by Adam Selzer
On the day my dad was taking me suit shopping, I went straight to the restaurant with Paige after school to wait for him to pick me up. They were already slammed inside, so I headed right for the Dumpsters, where I found myself talking to Chris, a balding server in his midthirties who looked like a washed-up professional wrestler, about Moby-Dick. The night before, I’d listened to the section about whale genitals, and I was dying to talk about it with someone.
“The whole last three or four CDs have just been the guy going on about whale anatomy and shit,” I said. “I didn’t think he’d ever get around to talking about whale dicks, but he finally did.”
Chris gave this a thoughtful nod as he puffed on his cigarette. “Bet those aren’t small.”
“Nope. Apparently the sailors used to call that part the ‘grandissimus.’ They’re roughly the size of a whole person.”
“So’s mine,” said Chris.
I almost asked him if he knew a girl named Mindy, but instead I just went on. “Some guy in the book actually takes the skin from one and goes around wearing it like papal robes or something.”
“Weird.”
“And then when the boat washes up on a desert island, all the natives see him dressed like that and think he’s a god. That’s what gave George Lucas the idea for the Ewoks and C-3PO.”
“Yeah?”
“Nah. I made that last part up.”
He flicked his cigarette lazily at the Dumpster. “Paige said you were kind of weird,” he told me. “What’s she like in bed?”
The most obvious response here was, “None of your fucking business, baldy,” but before I could say anything, a bunch of other servers showed up at the smoking area, and one of them, a middle-aged woman named Jane, announced that they were about to have a contest to see who could make their mouth look the most like a butt hole. One by one, they pursed their lips together so that they looked like anuses.
The conversations out by the Dumpster were often way, way nastier than anything we ever got up to in the Cave. They had the same pissing contests over which of them was the most fucked up, but there was a bit less pride in their voices. They were older than us, and dealing with stuff like custody issues, getting thrown out of apartments, and shit like that. I think that pretty much every restaurant is like this; all the people your parents don’t want you hanging out with in high school seem to grow up to work in food service.
But the smoking area behind Casa Bravo wasn’t a permanent den of sin, like the back of the Ice Cave. It was just a little one that existed for five minutes at a time when enough people could sneak away from their tables long enough to smoke, then ceased to exist when the cigarettes were tossed out. Most of the night the space by the Dumpster was just a space by the Dumpster.
The anus-mouthed servers finished smoking and went back inside just as Paige slipped out.
“Hey, baby,” she said. “Sorry it took me so long. My tables are all pains in the ass.”
“No problem,” I said. I kissed her, then asked if she realized that her coworkers were probably actually sicker than mine.
“Yeah,” she said. “But I don’t smoke, so I’m hardly ever out here when they really get going. I just do my work and go home. At least they work their butts off before they come back here.”
She gave me a quick kiss and a squeeze on the ass, then ran inside to get back to her tables. Every minute of downtime was something she had to fight for in her job. The servers at Casa Bravo may have been fucked up, but you couldn’t call them slackers. Their jobs were way, way harder than mine.
A minute later my dad texted me to say he was out front in the Casa Bravo parking lot. He was so enthusiastic about seeing me in a suit that he’d offered to buy me one, and I couldn’t really afford to say no.
“So, run this by me again,” he said as we drove towards downtown. “It’s a debutante ball?”
“Technically I guess it’s a scholarship cotillion,” I said.
“That’s even worse!” said Dad. “Do you have to know what kind of fork to use on your grapefruit?”
“I just have to escort Paige down a walkway or something, then mingle and dance around.”
“I didn’t realize Paige’s family was in that kind of circle,” he said. “I didn’t know we had high society in Iowa.”
“That’s because you and I spend our time at thrift stores, flea markets, and B-list ice cream parlors,” I said. “You don’t run into the country club set at those.”
“Hey, your mother and I go to fancy places sometimes,” he said. “We went to the West Egg Steakhouse a while ago.”
“When?” I asked.
He thought for a second, then said, “About two years ago, I guess. But in a couple of years when you’re out of the house, we’ll probably go more.”
“What’s stopping you now?” I asked. “I’m not home that much as it is, and it’s not like you need a babysitter for me.”
He didn’t have an answer for that, but he nodded for a bit rather than just admitting that he and Mom had turned old and lame.
Mom and Dad were barely into their forties. They were still young, really. At an age when a lot of people these days are just starting to think about settling down and having kids, they were about to enter the kid-free phase of life. They were young enough that they could still probably go to rock concerts and night clubs and stuff and not look completely stupid.
But would they? Nope. Maybe they planned on that when they got married young and had me in their early twenties, but instead they’d probably just bought themselves ten or twenty extra years of playing shuffleboard and watching game shows.
Suckers.
I directed Dad through downtown Des Moines to McIntyre’s, the place where Brianna worked. I sort of wanted to talk to her and make sure she wasn’t going to organize a protest against us or something.
Inside the store, she was sitting at a counter, wearing a plain black blouse and with her hair in a bun. Seeing her dressed like that, instead of like she was going to a protest rally, made me think about how most of the hippies from the 1960s ended up becoming yuppies in the eighties. But I suppose you shouldn’t look too hard for symbolism in people’s work uniforms.
Before she noticed us, I was whisked me over to some slick-looking asshole with a tape measure in his hand. My dad put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I have a young man here who needs a suit for a debutante ball.”
“You’ve come to the right place,” said the salesman. “The Harverster Club one?”
“That’s the one.”
He flashed me a no-cavities smile, and I looked around the store and felt sick to my stomach. I wasn’t a suit kind of guy. I was so far out of my element in a place like this that I almost wanted to pee on the wall just to make the place seem more agreeably squalid. The suits on the rack seemed like they were closing in around me, ready to swallow me up and spit a yuppie version of me back out.
But I shook the salesman’s hand. “Do you have anything made from the skin of a whale’s grandissimus?” I asked.
He didn’t quit smiling, but I could tell he thought this was going to be a long afternoon.
I waved at Brianna while Dad and the salesman talked about what sort of suits were hot this year (plain dark colors and shades of gray, of course), and she sort of smirked when she saw me. I pretended I was looking at some ties and walked over to her.
“Hey,” I said.
“Getting ready for the ball?” she asked.
“What else?”
She smirked again. “You know your coworker is insane, right?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “He’s been claiming to be Satan since he was at least nine.”
“Did he ever really even live in Japan?”
“Not that I know of.”
She just smiled and shook her head a bit. “Cute,” she said. “I guess he thought he was seducing me or something, right?”
“He probably just wanted to get you to hang out and join in the game they were
playing in the back room,” I said. “But I sort of feel like I should apologize on his behalf.”
She shook her head. “Let me guess,” she said. “He spent the next hour talking about what a bitch I was for leaving.”
“No,” I said. “He can take no for an answer pretty well.”
She tilted her head to the side and played with a pen that was on the counter. “Guess I’ll give him that, at least,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I hear that if a guy takes no for an answer and doesn’t text you pictures of his scrotum, he’s probably ahead of the curve.”
“Unfortunately, that’s about right. And that carbonated milk was really fucking good.”
I leaned in closer and motioned my head toward the salesman. “This guy strikes me as a scrotum texter.”
She nodded and leaned in even closer to me to whisper in my ear. “That’s Avery. He would probably send me pictures of his asshole as a morning pick-me-up if he didn’t know I’d sue him.”
“He could just send a shot of his face,” I said. “Same difference.”
She smirked, and I walked back over to the suit racks, where dad and Avery the salesman started having me try on suits, one after the other.
While we went through suit after suit, each of which looked alike to me, I developed a theory that we think of shopping as a women’s activity because it’s got to be more fun to shop for women’s clothes than men’s. Women get to pick out a dress style, the color, the accessories, all kinds of stuff. There are a million kinds of dresses in the world. Suits for men are all pretty much the same. They don’t even have plaid ones anymore. I looked. I liked the idea of showing up for the ball dressed up like a used-car salesman from an old movie and telling all the country club people that I owned Crazy Leon’s Used Car and Antique Hair Follicle Emporium, just to see how they reacted. Dad probably would have gotten a kick out of that, but he was determined not to walk out of there without getting me into a decent, “for realsies” suit.
I shrugged my way through the whole ordeal, and after a while my dad started getting frustrated.
“Come on, Leon!” he said. “Clothes make the man!”
Avery the Asshole went into what I assume was his standard pitch for no-good teenage slobs.
“Women can’t resist a man in a suit,” he said. “You put on a well-cut suit, and that shows women you’re a man of power, class, style, sophistication. A man of the world.”
“I make just over minimum wage,” I said. “I haven’t been out of Iowa in a couple of years, I haven’t got any power, and I’m about as sophisticated as your average baboon.”
“That’s why you need a suit,” said Avery. “You have to fake it ’til you make it.”
I was just about to make some sarcastic remark about what it was that I was supposed to make when he leaned over and whispered, “And by ‘make it,’ I mean make it with your girl.”
Then he patted me on the shoulder.
Over at the counter Brianna smirked again and rolled her eyes, like she knew exactly what he’d just whispered in my ear.
“What do you think of Brianna?” he whispered.
“She’s nice,” I said.
“She’s real nice,” he whispered. “And I happen to know she likes men in suits.”
I somehow doubted this, seeing as how she wore protest clothes outside of work. I also doubted that she’d like having her manager, or whoever Avery was, hold her up as a possible prize that you could win if you bought just the right suit.
Avery was wearing a gray suit, so I decided then and there not to get anything gray.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll take a black one.”
“The popular color this year is really more of a charcoal gray or a midnight blue,” said Dad. “Weren’t you paying attention?”
“It’s the women,” Avery said with a wink. “They find almost-black less threatening and more comforting than plain black.”
“Hey, Brianna,” I called out, “do you find men in black threatening?”
“Yes,” she said. “Men in gray suits are comforting and approachable. Men in black look like they’re coming to take me away.”
“See?” asked the salesman. “No one wears all black anymore, unless they’re going to a funeral. And you’ll scare Brianna.”
“Brianna could kick my ass,” I said, raising my voice enough that she could hear from across the store. “Couldn’t you, Brianna?”
“The customer is always right,” she called back.
“See?” I asked. “If I’m going to wear a suit, I want to look evil in it.”
Dad and the salesman looked at each other.
“Kids,” said Dad.
This from a man who once accidentally burned off most of his hair testing a new invention and dyed what was left of it green.
I ended up getting a black suit with a red vest, even though I had to admit that I didn’t really pull the look off. Stan would have looked good and evil in it, but I sort of looked like a raggedy butler. That still felt better to me than looking like the asshole who sold it to me, though.
Back in the car, Dad told me that he thought Brianna was flirting with me.
“I doubt that,” I said.
“I think she was,” he said. “Is that why you wanted to come here? To see her?”
I shrugged. “She and Stan had a bit of a fight yesterday, and I thought I should apologize for him.”
“She seemed nice,” he said. “Are you and Paige okay?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“Your mom and I thought you and Paige were an unusual match,” he went on. “But if it works for you, it works for you.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Relationships are all about taking two puzzle pieces that aren’t even from the same puzzle and making them fit.”
I suppose I hoped Dad would talk about what a wise young man I’d become when I threw a line like that out, but he just nodded a little.
Paige and I were back out hunting for Slushees the next day. Now that we’d established exactly how we’d celebrate getting the white grape one, she was much more into the whole quest than she had been before. In the days since the five-yen piece appeared on the wall, we’d searched for the Great White Grape Slushee everywhere: among the subdivisions of Ankeny, the split-level houses of Clive, the brick bungalows of Beaverdale, the stately mansions of Sherman Hill, and the neatly ordered streets of downtown Des Moines.
By this time we’d found that we could usually predict what they’d have in each gas station. Casey’s General Store usually had the same three flavors at every location, Kum and Go usually had the same four, and Quick Trip had the same six.
But now and then there’d be a wild card, and on that day we found two new flavors: Strawberry Citrus Freeze, and something called Purple Vanilla, which was tasty as hell. “Purple” is a reliably good flavor to start with, and adding vanilla made it practically a gourmet dish, as gas station grub goes. Rather than sharing one, like we usually did, we each got our own. Paige hadn’t had a whole one in a long time; she usually just had a sip of mine and got a bottle of juice, if anything. But one makes exceptions for purple vanilla.
When we got to the car, I called Stan.
“We found purple vanilla,” I said. “Is that it?”
“Why would purple vanilla be the same thing as white grape?” he asked.
“Well, purple usually means grape, and vanilla-flavored stuff is usually white, right?”
“You’ve got a fine understanding of junk food semiotics, Harris,” Stan said. “But you still haven’t found the Great White Grape.”
Whether it was the right one or not, purple vanilla was a great discovery. We were both on sugar rushes by the time we adjourned to the nook, where we did a couple of things that we’d never done before. We began with purple mouths, and by the time we finished, other parts of us were purple too. Parts that I’m pretty sure had never been purple on either of us before. We both probably looked lik
e we had leprosy or something, but making each other look like lepers turned out to be both fun and romantic. So much fun that for the first time I felt like I was actually ready to go further. Like finding the white grape Slushee was nothing to be afraid of anymore.
And it was still out there, hiding in some far-flung convenience store, as mysterious as love itself.
19. THAR SHE BLOWS
Just before spring break, I finished the layout for the yearbook, and Mr. Perkins officially absolved me of having to serve any further detention hours. As long as I kept coasting through my classes and didn’t fail any of them, I was going to graduate right on time.
There was a party at Stan’s place that night, and I felt like I’d earned a bit of celebrating. Paige was reluctant to go, though, and peppered me with questions as we drove towards his house on Sixtieth Street.
“Is Molly going to be there?”
“Who?”
“Molly,” she said. “You know. The drug. Not the person.”
I almost snorted. “There’ll be some pot, but you’d probably get laughed at if you asked for Molly.”
“I wouldn’t ask, I’m just wondering what to expect.”
“Just imagine a party that someone might have thrown after a Black Sabbath concert in 1974, if you can.”
“Will there be anything to drink besides beer?”
“What do you usually have at football parties?”
“Wine coolers. Stuff like that.”
Now I imagined Stan with a blender and slices of real fruit, mixing up frozen pink drinks, and I laughed out loud. We weren’t fancy down there. It was a working-class place with wood-paneled walls and an earthy aroma.
“They probably won’t have those.”
She moved her hand to my thigh. “Are you sure you don’t want to go on a Slushee hunt instead?”
I thought this over. I’d been looking forward to the party, but it wasn’t really going to get going for a while, and we’d been having so much fun on Slushee hunts that it was hard to say no. Better to at least start out doing something I knew we’d both like instead of something I had to talk Paige into.