I was sure of one thing—if the Clean People had taken me that day, things wouldn’t have turned out any better. When I was in the sixth grade at Clinton Elementary, there was a new kid there. The elementary was small enough so whenever there was a new kid who showed up, everyone knew right away who they were. Everyone called this kid Elf because he was so much smaller than the other kids were and his ears were sort of abnormally pointed. Like a lot of losers did, we started talking to each other because no one else would give us the time of day.
The family had lived in Milltown since I was in the second grade and I had yet to meet a big enough loser to call a friend. I was in sixth grade before Elf came along. And I couldn’t really say that Elf was a friend. Losers always have kind of shaky relationships, especially when they’re adolescents, which pretty much puts them in the same category as a sociopath. Like they just spend time together until something better comes along, avoiding any real emotional attachments. For instance, I can’t remember Elf’s real name. He probably wouldn’t remember my name at all.
Anyway, Elf had been through one of those blobbification programs. He was actually taken out of his home. The people who took him away from his folks though, he didn’t call them the Clean People. He said his father called them the Ringmasters. Elf really didn’t find out why he was taken out of the house until he went to live with the new people. They had told Elf how glad he should be to be living with them.
Apparently, his real parents didn’t send him to school. I always thought that was weird because Elf was probably the smartest kid in the sixth grade. It sounded like Elf’s real parents were fantastic. He couldn’t stand the new parents. They already had three kids of their own and didn’t really pay any attention to Elf. He said they only took him in so they could get paid for it. They left most of the discipline up to their oldest son, who would lock Elf in a closet just for the hell of it. Just like I had imagined, Elf was their pet, something cute and new for the family to fawn over for a few weeks until they realized he had needs like every other living thing.
Elf’s real mother stayed home all day with Elf and they had their own school, without the distractions of the other kids. The most fantastic thing was that Elf’s dad was a professional clown. Elf said his dad thoroughly enjoyed being a clown. Sometimes he wouldn’t change his clothes when he came home from clowning. In fact, sometimes when his dad came home, Elf and his mother would dress like clowns before they all sat down to dinner. Elf’s dad told him the only thing funnier than watching a clown was actually being a clown. Elf enjoyed dressing like a clown but he still had more fun watching his dad. Elf said dressing like a clown made him feel like he had to perform, like he was somehow obligated to entertain his parents. Like I said, Elf was the smartest kid I knew. These were the things Elf talked about. It wasn’t until years later that I realized he could have been lying to me. Not about his being taken from his parents, I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth about that, but what his parents were actually like before he was taken away.
The new parents had also told Elf that his old house was a complete and total wreck. Elf said he was upset when he had to leave the house because, ever since he was able to pick up a crayon, the parents had let him draw on the walls. Just before he was taken away, Elf was heavy into magazines and was working on a giant collage in his bedroom. Even in the sixth grade, Elf could see that the walls of his house were going to be his life’s work. Until being yanked out, he said he felt like that was what he was chosen to do.
About the other messes, Elf said his dad couldn’t understand the point of putting anything back when you were just going to be getting it right back out. Shelving merely eliminated the wall space, which was invaluable for Elf’s artistic endeavors. If they decided they didn’t want something anymore, they would set it out on the curb for someone else to take. Also, through the week, they just threw all their trash out the backdoor and made this big pile. At the end of the week they would rake it all up and burn it. Elf’s dad told him if they put all their stuff in the trashcan it would eventually just be buried into the earth. Elf’s dad also had a hatred of trashbags. He said if humans weren’t careful, they would find themselves living on a giant trashbag.
If there was one thing I didn’t like about Elf, it was that he talked about himself too much. I would rather have known he was making everything up. While he knew virtually nothing about me, I had a firm handle on his life history. But I liked Elf. It’s always seemed like everyone has annoyed me in some way or the other.
One day at school, Elf talked about running away. I think Elf had seen too many movies. He seemed to think he would be able to go to some large city and be taken in by some fabulously rich family who had always wanted a child. He said he wanted to go to New York. He’d heard that was where you could paint and get paid for it. Also, a lot of the trains that came through Milltown had elaborate spraypainted designs on them. He said if no one would buy his paintings then he would be perfectly happy spraypainting those trains and maybe walls and subways also. He said it would be like starting his life’s work over again except, this way, the whole country would be able to see it. It always amazed me how serious Elf was. Lying there beside the road and waiting for those black clouds to break over my body, I didn’t have any more plans or ideas than I did on that sixth grade playground talking to Elf. The next day, after telling me about running away, he wasn’t at school. I never saw him again. I hoped he made it to New York. I hoped he was able to make it. I hoped he was able to make himself weightless enough to do whatever it was he wanted to do.
I never told anyone he had mentioned running away, not even the mother and father. When I thought about that, I wondered if Elf wasn’t a rent-a-kid. That’s what happens to the children the social services take. They don’t always put them up for adoption into good homes. That usually only happened to babies. An older child was usually put into foster care, rented out. And maybe Elf knew he was like a book that had lain around the house too long. Maybe he knew he was going back to the library and decided to make it sound romantic and grand. No doubt the orphanages were just like a library. When a book first comes out, there is a waiting list for it. Two years later, people will deny they’d ever read the thing in the first place.
Even though that was most probably the truth, Elf’s present parents simply returning him after they’d paid off the mortgage on the house or something, I didn’t want to believe it. I realized that, more than anything, more than the fuckness or the parents or miserable little Milltown Middle, I was tired of reality. Maybe everything outside of reality was a lie but, lying there on the ground, I realized I needed all those fantasies. I needed Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I needed to believe the movies were just like real life. I needed to believe people weren’t judged by how much money they made or how much schooling they’d had. I needed to believe the moon was made of cheese. Maybe I even needed to believe the parents were always right and maybe I even needed a God to pray to.
Maybe I needed it or maybe I needed to deny it all. There was a rip somewhere in the middle of my body or my brain—half of it said I needed to believe everything and the other half said I shouldn’t believe any of it. Was it a breakdown? That’s what it felt like except I thought of it as more of a meltdown. Like everything that had ever been said to me, everything I’d ever done, every feeling I’d ever felt—all pressed down on me. I felt it enter my skin and crawl around in my veins. I felt all the fuckness beating a tattoo against my bones.
The whumming clanged along in my skull, a black death train. Nausea wrestled with my stomach and fought its way up to the back of my throat.
What came out was a shriek.
I raised myself up to my knees, holding my whumming head with both hands. The storm broke, the rain a distant whisper over the hills before drumming down on my face. Wicked lightning snapped, a jagged blue across the black of the sky.
“Why the hell is this happening to me!” I shouted at the clouds.
; I grabbed the horns and wrestled with them. Were they fate, handed down to me? If so, maybe this would be my last tangle with it, the last chance to change it. Violently, I tugged and pulled at them with every ounce of strength I had. I flopped all around on the wet ground, splashing around on the grass as I tried to brace myself against the ground, pulling and pulling to get them off.
It was hopeless. Exhausted, I sprawled back down on the grass, opening my eyes wide and letting the cold rain cleanse them, wash the burning away.
A car sped by and a McDonald’s sack hit me in the face.
I stood up on trembling legs. My skin felt hot against the rain.
Maybe it was fate, I thought. Maybe I didn’t have any will of my own. But there were directions. Above all the contradictory voices there was that singular feeling I felt, more and more, like I had to listen to. I knew I still had to get to the Tar District and, amazingly, I still felt weightless.
Chapter Thirteen
Johnny Metal
Maybe it was just the storm but it seemed like it was getting dark incredibly early. Of course, I had no real idea of what time it actually was. For all I knew, I could have lain down by the road for a half an hour or three hours. I didn’t know and I didn’t really care. Maybe I cared too much. I don’t know. It seemed like as the sky got darker, my mood darkened also. The weightlessness was replaced with some sort of grim determination. The rain had tapered off a little. The lightning and thunder had rolled on. In the distance I could see the depressing yellow glow of the Tar District, the drizzle and mist creating tainted haloes around the street lamps.
Pretty much what I did was just stay on the state route. Honestly, I don’t really know if it was Milltown that was curved or if it was the state route. One time, when we were still living in Farmertown, Racecar drove us out for a vacation on the East Coast. I remember we took all state routes because the mother wanted to see all the historical small towns of Eastern America for some reason I now found vaguely obscene. I remember it so well because Racecar was mad that he couldn’t drive on the highway.
“If we’d taken the highway we coulda been there by now on half the gas.”
He decided to elaborate on this theory when we were stuck at a traffic light at the end of a long line. “You wanted your chance to see the small towns, well, here you go. If you want to, you could probably get out and catch some local color before we ever get movin again. Damned state routes.”
“Oh, Carl, relax,” the mother said.
Perhaps from that experience, I should have known that all state routes were, in some form or the other, damned. I could still hear the click of the father’s cigarette lighter, becoming more incessant as we got closer to Maine. Eventually he just lit one right off the other. He certainly didn’t do a very good job of relaxing.
I felt kind of like the mother and the father as I slurped along the side of that road. All those conflicts that had first started a while ago were still raging along inside of me—half of them driving me onward, telling me I had to get to the Tar District and whatever wild bleak yonder lay after that and the other half telling me I should just relax, soak it all up.
“These are the best days of your life,” I laughed to myself.
I still wondered if I cared about what was happening to me at all or if I cared too much. Maybe it was better not to care. None of the fucking blobs cared—they didn’t care about anything. And there was something about their not caring that made them perfectly happy.
That kind of brought me back to the question of what the hell I was really doing. Was it some sort of moral dilemma or some sort of quest for freedom? I thought I was really too young to be having a moral dilemma and I guess it could have been both but those sets of voices in my head or body wanted things to be one way or another and they wanted those things to be in direct opposition to each other. A moral dilemma became a moral crisis. A quest for freedom became a violent and binding struggle.
Did Pearlbottom ever have a moral dilemma? I doubted it. I mean, the fucking blob devoured livestock in the hallway, for fucking Chrissake. And that fatass Swarth and his merry gang of Marlboro men. The only moral dilemma they had was when they raped someone, if they should do it single-handedly or if they should have their friends help. I was certain the only dilemma Mary Lou ever had was whether she should wear red or hot pink. I’m pretty sure there was a time when the parents had had moral dilemmas, but the mother had since used alcohol and a vigorous zest for cleaning to take her mind off any questions of morality. The father channeled all of it into hate—pure, unadulterated, stumpy hate.
Whatever it was I was feeling, it certainly wasn’t weightlessness. Not anymore. It was now like some kind of heavy soulhurt.
I was in a daze, just about ready to enter the Tar District. I stood hypnotized by the closeness of the dingy brown buildings. The storefronts were all adorned with outdated neon signs. I was sure all of these places were still open. Unlike the Historic District of Milltown, there weren’t 9-5 businesses like insurance agencies and banks. The Tar District was bars and tattoo parlors and bars and pool halls and triple- X video places and bars and pawnshops and bars and check cashing places and 24-hour diners for people to sober up in after the bars closed. I stood just outside that sickly yellow glow, watching the distant images of people shuffling around. According to the mother, these people were all either drunk or high on crack. A giant wave of depression washed over me. So this was where I wanted to come. This is where the inner feeling brought me. I felt both afraid and pathetic. Was I going to be one of them? Relax, I told myself, you’re just here to meet your Uncle Skad.
But what if he’s one of them?
And then I was lost, frozen. I stood there staring into the Tar District, nearly legendary for its seductive cruelty, and was completely unable to move.
I don’t know how much time passed before I was finally jolted alive by an excruciatingly loud train horn. I realized that I was standing maybe five feet away from the tracks.
For those who haven’t lived right next to train tracks, as I had for the past several years, a train’s sound seems to be made only of the whistle, somewhere far off in the distance, dragging its mysterious freight through the thick night air. During the day, some other distraction could keep you from noticing the sound at all. But a train’s sounds are really deafening. There’s the whistle, sure, but it is augmented, as though it’s funneled through a bullhorn. And there are other sounds, almost as deafening. There’s the rumblesqueak of the train itself, shooting along those steel rails, coupled with a nearly constant bell that tingalings throughout the train’s entire passing. Standing there, so close to the train, I was still overwhelmed by how loud it was. This one wasn’t going very fast. I figured it must have been dragging something away from one of those factories.
I looked to my right, down the train’s length. It was a long one. Something else caught my eye. Some dark object, not large enough to be a person, flew off the train, landed in the grass, and kind of skipped down the small incline there. I took a few steps toward the object, whatever the fuck it was, before the man flew out nearly right in front of me. He hit the ground with a bit of a grunt and went rolling down the hill, a few feet from the object he’d just hurled out.
I was excited to think this might be my first meeting with an honest-to-God hobo. Drifter Ken was adamant about being a drifter. According to him, a hobo was more clearly defined as someone who was constantly moving, often traveling in a pack, and usually by train. Sometimes they conjured up lovingly outdated images of a folksy person, a guitar slung over one shoulder, a knapsack tied around a stick slung over the other. Drifter Ken stayed some place until the law ran him out of town and then he want to the next place by foot. I think he liked the outlaw spin placed on drifters.
The man stood up, brushing wet grass off of his skintight pants. He looked dizzy and confused.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He picked a couple pieces of grass out of his curly blond hai
r. Even in the darkness, there was nothing natural-looking about that hair. It looked like it had been bleached a while ago, hanging to his shoulders in curls. Bangs had been cut straight across his forehead.
“I’ve died and gone straight to hell.” Then I guess he noticed I was trying to help and he smiled a little, his teeth gross within his mottled flesh. “What the hell’s them things on your head?”
“They’re horns.”
“Well I can see they’re horns, but why the hell’re they there? On your head. What are you tryin to pull? You’re not a Satan worshipper are you?”
“No.”
“You gotta be careful. I hear the Satan worshippers are fairly prevalent around here. I’m from back East. Back there you got your occasional psycho or mass murderer, whatever the hell, some office worker snaps and fires off a few rounds in a mall somewhere but the cult stuff’s spooky shit. I had a friend who’s a cop over in Illinois. He says they pulled some dead sacka shit outta some ditch and the poor bastard didn’t have any ears. Now whatta you reckon some sickos gonna do with this guy’s ears?” I briefly imagined someone holding this pair of severed ears up to their head, having a joyous time at the thrill of having a new set of ears.
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