by John Barnes
See, he could always crack me up. And we’d been through more shit together than an old plumber’s snake. So I wasn’t mad at him or anything—I just needed to duck him for a few weeks, and get people to stop saying KarlandPaul like it was one word, and disconnect myself from his weirdness, since being unweird was critical for Operation Be Fucking Normal.
Paul and me had always been on the same bus since the first day of kindergarten, so to make ducking him look like an accident was going to be tricky. Usually we’d be at the stop just after the early bus, on purpose, to goof some till the on-time bus came. Today I needed it to look like I accidentally took the early bus.
I glanced down at my watch—I had been walking slower than I meant to. Three blocks to cover, now. I ran down the street, sunlight flashing in and out of my eyes as I passed through the deep morning shadows of the big old trees. The early bus was at my stop, the last kid just getting on, so I started a serious kick, finishing in a blaze along its bright yellow side and jumping up onto the black rubber steps, landing tiptoe and rocked forward.
So much for looking like I caught it by accident.
Jolene Weber, the driver, was one of the ladies that got drunk with my mom. She grinned at me. “Made it, kiddo,” she said. “Two more steps and you’d’ve been hanging from the back windows on the way to school.”
“Yeah, well.” That’s what you said, in Lightsburg, when you were supposed to say something and couldn’t think of anything.
She swung the steel handle that thumped the door closed and hollered, “Everybody hang on, I’m peelin’ out.”
In the aisle, the guy in front of me turned partway around.
It was Paul. I was surprised to see him but I figured, oh, well, hitches in the plan were bound to happen, I couldn’t very well dodge him clear till Halloween, and come to admit it, I didn’t really want to. I’d have to sit with him.
But Paul stared at me like I’d just gotten off a flying saucer, and sat in the first open seat, next to one of those invisible sophomore girls that fill up the halls in school.
Plenty of double seats open, just a couple steps further back. I went and sat in the nearest open double, two rows behind Paul, watching the back of his head.
Paul and me’d been friends since before we could talk. We’d been in the Madman Underground ever since we’d gotten our first tickets in the first week of fourth grade.
I guess up until just a few years before Paul and me went into it, there wasn’t much mental health care in schools, which explained everything about the older generation, if you asked me, which is probably why nobody asked me.
When I asked Dad why I had to go to a shrink, back in fourth grade, he told me Mr. Knauss, Paul’s dad, had worked really hard to get school psychologists into the budget, which was good enough for me right there. Then he leaned forward and looked me right in the eye and added, “Karl, we are finally advanced enough to admit some kids need help, and provide it for them.” (Which told me I was one of those kids.)
But like Paul’s dad always added, this was still Ohio, the Cheap Bastard State, so they got the cheapest shrinks they could get—either fresh out of grad school or just up from a first job at a prison. First thing shrinks did when they got into the Lightsburg schools was start mailing out résumés to bigger school systems or real clinics, and they’d get hired away from Lightsburg pretty fast. Our therapy group went through like three to seven of them a year.
The school system didn’t exactly know what to do with the shrinks, either. Teachers had a list of who got out of class to go to group therapy, and you got sent off to it on the same period and day every other week, the same way the kids who talked funny went to speech.
Now here’s what was plain old wall-to-wall stupid: the teachers—not a shrink, not the kids, nobody who knew jack shit—the teachers decided who went to group therapy. Or sometimes the guidance counselors, which was not any better, since all our guidance counselors were coaches who were too stupid to teach. Which meant you got your ticket either because they knew your life was full of real bad shit, like Paul, or because the teacher caught you doing something weird, like me. And once you were in, they put a note in your file that said you were in therapy, and all your teachers saw that file.
They might as well have tattooed CRAZY on your forehead. The next year every teacher would be watching you for the first weird thing you did—and has there ever been a kid who never does anything an adult considers weird?
First thing you did, bing-o, back into therapy. They kept our same therapy groups together year after year, so almost always the newest person in the room was the shrink. Get one ticket once and it was good for free tickets every year afterwards.
Teachers have no sense of perspective. The first time I got a ticket it was in fourth grade, because Mrs. Daggett was reading a story and I got a crying jag like I did sometimes.
Stories nailed me. I was one of those kids that has to know how a movie comes out before I could see it. I couldn’t handle suspense, not even a little. And if I did know how it came out, and it wasn’t happy, that was even worse.
Mrs. Daggett was reading us “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” the part right before the end when the paper doll blows into the fire. I started to cry because I knew we were coming up on the part where they would find the tin heart in the ashes, and just knowing that was coming was too much for me.
When that happened at home, Mom or Dad would just go out to the kitchen, fix themselves a drink, and wait till I’d stop. Then if they remembered, they’d come back and finish the story. No big deal. But Mrs. Daggett didn’t know me, and she was one of those pushy people that just have to try and help, so she put her arm around me.
That got me crying so hard I couldn’t breathe, let alone explain. So I was making these weird hiccup noises and my face got all purple. Daggett called in the school nurse.
That was that, I got my ticket. The next week I was excused from class and started going with Paul to group therapy.
Paul had been going since the start of school that year. He got his ticket because everybody in Lightsburg knew about what had happened over the summer. His mom was going to take a picture of the kids just before going to church, so she had Paul and his big brother Dennis and little sister Kimmie lined up in front of the house. She had one of those old kind of cameras where you look down into it instead of through it, and you walk back and forth to get things right in the picture.
So she was down at the foot of the front yard, in the grass between the sidewalk and the street, trying to get it perfect, and she stepped one more step back without looking, and her high heel slipped over the curb and she fell over backwards in front of a speeding car.
The driver was some high school girl. Her family only lived in town that one year. People said they just weren’t Lightsburg people; I guess it was a shame that Mrs. Knauss didn’t get killed by a real local.
The tire went right over her neck, and she died that second. For years people in town said she didn’t have time to suffer. I think everyone always has time to suffer.
So I got my first ticket because I did something crazy, and Paul’s first ticket was because something awful happened so he was supposed to be crazy. Same story with all the other Madmen—once we got our first ones, from then on we got them because we’d had them before. We were gonna be in the Madman Underground till death or graduation.
But it couldn’t be absofuckinglutely impossible to not get the ticket, because now and then a kid was only there for a year and then left the group.
I was going to try being normal, starting today. Who knew what might follow? A social life. People off my case. A non-Madman girlfriend. The road was wide open, so I was pedal-to-the-metal-and-let-her-roar flooring it towards being more normal than anybody.
Still, I wondered what Paul’s problem was. Okay, so I wanted to avoid him. That didn’t mean I wanted to be avoided.
The bus pulled up at another crowded stop and a bunch of kids piled in. Some rab
bity-nervous freshman girl, carrying a big heavy pack for some reason, stood next to my seat. “I’m harmless,” I said to her.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m harmless,” I said. “That looks heavy. Sit down.”
She blushed but she sat.
I kept staring at the back of Paul’s head. Of all the group, Paul was the one I most needed to avoid hanging out with, because he was the heart and soul of the Madman Underground, the one who had named it.
For some reason, back when we were all in eighth grade, Paul had gotten hung up on reading The Catcher in the Rye and On the Road and he’d just kept reading them over and over all year, first one then the other, about one week per book. They sounded real boring, so I never read either. From what Paul said, they had three things in common: One, they were both classics, ten or twenty years old. Two, they were about young guys that didn’t give a shit what people thought. Three, both books used “madman” as a compliment.
So Paul started calling the therapy group the “Madman Underground,” and everyone else picked it up. The name stuck like a coat of paint, at least inside the group.
And supposedly nobody outside the group knew there was a group. Of course we all knew that wasn’t true. High school was like the little clear plastic tunnels that Paul’s hamsters lived in: you could run a long way but never get out, and always, everyone could see you.
So I was going to change tunnels. This year, no ticket for me. No Madman Underground. Normal normal normal.
Fuck. I wondered what Paul’s trip was.
The bus bottomed its shocks on the turn into Oakbrook, the closest thing that Lightsburg had to a suburb: a tangle of winding streets just outside the city limits, with houses that started looking fake the day they were put up, lawns that had no sidewalks or fences, station wagons or pony cars parked out on the street, and wide driveways full of the toys you saw on TV.
Oakbrook houses had “rec rooms” and “dens” and “foyers” and all kinds of pretentious shit like that, but what they were was plywood and Z-Brick boxes with plastic “ironwork” and pot-metal “brass” and hollow chipboard columns on the front. The last couple years, I’d made some money sticking all that frouf back on with Liquid Nails.
Everybody out there talked about their houses like they were always for sale, calling them “homes” and saying they lived in “a three-bedroom New England saltbox home” instead of “a big white house with siding and a sloped flat roof.”
But no matter how much molded plastic and pot metal you stuck on those cheap-bastard houses, the cheap-bastard just came bleeding through. They were on septic tanks so the yards stank all summer, especially after the low spots flooded. Because they only had county street maintenance, they had potholes the size of townships. And the kids from there were always in town anyway, paying a quarter to use the library, the pool, and the skating rink, because Dad and Mr. Knauss had fought to put in nonresident fees (and been called cheap bastards themselves for that).
Back when Dad was mayor, they’d tried to annex that land and the developers had put up a big fight and the city had lost. Later, while Oakbrook was being built, Paul’s father, on City Council, had tried to annex them and make them pay property taxes. Nobody else on the council wanted to do anything that would actually make the Oakbrookers pay their fair share, but sticking their kids up for candy money was pretty popular.
“Lightsburg politics in a nutshell,” Dad used to say. “A perfect balance between spiteful and ineffective.” That was one of a million things I missed, and Paul missed, too—we could still crack each other up talking about the way our dads would get rolling on the subject when the families’d do cookouts together. “Maybe they should just incorporate and get their own school district,” Dad would say. “Put in some used singlewides for the town hall and school if they can get them cheap enough.” And Mr. Knauss would add, “They could be our cross-town rivals. Come on out Friday night and see the Lightsburg Wildcats versus the Oakbrook Fighting Cheap Bastards.”
The school bus bucked and slammed along through Cheap Bastard Acres, picking up more people, and Jolene hollered and made everyone find a seat.
At school, I was one of the last people off because I’d sat so far towards the back, and I wanted to give Paul a head start.
Jolene gave my arm a squeeze. I don’t know why all of Mom’s friends were always touching me, but I didn’t mind much when it was Jolene. “Have a great year, kiddo.”
“Thanks, but I have other plans.”
2
How the Most Expensive Pizza of My Life Resulted in Delayed Gratzification
MY FIRST CLASS was college-track senior lit, taught by Coach Gratz. It bit the big hairy bag. I’d had Gratz before, twice, and that was like about four times too many.
How I happened to be taking this class from Gratz kind of happened in two stages. The first stage, last spring, was God’s punishment for my taking my mother out for her birthday.
I knew it was dangerous to get all dumb and sentimental. And yet all the same, right when I was about to sign up for my senior year classes, I tried to really celebrate Mom’s birthday, instead of just giving her the money to get drunk, high, and laid, like I had the year before. This time, I told her, she was going to be just slightly spoiled, and I was going to take her to Pietro’s, the semidecent pizza place in town. It had red-checked tablecloths, if you didn’t mind that they were fake plastic-coated canvas, and slightly better than decent pizza, if you were flexible about what you called decent.
“Are you sure you can afford this?” Mom asked, as soon as we’d already ordered.
“It’s your birthday, Mom, and I don’t spend money I can’t afford.” I wasn’t sure whether she was trying to be my loyal protective concerned mother, which would be nice for her to at least try for a change, or if she was setting me up for one of her sermons about “ucky ucky money,” so I played it neutral. “You know I have a bunch of jobs and I’m a miser, Mom. It’s just that last night I was visited by these three ghosts, the Ghost of Mom’s Birthday Past, the Ghost of Mom’s Birthday Present, and the Ghost of Mom’s Birthday Yet to Come, and they all showed me the true meaning of Mom’s Birthday, so I ran out into the street in my nightgown and started giving money to urchins and stuff. That’s why I ordered us the El Supremo Dreamo Extra Large. It’s twice the size of Tiny Tim. Of course we’re gonna both be twice our size by the time we finish—”
She was giggling pretty good by then, so even if she had been setting me up for a sermon, I’d managed to step out of that bear trap pretty neat and clean. “So what’s new at work?” I asked. She could always crack me up by saying mean shit about her coworkers.
She took a moment to light one of her Kents, take a deep drag, and pose with it; Mom used her cigs to wave around at least as much as she smoked them, so she probably only got like half the cancer she paid for. “Dull as shit all day, Tiger.” She always kind of emphasized the swear words when she was talking to me, I guess to remind me I had a cool mom that would say fuck and shit in front of me. “So I did one whole chapter of my real estate course, and filled out the answer sheet, and mailed that in. If the school is even still in business, now I’ve done eight chapters, with seventeen to go. So there’s some progress in my personal world, anyway.”
She’d started that correspondence course three years ago. Every couple-few months she’d do another chapter, mail it in, and get a grade back a couple weeks later, always an A because the assignments were retarded-chimp easy, and open-book besides. Supposedly once she finished the correspondence course she’d be all set to take the exam for her real estate license, but she could have just walked in and taken the exam; the course wasn’t like a requirement or anything. I’d speed-read the whole book in one long weekend last year, but then I’d been real disappointed when it turned out that in Ohio you had to be eighteen to sell real estate (I figured it couldn’t be any harder than selling radio ads, and it paid a lot better).
Come to admit it, I knew good
and well that Mom was taking the course so slow not because she wanted to get her license but because she wanted to avoid it. I had no idea why she’d want to stay a secretary/receptionist, but that was what she wanted.
Meanwhile, though, she could sure tell a story. She took another drag, then posed again, one arm across her chest to shove her boobs up, the other holding her cigarette vertical, head cocked to the side, the basic clever-and-flirty she did all the time when she was pretending to listen to Neil and the other losers.
She talked quite a bit of dirt about Mary, the part-time office help, who was a couple years older than me and screwing two of the married sales agents, which was why she never actually did anything “except her nails and hair,” Mom said, “which she does at her desk for hours. And whatever she does to her nipples to get them to stick through her blouse like that all the time,” Mom said. “That doesn’t happen naturally till you’ve had like ten babies. Oh, and she does talk to her girlfriends on the phone, but since we have to keep the line open she only does that maybe half the working time in the day. I just think of her as not really an employee, more like a benefit, we supply the sales guys with hot and cold running slut.”
Then she got going on all the weird gross stuff they found out at the Merton house when old Pearl Merton finally died. There were all these cat skeletons, boiled and cleaned like for a science fair project, with tags on them naming which cat they’d been (I almost asked Mom if she’d like me to start doing that for her cats instead of maintaining the cat cemetery in the backyard, but it was her birthday so I was being nice). Old Pearl also had a stack of Bibles all the way up to the ceiling at the north-east and southwest corners of every room, and three waist-high pyramids of carefully washed beer bottles in her attic. It didn’t seem to me like it meant much more than that old Pearl was crazy.