Three blocks might as well have been three miles, as far as Lee was concerned. And as they approached his street, his brain was such a bowl of mush he couldn’t even remember which “home” he was staying at tonight—pffff! which was mostly his mother’s fault; how was he supposed to keep track of her constantly changing schedule. He’d asked her once why she couldn’t just work Monday to Friday like the rest of the world, and she’d snorted, “The day I become a creature of habit is the day I make like a lemming and head for the nearest cliff.”
“Just lead me to the nearest cliff,” he mumbled to Rhonda, “and make it a high one.” But instead, he felt her steering him toward Agnes’s house. Good, thought Lee, Agnes would be the better of the two moms tonight. He knew his real mother would have a thing or two to say about this, and he didn’t have the stomach for it right now. Didn’t it just figure that as they reached Agnes’s sidewalk, his mother came bustling out of her own front door, late for work. She was tucking her denim shirt into her blue jeans with one hand and straightening her cowboy hat with the other. She stopped dead when she saw Lee leaning on Rhonda, looking pale as a naked spud. Lee used his last ounce of energy to make it up the steps and into Agnes’s house.
“What’s up with him?” Gertrude asked Rhonda as they both followed him into the house.
“Sunstroke,” said Rhonda.
“Sunstroke,” repeated Gertrude, hurrying over to the couch where Agnes was already fussing over Lee. “I thought you were going to a movie with a friend today.” She put a hand to his forehead. “How can you get sunstroke in an air-conditioned movie theater?” Her look of concern suddenly changed to one of suspicion. “Lee,” said Gertrude, eyes narrowed, “please, tell me you weren’t doing another one of your fool marathon records again …”
Lee knew his mother wasn’t going to like this. He remembered the day she finally put her foot down and tried to squash his record-breaking stunts. It had been a rainy afternoon when she’d come home from work to find him in the kitchen on his pogo stick. He happened to be two hours and eighteen minutes into a record of non-stop bouncing and the linoleum still had the dents to prove it. There had been no need for his mother to say a word. He could translate the angry smoke signals that had poured from her red ears that day: Verboten. No more records. The end. And now here he was with sunstroke.
Lee looked up now at his mother’s broad shoulders. There was a reason she’d been hired as a security bouncer at the Country and Western. Aside from her size, she had a presence that let you know at once that she wasn’t about to put up with any monkey business. Lee had heard stories of grown men who had been known to cower past her and out the club door after merely receiving one of her “I think it’s about time you were heading home” looks. Lee knew she had a soft side, but not everyone did.
“Your lipstick’s on crooked,” said Lee, hoping to buy a little time. Gertrude always wore a bold swipe of lipstick the same color as her bright red neckerchief.
“Never mind that,” said his mother. “Didn’t I make it abundantly clear to you that …”
But Lee was gone. He just made it to the bathroom in time. Rhonda squeezed her eyes shut and wrinkled her nose as she heard him retch.
Gertrude sighed, went to the kitchen for a cool cloth to put on Lee’s forehead, and met him at the bathroom door. “Come on, kiddo,” she said, gently leading him down the narrow hall to his bedroom.
Agnes grabbed a plate of homemade gingersnaps, and she and Rhonda tailed Gertrude (well … more accurately, Agnes tailed Gert, and Rhonda tailed the plate of cookies) and squeezed in the door before Gert could shut it.
By this time, Lee was moderately confident that the danger of barfing in front of them had passed. He looked at the trio at the foot of his bed and imagined he was viewing them through the lens of a video camera—zoom in for a close-up of their faces, zoom back out for a full frontal view of three goofy people framed against his bedroom wall like some kind of wacky portrait—okay, hold it; now freeze that frame. If he weren’t feeling so crappy, he’d be tempted to laugh at this bizarre picture of extremes: Rhonda, as short as he was tall, Agnes as thin as his mother was wide. It was as if they were made of silly putty and some kid had come along and stretched them this way and that for his own crazy amusement. It seemed to Lee that life was all about extremes. At school, for example. Kids were either very cool, or way uncool. They either came from nauseatingly normal families, or totally weird ones. Sometimes Lee wished he could just be Joe Average—dive right into the mainstream and coast along the current with everybody else. More often, though, the thought of being “ordinary” seemed like the worst life sentence in the world.
Agnes plumped his pillow, then sat on the edge of his bed and offered him a cookie. Aggie was every bit as strict as his mom, but she didn’t mind letting her affection gush out in a way that would have embarrassed his mother.
“You sure you don’t mind, Agnes?” said Gertrude. “Because I can book off work if you’d rather—”
“’Course I don’t mind,” chirped Agnes. “Sonny’ll be just fine here with me.” She looked over her shoulder at Gertrude. “Run along, now. No point in being late for work.”
Lee could see the motherly apprehension on Gertrude’s face as she took his chin in her fingers and gazed into his eyes as if she could read something there. Lee didn’t know much about telepathy, but just in case, he imagined his eyes were computer screens with the words I’LL BE FINE!! written across them in bold. Lee’s mom must have picked up the message. Suddenly satisfied, she squeezed Lee’s toe on her way out, and she and Agnes left the room, discussing such details as whether or not the ginger ale supplies would hold out until morning, and whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to persuade him to take a Gravol.
CHAPTER THREE
Rhonda took two more cookies from the plate beside Lee’s bed and fed one to Santiago. Lee could see she was enjoying this. He knew that she knew that the sign on his bedroom door, STAY OUT OR DIE!! was specifically meant for her. He also knew how much that bugged her. And now, here she was making a slow tour of his room with a smug smile while he watched, helpless, from his bed. There was nothing he could do about it. He was too sick to get up and kick her out. Besides, she had more or less helped him out this afternoon—although he guessed that that would have its own drawbacks. Tomorrow she’d be announcing to the world that she’d saved Daddy McGillicuddy’s life.
“This as nice as your bedroom at Gertie’s?” she asked. He’d made sure she’d never poked her nose inside that bedroom, either.
Lee shrugged his shoulders. “’Bout the same.”
Rhonda pointed to a framed photograph on the wall. “That your decreased father or sumthin’?”
Lee sat upright. “The word is deceased, ya blockhead!” he said, “and no, that is not my dad. It just happens to be the one and only Albert Einstein, the Father of Relativity. Cheeeez!”
Rhonda shrugged. “Least he’s somebody’s father.” She ambled over to his desk and took a leisurely look at the stuff heaped there: three old Eatmore wrappers, a dirty hacky sack that looked like it had landed in Santiago’s dinner bowl (or worse), and a half-eaten sandwich of peanut butter and … something red.
“Peanut butter and ketchup?” she said, faking a gag.
Lee rolled on his side, clutching his stomach. “Come on,” he groaned, “give a guy a break.” She picked up a crumpled English essay, flattened it out, and looked at the mark on the last page—C-minus. She re-scrunched it and picked up something else. “What was his name, anyhow?”
“Whose?”
“Your decreased … I mean, your dead dad.”
Long pause. “Frankin,” said Lee wearily—he knew what was coming.
“Frankin?” She let out a hoot. “As in, like … Frankinstein?”
“No,” said an impatient Lee, “Frankin is short for frankincense … you know, gold, frankincense, and myrrh? He was born on Christmas Day—what can I say?” Lee rolled over so his back faced Rhonda
. “Mostly people just called him Frankinstein, though.” He didn’t bother spilling the fact that his own nickname for his dad had been Frankindad.
“Yeah, okay, so what’s this?” said Rhonda, grown tired of the subject. She held up a small wooden plaque with a smooth black stone glued to its center.
“Black Cat,” mumbled Lee into his pillow.
“That some kind of precious stone, or what?”
“Black Cat bubble gum, bozo,” he said. “When I was nine, I chewed that piece eight hours every day for exactly one year.” Lee rolled onto his back and rubbed his stomach in a slow circular motion the way his mother used to when he was a kid with a bellyache. He could suddenly taste Black Cat in the back of his throat, and it made him wish the stuff had never been invented. “Can we drop the food references?” he said.
That’s not all Rhonda let drop. The plaque fell from her fingers like a hot potato.
“Hey! Careful,” said Lee. Rhonda wiped her hands on the back of her jeans as if she’d just picked up someone’s wet Kleenex by mistake.
“Hey, neato,” she said, once she’d recovered. “Where’d you get this?” She was looking up at a poster on his wall that said: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN. THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS. “Shoot,” she said, trying to cover the picture of a fried egg for the sake of Lee’s stomach. But it was no good. Even if Lee couldn’t see the egg, he could remember the snot-like, membrany, slippy-slidy egg innards of every egg he’d ever cracked in his life. He covered his head with his pillow.
“Sorry,” said Rhonda. She sat down at his computer and he heard her tapping away, clicking with the mouse.
“What’re you doing?”
“Nothing.”
*&@#@**#!! He badly wished she’d go and do nothing someplace else!
Instead, Rhonda ran a finger down the ribs of his perfectly stacked CDs, and along the spines of the books on his shelf. Lee knew it irritated Rhonda that he seemed always to have his nose stuck in a book. Once she’d grabbed a hardcover novel out of his hand and cranged him over the head with it. To get back at her, he’d shot her one of the many famous sayings he had stored in his head (another habit of his that bugged her butt)—“Groucho Marx once said: ‘Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.’” Lee smiled now to think how grouchy that had made her.
Rhonda snatched a book from the shelf. “Hemingway, huh? La-dee-da.” Rhonda fanned through the pages. “This crappy, or what?”
“The Old Man and the Sea?” Lee peeked out from under his pillow. “You haven’t read it?”
“Nope.”
Lee patted the side of his bed and whistled for his dog, “Come on, girl, up you come.” Santiago jumped up and tried licking Lee’s face. “My dad named Santiago after the guy in that book. He read it to me twice before he …” Lee hated using the word died. It somehow seemed like one of those embarrassing words not to be used in mixed company. For once he was glad when Rhonda cut him off.
“Whoa, back up. Your dad named your female dog after an old man?”
“Give it here,” said Lee, reaching for the book as if to rescue it. It was worn and dog-eared. He didn’t need Rhonda guessing that he’d flipped through those pages more than a couple of dozen times in the last few years.
Great. Lee could see Rhonda working up to some kind of idiotic question by the way she gave her nose a double upward swipe.
“So …” she said.
Yep, bring it on, sister, thought Lee, wondering if he was about to woof his cookies again.
“So, like, what did your old man do for a living and how’d he croa …” Lee watched Rhonda hesitate. He’d give her credit— even she couldn’t be that much of an insensitive schmuck. Rhonda looked down at her fingernails as if she’d found something intriguing there. “So, like, what I mean to say is … how’d he, like … pass out?”
Lee let his head drop and grabbed the roots of his hair. “It’s pass on, ya brickhead.” He would have laughed if he hadn’t felt like barfing.
“Pass out, pass on, whatever,” said Rhonda, “If you don’t wanna tell me, just …”
“Don’t have a hairy fit,” said Lee. Truth is, Lee liked talking about his father’s profession. “He was a photographer, if you must know.”
Rhonda gave Lee a sarcastic “wowzers!” look. “Photographer as in … like … click-click-click all day long?”
Lee could see she didn’t have an appreciation for the finer things. “Hey,” he said, “my dad was the best at what he did. He even won awards.”
He could see she was still unimpressed—he guessed she’d wanted to hear him say something cool like “broncobuster” or “movie stuntman.”
“Hey,” he said, “there were times his job was really dangerous.”
“Well, I guess so!” grinned Rhonda. “A sprained index finger can be a serious thing.”
“Yeah, well, even you would think twice about photographing a wild grizzly in the bush. And,” he added, “he had to have mega patience and super stamina for his job.”
He waited for Rhonda to ask why, but of course …
Sigh. “Yeah,” continued Lee stubbornly, “there were times when he’d sit in a boat with his camera focused, waiting with steel nerves to catch a shot of a jumping fish. And if he didn’t get the shot that day, he’d go back the next.”
Lee didn’t care that Rhonda looked like she could care less. He continued. “He once took a picture of a jumping marlin that was so spectacular, it ended up in National Geographic.” Lee rubbed his queasy stomach under the blankets. “And later he totally got into video cameras—we have a stack of nutty home movies that reach the family room ceiling.” As soon as he’d said it, he knew it was a mistake. Next week he’d come home to find Gertrude, who needed no begging, showing Rhonda footage of himself, starkers in the bathtub. Lee decided to zip his lips. Anyhow, it was none of her business how his dad died. She didn’t need to know about the poor guy’s blocked arteries. That part he wasn’t fond of talking about.
“Still got his camera?” asked Rhonda. The question surprised Lee.
“And what if I did?”
Rhonda turned her back toward him. “Just wondered if you ever fiddled with it.” Another swipe of the nose.
“Yeah, right,” said Lee. “That’d be like some amateur picking up Elvis’s guitar and forcing it to squawk.”
“Hmm …” said Rhonda. Lee didn’t bother guessing the meaning of her tone. What did she know, anyway? Not much. And he meant to keep it that way.
Crap, thought Lee, next thing you know she’ll be straining across my bed trying to read my wall. Sure as spit, right on cue, Rhonda piped up with: “What are those?” pointing to the curling strips of paper held to his wall with masking tape.
Truth is, Lee was a closet quote-junkie—ever since the day he’d been searching the Web and clicked the pop-up “fart button” for a free download that invited him to Climb inside the heads of the Famous, the Great, and the Successful!! Receive a new “SmartQuote” every day and GET SMART. For Lee, it had been a no-brainer. Yeah! Why not pick the brains of the brilliant who have already test-driven life and figured it all out? He’d learned all about his computer by reading PCS for Dummies. A quote a day could very well be the equivalent to Life’s Secrets For Dumb-dumbs.
For months now, he’d been receiving and memorizing quotes from the brilliant (and occasionally, not so brilliant). Things like:
Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails.
Some works. You do more of what works.
– Leonardo da Vinci
If you don’t want your dog to have bad breath, do what I do:
Pour a little Listerine in the toilet.
– Jay Leno
In the book of life, the answers aren’t in the back.
– Charlie Brown
But it was the Albert Einstein gems that seemed to grab his attention the most, and he faithfully copied those down on scraps of paper whenever they appeared on his
computer screen, and stuck them to the wall. ’Course, Lee had no desire to share them with Rhonda today (or any day), so he diverted her attention.
“Say, do you think you could pass me that ginger ale?”
She did, but resumed her snooping the minute the bottle left her fingers. Lee was getting more than a little peeved. Rhonda totally ignored him when he told her to put his baseball cap back where she’d found it, please—on the head of his life-sized cardboard cutout of Albert Einstein. Rhonda put it on her own head, instead. She turned the peak to the back, pulled up a wooden chair, and sat on it backwards. Resting her chin on the back of the chair, she took a good long look at Lee.
“Why do you do it?” she finally asked.
“What?”
“Knock yourself out over all this stuff. What’s so important about bouncing a basketball twelve hours straight?”
Lee rolled his eyeballs again—ouch! He sighed.
“It’s all about the zone,” he mumbled, not expecting Rhonda, of all people, to understand. He could see her about to interrogate him so he cut her off. “You know, the zone?” (Like, duh … no harm in making her feel a bit dumb in the process.) “You enter the zone when you’re concentrating so hard, the rest of the world doesn’t exist. It’s just you and the basketball. It’s not you and your homework, or you and your crappy marks, or you and your boring, unexceptional existence. It’s you, the ball, and the record you’re trying to set.” Lee tucked the sheet under his chin. “And besides,” he said, wishing he had his zone back to himself again, “it gives me time to think.”
Most of the time, he gave Rhonda only partial or guarded truths about himself—you couldn’t be too careful with girls, he figured. But today, he didn’t have the energy to pick and choose his words. “Makes the waiting easier.”
“Waiting? For what?”
Lee remained silent.
“Come on,” she said. He closed his eyes.
“For whatever it is I’m going to be good at one of these days.” Lee lifted himself up on one elbow. “Rhonda, do you ever feel … I don’t know, a kind of fire blazing inside, like a crazy yearning-burning in your guts, or your heart?”
The McGillicuddy Book of Personal Records Page 2