The New City

by Stephen Amidon

  “I’m not eating that,” he said, nodding at his lunch from in front of the open fridge.

  “I wish you would.”

  Teddy grabbed a carton of orange juice and downed a slug straight from the wax spout. Watergate was on the small black-and-white. He watched as he drank, orange rivulets trailing down his chin. He wiped them away with the back of his wrist, then pointed at the screen with the carton.

  “He’s going down.”

  “You think?” Sally asked.

  Teddy mimed a flushing toilet.

  “History. Ask Dad. He’ll tell you.”

  Sally pointed at his Two Virgins shirt with her fork.

  “You’re not actually wearing that thing, are you?”

  “It would appear that I am.”

  “Dear, it’s pornographic.”

  “Just like Adam and Eve were.”

  “Well, look what happened to them.”

  Teddy shrugged. His mom was Presbyterian.

  “Would you at least put a shirt over it. It really is unbearable.”

  “It’s supposed to be.”

  “Well, then, congratulations.”

  He drank again. She gave him an exasperated look.

  “All right,” Teddy said. “I’ll boil to death to make you happy.”

  They watched the news for a while.

  “Do you think Dad looks like John Dean?”

  Sally tilted her head at the TV.

  “Not so much looks like as brings to mind.” She speared a pineapple wedge and began to examine it. “So did you have fun last night?”

  Teddy shrugged.

  “What did you do?”

  “Stole a car. Drove to Vegas. Married a showgirl.”

  “She nice?”

  “Very.”

  Sally bit off some of the fruit, then seemed to have second thoughts, retrieving the pulp between two painted nails and scraping it off on the edge of the plate.

  “I heard there were fights at the teen center,” she said.

  “Really? Who said that?”

  “Your father.”

  “Jesus, is there anything the Swope doesn’t know?”

  Sally searched the cottage cheese for acceptable fruit.

  “Oh, there’s things.”

  A commercial came on. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

  “Have you picked out a present for his birthday?”

  “Not yet,” Teddy said.

  “You should.” Sally yawned. “He wants to see you as soon as you’re up.”

  “Why?”

  “I imagine he wants an eyewitness account of the trouble.”

  “All right. I was going to work on my novel, but.”

  “Were Susan and Joel there last night?”

  “We affected our escape together.”

  “Teddy, I was going to ask you about that. I saw Irma at the bridge round-robin the other day and she said she thought the two of them were getting too serious.”

  “Irma Truax is a Nazi.”

  “Nonsense. What a thing to say.”

  “Ma, the woman has a picture of Hitler in a scrapbook.”

  Sally shot him a dubious look.

  “I’ve seen it,” Teddy continued. “Joel showed me. It was taken back in the thirties, when she was a tyke. Old Adolf came to her hometown and she was picked to give him a bouquet. She’s got a picture of it. Hitler’s bending over, patting her on the head.”

  Sally stared at him for a moment.

  “Are you sure it’s Hitler? Mightn’t it be one of his evil henchmen or something?”

  “Mom. Please. Mustache? Three Stooges do? It’s Hitler.”

  “How strange. Though I suppose if she was just a girl …”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “So anyway,” Teddy said, wanting to hear more. “What did she say about Susan?”

  “She said that they were thinking about breaking them up.”

  Teddy looked at her for a moment.

  “What the fuck does that mean? Break them up.”

  “Edward, language.”

  “Sorry. So …”

  “Well, I suppose it means that she thinks the two of them are a bit too young to be so … serious.”

  Teddy executed a terse, nullifying shake of his head.

  “Never happen.”

  “I don’t know. She sounded pretty intent.”

  “So what did you want to ask me about?”

  “Well, I guess because you spend so much time together, I was wondering what you thought. I mean about them being so serious.”

  They are, Teddy thought. Way too serious.

  “They’re dating, Ma. Isn’t that what kids are supposed to do?”

  “Well, anyway. She said she was going to have a word with Earl and Ardelia.”

  They sat in silence. Teddy’s mind reeled. Susan and Joel broken up. He knew that Susan’s mom was weird about the two of them. And even Joel had begun taking flak from his parents, who were normally cool about everything. But Teddy had thought it was just the usual progenitorial bullshit. He never suspected for a moment that anyone was going to do anything as radical as break them up.

  “Teddy?”

  “Huh?”

  “If you’re not going to eat then you should go see your father. He sounded pretty anxious to speak with you.”

  “Sure.” He smiled. “I was going to hit him up for some change, anyway.”

  It was a ten-minute drive to the Swope’s office. Teddy raced through the quiet streets in the jet-black Firebird his folks had given him for acing his SAT’s. New houses and new lawns and new trees flashed by. Japanese beetles kamikazed against his windshield. As he drove he smoked a quick pick-me-up joint he’d earlier leavened with the remnants of a gutted Camel. It was only after his second toke that he remembered his bargain with himself to lay off the herb until happy hour. Ah well, he thought. Tomorrow. Teddy had bigger worries, anyway. He couldn’t stop thinking about what his mom had said about Joel and Susan. Normally, he wouldn’t have paid it any mind. Sally was a sucker for gossip. But if Irma was making public threats, the situation must be serious. The possibility that his best friend might be forced to stop seeing the love of his life suddenly loomed. Joel would go nuts. For some reason, he was crazy about the girl. Not that she wasn’t a serious piece of tail, especially now that it was summer and she could let it all hang out. Long blond hair shining in the summer sun. Small firm tits bouncing under a halter top. Hip huggers cut just above her snatch. She was a honey, no doubt about that. It was just that she was so transcendentally stupid. She understood precisely nothing. Last night, before the riot, Teddy was describing the eighth chapter of his novel when he noticed Susan yawning, staring with bored and vacant eyes up into the smoky rafters. Which was something you did not do. Not to Teddy. Not in his loft. He’d tried talking to Joel about her brain deficiency a few times but the guy was thinking with his dick. He just couldn’t see that the girl had pablum between her ears. Not that Susan’s stupidity was a problem in itself. There were a lot of stupid people in the world. They served their purpose. They made up the curve. If there weren’t stupid people then Teddy would have never got 1590 on his SAT’s. Their D’s made his A’s possible. It was just that Susan didn’t seem to understand that she was stupid. She was forever chirping in with her opinions, arguing with Teddy about things that were beyond discussion. Claiming, for instance, that McCartney wrote “Revolution.” Unbelievable. Or announcing that she thought The King of Marvin Gardens was boring. And Joel actually listened to her, swallowing her insipid little pearls of wisdom without even the smallest gag.

  It made Teddy yearn for the time when there had just been him and Joel, the summer four years ago when their fathers moved them out here to the middle of nowhere. At first, Teddy had hated leaving Potomac for this wasteland. Conditions were primitive back then. Strictly Omega Man. No more than two dozen houses were occupied when they arrived, each of them as isolated as frontier forts. The land around them was pocked and s
moldering. It looked like a war zone, where two terrible armies had fought to a bloody standstill before withdrawing in shattered defeat. Churned earth, roofless structures and piles of rubble were everywhere. Instead of Potomac’s comfortably worn houses there were timber frames and foundation ditches and big, scavenging machines that moved slowly over the land, leaving behind smudges of suspended smoke. You could barely move without tripping over a survey stake. The reports of hammers filled the air, sounding like the last, desperate fusillade of a retreating platoon. Newton Plaza and the mall had not even been built, while the lake was just a big weedy field.

  But then he met Joel. Their fathers threw them together at the beginning of that first summer, a couple of thirteen-year-olds recently exiled to a place that wasn’t even a place yet. Their first few minutes together were painfully uncomfortable. Joel was shy back then and Teddy had never even spoken to a black kid, except for that time he’d been mugged outside the Smithsonian, and then only to say sure, take the money, just don’t hit me. But they soon discovered they had the same bikes—metallic-blue Schwinn choppers with sissy bars and banana seats. That was it. They were off, vaulting drainage ditches and daredeviling over mounds of dozed clay. They rode every day that first summer, from the crack of dawn until twilight. The city was transformed from a hostile wasteland into an exotic wilderness. The concrete foundations of schools became mazes; corrugated iron drainpipes were turned into tunnels they would penetrate with flashlit daring. The condemned houses of the locals his dad was evicting became hideouts where they would sometimes find left-behind magazines and photos and letters which Teddy would use as fuel for the elaborate stories he had already begun to weave.

  They even invented their own game: house jumping. The rules were simple. They would stand together on the upper floor of one of the city’s hundreds of unfinished house frames, surrounded by stenciled plywood and tape-crossed windows. Side by side, they would inch up to the edge of the abyss where stairs had yet to be installed. Two stories below, in the pitch-black basement, rested the bags of cement mix and bales of bubblegum-pink insulation they’d constructed into a big cushion before climbing the ladder to the top floor. Joel would grab Teddy’s hand and count to three. And then they’d jump, falling at exactly the same speed, confirming what Teddy already knew about Galileo and gravity. Disappearing for a terrible moment into utter darkness before hitting the soft pile. Teddy could never have done it without Joel grabbing his hand. He would have been too scared, his mind too alive with the possibilities of fractured ankles or rusty nails. But once he felt Joel’s cool dark skin around his it was easy. He could have done anything.

  That first best summer ended on the day they were bused as freshmen to Cannon County High. It was an ordeal for them both. Teddy, accustomed to the property-taxed comfort of Potomac’s schools, suddenly found himself in a brick warehouse surrounded by jostling farmboys and sullen, ignorant teachers. The things he had to offer, the precocious intelligence and sharp invincible tongue, had no currency out here. And Joel was tormented horribly by the Powdertown blacks, the sons of casual laborers and cleaning women who mocked his clothes and speech. Teddy would sit in dread on the long bus ride they took each morning, gripping the safety rail so tightly that its metallic stench clung to his hands all day. The screeching bell that seemed to ring through the school’s halls every five minutes rattled through his synapses like an instrument invented to torture him alone.

  But their tribulations made them even closer. Some days they cut school and wandered the unfinished city, buying lunch from one of the dimpled metal trucks that served the construction workers. They had to be careful—Joel’s father could appear in his Ranchero as suddenly as a summer storm. But they were never caught. The school had bigger disciplinary problems than the whereabouts of a couple of scrawny freshmen. Any protests their parents might have at the number of unexcused absences were quickly stifled by the phalanx of A’s both boys achieved by simply showing up on test days.

  Newton High opened the next year and everything changed. Suddenly, Teddy and Joel found themselves among several hundred kids just like them. A new school—no cliques or gangs or tribes. Even better, Joel’s mother was vice principal, a daunting, blazingly articulate woman who was fearsome to those who didn’t know her. Nobody was about to mess with Ardelia Wooten’s son and his friend, the boy whose father sat behind those gleaming panels of mirrored glass on top of the tower just erected at the city’s center. The first two years there were perfect. They ran the place. Teddy was the smartest kid, Joel the most popular. Teddy had no problem letting his friend be the one everybody liked. Other kids, he was beginning to realize, were stupid. Cattle, who listened to Top 40 and read the books idiot teachers gave them. He didn’t give a shit what they thought. As long as he had Joel the others didn’t matter. Things didn’t even change when, at the end of their sophomore year, Joel began to get girlfriends. As he turned fifteen his voice deepened and his jaw broadened; he grew four inches and the awkwardness went out of his smile. The girls began to flock. White, black—it didn’t matter. They all loved Joel. He treated them with a neglect that only seemed to make them more desperate. After he’d french or finger them he’d always come to Teddy, telling him about the stupid things they said, the noises they made. Once he let Teddy smell the pussy juice staining the end of the finger he’d slid into Veronica Teller’s panties. Teddy had almost puked, though later when he thought about it he got hard. He never really had any girlfriends. All girls wanted to talk to him about was Joel. They were just a bunch of Cynthias, anyway. His Yoko had yet to arrive.

  For two long and perfect years Teddy and Joel lived in this paradise. But then, during the fall of the senior year, Renaissance Heights opened. Bad kids began to roam menacingly through Newton High’s unwalled pods. The school became charged with an undercurrent of violence. There had not been a single fight in its first two years—now there seemed to be one every day. Teddy could see the worry on Ardelia’s face. Worst of all, his status as co-king of the school was ignored by this new wave of students. By Christmas he was dying to get out.

  Making matters even worse was the advent of Miss Susan Truax. She’d appeared that September from Fort Meade, where she’d lived with her lunatic mother and ugly duckling sister while her father fought Charles in Nam. Her dad now peddled aluminums down at the model village. The other boys in the school went nuts with her arrival but Teddy decided to play it cool. If she understood, she could come to him. But she didn’t understand. Instead, she just sat there in a corner of the cafeteria, sipping chocolate milk and flipping through teen magazines. Boys would come up and take their best shots but she’d just shoot them down. It was almost like she was waiting for someone. Teddy tried to make eye contact to let her know that he was different from the rest. But she never met his eye. She never met anybody’s eye. She just sat there. Sipping and flipping.

  Until Joel showed. He’d missed the first two weeks of school with the mono he’d caught from some bimbo at the teen center. He was sitting with Teddy at their table when she walked in, a big balloon of Dubble Bubble attached to her pouting mouth like some blimp towing her along. As she sat the bubble burst, a pink veil collapsing demurely over her face. She collected it with a single swirl of her finger and deposited it behind her frosted lips.

  “And who,” Joel asked, “might this be?”

  “Her name’s Susan something. She has the IQ of a wombat.”

  Joel simply stared at her. She flipped page after page of a magazine with Bobby Sherman on the cover, tiny bubbles detonating against her molars. For almost two minutes Joel eyeballed the girl. Teddy kept quiet. He’d seen this before. Her radar would pick him up eventually. Alarms would go off. Planes would be scrambled; the doors of the missile silos would slide open.

  She’d look.

  Finally, she tossed the magazine on the table with a bored sigh, then let her eyes travel aimlessly around the cafeteria. She saw Joel. When their eyes met he smiled. That simple, unfacet
ed smile Teddy had seen a million times. She smirked back defiantly, then rolled her eyes. Joel’s expression remained unchanged. He nodded his head. Slowly. Once. This seemed to confuse her. She collected her books and walked quickly off to fifth period.

  “Good God,” Joel said, watching her go.

  “What?” Teddy asked.

  By the end of the month they were going steady. She was Joel’s first official girlfriend. From the beginning, Teddy could tell that this was different. Joel gabbed about her all the time. He’d never talked about girls before with anything other than dismissive indifference. Now, he’d bore Teddy to tears with stories of the little things she did or the clever words she said. At first Teddy tried to answer with sarcasm, but Joel always seemed to miss the slice and spin of his remarks. It was like her stupidity was rubbing off on him. For Christmas she bought him this hand-tooled leather visor down in D.C., a ridiculous item, its brim decorated with black curlicues that looked like fossilized spermatozoa. But Joel, usually so cool, planted it on his sleek head like a crown. And there it stayed. Religiously. No matter how often Teddy pointed out what a doofus it made him look, he just wouldn’t take it off. It was from Susan. Ergo, it was perfect.

  This was what Teddy suddenly found himself dealing with as his senior year rambled on. What made things even worse was the fact that Susan disliked him. Intensely. From the first. She failed to laugh at his simplest jokes and even teased him about not having a girlfriend, laughing out loud when he explained the Yoko Principle. Their time together often degenerated into bickering sessions, with Joel standing silently by, failing, for the first time ever, to take Teddy’s side. Some days Teddy would call the Wootens only to be told by Ardelia that Joel had gone out, and no, there wasn’t a message for him.