Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  My favorite poem is The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens. It is a poem about everything else: sex, lust, pleasure, loneliness, and death.

  It begins:

  Call the roller of big cigars,

  The muscular one, and bid him whip

  In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

  Robby recited his poem from memory that night, and I fumbled over some of the last lines in my poem, but finally got it right.

  They were both so beautiful, and their sound, as we said them to each other above the music, made our chests fill up with something electric and buzzing, like love and magic.

  When I finished throwing up, I flushed the toilet and turned on Robby’s shower.

  I dropped my orphaned sock and Iowa plaid boxers onto the floor below the sink. I climbed into the tub and got under the water.

  It was cold, and there was a grimy ring of brown that had accumulated around the bottom of Robby’s bathtub. The apartment had only the one bathroom. It was right in the middle of a T-shaped hallway that separated Robby’s bedroom from his mother’s.

  Connie Brees was not home from work yet.

  I put my face under the water. I felt terrible. My eyes blurred and I fingered the medal of Saint Kazimierz and looked at his modest eyes and little upside-down halo. I put the thing in my mouth.

  I heard the bathroom door open.

  Robby said, “Austin? Are you okay, Austin?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. There was an edge in my voice.

  And I said, “Can you just let me have five minutes, Robby? Okay?”

  Robby said, “Sure. I brought your school clothes in for you.”

  Robby was sad because I was being an asshole.

  I did not want to go to school.

  I never wanted to get out of that dirty shower.

  I did not want to look at Robby Brees.

  I said, “Okay. Thank you.”

  But I said it in such a tone that it meant: Get out of here and leave me alone.

  At exactly that moment, Shann was eating a toasted bagel and looking at a black-and-white photograph of the McKeon House.

  And while I was standing under the shower in Robby’s apartment, Travis Pope passed out behind the wheel of his Nissan truck and crashed into a shallow drainage ditch on the practice fields at Herbert Hoover High School. His wife, Eileen, was sitting beside him. She was not wearing her seat belt. They were hatching.

  Someone down the hall from Robby’s apartment at the Del Vista Arms was holding a torch lighter below a glass pipe and cooking methamphetamine smoke into his face.

  Ollie Jungfrau was finally taking a shit. He was going to be late for work.

  Johnny McKeon was driving to the Ealing Mall. He was in a good mood. Johnny was always in a good mood.

  Ah Wong Sing was looking at video from a porn site in the Netherlands. He was going to be late for work.

  I was combing Robby’s conditioner with my fingers through my hair. It smelled like bubble gum.

  My brother, Eric Christopher Szerba, was on his way to a hospital in Germany. He had lost both of his testicles and his right leg from the knee down. Two other boys died in the same explosion. We would not learn this until the following day.

  Robby Brees was in his underwear, sitting on his bed. He put his face into his palms and cried.

  SCHOOL PRAYERS

  EVERYTHING FELL INTO place, all right.

  But things dropped so hard the entire world broke.

  I learned this:

  My mother’s little blue kayaks were perfectly seaworthy. Her Xanax did make me feel not stressed out. They took away my confusion and worry. They made me believe that I only had one head on my shoulders, and that head had everything all figured out. Everything is nicely, sweetly normal when you are floating on the kayak.

  But I would need to take them forever if I wanted things to stay that way.

  There was one Xanax left.

  It was inside the matching, clean gray Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy regular boys’ socks Robby carried into the bathroom for me while I was under the shower.

  I flushed it down the toilet with the last of my vomit.

  While Robby showered, I quietly left his apartment at the Del Vista Arms. I counted three yellow Pay or Quit notices taped to doors on Robby’s floor. I walked to Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy alone.

  I was not late to class.

  I did not say anything to Robby.

  Every morning began with a prayer. Robby came in to class. He was almost tardy for the first time in his life. He was flustered and his cheeks were red. Robby’s tie was crooked and his shirttail hung down in back of his sweater like he’d been running. He’d obviously been looking for me. Robby would have to fix his appearance or Pastor Roland Duff would call him in for counseling about proper grooming for Lutheran boys.

  I prayed with the other students in the classroom, but I only thought about Robby Brees and the chain around my neck.

  I did not talk to Robby for days after that.

  I needed to talk to my father.

  I did not have any idea what I would say.

  I told Shann I was sick.

  She thought it was from drinking wine with Robby the night before. That may have been true. I had no way of figuring out if anything was true or not true on that Tuesday after I spent the night with Robby.

  So I told her we would have to go searching for her invisible silo after school on Wednesday. I needed to go home and let Ingrid out and then go to bed and shit like that, I told her. Shann understood.

  It was already getting too late to do anything about the entire world falling off the cliff that opened at our feet in Grasshopper Jungle. All I could think about was how the pull of gravity was screwing with one particular Polish kid from Ealing, Iowa.

  Shann said, “I think you’re both hung over. Robby looks sicker than you.”

  “Uh,” I said.

  “I hope this teaches you something,” Shann scolded.

  “So do I,” I said.

  “Tell Robby to come over tomorrow,” Shann said.

  “Uh. Robby can do whatever he wants.”

  Shann and I walked out of Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy at the end of the day. Robby had already gone home without saying anything to either one of us.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  It was the truth.

  Shann repeated her history lesson for the day: “I hope you learned your lesson, is all I can say.”

  “I’m sorry, Shann,” I said. Then I added, “I love you, Shann.”

  Shann looked around to see if anyone was paying attention to us.

  We were alone.

  She pressed up against me. It was a very daring move for a pair of Lutheran kids in eyeshot of the front doors of Curtis Crane.

  For some reason, the medallion of Saint Kazimierz seemed to get heavy and burn against my bare chest. And I thought about Robby again.

  Shann whispered, “I love you, Austin.”

  I rubbed my hips into her. I had to say it: “Shann, do you think . . . Um. Maybe . . . if I got some condoms . . .”

  She cut me off. “No! Go home, Austin Szerba. You’re sick. You’re not even thinking like a normal boy.”

  I thought that was what normal boys did think about.

  I tried to prove something, but my experiment failed.

  “Sorry, Shann. Um. Are you sure?”

  She said, “Can you for one moment stop being silly, Austin?”

  She said moment again. I was horny, and scared, and so confused about everything.

  “I will,” I said. “I need to go lie down. I’m sorry.”

  I was not thinking like a normal boy.

  What was I going to do?

  THE VICE PRESIDENT’S BALLS

  SOME NIGHTS MY mother stayed at work at the Hy-Vee until late, so my dad and I would have to prepare dinner for ourselves.

  There was once a time when it wa
s against the law in Iowa for women to allow boys and dads to cook dinner for themselves.

  Now, kids like Robby Brees and me often had to survive on our wits and by eating shit like Cup-O-Noodles and Doritos.

  Most of all, I wanted to go to bed and mope, but that evening I cooked fish sticks and frozen french fries for my dad. I waited for him to come home from school, so we could talk.

  The fish in the sticks claimed to come from Alaska.

  The fries were not from France. The package said they were grown in Oregon and Idaho.

  If there’s one thing America can do well, it’s freeze shit.

  I waited.

  I was nearly asleep with my head on the table when my father came in.

  “You stayed up too late with Robby last night, didn’t you?” my father, whose name was Eric, said.

  “Uh,” I answered. I picked my head up and rubbed my eyes.

  I was still wearing my Lutheran Boy tie and sweater.

  For the first time I realized I’d left my sleeping bag, underwear, socks, toothbrush, sneakers, and cell phone in Robby’s bedroom. At least I had the foresight to stuff my history notebooks into my Lutheran Boy school backpack.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I’m not feeling well, Dad.”

  My father sat at the table and began eating. I got up and went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of ketchup. My dad was a ketchup man. Not me.

  The ketchup was made in Nebraska.

  So they do something there, after all.

  I watched him.

  He ate.

  I was getting ready to say something. I just needed to know what words to start with.

  My dad said, “Is something wrong, Austin?”

  “Uh,” I said. I was determined to do it. So I said, “Dad, when you were about my age . . . Did you ever . . . Um . . . experience a . . . I mean, did you ever get a . . . have guy friends who you . . . Um . . . did you ever experiment with another . . . Um . . .”

  It was a mess.

  That is exactly how it came out.

  My father stopped chewing. Fish sticks are not things that require any degree of jaw strength.

  I wished my brother, Eric, was still at home.

  He had been gone so long that it was as though I were an only child. Having a brother there would help. Eric was someone I could have talked to about things like erections and sex and making mistakes and accidental spills and being confused and all that kind of shit.

  At exactly that moment, Eric Christopher Szerba was in a morphine-induced coma.

  As I sat there nervously watching my father, there was a small earthquake in Guatemala. Robert Brees Sr. was sleeping naked in a queen-sized bed with his new Guatemalan wife. Her name was Greta. Robert Brees Sr.’s two-year-old son, whose name was Hector, was lying on Robert’s chest. In the sky above them, hot ash from a volcano named Huacamochtli began billowing soundlessly into the atmosphere.

  And at that precise moment, there were three bugs in Ealing, Iowa: Hungry Jack, Travis Pope, and Travis’s wife, Eileen. They all wanted to do only two things.

  The four Hoover Boys had not yet hatched. They were sick. Young people don’t break down as fast.

  Robby Brees was lying in his bed at the Del Vista Arms Luxury Apartments. He was wearing my T-shirt and the boxers that I’d taken off and dropped on his bathroom floor. Robby was listening to the Rolling Stones.

  Shann Collins was writing in a diary she kept locked in the nightstand beside her bed. She theorized how she might get away with her wish to have sex with her boyfriend, who sensitively promised her he would use a condom.

  When my father and mother did learn about what happened to Eric, they left Iowa and flew to the military hospital in Germany where my brother was undergoing treatment. At first, they tried to arrange for me to stay at the Del Vista Arms with Robby and his mother. I begged them to leave me home alone because I was old enough, and somebody needed to let Ingrid out to shit, after all.

  It was really only that I was afraid to face Robby Brees. I knew I would have to face him eventually, but I did not want to do it yet.

  My parents would not take me with them.

  They said I should stay in school, and they would call me twice per day.

  When Eric Christopher Szerba was recovering from his wounds, the vice president of the United States of America came to the hospital and visited him.

  The vice president was from Delaware.

  I never knew anyone who’d even been to Delaware.

  The vice president of the United States of America took a shit that day in the men’s toilet of the cafeteria at the military hospital before visiting my brother’s room. The vice president of the United States of America had two testicles that he liked very much, and neither one of his legs had been blown off.

  When the vice president of the United States of America was a teenager, he also experimented.

  My father stopped chewing and stared at me. I could see in his eyes that he knew exactly what I was trying to talk about. There is a certain dark and faraway look that fathers get in their eyes when their sons uncomfortably venture toward asking them questions about their penises and shit like that.

  I could see that look right away.

  “Um,” he said. “You mean, like in chemistry class?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  For the last few days in chemistry class at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, we had been making a slippery, gooey, milky white polymer from borax and some other shit.

  A polymer is something that is heavy and thick, made up of lots of small molecules. The word polymer came from Greece.

  The Greeks were good at making up words for shit.

  Robby Brees was my partner in the lab.

  Robby said the polymer we made in chemistry class looked and felt exactly like sperm. Everyone else in the class also thought it was exactly like sperm.

  Actually, not everyone. Only the physically and spiritually weak boys who masturbated thought our polymer looked and felt exactly like sperm. That was every boy in the class, considering we were all in tenth grade and fifteen or sixteen years old, which made all us boys physically and spiritually weak masturbators who could never be relied on to effectively defend the United States against foreign invasions. Only a couple of the girls thought our borax polymer looked and felt exactly like sperm.

  Shann did. But she sat beside me during the awkward eruption at Eden Five Needs You 4.

  Mr. Duane Coventry, our chemistry teacher, got mad and embarrassed by the behavior of the boys in the class. He obviously thought the stuff was exactly like sperm, too. So Mr. Duane Coventry brought in small vials of blue food coloring and made us tint our borax-polymer sperm experiments, so they wouldn’t look so much like sperm.

  “Yeah, Dad. In chemistry,” I said.

  “I once made a battery with a lemon,” my father said.

  “Uh. I did that, too, Dad,” I said. “Everyone does that shit when they’re kids.”

  My father swabbed his Alaska fish stick through his puddle of Nebraska ketchup.

  “Yes, Austin,” he said. “I did do experiments when I was your age.”

  He said it with finality and relief.

  That was the end of the history lesson about my dad and what he did when he was a teenager.

  “Uh. Thanks, Dad. Well, good night.”

  “Good night, son,” my father said.

  I went to bed.

  I realized that was the last time in my life I would ever attempt to speak to my father about sperm, or about my sexual curiosity and confused feelings. I’d be just as well served watching daytime television programs for women, or speaking to Ollie Jungfrau about those kinds of things. Or to any complete stranger sitting on a bus bench, for that matter.

  In the morning chaos before school, my parents were up and speaking with two liaison officers in the kitchen when I came downstairs. That was the day they left Ealing to go to Germany and see my brother, Eric, who no longer had any balls. My moth
er and father both agreed it would be all right if I stayed in bed that day.

  So I did not go to school.

  MODERN-DAY NIGHTINGALES

  KRZYS SZCZERBA STARTED a factory in Minnesota.

  He manufactured urinals.

  There is something grandly American in the story.

  Krzys Szczerba came to America and earned a living by making things for guys to piss on. The urinals he made were big. They were shoulder height, spanning entire walls with thick porcelain backs and drainage gutters all along the floor where you would carefully distance the toes of your shoes.

  Americans like big things to piss on.

  In those days, guys didn’t feel the need for seclusion or personal space when they pissed. American men and boys lined up shoulder to shoulder and unashamedly pissed like a choreographed army on everything in front of them.

  That was our day.

  Krzys Szczerba’s urinals were big enough so a dozen or more guys could all piss on the same wall together, all at the same time.

  We had a similarly designed group urinal at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. It was the one with images of disembodied praying hands hanging above it at eye level to remind us boys not to get any experimental ideas with our hands while they were holding our penises.

  But the urinal at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy was stainless steel and shaped like a knee-high watering trough for livestock. The urinal chimed a musical song whenever boys would piss down onto its flat metal bottom. And only four boys at a time could use it. More than that, and there would be some uneasy trespassing into your neighbor’s personal space.

  We kept our eyes on the praying hands.

  Besides freezing shit and making it food, pissing on things was something American boys have always been real dynamos at.

  Krzys Szczerba called his urinals Nightingales, after his wife, Eva Nightingale, who, like the urinals Krzys made, was big, accommodating, and perfectly white.

  There were birds with ribbons streaming from their happy beaks etched along the top rail of Krzys Szczerba’s Nightingale urinals.

  It was a good name for a urinal, I thought.

  Krzys Szczerba’s urinal factory went out of business during the Great Depression.