Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  During the Great Depression, I think American boys pretty much pissed wherever they wanted to.

  There was also a stainless steel trough urinal at Satan’s Pizza, but it was only wide enough for two guys to use at once. It was extremely awkward, being paired up with a complete stranger like that at a pizza place.

  It was like being on a blind date.

  Worse yet would be if I was standing there peeing, and then one other guy would come into the men’s room and stand beside me, unzip, and when I glanced over, it would be Louis, the cook from The Pancake House, or maybe Ollie Jungfrau or Pastor Roland Duff.

  I always tried to hold my pee whenever I ate at Satan’s Pizza.

  Sometimes, a guy just can’t, though.

  There were old color photographs of Italy that hung behind glass-faced frames above the urinal at Satan’s Pizza. One of them showed the Coliseum in Rome, and the other showed Michelangelo’s statue of David.

  You know what I mean.

  What guy doesn’t like to think about Italy and civilization and shit like that when he is holding his penis and pissing into a steel trough?

  I am the great-great-grandson of Krzys Szczerba, a man who made things for other guys to piss on.

  My brother, Eric Christopher Szerba, got pissed on, too.

  In a way, Krzys Szczerba made me and my brother. When you think about it, Krzys Szczerba’s factory was still in full operation, and we were his modern-day Nightingales.

  Everyone at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy heard about what happened to Mr. Szerba’s son, Eric Szerba, who was in Afghanistan.

  Robby did not go to school that day, either.

  There was something wrong with both of us, but it was not something like what was happening to those Hoover Boys, although there was equally little Robby Brees or I could do about it.

  SHANN, THE HORNY POLISH KID, AND SATAN

  JOHNNY MCKEON CAME over to my house that afternoon. He said he wanted to check on me and see if I needed anything. There were lots of things I needed, but Johnny couldn’t give any of them to me.

  I certainly couldn’t talk to Johnny McKeon about my confusion, or about what was happening between me and Robby; and between me and Shann.

  “I came to see if you needed anything,” Johnny said when I opened the front door. He added, “You know, if I could do anything for you, Austin.”

  I was still in my boxers. I had not gotten out of bed all day. Ingrid squeezed between my legs and wriggled past Johnny out into the yard. The poor dog was about to explode.

  I combed my fingers through my messed-up hair. I said, “Thanks, Johnny. I think I’m okay. I could use a cigarette, I think.”

  “I brought some for you.” Johnny said, “They’re in my car. Hang on.”

  “Watch out for dog shit, Johnny,” I said. “And, thank you.”

  “If your mom or dad says anything about this, I’m telling them you stole them.”

  Johnny always said that.

  So Johnny McKeon stayed there with me on my front porch while I smoked a cigarette and talked to him. I’d forgotten all about my plan to look for the missing invisible McKeon silo with Shann. Everything had been such a nightmarish blur since Robby Brees and I had gotten beaten up for being queers by those four assholes in the alley at Grasshopper Jungle.

  It was like swimming through a big bowl of alphabet soup, where all the letters are alive and flash little dancing horror shows for you: grimacing lemurs, two-headed baby boys, accidental eruptions at the Waterloo Cinezaar, little blue kayaks, enormous green praying mantises, praying hands, the Tally-Ho!, my pissed-on brother, Eric Christopher Szerba, and my best friend, Robert Brees Jr., whom I loved very much and felt a terrible sadness for at the same time.

  “You’re a good dog, Ingrid,” I said.

  Ingrid lay beneath my bare feet and I sat on a wicker chair in my boxers and smoked a cigarette with Johnny McKeon in front of my house.

  At that moment, my parents were on an airplane flying over Scotland.

  “Why don’t you put some clothes on and I’ll take you and Shann out and get you pizza or something?” Johnny McKeon asked.

  “You mean you don’t want to just take me to dinner in my underwear, Johnny?” I said.

  Johnny shook his head gravely. For someone who was always in a good mood, Johnny McKeon never really knew when people were joking around with him.

  “No, kid,” he said. “Put some trousers and a shirt on or I ain’t taking you anywhere.”

  I waggled my Saint Kazimierz medal at Johnny and told him thanks, but I hoped he wasn’t planning on sitting in the middle, considering he was going to be chauffeuring his stepdaughter and me out on another date.

  He didn’t get that, either.

  Johnny said, “I’ll drop you two off, and come pick you up. But in Ealing, not Waterloo. Now go put some britches on, Austin.”

  I found some 501s that weren’t too dirty. They were lying on my bedroom floor. I slipped into Robby’s Spam T-shirt. He’d left it there at my house the day we went up on the roof of the Ealing Mall. It still had a few faded bloodstains and it smelled like Robby, which kind of made me a little sad. I didn’t bother putting on any socks. I got the Adidas I’d loaned to Robby a few days earlier and slipped them on.

  It made me feel lonely to wear Robby’s shirt.

  I went to pee in the men’s room at Satan’s Pizza before our Stanpreme arrived at the table. It was taking a chance because the pizza place was unusually busy for a Wednesday evening.

  Nobody came in to share the trough with me and the photos of Rome and naked David.

  I sat beside Shann and we looked out the window, across Kimber Drive to Grasshopper Jungle, the Ealing Mall.

  We talked.

  At first it was almost as uncomfortable as standing next to Ollie Jungfrau at the little trough urinal in the back of Satan’s Pizza. I kept thinking about Robby. I felt so guilty about the things we did.

  I do not lie, but I did not want to tell Shann about Robby, and I did not want to tell Robby about Shann, either.

  So I sat there and thought about how I was ripping my own heart in half, ghettoizing it like Warsaw during the Second World War—this area for Shann; the other area for queer kids only—and wondering how it was possible to be sexually attracted and in love with my best friend, a boy, and my other best friend, a girl—two completely different people, at the same time.

  I was so confused.

  There had to be something wrong with me. I envied Shann and Robby both so much for being confident in who they were and what they felt, and for knowing what part of my ghettoized heart they lived in.

  Eventually, Shann worked up the courage to talk to me about Eric.

  We were eating our pizza by that time, and I had pushed all those thoughts about my brother into a dark place in my head. The pissed-on Polish boys’ ghetto. Now a light shined on them.

  So I told her this:

  Eric Christopher Szerba and I got pissed on. I could not remember any image of my brother where we were not boys together. Eric Christopher Szerba was still a boy. Eric Christopher Szerba was my big brother. Now he was ruined, destroyed. He would be somebody else the next time we talked. It would be awkward, like peeing next to a stranger. We got pissed on, Eric and me. Everyone did. Nobody was better off anywhere. Nobody learned a lesson. Nobody got saved.

  I could not eat any more pizza after that.

  I think I might have been crying.

  I have to be honest. This is history. I was crying while I sat there at Satan’s Pizza, looking out the window at Grasshopper Jungle. I was crying, and it wasn’t only for Eric Christopher Szerba. It was for Robby Brees, my mother, my father, Robby’s mother, Krzys Szczerba, and for Saint Kazimierz, too.

  Shann was crying. She put her face against my neck.

  Shann said, “I’ve always been in love with you for how you say things, Austin. Ever since that day in eighth grade when we sat together and had Cokes and talked about The Chocolate War. Do y
ou remember that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s that book about the peacock who shits gumballs and Sugar Babies out of its ass, right?”

  Shann laughed a little and we kissed.

  And I told her: “Shann, sometimes I do really dumb things and I don’t think about the people I might be hurting. I want you to know that I love you, no matter how dumb I am. No matter what I do.”

  I was trying to tell her the truth—my abbreviated truth—about me and Robby. Shann thought I was talking about the day before, at school, when I attempted to start a conversation involving the use of condoms.

  Shann said, “You are not dumb, Austin. I love you very much. I was thinking about what you said, about . . . Um. You know. If you used a condom.”

  I nearly fell off the bench at Satan’s Pizza when she said that.

  I said, “You mean you would?”

  I tried to devise a means of getting Shann Collins over to my empty house that night.

  “Maybe we could try to do that sometime. When the time is right,” Shann said.

  I thought the time was right.

  Hearing her say the words do that made me very horny.

  Shann tried changing the subject. She placed her purse on the table beside the remains of our Stanpreme. When she opened the purse, I hoped she was going to show me how she’d brought along a pack of condoms or shit like that. Not that I needed any. I had dozens of condoms from cleaning out the furniture for Johnny McKeon at From Attic to Seller Consignment Store.

  I fought with myself.

  There was rioting in the ghetto.

  That is the truth.

  I was being such an asshole to my two best friends.

  I decided to shut up. Like Shann told me, she’d let me know when the time was right to try to do that, and that was much closer to a yes than a no.

  Eden Five needed me.

  Maybe I could prove something to myself, eventually, and watch how everything might fall perfectly into place for me.

  Shann pulled a small black-and-white photograph out from her purse. It was the picture she’d gotten from the Ealing Registry of Historic Homes.

  And, yes, I was disappointed, and very horny, too.

  FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS

  Here, our history looks at four photographs:

  1. THIS IS THE MCKEON SILO.

  In grainy black and white it looks like a galvanized steel penis with Saturn booster rockets, sitting on a launch pad a quarter mile behind Shann’s historic home, preparing to blast off for Eden Five.

  “I found it,” Shann said.

  2. THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF ME AND MY BROTHER, ERIC Christopher Szerba. The picture was taken when Eric was twelve years old. That would make me about five or six. In the picture, we are standing on the shore of Lake Minnewonka, in Canada. The sun is setting into our eyes. Our mother, Connie Szerba, was morbidly obsessed with having the sun shine in our white Polish faces whenever we posed for pictures.

  In the photograph, my hair is messy, sticking up unevenly. It is also much lighter in color than my hair is now. I am wearing Velcro-laced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sneakers. They had lights along their soles and flashed when I walked. I loved those shoes.

  Eric is tall and skinny. He wears a red plaid shirt, untucked, an Iowa boy after all. Eric also has on brand-new cuffed Levis. I can almost feel their stiffness in the photograph. His legs are like matchsticks in them. The jeans have not been washed yet. Eric Christopher Szerba has his arm around my shoulder, but the way he is standing is not the uncomfortable posture of a boy about to turn teenager who is coerced into hugging his little brother to falsely freeze a peaceful moment for a family snapshot while on vacation.

  Both of us have those Polish Boy bags under our eyes.

  Eric is very handsome. His hair is the color of maple syrup and he has a spray of freckles on his cheeks. The way he smiles, you can see his two big front teeth. His lips are wet. The shadow of my father stretches all the way past our ankles. You can see, in silhouette on the ground, how my father’s elbows point out like wings on a nightingale where he holds the camera up to his eyes.

  3. NEITHER OF THE OTHER BOYS killed in the same explosion that removed both of Eric Christopher Szerba’s balls and one of his legs were younger than my brother. But they were boys, too. Julio Arguelles was thirty-four years old. There is a snapshot of him that was taken when he was six years old. He grew up in Brooklyn, and in the photograph he is standing in the driveway beside his family’s home. There is a low redbrick wall at the end of the driveway. On the other side of the wall, you can see the white T of a wood-framed laundry post sticking up. There are some white T-shirts and underwear hanging from the clotheslines. It appears there is no wind blowing. Julio is wearing a Superman T-shirt with a red-rimmed collar, the triangular S, and there are fierce abdominal muscles drawn onto the fabric that loosely drapes over Julio’s six-year-old chest. At the very bottom of the T-shirt is a band of yellow—Superman’s belt—and the red swath that marks the upper waist of his briefs. It is a funny shirt. I would have worn it when I was a kid. Julio Arguelles’s dark chocolate hair sweeps down over his forehead, and Julio is holding up a hand in a permanent Number One gesture. I can’t guess what question Julio was answering when that photograph was taken. Julio Arguelles has a faint orange Kool-Aid mustache. He is wearing blue sweat pants, but the legs are pulled up to his knees. He has black sneakers and no socks. Julio Arguelles had three daughters. The oldest of his girls was nine.

  4. PAAVI SEPPANEN’S FAMILY came from Finland. Paavi means small. Paavi also died in the explosion that took my brother’s right leg below his knee and obliterated both of Eric Christopher Szerba’s testicles. Paavi Seppanen was twenty-six years old when he died in Afghanistan. There is a photograph of Paavi that was taken at Easter when Paavi Seppanen was ten years old. Paavi has airy, thin red-blond hair the color of clover honey. He is wearing a collared, white long-sleeve shirt that is tucked into belted black slacks. He has a black clip-on necktie and is standing between his younger brother and sister. He looks like their protector. You can see they believe that about Paavi. Paavi has his arms around his brother and sister and they are all smiling. The younger boy and girl are holding empty woven baskets in their hands. The egg hunt has not started yet. The girl is maybe three in the photograph, and Paavi’s younger brother is wearing gray pants, a necktie, and suspenders. Paavi was homosexual. Nobody knew anything about it.

  THE PRESIDENT’S SPERM

  “I FOUND IT,” Shann said.

  “It’s difficult to miss, I suppose,” I agreed. “Maybe it’s painted like the sky, instead of a penis, and so we just don’t notice it nowadays.”

  Shann bumped me with her shoulder.

  Johnny McKeon could not tell when people were messing around with him, but his stepdaughter could.

  “I mean, I really found it,” Shann insisted. “I hiked out along the old service roads. There are some broken-down henhouses there and old troughs for the milk cows.”

  “Maybe those are urinals,” I offered.

  “Be serious,” Shann said.

  “Uh. Okay.” I decided to be serious.

  Shann said, “I found the old foundation to the silo. It’s concrete, and there’s a circular hatch in the middle of it. It looks like something you’d climb through to get into a diving bell or something.”

  “Uh,” I said. “Nobody uses diving bells in Iowa. It’s not natural. Besides, there’s nothing to see beneath the surface of Iowa.”

  “I couldn’t open it,” Shann said.

  “You tried?” I was impressed.

  “Well . . . no. I was actually afraid to do it alone,” Shann admitted.

  “That was probably wise of you, Shann. There could be lost Russian sailors down there,” I offered. “They would be very horny if they’d been down there ever since Iowa was last covered by a vast sea. Or maybe it’s full of the president’s sperm.”

  That made Shann laugh.

  I was horny.

 
I felt like I scored points toward getting her to come over to my lonely house with me. I desperately wanted her to, but I was not going to ask her to please do that. Johnny would probably say no, anyway, in spite of the condoms.

  But Johnny McKeon waited in his car and pretended not to watch us when Shann walked me to my front door and we kissed good night.

  THE VIRGIN SAINT AND HIS WARD

  I WROTE.

  At the bottom of the first page, I penciled in a picture of a big galvanized steel silo that towered in the distance behind the McKeon House, which was Ealing, Iowa’s solitary listing on the Registry of Historic Homes.

  Ingrid squirmed beneath my bare feet. She perked her ears up. If she hadn’t been stricken by cancer when she was a puppy, she may have barked. She looked like she wanted to bark. So I thought maybe she wanted to bark at me because she needed to shit, which was the most predictable quality Ingrid possessed.

  She was a quiet fountain of shit and reliability.

  Outside, in the distance, a police siren wailed like a plaintive coyote.

  We never heard sirens in Ealing. It’s not that bad things never happened here, it’s just that nobody ever bothered to complain about it when they did.

  A few miles away from my house, Ollie Jungfrau was locking up Tipsy Cricket Liquors. He had called the Iowa State Patrol, reporting that some kind of wild animal had attacked Wayne DeLong in the parking lot after Wayne left Tipsy Cricket Liquors. Wayne was carrying a paper sack with a bottle of El Capitan Vodka and a twelve-pack of Dura-Flex Extra-Sensitive Condoms.

  The wild animal that attacked Wayne DeLong was Hungry Jack.

  Wayne’s friends called him Wayne-O. Wayne-O was a pilot. He didn’t drink too much on nights before he flew, he said. He was supposed to fly a commuter plane from Cedar Rapids to Omaha in six hours.

  Wayne-O wasn’t going to make that flight.

  Ollie Jungfrau told the Iowa State Patrol officers the animal he’d seen attacking Wayne DeLong looked like a six-foot-tall grasshopper. The troopers requested that Ollie Jungfrau breathe into a machine.