“Isn’t it nearly bedtime?” I quipped. “For me, I mean,” I added lamely, not wanting them to think I was telling them off.
Silence followed me inside.
Under the glaring neon, in front of the humming fridge, I looked at the rows of cans. A couple more would be enough for me. I could feel the lure of an uncomfortable night’s sleep on the couch calling. But then my thoughts returned to the boys outside. What if I did roll up with a six-pack, join them on the curb, offer them the wisdom of my forty-six years in exchange for the wisdom of their sixteen? What if I bonded with them? What if we got a bottle or two and all headed back to my place, and they called some more friends over, and we danced into the night to the greatest tunes of the eighties, and the party went down in local legend? What if I did something spontaneous?
The door to the store whooshed closed behind me and I walked to the corner, the weight of the extra cans like a trophy in a proud hunter’s hands. I just about caught sight of the last of the boys, sloping off around the corner a few blocks away.
“Hey,” I said softly. “It’s Friday night.”
As I walked back home, humming along to John Fogerty’s “The Old Man Down the Road,” something the kid had said echoed in my mind. He’d called me an “old-timer”! I was not an old-timer. I was forty-six, just like Christopher Lloyd had been when they shot Back to the Future—probably the best movie ever made.
Granted, he did play “Doc” Brown, the crazy-haired . . . old-timer.
Chapter 6
Photograph
BACK IN MY apartment, the streetlight was throwing a yellow glow on the Bryan Adams T-shirt I’d bought at my first rock show in Helsinki. I’d framed it and hung it on the wall when I moved in.
Well, the shirt was coming down. It came down from the wall, it came out of the frame, and I slipped into it. I say slipped, but perhaps struggled would be more to the point. It had obviously shrunk while up in the frame. Oh well. I shoved the letters into my back pocket and headed down to the Garage of Good Intentions, along with my six-pack.
I had been so excited when I moved into my apartment and discovered that not only did it have a parking lot, but I also got my own personal garage. I had so many great plans for that space.
It was at the other end of our white-brick building, which meant I had to walk out and along the full length of the apartments, running the risk of an encounter with Mrs. Hellgren. She was in her eighties, and the unofficial queen of the building (official, if you asked her). She made it her business to know who everybody was, as well as everything they did and everything they didn’t do. “I’ve lived here since the 1960s,” she would remind me every time I broke one of her unwritten rules.
I walked next to the wall, where she couldn’t see me. I knew she’d probably hear my garage door opening, but by then it would be too late.
I pulled the handle, opened the dark, wood-panelled door about a third of the way, and snuck underneath it like Indiana Jones. I reached back for my imaginary hat and quickly closed the door.
Safe.
In one of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, he writes about a study in which strangers got fifteen minutes to examine a person’s apartment before they filled out a questionnaire about that person. When they compared the strangers’ answers to those provided by the person’s close friends, they learned that the strangers were more accurate at predicting the person’s emotional stability and their openness to new experiences.
A stranger spending fifteen minutes in my garage would have had his work cut out for him. He would have seen the weights stacked neatly by the bench and deduced that I was a keep-fit kind of guy. He would have seen the electric guitar and the small Marshall amp and concluded that I was perhaps an amateur musician. He wouldn’t have known that I’d once binged on the Rocky movies and thought I could easily bulk up, or that I’d wasted a few hundred euros on the assumption that I could easily learn how to play like Prince in Purple Rain.
And so on.
I cracked a beer.
Over the years, things add up. There were boxes of Webscoe stationary, and smaller boxes of my Webscoe CEO business cards, all pushed away, out of sight, under a bookshelf in the back.
Not everything in the garage was there to enshrine another failed attempt at self-improvement. The stack of cardboard boxes along the walls was testament to a different kind of laziness; there had been one or two moves when I’d just carted the boxes from one storage place to another without even bothering to open them. I wasn’t even completely certain what some of them contained.
That was about to change. In just a few hours, I had lost my only client, had a stupid argument with my sister, and received a strange letter from the past. I was angry and sad. If for some reason I’d tried to explain this all to Tina, she likely would have talked about how the universe would even things out. But I resented the universe. I didn’t need the cosmos; I was going to create order in chaos myself.
I was going to clean up the garage.
I lifted the bike up to a hook in the ceiling, put the guitar in its case, and made a slightly neater pyramid of the weights. Pleased with the good start, I picked up one of the dumbbells and did a few curls. I glanced at myself in a dusty mirror on the wall and quickly put the dumbbell back in its place. The Bryan Adams T-shirt wasn’t a flattering look.
I swept the area in the middle and moved on toward the back, where the pile of old boxes lived. Moving half a dozen of them revealed a wooden bookshelf, and on it, a black JVC CD/cassette player, which I remembered buying in my late teens for what now seemed an obscene amount. It had a five-band graphic equalizer and Dynamic Bass Boost. I wiped off the dust, plugged it in, and pressed Play on the cassette deck. The guitars on Rainbow’s “I Surrender” startled me, and when I took a step back, I tripped on one of the boxes and ended up sitting in it.
When I finally got up, I picked up the plastic case next to the player. I couldn’t remember exactly who the intended recipient of this particular mix-tape was, though I did detect a certain theme: “I Surrender,” “Move Closer,” “Every Breath You Take.”
Yes, it was the theme shared with every other mix-tape I or anybody else in the world has ever made—love. And the fact that it was gathering dust in my garage, rather than in a certain someone’s tape collection, was a good indicator of my success in that department.
On the same shelf, next to the cassette player, was a pile of my old vinyl records—once my most prized possessions. I didn’t have a turntable in the garage, but that didn’t stop me from spending a while looking at the artwork, the track listings, the sleeve notes. I remember the frustration of the journey home from the record store, finally having the new Queen compilation but not being able to listen to it yet; the tingle of anticipation.
Fifteen minutes later, I cracked another beer and got to the last three boxes. They were among the oldest in the garage; I hadn’t seen them in years. Humming along to my excellent mix-tape—“Who Can It Be Now?” by Men at Work—I looked inside the first one. It was full of VHS tapes, some home-recorded, many of them rentals I had “borrowed” from Video 2000.
In the same box, as padding, were three of the promo T-shirts we had to wear at work. They each had a movie slogan on the back. One of them announced that the heat was on, another asked, Who ya gonna call? and the third, cleverly, had Wax on on the front and Wax off on the back.
Under all of that was an old Rubik’s Cube, and next to it the screwdriver I’d used to take it apart so I could “solve” it. There were some old coins, novelty mugs, video game cassettes, pencils, pens, and a copy of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, my favourite book growing up.
Seeing all that old stuff took me back to my little room in Kumpunotko, crouched over my Sinclair ZX Spectrum+. It was nothing, ridiculously feeble, an eight-bit computer with forty-eight kilobytes of memory—about enough to hold a low-res thumbnail JPEG—just a keyboard connected to a little TV set on my desk, but it opened the door to a new world.<
br />
The world of The Hobbit, for example, a game I loved. Just the thought of playing eighties games again made my fingers twitch, literally. I was sure there was a Donkey Kong game somewhere in the boxes, so I dug deeper, but all I found was more junk: old magazines and comics, and a few newspapers I’d saved for no apparent reason. “Kasparov and Karpov End 11th Game in Draw” read one headline; “Soviet Offers Trade: A-Site Inspection for End to Blasts” proclaimed another; a third announced, “Star Wars ‘Ballet’ Scheduled.”
Whatever was in the third box would have to wait, because when I picked up Verne’s book, something flew out. It was a photo I hadn’t seen in decades.
There were two people in that photo, a young man and a young woman.
He has his arm around her as they both look straight into the camera with big smiles on their faces. They’re in a school gym, but he’s wearing a tuxedo with a turquoise cummerbund. On his hands, white gloves. Above his lip, a shadow of a moustache. She’s wearing an electric-blue Victorian gown. The satin dress has short, puffy sleeves, so she’s wearing long gloves, the same colour as her dress. The front of the gloves and the square collar of the dress are decorated with black lace. Her dark blonde hair is in an elaborate bun, and to top it off, she’s wearing an elegant hat with peacock feathers.
She is absolutely gorgeous. A knockout. A beauty. Stunning.
It was the only photo I had of her, but that didn’t matter.
I didn’t need photos.
I remembered everything about Jennifer.
Chapter 7
Walking on Sunshine
I’M SO HAPPY you’re not freaking out about the dance like everybody else,” Jennifer said. It was a warm September afternoon, and I was leaning on my bike outside her house, while she sat on the big rock next to her mailbox. Our usual setup.
“Why would I be? It’s months away.”
“I know, but my parents are already planning for it. Mom’s going to take me to Helsinki to see some gowns, and Dad’s got a big pile of camcorder brochures on his desk.”
“Wow, that is serious.”
“Yes,” she said gravely. “It is tradition. And tradition must be respected.”
“I still don’t get how the Viennese waltz is a Finnish tradition,” I said glumly.
“Ours is not to question why,” she said, doing a passable impression of AJ, the gym teacher whose job it was to teach us the ancient dance routines. “Ours is to follow the steps of our forebears.” I had to laugh—whenever AJ said that, Mikke and Sami would growl and do bear impressions behind his back.
“Aren’t your parents the same? I thought your mom would love the sense of ceremony.”
“Not really. I think Tina made sure they didn’t get anywhere near her plans.”
“Lucky you. Hey, send her over to deal with my parents.”
The thought of Tina reading the riot act to Jennifer’s parents made me laugh. Although Jennifer’s dad was tricky, known for his temper.
“Didn’t your sister wear pants to the dance?” she asked.
“Mm-hmm.”
“What a rebel!” said Jennifer with a grin.
“Yeah, but the teachers didn’t even bat an eyelash. Nobody minded. She was so angry!”
Jennifer laughed. “I know some of the girls in our year want to wear pants too. So progressive. So some of the boys are talking about wearing dresses, just to annoy them. But I think it’s cool to dress up once in a while. I just don’t think it’s worth spending a year panicking about.”
“Of course,” I agreed.
I mean, of course I agreed. I always agreed with Jennifer. Not out of awe or whatever, but because we were in tune with one another. We thought alike.
“So,” she said with a conspiratorial smile. “How’s your partner?”
That was the big issue, of course. Having learned from past experiences, AJ had come up with a system for keeping the teenagers’ courting period as short as possible: he assigned everybody their practice partners at the start of the school year, and if anybody wanted to switch, they needed to let him know on or before December 1 so he could ensure everybody still had a partner. A daylong transfer window, just like in the hockey season, only shorter and more hormonal.
“She’s good. She can dance. Yours?”
“He’s no Kevin Bacon. Not yet, anyway.”
“You can always get another partner. I bet most guys would want to dance with you.”
“Most guys?” she repeated, and gave me one of those mischievous smiles I loved and hated to see (mostly loved).
A MONTH LATER, the leaves on the birches in Jennifer’s yard had turned red and yellow, and then fallen off. Jennifer was wearing a white sweater as she sat on the rock; I was leaning on my Crescent’s saddle.
“Have you asked anyone to the dance?” she said, apropos of nothing.
The moment I had been waiting for, hoping for, praying for—had it actually arrived?
“Not yet,” I said, trembling slightly.
“Well you’d better get a move on, silly, or all the good ones will be taken.”
A beat. A surging confidence began to build in me.
All through the autumn, I’d known this moment would come. Each time we’d talked about the dance I’d seen that playfulness in her eyes. And now here she was, practically asking me to ask her.
She sighed and a note of sadness crept into her voice. “Sami asked me,” she said. “And I said yes. AJ’s already found a new partner for my guy.”
“Oh,” I said, as brightly as a flickering bulb. “Great!”
Somehow I fought off the urge to run screaming for the hills.
“That’s great!” I said again.
Jennifer stared off into the distance.
I took that as my cue to leave.
And as I rode away, Bryan Adams’s “Jealousy” started to play in my head.
THE DAY OF the dance was February 14, 1986, Valentine’s Day, except that the tradition hadn’t made its way to Finland yet. English was the last class of our already shortened day, and since Hanna knew our minds were on the dance, she let us go home at noon to prepare.
Jennifer and I walked together to the bus stop.
“Are you all set?” she asked. “I have so much to do! I never thought I’d care this much about the dance. Tell me not to worry. Tell me not to care.”
“Don’t worry, don’t care,” I said flatly. She forced a laugh. “Honestly, you don’t have to worry about a thing. I’ve seen you at practice—you’re doing great.”
I wasn’t just trying to make her feel better. I had watched her at our rehearsals, and she was wonderful. Graceful. Beautiful.
“Besides, if anybody is going to rip his pants and fall on his face, it’s going to be this guy,” I said, and pointed my thumb at myself. “And you,” I said, now pointing at her with my index finger, “you’ll be perfect—as usual.”
“Oh, stop it,” she said.
So I didn’t say anything.
“No, don’t actually stop it, silly,” she added with a laugh, looping her arm through mine. “You’re the best.”
“I suppose it is a little easier for us guys. I’m just going to pick up my tuxedo on my way home,” I said. “Then I’ll only have about five hours to do my hair, so I’ll be cutting it close.”
Her giggles made me feel like I was Eddie Murphy, so I walked with a little spring in my step the rest of the way.
Around us, snowflakes were falling slowly. The days were getting longer again, but the winter was still bleak, especially the snowy days. Kumpunotko’s downtown was small, only a few blocks wide each way, but everything I needed was right there: the bookstore, the record store, the newsagent’s, the video store, and the movie theatres (Kumpunotko, despite having only one set of traffic lights, had two movie theatres).
It was weird to see Kumpunotko in the middle of a weekday. I’d only really seen it on the weekends, never when I should have been at school. People were out and about, working, running err
ands. Mothers with preschoolers filled the pavements; a man was blocking traffic while he unloaded boxes of fish; outside the Atlas, one of the theatres, two workmen were unrolling a red carpet.
I waited at the stop with Jennifer, and when she climbed into the bus and waved goodbye, wiggling her fingers, I held a smile until the bus drove off.
I pulled up my coat collar and headed for the only dry cleaners in town. The owner was a friend of my dad’s, and he had a tuxedo for me.
An hour later, I was back home with the tux, getting ready to get ready for the dance. I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. All I had to do was shower and get dressed.
Since I had some time to spare, I went to my room to play The Hobbit. The game had been Tina’s Christmas present to me, but in the month and a half that I’d had it, I’d only solved 25 percent of the adventure. Frustrated at my slow pace, I’d even read the Tolkien book that came with the game, but it hadn’t helped much.
I’d just switched to Hungry Horace, Spectrum’s version of Pac-Man, when Mom knocked on my door. She opened it carefully, pushing a pair of sweatpants on the floor out of the way with her foot.
“Did you get the tuxedo? Are you nervous? Would you like a sandwich?”
Mom didn’t waste any time.
“Yes, I did. Not too nervous. And it’s okay, I’ll come down in a second and grab a bowl of cereal or something.”
“Cereal,” she scoffed. “You need to eat real food. Can I see the tuxedo on you? Come downstairs and I’ll make you a sandwich.”
She closed the door. I turned off my Spectrum and tore open the plastic bag the tuxedo had come in. I had never worn a tux in my life. I had never even worn a real suit, to be honest. When I saw myself in the bathroom mirror—or, the two-thirds of myself I could see while standing on the toilet—a sense of power and pride filled me.
I looked good.
Mom called me from the kitchen and I walked down like I was Sean Connery in Thunderball.
Someday Jennifer Page 4