Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  There was no way that little boy could have moved his fingers at me.

  “Hey-ho, Lemur Boy,” I said.

  Robby raised his arms, twisting his fingers into claws above his hairy lemur head. He froze there like that, not saying anything. He stood with one foot on the deck of his skateboard. My board was right beside his.

  Grimacing lemurs are a little unnerving.

  “Amazingly lifelike,” I said.

  Robby remained silent and motionless, a taxidermist’s display of a lemur-Lutheran-boy-crossbreed experiment.

  I shrugged and slid my skateboard away from him. I got on it and pushed off.

  “Hey, wait up,” Robby said. He followed after me.

  When he rolled up alongside me, still wearing the mask, Robby said, “I went through the jungle, Porcupine.”

  “Did you see anything?” I asked.

  “Nah.” Robby said, “Somebody pushed the dumpster back. Everything was just like it’s always been.”

  “Are the pubic lice happy and well?” I asked.

  “Thriving,” Robby said. “I picked up a few hitchhikers who wanted to hang out with you. Let’s have a fag.”

  “Okay. Can you smoke in that thing?”

  “I haven’t tried yet,” Robby answered. “It’s probably not flame retardant. Or else it’s carcinogenic, or will mess up your sperm and make you have two-headed babies and shit.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “You wouldn’t want to smoke cigarettes wearing a carcinogenic grimacing lemur mask that’s capable of messing up your sperm.”

  “Nobody wants messed-up sperm.”

  “Messed-up sperm is the evolutionary slot machine that will destroy mankind.”

  Robby and I were having a conversation about sperm.

  Robby said, “How long are we going to talk about sperm?”

  I answered, “I don’t know. Talking about sperm is something that people just don’t do enough of. It does make me feel a little weird, though.”

  Robby took off the mask. His face was pink and damp with sweat.

  We looked at each other. Robby smiled and nodded. I knew everything between us was okay. He stuck his hand out, and I took it.

  It was a real Lutheran-minister-kind-of-awkward-and-sweaty Iowa handshake.

  “What is this shit?” I said, “We are shaking hands. We never shake hands.”

  Robby said, “I know. Well, I just, um, wanted to tell you . . .”

  “You don’t need to say anything, Rob.”

  I patted his shoulder.

  “I guess not,” Robby said. I took out one of the packs of cigarettes Ollie Jungfrau sold me, and Robby added, “I think it is always appropriate to end a conversation about sperm with a sweaty handshake.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We sat down on our skateboards right next to each other and smoked.

  Every Saturday, Robby asked me how many donuts Ollie Jungfrau ate. I could not be certain, but that day I think I counted nine. Robby asked me to swear I would take pictures with my cell phone if Ollie Jungfrau ever exploded.

  Then I told Robby about going back inside Johnny McKeon’s office, and how scared I was because I believed I saw the two-headed boy inside the jar twitch his fingers at me when I talked to him.

  Robby shook his head dismissively. “Last night, after all the shit that happened, we are both probably traumatized. You were seeing things.”

  “I don’t think I’m traumatized, Robby,” I said.

  “I think the inside of this lemur mask made my face stink,” Robby said. He blew out a big gaseous cloud of smoke.

  “You’re still wearing the T-shirt I loaned you,” I said.

  “I’ll give it back after I wash it.”

  “Oh. Sure thing, Rob.” I asked, “How’s the flamingo?”

  “Fine. Just fine.” Robby rocked sideways on his board. “On Monday night, my mom’s working a double shift. You should come over and get drunk with me.”

  “Maybe we should do that,” I said. “I was thinking. Have you ever popped one of your mom’s little blue relaxers?”

  “Zannies?” Robby asked.

  “Yeah. Ever taken one?” I said, “I was just wondering. They look like little boats, don’t they? Kayaks. I just figured they make you all calm and shit. Sailing away. Like you don’t have any problems and everything is figured out.”

  Robby said, “I never tried one. Anyway, you don’t have any problems, or anything to figure out, either.”

  “Sure. Sure I don’t,” I said.

  “Like what?” Robby asked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Okay, at times, can effectively serve as the closing curtain to difficult teenage conversations.

  Then I said, “I will come over on Monday and get drunk with you.”

  “I’ll let you wear the lemur mask.”

  “I don’t want my face to stink.”

  “Yeah. Probably not.”

  By the time we’d gotten on to our second cigarette, I worked up the nerve to tell Robby about the date I made with Shann. Feeling awkward and guilty about it was stupid, too, but it was just another element of my confusion about things. Robby didn’t seem to mind. I was more confused. I thought he’d feel left out, like we were ditching him.

  He offered to drive me to Shann’s house so I wouldn’t have to skate all the way out there. Robby said it would give me B.O., and I probably did not want to have B.O. on a date with Shann.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t want to have B.O.”

  Robby said, “If you have B.O., you might as well have messed-up sperm, too.”

  “I’ll shake to that,” I said.

  Robby picked up the grimacing lemur mask and sniffed the inside of it.

  “This is nasty,” he said.

  “I thought you’d be disappointed,” I said. “Because we’re going out on Saturday night without you.”

  “But it’s Shann,” Robby said. “She’s your girlfriend. You need to go out together. That’s what boyfriends and girlfriends do.”

  “Yeah. Well, I feel bad.”

  “Why?”

  I said, “I don’t really know, Robby. What are you going to do tonight?”

  Robby said, “Me? Laundry, I guess. Shit like that.”

  “Right.”

  “Come on,” Robby said, “let’s head out and pick up the Explorer.”

  “Maybe tomorrow we could do something,” I said. “Just me and you.”

  “We could fold my laundry,” Robby offered.

  EDEN FIVE NEEDS YOU

  SHANN COLLINS AND I ate burgers and onion rings at Jackie’s Country Kitchen in Waterloo, Iowa, after the movie.

  People in Iowa are real dynamos at naming businesses.

  Movies came to Waterloo about a month after they began showing on other parts of the continent. The movie Shann and I sat through was one that all the kids at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy had seen on opening day, which happened weeks earlier, just so they could tell everyone who hadn’t seen it what it was about and how good it was.

  The kids at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy all agreed the movie was terrific.

  It was probably the dumbest movie I’d ever seen in my life.

  But since I was with Shann, I didn’t actually pay attention to much of it.

  It is difficult for any movie to keep my attention. That’s something else wrong with me, I think. It’s all part of the big confusing history behind Austin Andrzej Szerba. I don’t know why I am the way I am. I knew I should talk to my father about things. I just needed to find a way to get that conversation to start.

  Shann and I sat in the corner of the back row.

  The movie was called Eden Five Needs You 4. I had not seen the first three parts, but it didn’t matter since everyone at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy had, and had told everything about what happened. It also didn’t matter because apparently the plot of the movie was not an essential element to the experience.

  Eden Five Needs You 4 was a very loud, v
isually assaulting science-fiction movie about a teenager who was abducted by benevolent aliens and taken to a planet called Eden Five.

  The first four Edens were probably shitholes.

  The benevolent aliens abducted the teen because Earth was dying, due to all the wars and environmental destruction humans had inflicted on their planet and shit like that. So the benevolent aliens chose the teen because they wanted his sperm to start a new population of human beings on this other, nice planet called Eden Five. Well, the teen didn’t want his sperm to be the sole genesis of a new race of mankind on Eden Five, because he did not want to be responsible for all the shitty things human beings are genetically driven to do: War, crucifixions, genocide, religion, television.

  He paid attention to history enough to know that Adam should have used a condom.

  So the teen stole one of the benevolent aliens’ spacecrafts and returned to Earth to get his best friend, another teen, so he could go back to Eden Five with him, and both of their sperm could be used to start a new race of mankind. That way, neither one of them would have to take full responsibility for all the shit human beings are naturally driven to do.

  You know, friends blaming friends for the other guy’s sperm being messed up.

  That’s what history’s all about.

  In the meantime, the president of the United States, who had formerly been director of the Central Intelligence Agency, learned of the plan to start a new world on Eden Five. The president was unhappy that it was not going to be his sperm that started an entire new race. He ordered the United States Space Agency to send rockets up and destroy the craft with (now) the two teenagers aboard. The United States spaceships were also loaded with frozen embryos that had all been created from the president’s sperm.

  The United States spacecrafts also looked like gigantic flying pairs of balls.

  Hollywood is good at subtlety.

  Like I said, it was the dumbest movie I ever saw.

  The actor who played the teenager was thirty years old in real life, but nobody in the paying audience seemed to mind because he was very handsome and well groomed.

  I don’t really know how the movie ended, or if there was a clear conclusion to the story. While we waited in line for our tickets, I did hear some boys ahead of us talking about next summer’s release of Eden Five Needs You 5, so the movie probably had a real cliffhanger of an ending.

  The boys in front of us chewed tobacco. They carried paper coffee cups that were halfway filled with sticky brown saliva. They left these on the floor of the theater, for the future. If you were ever going to start a new planet and needed some sperm, these boys would not be on your list.

  During the big in-space fight scene between the flying American testicles and the teens whose sperm was going to create a new race of blameless humans, Shann and I had our tongues in each other’s mouths.

  It’s not that the movie made us particularly horny. If we actually paid attention to it, we might likely have been anesthetized. I read a popular myth somewhere about how schools in Iowa used to put a chemical called saltpeter in their cafeteria food. People believed that saltpeter made it so boys would not get erections.

  It was all a bunch of shit, of course.

  Nothing, except possibly paying attention to Eden Five Needs You 4, could ever make boys not get erections.

  I slid my hand up inside the loose sweater Shann was wearing and played with her perfect breasts.

  The movie was very loud.

  I had never touched Shann’s naked breasts before. She liked it.

  I liked it more, I think.

  In fact, Shann dropped her hand between my legs and rubbed me. Shann had never put her hand there before. This caused a very sudden and accidental eruption of Mount Austin Andrzej Szerba inside my jeans.

  I gasped and gulped.

  It happened exactly at a moment where the dumb movie went absolutely quiet.

  I was mortified. I nearly passed out.

  Shann knew what happened. It was obvious.

  The tobacco-chewing yahoos in front of us could probably tell what happened.

  I slumped down in my seat.

  I wondered if it was possible to die from embarrassment.

  “Oh,” Shann said.

  “Uh,” I said.

  And Shann whispered, “Eden Five needs you.”

  So, while we eyed each other over our burgers and onion rings, I slipped my foot out of my shoe and caressed Shann’s leg with my toes under the table at Jackie’s Country Kitchen. I was somewhere in the middle of telling her the story about Ollie Jungfrau’s uncle’s German shepherd that can toast a brownie on demand, and how damaged sperm was probably responsible for every great man-made calamity in history, when Shann said to me:

  “You know what I really love about you, Austin?”

  I did not know what she really loved about me. Probably not my endurance.

  I said, “No. Tell me.”

  Shann said, “I love how you tell stories. I love how, whenever you tell me a story, you go backwards and forwards and tell me everything else that could possibly be happening in every direction, like an explosion. Like a flower blooming.”

  “Really?” I asked. “I . . . Hmm . . . I never noticed that about me before.”

  I felt myself getting embarrassed again, but not nearly to the degree I had been when we encountered an accidental spill during the painfully quiet post–epic battle scene in Eden Five Needs You 4.

  Shann said, “I think you’re irresistibly cute, Austin Szerba.”

  “Thank you, Shannon Collins.” I said, “I will shake to that.”

  Here is what happened that night:

  Seven people in Ealing, Iowa, stopped eating food. They began bumping into walls and shit. They were very sick.

  Ollie Jungfrau was constipated. He’d eaten too many donuts that day and had a dinner whose principal ingredient was cheese.

  There were only six houses on the street where I lived. Two of them had been repossessed by the bank. Their windows and doors were posted with notices printed in very small type. At exactly the same moment Eden Five Needs You 4 got embarrassingly silent and I erupted, a third home on my street went empty as the owners were ordered out by grim-faced officers of the court who waved official papers.

  And in that house, tucked away inside the drawer of an abandoned nightstand were four unopened condoms and a Book of Mormon that had been taken from a room at a Marriott Hotel in San Diego, California.

  The family had been to Sea World.

  Pastor Roland Duff ate a personal-sized Stanpreme pizza at Satan’s Pizza. While he sat alone, Roland Duff read the Waterloo paper and looked up movie listings. He thought he might enjoy seeing Eden Five Needs You 4. Pastor Roland Duff had never seen the Pacific Ocean.

  Shann’s stepfather, Johnny McKeon, who was also my employer, drove out to Waterloo to pick us up at Jackie’s Country Kitchen at 10:30.

  On the drive back to Ealing, Shann sat next to me with her head resting on my shoulder.

  It was a quiet ride.

  Most of the way home, I was trying to decide if what happened to me could technically be considered having sex; if that was the first time I actually had sex with someone else. I decided it was close enough. Close enough to repopulate Eden Five. Close enough to be a forbidden subject in the library at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy.

  Thinking about what happened in the movie theater made me hope Shann would touch me like that again.

  I also desperately wanted to change out of my soggy Iowa plaid boxers.

  “So, how was the movie?” Johnny asked.

  “Huh?” I said.

  Sweaty, damp, and oddly energized, I got home at 11:15. My predictable parents were already asleep at that time. The house was dark. Ingrid waggled and quivered excitedly. She stuck her bowling-pin nose into my crotch when I opened the door.

  “Go toast some brownies, Ingrid,” I said.

  I stood on our front step and waited for Ingrid to shit. Then
we both went upstairs into my room, where, at last, I could peel myself out of my ruined clothes.

  At 12:04 I slipped between the coolness of my sheets just as my phone rang.

  I thought it was Robby, but it was Shann.

  She told me the typing-ticking sound had come back and she was scared.

  “Tomorrow, after church, me and Robby are coming over,” I said. “We’re going to find out what’s inside the wall.”

  “Okay,” Shann said. “I love you, Austin.”

  “Eden Five needs me,” I said.

  I was very horny again.

  AN AWFUL LOT OF MATH

  WENDY MCKEON LOOKED so much like her daughter, Shann, that people sometimes assumed they might be sisters.

  Robby and I went directly to Shann’s house after church. Johnny and Wendy didn’t take Shann to services that week. They made the excuse that they were settling in to their new old house. When you didn’t go to church in Ealing, sometimes it was almost necessary to stick a sign in your yard asking forgiveness from your neighbors.

  God cuts slack to people who need to settle in, but your neighbors might not.

  Students from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy were required to wear our ties and sweaters at church, even though most people in Ealing did not dress up on Sundays.

  “Don’t you two look handsome?” Wendy McKeon said when she greeted us at her door.

  Robby and I hadn’t changed into our non-Lutheran-boy clothes yet.

  “Like candy canes,” I said.

  “Kind of makes you want to beat us up, doesn’t it?” Robby asked.

  “Oh, you,” Wendy said and put her hand flat on Robby’s chest.

  Robby was so much funnier and better looking than I was. I believed Wendy sometimes wondered why Shann wasn’t his girlfriend, instead of the Polish kid’s. Robby wasn’t out to anyone but me and Shann. Wendy McKeon didn’t know anything about teenage boys unless she learned it from one of those daytime television talk programs.

  Wendy McKeon would have thought it was not normal for Robby and me to experiment.

  There was an exterminator service van parked in front of the McKeon House. Shann had told her mother about the noises coming from the wall, and Johnny and Wendy decided it was most likely rats.