Tales of the Madman Underground

by John Barnes

  “Yeah, well.” He made the last turn, and the high school loomed before us. “Sometime soon we should all go out for Chinese—there’s a place in Port Clinton I love—and we can have a four-hour conversation in which nothing serious comes up. What do you think?”

  “Is that Jade Lotus Blossom?” I asked. “My friends and I have gone there a couple times, it’s awful.”

  “Yeah, but it’s awful exactly the way a Chinese restaurant on a Lake Erie beach ought to be awful. That’s why I love it. It’s just so fucking authentic.”

  I liked the way he said “fucking” around me. Like grown-up to grown-up, and all that shit. Like I figured I’d say it after I’d been in the army. “Sounds fucking great,” I said.

  I looked at my watch; I was going to be on time, even early. Driving took a lot less time than the school bus or walking. I guess if more people were to realize that, these automobile-thingies might really catch on.

  At the curb, Bill asked, “Are you going to be okay?”

  I wasn’t sure if he meant emotionally, financially, socially, or what. He might even have been asking if my dick was still hurting from having a giant Q-tip poked up it and twirled around. Anyway, not knowing what he meant, I said, “Yeah,” and knowing he meant it kindly I said, “Thank you” as I got out of the car.

  I closed his car door behind me and semiwaved. He flipped his hand up and popped into gear, a crazy little gnome dressed in sandals, jacket, and a rumpled pile of laundry, with gray Bozo flyers sticking out around his stupid fisherman cap. As he thundered away—had to be some major holes in that muffler—I thought, damn, she’ll get rid of him in a week, and I’ll miss him.

  At the top of the front steps to the main entrance, there was one of those excited, bunched little crowds you see sometimes in a high school, that mean something is happening that everyone wants to see and nobody wants adults to notice (at least not yet). Sometimes it would be something good for a laugh, like maybe Paul doing an imitation of some teacher, or some goofy piece of weird porno. Sometimes it would be shitheads on a rampage, like one time two years ago it was a couple jocks playing keepaway with Pancake Pete’s glasses, until I told them to stop (I had Squid standing beside me, which helped concentrate their attention). Most usually it would be some dumbass thing that just didn’t interest me, but you know how it goes—you can’t not look.

  So I climbed the front steps with only mild curiosity, figuring at best there might be a cheap laugh in it. But it got real quiet, and everyone turned around to stare at me.

  My first thought was that Stacy had gotten to school before I had.

  Then Paul stepped out of the crowd, with Danny and Squid right behind him. Squid’s arms were folded like a cop who doesn’t believe you, and Danny had his hand in the pockets of his FFA jacket and his shoulders hunched forward, so that I thought like he’s expecting a fight, and then I realized.

  Paul stepped forward. “So about you and Marti.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Something made me glance at Squid. There was something tight, almost too tight, about his expression, wound up and straining forward, like he was psyched for something.

  Of course.

  I stepped forward to Paul and said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do what I want, I’ve told you to get out of my way before. You gonna cry about it, pussy boy?”

  I had to kind of skip forward and turn my head to make sure I met his fist with my jaw, and even then I wasn’t sure I could block that slow, but then just in the last hair of a second, he figured out how to get his back and shoulder into it for real. He actually socked me a pretty good one, and I didn’t have to fake falling over at all, I can tell you that. I tumbled back about three steps on my ass and had to save myself with my hands, skinning them up a little.

  Paul glared down at me. He must not have thought of a good curtain line, because he just turned and walked away like Dirty Harry after a gunfight. Danny slouched off after him, being the solid sidekick. Squid chanced a wink to me, then did the same.

  I climbed to my feet, a little unsteady because that punch really had landed. I was the center of attention for just an instant, then the kids who had been the crowd started to fade away, going to find someone they could tell the story to: Psycho Shoemaker, decked by the school fairy.

  Operation Be Fucking Normal did not appear to be working out.

  In my locker, on top of everything, I found Gratz’s get-out-of-therapy letter, still in its signed and sealed envelope. I held it in my hand for a long time, like it was a feather from an angel wing. Then all the people crashing around the hall behind me pulled me back to reality, and I grabbed up what I needed.

  I walked into Gratz’s class like two minutes before class time, with almost everyone except the Madmen already there. I walked up to his desk, where he was pretending to review notes, and set my letter down firmly but gently in front of him, like it was covered with adhesive and I needed to stick it to the desk.

  He looked up. I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Sir, I’ve thought about it ever since Friday, and, um. Um. What I mean to say is—” Then it just popped out of my mouth, like when you try to sneak a fart in church, planning to just barely raise up the old butt cheek and let it escape quietly, but instead, uncontrollably, massively, and with a noise like an elephant being raped by a tuba, you shit your pants. “Coach,” I said, “I can’t help myself. It’s the peer pressure. Or maybe it’s all the drugs I take. But I read those chapters of Huckleberry Finn and I just kept thinking, two queers on a raft.”

  “Are you making fun of me?!”

  “Well, I’m trying, but I’m not sure you’re getting it.”

  He turned purple, and looked about ready to belt me, and finally he said, “Hunh.” Then he heaved a big sigh, dropped the sealed letter into the trash can beside him, and said, “You better hurry, you’ll be late.”

  Dip me in shit and paint me blue if I’ll ever understand Coach Gratz.

  From the way it got quiet, I could guess what the subject of conversation had been just before I walked into the therapy room. I sat down. “Sorry, guys, I know you weren’t expecting me, but I just did some major disrupting in Gratz’s class and, well, here I am.”

  Paul, who had been sounding real excited just as I came in, and then gone dead quiet, didn’t look at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, you got a real solid punch on me and I think I’ll have a lump on my jaw, so it’s lucky I never have used my head for much. But I really didn’t know you had a punch like that in you, Paul, and considering what it did to my jaw—is your hand okay? Can you still play your instruments and draw?”

  “I’m fine,” Paul said—always generous when people gave him attention and praise, and who knew that better than me? “And I didn’t know that I had that in me, either. I wanted to hit you but I didn’t mean to hit you that hard. It looks like you’re getting a bruise, too.”

  I touched my jaw; it was tender and I could feel stuff gooshing around a little. “Think you’re right.”

  “Boys,” Marti said, in about the tone she’d use to say “dogshit,” if there’d been some on the floor.

  “Yeah,” Darla said, agreeing hard enough to freeze the rest of us. She and Marti were glaring, and Bonny and Cheryl didn’t exactly look extra happy, either.

  “Uh,” I said. “We needed to talk cause we had a fight.”

  “Oh, boy, did you have a fight,” Bonny said, “like the biggest fight since maybe World War Two. Now if you boys are done congratulating each other over that manly sock in the jaw, can we talk about the fact that Marti is going to be hassled by every dumb ass loser in the school now, because they’re going to figure she’s easy?”

  “Plus they’ve realized her standards are low,” Darla said, looking right at me to make sure I got it, because she clearly doubted I was smart enough. “Karl gets to be all cool and dangerous and the bad boy. Marti just got stuck being a slut. And you guys can’t stop talking about what big balls Paul has.”

  “Now, w
ait a sec,” Danny said, in that reasonable-guy commentator voice that he used to impress teachers with how mature he was. “In the first place, punching out another guy for messing with your girlfriend is like primo antihomo for Paul’s image. No more dumbasses from the team hassling him. That’s why Squid and I were cheering for you, Paul, and made sure no one interfered.”

  “And we kept you from getting carried away and really hurting Karl,” Squid added.

  I was about to say, like shit, I took one punch and I knew what for, but in a real fight I’d’ve pounded Paul into the pavement, when I realized what Squid was doing for Paul. Not for the first time, I thought, okay, I understand why adults think Squid is stupid, because he’s big and talks slow and his parents were tomato pickers, and that’s how adults think, the stupid bastards. But why the hell did I ever think that?

  “Well, this is all great and wonderful and shit,” Darla said, “and just so groovy. For the guys. So Paul doesn’t get beat up. But Marti still gets labeled, and she’s gonna have Scott Tierden-type creeps trying to get into her pants, and if you guys’d just stop banging your damn antlers a minute you’d see what a fucked-up mess Karl just made out of Marti’s life, hanging all this shit around her neck.”

  I was stunned. “But you tell everyone that you—”

  “Karl, don’t be a bigger social retard-o than you have to be, okay? Just this once try to see how things really work? Okay, so like it’s the seventies and all, I am woman hear me roar, a girl can do whatever she wants and brag about it. Except one thing: she can’t get caught. Getting caught makes her look stupid and slutty, at least to every half-brained slimeball in the fucking world, and she—”

  “Good morning, everyone!” The lady who floated through the door in a cloud of books, papers, briefcase, and clipboard, like she’d just shoplifted a whole stationery store but didn’t have a bag for anything, was kind of tall and thin, with a pixie face and blonde hair down to the middle of her back with bangs all down her forehead. She wore a short brown leather dress with a big brass zipper that went from the neck to the hem, over a white fuzzy sweater. She had big honking Ping-Pong ball earrings like my mom wore, and textured panty hose, and black plastic clunky-wedgy shoes. You could just tell she’d been the cutest chick in her sorority three years ago, or maybe the lead singer in a Jesus-rock antidrug band, but she hadn’t been able to afford new clothes during her three years of shrink school.

  “I’m Doctor Leslie Schwinn,” she said, dropping that whole huge heap of books and papers on one end of the table. Looked like Theory One was right; she would try to make us fit all that stuff from the book. “And I’m going to start off by sharing my biggest fear. This is the first real therapy group of my professional career, and my biggest fear is that I’m just not ready for this yet.”

  “My name is Darla Pilsudski, and I’m going to share with you that your biggest fear is probably right.”

  Schwinn drew a breath, but before she could speak, Darla had sat straight up, brightly exclaimed, “What’s that, Mr. Babbitt?” and pulled her stuffed bunny out of her purse, listening to him like a phone. “Mr. Babbitt wants to know what kind of shrink you are? We’ve had TA a lot lately but we’re also experienced with Freud ians and there was a sort of half-ass Maslow-man we all liked.”

  “Your file mentioned Mr. Babbitt, and—”

  “Did it mention that Mr. Babbitt is usually the smartest person in the room?” Squid asked.

  Schwinn was hanging on to that poise for all it was worth, and she brightened and smiled at him. “You must be Esquibel.”

  “Well, if you say I must be. I was gonna be Cheryl this year, for a change.”

  Schwinn laughed, not making it convincing at all. “I can tell we’ll all enjoy your sense of humor. I thought we should start out kind of light today, just sort of build the group—”

  “The thing is,” Danny said, leaning forward, and looking pretty much like your shrewd old farmer type if you could look like that at seventeen, “it’s built. Most of us have been here through ten or twenty therapists. We kind of lose count.”

  “Oh, that’s not a problem,” Cheryl said. “I keep a diary and I just counted last summer.”

  “That’s interesting, but—” Schwinn was still trying to hang in there, but now we had something to run with.

  Cheryl rolled right on. “If you count from seventh grade, when Karl, Paul, and Bonny came in from Lincoln Elementary and me, Danny, and Hank came in from McKinley—Hank moved in tenth grade, Doctor Schwinn, we don’t have a lot of stories about him—then counting Doctor Schwinn here, it’s been eighteen therapists from seventh grade to date. My grade school group at McKinley had four before we got here.”

  “Paul and me just had two, and Bonny joined halfway through sixth grade,” I said, filling in some more, “along with Amy, who left the group in eighth and then got killed in a car wreck last year. What happened to Peter?”

  “Moved to Tiffin in the middle of the school year, but he was so quiet no one noticed,” Darla said. “One of those rock and drool types. So just keeping track, then, Mr. Babbitt says that eighteen plus four plus two is twenty-four in Ohio, although some of the churchies will tell you that’s just a theory. But I also had private therapists all along—”

  “I had private ones besides my group ones too,” Marti said. I’d been noticing that she almost busted out in a metal-mouth grin once she saw what we were all doing, but she had her game face on now and was ready to play with us. “It’s what weird girls with rich parents do.”

  “Then you’re a weird girl with rich parents and a private shrink too!” Darla exclaimed, like she’d just realized it. “And we both know that Gratz is an evil bully and Karl and Paul are complete shits. We are so bonded.” She threw her arms around Marti.

  “Cool! Do I get a rabbit?”

  “You can use mine till you get your own.”

  “This is all very funny,” Schwinn said, meaning it wasn’t. “Now if you’re all done—”

  “Done?” I don’t know why but she’d just pissed me off completely, or maybe I was mad at Darla and taking it out on Schwinn, which was a good place to take it out. “Lady, some of us have been here eight or ten years and we’re never getting ‘done.’ We’re just graduating. I mean, that’s our point, if you haven’t got that yet. We need the group to get by, but we ain’t getting better.”

  “Nonetheless,” Schwinn said, putting on a toothy smile so fake it should’ve gone to church, “I need to get acquainted with all of you, and we need to discuss our goals in therapy for this year—”

  “You need to do all that,” Bonny said. She seemed to have leaped right over gypsy and gone for fairy princess when she dressed this morning, with a billowy rainbow skirt, about ten iridescent blouses that stuck out through each other, stripey socks I think she stole from the Wicked Witch of the West, and huge wedge heels. “You are the one who has to do paperwork and report on how we’re doing and all that shit. You have to do that because that is your job. We have other stuff to do. You happened to turn up when we’ve got some urgent things to do, and we have to do them today, so we don’t have time to do the usual shrink thing of pretending we’re all going to be great friends. Now if you are nice to us, and we get to trust you in a few weeks or so, we’ll let you hang around and take the credit. So just write down on your little pad that you met the group, many of us have serious problems, and you are especially worried about Paul, Marti, and Karl, because that will make you look real smart if any bad shit happens, which it is likely to do if we don’t get going on fixing things—which is a hint, guys, let’s stop clowning and figure out what we need to do.”

  Schwinn looked shocked and confused. I think that happens because the shrink schoolteachers all did their therapy work, if they ever did it, back in the 1950s when no one outside of shrink school had ever even heard of the whole shrinkamatology routine, so they never had kids who knew what the game was. So the teachers at shrink school didn’t tell little bookaholic posit
ive-attitude moron-girls like Leslie Schwinn, who probably got into psych because it was just such a super thing to be able to help people, that the clowns might already know what the ringmaster had in mind, and have other plans for the circus.

  “I’m not going to forge my records,” Schwinn said, sounding really shocked for the first time. You could tell some prof she’d liked had told her the records were the most important thing.

  This was a perfect moment. I’d recognized Bon’s tactics; good thing the Madmen had two sales people in the group, because Bon’s “are you gonna buy or should I walk” needed the walk-out close to complete it, and I knew how to do that one. “No one is asking you to forge the records,” I said, turning up the charm. “Look, you seem nice and all. We don’t want you to be in trouble. But we have a big mess to cope with, and we know how to handle it, and you’re coming in too late for this one. Just the way it goes. We need this time.

  “So grab your pen. We’ve been through this with so many shrinks that we know all about first meetings, which is why Darla asked what kind of therapy you do. Now, if you let us get you through this first-day thing in like five minutes, so we can use the rest of the time to sort out the group emergency, we will let you just watch and listen while we solve our problems, and you will know a fuckload more than the average shrink knows about us at the end of the first month, I can tell you that. And have all your paperwork right.” Continuing to be a sales guy, I assumed the close and proceeded like she’d already signed. “Okay, then. Pencil ready, Doctor Schwinn? Now, everybody just spit it out, you know the basics she needs to get down on paper today, and no bullshit.” I made a point of glaring at Darla. “Doctor Schwinn needs us to keep our side of the deal.”

  “Um, actually, um. I prefer that you call me Leslie—”

  “Oh, you’re one of the nice informal ones!” Cheryl turned on a smile as fake as Schwinn’s. “Okay, Leslie, I’m Cheryl Taliaferro, I lose my temper and have crying fits and have trouble saying no to sex, and I’m an incest victim.” Schwinn’s pencil was moving; whether she wanted to or not, she was writing it down.