Growing Up Wired

by David Wallace Fleming

  “Nope,” he said and flicked on her light switch, “Wrong… WRONG! WRONG!” He stood inside her lighted entryway. “We’re in!”

  We shoved our way inside the cold, strangely shaped room with its clustered armoires, bronze plaques, its blue-washed walls, florid green and red wallpaper strips and white Victorian ceiling moldings. “Paradisio!” someone said.

  Wilfred swiped some grandmotherly accoutrements out of the way and belly flopped onto the center of her circular, mahogany table, his dangling arms and legs forming an ‘X’: “Spin me! Spin me like a top! I can do it!” We each grabbed an arm or leg and ran in circles until he cried: “Uncle! Uncle! Hey—Uncle. Damn, I hate you guys! Stop!”—we spun him—“I’m dying. Goodbye beautiful women I never fucked.”

  Drake bolted toward a white door. “I’m ransacking the granny-bathroom!”

  Gerhard smashed two glazed figurines together. “And I’m breaking this shit in case the Unbroken Police come around.”

  “Good thinking,” Mark said, rifling through her closet, “The Unbroken Police have been making the rounds.” He threw a green cardigan on the floor. “Where’s the Fila? This bitch ain’t got no Fila. Damn!”

  “It would be in a drawer!” Rex said. “I know her.” He yanked on a couple drawers of a dresser, unhinging them as they flew out. “She’d put it in a drawer. She would, she would.”

  “It’s like we’re all a bunch of kites on strings,” Solomon explained to us, stroking his Van Dyke, “Skeet-skeet-skeet-skeet-skeet!” He ran face-first into a wall and pinwheeled his arms on the recoil. “Dizzy baby. More dizziness.”

  Tag produced a grey lockbox from a closet and K-Zorro snatched it from him and tossed it on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Tag asked.

  “I’ve got the key,” K-Zorro said.

  “You do?”

  “Yah, it’s right here under my fucking shoe!” K-Zorro stomped and dented the lockbox.

  “You can’t get it open that way—”

  “But I can fucking destroy it!”

  “Good point.”

  “If I were an Elizabeth,” I said to myself, “If I were an Elizabeth.” I walked toward her neatly made bed. I ripped off the lacy emerald comforter and the soft, blue cotton sheets, lifting the mattress from the box spring to grope inside the cold, smooth recess. My triumphant hand yanked a leather portfolio into the air. Inside I flipped through her W2’s and her 1040 tax forms to find it! A quarter-inch stack of house letterhead. I flipped through them. They were beige with our House crest in the upper left hand corner. I turned it in the light to admire the filigree watermark in the center of the page. “Found it,” I said.

  Rex turned to me. “Yes! Good work, Hasty.” He snatched a white plastic trash can out from beneath a writing desk and dumped its contents on the floor. “Hasty found it!”

  They gathered around me and Rex snatched them from me. He inspected them briefly, flipping through them. “I knew she had some. I knew it!” He stuffed them in the trash can. “You see this, K-Zorro!”

  “Yes,” K-Zorro said.

  “Are you properly impressed with me now?” Rex said.

  K-Zorro grinned, triumphantly, “Yes, Rex. Nice work.”

  “Who’s got a light?” Rex asked.

  Several lighters appeared. Flint-wheels flashed.

  “Wait,” Drake said. “Is this trashcan flame retardant?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilfred said. “Are you retardant?”

  “We’ll take it outside!” Rex said, heading out of her suite’s doorway. Several of us stuttered to appraise the splintery mess of the door in bewilderment.

  Outside, beneath the overhang of the front porch, Rex said, “Let’s light it!” And we lit it. It flamed and flamed as the breeze caught it. Rex picked it up over his head, stepped toward the lower porch landing like a Donkey-Kong gorilla hefting a barrel overhead. He shook the flaming mess out for the wind to tumble over the landing, “hahahaha—haaaaah!”

  We dashed out and stomped over the flaming, spinning scraps like an incensed ballerina troupe as UNL Alphas lined up to watch us from the other side of the Blue Room windows. Rex tossed the flimsy trashcan and let it skip over the landing. “It’s done.”

  We walked back inside there.

  “You sick, repressed fucks…” one of the UNL guys said.

  “Word! Big-Bird!” Wilfred retorted.

  “We’re not responsible for this,” one of them who had followed us yelled as we headed for the stairwell.

  “Aren’t you? Aren’t you—Aren’t, aren’t, aren’t you?” we hyena-barked, “Aren’t, aren’t you?!”

  As we walked up the stairwell, I heard K-Zorro say, “There isn’t really an extra door in the Pit-Pit.” He closed his eyes as he walked up stairs with his hand on the railing. “I just wanted to feel something.” He grinned.

  “Who’s setting an alarm to clean this shit up before Ma Red get’s back?” Drake asked. “She gets back at eleven in the morning.”

  “I’ll do it!” Solomon said.

  “No you won’t,” someone else said.

  I followed them through the halls and collapsed inside my rack. My head was dizzy and I was tired. I tried to figure out what had happened that night. Through cracks in my sheets I could see the sunlight flooding through the casement windows. The morning was already here and nobody had set an alarm clock. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get worried about it.

  I had made it through my first major frat-party as an in-house member; I’d been peer-pressured into trying at least one hallucinogen; I’d helped break-in and ransack Ma Red’s suite and I was falling in love with Emily. Emily: a beautiful, spoiled, do-gooder with half a hand.

  I heard a lawnmower’s engine near my head. I jumped out of the rack. Other people were getting out of their racks too. Wilfred ran down the center aisle of the sunlight filling rack-room pushing a lawnmower. The lawnmower sputtered and died. Wilfred halted in the center of the room. “… ran out of gas,” he said.

  We cheered.

  Rex rushed before Wilfred and cried out with bravado, “How about a round of ‘Hail, Oh Hail Thee Alphas’?”

  We cheered.

  “Ohhhh!—we’ll serve with mirth and prudence,” Rex bellowed, blue neck veins bulging. He looked around. “You fuckers aren’t singing!”

  “Wait!” Mark said. “Are we singing the Sober or the Drunk version?”

  “The Drunk!” Rex said. “The Drunk version—the Drunk.”

  I heartily rejoined with them:

  “Ohhhh!—we’ll serve with mirth and prudence

  ‘Till moon falls in the sea…”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE ANTI-POET

  The morning of the guilty who felt terrific. I still felt like I was One with them. The world was exciting and big; I was a part of it: I was still drunk. I couldn’t remember what we had done. It was cool inside the cocoon of blue bed sheets hanging from my rack. Sunlight from the casement windows cut through cracks in the hanging sheets, warming my cheeks as the translucent spots that looked like these tiny trademark symbols effervesced and dispersed up through bright air.

  The guilt and knowledge of what we had done was this rickety ship that I was floating up to see from underneath. I made out its hull through murky waters, floating up to ghost through the planks into the hold: Ma Red’s 1040 forms in her leather portfolio! my hands going through her personal belongings. I had gone into her suite and I had loved it. It was the one place in the house I was forbidden to enter. The buried part of the engine of my mind must have been diverting extra fuel, burning red hot, calculating all the possible circumstances that might give me the excuse to tread my dirty shoes over that immaculate emerald carpet of hers. I smiled even as I felt horrible. Maybe there was still time to fix things. I lifted the sheets and swung my head over the side of the bed to squint at the digital alarm clock on the cement floor beneath a rack in the corner. It was 2:00 in the afternoon. Rats! I could lay in bed
forever. That was an option; sure. I had the right to make that choice. I could get out of bed and sidestep all responsibility, alternating responses of “what?” and “huh?” until my inquisitors gave up in exasperation. But that wouldn’t do. I touched over my eyes. I had to get out of there and shave or something.

  I shuffled and trudged my way to my room, squinting at all natural light as I rubbed my forehead. All the doors on my nerd side of the hallway were closed except for Dubnicek’s. I tried a few locked doorknobs and heard members talking softly inside. After I’d grabbed my shower caddy out of my room I stopped in front of Dubnicek’s room to find Rex, Drake and Wilfred arguing about whether the pledges could get a new door delivered to the house in time. Rex sat on the floor with his hands between his knees playing some noisy, motorcycle video game. Erin Masters got up off of Dubnicek’s couch and walked out the room toward me. She was wearing a purple sweatshirt and jeans with a backpack slung over her shoulders.

  “Here,” she said, handing me a crumpled wad of slimy toilet paper. “Can you take this to the bathroom trash for me?”

  I took the wadded tissue. “Uh, okay.”

  “Thanks,” she said and walked toward the fire escape exit.

  I turned and headed inside the bathroom with my shower caddy and my wadded tissue. The tissue looked like it was covered in black-tinged Vaseline, like she’d used it to take off her mascara. Why couldn’t she throw it in Dubnicek’s trash can? What?—had she sat there on that couch waiting for me to come out so she could hand me this? Girls were strange.

  I threw the tissue away and started shaving. The house phone bleeped and the intercom kicked-in. It was Ma Red:

  “It’s beyond wretchedness what was done. Know that I called the police to report for what was done,”—she talked directly at me—“I won’t upset—I’ve tried my whole life only to dislike… never to hate. I hate… That’s how you lowered me. I hate myself for hating you. I will no longer be house mother.

  “One of the UNL boys told me you were all on depressant medication and narcotics last night when… I’ve long suspected drug-play but held silent because I wouldn’t accuse without proof. How can you each be depressed when you have so much? It’s not depression. I don’t call this depression. This many can’t be depressed. It’s pamperedness. You’re in pampers. What will you think of yourself, looking back on your youth, when you reach my age? Will you be proud of your accomplishments—realizing you made them of your own, uninfluenced power—or will you realize you used pills, and the Internet nudes and your hand-toys and your phones to hide? You hide in your rooms. Because you’re children. You’re kids.

  “I’ve known the Rapture is close for all of us. This world deserved better. It deserved men. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to help the world make its last men. It’s all I—I suppose you doing this is your way of telling me my function has become obsolete.”

  The Rapture… the Rapture? Huh? Was she somehow giving what had happened a biblical significance? She’d worked for the House for almost twenty years and my actions had served to squelch her faith in manhood. I’d never been guiltier. A lump formed in my throat. My eyes watered. I scraped the shaving cream off my face and smeared it on my sweatpants as I headed for the door.

  Ma Red stood in the hallway, staring at the telephone receiver like she might bring it to her lips at any moment to add something. She wore a feminine, white v-neck with jeans of a 1980’s whitewash. She grumbled something and slammed the receiver down, adjusting her wicker shoulder bag as she turned to face me. She stared at me. She was an animal. Her white hair was frazzled and looked thinner than normal. Tear tracks streaked her thin, wrinkled skin with her cheeks pulled halfway between a smile and a snarl. “Well… ?” her lips formed the word slowly. Half her upper lip glimmered with salmon lipstick as the rest of her grey mouth moved, “Well?”

  I wanted to melt into the floor. “Mrs. Redding,” I said, “I am truly sorry.”

  “It’s Miss Redding.” She brushed past me. “It’s always been Miss Redding.” She headed toward Dubnicek’s room and I followed her.

  There was nothing I could do. “I can’t change what happened but—” Everything was out of my control as I followed her.

  She crossed the threshold of Dubnicek’s door and everyone grew quiet. Rex attempted to continue playing his noisy motorcycle video game as she got between him and the TV. She stood widely and placed her hands on her hips.

  He leaned to his left, attempting to peer around her and he reluctantly paused the game, never meeting her eyes once.

  “What did I do to deserve this?”

  Rex seemed to stare blankly at her hips.

  She took a step toward him. “What—?” her hand smacked the side of his forehead, turning his head to the left. She spat, “WHAT—?” her other hand smacked his forehead turning it right.

  He remained silent and dead.

  She stood there over him, heaving her chest, glowering. I could swear she was a much younger woman, a woman of her early thirties. I thought she might swallow Rex, spit out his big bones for us.

  Rex flattened his hair and touched over some red fingernail scratches. It felt like he only wanted her to leave so he could continue playing. He spoke with impatience, “You’re in the way.”

  Her mouth gaped as she looked at him with hate. With the stillness in the heavy air it felt like she must have been tearing apart and rebuilding all the most sacred connections in her mind.

  I wanted to get out of their quick but some part of me had to know what happened next.

  “Oh—oh dear!” She looked around the room to meet each of our eyes. “No. I—I don’t think I love you boys any more. You’ve always been boys and I’ve always had hope in the future of your manhoods. But something’s changed. How could you do this to me?”

  Drake sat up straight like he was his own chair. Wilfred pushed back, digging himself into the couch’s back. They were so still, I wondered if they were still breathing.

  She touched her forehead, whispering to herself, “Is this, is this what’s left?”

  Drake angled his stiff chair-like frame toward the door and Wilfred turned his head down to the carpet.

  She spoke to someone she’d met long ago, “I never believed it would happen like this.” She turned toward the door. She walked, stirring the dust in the window’s sunbeams.

  Rex unpaused his noisy motorcycles. Engines revved on the TV. “Bitch,” he mumbled and clicked his controller buttons.

  She neared. I couldn’t talk.

  She passed through Dubnicek’s doorway. “I didn’t waste my life,” she told us.

  We remained silent in there, the four of us. Drake and Wilfred got more comfortable on the couch and Rex kept on clicking his controller buttons. Dubnicek came back in and sat on a plastic chair. “What happened in here?” He strummed his fingers over his plaster cast. “Why’s everybody so quiet?”

  We ignored him. I walked over to the window and waited. I watched her stomp off to her Buick and get inside. She sent gravel flying and flew out of our parking lot. “She’s leaving us,” I said.

  Rex stopped clicking buttons and let his motorcycle slow and fall over into the dirt as the other bikes wizzed past.

  “What,” Dubnicek said. “What are you guys talking about?”

  Rex tossed his controller across the room and stood. He headed toward the door.

  “Rex?” Wilfred said. “Rex?… wait. Are you crying? What? Why, why are you crying, man?”

  “I knew I could get her game over quicker.” His ruddy face ran with silvery tears. “I knew I could make her leave me.” He turned from us, “It’s our future now.” He punched the open, thick door on his way out and it rung with shudders. “But what was our past?”

  “Wait, Rex,” Wilfred said.

  “No,” Rex said and he left.

  “What’s going on?” Dubnicek asked.

  I went into my room to get something to drink. I had some grape Kool-Aid in the fridge so I poure
d myself some. It tasted good but something was missing. The grape tasted a little lonesome without the ‘quila and it had been a rough morning after all so I poured in some plastic-bottle tequila to take the rough edges off of things. Next, I worried myself over what had just happened. I worried and worried myself until my skin itched. I drank some more—yah! Good stuff. What kind of trouble had I gotten myself into last night? Legal trouble? Or was it simply a matter of irreparably compromising one’s principles? I needed reassurance.

  I would go downstairs and talk things over with Thomas Clark. I hadn’t seen him at all last night and I was pretty sure he hadn’t been with us when we busted Ma Red’s door down.

  I knocked on his door and waited. And waited. I knocked again, only louder. “It’s Victor,” I hollered, “Stop ignoring me.”

  “Victor who?” he asked.

  “Victor Open-The-Fucking-Door!” I replied.

  The door unlocked and opened. He smiled and pulled a blue tank top over his stomach. “Oh, that Victor.” He scratched his skinny, brown neck. “Come on in. I’m taking an online IQ test. You can help me cheat. I just need to get above 130 and I don’t care how I do it.”

  I walked into his room and took a seat on his busted recliner.

  “How are you on your palindromes?” he asked.

  “My palindromes have been falling off lately,” I said. “Look, Thomas, I’ve got some serious stuff to talk about.”

  Thomas clicked his mouse. “Oh, I see. And I suppose my quest for a Mensan IQ score is just messing around.”

  “I can take a shit in a box for you and mark it 132, if you want.”

  Thomas spun on his chair. “You’d do that for me.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious.

  “Alright, Chris Farley,” he said, “what’s so damn important that I can’t finish my test?”

  “Didn’t you see what we did last night?”

  “See it?” he said, “I fucking heard it. You were with those guys when they did that?”

  “Why didn’t you try to stop it?”

  He picked up a tennis ball that he’d cut in half and started tossing it in the air. “Not my concern.”