Now Kelly was going to be pissed at me forever.
And the second reason?
Someone said the magic word, and we all prepared to scatter.
The magic scatter word at any party was, of course, “cops.”
And so we separated, some sneaking into the pool house, others running into the woods through the backyards of other houses. Already in Crash Bandicoot mode, I bolted and didn’t stop until I got to Newman’s car, ten blocks away.
Then I threw up again.
Chapter Five
How the Panthers Got Their Spots
“Yo, Crash. Are you still alive?”
I was twelve years old, in seventh grade, when Jackass: The Movie came to town. By then, almost everyone in town called me “Crash.” Even though at that point, the video game character meant nothing to me. I had moved on, beyond Crash Bandicoot and PlayStation.
All the way to PlayStation 2.
And MTV.
And Jackass.
And my new hero, Steve-O. Sure, there was Johnny Knoxville and Bam and Ryan and Wee Man and the others. And of course, Johnny got all the attention. But if you really knew crazy like I did, you’d recognize immediately that there was something entirely different about Steve-O. Those other guys did incredible stunts and you couldn’t help but be shocked into laughter.
But mostly, with Steve-O, you just watched in awe.
Because Steve-O actually should have died.
I don’t mean once. I mean like every single time you saw Steve-O, he really should have died. Over and over and over again.
But he didn’t. And if he survived, so could we. And I was as good at playing Jackass as any kid could be.
I rode shopping carts down the two hundred steps from the front entrance to the town hall. I tried to feed a psychotic pit bull a Slim Jim, with the Slim Jim in my mouth. The dog was on the other side of a fence, but still would have been able to reach more than just my lips if he wanted to tear off my face. I had my friends attach different size fishhooks around my neck in the most painful necklace ever made. No shit, I have the proof; there are videos of the stunts we did.
I did it all. I was creative; I was awesome; I was completely and totally fearless. Well, completely and totally fearless until I heard the words “Yo, Crash. Are you still alive?” while standing on the popcorn line the Saturday of opening weekend.
Pete’s brother got us the tickets and waited with us. I had enough money from my mom to buy him refreshments, which my mom suggested that I do to thank him for the ride. So all I was thinking about in the moments before I saw him was what was Pete’s brother going to want and how long it would take and would we get really good seats.
And then this tall kid singled me out among my friends and spoke to me in an almost manly voice for a kid, which sounded oddly familiar. Staring at him, I had this feeling that time and space converged and then stood completely still, a feeling that I have never since been able to duplicate without weed or shrooms. Except for once, during the siege, and that was a different matter entirely.
Only this first experience was not a pleasant feeling at all.
Because as soon as it clicked in who I was talking to, I was no longer Steve-O, fearless and immortal. I was immediately back in the panic zone again.
This simply could not be.
What I said was “You’re in Chicago.” I said this not as a question, but a demand, like just saying it would somehow magically transport him halfway across the country where he belonged, with his new life, far, far away from mine.
“It appears not.” He stepped back, closer to us.
Pete recognized him too and said, “No way.”
“Way,” he said. “Chicago was history ago. We moved back, actually to Long Island.”
“So why are you here?” I demanded to know.
“We’re moving back here again. In with my aunt.”
I remembered that his aunt lived in our town, in this huge house off Main Street, the one with the porch that surrounded the whole house. My mom had to go there once to pick up some kind of makeup thing, and being as it was after school, I had to go with her. I remembered Burn’s aunt as a fat lady who smelled like urine. So, as I remembered, did her entire house.
“Why?” I asked. For me, this wasn’t just “why,” it was more like “no,” like “go back to wherever you were,” “don’t be real, be some kind of nightmare dream,” which is what I felt like I was in.
“My father was dusted in the towers,” he said.
I had no clue what he was talking about. And then his sister, Roxanne, came over, yelling “Oh my frickin’ god, it’s little Crash. Do they still call you that?” I couldn’t tell whether she was genuinely happy to see me or secretly making fun of me. If not for the hurdles between us, I think she would have barreled into me like she did when I was younger. Seeing her again, I felt like I was back in McAllister and that somehow everything between the moment that they left town and the very instant before seeing them was all some kind of illusion.
“You got so cuuuuuuuuute,” she squealed, adding to my feeling of being in elementary school with no time having passed.
And there, wobbling out of the women’s room, was their fat Aunt Peesmell, looking exactly as I remembered her.
So there it was.
Of course, I couldn’t concentrate on the movie at all (except for the scenes with Steve-O, which, as always, were over-the-top great). I remember sitting there, in a sweat, thinking about whether Burnett remembered that he wanted to kill me.
Maybe he had forgotten. Or gotten over it.
Maybe he was different now.
Then, after the movie, he came over to us again and told us that he had Xbox, and did we want to come over to his aunt’s place. And Roxanne said, “When are you going to come to my aunt’s house to play with David? Puleeze come over to play with David,” sounding very much the same as she had sounded when we were in McAllister and totally different at the same time. Different because her voice was deeper, more grown up, and she now had breasts and all, which she totally caught me staring at, although I didn’t intend to stare. I remembered that she was Lindsey’s age, but she looked older, more mature than Lindsey. And she did have kind of a cute face for someone who kind of looked like Burn. Kind of a mix between Burn and Christina Ricci.
Pete’s brother drove us home, and I lay in bed all night, wondering whether I would ever sleep again.
And then it was Monday, and I didn’t see Burn in school, though I checked in every class to see where he could have been assigned. And when class after class was Burn-free, I decided that it had to have been a hallucination after all.
Except.
Except that Burn was standing there. Between me and my bus. And oddly, I was completely by myself, which was rare for me, since I was almost always with some of my friends.
And he was walking over to me. I remember needing to take the worst shit ever and hoping I made it home in time as my stomach was increasingly tightening every second throughout the day. Now I was in trouble.
“Did you think we were done with each other?” he said, getting up close to me.
“Well, yeah.”
“Don’t you know, Crash, that we are like Voldemort and Harry Potter? We are dependent on each other.” The look in his eyes left no doubt as to which of us was which. It was not lost on me that Voldemort will not rest until Harry is dead.
I could feel the shit liquefying in my intestines. I had to use every muscle in my body to keep things from flowing out. I clamped down with my arms and even my teeth. He must’ve noticed that something was wrong, because he backed off, and I looked beyond his shoulders.
My bus was leaving. Without me. I was unable to move.
Fuckme. How was I going to get home? How was I going to get to a bathroom? And how long did I have to live?
From behind us a car horn was honking.
“That’s my mom,” he said, walking backward. “See you tomorrow.”
Me
, still not moving.
And him, apparently noticing that there were no buses left, “Do you want a ride?” all nice and everything. Did he forget that he had just threatened my life again?
Then his mom pulled up and said “Get in” to both of us, and I really had no choice, because even if he was going to kill me, it was probably, like, days, weeks, months away, and in my condition I was not going to otherwise last for the rest of the afternoon.
So this is how my mom and Burn’s mom became friends again.
Mrs. Burnett calls my mom on her cell phone on the way home to tell her that she has me, and I have to give her the directions, which of course means that Burn now knows exactly where I live. Then Mrs. Burnett pulls into my driveway and I thank her very much and fly, literally, fly out the door, bulldozing past my mom, who is coming out of the house at the same time, and I am hitting her with my backpack, nearly knocking her over and flinging it into the closet, then bounding up the stairs to the hall bathroom and just making it, instantly exploding into the first restful moment for me since Burn showed up at the movie theater three days before.
Then I come out of the bathroom, breathe for the first time all day, and Mrs. Burnett is in the kitchen, sitting across the kitchen island from my mom. They are having coffee together and talking like old friends, which is so far from the universe that I wanted to live in that I practically scream, but before I can scream, my mom says, “David is in your room, honey,” and I rush up the stairs faster than I’ve ever moved before. And . . .
Burn is sitting on my bed, controller in hand, playing Jak and Daxter on my PlayStation 2. All of my other video games are laid out on the floor, my closet flung open and ransacked-looking.
“Your games suck, dude” is what he said. “How do you not have Final Fantasy? Xbox is so much better. How could you not have Halo?” Then he looked at me looking at my room, now in total disarray, and seeing I was pissed off, he added, “Don’t you have any porn?”
And I watched him play my games for like an hour until my mom called up to us to come down, and then I followed him down to the living room. And as he was leaving, in front of his mother and my mother, he said to me, “Sorry for getting you into trouble in elementary school, dude. I had some really big problems then. I’m on much better meds now.”
And he extended his hand out to me, all gentlemanly.
I looked at his mom and my mom and wondered if he was apologizing now, then what was up with the Harry Potter/Voldemort line from earlier in the day.
“He’s a troubled child” is what my mother said that night as we were sitting in front of the television. As usual, we were watching some Nickelodeon show, being as Jamie was a true Nick addict. She came home after school every day, sat on the family room floor with her homework, and never actually took her eyes off the screen.
Me and Lindsey would sit on the couch when we were younger, each of us on a separate side since Lindsey refused to get any closer to me, and keeping our ritualistic distance, we watched the classic shows together—Doug, Ren & Stimpy, Angry Beavers, Rocko’s Modern Life, Hey Arnold!, Real Monsters, Catdog, and, of course Rugrats. But always like three, maybe four in a row and we were done.
Not Jamie.
She knew most of those shows, the ones that were still on, but supplemented those by also watching The Wild Thornberrys, Rocket Power, Oh Yeah!, The Fairly OddParents, Pinky and the Brain, Invader Zim, and, of course, SpongeBob (which OK, I never missed either). Plus, All That, Keenan & Kel, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, and anything else on Nick. And Nick at Nite. She switched channels only for Full House, which she watched with total rapture, reciting every word from every character simultaneously with the actors. (I tried to get her to do this in front of my friends, but without the actual shows, she could remember nothing.) She had recently started cheating on Nick whenever Lizzie McGuire or Kim Possible came on, but mostly switched back and forth during these shows, out of loyalty to Nick. Which, of course, would be the one word to sum up Jamie.
Loyalty.
She was mostly a B student (as compared to my C’s and C minuses), which made my parents crazy, because Lindsey was all straight A’s and they thought Jamie was as smart as Lindsey.
But Jamie didn’t care about stuff like schoolwork or sports or friends or anything else. If she liked something, she pretty much stuck with it, without questioning it, and dedicated herself to it, whatever it was, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. And the one thing she loved more than anything else was Nickelodeon.
My father tried to keep her from her shows, first encouraging her not to watch, thinking all the time that she would do better at school without TV (which she didn’t; actually, when she did her homework without the TV, her grades went down). And when that didn’t work, he tried bribing her with other things, but there was nothing else she wanted except Nick shows.
More than once, my father attempted to threaten her, saying, “Do you want to end up like your brother?”
Which, of course, wasn’t a threat to her, since I could do no wrong in her eyes, even when I continued to tease her, fight with her, trip her, knock her down, barrel into her, or use her for one of my Jackass stunts. Nothing I could do to her would make her love me less (the exact opposite of Lindsey, who I had given up on and who hardly ever talked to me).
So as Jamie folded her math homework into her notebook and The Jimmy Neutron Show was about to start, my mother started talking about her conversation with Mrs. Burnett, how her son has been on different medications his whole life to control his bipolar disorder and his anxiety and depression, and that he never had many friends wherever they went, and how, to make it even more difficult for him, his father’s job required that they had to move frequently.
In fact, my mother said, according to Mrs. Burnett, David told her that he still considered me to be his best friend, even though he hadn’t seen me in like four years.
“She said that you were the only kid who made him feel comfortable here.”
And I responded, “Did you remind her that he tried to kill me when I wouldn’t help him burn down McAllister?”
“Yeah, well, he had this thing about fire and explosions when he was young,” she said, and it was almost like she was making excuses for him. “But his mother said that he’s over it now.”
“I just don’t get why he’s back” is what I told her.
I was totally unprepared for her response. In my twelve-year-old mind, there weren’t too many possibilities. The Burnetts had only lived in our town for a short period, and Burn always said it was a sinkhole, not only for him, but for his family. He actually said that no one in his family liked our town at all. And he definitely didn’t like anyone here, including me. So why not stay in Chicago? Even Long Island could’ve been better.
“His father died” was what she said. “He was killed on nine-eleven. He was in the World Trade Center. North Tower. How horrible.” My mother actually shuddered, looked like she was really thinking about how horrible it was. At that time, I didn’t understand the concept of irony well enough to realize how ironic it was that Burn’s father died from the very thing that fascinated Burn most. As in explosions.
“So he really needs a friend, Steven.”
As she was talking, Lindsey came down from her room, all high-schooled up in her makeup, with her attitude, head-tilt, glanced at the TV (like she was expecting something other than Nick), shuddered (which she did like once an hour), and made a face of cartoon disapproval at our choice with her official eye roll (she was officially out of Nickzone). She said something about needing money for some after-school activity to my mom, and my mom was all, your father will be home within the hour, ask him, which of course would not be a problem for Lindsey, her being his favorite and everything. In fact, it seemed to me that those two only talked to each other and never to any of us (actually, he only seemed to talk to my mom about answers to questions from her or questions he had to have answered, not like “how was your day, dear�
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“In fact,” said my mother, more to Lindsey than to me, “the whole family seems to need a few good friends. They are going through a very difficult period.”
“Who?” Lindsey with her sarcasm.
“The Burnetts. Mrs. Burnett, David, and the girl . . . Roxanne.”
There goes the eye roll again. “Uugggh. She’s like el wierdo. I saw her today. She sits next to me in English and talks all the time.”
Jamie, not missing a beat, matching Lindsey’s sarcasm, “Thankfully, they don’t have a kid my age.”
You had to love Jamie.
“I invited them over for Thanksgiving,” my mother responded.
Lindsey and I actually made eye contact on that one, one of the few times we bonded. Disaster was certain.
“Dad’s gonna love that,” said Jamie, never taking her eyes off Jimmy Neutron. Even as she said it, Lindsey and I knew exactly what she meant. When it came down to it, Jamie was more insightful than Lindsey and me combined.
As I said, you had to love Jamie.
“Jamie’s right,” Lindsey added, ever the lawyer. “Dad’s going to hit the roof when he finds out that you are encouraging Steven to spend time with the fire boy.” Another eye roll from her, and she turned as if ready to go back to her room, but she wasn’t done yet. “C’mon, Mom, he’s even more out of control than Steven.”
Apparently any bonding time between us was over. Thanks, Lindsey.
About to leave, she turned back to my mom to add, “You should know better,” sounding very much like my dad; her condescending tone was a perfect match.
That was my cue to go to my room. My dad was going to be home soon enough, and I retreated whenever I could to avoid contact with him. I would open my homework and get it started; actually the truth was Jak and Daxter were waiting for me on the PlayStation, just where Burn had left them.
The next day in school, Burn found me in the lunchroom with my friends.
“My mom thinks your mom is very stressed out” is what he said. And I wondered, like, what kind of thing is that for one kid to say to another kid? I didn’t know how to respond. Of course, I didn’t have to, because he started talking again, and it was like we were back in McAllister and the fire incident and the subsequent death threats were an illusion.
Crash and Burn Page 7