by John Barnes
I was thinking about what Mom had said. Even though she was weird about it, I did need to get out of that little dying town.
Something or other made me think for just a sec, maybe, too, about Dad having gone through AA.
I looked at that bottle of cheap fake wine and saw things real clear, the way you see them just before you start to drink to get drunk: I would drink away my money and time and energy, and be a fucked-up failure all through my twenties, probably hanging around the high school looking for loser chicks I could fuck. Then I’d dry out and get Jesus when I got old.
It wouldn’t take long. Thirty is old in drunk years—this was Mom’s thirty-ninth birthday and she was definitely an old, old drunk.
I realized after I got Jesus, I’d marry “that good woman who put me right with the Lord, got me away from the bottle, and taught me what life is really all about.” Which was to say, some church girl that resembles a pile of loose fat upholstered with pale goopy skin, and whose whole life is chocolate cake and visiting her sister.
Then we’d have kids—two or three whiny little failures who never succeeded at anything, or maybe a smart one who went off to college and never came home and despised his old man as much as his old man despised himself.
All of a sudden, with that vision of my future, I just said to myself, fuck it. If I kept drinking I’d never leave Lightsburg. If I stopped right now I could not only skip Jesus, I could skip the church girl. It was like, right there, with that cool smooth bottle clenched in my fist, the screw cap still in my other hand, I could smell cheap scent not quite masking fat-girl sweat, and hear her war bly voice singing country music and gospel hymns beside me in our broken-down fourth-hand pickup.
I screwed the cap back on the bottle and went out to the Dumpster. I thought about having one last drink.
Decided that would mean there’d never be a last one. Threw it hard against the back of the Dumpster. Great little smash.
I went inside and cried because Dad was dead, and I wanted, so bad, to tell him about it. At the same time, I was so grateful that I felt like thanking Jesus for not existing.
Next day I went to my first meeting. By the end of school two weeks later, my life was noticeably better, so I stuck to AA like a coat of paint.
It wasn’t all happy. Bonny dumped me because she wanted a guy who would drink with her. Paul still drank but never around me, and hung out with me night after night, talking and goofing and just being there with me at McDonald’s, making me pour Sprite and Coke down myself till I washed the poison out. Mom decided that since I was broken up with Bonny and constantly with Paul, I’d turned queer, and screamed at me till I admitted I’d just stopped drinking, which offended her even more. Every time we ate together she’d be trying to get me to take a drink.
Still, by the end of June, I was busier than ever but getting more sleep, and a lot of times Paul and me would be up till three or four in the morning talking about life and stuff; I remembered more of the day-to-day stuff. The blur was sharpening, and I was getting to like things better with hard edges.
I kept right on going to AA, and got a sponsor, Dick Larren, the cook at Philbin’s where I was hopping the counter for the summer.
By July, Mom stopped hassling me about being a fag, and then about being an “ucky ucky Puritan,” and went back to hassling me about going to college. Since I’d already agreed to do college prep, and application deadlines were a long way away, it just wasn’t that big a deal.
Then less than a week before school started, Kliburn’s husband suddenly got a job in Boise. The class was going to be taught by Gratz. I about shat my shorts.
Gratz was an asshole Vietnam vet. I know they didn’t all bayonet babies and set villages on fire and shit, despite what Mom said. I bet most of them just followed orders, and were just real glad to be back, and their friends got killed and stuff, so we should respect them or feel sorry for them or something nice like that. I shouldn’t be all down on every whacked-out flag-waving hates-everybody psycho that came back from Vietnam.
Just the bad whacked-out flag-waving hates-everybody psychos, the ones that machine-gunned old farmers and bombed grade schools and got the clap from twelve-year-old hookers and didn’t have any sensitivity to the culture and all.
Gratz carried Vietnam like this twenty-ton chip on his shoulder, and we all had to admire his chip. He wanted everyone to hear how sincere he was every time he said “God bless America,” and notice how often he stood up and told everyone exactly what the facts were. When he lost it in class, which was often, he would slice some poor kids to the bone, humiliating them until they half-drowned in tears and snot. Then Gratz would get all apologetic and I-care-so-much-about-you.
I think that’s why us Madmen loathed him. Switching back and forth between this-is-the-way-the-world-is, my-way-or-the-highway tough, and remorseful big-wuvvy- teddy-bear sweet, was what a lot of us saw at home—the behavior of a father that beats his kids or fucks them.
Rude hollering asshole teachers always get way too much respect from adults, so lots of people in Lightsburg were Gratz fans. When I hopped Philbin’s lunch counter, every old fart with too much mouth and not enough brains blabbed about how Gratz was a great wrestling coach, and how much he cared, and what a great teacher Gratz was, and it was so good for the kids to be taught by a real man, a guy who had been a Green Beret and still got choked up at the national anthem and always sang real loud in church and knew there was one right way and would keep the kids on it. The old gomer would take a big drag on one of those nasty unfiltered cigarettes, and like, arf up half a lung, and thump the counter and glare at me. “He keeps those kids in line and he really cares about them.”
Unh fucking hunh.
Literature, in the Gratz universe, was good for us because it would make us manly. (Especially the girls.) Every single book or story you read in one of his classes, every line of poetry, every paragraph of every essay, you were supposed to get all these lessons about being manly men. I guess all the great authors really just wanted to write pep talks for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
I tried to get out of it. I told Mom, “Hey, I’m trying to avoid a screaming hollering Vietnam vet fascist asshole.”
It didn’t work. Instead, Mom had looked up from her almanacs and flying saucer books and all that, and set down her glass of white wine, and thought seriously, or at least looked serious, and said, “Well, I know you don’t like him. I don’t like him either. But he really does make kids learn things, and he was one of your father’s very best friends, even went into that awful AA program with him, and I think you should probably take that class, Karl, I’m sorry you don’t want to, but I think you should.”
For just a second she sounded just like the Mom I remembered from before Dad died. I don’t know why, but that really got to me, and I didn’t ask again while there was time to switch classes.
So, anyway, that’s how my deal with having to take Gratz happened, that’s who Gratz was, that’s how Mom’s birthday pizza turned into some of the most expensive pizza I ever ate, so here I was. Like the army except with an extra-abusive sergeant, no pay, no free stuff, and no promotions.
Gratz for breakfast, and no alcohol. My senior year was shaping up fucking great.
3
Eight Madmen, the Biggest Asshole in Ohio, and One Very Normal Guy
BECAUSE I HAD caught the early bus, I got into Gratz’s classroom so early that only Cheryl Taliaferro was there.
Cheryl had a lot of thick brown hair permed into ringlets, and perfect makeup—her stepmom took her over to Cleveland to see a professional cosmetologist every few months. She had on a tight tan jacket, a loose blousy top, and nice tight pants that rode low, and the soles and heels of her shoes probably added three pounds to each foot and three inches to her height.
Cheryl was the queen of the socials—all the cute perky girls with big smiles that knew everybody. She was the secretary or the vice president for every club and committee, always a
t every party, and never missed a game. She was always tits-up go-team super-positive gosh-I-love-it-here-and-everything-is-so-wonderful and all-my-friends-are-my-specialest-funnest-buddies. All the regular teachers and counselors adored her, and all the cool intelligent teachers hated her guts.
But even though she was Queen of the Socials, Cheryl was even more the Queen of the Madman Underground.
I squatted down beside her. “Hey, haven’t seen you at McDonald’s in a while.” She usually came to hang out and talk while I cleaned, once in a week or so.
She made a face. “Grandpa stayed the summer.”
“Were you and Sammy okay?” Her sister Sammy was a freshman this year.
“Basically, but I had to make excuses and stay in, like, after nine P.M. and till he’d pass out about one in the morning, so that I was stuck in the house. I guess I could bring Sammy by McDonald’s—she’s in a therapy group now, we could start another generation of Madmen.”
“Any time, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. Anyway, it’s not so bad now. Grandpa’s scared of me; I told him to his face that if he messes with Sammy again and I catch him, I’ll tell the cops. But the threat only works while I’m right there. So instead he’s been doing a lot of that same old creepy stuff in front of my parents. He told me in front of Daddy that my boobs are even bigger than my stepmom’s were at the same age. Daddy sat there and nodded like a good doggy, like he always does, and Barb said, ‘Oh, she’s so beautiful,’ just like he’d complimented both of us. I don’t think I ate anything all August. At least my jeans fit great.”
Cheryl and her sister got punished if they “disre- spected” the old troll.
“Well, that all sucks the big one,” I said.
“Yeah.” She was looking down at her desk.
Stacy Hobbins came clattering in, and just started telling Cheryl about a phone call she’d gotten from a guy the night before. Cheryl acted all interested and stuff. Since I’d just become invisible, I sat down.
After Stacy the room filled up pretty fast with the usual group of brains and socials you found in college prep classes. The only one I didn’t know was a pale, skinny girl with bad acne who came in, looked bewildered, and then took a seat behind me.
The next Madman in was Danny, in his FFA jacket. Paul always said that he probably slept in it and you couldn’t prove he didn’t have it on under his football uniform. He was a one-man two-clique wonder, leader of jocks and farm boys alike. Three-clique, really, the smart kids let him hang with them to show they could be tolerant.
Four, I guess, if you counted the Madman Underground.
Danny was a brainy all-American jock that most parents would trade their real kids for in a heartbeat. His old man hated him for being a success and threw it in his face all the time, or all the time he could spare from drinking and screwing up the farm. Danny always got his ticket in the first week because he’d get awful crying jags.
The next Madman to arrive was Darla Pilsudski, who was super-intense and super-smart and ultra-beyond-super-weird. She plucked her eyebrows into strange wickets and wore huge circular tortoiseshell glasses and bright blue eye shadow. Her daily uniform was a hot pink or electric blue leotard, sprayed-on jeans, and huge clunky heels. Darla fit into no cliques. She was a fox but she didn’t hang out with either the socials or the hoods. She was a brain and super-serious about books and grades, but she dyed her hair hooker blonde, smoked, and cut school. She always had a couple of steady jobs and every employer loved her but she was always in trouble with the cops.
Darla read books nobody else read, had records from bands like two years before they were on the radio, and went out with art students from Plantagenet College who had little stripped-down motorcycles and big built-up attitudes.
She always carried Mister Babbitt, a stuffed rabbit she talked to out loud. Most people thought that was so weird that they never actually listened to what she said, so she got away with saying all this fucking hilarious shit right out in public.
She got her ticket for being weird and obnoxious but she really did have problems, like burning herself with cigarettes and cutting little bits of skin off with a razor blade. When she was in ninth grade, the cops came to her house and she had dragged her seven-year-old brother, Logan, into the bathroom and threatened to blind him with Drano. Gist County Child Welfare had put Logan in foster care and tried to get Darla locked up, but it was pretty clear her parents didn’t really want Logan back anyway, and that was right when the group had Shirley Reloso for a therapist. Good old “Doctor Shirl” responded to any negative comment about any of the Madmen with “Prejudice city! There are no bad kids!”
Reloso had gone to the judge and sworn up and down that Darla wasn’t a bad or evil person, she was a good person who did extremely brutal, violent, nasty things, and—who the fuck knows what or if grown-ups think?—they gave Darla supervised probation and left Logan in the foster home.
A week later Darla’s parents left for six months in Hawaii. Most of the kids would tell you that her parents were never home because her dad was a Hells Angel, and they dealt drugs and were always on the road. Older people knew her dad had made a bunch of money as a stockbroker, then married a Prentiss, which used to be the big family around town, bigger even than the Shoemakers, and they’d been living off her trust fund.
Darla had told us that her parents were “pussy-nerd wimp-ass trustfunders who inherited a fuckload of money and spend it all in New York, L.A., Aspen, Acapulco, all those shitholes. They always come back complaining it was nothing like what they expected, but they always go again.”
She usually had the house to herself, a big old place on the hill. Old people in town said that house had once been the place to be invited. Now it was the place for the kind of party that parents didn’t want their kids at—or most kids’ parents, I ought to say. I’d run into my mom at two of Darla’s parties, but I think she was just there to score pot, or because Neil had crashed it.
Darla’s big plan was to go somewhere east to school and never come back to Lightsburg at all, so she played serious-student real hard. Like always, today she sat in the center of the front row, opened a pad to take notes, and set four neatly sharpened pencils beside it to the left. (Paul and me had timed her once: class hours were fifty-four minutes, with six in between for getting to your next class, and sure enough, with Mr. Irish, this one obsessive science teacher we had who always started exactly on time, Darla changed pencils every thirteen minutes and thirty seconds, exactly one quarter of the class time.)
She stuck the suction cup on Mister Babbitt’s ass onto the desk so he faced her. She plucked at his ears for a moment to make one stand up straight and the other droop at whatever exactly the right angle was.
Paul came in, and took a seat far away from me, over in the corner behind Danny. He didn’t look at me at all.
I wondered if maybe he had a crush on that invisible sophomore girl he sat beside on the bus. Normally he got crushes on prom-queen all-American shampoo-commercial girls whose major conversational gambit was “What?” and whose huge boyfriends would beat the shit out of him.
He was my best friend but he wasn’t perfect, you know? I was worried about him, and, come to admit it, pretty hurt.
Coach Gratz walked in on the balls of his feet, arms held away from his body like he expected someone to yell, “Ready, Wrestle!” He had gold-blond hair, piercing blue eyes with little crinkles in the deep tan around them, and a hard-edged cleft chin. He wore dorky stretch-knit shirts, the ones that go over your head like a T-shirt but have a few buttons and a collar, to show off his hard muscular body and keep Mrs. Gratz horny. He always wore the same bolo tie with a turquoise and silver slide, because the dress code for male teachers said a tie, but it didn’t say what kind.
He slung a big stack of books onto the desk with a bang. I don’t think anyone jumped as much as he’d’ve liked.
“Hi, since I’ve had everyone in this room for one class or another, sometime in t
he past, you all know I’m Coach Gratz, and I’m not Mrs. Kliburn. For those of you who took this class because you heard Mrs. Kliburn was easy, tough. For the rest of you, we’re gonna learn some stuff. It won’t all be easy, and it won’t all be—”
“Excuse me, sir,” the new girl behind me said. I looked around. She had very thick, messy, wavy blonde hair that sat on her head like a thatched roof. Her wire rim glasses perched on chipmunk cheeks smeared with acne, above a mouth full of braces. The white T-shirt she was wearing was too big on her; she looked like she’d missed her last three months of meals.
“I haven’t been in one of your classes before,” she said. “My name is Martinella Nielsen. Most people call me Marti.”
Gratz frowned. “Well, Marti, that is very interesting. Normally in my class you speak only when there is a reason for you to speak.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
That was about twice as polite as anything Gratz was expecting, and he kind of half-froze in shock.
The moment for tearing into Marti slipped right away. When he launched into the tirade for the second time, it just didn’t have that old Gratzical energy.
Anyway, Gratz announced, “with great pleasure,” that we were going to read Huckleberry Finn first, because it was “the greatest American novel.” We knew that because Hemingway said so. Or something. Then he hollered about how our literature was just as good as anybody else’s literature, so there, and if you didn’t know Huckleberry Finn you “didn’t really know what it was to be an American.” Once he slipped back into his groove, I tuned out.
One thing about Gratz was kind of funny in a pathetic sort of way—you could tell that he really did like books and poetry by the way his eyes would light up, especially when he got off his lecture notes and just talked. The Budweiser company didn’t want people to drink beer half as much as Gratz wanted us to like poetry. But the poor guy just couldn’t shake his terrible fear that literature might be for fags.