by David Klass
When it comes to increasing one’s happiness
All the math in the world is clearly powerless.
Mrs. Moonface does not respond to my poem, because all her energy is being directed toward trying not to look sad and lonely. She has a magazine on her lap and a camera around her neck, and she keeps glancing toward the doorways, as if at any second she expects a handsome man named Jacques to appear bearing a sandwich tray and escorting Clark Gable, her date for the evening.
Mrs. Moonface, I do not mean to be cruel, but there are no handsome men named Jacques in the vicinity, and the only sandwiches served during our basketball games are hot dogs and tuna melts sold by the Veterans’ Wives Auxiliary. And the chances of Clark Gable appearing tonight as your date would be far in the negative range, even if he were not dead, which I am quite certain he is.
Meanwhile, Glory Hallelujah is leading me along at a rapid clip, her eyes raking eagerly over the hundreds of people settling in on the rows of bleachers. “They must be sitting right smack in the middle of the Beaver cheering section. Mindy’s so predictable. Oh my God, there’s Yuki Kaguchi! And look, she dared to wear my personal shade of eyeliner, the little thief. And there’s Julie Moskowitz—I see she’s got her bony little sparrow legs all covered up for once. Wise move.”
A note of panic begins to sound in Gloria’s otherwise musical voice as she continues to scan the gymnasium. “But I don’t see Mindy Fairchild. She’s probably home doing her English homework with Toby Walsh. Which is fine by me, because I think Toby’s almost as much of a loser as she is, and even if they were here, we absolutely would not sit anywhere near them.”
That is good news for me, because Toby Walsh is the handsome star of the football team, and I have no desire to sit near him, where the ten million kilowatts of his social-status star power will completely eclipse the few feeble volts of juice that I occasionally give off.
The two teams run out and begin warming up. The audience roars as the Friendly Beavers go through a lackluster layup drill while the Saber-Toothed Tigers dunk ball after ball with such fury that the rim seems in danger of snapping. I believe the time has come for us to sit down, but Gloria is not slackening her pace in the least.
We pass Mr. Steenwilly, who is sitting ten bleachers up, with his arm around a pleasant-looking woman with long red hair and striking green eyes. She must be Mrs. Steenwilly. He sees Gloria and me pass by, smiles broadly, waves, and points us out to Mrs. Steenwilly.
I know exactly what you are thinking, Mr. Steenwilly. You believe that we are kindred spirits. You feel you understand me, and that just as you have apparently persuaded some lovely lady that Arthur Flemingham Steenwilly is a keeper, I have now done the same with Glory Hallelujah. You feel that I am therefore a successful chip off the old Steenwilly, and that thought evidently gives you pleasure.
But the truth, Mr. Steenwilly, is that you don’t know me from Adam, whoever he is. You don’t know me at all. And the only thing I will tell you about myself, Mr. Steenwilly, is that we really have absolutely nothing in common. You are a talented man, cut out for great things, who is temporarily on a doomed crusade to bring light to our anti-school.
And I am a shipwreck survivor, clinging to a raft that is slowly disintegrating while hungry sharks swim in circles beneath me and starfish ring dinner bells with each of their five arms. So why don’t you turn back to Mrs. Steenwilly and peer into her striking green eyes and stop waving and staring at me with that big, goofy smile running parallel to the thin mustache on your face.
Gloria’s head suddenly stops rotating. “There they are, right next to the Tigers’ section!” Gloria says. “Of course they think they’re too cool to sit with everyone from their own school. They’re so predictable. Come on.”
“I thought we weren’t going to sit near them,” I say, attempting to keep pace with her. I am beginning to suspect that Gloria may in fact be a goat and not a girl after all, because her climbing ability as she springs from bleacher to bleacher seems more caprine than human, whatever that means.
We reach the bleacher where Mindy Fairchild and Toby Walsh are seated. Mindy is a very pretty dark-haired girl who I don’t know very well since we have no classes together and on the social-status ladder of our anti-school she is at the very top while I am under the rock that props up the lowest rung. Not merely is her date for the evening, Toby Walsh, the best athlete at our school, but his broad shoulders, which resemble the shoulders of a Brahma bull, his tropical rain forest of curly brown hair, and his good-natured aw-shucks grin make him a likely candidate for future matinee idol and multiple Oscar winner, if he is not too busy leading the NFL in rushing.
Gloria stops when we reach their bleacher. She puts her hands on her hips rather dramatically. “So, I was beginning to think you two weren’t coming,” she says to Mindy as if a dirty trick has been played on her.
“What are you talking about?” Mindy replies coolly. “We’ve been here for twenty minutes. You’re the one who’s late.”
This makes so much sense that Gloria switches tack. “Well, I was kind of busy with Luke,” she says. “Some of us have obligations. Some of us were giving care and affection to animals that need us and love us and depend on us.”
“What makes you think I haven’t been doing a little of that tonight?” Mindy asks with a smile, and nestles her head against Toby’s mountainside of a shoulder. As if responding to a secret order, he puts his arm around her. They are, in fact, a very attractive couple.
Suddenly I feel Gloria’s hand slip into my own. And I believe one entire side of her body is suddenly and inexplicably pressing up against me. The Supreme Court must have repealed the rule against PDAs without notifying me.
Gloria sits down next to Mindy on the bleacher, dragging me down alongside her. For someone who has mentioned several times that she does not intend to sit next to Mindy, she has by some accident of fate ended up very close to her indeed. In fact, she is practically sitting on Mindy, and she is also quite close to Toby, who she smiles at periodically in what is doubtless a friendly and innocent fashion.
“You may have forgotten,” Gloria says to Mindy, “but Friday is Owner Care Day. But don’t worry, Luke and I had an extraspecial wonderful time this afternoon. You know, he gets so lonely when I’m not there. I brushed him till he made that happy sound in his throat. And I fed him a little snack. He ate it right out of my hand.”
Mindy rolls her eyes, and shrugs her shoulders very slightly, as if to say, “Oh, no, don’t bring up that Luke nonsense again.”
Toby appears confused. He looks at me. ‘Are you Luke?”
“No,” I say, “I am John. Luke is a horse.” I consider adding that Gloria does not brush me, and that I do not eat snacks out of her hand, but I have to admit I would not completely rule out either of those if the chance arose later this evening.
“Luke is our horse,” Mindy tells her broad-shouldered date. “Gloria and I each own half of him.”
“Yes, and we’re supposed to share taking care of him,” Gloria says. “I guess some people have more important things to do with their time. But don’t worry, I fed him and brushed him down from the tips of his ears to the bottoms of his feet and now he’s just fine.”
Just then I hear a familiar voice behind me proclaim, with incontrovertible authority, whatever that means, “Horses don’t have feet. They have hooves.”
I turn and see Andy Pearce and Billy Beezer standing just below us on the bleachers.
“What do you know about horses’ feet?” Gloria asks Andy. But what she is really asking is: “Who are you, you annoying little geek? And who is this strange-looking big-beaked bozo next to you? Is it really possible that we inhabit the same earth, or is this just a bad dream and when I wake up you will fade away into the nothingness you deserve?”
“I know that horses have hooves and not feet,” Andy Pearce says. “Haven’t you heard of hoof-and-mouth disease? They don’t call it foot-and-mouth disease.”
Gloria
wisely decides not to argue this point, but she looks back at Andy as if she is fairly certain she can make him disappear by willing it and squinting her eyes a certain way.
Andy Pearce does not disappear. He turns to look at me. “John, how come you’re not sitting with your friends?”
Billy Beezer steps forward. “Because we’re not his friends, Andy. Not anymore.”
“Whoever you are, why don’t you sit down,” Toby suggests. “The game’s about to start.”
“Allow me to introduce myself,” Billy Beezer says, looking at Gloria with the same poorly disguised hunger he once focused on steaming Chinese appetizers. “My name is Bill Beanman. My parents named me William, but my friends call me Billy or just Bill. Except for one aunt who calls me Willy.”
“If you don’t quit blocking my view, I might have to rip your willy off,” Toby growls.
Billy Beezer sits down very fast, but continues talking. He is now speaking directly to Gloria. “We actually sit near each other in math class. You may have noticed me.”
Gloria does not deign to reply, but what she is thinking is: “If you were a cuticle and I had the right size scissors, I could snip you off and throw you away and be done with it.”
“You may also have heard about my speech in the Student Council on behalf of adding a grapefruit juice option to our cafeteria selection,” Billy Beezer says. “It was reprinted on the back page of The Daily Beaver.”
I believe Billy Beezer is prepared to go on listing his Student Council achievements for some time, but at this moment a sonic boom rocks the gymnasium as the crowd roars for the opening tip-off. The Saber-Toothed Tiger center, who looks like a giraffe on stilts, barely has to leave his feet as he tips the ball to his point guard, who dribbles circles around our entire hapless Beaver squad and dunks the ball with enough force to crack the floorboards under our net.
“Go, Tigers!” a large and rather rotund young man sitting barely five rows in front of us shouts, and he holds up a large brass bell over his head and rings it furiously.
“Hey, tubby, pipe down and lose the bell,” Toby suggests helpfully.
“Screw you. You’re sitting in our section,” the portly Tiger rooter replies.
“Yeah? Well, you’re in our gym,” Toby points out.
“Yeah? Well, your team sucks.”
“Yeah, well, you’re fat and your girlfriend’s ugly.”
“I’d like to hear you say that again.”
“You’re fat and your girlfriend’s ugly. What are you going to do about it?”
“What are you going to do about it?”
Toby stands up. Walks down five rows of bleachers. The Tiger fan tries to stand also, but before he can hoist his considerable bulk to his feet, Toby grabs him by the shirtfront. With a clever twisting and shoving maneuver, Toby sends the large young man rolling down the bleachers like a one-man avalanche.
Unfortunately, the vanquished bell ringer was right about at least one thing. We are indeed in the Tiger cheering section. There are cries of “Did you see what he did to Chris? Get him! Kill his friends, too!”
I raise my hands. “Dear friends,” I say with such authority that the gym quiets. “Let me remind you that we are met here, not on the field of combat, but for a sporting occasion. You have come to our school, in friendship, and we welcome you. Are not the Beaver and the Saber-Toothed Tiger both creatures of the same forest? And while I am speaking of the forest, allow me to mention that among the Lashasa Palulu, a tribe renowned for its manliness, when the animal-hide ball is being batted around with a rival tribe, it is considered not merely rude to lose one’s temper but a sign of unworthiness.”
Actually, I think of delivering this speech, but I do not get the chance because a full-scale riot is breaking out all around us, and I find myself trying to squeeze my way, on the subatomic level, inside the wooden framework of the bleachers. Unfortunately, I am unable to merge with the varnished wood. Right next to me, Mindy Fairchild is shrieking and kicking at the date of the dispatched Chris, who has apparently decided to avenge her boyfriend by pulling out Mindy’s long black hair. Gloria is also yelling at full blast, in my direction, “SAVE ME, YOU IDIOT! DO SOMETHING!”
A dozen or so Tiger faithful charge up the bleachers, only to be met by Toby, who—with a remarkable impulse of selfsacrifice—flings himself at them, knocking them over like so many bowling pins. There are police whistles. Frantic announcements over the P.A. system are drowned out by the closer and more terrifying sounds of knuckles connecting with jaws and knees crunching noses.
Everyone is trying to climb over everyone else. Inspired by some self-preservation instinct perhaps inherited from an ancestral earthworm in my very distant evolutionary past, I drop to my knees, then to my stomach, and actually see light and space down there. I grab Gloria’s hand. “This way. Crawl.”
We slither on our stomachs beneath the churning mass of bodies, to the end of a bleacher, and slide down a metal support to the gym floor. We are still not out of the woods, so to speak, for—in a misguided attempt at crowd control—the police have completely sealed off the exits to our anti-school gym and are advancing in riot formation down every stairway.
Out of the corner of my eye I see a rather beefy policeman dragging Billy Beezer away by the scruff of his neck. It is, I believe, the very same policeman who arrested Billy at the Bay View Mall. “This time we’re going to throw away the key,” I hear him growl.
“I don’t want to get arrested,” Gloria wails. “Do something, you idiot!” Apparently, in her excitement, she has bestowed “idiot” on me as what is no doubt meant as an endearing nickname.
I lead her underneath the bleachers.
It is a dark space, latticed with dark metal pillars and wires, with hanging ropes and spiderwebs and faded streamers from proms of years gone by. Above us echo the thunderous sounds of the riot.
This is, in fact, not the first time that I have taken refuge beneath the bleachers. On occasion, to escape a particularly onerous and competitive gym class, I have slipped away beneath these very same bleachers. So I happen to know that there is a small and rarely used door in the back that leads to a supply room that leads to a janitor’s closet that ultimately emerges into the boys’ locker room.
Within two minutes, Gloria and I have made a successful escape, and we are walking away from our anti-school with the few lucky survivors of the battle royal in the gym.
It is an exciting feeling. Police cars and vans are speeding by, sirens shrieking. In one of those vans, no doubt, Billy Beezer is being whisked to some sort of maximum-security facility. Occasionally, the police cars themselves pull over to allow an ambulance unobstructed passage.
All of us streaming home on the sidewalks feel a common bond—we have survived a massacre and lived to tell the tale. Three blocks from our anti-school, Gloria and I are unexpectedly joined by Mindy Fairchild and Toby Walsh. He has blood on his face, and I believe somebody has torn off part of his ear.
“How did you guys ever get out of that gym?” Gloria asks them.
“The police were coming to arrest us, so Toby ran right through a wall,” Mindy coos admiringly.
‘Actually, it was a supply door and I just kind of gave it a good stiff shoulder,” Toby says modestly. “How did you guys get out?”
Before I can explain that we crawled out on our stomachs like earthworms, I am surprised to hear Gloria say, “John kicked out a window and we climbed out over the jagged shards of glass.”
“Cool,” Toby says, slapping me on the back. “Well done.”
“It was one of those things that just had to be done,” I mumble.
Mindy pairs off with Gloria and the two of them begin gossiping about who got arrested and who got their noses broken.
I find myself in the unlikely position of walking on ahead, with Toby Walsh, the most popular guy in our school. “So,” he says, “you’re going out with Gloria?”
“Yeah. I guess,” I respond cautiously.
; “She’s pretty fine.” He throws a backward look—our two dates are out of earshot. “So, you getting anything?”
I am not sure I understand his question, so I decide to answer without answering. “You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t know how it is,” Toby says with a laugh. “I never went out with her. To tell you the truth, she wanted to go out with me, but I said no go.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“Well, she’s real cute, and I hear she’s pretty wild, but she has the personality of a disease,” Toby says. ‘And then there’s her dad.”
“I met him tonight,” I say. “He seemed okay.”
“Did you hear what he did to Jerry Dickman?”
“No,” I say. “Who is Jerry Dickman?”
“Her last boyfriend. Her dad caught them in the basement together, and he nearly separated Jerry’s head from his body.”
We are suddenly rejoined by the two girls. “Okay, Toby,” Mindy says, putting her arm around his waist, “time to take you home and get you patched up.”
“Hell, this little scratch on the ear barely hurts,” Toby says. “I’ve played with far worse injuries than this.”
“Toby, for the millionth time, life isn’t a football game,” Mindy says, reeling him in a little tighter. “And would a little care and affection from little old me really be such a bad thing?”
Toby changes his mind very quickly. “Goodbye, you guys,” he says to us. “This is where we turn off.”
“Goodbye,” Gloria says back to them. “I’ve got to take John home and get him patched up, too.”
Suddenly we are alone, on the street, near Gloria’s house. “I actually don’t believe I have anything wrong with me,” I say to Gloria.
“I think I saw some bruises,” she says. “We better give you a quick checkup. And anyway, my parents are almost definitely asleep by now. Come in, and we can get to know each other better.”
I confess that I am torn, but at the same time, I confess that I do not want to end the night torn in half like Jerry Dickman. “I don’t know if that’s such a great idea . . .” I say.