman seemed pleased with his new lot, his father was not. “Why do you join with such riff raff!” scolded the man, an Iraqi-born physician. But Sherman just smiled the mysterious smile he’d shown his classmates for two years and shrugged. “At least he has friends now,” said his mother, the beautiful daughter of an Iranian banker who had fled before the fall of the Shah. She stroked her son’s raven hair. “I think it’s wonderful he has playmates.”
“Such playmates can make big trouble,” said the father. But Sherman refused to go back to the playground without protection, and besides, he figured, it was just a few weeks until the end of the school year, and then he could make a clean break with Duck’s crew. He just had to keep it cool until then, and he had lots to occupy his time, for he was working on a project–a top secret one, like all his endeavors–in the computer lab, where he was already spending inordinate amounts of time writing term history reports for Duck’s gang. Not that he minded doing so, for it kept him in their good graces, and out from under their thumbs. By delaying the completion of the reports until the morning they were due, which was two days before commencement, Sherman managed to reduce his face time with the gang to about twenty minutes a week. Naturally they were thrilled with the reports he produced, all perfectly formatted and spiral-bound, yet riddled with the copious quantity of spelling errors the teacher would expect from them (Sherman had even cribbed the errors from the gang’s own spelling tests to ensure authenticity): Victury Of The West. The New American Millenium. The Impereel Eagle. “What do we owe you?” they asked. Nothing, Sherman insisted. But you deserve something, they said. “I will get it,” he replied.
The day before commencement, Sherman was two hours late coming home. His father, having read that lawlessness among juveniles increases near the end of the school year, feared the worst. He set out in his car to trace Sherman’s usual route home. Near the 7-Eleven, he saw Duck and his gang in a semicircle around the wall, and he could see fragments of a figure pinned up against the wall. It was Uriah Peckinpaugh, his eyes wide with fright, clutching his briefcase to keep Albert Chu from snatching it. Sherman’s dad, who was called “Dr. Zahd” by everyone who knew him despite the fact that he hadn’t practiced medicine since fleeing Iraq, pulled up alongside and blew his horn. “What are you doing!” he thundered.
“Just talking with our lawyer,” Duck grinned. Uriah seized the opportunity to reclaim his briefcase and scurry away.
“Have you seen my son?” said Dr. Zahd.
“Could you describe him?” chortled Duck.
Dr. Zahd had been an army medic during the war with Iran. He had seen men holding their intestines in place, and had learned to see such things clinically, dispassionately, else he could not have functioned. He looked at Duck and company in just this way. “Tell him I’m looking for him if you see him.”
But Sherman was already back home, pacing in anticipation of the next day’s commencement activities. He was up for an award, and he wanted it badly.
The awards for the most part went to the expected recipients, including Mary Wong, who won the Biology Award. At 11:15, Sherman Zahd strode to the podium to accept the Creative Writing Award. “Not bad for a boy who spoke little English when he came to this country from France,” said the presenting teacher. At about the same time, the answering machines and voice mail boxes of Ms. Elizabeth Saunders, Mr. and Mrs. Oswald Rankin, and Mr. and Mrs. Simon Chu reached their limits, filled to capacity with irate messages from callers who had read the flyers posted on walls and utility poles all over the neighborhood the night before. “Death to America the fashist viper,” the flyers said, repeating a phrase–“the fashist viper”–employed in the history reports authored, but never read by, Duck Saunders, Oddis Rankin, and Albert Chu (Duck had in fact glanced through his paper on the way to class, but didn’t know what either “fashist” or “viper” meant). Only a few of the hundreds of callers seemed intent on accepting the invitation at the bottom of the flyer to “Join our Def Underground Heros call to action to defeat the impereel beast! Break windows! Smash windsheelds! Slash tires! Go crazy!” And while the FBI didn’t really believe that three 12 year-old boys would be dumb enough to put their phone numbers on flyers as incendiary as this (or to form a group called DUH), the fact that the flyers were written in the school computer lab on password-protected computers used by the very kids whose phone numbers appeared on the flyers would cause the agency to keep its files open for quite some time; this thought consoled Sherman Zahd as he sipped a Slurpee and contemplated the lonely summer ahead.
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