by Pernice, Joe
“Hey, Sully, Dean-o, check this shit out,” his voice boomed in the steam as he slid over the slippery tiles of the shower room floor. Fuckface was exactly the kind of guy who would scratch his ass or fart in his hand and then ask his girlfriend if she thought his fingers smelled funny. A real charming sadist.
Shooting himself in the head or the side or the heart probably never entered Fuckface’s mind, and if it ever did, he had what it takes, the right stuff, to push that thought out and far away.
All that bullshit about what goes around comes around and karma and do unto others is just that: bullshit. It’s the God’s honest truth, he went on to cheat his way into the Ivy League (and most likely through it) and is now a successful settlement lawyer for a medical malpractice insurance company. Perfect.
* * *
I was dying in Catholic school. It was spring and all anyone wanted to do was fuck. To put it in aviation terms, it was a nasty patch of turbulence. Some kids were vaguely aware of what was going on and did their devious best (or worst) to manipulate this raw, new energy into any kind of usable social skill. They put on good clean complexions, but were completely fucked like the rest of us. These were the jock-snapping athletes. The Fuckfaces, who sported five o’clock shadows (because they could) for good luck days before the Big Game. Connoisseurs of all things lite beer and alpine skiing.
And the vapid, letterman-jacketed party hostesses who wanted so badly to be filled with cherished memories. The class officers with their kickable smiles and second tier sidekicks orbiting them like the small birds who peck clean the teeth of rhinos. Plaque-eaters and plaque-eater enablers. And book stupid to boot.
Another group of the gawky, uncomfortable student body occupied the unenviable place at the other end of the spectrum, and had terror in their astigmatic eyes. Their award-winning sexual frustration took a U-turn brainward and compelled them to fiddle, not with themselves or each other, but with Ataris, Commodore Vic 20s and assorted woodwinds. They looked war-torn and nervous. Chess club titans who were sadly impotent anywhere outside the jurisdiction of Chess club law. Body odor in perfect dischord with the self-conscious clanking of scoliosis back braces. Book-bagged refugees scrambling through the hallways for cover. They knew the whole world could see, written all over their oily faces, that unknowable things were going on inside them.
Fuckfaces and Pac Men. Promising futures wrapped up in white-collar crime and ring around the collar. An enormous dark ocean separated Club Med from the leper colony. And that’s where the rest of us helplessly drifted, in fear of washing up in either place. Any way you sliced it, just about everyone was miserable.
For instance, the number-one student in my class was a genius kid named Douglas. This kid had never once in his life received a mark other than an A. He was a textbook geek, a yearbook geek, a Star Trek geek. The real McCoy. The real Bones McCoy. A shameless Monty Python skitster who preferred to be called Buddy by teachers and students alike. He may as well have called himself Bullseye for the amount of shit that hit him.
Well, Buddy was a terrible athlete, and that’s no exaggeration. I’m trying to be as objective as possible. And even though he could titrate, integrate and differentiate like a Fermi, those skills were not highly prized in gym, especially right before Christmas break, when The President of the United States Fitness Exam is administered.
Anyway, to make a predictable story as quick and painless as possible, Buddy only managed, through some heroic and grotesque take on peristalsis, to inch himself halfway up the rope climb before he froze. A record-breaking number of jeers and negative encouragements boomed throughout the rambunctious coliseum. He would go no further, up or down.
“Crucify him!” someone yelled.
Miss Hall, our gym teacher, had the face and build of a mid-air collision involving Newt Gingrich and Sluggo from the ‘Nancy’ comic strip. She was perpetually dressed in a coach’s jacket and wide wale corduroy coaching shorts that were so tight, when she walked a disturbing “ffffit, ffffit, ffffit” sizzled from her loins.
“Get your fat ass to the top of that rope and back down here a-sap!” The veins in her neck bulged like Alexiev’s.
A smartass named Mahoney started jerking the rope from side to side, trying to liberate the brilliant hunger artist like you would a pear from a tree. Hall swung at Mahoney with a backhanded hack of her arm wrestler’s forearm. There was a single thud, followed by a short series of smaller thuds, as if someone had spilled the holiday ham from its can onto a hardwood floor. Mahoney came to rest near the bleachers, and crawled like a wounded animal under them for cover.
“Stay out of my sight!” Hall sneered as she repositioned her wristwatch that had shifted dramatically in the attack.
Buddy just hung there, deaf to everything. For more than fifty minutes. That had to be something of a record right there. Reagan himself should have dragged his old bones up that rope and given Buddy a gold medal. I certainly couldn’t hang from a rope for almost an hour while people insulted me.
His parents had been sobbing when they showed up to talk him down. Finally, the three of them collected into a single weeping unit and slouched off toward Christmas break.
* * *
Allison smelled like Halsa brand shampoo. It has a very distinct scent. Not the green apple or orange kind, but the brown henna kind that comes in the bottle with the Swiss mountain scene on the label. I’d say I catch a whiff of that scent on other people no less than once a month, and it never fails to shake me a little. She wore her hair in a short black bob during what was the heyday of colossal styles, and I was clobbered. At that age I learned a hair-do has magical powers.
I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but sometime during that spring she got under my skin. A simple turn of her head could liberate in me a bolt of libidinous energy powerful enough to shoot my satellite from the sky. Our last names were close in spelling and we were both in the “accelerated class” as they liked to call it, so to my discomfort and delight, she always sat close by.
When she sat in front of me, I’d stare at her through the prison lattice of her chair back and try to make out the lines of her underclothes. Her blue pastel uniform blouse covered the mystery of her skin like a palimpsest. I wanted to scrape away the cheap paint and reveal the hidden pornographic landscape.
When she sat beside me, I’d gaze at her out of the corners of my eyes, straining them to the point of headache, until curlicue floaters sailed through my frame of vision. When she’d shift in her seat, so would I, but self-consciously, carefully.
I was becoming a more horrible student by the minute, and a smoker. Allison smoked like a starlet, Merit Lights, so I took it up and practiced harder than a future Olympian to impress her at “The Lung”—a benchless, concrete slab of a patio near the dumpster behind the cafeteria. On rainy mornings I’d hang out at The Lung before school and chain-smoke beneath the impotent tin awning that hung over the door, listening to a tape of Hatful of Hollow or All Mod Cons on my walkman.
I played it out in my head countless times: Allison soaking wet, pushing against me to fit beneath the awning while streams of rainwater pour down around us … when she cycles by … Her smokes soggy, contaminated, she says, and her lips kiss the air. I offer her one of mine … there go all my dreams … She holds it in her fingers like the bone of a saint. Raises it to her lips, wordless. Her eyes so giant, I look at each individually. I light her smoke … is she still there or has she gone away? … She smokes. She blinks. We fuck.
What I felt for her then was real and big enough to eclipse the memory of an old dead friend, and I refused to hate myself for it. Danny who? When she sat behind me, it frustrated me that I couldn’t see her. It had a physically painful quality to it. I did some frantic calculations that verified what I already knew: There were not many minutes left in the semester. I’d have to work quickly and efficiently, though I wasn’t really sure what that meant.
Allison knew I was alive, but that was about it, and it t
roubled me no end. I wanted to stick myself with something sharp, the way a dermatologist lances a painful cyst. I wanted to loosen my own teeth for her. Instead I listened endlessly to ‘Reel Around the Fountain’ and withdrew into the reliable and disturbing comfort of longing.
* * *
MTV was already in full swing by ’85, but my family didn’t have cable TV. I’d seen it a couple times at my cousin’s house and was transfixed. It was intoxicating. It was numbing. And it was hot, hot, hot. But my old man said there was no way in hell he was going to pay good money to watch bad television and that was the end of that. So I pined away in my room at night with a purple black light on the job, listening to The Smiths and blowing tidy pillars of cigarette smoke into the back yard. I did my best to draw pictures of Allison, but I had—and still have—zero artistic ability.
Some nights in bed I’d fire up a transistor radio (manufactured in the shape of Popeye’s head) in hopes of hearing ‘How Soon is Now’ and thus feeling vaguely connected to the outside world. Radio was only a few synapses away from brain dead, but they kept the poor vegetable on life support for years. Once in a great while, a station on the North Shore called Y95 would play my favorite song or ‘Hand in Glove’, or something by The Cure or New Order.
The problem was Y95’s transmitter was so weak—powered by a monkey pedaling a miniature bicycle—that its broadcast was always going in and out. It was as frustrating as anything I can remember. I’d micro tune like a madman, trying to catch a clear sounding verse or chorus before the song ended. And if I missed the song I tried to pick up the disc jockey’s back announcement. It was that important to connect. To this day, even the slightest bit of static peppering a broadcast makes me anxious.
But tweaking the Popeye transistor caused Y95’s signal to vanish completely, and that of a powerful mainstream station would paint over the smaller station’s bandwidth. I suffered through countless surprising flourishes of Wang Chung and Phil Collins and Van Halen and that ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ song. The one about riding on the freeway of love, man, that was deplorable. Pure fucking misery.
That summer the little monkey died in a hostile corporate takeover, and Y95 went away for good.
I had a twelve-inch black and white TV made by a company called Admiral. If I moved the TV to the northernmost point of my bedroom and taped a disfigured wire coat hanger to the end of the antenna, and if the weather was just right then maybe, just maybe, I could pick up a grainy broadcast music video station called V68. It was like I was trying to receive secretly coded messages from the French Underground. Actually, Polish Underground is more accurate: I discovered V68 by accident one Friday night. I was twisting the VHF dial looking for a movie with lots of implicit sex, when I happened upon the video for ‘Minus Zero’ by Lady Pank. They were driving around in a white battle tank I later found out was actually pink. I was looking at the black and white world.
I saw the video for ‘How Soon is Now’ within an hour of picking up the channel for the first time. I recognized the tremelo guitar but couldn’t believe it was actually happening. The Smiths on regular TV? I felt hopeful and victorious. Anyone who watched V68 at that moment had to be watching The Smiths. It was like my world went from black and white to a thousand shades of gray.
For me, The Smiths were the great pasty white hope. R.E.M. ran a close second (until late ’86 when they lost me), but the Brits had an emotional edge. It was like Morrissey was given the key to the city of morbid, romantic angst. He tiptoed over a suspension bridge of glass blown by Marr and Co. It was pop music and ultra-melodic, with lyrics that penetrated my quietest fears with a diamond-tipped bummer.
“Why don’t you listen to something else … like jazz? That Smith Family is so depressing,” offered my mother, simply doing her best to help, and I blamed her for it. “No wonder you don’t feel like getting up,” she added, leaving a basket of folded laundry inside my room without coming in. “Their poor mother and father.” I rolled over on the bed so that if she had anything else to say, it would be to my back. Even as I was acting like a hateful little shit, I knew I loved her, but I could not stop myself from excluding her from my life in a hurtful way. It’s endearing now, the way she thought The Smiths were a real dysfunctional family. But then I was embarrassed both for her and for myself.
“They’re not related. It’s just a band name, like The Dead Kennedys,” I snapped (though at that time the Dead Kennedys were a band I knew by name alone), and closed the door hard in her face with my foot. “Besides, it makes me feel good.”
She stood outside for a few seconds, then she sighed. I could hear her footsteps moving down the hardwood hallway until I jacked up the volume knob on the tape player. Once again, thankfully, I was alone. I took a pen and some paper from my bag and started to write Allison yet another note I would never send. I flipped the tape from front to back as I imagined her on her bed, listening to a girlfriend on the phone, with her feet against the wall.
* * *
Denise was a knockout right out of The Last Picture Show. She was so beautiful that she could drive a teenage boy (or a man) into a state of complete lovesick ruination from which he might never, and I mean never, recover. But Jesus H. Christ, our Lord and Salvation, took pity on me, and I felt no inklings of love for her. Instead I suffered over Allison, played bass guitar and was trying to put a band together. In a school as small as Saint Longinus (eight hundred inmates strong), a cool tidbit—like you’re in a band—travels fast. Even the rumor of possibly wanting to form a band carried with it a speck of social clout, and I took it.
Denise was already known among the student body for being not only absolutely mint, but also an artist of notable talent. Her charcoals of a windswept Bryan Adams looked real enough to earn her first prize (four free movie tickets to the of-the-moment Jeff Bridges vehicle) in the all-school art fair. Anyway, her artistic ability and my fledgling musical ambitions made us kindred spirits in the eyes of the talentless. Therefore it was okay and kind of expected of us to have short conversations or wave to each other in passing. And though it never grew beyond that, we were known as friends bound by a shared insight into “some pretty deep shit”.
She was from a wealthy beach town, known as the Irish Riviera, on the South Shore of Boston that was closer to Cape Cod than to Southie or Dorchester. Her suntans lasted well into October and resurfaced by the middle of March. At the start of April she and three of her hometown friends (a girl and two guys) killed themselves by crashing her Swedish car through a pharmacy at the sufficient speed. The paper ran a photo of the remnants of what was once a fully functioning automobile, all smashed up and twisted, jutting out of a fresh breach in the wall, blocking the sidewalk. Four o’clock in the afternoon. They died just as a syndicated episode of Magnum P.I. lit up my tiny black and white TV.
A newspaper article said an employee’s leg was broken by one of the victims who had been ejected from the car. They were pretty wasted (on “vocka” as they say in the suburban Boston vernacular), but there was no mistaking their intentions. They all signed a suicide note, and fixed it to the other girl’s refrigerator with a souvenir magnet, probably from Sea World or Freeport, Maine. The quadruple wake had already come and gone before anyone discovered it, camouflaged by the usual refrigerator clutter accumulated by a family of six.
There was a lot of speculation among the kids at school as to the contents of the suicide note. Me, I was more interested in knowing exactly who wrote it and when and where. Did they all write a paragraph? Did they vote on the method? Were they concerned with the possibility of surviving and spending the rest of their lives crippled, unable to, among other things, have sex, wipe, or cut up their own chicken? I was still waiting for my maiden voyage on the SS Intercourse. At the time, suicide was not so high on my to-do list, and Denise the person faded from my consciousness like a much hyped TV serial canceled during its first season.
“They did it because they were in a cult,” or “Nobody would ever accept
them for what they were, a gay/lesbian foursome.” People were really saying things like that. My favorite came from this balding sixteen-year-old named Flaherty who later joined—and was subsequently asked to leave—the seminary: “They did it because of despair.” No fucking shit.
Anyway, all of the talk got the higher-ups at school concerned. Monkey-see, monkey-do, and all that. Monkey-lawsuit is more like it. I was mildly sad and all, but I couldn’t help thinking of Allison. Death and mourning made me want to marry her. I was alive. She was alive. Add it up.
Outlandish schemes of exodus and teenage codependency began to seem possible and worthy of goal-like status after I’d found myself alone with her in The Lung one day, during lunch period. It was a sunny afternoon following a heavy morning shower. You could still smell the rain. Allison was standing at the edge of a puddle that was as big as a black Crown Victoria. Her reflection grooved languidly, reclining on what would be the hood. I positioned myself so that I could see both of her.
The bell signaling the end of lunch had sounded. Kids scrambled for the door, flicking their heaters against the ash blackened wall and blowing huge gulps of smoke back into the cafeteria just to piss off anyone inside who might take offense. Allison stayed behind to work on a brand new dart. I could taste the filter burning in my mouth, but I made it last while my glances shifted quickly from the real her to the reflected her, to the real her.
“How’s the band?” she asked while exhaling a long drag. It was so quiet in The Lung with everyone else gone, and her voice and cigarette smoke were one and the same. I was momentarily, for obvious reasons, breathless. Then I leaned in toward the second hand cloud and inhaled some of her words as if they were kisses. It was all terribly romantic, at least for me. What had been in her was now in me. I kept it there until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Danny who? Denise who? And then I doubled over, coughing uncontrollably.