by Joe Meno
Praise for Joe Meno’s previous novels
How the Hula Girl Sings (2001)
“Mr. Meno is a superb craftsman whose language is simple and direct and never loses sight of its origins.”—Hubert Selby, Jr.
“Meno has a poet’s feel for small-town details … He’s a natural storyteller with a talent for characterization.”—Publishers Weekly
“Meno’s poetic and visceral style perfectly captures the seedy locale, and he finds the sadness behind the violence and the anger behind revenge.”—Booklist
“How the Hula Girl Sings is a powerful tale, a breezy little yarn of small-town intrigue overshadowed by a host of deeper meanings woven into the roof of the narrative.”—Chicago Tribune
Tender As Hellfire (1999)
“Tender As Hellfire features some of the liveliest characters that one is apt to meet in a contemporary novel … Meno’s passionate new voice makes him a writer to watch.”—Publishers Weekly
“Meno’s voice—rough, repetitive, and intense as a dog’s growl—is evidence that he is a writer with promise.”—Booklist
“Dark and exuberant with a stunning lyrical quality … Tender As Hellfire is reckless storytelling, both in the audacity of its plot twists and in the nearly sentimental quality of the emotions that it plumbs.”
—Chicago Tribune
“We’re hooked.”—New City
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
acknowledgments
american nightmare
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
twenty one
twenty two
twenty three
twenty four
twenty five
twenty six
twenty seven
twenty eight
twenty nine
thirty
thirty one
thirty two
thirty three
thirty four
thirty five
I was a teenage teen
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
twenty one
twenty two
twenty three
the album that saved my life
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
halloween night
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books/Punk Planet Books
©2004 Joe Meno
Punk Planet Books is a division of Independents’ Day Media.
Photographs by Laurent Yen
Model: Meghan Galbraith
Book design by Pirate Signal International
ePub ISBN 13: 978-1-936-07029-9
ISBN: 1-888451-70-X
Library of Congress Control Number: 2004106233
All rights reserved
Akashic Books Punk Planet Books
PO Box 1456 4229 N. Honore
New York, NY 10009 Chicago, IL 60613
[email protected] [email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com www.punkplanetbooks.com
acknowledgments
You rock it: Koren #1 favorite wife of all time, Dan Sinker, Mark Zambo, Meghan Lee, Jimmy Vickery, Jake Silker, Chad Rasner, Meg Stielstra, Lott Hill, Todd Dills, Jim Munroe, Jon Resh, Mike Coleman, Joe Tower, Joe Denk, Meredith Stone, Jenny Norton, Sarah K., Nick Novosel, the cast and crew of “Haunted Trails,” Brian Peterson at the Fireside Bowl, Quimby’s Bookstore, The Alley Chicago, Charles Everitt, Jenny Bent, Johnny Temple, my family, folks I met through the Phantom Three, Our Missles Are:, Sleepwalk magazine, Go Cougars, Bail magazine, Punk Planet magazine, the all-powerful Columbia College Fiction Writing Department, the Chicago Tribune, and the always supportive New City.
You suck it: Judith Regan. Badly. And all you other bad publishing corporations. Be ready, the end is nigh.
american nightmare
october 1990
“Whoa, oh, oh oh, sweet child of mine”
—“Sweet Child o’ Mine”
Axl Rose, Guns n’ Roses
“Your penis is king”
—Graffiti in a high school boy’s bathroom
“The sun shines out of our behinds”
—“Hand in Glove”
Morrissey, The Smiths
one
The other problem I had was that I was falling in love with my best friend, Gretchen, who I thought the rest of the world considered fat. We were in her crappy car and singing, and at the end of the song “White Riot,” the one by the Clash, I realized by the way I was watching her mouth pucker and smile and her eyes blink and wink, we were way more than friends, at least to me. I looked over at Gretchen driving and she was starting to sing the next song, “Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?” by the Clash again, and I said, “I love driving around with you, Gretchen,” but because the radio was so loud all she could do was see my mouth move.
It was a Tuesday around four in the afternoon, the first semester of our junior year in high school, and neither one of us had anything to do, because Gretchen had just recently been fired from the Cinnabon at the mall for flipping off a female customer when she asked for more icing, and I wasn’t allowed to work because my mother was very overprotective of me and insisted that I only focus on studying. I yelled something to Gretchen again and she nodded at me and then turned her head back to drive and kept on singing and I guess I looked over at her, at her short blondish-pink hair—some of it hanging in her face, some tucked behind her ear, some dyed brighter pink than the rest—and I watched the way her mouth moved again and I noticed she didn’t ever wear lipstick and it was one of the reasons I think I liked her; and also I smiled at how she was holding her small white hands on the steering wheel very seriously, like she was a new driver, which she was not, because she was seventeen and had been driving way before she had gotten her license last year. I also looked at her breasts; I looked at them and they were big, very big, more than I knew what to do with, and I guess the truth of the matter was they were big because she was fat, and it didn’t matter to me then, not the way it would if I was like hanging out with Bobby B. or some other guy at the mall, and he’d be like, “Check out that porker,” and I’d be like, “Yeah,” and then I’d laugh. Gretchen was fat, I mean not like obese, but she was definitely big, not her face so much, but her middle and behind.
Worse than that, she was known for kicking other
girls’ asses on a regular basis. It was not very cool. There was the awful hair-pulling incident with Polly Winchensky. There was the enormous black eye she gave Lisa Hensel. There was the time Gretchen broke Amy Schaffer’s arm at a Halloween party—you know, when Amy Schaffer had rolled her eyes at Gretchen’s costume, when she came as JFK post-assassination, with the black suit and blood and bullet holes, and Amy Schaffer said, “You really do look like a man,” and Gretchen just turned and grabbed Amy Schaffer’s arm and twisted it so hard behind her back that Amy Schaffer’s school drama days were ended right there, just like that, so that poor Amy Schaffer had to go around for the next two years milking sympathy, like a fucking martyr wearing her aircast everywhere, long after it could have possibly been needed for anything recuperative.
Also, well, also Gretchen wasn’t the most feminine girl in the world, sincerely. She swore a lot and only listened to punk, like the Misfits and the Ramones and the Descendents, especially when we were in the car, because, although it had a decent stereo for a Ford Escort, there was a tape that had been stuck in the cassette player for about a year now and most of the time that was all it would play, and you had to jab the tape with a pen or nail file to get it to start, and the tape was the same handpicked mix Gretchen had thought was cool a year ago, which according to the label on the tape was what she had called White Protest Rock, version II.
Gretchen’s mix-tapes, her music choices, were like these songs that seemed to be all about our lives, but in small random ways that made sense on almost any occasion. Like “Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?” Maybe it meant I should tell Gretchen how I was feeling. Or maybe it meant I should just go home. To me, the tapes were what made me like her, then love her so much: the fact that in between the Misfits and the Specials, she would have a song from the Mamas and the Papas, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” or something like that. Those mix-tapes were the secret soundtrack to how I was feeling or what I thought about almost everything.
Also—and I don’t know if I should mention this or not—Gretchen always called other people, even our friends, “douche-bags” or “douche-holes” or “cunts” or “cunt-holes” or “cunt-teasers” or “cuntwads” or “cunt-heads” or even “cunt-asses,” which doesn’t even make sense when you think about it, things like that. The way she swore amazed me and again, it probably made me like her a lot more than any other girl I had ever met because she didn’t ever seem to mind hanging out with me.
OK, so the thing of it was, the Homecoming Dance was like in three weeks and I hadn’t asked anyone and I wanted to ask Gretchen, but I hadn’t for good reasons: one, I didn’t want her to know I liked-her-liked-her; two, I knew she liked Tony Degan, this white power dude; and also—and this is the worst thing so I hate to admit it—but well, I didn’t want the photographs. You know how they make you take your picture and everything? I didn’t want photographs of me at Homecoming with a fat girl so that in fifty years I’d have to be reminded of what a loser I was because, well, I hoped things in the future were going to change for me.
“Do you want to go get something to eat?” Gretchen asked. “I am fucking starving, because I don’t know if you noticed or not, but I’m a big fat cow.”
“Whatever,” I said, turning the radio down so we could talk. “Where do you want to go eat? Haunted Trails?”
Haunted Trails was on 79th Street, this monster-movie-themed miniature golf course and video arcade, really the only place we or any of the other stoners and punks hung out. “No, wait, forget it,” she said. “All those kids’ll be there and I look so gross. I’m supposed to be on this diet where I only eat white foods, it’s like racist or something. Seriously. I am disgusted with myself, you know? I practically am a boy. Look at me. I practically have chest hair. I could join the football team or something.”
“Shut up,” I said. “You just said that so I’d say how you look OK, so I’m not even saying it.”
“Oh, you figured me out, douche-bag. No, I mean it, look at me:I’m practically a boy; I practically have a dick.” And as she slowed the crappy blue Escort to a stop at the next light, she bunched the front of her jeans up so it looked like she had an erection. “Look, look, my god, I have an erection! I’ve got blue balls! Oh, they hurt! I need help!Give me some porn, hurry! Come on, let’s go rape some cheerleaders!Oh, they hurt!”
I laughed, looking away.
“Forget it, though, seriously. I am so disgusted with myself. Hey, did I tell you that I’m in love with Tony Degan again?”
“What?” I asked. “Why don’t you forget him? He’s like fucking twenty-six. And a white power asshole. And, I dunno, that should be enough.”
“I’m not really in love with him. I’d just like for him to totally devirginize me.”
“What?”
“You know, just have some meathead who doesn’t give a shit about you, just get it over with, you know, so you wouldn’t have to talk to him ever again? That way, it wouldn’t be like uncomfortable afterwards.”
“Yeah, I could see how being like raped by some white power dude wouldn’t be uncomfortable.”
“Exactly,” she said. “That’s why you’re like my best girlfriend.”
“Gretchen, you know I’m not a girl, right?”
“I know, but if I think of you as a guy, then I have to worry about what I eat in front of you.”
“But I don’t care how you look,” I said, and I knew I was lying.
two
i am in love with a white power thug . tony degan. tony degan, you’re all i can think of. i know you’re a burnout. i know you’re a racist jag-off. but i can’t stop thinking about you. the way you smile , like you’re already unsnapping my bra, i don’t know, you’re all i think about . you make me feel ok. you make me feel less lonely. i think about you and i know i’ll never be lonely. no one’s going to make me feel gross . no one’s ever going to call me fatty again. tony degan. tony degan. the next time . the next time i’m alone with you i’m going to let you do it. i’m gonna let you do anything you want to do.
three
At the video arcade later, Gretchen was crying. It was something I’d never seen before in my life. “What’s wrong?” I asked. I was in the middle of a high-scoring game of Phantom Racer and not really listening. I turned and saw her cheeks were pink and shiny with tears, and she was biting her bottom lip to keep from sobbing. She had on her black hoodie and in the light it looked like her bright pink hair was washing away to white-blond again. I hate to say it, but thinking about it now, standing there with her arms crossed and looking sad, looking down, with the flashing lights from Galaga and Bonn Scott from the great AC/DC wailing about “TNT” through the arcade speakers, all of it mixing in with the click, click of the air hockey machine and the blips and buzzes and outer space noises from the other video games, well, I dunno, she looked really gentle standing there. Real pretty.
“Tony Degan asked me to go for a ride with him,” she finally said.
“So?” I said, looking back at the blinking screen.
“So, I didn’t.”
“So?”
“So, I just saw some fucking skank making out with him.”
“So? Big deal.” I shrugged my shoulders and zoomed past a stalled-out race car, downshifting to regain speed, but two red-eyed pixilated demons lurched into my path. I looked over and Gretchen was gone. In a moment then, from the parking lot outside, I could hear someone let out a scream. I finished that level and watched as my score was totaled. Some dick with the name RAD1 had blown all of my old scores and it seemed pretty pointless to even try for first place, because RAD1 had to be some retarded video game genius who worked for the video game company, you know, kind of like The Who’s Tommy? I mean, who scores 1,500,200 points anyways? Retarded video game playing geniuses. I dunno. I heard the scream from the parking lot again and since my score wasn’t shit, I just turned and walked away.
Outside, it was very bright in the daylight and also very quiet. I had to cover my eyes
to let them adjust to the sun, which was just starting to go down. It was around five o’clock. Outside, the Haunted Trails Miniature Golf and Amusement Arcade was pretty much empty. There were all the usual weird horror-themed miniature golf obstacles—the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Hole 3, the green monster rising out of the middle of a blue-green swamp, a coffin with a crappy plastic mechanical hand that rose and fell sporadically, dancing skeletons that you had to putt past—but no one was really around. Some dad and his two little girls were arriving at Hole 8, which was a big wooden haunted castle, in which you had to hit the ball through the drawbridge. The dad was lining up his shot; he had a shiny black patch over his left eye. They all looked like they had been in some kind of accident. Both of the little girls had bandages on their faces and one had a broken arm. It made me wonder for a minute. Then one of the girls kicked a blue golf ball with the tip of her shoe into the hole and they all laughed. Everything is good when your dad bothers to be around, I thought to myself. Across from the miniature golf course, some overweight jocks were hitting balls in the “fast pitch” batting cages. One guy had on an American flag baseball hat and a T-shirt that said “One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor.” He knocked the hell out of an inside pitch and shouted, “He shoots, he scores!” and I decided I did not like that. Across from the batting cages, a Mexican guy was selling hairy-looking hot dogs at the Spooky Snack Shop. There were exactly two fat kids speeding along on the go-cart drag way behind that; they were twins in yellow paper birthday hats. They both had the same joyful expression on their round, tubby faces and I thought how nice it would be to be a kid again. But not fat. At the gates, there was the giant plastic Frankenstein statue rising up to the sky, brandishing his axe. His expression seemed to say, Yes, I am just as lonely up here. I waved to him and walked around back.
I lit up a cigarette and looked across the parking lot to where all the stoners hung out. I was trying smoking—what the hell, everyone else did it. I sucked in a mouthful and coughed like a war veteran, then flicked the cigarette behind me, doing my best strut across the parking lot. At the end of the lot there were two or three cool-looking cars: a rebuilt blue metallic-flake Nova, an Impala which was rusty but still sweet, and two decent-looking vans. The guys with the best mustaches and the best cars all hung out in the parking lot. They were kids who were still in high school but because of their fine mustaches and fine cars got some pussy and looked old enough to buy beer. Also, there were older guys like Tony Degan, who had to be like twenty-six but still hung out with high school kids, you know, to sell them dope and talk shit and to try and get some teenage trim. Tony did well, mostly because he was older and knew what to do to get a girl to believe whatever it was he was saying with lines like, “Hey, I really feel like I can open up with you,” while jamming his hand down the poor girl’s pants. Or so I had heard anyway.