Fifty in Reverse

by Bill Flanagan

  Peter said, “But they never existed? I’m supposed to accept that they never existed?”

  * * *

  In the kitchen Peter’s parents were drinking iced tea.

  Joanne said, “He seemed good today.”

  Howard said, “He’s strong, Joanne. The doctor says he’s exceptionally bright.”

  Joanne said that she wondered if that pretty girl would come around again. Howard said there would be time enough for that. Peter was only fifteen. He asked if she had spoken to their daughters. Cathy was newly married in Rochester. Sally had moved with a boyfriend to Vermont. The parents had told them nothing about their little brother’s trouble.

  Joanne said, “Do you think we didn’t pay enough attention to Peter? With the girls we were so involved.”

  “The girls were demanding,” Howard replied.

  “Peter was always easy.”

  “My old man used to say, when the first kid drops a cookie on the floor, you grab it and throw it away and give him a new one. When the second kid drops a cookie, you pick it up and wipe it off and hand it back to him. By the third kid, you say, ‘Pick up that damn cookie and eat it!’ ”

  She had heard that story a hundred times.

  They watched the clock and sipped their drinks until they heard the door close behind the doctor. Peter wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He leaned in, moving the cartons and bottles, and said, “Mom, whole milk again? Bacon, processed ham, and Miracle Whip. We have to start eating healthier.”

  His mother said, “I spoke to Dr. Sullivan. He agrees that whole milk, eggs, and plenty of red meat is the best diet.”

  Peter said, “Dr. Sullivan smokes Old Golds while he examines his patients. He dies of a massive stroke my first year of college.”

  He shut the refrigerator and turned around. His parents saw that he had been crying.

  “Are you okay, Pete?” Howard asked.

  “Rough session,” Peter said.

  “If you’d like to try a more traditional counselor…” Joanne offered.

  “Terry is great,” Peter said. “This is just some shit… sorry, Mom. This is just some stuff I have to go through. It’ll be fine.”

  His mother looked unconvinced. His father said, “As long as he’s not trying any of that orgone box, primal scream baloney…”

  “Not at all,” Peter said. He sat at the kitchen table between his parents and peeled an orange.

  “School going okay?” Joanne asked.

  “I got elected to be a student representative to a special assembly.”

  His parents were cautiously encouraged. Joanne said, “How did that go?”

  “It went well,” Peter said, taking a bite of his orange and talking with his mouth full. “I actually got up and sang a song I wrote. It got a big reaction.”

  The parents were surprised. Howard said, “I guess that old guitar of yours is paying off. Maybe you’ll play some dances.”

  “Maybe,” Peter said. He had a strange expression. His eyes were shining but his voice was even. “It turns out I’m a gifted songwriter. I wrote a song called ‘Ohio’ about Kent State. After I finish my homework I’m going to start writing Game of Thrones.”

  Peter’s parents exchanged glances. Joanne asked if the boy wanted her to make him a hamburger.

  “Mom,” Peter said, “I’m going to make you a deal. You stop eating poison, and I’ll stop acting like a crazy person and we’ll get back to normal. Green vegetables, fruit. We can eat fish, we can eat some chicken. Please. I don’t want to lose you.”

  Joanne considered how to respond to that. She put her hand on her son’s neck and said, “Fair enough, Peter. We’re in this together.”

  Peter threw his arms around her. She was startled but didn’t resist. She hugged him back.

  He said, “Mother, you’re all I have left.”

  ELEVEN

  As I headed deeper into mists and old stories, into windy images poised on the rim of sleep, I began to feel that the bed was having a dream and that the dream was me.

  —Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

  For three days Peter refused to get out of bed. He wouldn’t come downstairs to speak with Dr. Terry. He wouldn’t get up for school. The only foods he would eat were Hydrox cookies and Waleeco bars, which he explained to his parents would no longer exist in 2020. “I’m trying to find something positive about being here,” he said, and then turned off the bedroom light.

  At 7:00 a.m. on the fourth day, Moe Mosspaw appeared at the front door. To the amazement of the boy’s parents, Peter came downstairs fully dressed, as if nothing was wrong. He took a bite from a banana and accepted the guidance counselor’s offer of a lift to school.

  On the ride, Mosspaw asked where he had been. Peter said he had been sick. The counselor asked, “With what?” Peter said, “The bends.”

  Peter got through the morning counting the heresies. The man who taught history said that Africans allowed themselves to be enslaved but Indians were too proud. The woman who taught English wouldn’t accept that the word where in the sentence “I saw in the paper where Judy got married” could be grammatically correct.

  In algebra class Mr. Wood welcomed the head of the math department, who talked to the students about the importance of learning the metric system. He told them that by 1990 the United States would be on the metric standard and anyone who still thought in inches, miles, ounces, and pounds would be unable to hold a job.

  Daphne passed him a note. “I want to ride your horse.”

  Peter folded the paper in quarters and nodded toward her without making eye contact. Daphne would have to get into her own trouble, without help from Peter Wyatt. He had troubles of his own.

  Mr. Houlihan sat behind his mayonnaise-stained blotter and read aloud from the science textbook. Peter stared at the clock, begging it to tick another minute. He decided his first theory had been right—he must be in a coma. This was the last illuminated corner of his mind to which consciousness fled as the lights flickered out. Another half hour of hearing about vacuoles and he wouldn’t mind going.

  At fourth lunch, Peter was waylaid by Ricky DeVille carrying a plate of American chop suey.

  “Wyatt, I got to talk to you,” Ricky said in his low monotone. He guided Peter toward the last table in the lunchroom, domain of greasers, hitters, and voc-tech short-timers. An overweight kid with a failed mustache slid over to give them room.

  “That song about Ohio,” Ricky DeVille said. “You write that?”

  “Yeah,” Peter said, “It just kind of came to me.” Hedging his bets, he added, “I might have been channeling Neil Young.”

  “That’s cool,” Ricky said. “My brothers and me have a band, you know. Malleable Iron. We played out at the lake last summer, at the Barge, and we played the Youth Club in New Greenwich, the coffeehouse at St. Gregg’s. You ever hear us?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Because the thing is, we really want to get into doing some original material. But in our style, you know? We do some Blue Cheer, Doors, we do ‘Heartbreaker’ by Grand Funk. A lot of Steppenwolf—that’s kind of what we’re known for mainly. We do ‘Monster,’ we do ‘The Pusher’ for, like, twenty minutes. There’s a manager from New York who’s come to see us a couple of times, and he likes us but says we got to write our own stuff. My brother says we need a big anthem like our own ‘Born to Be Wild.’ You got any ideas for a song like that, like ‘Born to Be Wild’? A Hells Angels kind of song?”

  Peter said, “How about ‘Born to Run’?”

  Ricky’s hair was draped over his tinted aviator glasses. He sang the words “born to run” over the melody to “Born to Be Wild” and then said, “Like that?”

  Peter said, “Not really. Picture eighth notes like a motor on the bass strings of a Telecaster, okay? Like duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh.” He slapped the corner of the table. “Now think of a big Roy Orbison voice with Phil Spector echo and he’s going, ‘In the day we sweat it out on
the streets…’ ”

  Peter talk/sang the lyrics to “Born to Run” in a low voice. Ricky had his head down, his focus on the table. Even as he laid it out, Peter was aware that his version sounded like a sequel to “Eve of Destruction” arranged for accompaniment by a manual typewriter and sung by Mister Ed. When he finished, Ricky raised his eyes and said, “You just came up with that right now?”

  “I had some of it already.”

  “Can you write that down for me?”

  When Peter finished writing out the lyrics, lunch was over and he hadn’t eaten. He grabbed a ham loaf on white bread and a four-cent carton of milk and was wolfing it down when his childhood friend John North caught up with him. Peter felt guilty. He had been avoiding John since he woke up in 1970. He didn’t want to let him in on his secret, and he was pretty sure he couldn’t pass for the teenage buddy John was accustomed to hanging around with.

  Puberty had not yet found John North. He had a high voice, the smooth cheeks of a child, and fine, fair hair. He said, “Everybody’s talking about your song.”

  “Crazy, huh?” Peter replied.

  “You’re hanging out with Ricky DeVille?”

  “Did you know he and his brother have a band?”

  “I thought his brother was in Socko.”

  “He has a couple of brothers.”

  “Barry DeVille was pretty scary. When we were kids he killed Mrs. Quigly’s cat.”

  “I don’t know if that was ever proved, John.”

  “Mrs. Quigly opened her door and her cat was hanging from the porch fan. She fainted right there. My father had to take her to the hospital and then come back and cut down the cat.”

  “I do remember that.”

  “Be careful around those guys.”

  “I will.”

  * * *

  “I kept in touch with John North,” Peter told Dr. Terry at the next session. “He’s one person from 1970 who was still in my life when I left 2020. Sweet guy. Worked as a carpenter in Hartford until he hurt his back. I had lunch with him around Thanksgiving. I got the impression he was stretched financially. I remember he said the bad thing about being in your sixties is you don’t know how much money you need for the future. If you’re going to live to be ninety, you have to keep working. If you’re going to die in five years, you’d rather quit now and see the pyramids. Mathematically, either outcome is equally likely. Of course, by the time you find out the age at which you’re going to die, it’s too late to make any plans.”

  “Everybody dies too soon,” Dr. Terry said.

  “Not objectively,” Peter answered. “But from their own perspective, certainly.”

  “When you look around your school, you feel like you know everybody’s destiny?”

  “No,” Peter said. “Most people I don’t remember, and I don’t know what became of most of those I do. But some, yeah. There’s a guidance counselor named Maurice Mosspaw. He ran the Kent State meeting.”

  There was no reason for Dr. Terry to let on that he had met with Mosspaw.

  Peter said, “When we were kids, I think we made fun of him. But I looked at Mosspaw at that assembly and saw an earnest man doing his best to herd hundreds of uninterested adolescents through a system institutionally indifferent to their needs or potential. He hectors them to sign up for the SATs, apply for scholarships, and engage in after-school activities to impress admissions officers. He writes letters of recommendation, chaperones school dances, supervises field trips, and serves as faculty advisor to a half dozen student clubs. As I recall, Mr. Mosspaw died of AIDS in the eighties. He couldn’t have been older than fifty.” The boy stared at his knee and said, “I wish I had made time to go to his funeral.”

  Dr. Terry said, “What’s AIDS?”

  * * *

  On the school bus the next morning Peter tried to pick out the students who had died before 2020. He saw a baseball player named Keith who would pile up his car on the night of the senior prom. He wondered if he should warn him. But that would just be taken as further evidence of his lunacy. And perhaps that was all it was.

  TWELVE

  Ricky DeVille lived within walking distance of the high school, in a ranch house across from a small strip mall at the far corner of the parking lot of a large A&P grocery store.

  There were three businesses in the strip mall—a pharmacy, a liquor store, and a Greek diner. Ricky suggested that they stop at the diner and pick up a couple of wieners before heading to his house to rock out. They bought their hot dogs and stood in the parking lot chewing them. Ricky directed Peter’s attention to three matching fluorescent signs hanging over the doors of the three businesses: DRUGS, LIQUOR, WIENERS.

  “The three major nutritional groups,” he said.

  Peter had assumed that the DeVille brothers were poor, but their house and yard suggested they either had money once and lost it or still had money and were slobs. The place needed painting, there was a beat-up Plymouth Barracuda sitting on blocks in the driveway, and a couple of tires lay sprawled on the overgrown lawn. When they walked around back, the boy was surprised to find a large swimming pool. It was empty except for an outboard motor someone had deposited in two feet of rainwater in the deep end. There was a bent-legged trampoline, a motorcycle half covered by a yellow tarp, and a homemade skateboard ramp so treacherous it might have killed Evel Knievel. Two dirt bikes leaned against the outside wall of the freestanding shed, which served as the DeVille brothers’ music room.

  They had a lot of expensive gear. It was not impossible that the DeVilles stole it, but it occurred to Peter that the family might have more money than he had guessed. In mid-twentieth-century America there wasn’t much connection between income and class. It was the golden hour of union jobs and domestic manufacturing.

  The biggest surprise was Ricky’s mom, who came out of the house and told Peter it was nice to meet him. He had expected the mother of three notorious tough guys, the oldest of whom had to be at least twenty-one, to be either a hardened Ma Barker type or the sort of down-beaten bad-luck wife in photos from the Great Depression. Mrs. DeVille was nothing of the sort. She was no older than forty and tall. She had tinted blond hair, a broad smile, and a figure not far past what must have been a traffic-stopping heyday.

  To be attracted to the mother of one of his classmates excited Peter and then embarrassed him.

  Mrs. DeVille told the boys to have fun and try not to make too much noise. Then she jumped into a silver MG two-seater and peeled out.

  “What does your dad do, Rick?” Peter asked.

  Ricky DeVille said, “He’s not around.”

  The rehearsal shed was as big as a small garage. The drum kit and amplifier from the Kent State assembly were set up, along with a couple of microphones, a small Peavey public address system, two other amps, and several guitars. There was an old upholstered couch along one wall and a dilapidated upright piano with chipped keys against the other. The decorations were a mix of black-light posters—Hendrix loomed large—and pinups from girlie magazines. Peter did a double take when he thought one of the posters was of the DeVilles’ mom. He was relieved, on inspection, to see it was Barbarella.

  Ricky suggested Peter choose a guitar, and he selected a half-decent Stratocaster knockoff made by Sears. He plugged it in, Ricky turned on his Gretsch, and they began to riff on “White Room” until the door opened and switchblade-shaped Rocky walked in, followed by older brother Barry, the jailbird juvenile delinquent and suspected cat killer.

  Ricky and Peter stopped playing. Barry nodded for them to continue and dropped onto the couch. Rocky took a seat behind the drums and began tapping out a beat.

  Barry DeVille was shorter than his brothers, but there was no question he was the dominant primate. He had broad shoulders, a tiny waist, and stumpy, muscular legs that he squeezed into jeans two sizes too small. He wore his hair in an anachronistic pompadour that recalled Michael Landon when he was a teenage werewolf. Where middle-brother Rocky’s ice-cool greaser pose suggeste
d a self-consciously retro fashion statement, Barry looked like someone who had been locked up since 1963 and didn’t know styles had changed.

  Barry spread his feet far apart. He had a can of Narragansett beer in his hand. He said, “This is the kid?” His brothers nodded. Barry said, “What’s your name?”

  “Wyatt. Pete Wyatt.”

  “Okay, Pete Wyatt, play me a song you wrote your own self.”

  The boy went into “Ohio”—his hit—while Ricky and Rocky rumbled along in and out of key and tempo. When it was over Barry swigged his beer and said, “What else you wrote?”

  Peter said, “Here’s an idea I’m working on,” and launched into “Sweet Home Alabama,” still four years away from being written by Lynyrd Skynyrd. He was giving it his all until he opened his eyes and saw Barry waving for him to stop.

  “I don’t think that’s a hit,” he said. “You got something better?”

  Peter didn’t think he could pull off David Bowie’s “Heroes,” and he was pretty sure Barry would hate U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” as much in 1970 as he probably did when he heard it through the bars of a penitentiary in 1987. He tried “We Are the Champions” and Barry stopped him again.

  “That’s not even rock,” he said.

  “Okay,” Peter said. “This will rock you.”

  He laid into the riff every kid walking into every music store plays when he picks up a guitar he cannot afford. Peter hit the DeVille brothers with “Smoke on the Water.” This time he was allowed to play the whole song. When he finished, Ricky said, “That’s cool,” and repeated the riff a few times on his Gretsch. Rocky nodded.

  Barry said, “I don’t like the words, though.” What else?

  Peter played “Every Breath You Take” and Barry said it was dumb.

  He played “Money” by Pink Floyd, and Barry made an elaborate yawn and fanned his face.