As I walk down the hall, everyone says, “Surf’s up, dude. Hey, dude, surf’s up” because of my long blond hair, even though I’ve never been on a surfboard. There’s music everywhere from radios carried around inside backpacks casually slung off one shoulder.
Even the handful of white faces seem different from the ones I knew in Oregon. Cleaner. Brighter somehow. Their clothes are new. They wear T-shirts with cartoons on them from T&C Surf Designs or Quiksilver. They use the word “radical” or the word “gnarly” or the word “awesome.” Everyone seems rich.
Chris Faraday is a tall redheaded boy with freckles in a white T-shirt with a picture of an ape on a skateboard. He’s got sleepy eyes and skin that looks like it’s been tanned from days in the sun. He sits next to me in social studies. He’s got a pair of thick British Knights sneakers on and a pack of purple Now and Laters open behind his book so our teacher, Mr. Schneider, can’t see it. He leans into me and says, “Hey, dude, where you from?”
“Oregon.”
“Oh shit, really? Damn. What’s it like?”
I picture rain falling on the rabbit barn, the muddy shore of the Willamette River under the West Salem bridge, the red rabbit blood splattered on the gravel path next to the shed, the campsite next to the big rocks on the Oregon coast, the snow in the sand, Billy and I planning our trip, Billy as a ghost, Paul lying still in a creek bed, the spit in Doug’s teeth, Mom crying on the floor of the wolf den next to the wood-burning stove.
“It’s cool.”
“Do you guys skate?”
“A little.”
“Can you ollie?”
“Almost.”
“What kind of board you got?”
“Nash.”
“That’s a little kid’s board.”
“Oh yeah, I know. My dad’s going to get me a new one. We just haven’t gone to get it yet.”
In front of me is a girl named Tanisha Campbell who smiles with a mouthful of braces. “Hi!” Her hair is pulled tight on her head in a bun with little pink flower clips and golden hoop earrings that look like two dolphins jumping together to kiss beneath her earlobe. “What’s your name?”
“Mike.” I’ve decided that I’m tired of being teased for being named Mikel, which sounds like a girl’s name, and if I’m at a new school nobody knows me anyway so I may as well go by Mike. Everybody knows at least five Mikes.
“Hi, Mike. You need a pen? Mr. Schneider gets mad if you don’t take notes while he talking.”
Tanisha likes Blow Pops covered in red Jolly Ranchers. She keeps a couple in the zip-up plastic pen case snapped into her three-hole binder notebook. At the start of class every day she lends me a blue Bic ballpoint pen for notes, saying, “When you gonna start bringing your own pen?”
“They weigh me down.” I blush because I have three in the small pocket on the front of my backpack. I just like the chance to talk to Tanisha. Sometimes she passes me notes over her shoulder that say, “If you could live anywhere you want, where would you live?” or “Look at that man stomach. Mr. Schneider need to eat more vegetables!” or “Daaaaamn a quiz! I didn’t study. Did you?”
As I walk into class one day, Donte Parker, who is nearly as tall as Jake, though still only a seventh grader, runs up behind me and pushes me into the door frame as he leans into the room to yell, “The big one coming, y’all! Watch out!” Everyone is scared of the Big One, the earthquake that will destroy Southern California. It lurks at the edges of our minds like the Night Stalker, the serial killer who was in the news for all those murders and rapes and something called sodomy. My aunt Jeannie discovered a victim one night. It was one of her first calls as a rookie cop. The father was killed, the children raped. She said it was “horrific.” Something about this place, despite the palm trees and warm weather, suggests there is a terrible, invisible rot that threatens the Good Life promised to the rows and rows of perfect houses with their perfect green lawns.
Tanisha yells at him, “You play too much! That’s my friend.”
At the end of the period, when the bell rings for lunch, Tanisha is standing outside the doorway waiting for me. “You got my pen?” I give it to her and she leans in to give me a hug. She puts her arm around my back, pulling me toward her, smelling of cinnamon and cocoa butter. I feel a warmth spread through my chest and radiate over my body, a feeling that marks her at that instant, like I could find her in my mind from then on as if on a map of the world. My first hug. “Bye,” she says as I watch her walk away, a blur of acid-wash jeans. Somewhere beneath the sky-blue cotton of her thin sweatshirt dances the white line of an actual bra.
At lunch I sit at a table with some of the other boys from pre-algebra: Stephen Perkins, who is tall, kind and studious, quietly observing us all. Ryan Church, also tall with glasses and brown hair, sarcastic and good at basketball. And my favorite: Drew. He’s blond and thin, smart like Jake and awkwardly dressed like me. He doesn’t seem to understand the rules against knee-high socks or Reebok knockoffs from Payless ShoeSource either. Like me, he doesn’t quite get the fashion code. He’s the only other kid at Orville Wright Junior High School who knows about the Cure. His brother, who is a college DJ, makes him mix tapes filled with the Cure and the Smiths, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. We decide to stick together, sensing a strength in numbers, trading tapes. I give him The Head on the Door. He gives me Some Great Reward by Depeche Mode. It feels like we’re the only two members of a club. Misfits Without Jackets.
It’s an unspoken pact we’ve made, for mutual protection from the humiliation of junior high life: me the white trash latchkey son of an ex-con, he the do-gooder son of the PTA president. There’s a balance struck. He makes me look more respectable. I make him look more reckless.
Chris Faraday comes and goes, floating between us and other groups, the kind of mouthy kid that no one likes but everyone tolerates for some reason. When he’s out of earshot, Ryan always says, “That kid’s an asshole.” Ryan seems to have the school down. He hangs out with us misfits but he seems to understand how to fake fitting in better than we do. Maybe it’s because he’s good at basketball.
The kids from class talk about trips to Palm Springs or Hawaii, their dads who work as engineers or lawyers at the big Hughes Aircraft building on the side of the hill next to the enormous white letters spelling out “LMU” for Loyola Marymount University.
When I mention my hug with Tanisha, Chris Faraday says, “Oh yeah, I hugged Tanisha tons of times. That’s my girl.” I don’t believe him. Tanisha has better taste than that.
“My dad says you got to be careful with black girls, though.” He tears a piece of cherry Fruit Roll-Up from wax paper.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Because they’re a pain in the ass. He told me everything changed when the busing started.”
“The busing?”
“Yeah, haven’t you asked yourself why this school is like 80 percent black even though Westchester is 90 percent white?”
I never thought about it because everyone was white in Oregon and I just figured L.A. was the opposite. Anyway he sounds angry about it which doesn’t make sense because that’s the whole thing that makes this school good. All the mama jokes and dance moves. The new music: Guy and LeVert and Troop and Salt-N-Pepa. Plus the kids here can really break-dance. We had a break-dancing crew in Oregon but nobody was very good at it. Anyway, Tanisha is nicer to me than anyone else.
“You know what they say,” he says.
“No. I don’t.”
“About black people.”
“What?” I have no idea what this has to do with Tanisha Campbell who is the only beautiful thing about this school.
“Black people are lazy.”
“No they’re not. That’s stupid.”
He explains it like it’s my mistake, like it’s something I need to know, like I am silly or naive for never having learned it. “Seriously, you don’t know this shit?”
I shake my head. It doesn’t fe
el true. “That doesn’t sound right.”
“Yeah, and they eat chicken and watermelon.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I’d take chicken and watermelon over rabbit stew any day.
“It’s just that they’re usually kind of dirty and poor. You know, on food stamps with single moms and a dad in prison or on drugs.”
I remember that none of these kids know we were on food stamps in Oregon and my dad was in prison and before that he was on heroin. Anyway, Dad makes fun of white guys in suits too. He’ll hitch his pants up high on his waist and pretend to push invisible glasses up his nose as he shakes a disapproving finger. I wonder what Chris Faraday would say if I told him those things. Would he look at black people differently, or me?
“I’m just joking.” He claps me on the back. “That’s just what people say. It’s kinda true, though. Hahahaha.” Maybe he doesn’t know about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, about the tear gas in People’s Park, the Black Panthers in Oakland or trying to stop Thatasshole Reagan.
“It’s not just blacks, though. Mexicans steal shit. You gotta watch out. And Orientals can’t drive.”
“I think you’re making all this up,” I say. It sounds so foreign and stupid. “Why would they steal things?”
“Because they’re poor.” There it is again. Poor. I think about the Monopoly money and the hand-me-downs, the big blocks of government cheese we melted into noodles, the trips to Goodwill for the bubble gum shoes. I picture their big houses, their moms with bobbed haircuts and cheery makeup, their dads sitting quietly, one leg crossed over the other, reading a newspaper. I don’t know these people.
“What’s our thing?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean white people. What’s our bad thing?”
“Oh. We’re just normal.”
CHAPTER 25
GOTH
A few months after I start school, Mom calls and says Tony is becoming a goth. The football team didn’t “work out” for him so he found a new crowd and started wearing eyeliner and lacy gloves, bolo ties and weird pointy shoes with thick rubber soles. She’s pretty sure they’re all on drugs. It doesn’t surprise her, she says. “He’s always struggled with the early signs of an addictive personality.” But he’s looking weirder these days in the pictures she sent, with his hair blown out in all directions like he stuck his finger in a socket.
He had a party and destroyed the house. She left him in charge for the weekend and he invited “every burnout in the city of Salem.” When she got home from her conference, the house was filled with trash, cigarette butts, empty beer cans on the floor. The fireplace banister was broken. There was a hole in the living room wall leading to the bathroom that someone made with the orange maul from the toolshed. The floor of the wolf den was covered in puke. The floor in Tony’s room looked as if snow had fallen because the rug was dusted in a thick layer of white powder. At first Mom thought it was drugs but it turned out to be laundry detergent.
Doug had left again, so she came home alone. “Imagine, going somewhere to seek clarity and coming home to that,” she says.
When she walked in, Tony was standing in the kitchen washing a dish. He looked up and calmly said, “So … how was your weekend?”
She says she can’t take it anymore and he has to move back to L.A. He’s out of control and he needs his father.
“I knew I was in deep shit so I was like fuck it, you know? We were in trouble anyway,” he tells me, smoking a cigarette behind the Bowl a few days after he gets to Los Angeles. The Bowl is our constant destination, the place we go to hang out and smoke and be good at being bad. He says he didn’t even know what happened at that party. He was passed out in his room the whole time.
“I guess shit got out of hand. When I woke up and saw what happened, all I could think was, ‘Damn that was one sick party.’” He has black eyeliner on and a pair of tapered Dickies. He’s wearing leopard-print Creepers, which are shoes that look like big elevated triangles, and a white shirt with a big collar buttoned all the way up to his chin. His hair is sprayed in different directions in big swooping arcs like ocean waves crashing together on his head. His fingernails are painted black. “We had to drive some heads home and we thought we had time to clean the house or make up a story about how it was robbed, but out of nowhere we saw Mom in her Honda on D Street. We boned out, like we drove fifty miles an hour down the alley to beat her home but there was no time to do anything. It was just too fucked-up, bro. The worst part is all my friends hate me now because she called their parents.
“Still, it was fuckin’ legendary.” He takes a drag from a long white menthol. “People were tripping acid in the barn, breaking down the walls. There was a punch made from vodka and peach schnapps, the music was loud and everyone was just dancing. Nobody gave a fuck. It was the greatest thing.”
I don’t know this person. The last time I saw Tony he wanted to play football and learn to pitch an overhand curve. Who are these friends he’s talking about? What is this hair? I tell him I don’t even understand why he wanted to go back there in the first place.
“Oh man, she had no idea what I was doing. I spent the whole summer drinking. I snuck out every night. I cut the screen off the window to use in my one-hitter pipe. I smoked cigarettes in the fucking house, while she was home. She came in once and I had just spilled a full ashtray on the floor and she didn’t even notice. It was like living alone.”
It’s ironic. After all those meetings about the negative consequences of drug use, all those books and pamphlets, all those AA sayings hanging from the walls, “Let go and let God,” “One day at a time,” all the campouts and Big Talks and Child Psychology books about “roles children take on in addictive families,” and despite it all, the house on Breys Avenue was destroyed by a drug party.
* * *
THE TABLE IN the dining room at Grandpa Nat and Grandma Juliette’s house is covered in a long white cloth. On top of it are big glass jars with orange labels that read, “Manischewitz.” One says, “Borscht.” It’s filled with a red beet soup. Another jar reads, “Gefilte Fish.” Inside it is a gray fish-shaped mass suspended in goo that looks like something from the movie Alien. There’s lox, smoked white fish, pickled herring in white cream sauce, stacks of huge crackers called matzo and bottles of Manischewitz Cherry and Grape Concord wine, all set out for the Passover Seder.
Bonnie told us that the Passover Seder is a Jewish feast in which Jews tell the story of their escape from slavery, read Hebrew and drink wine, even though she doesn’t drink or believe in God. She is adamant that it is not a religious ceremony because religion is the cause of more death in the world than anything. She says we’re just doing the Passover Seder for “tradition” so we can be exposed to different ideas.
“Those people had it rough with all that walking around in that heat with no air-conditioning.” Grandma Juliette sits next to me, her running commentary about the dinner filling my ear while she laughs. “Where do you pish in the desert? There are no trees.”
Across from me is an empty place setting. “That’s for Elijah,” Grandma says. “In case he decides to show up.”
“Who’s Elijah?”
“Don’t you worry about him. He’s always late.”
Because I am the youngest, it’s my job in the ceremony to read the four questions in Hebrew. The sheet of paper is handed down to me. The words are spelled out phonetically on the page, so I lift my grape juice and read aloud. Everyone stops when I read the questions, which Grandpa answers from his sheet. It’s a strange feeling, to feel so much like I belong, to be young means that I have something to add. In Oregon we’re always told how much we have to learn, that Mom understands the world, our lives, our own feelings better than we do. There is no place for an opinion and our youth is just getting in the way. But here at this big table with my aunts Jeannie and Nancy looking at me and smiling, with Grandma Juliette in my ear and Grandfather Nat waiting for me to read the strange ancient words,
I feel something else. Like I have something to add. I can see the joy in their faces when we show up at a dinner or a birthday party: “Look at the little ones! Come here!” as if there is nothing better in the world than to be a grandson.
Matzos are broken, candles lit, hands dipped, wine drunk, bitter herbs eaten, the big plates of smoked fish and pickled herring passed around. Grandma keeps spilling wine on the table because of her essential tremor. She yells, “Save some for Elijah! He’s hungry!” Then, under her breath, as an aside to me, “Can you believe these schmendricks?”
“What’s a schmendrick?”
“An idiot.”
She tosses Yiddish out in the middle of sentences like a spice as she gives a running play-by-play of the story of Passover. “Those poor people, schlepping all across the desert covered in schmutz … That fakaktah pharaoh, he finally learned his lesson … Listen to him reading. I’m shpilkes. Here in front of the whole mishpucha. I’m so proud.”
“Why do all the words in Yiddish sound like the thing they are?”
She looks at me. “What else are words supposed to sound like?”
I remember the time when a group of us were buying candy at the liquor store and I had only fifty cents. Everyone else had a dollar to contribute and Chris Faraday looked at me and said, “Dude, don’t be Jewish.”
I was confused. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t be cheap, homey,” he said. “Jews are fucking cheap. Don’t you know that?”
I thought of my little grandma Juliette smiling and saying, “Mikel, dahhling, how’s my boy?” My grandpa Nat who likes to talk to me about his magazines The Nation and The Progressive. He’ll clip out an article and hand it to me to read like he just wants so much for me. They always pay for dinner when we go for Chinese and seem to want nothing more than more family, more love, to enjoy each other while we can. I don’t know if it’s because of Hitler or Chuck Dederich or my aunt Joey, who I never knew, because she died when she was only nineteen. But even if they didn’t give me a hundred dollars every year on my birthday, I would say they were the most generous people I’ve ever met.
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