by Chris Lynch
“That’s good,” Mike said. He was doing the serious thing again, which somehow was even more degrading than Frankie’s ridicule thing. See, when Frankie abused and humiliated me, it was half accidental, because he was teaching me life in his style, and his style was mayhem. But when Mikie did it, he was being Dad. He was always right, and we all knew it. If Mikie was bringing me down, I always assumed down was where I belonged.
“Maybe you wouldn’t have the ’rhoids if you’d keep the weight under control. ...”
See? Like that.
“So what. You guys can stop worrying about my health, and we can skip the Big and Tall Shop because since my diet started this morning I’ve already gotten everything under control. So let’s skip the clothes store and go on over and spend the money at Pizzeria Uno instead.”
“Come on, El, the dance is Friday. You can’t lose that much by then, and I am determined to get you some companionship if it kills me,” Frankie said.
And you thought he couldn’t be nice.
“We can’t change you,” he added, “but we might be able to disguise you, with the right outfit.”
Never mind.
I looked up at the sign again. I closed my eyes tight. I opened them again. It was still there. It was still big and tall.
“I can’t do it. This is the lowest, you know? Do you understand, what I am admitting, if I start buying my clothes in there? Huh? Do ya?”
They looked at each other, then looked back at me.
“Uh-huh,” they both said.
So. See these are the things here at fourteen long hard years, the things I have to reassess. Are these guys my friends, my best-of-alls, because they are the people who will tell me the truth? Or would they be better for me if they could just make me feel good by saying whatever necessary? Y’know, every part of me, every cell, every jiggly cell, wants to tell them to shut up, beat it boys, leave me alone. Two problems with that, though. First, they probably wouldn’t listen to me if I did tell them to blow. Second, then again they might.
That still doesn’t mean I was ready to take this thing head-on.
“Well, no sale,” I said. “I can’t do it. I can’t admit that.”
So there we were. Two well-proportioned high school freshmen and myself, standing outside the B&T, staring.
“You’re tall,” Mikie said suddenly.
“Huh?” I asked.
“Huh?” Frank asked.
“You’re tall, Elvin,” Mike repeated. “You had a growth spurt recently or something? Because I didn’t realize before this how tall you are. Isn’t that right, Franko?”
Franko was a little slow on the uptake. “Tall? I suppose, he’s maybe kinda tall. Where we goin’ with this?”
“Tall, Frank. He’s tall. He’s wicked tall.” Mikie was gesturing madly up at the Big and Tall sign as he spoke, trying to get the point over.
As a thinker, Frank is a very handsome guy. But eventually he got it. “Ah,” Frank said, “tall. You been drinking giraffe milk, El? Listen, we got to get you into the Big and Tall shop, get you outfitted. ...”
We had magically gotten to that place where a person’s life becomes so pathetic it isn’t even embarrassing anymore. I was enjoying it.
I allowed myself to be tugged toward the shop, each friend pulling one of my hands.
“I better duck on the way in,” I said as Mikie held the glass door open for me.
“Better pull on your boots too,” Frank said. “It’s gettin’ deep.”
Mike elbowed him in the chest.
“Yes sir, what can I show you?” the very big and not so tall salesguy said. To me.
I frowned at him. “How do you know it’s me? There are three of us just walked in, so how come you came right up to me, huh?”
The guy flinched. Then he looked at Mikie, who got way up on his toes, pointed at me, smiled and nodded at the guy. Frank, who was about three inches taller than me, slouched dramatically and gave the guy the high sign.
Good friends. Knuckleheads, but good friends.
“Oh, well, you’re the tall guy,” the salesman said to me. “Obviously.”
I suppose he’d served a neurotic defensive fatty or two in his career.
“He’d like to see some of your finest tall-people pants, please,” Mikie said.
The salesman looked at my waist. “Thirty-eight, right, Stretch?”
“You got it, cowboy,” I said, and we followed him to the racks.
It was a pretty silly scene, actually. Mike would select a shirt and Frank would select the pants to match, nobody would ask me anything, and then I’d try on whatever they pushed on me. “Right this way,” the salesman said; then he’d shove me into a snug-fitting dressing room where I’d wrestle with the ensemble, trying to get it on and get a look at myself in the mirror that was practically rubbing up against me and trying not to expose the glory of me too soon as the skimpy curtain that served as a door insisted on attaching itself to me with all its static clingy might.
I know, by the way, that they do hide surveillance cameras in dressing rooms. It’s against the law and all, but we all know they do it. And it’s not to catch shoplifters half as much as it is to catch scenes like this one. I’d do it if I were them.
“Come out,” Mikie called the first time I took twenty minutes with an outfit.
“Cripes,” he said when I came out wearing my own clothes. “What the hell, El?”
I mumbled. “Try thirty-nine.”
“Jeez,” Frankie said. “Whatja do, Elvin, bring snacks in there with ya?”
I retained all my dignity. Fortunately this didn’t take long since I didn’t bring all that much with me in the first place. “Thirty... nine, please.”
“There should be a law,” Frank grumbled, snatching the pants away from me. Frank takes fashion issues very seriously. “If your waist number is bigger than your inseam number, you should be forced to wear corduroys that thigh-whistle at you every day till you get your act together.”
I didn’t have to take that kind of crap off him. There are moments in life when even us even-tempered guys have to spout. This was one of those moments. This was where I needed to draw a line. When the going gets tough and all that, right?
Right?
“And bring me back a Coke,” I yelled.
That would have been funny, huh? If I were trying to make a joke instead of a stand.
It was a real boys’ day out though. I tried on seventeen combinations without even counting the hats and socks. The guys were very patient with me.
“Cripes, Elvin, just wear a toga,” Frank said.
“Hang in there five more minutes, Elvin,” Mike cracked, “and that outfit will qualify as secondhand and you’ll get it cheaper.”
“Five more minutes and you’ll owe me rent/’ the salesman snapped.
“Sheesh,” I said. “What a grouch. Maybe a year from now when I buy my next new outfit I’ll take my business somewhere else.”
“If you’re even out of the dressing room by then,” he said.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Mikie said. “They’re wheeling in the spring collection. A whole season changed while you were in there. New colors, new fabrics.”
Can’t believe I fell for it. I stuck my head out through the curtain again, and they nabbed me. Frank grabbed my head, Mikie ran into the dressing room and collected all my old clothes, shoes, everything, and the salesman led the group of us to the register.
“He’ll take this,” somebody said, the voice muffled by the arm around my head.
But they were right. I looked smashing. Once I got my shoes on I was a new man, and all I wanted to do was parade around that mall and check myself out in every store window. The shirt was one of those granddad things, with about a hundred buttons running between the straight-up collar and the navel, where the button deal stopped entirely. A button-down shirt that you still have to pull over head! Madness. Fashion genius. I could feel everybody looking at me, and well they should, with that on
e subtle-but-daring powder-blue stripe running between each pair of brown stripes. Imagine!
And brown jeans. You heard me. Brown. I looked at my reflection in the Puppy Palace and had to just shake my head. Brown jeans. Not the basic boring blue jeans. Not even the now-cliched black jeans. Even the drug-addicted dogs of Puppy Palace sat up and took notice. Right, well they didn’t sit up exactly, not all the way up, but their heads lifted, a couple of them, with the drool making wood shavings stick to their chins like little goat beards.
Maybe somebody would buy them, finally, if they were disguised as goats.
Even the hopeless basset hound—who had been sitting right there in that front window since the mall opened in 1987, who couldn’t even remember being a puppy (and judging from his glassy eyes couldn’t remember this morning), who had been reduced to fifteen dollars with a coupon for a ten-pound bag of dry dog food—even he dragged himself closer to the glass and checked me out. I read his floppy brown felt lips.
“Wow,” the basset hound said.
Then he fell over dead. Finally, mercifully, dead. I killed him.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a fashion statement.
“Oh, he is not dead, ya jerk,” Frankie said as he walked on ahead. “He always sleeps like that.”
Mikie went up close to the glass. “I don’t know, Franko. His nose is pressed right up to the window, and he’s not fogging it.”
“He hasn’t been able to fog the glass since that little girl dropped him at the sidewalk sale.”
“Maybe if he’s dead,” Mike mused, “we could go in and see if they’ll let us have him for a fiver. The bag of food is worth that much, and I can bring that home to feed to Freckles, my hamster, for the rest of his life.”
Frankie laughed. Obviously these guys were not as tuned as I to the bigness of this moment. I had just gone from portly ragbag to Killer Joe Ladyslayer in one afternoon. The dance was two days away, and I didn’t even want to go to sleep until then. I picked up the pace and led the boys on a few brisk laps of the mall. We looked like one of those old-dude mallwalker exercise clubs.
“I can’t wait for the Ball now.”
“The Ball?” they both yiked at once.
“Elvin, calm thyself, all right?” Mike said. “This isn’t a ball. It’s not even a real dance, really. It’s like... a lab exercise. Almost like a cross between an extra gym class and a social skills seminar.”
“It’s for scouting reports, really,” Franko said. “So they can tell right off the bat who they gotta keep tabs on.” He put his fists on his narrow hips and looked me and Mikie up and down. “You guys are safe. But they’re gonna make me wear one of those electronic monitor ankle bracelets for the whole year once they see me dance.”
I’ve seen him dance. Without a girl, even. Saw him in his basement, demonstrating moves with a full-length mirror reflective version of himself. He should wear one of those anklets. He should wear one on each ankle. And they should be linked together with a sturdy little chain.
“But it’s so stupid,” I said. “They’re having it Friday afternoon. It won’t even be dark by the time it’s over. How much trouble could we get into?”
Frankie’s eyes went big and bug on me. I was such a challenge for him that he often couldn’t decide whether to get angry at me or pity me. Usually he managed both. “God, are you ever gonna grow up to life’s possibilities, El? Bring a notebook and watch me closely.”
I didn’t care if it was a practice dance to grade us on social skills, or a lab experiment to flush out the Frankie among us, or an extra gym class slipped into the schedule. As long as I got to glide into my new duds and lay the new-model Elvin on a batch of captive girl folk.
Might be nice, after all, to get a close-up look at some girls when there was a chance they might actually look back. I felt half stupid for paying so much attention to how I looked, because that was so not me. But at the moment I wanted a little more than just me. Was that something to apologize for?
No. Full steam ahead. I wore the clothes for the rest of Wednesday afternoon. Put them on again to wear around the house for an hour before school on Thursday. Put them right back on when I got home that afternoon. I was primed. The clothes do make the man, and they made me into Mr. Slickmaster.
I was so confident I forgot all about my diet. Who needs a diet when you’re Mr. Slickmaster?
“Oh my god,” I yelled first thing Friday morning. The Friday morning. Dance Friday. Good Friday Great Friday.
Fat Friday.
“No, no, no!” I yelled at myself in that desperate, deathly wheezy voice a person makes when he tries to suck in his stomach and scream at himself at the same time.
“Suck!” I yelled.
“Elvin Bishop,” my mother yelled back, from outside my bedroom door.
“Not the swear suck, Ma, the command Suck!” I explained more calmly. “I’m talking to my stomach. It grew. Ma, it grew, just since last night. Out of no place. Like the virgin birth.”
I yanked. I fell back on the bed. I pulled. You know the method, right? Grab a fistful of material with your right hand and try to haul the button across the great plains over to the other side where your left fist is cattle-driving the buttonhole over to meet it. But what you really do is wind up torquing yourself all over the place like a washing machine.
I looked just like one of those sexy ads with the models pulling on shrink-to-fits by standing on their heads and writhing on satin sheets and... you know.
Just like that.
“Suck!”
“Elvin, that is enough.”
“Poof, Ma. Just like that. Out of nowhere. Just since last night.”
“Out of nowhere? Virgin birth? Just since last night? Just since the pot roast, you mean? And since the cherry pie with ice cream, and the yogurt-covered raisins?” She was fully in the room now, bold and uninvited. I was lying flat on my back on the floor staring up at her with my pants still undone. “Or since the second round of the pot roast? Followed by a repeat of all of the above?”
I sighed. “Wouldja get to the point, Ma? I kind of have a lot on my plate today.”
“Self-control, I suppose would be my point, Son.”
“Fine, point taken. Now would you just step on my abdomen with both feet while I... you know, like with luggage.”
“How could you do this to yourself? I told you to slow down—”
“Stress. I’ve been under a lot of—”
“Put on the blue pants, for godsake.”
“I will not put on the blue bus-driver pants. I am not a bus driver. I will not be a bus driver. Bus drivers wear their pants fastened above the waistline, or below the waistline, but Elvin Bishop wears his waistline at the waistline. No. I’m almost there now... just another...”
“I can’t watch this.”
“I hadn’t meant to perform it yet for a live audience anyway. Please close the door on your way out.”
She did.
“Suck!”
I heard the doorbell ring.
“Suck!”
I could not believe how fast those two rats got up the stairs and into my room.
“Since Wednesday, El?” Mikie asked, staring at my stomach like he was my doctor watching my heart monitor flatline.
“So kill me,” I snarled. “I baked a banana bread yesterday afternoon. I can’t leave the baking to my mother, because she cannot bake. Do I leave her to starve to death then, my own mother, just so I can get a girl?”
Yes, I could hear what I sounded like. And yes, what I was really trying to say was that I felt like I did the day I played football at camp and got my head slapped until my nose bled. I sort of cried that time, but I sort of would not now. Big difference, you know, when you’ve been the one slapping your own head. With a pot roast.
I was thrashing around the room pretty good now, trying to get these pants to close.
“Better watch it, man,” Frankie said. “Remember your condition. My grandmother had the ’rhoids, and eve
ry time she got worked up she had a flare-up. The time she found my private stack of magazines, she had to eat standing up at the sink for almost a month.”
“What about the blue pants?” Mikie suggested.
“Shut up with the blue pants, all right? Go downstairs and have breakfast with my mother.”
“Listen then,” Frank said, checking his watch. “Don’t button the pants. Hold them closed with the belt, and keep the granddad shirt untucked to cover it up.”
I had managed to get up to standing position by then. But those words brought me back down onto the bed. I unpuffed my chest, repuffed my stomach, and sat with my face in my hands. “Ah. So I’m back to the tent maneuver. What a disgrace.”
“So what. At least this way you still get to wear the new gear, and if you control yourself for a few hours, you can try again after lunch.”
When I showed no sign of life, Mikie hit me with his own version of defibrillator paddles.
“We can do this, Elvin.”
We. You heard it.
I sucked it in, I sucked it up, I held the tent maneuver, and I would control myself.
As we walked to the bus stop, Frankie was already into the next stage of my development. It didn’t seem to matter to him that with me gaining girth at the rate of two stomach inches per twelve hours, I’d never get a girl to look at me outside a circus. He was already working on what I was going to do with this girl once I got her.
“Dinners are good,” he said, “but don’t go Mexican. Flowers are good. Candy is good, but creams, not caramels. She’d be, like, picking stuff out of her teeth the whole time... and no bowling. Bowling’s cool, but kind of... wait, check that.” Frank got a glassy faraway look. He’s a visualizer. Visualizing a bowling date, apparently. “Do. Do take her bowling. ...”
Then it hit me.
“Wait!” I said, spun, and ran back toward home.
“What are you doing, El?” Mike called. “You’re going to be late.”
But it didn’t matter. I was already sweating, chugging, steaming my way home even though the bus was only five minutes away.
I burst through the kitchen door, found my mother finishing the last of her coffee.
“Did you wash my pants while I was sleeping?” I demanded.