Unfortunately, it was a big night for the roving-eye boys, and Lance was still in the spotlight for the next bit o’ news. What with the darkening sky and his hair flapping unprofessionally in the breeze, it looked like he was coming to us live from the bandstand in McCreary Park, the chunk of green space separating the big houses on Water Street from the stores downtown.
“Oh, here we go,” my mom said, with a sharp edge to her voice.
“What?”
“You missed this at the beginning. Listen.”
Lance chitchatted with the station anchor for a while. I’ll summarize. Apparently, a bunch of gay guys, driven out of the rest stop on Interstate 75 near the Rolland/Stokum exit, had been tooting each other’s horns in the McCreary Park bandstand on a nightly basis for the past few months. After complaints from locals trying to use the park for nonsexual activities like letting their dogs shit, the police had finally raided the place. Fifteen Stokum residents, including several minors, who’d been in the swing of things last night at Blow Job Central had been arrested. Odd thing was, no names had been released. Lance and the anchorman got all revved up speculating how the sting must have netted a couple big local players—guys with enough power to keep the names locked down tight.
“Jack wasn’t at work today,” my dad said in this slow, speculative sort of tone.
“Mr. Kite? Your boss?” Visions of Kite standing in his purple living room blabbing about his decorator from Chicago while the missus handed out crap food in her shiny dress danced through my head.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” my mom said. “Don’t even go there. That’s just ridiculous.”
“Mr. Kite’s gay?” I asked.
“No!” This from my mom. “You see what you’ve started? Mr. Kite is not gay. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if he is.”
“All I said was, he wasn’t at work today. He never misses work.”
“That’s enough,” my mom said, tacking on a disgusted, “Really!” From where I was sprawled on the floor, I couldn’t see my parents on the couch behind me, but I had no problem imagining the killer look my mom was using to extinguish this particular tête-à-tête.
By this time the news anchor was gone and Lance was now solidly center stage. Having an eye for detail, he and his camera guy poked around a bit, filmed a couple limp condoms shriveled up under some bushes at one side of the bandstand and an effeminate-looking guy sitting on a nearby bench pretending to read a newspaper (I guess no one called to tell him the party was over), just in case anyone doubted the validity of the story. A few concerned citizens were pressing in on Lance, all eager to be interviewed. One of them turned out to be my good doctor’s wife, “Laura, Laura Cramp,” who was particularly pissed at the “perverse activities” that had been taking place within ejaculating distance of her family’s home. She pushed her long blonde hair over her shoulder and her big blue eyes straight into the camera. She wanted to know why the names of those arrested hadn’t been made public so the citizens of Stokum would have the information needed “to ensure our park and our community are as safe as possible for our children.” The whole time she was blabbing, she was also absently caressing her bump of a belly, drawing attention to the fact there’d soon be one more unsafe child toddling around the condom-cluttered park.
Lance assured her he was going to pry the lid off the whole sticky business before signing off. But the feed didn’t cut back to the newsroom right away, and during the delay the home viewers got a couple-second shot of Lance taking a long, lecherous look at Laura Cramp’s pregnant tits. And seriously, I couldn’t help expressing my thoughts.
“God, that guy is a complete asshole.”
“Watch your language,” my dad said behind me.
“Sorry, but he is.”
“Listen, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
I’d heard that one a million times. It was one of my mom’s favorites, and it looked like she was just getting started. She gave me a poke with her shoe. “And while we’re on the subject, Luke, I can’t remember the last time—”
I didn’t stick around to hear what she couldn’t remember. I rolled up off the floor pretty quick, hit the stairs at a trot, with my mom calling after me, sounding tired and annoyed. But seriously, I wasn’t in the mood. Turns out, neither was she.
“GET UP.”
Followed by a sharp click. I squeezed my eyes shut and threw an arm across my face to block out the hellish blaze flooding my room.
“Turn that off!”
“Get up.”
I lifted my head. The clock flashed 7:30. A frame of bright sunlight edged my curtains. I squinted at my mom, standing beside my bed wearing an old pair of jeans, plaid shirt and baseball cap. She wasn’t dressed for the bank, which made sense when I remembered it was Saturday.
I reached out and tilted the shade on the bedside light so it wasn’t completely blinding me. “What?”
“You’re coming with me,” she said, and marched out of the room.
“Great,” I called after her. “Do you wanna tell me where we’re going?” She didn’t answer and I just knew the destination wasn’t going to be put to a vote. My hand dropped from the lampshade to the bottle of Trazon on the bedside table. I popped off the lid, and all of a sudden it was my mom with the ESP, because she swung back into the room, hands on her hips.
“And leave those goddamn pills alone,” she snapped. “I think it’s about time you tried making it through a day without being stoned to the gills.”
“Settle. It’s not like I’m doing anything illegal. Just following doctor’s orders.” I wrapped my fingers around the pill bottle just to bug her.
“Well, maybe the doctor is an overprescribing idiot.”
“Yeah, and maybe you’re overreacting.”
“Luke, I’m telling you I don’t want you taking any pills today. Okay?”
“Fine,” I said, keeping my voice casual, letting her know how completely out of line her anger was, how her suggestion wasn’t causing me any concern.
“Fine,” she snapped, and stomped out of my room again.
My mom’s idea for a mother–son bonding activity was a bit bizarre. We ended up picking dead fish and garbage off the Stokum “beach” as part of the fall cleanup organized by my mom and the rest of the Lake Erie enthusiasts. Even on sunny days the sky was a dark, dirty gray along the southern shore, courtesy of Central Michigan Electric’s coal-burning plant, located only a few short miles from town. My mom had told me there’d been plans to replace the thing with a wind-powered facility, but the project never got off the ground. Fearing job losses, the workers, including lots of Stokumites, had fought against it. So, to the south, the sky was gray.
I hadn’t been to the beach in a long while. My parents used to bring me down a lot, to skip rocks or collect shells or whatever. And I remember, when I was little, looking across the water to the horizon and thinking it was the end of the world I was seeing. Until this one night my dad threw a big map on the kitchen table and ironed the creases from the Eastern States with his palm. I was five or six at the time, I could barely read, but regardless, my dad gave me this impromptu geography lesson in preparation for an upcoming road trip or something. He’d dragged his finger along the Erie shoreline, reading the names on the map aloud. Detroit. Toledo. Lakewood. Cleveland. Then he’d moved farther east, into pale green places I’d never heard of. “Pittsburgh,” he said. Then, raising his eyebrows, “New York City.”
We weren’t even on the map. He had to pencil Stokum in between Detroit and Toledo, and I remember going to bed all worried and confused. Even after he showed me the map, shit, even right that day, I could look at the lake and convince myself there was nothing on the other side of all that water, that we hung alone on that skanky strip of shoreline.
Quite a few people showed up for the cleanup, including the Great Lake–loving Ms. Banks, who managed to look hot in rubber boots and a baggy fleece jacket. Eve
n with the lovely librarian lurking, I kept to myself so I wouldn’t have to engage in any taxing conversation or answer any probing questions. It was a weird morning—handling dead things, being only partway there on Trazon (to keep my mom happy I’d halved my regular morning dosage, but had stuffed a few pills into my pocket just in case things got rough at the beach), surrounded by open space and dirty air, trying hard not to think about so many things.
Like … the fact that I’d actually had death premonitions. Actual premonitions of death. Two for sure. More, maybe. That day, denial was difficult. The ones I couldn’t nail down, the ones with no names, were harder to write off as mental backwash left behind by the Bernoffski–Miller tag team, or figments of a video-stoked imagination, or fallout from a ramped-up obsession with death. Even without the maybes, there was no getting around the brutal reality that, for a couple of days there in October, I’d known how, and when, someone was going to die. And for the few choice seconds they were actually doing it? How I’d felt their swan songs playing inside me. Aided by a medicinally mutated mind and a knack for deceit, I’d gotten so good at pretending the premonitions and their aftershocks weren’t real, I’d almost begun to believe my own twisted version of the truth. Almost.
But that day on the beach, in the gray-light sky, that fantasy just wouldn’t hang. And once I acknowledged the premonitions, I had to admit how truly freaked I was, how scared, how badly I wanted this shit to stop. Then I had to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, I did share some freakoid genetic mutation with Mexican Mick. See, that’s the problem with stepping up to one thing: It leads to the collapse of the next untruth, and the next, and before I knew it I was pressed up against the cold hard fact that Stan was dead.
I mean, I knew he was dead. I’d seen the body on the sidewalk. I’d done the funeral. And just in case all that slipped my mind, two, three times a week Pastor Ted was there, on the other end of the line, going on about Stan’s one-way trip to paradise. So, yeah. I knew he was dead. It’s just that I didn’t believe it. Not really. Maybe I was in shock or something, but until that morning on the beach, part of me had been waiting for my friend to just show up, a huge smile plastered on his face as he explained how he’d staged the cream scene at the old 7-Eleven. Laughing his ass off at having pulled off the world’s sickest joke.
And once my dead friend found me, he wouldn’t let go. Then all morning it was Stan slicing through town on his board, so smooth and easy you’d think the pavement had turned to water. Stan strolling out of Jefferson’s back parking lot, a basketball tucked under one arm, a beautiful girl under the other. Stan clowning in the school foyer, squeezed into a Stokum Sucks XS T. Stan lying in the next sleeping bag, his head thrown back in a big, easy laugh.
That particular laugh came on our one and only camping trip. Having raised all that dough with our T-shirt gig, I guess Stan and I both felt some kind of claim on the wetlands and had decided to camp out, even though the park definitely wasn’t designed for overnight stays. Stan had brought most of the practical gear and I’d brought the weed. We didn’t have a tent, we just lay under the stars, nestled inside the Millers’ fluffy sleeping bags, serenaded by frogs, the fire we’d cooked the dogs on dying out by our feet.
We were whanging it back and forth a bit, and I’d been trying hard to get Stan to talk about Faith, maybe offer up a few choice sexual details, something to sugar up my fantasies of fantasy girl, but he kept moving the conversation in a completely different direction. He kept telling me how amazing she was, what a clear, expansive way she had of seeing the world. He told me about her huge appetite for learning, how she wanted to know everything, do everything, be everything. I watched him as he talked, and man, he looked so happy, not like hard-on happy or anything, more like completely-in-love happy, and I remember being amazed at how, lying on the hard ground in the middle of a fake swamp, he still managed to look like a GQ model lounging on the deck of a yacht or something.
When Stan finally stopped for air, I made another attempt to knock the conversation down to my level. “Your girlfriend’s also a wee bit of a hottie.”
“Yeah.” He reached over and gave my shoulder a shove. My sleeping bag slid beneath me. “Don’t go near her, man. I just know she’d dig you.”
My head flew off the balled-up hoodie I was using for a pillow. Craning my neck, I stared at Stan. “Are you fucking joking?”
“No.” He rolled on his side and propped his head on his elbow. His face was all serious, and even though we were, like, three feet apart, suddenly he felt super-close. “Don’t play dumb with me, Luke. Don’t think I can’t see you. I see you, man. Always thinking. Always trying to figure things out. In a weird way, you’re just like her.” The Luke Hunter he described was, like, a million shades away from any self-portrait I might have painted. And he wasn’t even finished. “And you know you’re funny as hell. Here’s a news flash for you: Dumb people aren’t funny. At least not on purpose, anyway.”
“Do you have any idea who you’re even talking to?” My sleeping bag was beginning to feel a bit confining, sort of tight at the bottom, having worked itself around my legs. I gave my cocoon a couple kicks to straighten it out.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
Wanting to change the subject and keep Stan from guessing that my conversational repertoire didn’t normally go beyond lobbing an occasional grunt or abusive insult at my friends, I put some effort into asking him a couple of questions. “How about you? What do you want to do? After high school, I mean.”
“Doctor. Probably. And you?”
“Never thought about it.”
“Never thought about it!” His eyes bulged. “We’re graduating in, like, two years. Time to come up with an exit strategy, buddy. Seriously. You’re definitely too large to be contained by this town. You blow in math, but you’re good in English, right? Remember your Seuss presentation?”
“It was retarded.”
“It was hilarious. There’s a reason you got an A-plus, Luke. And you wrote that story. The one Mrs. Hayward read in class, about that kid growing up in a real shit town who has, like, zero selfesteem? The one who can’t talk to anyone?”
“I don’t really recall.” The fire, which I’d thought was pretty much out, suddenly crackled before spitting a large ember my way. It landed on my highly flammable sleeping bag, suspended above my cock by a handful of feathers and two nothing layers of polyester. I scrambled to free my hands—tucked into the waistband of the jeans I hadn’t bothered to remove—but Stan was way quicker. He reached out and flicked the ember straight back into the fire on his first try, no problem, then carried on like saving my ass was nothing, nothing at all.
“You know the story. Where the kid starts smoking after his mother gets rolled under by the paving machine? All those images of tar? All that social alienation?”
“It’s starting to sound familiar.” I was suddenly very hot inside the cheap synthetic sack, and I pressed my knees against the lining, trying to create a little breathing room. When I dropped my legs back down, I saw the misshapen black circle decorating the sleeping bag below my navel, its melted edge already cooled and curled.
“I’m telling you, the story kicked.”
“Mrs. Hayward just read it to embarrass me. She hates my guts.”
“Don’t be an asshole, man. First of all, you and I both know you’re her fucking star pupil. And secondly, she read your story to inspire the rest of us. To show us what was possible.” Even in the dark, I could see how his eyes glistened. “So pick up a pen, dude. Write some shit down. Send it off to a few colleges. See what happens.”
“What are you? My fucking career counselor or something?”
“Nope. Just your friend, Luke. Just your friend.” He didn’t even flinch. He wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable saying the words. Then, for no apparent reason at all, he threw his head back and laughed, the big, easy laugh.
Fucking Stan. He could do shit like that. Look people in the eye and say good, t
rue things. Fool you into believing that everything you ever wanted was so close all you had to do was reach out and grab it. Fucking Stan. Busting with laughter. Thrilling to life. Making it all look so goddamn effortless.
WHEN WE TOOK A BREAK for lunch, I ended up talking to my mom and Ms. Banks (you can call me Kate—outside of school). I found out she was married to the big black guy who owned Sam’s, the independent music store in Rolland—the artsy college town just up the highway from Stokum—where I bought all my CDs, which explained her above-average knowledge of rock musicians vis-à-vis most hottie librarians.
I had half a tuna sandwich stuffed in my mouth when “Kate” asked if I’d like to design the shirts for the One Drum music festival in April. One Drum was this big outdoor event, held every spring in Rolland to raise money for local food banks. I knew Sam’s was one of the main sponsors, because Stan and I had sold shirts for Hank there last year, and Sam’s logo had been plastered everywhere.
My mom acted all surprised by Kate’s offer, like they hadn’t preplanned the whole thing. Apparently she was oblivious to my mouthful of food, because she kept nudging me and saying, “Well, Luke, what do you think? What do you think?” Finally, to shut her up, I gagged out a “That’d be cool,” spitting a huge hunk of tuna onto Kate’s boot in the process. Always graceful, she tipped her foot nonchalantly and the saliva-slippery fish slid onto the sand.
Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet Page 8