Giraffe People

by Jill Malone

  “Listen, Cole, your mother and I have decided to let you try the band thing.”

  Without considering, I launch at him. I can’t remember the last time I kissed my dad, but I’m so excited, I kiss him a couple of times, and jump up and down, and maybe shriek too.

  He has a startled smile on his face, and pats my arm in that take it easy way he does with Pepper, before picking up his mug and sipping from it. “Bands have complicated dynamics sometimes. This’ll be a different stress from basketball, but it’ll still be a stress.” He examines my face as if to trace his argument in my expression. “Basketball isn’t your only gift, I know that. But it’s a gift that would pay for college.”

  “I don’t want to play basketball in college.” I’m worried, suddenly, that he’s going to refuse to let me quit after all. “Or high school.”

  “Well,” he says, and it’s more a gesture than a word.

  I’m trying to decide if a handshake is appropriate when he says, “And Cole, church and Sunday school are non-negotiable.”

  This has never occurred to me, I mean, to negotiate them. “Sure,” I say.

  “Fair warning,” he says. “No matter how late you’re out Saturday night, you’ll be up and ready for Sunday school.”

  No matter how late I’m out Saturday night? “Absolutely,” I say. Nod and back away. Just nod and back away. “For sure.”

  If a guy called you up, and suggested a picnic in his mom’s car, in the parking lot of a community college, in the middle of a rainstorm as a prelude to a double feature of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo, you might refuse—find it a little too suggestive of the sociopath dating manual or something—but you’d be so wrong. Psycho is a comedy: a really black one, yes, full of camp—that knowing cheesiness—but a comedy nonetheless, and a film that changed film. (The announcer guy said it was the first time a toilet bowl had been flushed on film.) And sitting in the Brookdale auditorium, eating Red Vines and bagels with cream cheese, we laughed with a bunch of junior college nerds, from the ridiculous opening scene with the blinds and the weirdly formal illicitness right through to the light-bulb-pitching reveal and the not-gonna-hurt-a-fly leer. How cool is the skeleton on the swivel chair?

  Vertigo wasn’t as fun; obsession is creepy. You kind of hate to see James Stewart as a lunatic. The colors of the film—announcer guy kept saying palette—are so striking that sometimes I would forget about the actors and just admire the sets.

  “Old Hitch likes blondes,” Jeremy says as he climbs back into the car with our slices of pepperoni pizza.

  Drizzle now, instead of rain, but it drops bead on his letterman jacket. “And circular resolution,” I say.

  Jeremy shrugs, “That’s just good storytelling, isn’t it? Good stories resolve on themselves. But Psycho, with the money misdirection, that’s pure genius.”

  “It’d be hard to argue that Hitchcock isn’t clever.”

  He grins at me. Neither of us mentions the sexual tone of the films. We picked it up, of course, but that’s as far as we’ll carry it. I have so much to say that I can’t think of anything.

  Headlights graze us as we drive. Tires on the wet road, and a funky band on the radio, and I’m sleepy now from food and pleasure, and this boy humming beside me.

  “Do you like this?” he asks, meaning the song.

  “I like this one. They’re kind of all over the place.”

  “Red Hot Chili Peppers,” he says. “Mike made me a tape.”

  It’s only ten, but Jeremy drives back to the base, and then, amazingly, parks his mother’s car at the end of the street, several blocks from their house, and looks at me. “Are you ready for your surprise?”

  “Yes.”

  He jumps out of the car and runs around to my side to take my hand. “Follow me,” he says, and then we sprint through the alleyway, across our yard, and up the stairs to the back door of my building. “Quietly,” he says, when I hesitate.

  I sneak us inside—someone’s moving in the kitchen as we creep past, but the kitchen door never opens—and up the stairs, and into my room. In the dark of the room, I can smell us: the wet of his jacket, and my hair, and the mud on our shoes, and we’re tangled and kissing, and he lifts me toward him in that way that makes me breathless. Even as the ache becomes unbearable, I realize that something is different; something in my room is different.

  “Wait,” I gasp. His breathing labors as well, as I stagger back and throw the light switch. The guitar is propped on a stand by my acoustic. I approach it with my hand out as though it were a suspicious dog. “A Fender,” I say. On my knees now, supplicating, I pull the guitar into my lap and run my fingers over the fret board, the green and white belly, the new strings.

  “Do you like it?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “Mike says Fenders are good guitars.” I look up at Jeremy, at his beaming face. “You only have an acoustic, and I thought, you know, with the band and all, that you’d need an electric.”

  “Nigel told you.” It comes out like I have laryngitis.

  “Yes,” Jeremy says. “I told him I’d got you a guitar, for your birthday, but if your parents decided to let you play in the band to let me know right away.” He shrugs. “You’d need it sooner.”

  He bought me a guitar for my birthday: a weird, green, electric guitar. And sneaked it into my room. He kneels beside me now.

  “Will you play me something?” he asks.

  Without an amp, I can’t play much he’d hear, and then I realize that he knows this. He grins at me, whispers, “In the closet.”

  An amp and cord. It’s too much, of course. Jeremy bags groceries at the commissary, and bought me an electric guitar and an amp for my birthday (which is still nearly three weeks away).

  “Jeremy,” I say, and I know already that I’m going to cry and ruin everything. He’s so excited and has surprised me with these beautiful, thoughtful gifts and I’m going to ruin everything by crying.

  I plug the amp and guitar in. Test and tune, and the tears are down my face—coming no matter how hard I wipe them away—and I play the first song I can think of.

  It’s Thursday in a week that never changes,

  Colder now than I remember then.

  I still see you across the kitchen table.

  When I left I wanted to be wrong.

  I understand I was lying to the waiter

  When I said, I meant to love you better.

  In the kitchen, light has finally faded

  Convince me we meant no harm.

  Yes you rant

  And oh you rave

  The shameful way we behave.

  Drag my hair across your face.

  You’re not my love. You’re not my love.

  Years later you will say our palms were empty,

  That love was not the game we played.

  Maybe we just had too much to carry,

  I’ve got blisters from the boy I couldn’t hold,

  I fought that car all down the highway

  Wanting every town to turn around

  And for you to be waiting at the window

  Oh so anxious that I had really gone.

  Jeremy laughs when I finish playing. (It’s a fast song, even when I’m not nervous.) “Figures you’d play something tortured.”

  “I love this guitar,” I say. Like Overhead loves irony. Like old Hitch loves blondes. I love it proprietarily.

  “It’s a little used,” he says. “You can see some nicks around the pickup. But Mike called some of his old band mates, and one of them said he didn’t even want this guitar in his basement anymore. I guess the green kind of freaked him out.”

  Jeremy kisses me again, his lips soft as the guitar’s nylon strings.

  Ephemeral. Short-lived; transitory. Adjective and noun. I hope my midnight curfew is ephemeral.

  Meghan and I are almost through our vocabulary list Sunday afternoon, when Nate bursts into the sunroom, and tells us to hop to. “We’re going to the gym for some 3-on
-3.”

  Never mind that I’ve just been granted a reprieve from basketball, and still have Biology reading to do, and a new-to-me guitar to practice (Joe told me our first practice is tomorrow after school)—and Nate and I have been pretending Nigel’s our only sibling, Meghan and I both jump up and follow him.

  “I need to get my high tops from the dorm,” Meghan says.

  “You girls are going with Jeremy,” Nate directs. “He’ll swing by the dorm, and then you’ll meet up with us at the gym.”

  Jeremy’s standing in the foyer, grinning. “How about the three of us against your dad and brothers?”

  “Oh yes,” I say.

  “Suicide’s a choice,” Nate hollers after us.

  At the gym, the side baskets have all been lowered, allowing four additional half-court games. Sweaty, grasping bodies, squeaky shoes, balls rocketing out of bounds, the sweet sound of swish, and for a second, I miss this game.

  Nate sinks a jump shot as we arrive, and blows on his fingers. “Last chance, Jeremy,” he calls. “Stick with those two and it’s gonna be ugly.”

  Jeremy winks at me, before dropping into leg stretches. We’re playing with a boy’s ball because life is just like that. Meghan nails a couple from the outside, and I start thinking we should play for money.

  Nate ought to guard Jeremy, but takes me instead, and makes a point of leaning back whenever I have the ball, like he’s going to give me plenty of space to make my move. None of us has ever played ball with Meghan, and so Nigel doesn’t know she’ll drive in, fake, and cross over for a left hook. (My dad thinks the hook shot is maybe the finest in the sport, and applauds even as Nate harangues Nigel for pitiful defense.) We will destroy these chumps.

  Jeremy and I handle the rebounds while Meghan steals into the paint for a short jumper, or hands the ball off for Jeremy to power up. Nate forgoes the casual defense, and starts fouling, hard and sloppy. Dad reprimands him a couple of times, and then Jeremy drills Nate in the chest and sends him sprawling.

  “Time out,” Nate yells, and walks off the court.

  “Meghan,” Dad says, passing her the ball, “what a touch you have!”

  Dad handed me a basketball for the first time when I was six. Even with a granny shot, I couldn’t heave that thing anywhere near the basket. Thrilled, fanatical, he encouraged me, and played the showman: dribbling figure eights between his legs, spinning the ball on his finger, and finally, lifting me as I lifted the ball, to push it over the rim with an exultant shout.

  We pass the ball around and take shots as they occur to us, until we hear multiple voices calling to Meghan. Suddenly five boys wearing grey ARMY t-shirts mob her, and demand that we play a full-court game. The cadets razz her (like Doug with me) and she murmurs to us that we cannot lose as we take possession.

  And that’s how the thrill comes back to me. The sprint and pass, the darting shot, the pleasure of firing a worn leather ball in an arc that touches nothing but net. Meghan plays point, and Dad and Jeremy post up, and Nigel is everywhere, irritating the hell out of two guys yelling Switch! all through the plays. Sometimes the ball is a kite that you guide on the wind, and sometimes it’s your conscience meandering around, and sometimes the ball is your child tucked against you.

  We play best of three (first to twenty-one), and when Nate finally returns from his time-out, we have a much-needed sub, one whose aggressiveness we now appreciate since we benefit from it. Meghan gets her wish; we win both games, and the cadets seem to enjoy losing to her. They call for a rematch, even as we pull on our warm-ups.

  That night, I plug my green electric into the little amp and play the lick Leroy taught me, and dream of a new kind of kite conscience child.

  The garage has brown carpet spread down the center, and a stage they’ve built from wood, the assembled drum kit, along with the mic stands and amplifiers, and a space heater mounted from the ceiling and glowing orange.

  “Who’s this dude?” Trevor asks when he sees Jeremy.

  “Jeremy,” I say.

  “A different guy every time, huh?” he says. He drains his Budweiser, and opens another. “I see how it is.”

  Joe points at my case. “Bust out the Strat.” I hand over my Fender, and Joe nods. “Groovy. Play me something.”

  I fuck about with a few progressions, and then, something Ernie’s strumming in the background catches my attention. “That’s Red Hot Chili Peppers,” I tell him.

  “You’re right,” he says. “Pretty Little Ditty.”

  “You know the lyric?” I ask. “To write out?”

  He nods.

  “We should play that one,” I say.

  Jeremy writes out the lyric while Ernie teaches us the song. He demonstrates the rhythm for Trevor and we begin, in a hesitant way, to follow him through the song. Just the music, the first few times, until I turn the mic to face them, and sing as though to myself, and they’re nodding along, Ernie with a maniacal grin, and Joe with a cigarette dangling from his mouth like he’s modeling rock and roll, and Trevor watching Joe for changes.

  “You singing Anthony Kiedis,” Trevor says after we’ve played it a dozen times, “gives me a funny feeling right here.” He looks at his lap.

  “I’ll bet it’s just a little funny,” I say into the microphone.

  He laughs loudest of all of them, and gives me a couple of high hat taps.

  “I knew you were a dirty girl!”

  “Dude,” Joe says, “how about this?” And he plays Concrete Blonde’s Tomorrow, Wendy, and even as I’m singing it, convinced I’m going to hell, Ernie and Joe dance with their instruments, and Trevor flourishes his sticks, and pushes us a little faster until we’ve rewritten the song as a fast number, more taunt than lamentation.

  Half a dozen songs played with varying rhythms and bridges—Ernie and Joe harmonizing and adding random solos with extra measures—and I get so I can sing without smacking my mouth into the mic. The boys hop and thrash and trill like displaying birds, until I groove with them, high on this thing we unleash, set roaring.

  “I think we should play Saturday,” Joe says as we pack up. “Practice every afternoon this week, and then play a gig Saturday at Board.”

  “Thursday’s Thanksgiving,” I say.

  “Shit,” he says. “Well, Friday we’ll just go longer.”

  “Board hosts weekly gigs now?” I ask.

  “Just started,” Ernie says. “Saturday nights—$2 cover.”

  “Crap money,” Trevor says. “I’ll look around for something better, maybe Ichabod’s. They said we could play a weeknight last time I checked. Something tells me they’ll give us a weekend pretty fucking quick.”

  “Same time tomorrow?” Joe asks. They all look at me.

  “Tomorrow,” I agree, and follow my roadie to the car.

  Do you know about Elizabeth Bishop’s poems? The one about how dirty everything is, and how somebody loves us all—The Filling Station—we’re reading today in Overhead’s class. The language throughout the poem is conversational and knowing—a certain color—and witty—high-strung automobiles—and I read it over and over and love it a little more each go.

  Do you ever feel like you’ve exposed a secret when you read something you love? Like you’ve discovered a reality that, for whatever reason, had been kept from you? I think maybe the point of art is that it’s intimate, and steps across time, and feels like revelation, and that I’m different simply because I’ve experienced it.

  We have half a dozen poems to read while Overhead does her nails, and, I don’t know about the rest of the class, but this poem is making me stupidly sentimental. Like, I keep thinking about my mom and her endless barrage of questions, and how she packs our lunches and includes a napkin, and the track meet in seventh grade when those two girls knocked me down during the half mile, and I chased after them and kicked their fucking asses—won the race by twelve seconds—and then noticed my arms and legs were burned and bleeding from the track and had little black pieces of gravel in them, and my
mother cleaned the burns and patched me up and said that night at dinner it was the first time I hadn’t complained about her coming to a meet. You know, junk like that.

  “Cole,” Overhead says. “Have you read the poems?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  She smirks, crosses her arms, and leans against the blackboard. Overhead is Veronica Lake if Veronica Lake were in her sixties with a bad complexion and a habit of sucking her teeth.

  “And what do you think of them?” she asks.

  “Elizabeth Bishop makes it seem easy—accessible—like maybe she wrote this entire poem from the car while they filled her tank. At first it even sounds like she’s judging them, but the narrator’s voice is so specific that it’s almost making fun of itself. And by the last line, the poem’s something else again. Suddenly it’s about a mother.”

  Her mouth is a little “O” for a moment, and then she gets all smarmy again. “Very intricately stated, Cole.” Backhand.

  “What is the deal,” Alicia says, “with Emily Dickinson and bees?”

  “What’s the deal,” Sarah scoffs, “with Emily Dickinson at all?”

  And they’re off. Arguing the merits of a dead chick who liked dashes, not even acknowledging the whispered esso-so-so-so of Bishop’s final lines. Love is a deliberate act, isn’t it? Love like that, anyway: nurturing love.

  Tonya makes a long point about line breaks, in reference to William Carlos Williams, that I don’t follow at all. I love his wheelbarrow poem. How it’s concrete and abstract in this perfect mix: so much depends … beside the white chickens.

  “Over the break, you will write a poem,” Overhead announces. “You may choose to write a sonnet, or a free-verse poem with at least four stanzas. Choose your subject. Also, I want you to read Steinbeck’s The Chrysanthemums and write a response.” The bell rings, and she calls to us over her shoulder, “Be good.”