Fubar

by Ron Carpol

  “Castle! Why you here?”

  He was standing to my left. He was about five-ten, skinny as a broomstick, and so bowlegged that he must’ve been conceived when his mother was fucked on a saddle. He ran his right hand across the top of his dark oily hair that was probably soaked in Pennzoil.

  “Killing time waiting for my father to die. He’s a multi-millionaire.”

  “Vysell, why your high school grades shit?”

  He was about six-one, with reddish-brown hair, droopy eyelids and a deep dimple in the middle of his chin. He always seemed to smile. An intricate barbed wire tattoo circled each biceps.

  “Didn’t learn much,” he mumbled almost through clenched teeth like a ventriloquist. “School full of wetbacks.”

  He seemed like another good guy and was obviously smart.

  “Hood! You a virgin?” some other drunk yelled out laughing.

  He was my height but heavier, with thick, dark hair and a very Ivy-League, prissy look behind tortoise-shell glasses. His first name was probably Skip, Buzzy or Troy.

  “I went to Tijuana last month but I couldn’t get an erection. Girl looked dirty.”

  “I got his name!” some guy with a deep voice yelled out over the laughter. “No-Wood!”

  The loud cheering almost drowned out a different voice on the bullhorn.

  “Wide-Load! You with the fat ass and goatee! What’s your father’s occupation?”

  “Real Estate.”

  “He’s a slumlord!” somebody else growled, making the word slumlord sound bad.

  “So?”

  “Who’re his tenants?”

  “Mostly beans and niggers. Animals, they break everything and run out on the rent.”

  “Brannigan, the IRA mick!” the voice on the bullhorn interrupted.

  A guy with pink skin, green eyes and a reddish-brown crew-cut who looked right out of an Irish travel magazine stepped forward.

  “I’m English,” he growled. “Anyway, what kind of insulting question is that?”

  “A mick question.”

  “What is this shit?” he snapped. “School rules say no hazing pledges; nothing insulting, degrading or humiliating. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t have to be insulted by you fucking assholes!”

  Suddenly Christianson’s voice came out of the bullhorn. “Unless you’re the victim of an IRA kidnapping, the door’s open. Get the hell out of here!”

  “Fuck you!” this short-lived pledge brother snarled. He twisted out of line and stormed toward the door. “Fuck all you!” he yelled over his right shoulder, slamming the front door so hard that it was lucky the door didn’t fly off the hinges.

  And just like that, one pledge down and eight to go.

  The mood was somber for about five seconds until the next name was called out.

  “Rainey. Your blind barber near death?”

  He was a husky, rugged-looking guy, with bright blue eyes, a thick, blue-black beard, and a dark mullet haircut: sides shaved, top in a crew-cut with the back hanging down way past the collar of his yellow Polo shirt.

  He laughed. “Not really.”

  “What’s your favorite sport?”

  He smiled, revealing about ten grand of perfectly capped, sparkling, white teeth.

  “Sixty-nining.”

  “Spottler!” somebody yelled out. “Your first name really got three G’s?”

  “Yeah. G-R-E-G-G,” the guy with the pockmarked cheeks and the Bart Simpson haircut answered.

  “You’re now known as G-Spot. Why you here?”

  “Got a track scholarship.”

  This got one of the loudest laughs of the night.

  “This school couldn’t win the Special Olympics.”

  “Ovary! Get up here!”

  “Yes, sir. But my name’s Overby not Ovary.”

  At six-one and wiry, he had tan fuzzy hair that looked like a Brillo pad perched on top of his head and enough ear, nose, and mouth piercings to keep an airport metal detector beeping for hours.

  “You’re always poor-mouthing. Who’s paying for college?”

  Somehow this question really hit a nerve. He swallowed slowly and seemed to hesitate before he answered unevenly, “My uncle.”

  “Rick Shaw now known as Rickshaw Boy! Why you here?”

  He was the guy about six-eight who was smoking dope with me and the other three guys last week in the yard.

  “Full basketball scholarship.”

  A bunch of guys laughed.

  “This school couldn’t beat a wheelchair basketball team,” somebody yelled.

  A squeaky voice suddenly screamed out, “Why ain’t there no gooks on campus to pedal your rickshaw?”

  “Because they’re too smart to be here.”

  Christianson’s voice on the bullhorn said sternly, “Pledges: Here’s your last warning on the subject. Even any hint that any of you pledges is involved in gay sex is your ticket out of here.” Then he sounded friendly again. “Congratulations to our new pledges. After you pose for Richie LeRoy, the house photographer, join the rest of us here at Club Jagermeister!”

  6

  THE SNIPER

  Monday, September 16

  3:15 P.M.

  “LYMAN SAID THAT IF HE COULD AFFORD IT, he’d pay somebody to kill you,” Holmes told me at the apartment that he and Watson shared with Lyman in Westchester, near the airport. “Why does he hate you so much?”

  “Because he thinks the whole family hates flippers.”

  “Filipinos?” Watson asked.

  “Who do you think I’m talking about? Flipper the Dolphin at Sea World?”

  Watson laughed as Holmes continued this stupid conversation. “Only person he hates more than you is your grandfather.”

  “Seriously, why does he hate you?” Watson asked.

  “Because he’s jealous. My parents give me everything like they should but his cheap-bastard parents make him work. For grades, spending money, all that shit.”

  “Why does he hate your grandfather?”

  “Because he never had anything to do with Lyman.”

  “Because he’s Filipino?”

  I shook my head in disgust. “Probably. But so what? My grandfather hated me too. Anyway, how can you guys stand living here with Lyman. He’s such an asshole. Always was and always will be.”

  “Actually, he’s OK,” Watson answered to my surprise, “except for his obsession with that genealogy shit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s trying to locate his real mother and father. Look at his room.”

  It seemed like every five seconds another goddamn plane roared overhead. I looked up at the ceiling. “Isn’t the noise annoying as hell?”

  “You get used to it,” Holmes answered.

  We walked down the small hallway and Holmes opened Lyman’s bedroom door and we went inside. Except for the girl with big tits on the collegehumor.com poster, almost all the rest of the wall space was covered with maps, charts, diagrams; all on the subject of ancestors and finding people.

  “He’s got a new lead,” Holmes said, sounding happy.

  “Oh,” I answered, not really giving a shit.

  “Yeah. Well, you know, Lyman’s mother worked for your grandfather as a maid.”

  “What’re you, his biographer?”

  “Hardly. But that’s the only thing he does that drives me and Watson crazy. Always talking about when he got adopted.”

  “So his mother was the maid. So what? She’s a flipper too.”

  Holmes looked puzzled, obviously not understanding my logic and continued with Lyman’s pitiful, who-wants-to-hear-it? biography.

  “When he was a year old she left to go to the Philippines temporarily for a family emergency and she left him with the woman who took over for her at your grandfather’s house. Some woman whose husband was in the Army.”

  This was still boring as shit. “So what?”

  “So when his mothe
r never came back, and the replacement woman went to Germany with her husband when the Army transferred him there, that’s when your aunt and uncle adopted him.”

  “So who-the-fuck cares? Anyway, what’s the big lead from the Army?”

  Holmes, with his pretentious English accent, sounded like a goddamn butler. “Army records came back a few days ago and showed that the woman and her husband left Germany and now live near Fort Worth, Texas.”

  “Lyman talk to her?”

  “No. Records must’ve been old. She moved from there since. But he’s got a search company out looking for her.”

  “You know what else I think of Lyman?” I asked innocently. A second later I broke the silence with a rumbling, five-second-long fart that picked up speed as I blasted it out of my ass. Then a big burp finished my opinion. “That’s what. So who the hell cares if he finds his parents anyway?”

  “He does, for one,” Watson answered testily. He looked over at Holmes and both guys shook their heads and looked at me. Then Watson smiled. “You told us why Lyman hates you and your grandfather. But why did you hate your grandfather?”

  “Always criticizing me. And instead of calling me by name, he called me ‘useless parasite.’ And he was always bragging about the goddamn Marines and showing off his war souvenirs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for instance, I remember a large, glass-covered picture frame in the den with his uniform shirt covered with dried blood that had the Purple Heart pinned on it. That was the biggest thing in his life. The minute anybody walked in the house, he’d grab them, take them into the den and show him the goddamn shirt and tell them he wore it when he got shot at Iwo Jima killing Japs.”

  Holmes smiled. “You know what you and your grandfather have in common with Lyman?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “What?”

  He pointed to the open bedroom door. “Look behind it.”

  I pushed the bedroom door closed and saw two black and white cork dartboards, one on top of the other. My grandfather’s cut-out picture was glued into the bulls-eye on the top one. And my picture was in the center of the lower one! The sharp, silver tips of red-feathered darts was stuck through each of our eyeballs!

  “A lot of pledges hate you too,” Holmes suddenly informed me, keeping this great conversation going. “And the list is growing pretty fast. There’s even talk about most of the pledge class signing a petition threatening to quit unless the actives kick you out.”

  I was really surprised. “Why?”

  “Everybody can see that you don’t give a shit about the pledge class or the fraternity. Always criticizing everybody, making cruel jokes, just being an arrogant prick. In fact, nobody can figure out why you even want to be in the fraternity.”

  “To make friends,” I said straight-faced. “And the pledges are wrong about me,” I lied. “Anyway that flipper bastard’s got no reason to hate me. I never did anything to him.”

  Holmes opened the door. “Let’s get out of here. Lyman ought to be back any minute. Nobody but me and Watson are allowed in here without Lyman.”

  The continual rumble overhead from the planes was finally driving me crazy. “How can you stand the fucking noise?” I yelled.

  “Told you. You get used to it. Don’t hear it after a while.”

  “Not me.”

  We went back into the living room to wait for the others so we could discuss our term project in our Sociology class.

  About two minutes later Lyman walked in with two girls. The taller one was Nina, Lyman’s girlfriend. She was a dull, mousy-looking thing that we named Headlights since her good-sized tits bounced as she walked. She was with her bosom-buddy named Heather; a little twat about four-ten, with wild, frizzy hair that she probably styled by jamming a hairpin into an electrical outlet. Everybody called her Frizzhead.

  Our planning session barely started when Frizzhead, who was sitting next to me at the kitchen table, started rubbing her fuck-me high heels against my ankles. It would’ve been welcome if she was decent looking but she was a scrawny dwarf. I kept twisting away from her but she wouldn’t stop. Finally I couldn’t stand it any more. I leaned over to her, cupped my hands over her right ear and whispered, “I wouldn’t fuck you with someone else’s dick.” Then I left.

  PART 2

  TOO UGLY

  TO RAPE

  7

  A BAIL BONDSMAN’S WET DREAM

  FOR THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS, between mid-September and early-January, things mostly fell into a cycle: going to school as little as possible, getting tan at the beach, getting drunk, smoking dope, scoring X, and hitting clubs.

  And the routine around the house was pretty much the same each week. On school days all the pledges and actives would have lunch together, with the pledges being the waiters. The cook was a cranky, Aunt Jemima look-alike, with a fake Jamaican accent, who could cook anything, as long as it was fried. On Monday nights everybody would have dinner together. Then afterward, the actives would have their meeting in the Chapter Room and we’d have our pledge meeting upstairs in the pledge dorm. Saturdays were workdays for the pledges, where we were supposed to clean up the house. But instead, we picked up Mexicans from Venice street corners and paid them to do the cleaning while we drank beer and smoked pot all day watching college football games.

  I only showed up at the fraternity house the minimum times required in order to give the actives less time to know me since everybody seemed to dislike me so much. I’m sure, like most other people, they were jealous of my money, my new 4Runner, my Rolex. Besides, it really bothered me that Lyman was so popular with the other pledges; always kissing everybody’s ass by helping them with homework, explaining assignments, tutoring some guys, especially Rawlings, and preparing them for tests.

  I tried to fit in the pledge class as best I could, considering that most of them were total dipshits. Almost every day I wore either my emerald green fraternity sweatshirt or T-shirt with ΣOΛ printed in white letters on the front like most of the guys wore. And on colder days I’d wear the turquoise and blue CAS windbreaker over it.

  At the beginning of pledging, my only contribution to the pledge class was being over twenty-one and being able to buy beer and liquor. But as week after week passed, something really strange happened. For the first time in my life I was actually starting to, kind of at least, beginning to make a couple of friends: Vysell and Batman, even though they were both eighteen.

  Batman and Vysell hooked-up a fast friendship, but more and more, a little bit at a time, I started hanging around with them. It was an odd feeling–strange but good–to be accepted by these guys.

  Late one Sunday afternoon at my apartment, after watching two pro games and drinking beer and smoking pot, I felt like really impressing these guys and played the videos of me fucking the San Francisco Sleeping Beauties; all thirteen of them that I drugged with roofies over a two-year period.

  Naturally these guys thought it was great, which it was.

  _____

  So far, eighteen pledges were still left. What I really needed was another Columbine here, sparing only me and Vysell and Batman. Or if absolutely necessary, sparing only me.

  Daily, I’d stare, one-at-a-time, at the actives’ photographs on the dining room wall trying to figure out who the two Jews were who blackballed me. It was driving me crazy. I had no idea whatsoever who they were so whenever I was on the Third Street Promenade, I’d stop at Borders or Barnes & Noble and look at books about Jewish holidays and Jewish customs to try to get a clue.

  One time I even asked Grossberg who the two Jews were since I’m sure he knew. But he wasn’t his usual friendly self.

  “Nobody here was in my Bar Mitzvah class,” he answered snidely.

  All I thought about was getting some scheme together to oust as many pledges as fast as possible. So far I didn’t trust Batman or Vysell enough to confide in them about this.

  Finally it was at the pledge meeting the day before Halloween when I got my fir
st shot at getting somebody dumped.

  Ovary was sitting hunched over on the edge of his bed reading a letter, holding it just a few inches from his eyes, guarding it carefully. It looked like he was going to cry. He sniffed a little and rubbed the corner of each eye with the back of his left hand. Then he sat up stiffly, squished the letter into a ball and stuffed it under his mattress.

  Later, when Ovary was in the bathroom, I pulled the letter out of its hiding place and jammed it in the back pocket of my jeans. In my truck on the way home after the meeting I quickly read the letter. It was from his father who was doing time at a Federal Prison in Illinois. The letter ended by saying, “Be out in six years with an early parole.”

  I immediately drove over to Kinko’s on Lincoln and made seventy-five photocopies of the letter in minutes. Then I stood there and yellow-highlighted each letter at the part about his father getting out of prison in six years.

  The next afternoon, when I was sure nobody saw me at the house, I slipped a copy in everybody’s mail slot and pinned a few copies on the bulletin board and then got the hell out of there fast.

  Just as it was getting dark, about five, I drove back to the house. A red and white paramedic truck, with its red lights flashing and siren wailing, sped out of the driveway and raced down the street.

  As I got out of the truck, Castle rushed up to me, his knees bowed far enough apart to roll a big beach ball through. “Hear what happened to Ovary?”

  “No, what?”

  “Tried to kill himself. OD’d. Might die.”

  My stomach almost leaped out of my throat. “Oh, Jesus!” I wanted him out but not dead. “How? Why?”

  “Swallowed a bottle of aspirins. Left a note. Quit school. Quit the pledge class. Said he was disgraced by the letter.”

  “What letter?”

  “In everybody’s mail slot and on the bulletin board. About his father being in prison.”