by Joe Meno
“I’m not going to pee in front of you.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“Fuck you, why not,” I said.
“Then do it behind one of these cars.”
“Fine.”
I hopped out of the car, taking one of the big plastic bags with me. I slumped down behind someone’s red convertible and unzipped my pants, took out my dong, and started peeing into the bag. It was hot and it stunk and I scrunched my nose as I smelled it, laughing. Gretchen was in the car, watching it all in the rearview mirror. I finished peeing, filling the bag up halfway, then zipped it up quick. I carried the bag of piss, all hot and steamy inside, back to the car and started sitting down again.
“Dude, you’re not getting in this car with that,” she said, slamming down the lock with her hand. I stood there, holding the bag of piss, shaking my head.
“Dude,” I said. “I don’t even want to be doing this shit. You made me do it, now open the door.”
“Look, look, football practice is ending,” she said, pointing across the field. The entire football team was in a large huddle, all of them with their helmets off, their short hair mussed, their handsome faces glistening with sweat.
“Do you know who the guy is?” I asked.
“I know him,” she said.
“So how are we going to do this?”
“We’ll pull up to him and you open the bag and toss it at him.”
“I have to toss it?” I asked.
“I have to drive,” she said.
“Fine, fuck you, whatever, open the door,” I said.
Gretchen popped up the lock of the car door and I sat down, holding the bag away from my body.
“That smells,” she said.
“Yeah, it does.”
“It’s bright yellow!” she shouted, holding her nose and laughing. “Why is it so yellow?”
“I dunno. I take vitamins in the morning, maybe that’s it.”
“Jesus, put it in the backseat or something.”
I nodded and put the bag down by my feet.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now, we wait,” she said, and backed the Escort toward the front of the parking lot, where a long, narrow cement path led from the field-house to where the students parked their cars. We waited, listening to the same songs which had been playing over and over again since her last mix-tape got stuck in the tape player, the monotony of it comforting, familiar, something you could always count on. After twenty minutes or so, a brown metal door opened and five or six football types clambered out, laughing, snorting, high-fiving each other, nodding.
“OK, tell me when,” I said.
“He’s blond,” she said, “and he’s got this shit-eating grin.”
“How do you know him?”
“He fucked Kim, when she was a cheerleader,” Gretchen whispered, and at once I knew this had more to do with that than with poor old Stacy Bensen. I looked back to where the football players were marching out—whistling, he-hawing—and then Gretchen leaned over and pointed, grabbing my shoulder hard. “That’s him. That’s fucking him, all right.”
I swallowed hard and grabbed the bag of piss at my feet.
This guy, Mark Dayton, didn’t look like such a bad guy, except that he was tall, blond, and good-looking—the kind of guy girls wet their fucking pants over all the time. His face was wet and shiny, and he had a soft white towel around his shoulders, still drying his hair as he talked over important jock stuff with some other football-type, the two of them nodding seriously, maybe mumbling, “32-29-36, hike?” then, “Fumble, pass, first down?”
I unlocked the car door, grabbed the door handle with my left hand, held the pee bag with my right, and waited, waited, waited until Mark Dayton was like three feet from the Escort. Then I flung open the car door, shouted, “Hey, fucker!” and whipped the bag of pee at Mark Dayton’s chest. It flew end over end at him, smacking him directly on his neck, then fell at his feet, still closed, not even broken—just this hot, clear bag of pee lying there unopened at his feet. I felt the hot stupidity of the situation smack me in the head, suddenly remembering, I forgot to open it. I forgot to open the fucking thing.
“What the fuck?” the thick-necked dude beside Mark Dayton asked, throwing down his gym bag and charging toward the car, but Gretchen had already hit the gas. I was slow closing the door and it nicked the back end of someone’s Blazer before we pulled away, spinning out of the parking lot like a scene from a car-chase-type movie.
“Sorry,” I said after a while. “I guess I forgot to open the bag.”
“You’re just an idiot,” was all she said back.
thirty-four
OK, I had some beers with Mr. D. Like I said, I went by to see Gretchen and there was like only five days left before Homecoming, and I decided I would finally, finally, finally ask her. Mr. D. answered the door and said, “Hey, Brian, how you doing, champ?” and he had a can of the Beast—Milwaukee’s Best, my dad’s favorite beer—in his hand and I think he might have been drinking for a while because he was still wearing his, “Kiss the Cook” apron and smiling a little too much and winking at me, I guess. I asked, “Is, um, Gretchen home?” shrugging my shoulders, staring down at my feet.
“Brian, all the girls are gone for the night. Jess is at work and Gretch is out with Kim,” which I knew was straight-up bullshit because Kim was working at Orange Julius, which must have meant Gretchen was either out hanging alone at Haunted Trails waiting to choke down Tony Degan’s member, or doing whatever she had decided to with him, pinned underneath his gorilla-type cro-mag hands already.
“Oh, that’s cool,” I said. “I’ll call her later.”
“You can hang out here, if you want to wait ’til she gets back.”
“Yeah, I dunno, Mr. D. I might just head home.”
“Oh, come on, pal, why don’t you come on in and we’ll have a beer. How’s that sound, champ?”
OK, now, nowhere, in the short history of my life, had any adult ever asked me to have a fucking beer with them. It was so random and weird that I didn’t know what else to say but, well, yes.
I nodded and followed him inside and we went to the kitchen and he fished another Beast out of the fridge and handed it to me, just like that, as if it was something we just did, the two of us, always drinking together.
“Wait a minute—you want it in a glass?” he asked.
“No, the can’s cool,” I said, feeling more weird and uncomfortable than ever. I followed him over to the kitchen table and we sat down, him across from me, as he started patting down this thinning hair and smiling strangely at me.
“So it’s just us. Just the men,” he sighed. “Just the men. The bachelors,” he said.
“Yep,” I said.
“Hey, how long have you known Gretchen?” he asked, kind of surprised by his own question.
“Since junior high,” I said.
“Sure, sure, you were on the math team together, weren’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Go math team!” he hooted. “Those were the days, huh?”
“I guess.”
“You guys were unstoppable, huh? All out victory!”
“Yep,” I said.
“Whatever happened to that Chinese kid on the team?”
“Greg? He was Filipino,” I said.
“That kid. He was a great kid. Whatever happened to him?”
“Oh, you know, he’s going to high school,” I said, taking a swig of the beer.
“Yeah, high school,” Mr. D. said. “Hey, you remember that time you guys made it to the semifinals and we all drove down to Springfield?”
“Yep.”
“And Mrs. D. made all you guys T-shirts, the ones that said, ‘Math Team Semifinal Champs,’ but you didn’t win, but you all wore the T-shirts anyway?”
“Yeah, that was kinda funny.”
“Yep,” Mr. D. said, “that was kind of funny. Remember, we stopped at that truck stop and that little girl—who was the little
girl?”
“Andrea?”
“Andrea wouldn’t get back in the car because she felt so bad for losing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She was a weird kid.”
“Well, it was her parents,” Mr. D. said. “They had very high expectations for her, you know? All we ever wanted was for you guys to do your best, right?”
“Right.”
“That poor girl, well, she was, what, in seventh grade?” Mr. D. asked.
“Seventh, yep,” I said.
“And her parents must have laid a lot of pressure on her to make her feel like that.”
“Yep,” I said.
“Well,” he smiled, nodding, “Mrs. D. calmed her down and, even though Andrea was in seventh grade, she got her to sit in her lap, and we went home and all you kids were so nice about it. You never told anyone about that, did you, Brian?”
I had never told anyone about that day. I didn’t know why, only I didn’t. “Nope,” I said. “I never told.”
“I didn’t know that day was going to be one of my best memories,” he said, still smiling and nodding. “You never know. That’s the trick, Brian. You never know which times are going to be important until later.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling more weird each fucking minute. “I guess.”
“That’s why you shouldn’t worry. You should just be happy when you can.”
“That sounds good, Mr. D.,” I said. “Listen, I think I’m gonna head home. I’ll call Gretchen later.”
“Brian?” Mr. D. whispered, raising his head.
“Yeah?”
“You’re a good kid. In case nobody ever tells you that,” he said, and I almost started fucking crying right then.
thirty-five
The truth, then: I was very in love with Gretchen and wanted to ask her to Homecoming, but I was a pussy and embarrassed about being in love with her because she was fat, and also because, well, I knew she didn’t even like me. Not only that, but she was also bigger than me, physically, and also because deep down in the only honest part of my heart, I knew two things: one, she was still very hung-up on Tony Degan; and two, she could, without any trouble, truly kick my ass in like five seconds flat.
So the truth of the matter was this: Homecoming was like two days away and I thought if I took Gretchen maybe I would regret it. I had had a bad enough high school experience as it was and, well, you know, did not exactly fit in and all, and I was afraid that Gretchen might do something at the dance, you know, like break Amy Schaffer’s arm. I’m not joking—I mean, she had done that kind of shit already, for real.
OK, as we were driving around in the Escort a few days later, I told Gretchen about not having anyone to ask to Homecoming. “I probably won’t even go now,” I said, hoping she’d say something back, like No, no, ask me, but instead she said:
“Homecoming is like the most chauvinistic night of all time. It’s like, ‘Look, I bought you a corsage and now you should go down on me.’”
I nodded, though that wasn’t exactly what I had been thinking. It was quiet for a couple of minutes, us just driving, and then Gretchen sighed and looked over at me. “I got to tell you something,” she said.
“What?” I asked. She turned down the Clash or whatever it was on the radio and immediately I could see she was starting to cry, and then she tried to smile and said, “I let Tony Degan dry-hump me the other night.”
“What?”
“I let Tony Degan dry-hump me. Two days ago. In the backseat,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “Right in front of his house.”
“Jesus, Gretchen, he’s like thirty,” I said.
“He’s twenty-six,” she said, and I could tell she wasn’t sad as much as she was angry. “The thing was, it wasn’t even bad,” she whispered. “Not that I’d know, considering he was the first guy to ever dry-hump me.”
I nodded, because what could I say? Here I felt terrible for her and mad as hell myself because, well, I mean, here I was walking around with an erection every ten minutes and all she had to do was ask.
“Let’s get something to eat,” she said. “I’ll buy.”
And so we headed over toward Haunted Trails. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot, I could see all the punks and stoners hanging out by their cars, some good-looking ones, some pieces of shit, Ford Escorts and El Caminos and a few station wagons that looked all the same except they had different punk stickers like Operation Ivy or The Specials on them.
I got out of the car to go get three hot dogs from the snack shop, and as I was walking back with the food I heard Gretchen shout, “Douche-bag!” and when I looked over, she was already running—and for a big girl, she could move pretty fast—and there, there was Tony Degan with his shaggy blond hair and sleeveless T-shirt which said, I’m with Stupid and he had this girl we knew, Erica Lane, this skank, straddled around his middle as they crawled out of the back of Bobby B.’s purple wizard van, laughing and kissing and pinching each other very happily, and then, well, then Gretchen came flying out of nowhere and before anyone could stop it, she was pummeling Erica Lane’s head against the hood of the van, and Tony was trying to break it up but laughing at the same time, and I thought about going up and taking a swing at Tony, but I knew I never would, and so I helped pull Gretchen off and she shoved me and I spilled the hot dogs on my shirt.
Gretchen walked back to the Escort and started it up and I said, “Why do you got to act like a fucking dude all the time?” and she looked at me and said, “Fuck you, you fucking sissy,” and she started crying, and I felt like crying too, and then she threw the car into gear and took off.
I had to take three buses to get home that day and I had mustard all over my shirt.
I was a teenage teen
march 1991
“Finished with my woman
’cause she couldn’t love me with my mind”
—“Paranoid”
Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath
“For whom the bell tolls,
Time marches on”
—“For Whom the Bell Tolls”
James Hetfield, borrowing from John Donne, maybe?
Metallica
one
In our history class, we had to do a twenty-minute oral report on An Event That Changed America so we picked the Boston Strangler—it was Mike’s idea, mostly, as my history partner. Mike was a stoner or a head or a burnout—as my super-anorexic sister called him—and, like me, he was very into metal and slasher movies. He also smoked a lot of grass. Mike had this hair, this really long reddish hair, which he tucked into his dress-shirt collar in the back and tied up with a rubber band at the end. There were a couple dudes like him who had tried to grow their hair long, but sooner or later they got busted and had to cut it all off. That’s how it was in Catholic high school. You could even argue that if you looked at paintings of Jesus he had long hair, but they weren’t gonna hear it. It was all dress shirt, dress pants, dress shoes, ties, proper grooming. Proper grooming meant being clean-shaven, no mustaches or beards, and short hair. But somehow, like a fucking miracle, Mike had been able to escape Bro. Cardy, the drill-instructor-like dean of discipline, long enough that if he got caught now, all would be fucking lost. Bro. Cardy would either hit him up with so many detentions or cut his hair off in his office, right there, right then.
So when Ms. Aiken, our new super-fine history teacher who replaced Bro. Flanagan when he needed throat surgery, wrote the assignment on the blackboard, Final Project: An Event That Changed America, Mike and I looked at each other and nodded. He pulled out a piece of notebook paper, drew a quick picture of a muscular man strangling some other comic book–figure person with a huge rope—it was bigger than the both of them—and over their heads, nodding and winking, he scratched out a five-pointed pentagram. He showed it to me and I nodded at it for some reason. Why? Because he was like my friend and I thought his drawings were pretty amazing. I mean, Mike was the only dude I hung out with at the time.
Oh yeah, by then, I
had tried to forget all about Gretchen. If she called for me, I wouldn’t talk to her for long and if she asked to go hang out, I told her I was busy. I had been hanging out pretty much every day with Mike. After school, we would just sit around his basement and listen to a lot of old metal records, like early Sabbath with Ozzy, Alice Cooper, KISS. Also, like I said, he was very into serial killers. He had pictures and books and movies all about Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy. We would talk about serial killers and watch slasher movies and sometimes he’d try to teach me how to play Dungeons and Dragons, which I still didn’t understand. Mike also knew a lot of girls, all kinds of them. Girls seemed to really like him for some reason—mostly because he got them high, I think, but also because he had this easy-going way with them, like they just didn’t make him nervous; like he didn’t care if they liked him or not, which made them like him even more. So he would have all kinds of girls down in his basement and then he’d invite me over and we would put on some stoner records, like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and then they would smoke dope—I didn’t really smoke dope, I would just try to get high secondhand—and then the girls would get all giggly and sometimes, sometimes, if I was lucky, I would end up making out with one of them. Mike was like the best friend I had ever had for inviting me over like that, though later he said it all just was part of his plan. He said girls were more comfortable coming over together than alone and that he always needed a second man, which I was more than happy to be, like I said.
The whole hanging out thing and finally meeting girls led me to make a very important decision. As an early birthday present, I told my folks I wanted contacts instead of my plastic-rimmed glasses. I appealed to my dad, simply saying, “You know, for girls,” and he took me to the eye doctor himself. Getting contacts had practically changed me. That and not hanging out with Gretchen anymore. I didn’t feel like such a total loser all the time, and because of Mike, I could at least talk to the girls I liked.
“All right, guys, Dave Dupree and Alex? What historical event are you thinking of?” Ms. Aiken asked, hot like always, her blond hair in a bob, her short white skirt, and her see-through blouse perfectly cupping her severe rack.