Giraffe People

by Jill Malone

  “OK, Coach.”

  “Don’t ‘OK, Coach’ me like a twit. I want your guarantee.”

  “OK, Coach—I promise.” You have to humor adults. They can totally fuck with your life.

  “Good, Peters. Now get lost. I’m trying to watch football.”

  Renee and I have eaten four chili dogs, and three bags of chips, and a box of licorice, and have shared a beer that some chicks we play ball with smuggled in. We were the only freshmen to letter in three varsity sports last year. They happened to be the same three varsity sports. I’ve known Renee since seventh grade, when she weighed forty pounds more, and had buckteeth.

  “Y’all going to the party after?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “I don’t know why I keep asking,” she says, and then groans as they sack our quarterback. “Does your boy do it right there in the car, or does he wait until he gets you home?” Renee and Dwayne have been having sex since she was a freshman, and she assumes the same for the rest of us, no matter how we protest.

  “It’s not like that,” I say.

  “Uh huh. Whatever you say, baby.”

  Twenty minutes after the game ends, Jeremy comes out with his duffel, and puts an arm around me. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he says.

  “I wanted to see you. Since I can’t tomorrow.”

  “Oh, right.” His enthusiasm almost falters. “I’ll bet you’re hungry.”

  “Starved,” I say.

  “Chicken wings?”

  The wings are so hot that they burn our fingertips. We’re exclaiming, and biting into them all the same, orange sauce across our mouths.

  “There’s beer,” he says, and grabs two cans from the cooler behind my seat. We’re parked across from the bowling alley, in a turnaround shielded by greenery and another brick memorial commemorating some battle someplace. The MPs won’t check out here for another three hours.

  The interior of his mother’s white Honda is plush and blue and spotless. My family doesn’t have vehicles like this. My father’s van didn’t run when he bought it—he had to tow it home before he could work on the engine and sort the problem out. He always sorts the problem out, and the vehicles always look like they have problems to be sorted.

  I want to ask if Jeremy is sick of losing. Game after game, and they never win. Can’t find a way to manage it, though, without sounding like a vainglorious ass.

  “I missed you,” he says, “when I woke.”

  “You wouldn’t budge. I practically had to throw you off me to get home. You’re heavier than you look.”

  He grins, and hands me another wing. “I don’t remember falling asleep. You were crying, and I was kissing you, and then I woke up alone on the floor.”

  “Irascible” means hot-tempered, and I wonder, as he’s nibbling at a wing bone, how temperate Jeremy is. Would he be mad if he knew I was going to a party tomorrow night, and that I’d been invited by two different boys? Would he disapprove that I’d lied to my parents, that Kelly’s mother had called and convinced them we were going to take the train into the city to see a play, and that she had their permission to drop me off back home Sunday afternoon? (Apparently, her mom had to promise we’d sleep in separate rooms.) Was it terrible, that after all this trouble, I didn’t even want to go? Would, in fact, have preferred another Saturday night of miniature golf and Burger King, than this elaborate charade? I didn’t want Jeremy to know, or Meghan. I didn’t want to tell either of them how I’d schemed.

  “Beer?” He hands one to me, and then, as he fiddles with the radio, he says softly, “I could get used to kissing you to sleep.”

  More warehouse party than the usual house variety. Kelly’s mother pulls up to BOARD The Skate Shop in Asbury Park, and waves to the two fellows at the door (they must weigh four hundred pounds apiece, but they wave back and grin friendly gold teeth).

  “Ladies,” one says, and holds the door open for us. This chivalry crap is all down to Kelly. Tonight she’s wrapped in a blue dress that glitters, and rounds places on her that never seemed round before. When I showed up at her house wearing jeans and a t-shirt, Kelly said all the stuff I didn’t know had really started to annoy her, and now I’m freezing in borrowed clothes: a short black skirt, and a green V-neck cashmere sweater that somehow manages to give me cleavage.

  Inside, decks line the walls—the visual interspersed with photos of famous skaters, and sick tricks, and ads for Vans and Independent, and cardboard signs with “The Management Reserves the Right to Beat Shoplifters Down.” Behind display cases are wheels, trucks, grip tape, and punk cassettes. Racks of magazines lead into the clothing section of the store: sweatshirts, t-shirts, and thick pants, and an entire corner of rubber-soled shoes. A dude sits on the glass counter beside a cash register and leers at us. Four girls in the corner, by the shoes, giggle something and stare. Everyone else wears jeans and sweatshirts. Fucking Kelly.

  Almost like an alcove, the store is just a foyer for the building, and once we walk beneath the rolling gate, we’re inside the warehouse with its Keyhole Bowl Ramp, half-pipe ramp, and the makeshift stage that towers above the room. The place is dirty in that way that smells—like an old refrigerator—and crowds of kids move in and out of the rumble. That’s right, rumble: my ears hurt, and I’m grateful to be wearing Kelly’s clothes because they’re going to need torching when we get out of here. On the stage, four skinny boys dressed in black play with their heads bowed, distortion bursting from their amps. Bangs isn’t one of them, and Joe’s band doesn’t suck like this.

  “I know that guy,” Kelly says, pointing. I follow her gesture, and realize, with horror, that I know that guy too. “Isn’t that your brother?”

  I cannot say yes, because that would mean that I accept it: Nate is here too, and I am so dead.

  “How’d he manage that?” Kelly asks.

  And then I realize that Kelly’s right, and Nate must have plotted as well, that we have mutually assured destruction, and so are both safe. He’s standing by the bowl, with Doug and a couple of skanky girls with streaks of white bleached into their hair, watching a guy with a Fu Manchu mustache skate.

  “Your brother looks good,” she says.

  “What?” I say, but then Bangs joins us, grinning at our outfits.

  “Kind of formal,” he says. His jeans have holes in the knees, and his t-shirt proclaims Armed Resistance and has a stick figure holding a guitar out like a sword.

  “When do you play?” I ask, so he’ll stop staring at me.

  “10:30.”

  “You skate these?” People could die here: high entries, and hard surfaces. No one’s wearing a helmet or pads.

  “Yeah, I had a couple runs earlier. Pretty sonic.” He unwinds his sweatshirt from his waist, and hands it to me. “Put this on.” I think he’s as embarrassed of my clothes as I am, until he adds, “You’re cold.” It might just be shock that has me shivering, but I put the sweatshirt (Independent Truck Company with the sweet red logo) on anyway, and am grateful for the camouflage.

  I’ve just realized that Kelly’s gone when Joe slams into me—he’s wearing Army surplus boots and jeans so tight his balls must ache. He has dyed his hair black, that deep, fake black that makes people look like they’ve been bled.

  “Oh, Cole,” he says. “I didn’t see you.” And then he sees Bangs, and takes a step back from me.

  “This is Christian,” I say. “Christian, Joe.”

  “Hey, man,” Bangs says.

  Joe takes out a cigarette, and looks at it. “Our singer is no-showing.”

  I don’t think this grammar works. How do you no-showing? “What will you do?” I ask. “Have someone else sing?”

  “Sure,” Joe says. “I’ll sing. That should clear out half the place at least.”

  “What do you guys play, Just Like Heaven and Fascination Street, or just classics like Killing an Arab?”

  “Don’t be funny, Cole, it isn’t helping.”

  “You totally play Just Like Heaven, do
n’t you?” I insist.

  “Yes,” he hisses.

  “Do you have a set list?”

  “Why?” he asks.

  “Just let me see it.” He hands the set list over: U2, The Cure, The Ramones, The Clash. God, I want to hug the guy. He’s so predictable. “I know all these songs.”

  Joe stares at me. “To play, or to sing?”

  “Either.”

  He looks at Bangs, then back at me. “You got a guitar in your pocket, by any chance?”

  “You can use mine,” Bangs says to me.

  Joe tucks his cigarette behind his left ear. “Well, I guess it couldn’t be worse than dropping out, right?”

  In their band, Doggy Life, Joe plays bass, Trevor drums, and Ernie—a slim poetic kid with acne—rips lead guitar. Their lead singers change every gig. I can’t even remember the name of the last couple guys. Jason? When Joe tells them that I’m going to sing with them tonight, they cock their heads like Pepper when you ask her some question that doesn’t include the word treat or walk, and then Trevor says, “Chick singers are bitchin’.”

  We’re all backstage (in a hallway that stretches the length of the building), and Trevor’s got a six-pack of Budweiser on his amp. He graduated last year, and looks like Mr. Metal in his leather vest, with his lank black hair, and giant pirate skull belt buckle. He’s a big dude, who spent lunch periods flicking anyone unlucky enough to sit nearby.

  “You look different from last year,” he tells me. “You want a beer?”

  Bangs brings his Gibson—red and pristine—and a little amp into the hallway, and sets them up for me. After a couple of strums, I already feel rotten about playing such an instrument in this shithole.

  “It’s pretty,” I say, and mean the sound, and the guitar. I’m nervous, like before a cross-country race. Nervous as a kind of palpable energy: my stomach wonky, my head light.

  Joe kneels between us. “OK, so it’s Super Sock Monkey Puppets, and then us. You’ve sung into a microphone before, right?”

  I nod.

  “This’ll be fine. You’ve seen us play a bunch of times. You know how we work.”

  I know these guys can all play, and that no one who ever stood up with them could sing. Joe grabs his bass, and waves Ernie over, and the three of us play a couple of Cure songs. Ernie stops watching my fingers after five measures, but Joe keeps his eyes on my left hand, nodding along in tempo, but also in a way I find encouraging.

  On stage, the place is hot; the lights make everything except the kids closest to stage just a bunch of random noise. If Bangs hadn’t lent me his guitar, I couldn’t have done this, not with only the mic stand to hide behind.

  Joe introduces us, and then we roar into Judy Is a Punk like we’ve rehearsed the damn thing, our guitars rapid fire, and the drum kicking up against the bass, and I see kids leaping around the floor in front of us. Over the drum, I can’t hear myself sing, but it can’t matter. These kids are crazy—they’re flinging into each other like they’re on bungee ropes; for them, the lyrics are the least of it. I think so, anyway, until I see several of them singing along to the chorus. And that’s when I stop feeling like I’m going to vomit, and start singing like I wrote these songs, and mean them.

  When we play Just Like Heaven I hear girls start screaming, and the invisible crowd shifts on the floor beyond us. Under the lights, we could be alone, the four of us. Ernie, his shoulders hunched, his hair covering his face, is resonant, and pure, stationary except for his gliding fingers. Joe bounces all over the fucking place, and rushes up to scream random lines at the crowd from the stage’s edge. I keep hitting my teeth against the microphone, and finally grab it when I belt the lyrics, and let the guitar hang against me like I’m a tired rocker. Trevor drums the current beneath us, the one the kids keep diving into. We are so cool. No one has ever been as cool as the four of us, on this stage, with this wailing crowd.

  Joe drives me home after. We won first prize—I didn’t even know it was a competition, but we got $50 when the crowd cheered loudest for us at the end of the night. Bangs’ band, Slim and None, won second place, and $25.

  Kelly left with my brother; anyway that’s what Doug said. He said it with a smirk, in this tone meant to antagonize me. I have no idea if they saw us play, or what, and I don’t mean to be all stage actress, but she is dead to me. My brother, for real? That is so wrong, and gross, and not OK with me. Bangs isn’t old enough to drive, and caught a ride to this party with his crew, who are headed to another party afterwards, so I was kind of screwed until Joe offered to take me home.

  Bangs walked me to Joe’s car, and said watching me play was even better than watching girls fight over me. He told me to keep his sweatshirt.

  Joe turns the heater on high, and hands me his scarf. “Man, we’re lucky you came tonight.”

  I’d thought Bangs might kiss me. When he played, he had a little bounce during the chorus, and the rest of the time he just thrashed his head in this furious, whiplash way that was rhythmic and punk and weirdly angelic.

  Joe and Trevor and Ernie want me to be in their band. “Jesus, just imagine what we could sound like if we practiced,” Ernie said, and grinned. He looked like a completely different person when he grinned, not meek at all.

  “How’s a girl like you sing like that?” Trevor asked.

  “What does that even mean?” I said.

  But Joe had already steered me toward the car, and I never heard Trevor’s explanation.

  “A girl like me?” I ask Joe now.

  He glances at me, and then lights his cigarette. “You want one?” he asks.

  I nod, and he lights another, hands it over.

  “Have you ever noticed anything about our front men?” he asks.

  “Besides the fact that they can’t sing?”

  “Yeah, besides that.”

  I think about them, the four or five that I have seen play with Doggy Life. They’re kind of blah, and interchangeable. “They’re ordinary,” I say.

  “Not one of them had presence. Not fucking one. They just stood up there mumbling into the mic, and no one cared. The audience got bored.”

  “Yeah, and?” He’s totally dodging the question.

  “You walked on stage tonight, and they were all watching you. From the first number, they were absolutely fixated. It was wild. The whole crowd just kinda tuned into your frequency.”

  I flick ash into the tray. An old Police album plays on his crappy tape deck. Maybe none of this even happened. The bands, and the funky warehouse, and Bangs’ guitar, and Joe driving me back home because Kelly ran off with my brother. Trevor had called me a virgin. I felt it. He’d meant I was too fucking good and pedestrian to be something else on stage. Too virginal to be provocative, that’s what he’d meant. That’s what Joe is trying to explain now, walking deep into the woods to avoid the road.

  I stub the cigarette out, and stare into the darkness. In seventh grade, we took a field trip to the factory where they print the Asbury Park Press. The tour guy said they used enough paper every year to go around the earth a bunch of times. That just crushed me—wrapping the world in newspaper, like you were going to put it in a box.

  At the gate, the MP checks my ID card, and waves us through. Joe parks out front, and kills the engine, but I’m already out. “Thanks, Joe. See you Monday.” I toss his scarf onto the seat, and close the door.

  The triumph all spoiled: the lights burning into me on stage, Bangs’ guitar heavy against my body, the kids singing along. I tiptoe up the stairs in my bare feet. In the morning, they’ll leave for church and never think to look for me. Just another sneak creeping home.

  Watershed. A drainage area. My life is a watershed. Noun. But as an adjective, watershed means an important point of transition, like the night I first played with Doggy Life (not to make everything about me, but anyway).

  I never get to sleep in. On Saturdays, I have to be at my guitar lesson with Leroy by ten, and school days are worse, and Sunday school begins at nine.
When I wake up the morning after the warehouse party, I can’t believe it’s nearly 10:30.

  The maid’s room only has a tub, though my dad rigged up an extension-nozzle-thing that drips a little when I’m in a hurry, but this morning I run the bath, and scrub and dunk a bunch of times until the smell of cigarettes is gone. Then I put a damp washcloth over my eyes like the light hurts me, and soak and think. The summer before freshman year, my parents sent me to a basketball camp in June, and then in July I went on this outdoor adventure called Allegheny Outback. Mom asked me if I’d be interested in rafting and canoeing and camping for a couple of weeks, and I said yes, and she signed me up. That was all I knew about the camp when I got dropped at Tim Fitzgerald’s one Saturday morning.

  Tim’s dad put our bags in the minivan, and told me to take shotgun. He said we’d drive to Pennsylvania with the windows down because the air conditioner wasted a lot of gas. He was kind of a funny guy, but friendly, and had thinning blond hair and squinty eyes just like Tim. Anyway, Tim climbed into the van, and another kid that never said a complete sentence to anyone the entire trip—he was the kind of shy kid that goes bright red and trembles all over if you even look at him—and then Jeremy climbed in.

  Tim’s dad drove us to White Sulphur Springs, this retreat center in Pennsylvania, and told us interesting stories about his Ranger training, and what it had been like to drive a tank along the East German border, and the time he went to Latin America to meet with a missionary who got killed that same year by agitators. When we stopped for lunch, he told the shy kid to take shotgun, and I ended up on the bench seat with Jeremy.

  We didn’t talk at all in the car. Not one little exchange. When we got to the center, there were three other girls, and six more boys. We spent the first night in cabins just down the road from the retreat center, and we cooked dinner, and sat around the campfire talking. There were only two seniors, and they seemed pretty upset about that, like the rest of us were infants. I didn’t know that first night what a great trip we’d have. Those were some of the nicest kids I ever met. No one bickered or bitched or ragged on anybody else. They were all competent kids, handy and confident, and easy to talk to. We had two college counselors, this small blond with a bunch of freckles who told the girls she had extra pads if we needed them, and her twin, a guy a little taller than she was, who smiled a lot. The outback leader was in his thirties and had a beard, and looked exactly like a disciple. He spoke in a quiet, solemn voice, and always said Christ in this way that indicated to me he was new to Christianity. He’d probably been wild ages ago when he was a kid.