by John Barnes
“Took care of that?”
“It’s another Madman Underground story. Maybe our finest hour, which is pathetic if you think about it. Last year their favorite target was Cheryl Taliaferro, you know, the cute social with the curly brown hair and the big, um—”
“She definitely has a big um. If her um got any bigger it would rip her sweater apart.” She saw my expression. “Sorry.”
“Well—the thing she’s in therapy for—you’ll hear all about it but she should be the one to decide to tell you—anyway, it makes her pretty sensitive about her body, and comments, and shit.
“Anyway, so for like weeks they were always saying gross things about her big boobs, whenever there wasn’t any teacher to hear.
“So there was this pep rally, where they had all the cheerleaders doing their cheerleader stuff. And Cheryl did this stunt where her legs were way apart in midair. So Harris yells ‘Nice shot!’ and Tierden shouts ‘Tuna!’ and Cheryl kind of stumbled coming out of it, and Tierden said something about her boobs bouncing, and that’s when Mrs. Emerson, who’s the cheerleading coach and the French teacher and is married to the vice principal, grabbed them both and marched them out of there, but of course Cheryl was already humiliated and it wasn’t going to make much difference that those guys were going to serve some detention time, shit, they have reserved parking slots on the bench in the office, you know?
“The next day they were making like it was a big joke and like everyone should think they were heroes for, I don’t know, putting Cheryl in her place, or standing up to the forces of busty cheerleaderism. Anyway, trust me, none of it was funny.”
“Oh, I trust you that none of it was funny.”
“So we were lucky. That Monday the therapist, Vic Marston, was a little late, and we got to have a conversation.”
9
“Don’t Be an Asshole,” Explained in Easy-to-Understand Terms
FOR EACH THERAPY meeting, Marston always wrote up an agenda on a whiteboard. When I got there that Monday morning, everybody but Cheryl was already there, and Marston was off loading up his big coffee cup.
Number one on the whiteboard was CHERYL, BULLIES, BODY ISSUES.
Everyone was quiet—we often were. I mean, Monday morning, not a lot of small talk subjects, how would you launch a conversation?
So, how’s the medication working out?
Hey, too bad your mom got arrested again.
Hey, aren’t the new sheets on the Salvation Army bunks great?
Today, though, we were even quieter.
One thing I hated about Marston, he had no sense that sometimes you just need to skip a fucking subject. He was like always trying to be a movie shrink, get right to whatever the matter is, nail us to the wall, make us say the bad thing in our lives, like that would instantly make us all better and totally grateful and we’d write our life story for Reader’s Digest and he’d be able to get a real job.
So he was on us all the time, telling me that my money was a defense, or Paul that he had to accept being gay, or riding Darla about drugs. For a guy who didn’t believe in stress he sure liked to push and push and push, you know?
So: #1. CHERYL, BULLIES, BODY ISSUES.
He’d push her about how she didn’t trust boys, how she didn’t set boundaries, shit that had nothing to do with Harris and Tierden. Somehow it was all going to be her fault, because Marston liked to make girls feel weird about sex. Probably that was why he went to shrink school in the first place.
I don’t know what anybody but me and Paul was thinking, but him and me were pretty much sitting there feeling sick and not knowing what to do.
Cheryl came in, and she was wearing her cream-colored silk blouse and her black cutaway jacket and slit skirt with big clunky shoes, which she called her “cheer-up suit” because she felt pretty in it and wore it to make herself feel better.
She took one look at that on the board and just ran right out the door, into Vic Marston, coming in. His coffee splashed all over her, ruining her favorite clothes.
She started yelling and crying, and he was trying to be all shrink with her out in the hallway where anyone could see.
The rest of us had to hear all of it because that room had just one exit.
Finally Marston said he’d give her a ride home so she could change and try to save her blouse, and came in and told us we could go back to class, or just sit and talk, as long as we all did one or the other. Then he left with Cheryl, who was keening like her puppy got run over.
As soon as he was gone, Darla pulled out Mr. Babbitt and said, “What’s that, Mr. Babbitt? Why, you’re right. It’s a pity we don’t have a gallon of vodka here, so we could all get drunkies as drunkies can be, and then go back to our classies and tell the teachers that good old Doctor Vic gave us the vodka. We could even say he told us to keep quiet while he went home to help Cheryl take her blouse off. Wouldn’t that be just the mostest specialest funsies, Mr. Babbitt? Oh, you’re right, you naughty bunny, it would!”
I couldn’t have laughed any harder if we’d been taking turns writing “I want you to know I’m concerned about you,” Marston’s favorite phrase, on Marston’s dick with a wood-burning pen.
After we got done gasping for air, Danny said, “Well, personally, I agree with the rabbit. I’d do it even though I don’t drink, just to get rid of Marston. Fuck, yeah.”
Darla covered the rabbit’s ears. “Why, Mr. Babbitt, don’t faint, Danny said fuck.”
“Danny does, when he’s really pissed off,” Squid observed.
“Yeah. Fuck yeah.”
Two fucks out of Danny in less than a minute. Definitely a red-letter day.
Squid looked around at us. “You think anybody’s gonna fucking do anything about it that will make Harris and Tierden stop hurting Cheryl?”
Paul said, very quietly, “Not unless we do it.”
Squid nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
Bonny was nodding, too. “Marston and Emerson and all them are either going to be all concerned about the develop -ment of those poor misguided boys, or they’re going to want Cheryl to express her feelings. Either way Harris and Tierden get all the attention they want. There might be seminars and mandatory meetings and all that shit till doomsday, but those assholes won’t feel a bit of fear or pain about this.”
“Unless we make them,” I said.
“Well,” Darla said, “anybody doing anything tonight, say eight? It’s always dead on Mondays at Pongo’s but I work till closing.”
“Might have to park Junie in the corner with a coloring book,” Squid said, “and it’s kind of a long walk, but I can be there.”
“I’ll give you a ride,” Danny said.
“Bring Tony, come early, and I’ll buy all of you dinner, ” I said.
“Split it with you, Karl,” Bonny said. “We want you there, Squid. This is important, and you’re essential.”
Squid slammed his fist into his palm. “Deal.”
“Then Pongo’s, tonight, eight P.M., where the elite meet to be indiscreet,” Darla said. She got up and held up her silly rabbit. “Wave bye-bye to our friendsies, Mr. Babbitt, and think naughty bunny thoughts all day.”
The teachers must have thought therapy was working great, because we were all back in our classes fifteen minutes into the period, and all of us were in a real good mood all day long.
Three days later Paul and me were shooting pool with Danny and Squid at New Life, which was supposed to be a “coffeehouse” but was actually just a storefront fixed up with a couple pool tables, foosball, Ping-Pong, and some board games. There were a few tables and a little soft drink counter. Some of the churches here in town fixed it up for us youths, I guess to keep us from stealing hub-caps and making zip guns. Anyway, it was somewhere you could be for free with some stuff to do. When us Madmen were in junior high, it was our refuge a lot of times.
Rev Dave, the Youth Minister there, was sort of all right, for a guy who probably just never really recovered from
spending his high school years in church youth group. You just had to make sure you didn’t give him a chance to go after your soul, because as a sales guy he was a slow warm-up but a hell-on-wheels closer.
The New Life didn’t want you to hang out there and then go out to drink or toke up or have sex, so you had to sign in and out, and you had to let Rev Dave look at your pupils and smell your breath every time you came back in. I always wondered how he found out if you’d been having sex.
Anyway, a nice thing about New Life, you could get phone calls there, and make local calls. That was why two of the biggest dealers in the school hung out there. Rev Dave thought he had them about 95 percent converted, and had no idea why he couldn’t close the deal.
Now, Harris and Tierden were what you might call predictable guys. Wednesday nights they’d hang out at Pongo’s Monkey Burger till sometime after the DQ closed, daring each other to talk dirty to Darla (neither of them ever had the nerve). Then they’d go smoke dope in the Dairy Queen parking lot and crank up Iron Butterfly on the eight-track, till it was time to splash water on the window at McDonald’s. It was a full, busy life, you know? Both of them being all that they could be.
So that Wednesday night, after Paul’s play practice, me and Paul went to New Life together, and Danny and Squid happened to be there. We all decided to split a pool table because it was crowded. So there we all were, being good but troubled youths, basically good kids with just a few problems at home, shooting pool together. You could’ve taken pictures of us for the fund-raising brochure.
The phone rang, and Rebecca behind the counter—Rev Dave’s daughter, in ninth grade, a Madman herself—announced it was for me, handed me the phone, and wound up the two-minute egg timer.
“Hello,” I said, leaning against the wall and cradling the phone like I thought it might be a girlfriend.
“Hey,” Darla said. “Two assholes just left me a fifteen-cent tip after tying up a table for three hours sharing an order of fries. Do you think anyone would like to beat the shit out of them?”
“I’ll ask Rev Dave,” I said, “but it would be better if you asked him yourself.”
“Tell the Reverend I’ll give him a blow job if he breaks Tierden’s nose.”
That bit was off script. I had a hell of a time not laughing like a crazy bastard. “I think he’ll have some kind of answer but it would be better if you came down yourself.”
“Yeah. Hey, tell Danny and Squid I want all the details.”
“Everyone’s coming to work with me, after,” I said, “so you can catch up with us there if you want.”
“Cool. Good luck. Say something about Rev Dave one more time.”
“Like I said,” I said, “I think it would be better if you talked to Rev Dave yourself.”
The egg timer went off just as I handed the phone back to Rebecca.
Now, Rev Dave thought he was the last of the hot-ass arguers, and kept all these cartoon pamphlets in his office behind the counter, ready to go in case anyone wanted to argue. So when he heard me say “I’ll ask Rev Dave,” he was already gwomming his holy diapies for a chance to argue some Jesus into a youth, but coming out of his office acting all casual, like he just happened to be there.
I said I had this friend, Paul and me wanted her to come down to New Life with us, Danny and Squid had asked, too, stuff like that, making it real clear that this was a lost friend with big problems, a messed-up young sinner fit to make a youth minister salivate uncontrollably, who said she wasn’t going to come in because God was bullshit. “See, Rev, every now and then she calls me because she thinks up some stupid question, like the one about God making a rock so big he can’t lift it. It’s just her excuse to not come in and give it a try.”
“Oh, and what was your friend’s question tonight?” Rev Dave asked, stroking his little beatnik beard like he was flexing before stepping into the ring.
“It’s so stupid it’s embarrassing.”
“There are no stupid questions.”
Only stupid people, I thought, but said, “Well, I think it’s even dumber than the one about the rock. She asked why God lets there be all this pain, and suffering, and war and death and shi—um, stuff—in the world, since he could stop it, and if he has the power to stop it, doesn’t that make him responsible for it?”
“Well,” Rev Dave said, “that’s not really a dumb question at all. That’s a very important question.” He settled his rimless glasses high on his nose.
Paul drifted over from the pool table, like he was interested, and pretty soon Rev Dave had warmed into the subject and there we were, him talking to Paul and me in his office, with the Rev pushing a lot of cartoon books across the table at us and earnestly explaining how this was called “The Problem of Pain” and it was very-very-ver y important to Christians. Darla’s boyfriend at the time, who was majoring in religious studies, had really come up with a perfect one to get Rev Dave going. Paul and me started to wonder whether the Rev would ever stop. He had three pamphlets on the subject, so you could tell it was important. And we went over all of them in detail.
Squid and Danny said later that we had the hard part of the job and they had all the fun. With Rev Dave’s back to the door, Rebecca gave Danny and Squid the high sign; they were out the door in zero flat, ran two blocks to the back of the Dairy Queen parking lot, sneaked up behind Bobby Harris’s rolling rust pile, and used a little added touch that Squid thought of—they each turned on a flashlight and shined it in the window on their side, and Danny yelled, “Out of the car, long hair!” just like Kenny Loggins in that song.
So Harris and Tierden opened their doors, already pissing down their legs because they were pretty far into a bowl and thought they were busted. Squid got Tierden by his long dirty hair (“felt like washing my hands for a week afterward,” he said). Danny grabbed Harris by the boy-boobs, right through his shirt, and lifted him off the ground.
They body-slammed those two assholes up against the car to take the breath out of them, and then just hit them till they were both crying and all curled up with their hands around their faces. Later that night, at McDonald’s, Squid said Tierden’s ribs thudded like a bass drum; Danny did a pretty good imitation of Bobby Harris keening “no-o-o-o” as his head got slapped back and forth.
Squid and Danny worked fast but they made sure they hit about every surface there was to hit on those assholes. Then they pantsed them both, pants and shoes and underwear and all, dragged them over to the freezing-cold ditch that runs by there, and pushed them in. Squid said they were crying real hard and hanging on to each other like a couple of homos.
Then Squid stood guard to keep them standing there in that icy water up to their waists, and Danny took their pants and stuff and sprinted up to a streetlight up on Courthouse Street where lots of cars go by. He dropped the pile there and then him and Squid took off, running back to New Life. The way Squid put it, they had explained “don’t be an asshole” in terms anyone could understand. Even Harris and Tierden.
“Wow,” Marti said, “that was doing the job. So how many demerits was that, sixty-two million?”
I swallowed some coffee let my big smile build the effect. “Not even one.”
“Those guys must’ve narked, though, they’re such losers—”
“Of course they narked. Now we’re getting to the beautiful part. See, Danny and Squid had only been gone for like ten minutes, so they came back to the pay phone just outside the door of New Life, called, and asked for me. I pretended I was getting another call from my friend who was all messed up and hung up on the problem of pain, and Rev Dave started trying to get onto the phone with ‘her’ over my shoulder.
“Meanwhile Paul dashed around, opened the side door, and he and Squid and Danny cruised back in. Then my ‘friend on the phone’ turned out to be mad at me and hung up, and the three guys acted like they wanted to get another game of pool going, and when I called my nonexistent friend back—Darla’s house, just in case Rev Dave got nosy—she wouldn’t
answer.”
“Nonexistent friends can be like that.”
“You bet. I won’t date imaginary people anymore. My friend Larry keeps losing his virginity to them and it never works out.”
“Larry in math class? Okay, that’s another story I have to hear—”
“Oh, you will. Have faith in Larry. Anyway, meanwhile, back at the story I was telling, I apologized to Rev Dave, and us four guys shot pool for another hour and went home. Next day in school, Harris and Tierden turned up looking like raccoons and walking like old men. So of course, being pussies—”
“Pick a better word.”
“Uh, so, being wimps, they went to Emerson, the vice principal, and narked out Danny and Squid.”
Danny and Squid, of course, said they had an alibi, so Emerson called me and Paul in.
He made this big show out of asking us before we saw Danny and Squid, and not telling us what all the questions were about. Of course me and Paul just said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we shot pool with Danny and Squid—or Daniel and Esquibel, trying to sound super-sincere for the adults—all night at New Life. And of course we hung out and rapped about that groovy Bible thing with Rev Dave.
I mean, it was true except for about ten minutes out of four hours. Do the math, that works out to ninety-four percent true, that’s an A in truthfulness anywhere.
Emerson got the weirdest smile, and called New Life.
Rev Dave checked his check-in book and found that all four of us had had Pool Table A for an hour and a half before, and an hour after, Harris and Tierden said Danny and Squid beat them up. Rev Dave even added that he especially remembered us because we’d really rapped seriously about some heavy issues, and he thought he might have turned us on to the Book, and that we were really a bunch of far-out kids.
You really had to be there to see Emerson repeating, into the phone, in that flat vice principal voice, “Yes, Reverend, yes, I got that,” and writing down “turned on to the Book” and “far-out kids” on his yellow legal pad. We could hear Rev Dave’s voice through Emerson’s head because of all the enthusiasm the Rev had.