One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy

by Stephen Tunney

  Hieronymous sighed.

  “You want to quiet down?” shouted Chahz O’Looney. “I’ll toss you out of here!”

  Bruegel rushed over and picked up one can of beer with one hand, and a can of dog food with the other.

  “LOOK! Same can! What kind of factory do these come from? Is it just a big white building with the word Factory written on the side?”

  O’Looney usually tolerated Bruegel because the boy never stole and he always purchased a lot of beer for himself and his mother, but sometimes, whenever he got excessively loud and excited over the most mundane things, even he had to get tossed out—which is exactly what Chahz O’Looney was about to do.

  There was another rude interruption.

  An old man stumbled into O’Looney’s. He was from the group outside. He shuffled past Hieronymus and then nearly bumped into Bruegel, who was still holding the identical cans. The newcomer walked three more steps into the beer aisle and picked up a forty-ounce bottle of yellow ale. He walked in an almost lopsided way to the counter.

  “Chop-chop on the blundering pig-pie fock!” he sang out loud.

  “And I see a pig-pie sucking on a tarstick!” remarked Bruegel just as loud.

  Two elderly men standing by the counter got excited when they saw the fellow with the forty-ounce bottle approach, and at once, began to call him names and shout at him. Apparently, there was some unfinished business among these old hobos as several filthy red hands grabbed the beer bottle. Insults and curses were violently expressed, and all three started fighting as the bottle fell to the hard linoleum floor, shattering and splashing the malty-smelling fermentation in every direction. The fight grew. Hieronymus had never seen old men go at it like this before. Chahz O’Looney himself was a little surprised at the confagration before him, and it wasn’t until the third forty-ounce bottle was smashed over one of the gentlemen’s heads that he began the tiresome effort to throw them out. O’Looney’s dog, a large creature with matted dirty gray hair and bad breath, was already barking at the noisy customers.

  “Get out of here before I call the police!” O’Looney wrestled with one of the boozers, who was himself caught in a biting death grip with one of the others. “Out! Out, you old bastards, and never come back!” Expelling the violent, geriatric hoodlums was proving a difficult and excruciating task.

  Staring at this circus of clashing fists and mumbled screams and shattered bottles, Bruegel, who had stood in the exact same spot holding the two cans, calmly put down his generic products, casually walked over to the three fighting men, and in one seamless gesture, disengaged them from one another and tossed them out the front door as if they were three old piles of soggy newspapers. He hardly noticed that all three men landed hard on their faces, injuring themselves. He then walked back and sat down opposite Hieronymus, picking up where their conversation had broken of, behaving as if he had never interrupted himself in the first place.

  “So, what were you telling me again? That girl took your goggles off, or something like that?”

  Hieronymus realized what a complete waste of time it was to explain any of these details to Bruegel. Anytime he tried to explain what lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis was, or why he had to wear the goggles, or why he was restricted to a lifetime on the Moon, all of these things were met with a friendly, blank indifference. Bruegel could not follow the complicated explanation, and even if he could, something would enter his field of vision and completely distract him. As far as he was concerned, there was no reason at all why Hieronymus wore goggles. And that was that.

  But Hieronymus was not there to discuss LOS with his friend from the Loopie class. He needed a distinct favor.

  “Listen. You have your driver’s license, don’t you?”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “How about borrowing your mother’s car and driving me out to LEM Zone One tonight.”

  “LEM Zone One? What are you talking about? You were just there last night.”

  “That is true. And I need to go back.”

  “I’m assuming this has to do with the girl we all saw you walking of with. What, she comes from around there? Is she a LEM Zonian foxentrotter?”

  “She’s from Earth.”

  Bruegel’s eyebrows fexed upward so high on his forehead that, for a brief moment, Hieronymus thought that his large friend’s skull had imploded.

  “Earth?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “An Earth girl, same age as us, was just wandering around LEM Zone One?”

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it.”

  “Well, what happened? Did you and her do any kind of pleasure particulars of the rumdangle oxmolitrex?”

  “Stop throwing your fake words at me. I don’t fall for that.”

  “Did you touch her with your lips?”

  Hieronymus sighed.

  “If you mean did we kiss, yes.”

  “Did you make out with her? Tongues?”

  “Bruegel, you know I hate questions like that.”

  “Sorry. I forgot how uptight you are.”

  “I’m not uptight. What are you talking about?”

  “Clellen told everybody that you were uptight.”

  “Clellen? What does Clellen have to do with any of this?”

  “Clellen told everyone in class that you were the most uptight guy she ever made out with.”

  “She’s a liar. I never made out with her.”

  “That’s not what she says. She said that you were a good kisser but a lousy maker-outer.”

  “I think Clellen is a little confused—about a lot of things.”

  “So you never kissed her?”

  “I kissed her, but I never made out with her.”

  “Well, what’s the difference?”

  “Big difference, you stupid idiot. Just kissing is when you do just that. Kissing. And just a few times. Under ten minutes. Making out is rolling around in addition to kissing. It’s pretty straight-forward.”

  “Clellen said you made out with her for hours at Maggie-Mag’s party last month, and I know others who saw the both of you going at it and…”

  “Oh, so what, Breugel, who cares! Everyone was drunk on Zhengo at that party…”

  “Clellen’s pretty hot.”

  “She is, but I think she’s totally insane.”

  “Well, she might be insane, but I would sniff Jessker’s silver box for a month just to get my tongue between her teeth! I’ve tried a hundred times to make out with her, but she always pushes me away as if I’m some kind of a Racker-Stang! But you’ve had her, man! You made out with her and everybody knows it!”

  “Look, I don’t want to talk about her. Are you going to drive me out to LEM Zone One tonight?”

  “Who am I, your chaufeur? Your foot valet? Your Crinx-Balfour? You are assuming my mother is not driving her car tonight…”

  “Your mother never uses that car. You told me that.”

  “Sometimes she does.”

  “Well, let’s buy her a case of beer and she’ll have no reason to go anywhere tonight, and you just take the keys and of we go.”

  “You know, I should dislocate your jaw from your face for just saying such a thing.”

  “Stop it. Just agree. We are going out to LEM Zone One.”

  Bruegel stared straight ahead.

  “This girl from Earth. What is her name?”

  “Windows Falling On Sparrows.”

  “How does that work? Is ’Windows’ her first name, ’Falling On’ her middle name, and ’Sparrows’ her last name?”

  “No. The whole sentence is her first name. I have no idea what her last name is.”

  “When a woman looks like that, I guess it doesn’t matter what the Crack her name is. Does she have a friend or a sister? I’m not into this if there’s no foxentrotter action for me. You can just zag out on the train all by yourself if you think I’m going to be the towel-holding man while you get your tongue all knotted up in that Earthling whirlpool juice.”

 
; Jesus and Pixie! fumed Hieronymus. He is such a damned stupid crater-head!

  “Something tells me,” continued Bruegel after taking a long and noisy gulp of zag-zag. “that you have no way of getting in touch with this young toaster from the Motherworld, yes?”

  “All I have with her is a rendezvous point. At the Ferris wheel. In the amusement park. Eight o’clock. But something happened last night that I might be in a lot of trouble for, so I can’t call her hotel.”

  “Well, have a good time. I’m not driving you. I hate LEM Zone One. And I am not going if there is not an additional set of overies for me to match up with my set of…”

  “Okay! Stop! Listen. How’s this? Let’s give Clellen a call. You said that you like Clellen, right? Let’s invite her along. We get to LEM Zone One, I’ll meet the girl from Earth, and then we just pair of, and you see if you can get something happening with Clellen, okay?

  Bruegel listened to this proposal, which Hieronymus thought was pretty damn clever, and after a quick contemplative moment, burst out laughing.

  “Clellen! Oh, once again we return to Clellen! Hieronymus, I appreciate your ofer to set me up with the Queen of Gel-Fantastique, but I have it on very good authority—actually, from Clellen herself—that she will be unavailable tonight!”

  “Wait. What do you mean?”

  “Clellen. She is a very bad girl. She has a hot date with Pete.”

  “Pete?”

  “Is your brain caked with moose curd? Pete, the fellow we met on the transport yesterday who started trading tongues with dear old Clellen! Your acquaintance—the athlete boy who plays those inane games with the other barrelheads like him. It is pointless to ask her to accompany us on this misunderadventure because she is taking Pete to a motel over by Telstar Towers tonight! A motel! How sleazy and cheesy is that?”

  Hieronymus looked down into his mug of hot fedderkoppen. The purple swirls on its surface dissolved into cruel fuzzy rings. The stuff was awful. Why did he drink it? Why did he come to places like this? Why was he friends with people like this?

  O’Looney’s horrible dog started barking at the homeless old men banging on the Plexiglas storefront, trying to get back in.

  Then Bruegel came up with a suggestion that truly disgusted Hieronymus. And as soon as he mentioned it, the One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy knew it was going to be the program of the evening, the awful trade-of he had to make if he wanted to see that damn Ferris wheel again…

  “So Clellen is out. But, Hieronymus, there is someone else I am dying to meet, and I know that you are friends with her because I have seen you with her on numerous occasions. That girl with the goggles and the blue hair…”

  * * *

  He hated to mix his two worlds. He hated to socially mix anything up. And now this. Not so much because he was afraid something would happen between Slue and Bruegel—he knew beyond all certainties that that was the mother of all dead ends. Slue would hate Bruegel. Period. But it was the mix between Slue and Windows Falling On Sparrows that made him curl his toes and grit his teeth. Both girls, thrown together like that in front of him. The idea bounced between the hemispheres of his brain and it went nowhere comfortable.

  As he pondered that inevitable awkwardness, he barely heard Bruegel going on about how hot he thought Slue was. That damn fool! Look at him, talking about Slue as if she was his girlfriend already. What an arrogant, pathetic spectacle that big oaf is making out of himself as he sits there running his mouth of, that presumptuous, pompous Loopie, talking about Slue like that, how dare he! On the other hand, it certainly would be comical to set this up. Slue, after all, has been snubbing him, so the idea that she would go somewhere with he and Bruegel was beyond all remote possibilities. She was pissed of at him. She refused to even say hello. Then he found out she’d been socializing with Pete. Of all people! Despite that misunderstanding in the rotunda, Pete was a nice guy, but also a complete barrelhead! Why, he could not fathom. Pete? He did have a nice car—a Prokong-90. But Slue didn’t give a Pixie about things like that. Or did she? If he were to call her, she would just be dismissive and inform him she had a date with Pete. On the other hand, thanks to Clellen and that motel in Telstar, Pete might be…busy…

  “Are you even listening to me?” demanded Bruegel, who noticed that Hieronymus was drifting of into his own daydream.

  “No, not really, big guy. What were you talking about?”

  “I was talking about tonight. We are going to go see the Ginger Kang Kangs.”

  “The Ginger Kang Kangs? What are you talking about? I told you that we’re going to the amusement park at LEM Zone One.”

  “Only losers go there. Losers and children. No. We are adults now, adults with a vehicle, and adults with vehicles do not go to amusement parks. You will call Slue and you ask her if she’d like to come on an exciting road trip tonight with you and your pal Bruegel, who is an allaround T-Bird guy, extremely good looking and, unlike you, can actually drive a car—tell her that I have four tickets to see the Ginger Kang Kangs, who are playing tonight at the Dog Shelter, which is right next to LEM Zone One. Tell her that we will go to the amusement park to pick up your date…”

  “Bruegel, hold on—the Ginger Kang Kangs?”

  “They’re a local band. They’re really excellent. They come from Sputnik Heights and everyone says they are really happening. Clellen, for example, loves them and Clellen does have good taste in music, if nothing else. Also, the Dog Shelter is the grooviest club—very underground, so it might even be illegal. It was a dog shelter in former times. They still have old dilapidated kennels in a separate room. It’s like the make-out room. People make out in the dog kennels while the band plays in the main hall. It’s really wild.”

  “That sounds completely sick. I’m not taking the Earth girl there. And I’m not inviting Slue to a place where people make out in cages meant for dogs.”

  “I see. I guess Clellen was right about you.”

  “Right about what?”

  “You being uptight and all.”

  chapter nine

  The public bubblephone at O’Looney’s was all the way in the back and mounted to a yellow painted cinderblock wall. It had a small screen. Neither Hieronymus nor Bruegel was in the habit of carrying around portable phones or screen devices of any sort. It was a distaste for instant communication they had in common. Hieronymus hated the idea of always being cornered by a call of some sort. The obligation of answering the phone. It was a form of tyranny.

  Bruegel decided to follow Hieronymus to the back and listen in on the conversation the One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy was about to have with the One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl. Hieronymus punched in the numbers. It had been three weeks since he last spoke to Slue. His heart was racing.

  She answered, turning away slightly as if someone had distracted her just the second before she answered her bubblephone. He took in the image of her. Her three-quarter angle, the slope of her nose. Her cheekbones. Her jawline, her lips, and her eyebrows. Her blue hair appeared bluer that ever in the extreme palate of the small screen.

  She looked into the field of the screen and recognized it was Hieronymus. She was slightly speechless.

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “Hey, Slue. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, Hieronymus. How is everything going with you?”

  “It’s good.”

  Awkward silence followed. She looked away, then back. He was not sure if she was looking at him, or looking at the edge of her screen. The electric field was blurry, and the colors were saturated, and the contrast was high. The bubblephone at O’Looney’s was several decades old and in need of repair. Her face was vague, and he wondered if he looked as distorted to her as she to him. Then he thought that this was probably a good thing—they could hide behind the imperfect images they saw of each other. She futtered on and of, and in that millisecond when she disappeared, his heart sank, and when she came back on, he realized how much he really missed her. She spoke, her voice crackling through
the broken speaker.

  “I…I never told you this, but I really loved your presentation on The Random Treewolf. It was so wonderful. I think you worked much better on it alone than if I was there. I would have just made it weaker.”

  “Don’t say that, Slue. That’s not true. I think the opposite. I think my presentation would have been a lot better if it was our presentation. I think there’s a lot of things I missed that you would have picked up and made into something wonderful.”

  “Did you like the presentation I made with Poole on Sanctified Island?”

  “Yes,” Hieronymus lied. “It was very powerful.”

  But nothing like what you came up with, she thought.

  “So. Hieronymus. Why are you calling me?”

  “Well, I was wondering if you’d like to check out this band tonight. The Ginger Kang Kangs? Have you ever heard of them?”

  “They sound familiar. Where are they playing?”

  “The Dog Shelter.”

  “The Dog Shelter? Isn’t that over by LEM Zone One?”

  “Yea. But my friend Bruegel is willing to drive. He has a driver’s license.”

  “Bruegel. Isn’t he one of the Loopies? Oh. I forgot. You’re a Loopie, or at least half a Loopie. And you hang out with Loopies.”

  Hieronymus cringed and looked to the side. Luckily, Bruegel had stepped away as soon as the conversation turned to their ancient literature presentations. He was already at the far end of the aisle, reading the ingredients on a box of children’s cookies. He appeared to be deeply interested in the list of chemicals.

  “You know, that’s a really mean thing to say.”

  “You saw what they did to the rotunda. I want nothing to do with any of those criminals.”

  “Bruegel wasn’t there that day.”

  “Are you sure? I’d hate to imagine that I’ll be stuck in a car with some guy who tricks me into smelling something abominably horrible from a small silver box around his neck.”

  “Come on. You have to admit that that was funny.”

  “It was one of the worst moments of my life.”