by John McNally
Table of Contents
Half Title
Also by the Author
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Lord
of the
Ralphs
Also by the Author
Fiction
After the Workshop
Ghosts of Chicago
America’s Report Card
The Book of Ralph
Troublemakers
Nonfiction
Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction
The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepetant Novelist
Lord
of the
Ralphs
John McNally
Lacewing Books
Indianapolis
Lacewing Books
an imprint of Engine Books
PO Box 44167
Indianapolis, IN 46244
lacewingbooks.org
Copyright © 2015 by John McNally
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
either the product of the authors’ imagination or used fictitiously.
Also available in paperback from Lacewing Books.
ISBN: 978-1938126321
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014944274
This book is for those grade school and high school teachers who encouraged my creativity. If I hadn’t been asked to write a play in the fourth grade, you wouldn’t be holding this book today.
1
At the end of seventh grade, Ralph hired a sixth grader to spray-paint “We’re outta here!” across the sidewalk in front of our school, but Ralph hadn’t had time to check it out for himself until today, just a few weeks before the start of eighth grade. There had been reports that the kid had screwed it up, so Ralph and I walked over to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Grade School to inspect the work ourselves.
“We’re outta hair?” Ralph said to me as the two of us stood there looking down at what the sixth grader had spray-painted. “What is this? A campaign slogan for bald people?” He sighed and said, “If you want a job done right, you got to do it yourself.”
Ralph had failed both the third and fifth grades, making him the tallest and oldest student in our class. He was a foot taller than the rest of us, and what I had begun to think of as his dirty upper lip was actually the early stages of a mustache.
Ralph pulled a spray-paint can from his back pocket, shook it a few dozen times, and then started correcting the error. I stood watch, making sure no one was coming. I was a good kid and couldn’t afford the kind of punishment that Ralph regularly received.
So this is it, I thought. Eighth grade!
Every school year was a chance to start all over again, and so while the first seven months of 1978 had sucked, I had high hopes that August would be the beginning of the year not sucking. And because it would be my last year of grade school, I had secretly hoped that eighth grade would be different somehow, that a cute girl from another state would transfer to my school and fall insanely in love with me, maybe even start stalking me all over Chicago’s South Side, or that I would crack a joke on the playground, my best joke ever, and win over a whole new batch of friends, or that my clothes would fit better, that my teachers would take me under their wings, and that, for reasons I couldn’t imagine yet, the principal, Mr. Santoro, would commission a bronze bust likeness of me to be placed in the school’s entryway so that all the new kids, from here on out, could walk respectfully past it and think, So THAT’S what Hank Boyd looked like! I bought a shirt with a “Class of 1979” iron-on decal, and I planned on wearing it every day leading up to the first day of school. I would chew gum and lean against walls, and with a toothpick stuck in the corner of my mouth, I would say things like, “So you’re class of 1981? Is that right? Well, good luck, kiddo.” I would wink, or maybe I would point my finger like a gun at the kid and then make a popping sound with my tongue. And all of this would make me happy. Very happy.
“There,” Ralph said.
I waited until the mist of paint disappeared before stepping forward and examining Ralph’s work. Instead of changing the word “hair” to “here,” Ralph had drawn a man behind the counter of a wig store. It was a simple drawing, really: three lines for the counter, a man’s head hovering above it, and a sign that said “wigs” next to the man’s head. Ralph had turned the words into a dialog balloon, which was attached to the man’s mouth. “We’re outta hair,” the man was saying.
“Nice,” I said. “But what does this have to do with anything?”
Ralph stuffed the spray-paint can into his back pocket and said, “One day we’ll both be old and bald, and walking some old dog that nobody wants, and who knows…maybe we’ll be working in a wig store. It’s a statement about where we’re heading. It has everything to do with everything, Hank. I should find the kid who screwed up and thank him.”
Before we left the scene of the crime, I took one last long look at what Ralph had painted. The guy, whose round head was decorated with little more than two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, looked a bit like me. I shivered at the sight of it.
“Come on,” Ralph said, “before the police come.”
“Where next?” I asked.
“Nowhere,” Ralph said. “Anywhere.” He shrugged. “It’s all the same to me.”
2
One week before school started, my father insisted that he would take me to Kmart so that I could buy all the back-to-school crap I needed, but I knew the truth: my father couldn’t resist a blue-light special. As soon as the raspy voice came over the intercom, my father would start peering over the aisles to find the swirling blue light.
“I see it over in auto repair,” he might say. Or: “Is that the blue light over by the flip-flops?” Or, when I was younger, he’d hoist me up onto his shoulders and say, “Where is it, kiddo? Where’s the blue devil today?”
My dad didn’t care what was on sale. Cans of Pledge, socket sets, Rice-A-Roni. He used his shopping cart as a barrier, blocking old women from the display, keeping everyone away from all the things he didn’t realize he wanted until they had become blue-light specials.
But my father’s obsession really kicked into high gear this past summer. He made at least one stop at Kmart each day, sometimes two. And I went with him nearly every time. I was twelve years old; I didn’t have much say in what I did. My father and my mother spent most of that summer arguing, usually about money, and one morning my mother caught my father actually poking through her pocket book, searching for loose bills and change. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she yelled. I expected her to end the sentence with “MISTER,” which is how she addressed me when I’d done something wrong. Instead of being gr
ounded, which is what would have happened to me if I were in his shoes, my father was the opposite of grounded: he was banned from entering the bedroom. It seemed to me that he should have been happy about this—I would have been—but he wasn’t. He slept on the couch and moaned in the mornings about how bad the couch was for his back.
My father kept away from Kmart during his couch phase, but we ended up going back there the morning after he was finally allowed back into his own bedroom. The blue-light special that day was L’eggs pantyhose, and he was holding one of the eggs up into the air, toward the bank of fluorescent lights, staring at it as though he had found something prehistoric.
He placed the egg up against his ear, shook it a few times, and asked, “You think your mom would like these?” but before I could answer him, another customer—a woman as old as my grandmother—tried reaching for one, and my father began tossing them two at a time into his cart.
I knew my mother was going to be mad when she saw what he’d bought. I’d never seen her wear pantyhose. Ever. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why my father didn’t realize that she was going to be mad, but I didn’t tell him what I was thinking. I almost never told him what I was thinking because I knew that what I was thinking wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
“Can I go get an Icee?” I asked instead.
Dad stared hard at me, trying to remember what an Icee was, then pulled a dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to me.
“Meet me outside,” he said. “I’m not done here yet.”
The only reason I didn’t mind being dragged to Kmart by my father was because he gave me money when I asked for it. My mother, on the other hand, denied all requests for cash. She was especially opposed to giving me money so that I could buy, according to her, “sugar-flavored crushed ice.”
“That’s the last thing you need, Hank,” my mom said to me the few times I had asked.
I never asked my father for money until he had found the blue-light special. Something about the revolving blue light changed the way my father looked at the world: money suddenly became no object. It was like movies I saw at the Sheridan Drive-in that took place in Las Vegas, movies where you could see reflections of neon lights inside the wide eyes of someone who, until then, had been a perfectly normal person. These movies never ended pretty. The guys usually wound up broke or alcoholic, and the women wore makeup that smeared when they cried and they started putting on their wigs crooked. My mother always said to my father afterward, “I don’t know why we bring the kids to these kinds of movies,” and my father would say, “It’s not like it’s going to kill them.” This, I came to realize, was my father’s bottom-line: if what we were doing wasn’t going to kill us, then he was fine with it. Time and again, my father would ask my mother, “Are they dead? No? Then I don’t see why you’re getting so worked up!”
I never actually saw reflections of the swirling blue light inside my father’s eyes, but they might as well have been there. I knew he was weak in these moments, but I asked for the money, anyway. What I was doing was wrong, but I couldn’t have said exactly why it was wrong. I just felt it in the pit of my gut, was all. One thing I did know was that I needed the Icee more than he needed his dollar. That’s the way I saw things, at least.
The Icee machine was located at the front of the store, across from Customer Service. I loved everything about the Icee machine. I loved the plastic Icee display—a gigantic three-dimensional cup with a heaping pile of red Icee, all of it illuminated from the inside, causing the cup to glow. A huge red-and-white straw poked up out of the fake mound of ice. I loved how each letter in the word “Icee” was covered in snow, and how the colors alternated blue-red-blue-red. The cup was raised high enough that I could see it from distant parts of the store, causing me to salivate as far away as the fish hooks or radiator fluid. The only flavors to choose from were blue and red. I never knew what the flavors actually were, so I ordered them by color. I preferred red.
I was also in love with the girl who worked the Icee machine. She had long blonde hair, but her eyebrows were dark, and she had a tiny dot of a mole on the side of her cheek, like Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. The mole wasn’t always in the same place, though, which worried me. It traveled up and down her right cheek. One time it was even on the left side of her face. I wanted to ask her about it, but I was so in love with her that I could barely bring myself to speak in her presence. More often than not when I opened my mouth, nothing came out.
“Look who’s here,” she said the day my father was loading up on L’eggs. “Let me guess,” she said. “You want the red one. Right?”
I nodded.
She pulled a cup from a contraption that held all the cups. When it came time to work the Icee machine, she always made a serious face while placing the cup beneath the spout and pulling down the lever. While she did this, I stared into the Icee machine, which kept the colored ice inside swirling, round and round. The swirling hypnotized me, and I couldn’t stop staring at it until the girl touched my hand with the ice-cold Icee she’d made for me, and then I’d involuntarily jump.
“I made an extra-big one for you today,” she said, even though she always made an extra-big one for me.
While I was busy uncrinkling my dollar bill, she reached out and ruffled my hair. She was the only cashier I knew who liked to touch me. It both startled and pleased me. It made me want to reach out and touch the mole on her cheek, but I didn’t. I ducked my head and mumbled, “Thank you.”
Icee in hand, I headed for the exit to wait for my dad. In the shadows of the giant Kmart sign above the store, I slowly sucked down my drink, but even when I took measured sucks, the brain freeze usually came after my third or fourth mouthful. The pain arrived like a knife rammed into my forehead, or like a truck running over my head, backing up, and running over it again. I’d never experienced anything so awful in my life. I would fall against one of Kmart’s windows as soon as the pain struck. Any shopper who happened to be near the window, circling a clothes rack, looking for the perfect pair of back-to-school pants for their kid, would jump back and scream. Next, I would lean forward, clutching my head while still holding onto my Icee. Tears would fill my eyes. Finally, I would slump to the ground and sit with my head between my knees, waiting for the blaze of pain to pass. When it did—and it always did—I would slowly, nervously, bring the straw back up to my lips and suck in another tentative mouthful of Icee, until the brain freeze came back, causing me to lie on my side and moan.
This was how my dad often found me, curled on the ground, my face contorted.
“Brain freeze?” he’d ask, and I’d nod. One time he said, “It’s a sign of superior intelligence, you know. Me and you, we’re alike that way. Now, I’d never criticize your mother or your sister, but you know what? They don’t get brain freezes. Neither of them. I’m not going to draw any conclusions for you, but I think you can see where I’m going here, Hank. The thing is, we need to stick together. Me and you, buddy.”
Today, I was about to suck in my third mouthful of Icee when two high school boys, Vik Schwingel and Bobby Smidowicz, walked up to me.
Vik Schwingel said, “You look familiar.”
“You go to Kennedy?” Bobby Smidowicz asked.
I nodded. I knew who Vik Schwingel and Bobby Smidowicz were. They had graduated from my school. About half the time the school’s p.a. came on, one or the other (or both of them) was being called to Principal Santoro’s office, where a bloodied student (either Vik’s or Bobby’s victim) waited nervously for his mother to come get him.
“I want that Icee,” Vik Schwingel said.
“My lips already touched the straw,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bobby Smidowicz asked.
Vik said, “Did I ask you where your lips have been?”
“No,” I said.
“Didn’t your mommy teach you to share?” Vik asked.
I raised the straw to my lips and sucked in another mound of ice. Tha
t’s when it hit me: the worst brain freeze ever.
Bobby said, “Look at him, Vik. He’s gonna start crying.”
“You gonna start crying?” Vik asked. “Hey, Bobby. You got any Kleenex on you?”
“Kleenex?” Bobby asked, patting himself down.
“For the kid,” Vik said.
“Oh,” Bobby said. “Nope, I don’t. I’m clean out.”
Vik, staring into my eyes, said, “Bobby here, he’s all out of Kleenex. Now, give me that Icee.”
I wasn’t sure what came over me, but I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going to give it to him. But I also knew that I couldn’t keep it, either. I took off the lid and turned the cup upside down. At first, nothing came out. Then a giant blob of red ice came out all at once, hitting the ground and splattering all three of us. The upside-down cup started dripping, as if it were bleeding.
Bobby balled up his fists, but Vik asked calmly, “Now, why did you do that?” Then he gritted his teeth and pushed me hard against Kmart. The back of my head hit the window and I dropped the cup, which Bobby needlessly stomped on, crushing it.
Vik held up his palm and said, “See this?” When I nodded, he smacked my nose hard with his open hand. The nerves inside my nose seemed attached directly to my eyes, which instantly sprang tears. I clutched my nose. What I hadn’t expected was for the physical pain of getting punched to smother the brain freeze, but that’s what happened, and I was suddenly grateful for the arrival of Vik and Bobby and for the violence they had doled out to me. In fact, getting beaten up was almost a comfort. When I moved my hand, I saw that my palm was covered with what I thought at first was Icee juice. I looked down and saw that the entire front of my shirt was streaked red. Blood, I thought, and my knees started going soft.
“Next time,” Bobby said, “when Vik asks for something, you just give it to him. You hear me?”