The Amazing Adventures of John Smith, Jr. AKA Houdini

by Peter Johnson

  It’s hard to blame him, though, because there’s always something nutty happening at his house, partly because his mother has more boyfriends than Paris Hilton. A few have lived there for a while, others pop in and out. He’s part Latino (that’s his mother’s background), but the identity of his father remains a mystery. My theory is that on the days Jorge’s head is in fifth gear, he hasn’t slept much. That’s when his eyes are like slits, his eyelids puffy, like he got freaked by whatever demons visited him in his sleep. He doesn’t say much about his mother, but then no one talks about problems at home.

  Especially Lucky.

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  As long as I could remember, Lucky was unlucky.

  One day a kid brought a nasty magazine to school and Lucky got caught looking at it.

  Another time we were sledding down a hill by the rich kids’ school and crashed into a fence. No one got hurt, except Lucky, who broke his ankle. Jorge said he should have sued someone, but Lucky said that would’ve made him a sissy. (But a rich sissy, Jorge added.)

  And then there was the night when we decided to camp out in my backyard. We thought we’d be real Davy Crocketts and boil water from a local creek a bazillion people had probably peed in. We heated up the water on my grill, let it cool, then drank it, and while Jorge and I got the runs, Lucky had to spend two days in the hospital.

  After that misfortune, as a joke, we started calling him Lucky, and it caught on.

  But Lucky was probably most unlucky because his father was a drunk. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but he was a big, fat, mean, redheaded drunk who pushed him around and swore at him in public, especially when Lucky played sports. His mother, who was pretty nice, put up with his father even though he hardly worked, so he always seemed to be around causing problems. It wasn’t unusual for Lucky to be looking over his shoulder, waiting for his father to drive by and give him a bad time.

  Lucky was lucky, though, when it came to football. Like me, Lucky is big for his age and very strong, so local coaches had their eyes on us since Peewee football, especially me because of my brother. I stopped playing after sixth grade, but Lucky stayed with Pop Warner and was good enough to start in the oldest division. Although his team stunk, they won a lot of games because Lucky would run over everyone. His legs are incredibly strong and he constantly lifts weights. It’s cool to watch his long, red hair flaming behind him when he shifts into high gear.

  Girls like Lucky. They like his looks—the cinnamon-colored skin and small nose he inherited from his mother, and the red hair and freckles he got from his dad. Girls always go on about Lucky’s smile, which is one of the reasons they don’t flip out when he teases them. If the school ever votes on the coolest, best-looking eighth graders, Lucky and Fiona Rodriguez will win hands down. But there won’t be much about Fiona or any other girls in this story because if I start describing them I might say something sexual, and this book will never get published.

  There won’t be any football heroics either because Lucky quit the year after me, so now none of us play.

  Why did Lucky quit? Partly, to tick off his father, but mostly because he had an idea.

  “MY FRIENDS, I THINK WE HIT THE BIG TIME”

  Leaves. That’s how Lucky’s idea started. If you want to be a landscaper, you’re glad people hate to rake and bag leaves. Rich people hire fancy landscapers, but most people in my neighborhood ignore their leaves until the snow buries them.

  Lucky realized this and also that the city wouldn’t do anything about it unless someone forced them to. But we all know there’s always money for what the city calls “community action programs” because they make politicians look good, so Lucky approached our local councilman, a guy named Mr. Gregory Gregory (no kidding) with a plan. He also tricked Gregory into notifying the newspaper, making him think our venture might help him become mayor some day. Lucky argued that if the city gave us the equipment we needed and ten dollars an hour, then on weekends we’d rake and bag leaves on certain blocks. No longer would they smell and decay, ending up as a litter box for every neighborhood cat and dog. He figured that if we did a good job focusing on only three blocks this year, then next fall we’d be able to hire more kids and we’d be the bosses.

  Lucky called Gregory “oily” and said he’d probably been a worm in a previous life. He had thickly gelled, wavy, black hair and always wore a shiny, light-gray suit. He was constantly smiling and laughing and shaking people’s hands when he’d show up to help old ladies unload their groceries or to rap with unemployed guys on street corners. All of this would’ve been excellent except you felt he wasn’t paying much attention to those old ladies but, instead, looking to see if the cameras were rolling. He was a big dude who had played college football at some little school in Massachusetts, so when he was around, you had to take notice. He also called any group of two or more guys, “gentlemen,” which ticked off Jorge for some reason.

  Lucky not only knew how to work Gregory, but he also realized that if we kept our little business going and got the newspapers to write about it, he’d be in good shape when he graduated. He’d be, as he said, “the poor kid who cleaned up a pretty run-down neighborhood,” and he’d end up with contracts from every rich do-gooder within ten miles.

  “Hot damn,” Jorge said.

  So Mr. Gregory Gregory made it happen, and Lucky, Jorge, and I walked to Benny’s Hardware and bought our weapons: rakes, edgers, clippers, goggles, plastic gloves, and even some thin masks, because in my neighborhood you never know what you might inhale from a pile of leaves. We decided there’d be no leaf blowers for us, not that the city would’ve sprung for them, anyway.

  Our first day, we posed for a photographer in front of a brown two-family on Cross Street. Lucky stood between me and Jorge, his chin resting on the handle of his rake. I was told to lean into Lucky’s left side and put my right arm around his shoulder while holding my rake in my left hand. Jorge was told to do the opposite, so we provided nice bookends for Lucky. When the photographer was about to shoot, just as Lucky predicted, Gregory pulled up in his shiny black Maxima. The tinted window on the driver’s side went down, and his big, happy, jack-o’-lantern face appeared. “Gentlemen,” he said, getting out of the car and positioning himself behind Lucky. I could feel Jorge and Lucky squirming, but we all smiled as the photographer went about his business.

  The next day, we ended up on the front page of the Metro section. The photo was in color, and because of our different racial backgrounds, we lit up the page.

  “Freaking unbelievable,” Jorge said.

  “My friends,” Lucky added, “I think we hit the big time.”

  “No kidding” was all I could say.

  TEN CREATURES MR. GREGORY GREGORY COULD HAVE BEEN IN A PREVIOUS LIFE

  1. A slug

  2. A bloodsucker (“Ain’t that the same as a politician?” Jorge said.)

  3. A vampire from the planet Zeno

  4. An assassin bug

  5. The crack dealer’s three-legged German shepherd (“That’s one mean animal,” Lucky said.)

  6. The Incredible Shrinking Penis (A character Jorge made up.)

  7. A big, black-headed python (We saw this at the zoo.)

  8. The Headless Horseman (The only book Jorge had read from beginning to end.)

  9. A toothless, blind warthog who was Angel Dimitri in his previous life

  10. Mastodon poop

  MY FAMILY

  Even my father was impressed by the photo, though he said, “What’s that goofball Gregory doing in the picture?”

  “John,” my mother warned.

  “Well, it’s not like he’s going to be raking,” my father complained.

  He had bought a bunch of newspapers, and he and my mother had scissored out photos. She taped one to the refrigerator, and he folded another into his wallet. I told him the job would last only a month, until most of the leaves were gone, but he said he was proud of me, anyway. That was pretty huge for him because, like Franklin
, he doesn’t say much.

  My dad’s a big guy with curly brown hair and bright blue eyes barely visible because of his heavy eyelids, which make him look sad. He works the midnight shift for a cleaning company, buffing floors, so he sleeps during the day, then eats dinner with us, watches the news, insults politicians, and steps outside once in a while to have a smoke.

  For work, he has to wear a blue cap stamped with the company’s insignia and a striped shirt with his name tag ironed on. He says this outfit makes him feel like a robot, like the company owns him, and maybe that was why he was glad I was working for myself.

  My parents said I could keep twenty dollars a week and that they’d put the rest in a special bank account. They wanted to teach me how to handle money, and that was fine with me. I knew how tough things were around the house and how difficult it was for them to save. My father works hard, and my mother has a job at a local dry cleaners owned by one of the meanest women on earth, who happens to be Angel Dimitri’s mother. When my mother isn’t slaving away at the cleaners, she’s studying at the community college to be a legal secretary.

  Besides taping a photo to the refrigerator, my mother sent one to Franklin, though we weren’t too sure where he was. He was on an important mission, so he couldn’t say much, not that he would’ve, anyway. Normally, he’d email or call us once a week, but every other week I got a special handwritten note, and when it arrived, I’d run my fingers over the letters, feeling the indentations the pen had made. The letter was always short. The first sentence read, “Staying alive here, Scout” (which is what he called me), and the last sentence was usually something like, “Study hard,” or “Stay out of trouble,” or “You really should play football.”

  Franklin didn’t have to say much to make my day. I’m not embarrassed to say I love Franklin. We grew up sharing a big bedroom and when he left, something important went with him. His awards and trophies were still there, but, for me, sleeping alone was like being at Fenway on a night when the Red Sox were out of town.

  Surprisingly, none of us talked much about Franklin, except at dinnertime when we’d say a prayer, or when some aunt or uncle or cousin would visit and ask about him. We didn’t want to remind ourselves he was in Iraq and could get killed or have an arm or leg blown off. Every time I thought about him getting hurt, I couldn’t breathe.

  I knew my parents felt the same, especially my mother, because whenever the war came up or she’d see something about it on TV, she’d scurry around, rearranging dishes in the cupboards or she’d scrub the kitchen sink or bathroom floor. Sometimes, it hurt to watch her.

  Also, every week she’d wash Franklin’s sheets and make his bed as if he were still home. One day, when I was writing at my computer and she was working on Franklin’s bed, my father appeared in the doorway, surprising me.

  “By the time Franklin gets back,” I joked, “he’ll have the cleanest bed in Providence.”

  My mother sat down on the unmade bed. When I continued to kid her, my father glared at me, then joined her, placing his hand on her knee.

  “He’ll be okay,” he said, kissing her on the cheek.

  They looked like they wanted to be alone, so I went downstairs to get a snack because it was getting too “private” for me.

  Still, it made me happy that my picture in the newspaper raised their spirits, and for a while, even at school, Lucky, Jorge, and I would be the focus of attention until the next fight broke out in the cafeteria or Sergio Frias’s locker got raided for the tenth time. The only one who gave us a bad time about the picture was Angel Dimitri.

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CRAZY AND MEAN

  That fall, Angel Dimitri seemed angrier than usual, if that was possible. He’s olive-skinned and has a three-inch-wide, two-inch-high Mohawk splitting the middle of his head, so that he looks like some biker villain from the future. If our enemies decide to bomb us back to prehistoric times, like my father says they will, Angel will be one of the survivors, straddling the neck of a Tyrannosaurus rex and swinging a spiked club.

  He’s also a big kid, a little fat, really, and he smells like fried fish. In gym class we sometimes have wrestling, and he’s undefeated, mostly because when he works up a sweat his opponent has two choices: lose or be asphyxiated. If he ever slept over, especially on a hot night, I’d have to hose him down every fifteen minutes. Angel also has a weird mental problem. Lucky heard Mrs. Guido call it narcolepsy. Because of it, he sometimes dozes off in class and has trouble waking up unless someone explodes a cherry bomb in his ear. In a way, it’s funny, but you have to feel sorry for someone, even a jerk like Angel, who has a problem like that.

  Jorge doesn’t share my sympathy. When he first heard the word narcolepsy, he said, “I told you, the dude does drugs.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with drugs,” Lucky said.

  “Then why does the word have narco in it?”

  Lucky had no answer to that.

  Jorge also hated Angel’s Mohawk, saying it made his head look like the reverse of a skunk. He often wished Angel would disappear, “But who’d want to kidnap a head case like Angel?” he said. “Isn’t there some trick, Houdini, where we can put him in a wooden box, wave a white hankie over it, and he’ll end up in freaking China?”

  Surprisingly, before Lucky became friends with me and Jorge, he’d hung out with Angel because they grew up a few houses from each other. I met Lucky at the basketball courts when I was about eight, three years before we started to call him Lucky, and for a while, we all did things together until Angel started to pick fights with everyone. Then one day he and Lucky got into it when Angel undercut him on a layup. They started to wrestle on the concrete court, Angel eventually pinning him and almost tearing off his arm until I jumped him from behind.

  Lucky couldn’t shoot hoops for a week, so after that, Jorge and I decided to blackball Angel. Lucky said to let it slide, but there was something so wack about Angel’s attack, it seemed better to avoid him.

  Once, when Lucky and I were alone, he said, “Jorge can be crazy too, and he’s still our friend.”

  “But Jorge’s not mean,” I said.

  Lucky had to agree, though he always seemed to feel bad about the split until one day when we came across Angel wailing on some guy’s butt with a Wiffle ball bat while two other losers held his arms. Then we heard Angel was hanging with a bunch of older punks, and that he was sneaking beer out his house, thinking it made him look like a tough guy.

  “Real lame,” Jorge said.

  Still, Angel was tough, and I knew I’d have to knock him out if I fought him. He wasn’t the kind of guy who’d give up, and I wasn’t surprised when he hassled us about the picture, calling us a bunch of “sissies.”

  “Take a hike,” Jorge said.

  I just stood there.

  “Don’t you have anything to say, Weenie Boy?” Angel said. He was flanked by two skinny kids who got into so much trouble at a private school they ended up at ours. But I wasn’t afraid of them because they didn’t know how to fight.

  “What’s the matter, Weenie Boy,” Angel said, “you too pooped from raking all those leaves?”

  “Take a hike,” I said.

  “Are we talking about your mother again? You don’t want to get her fired, do you?”

  I wondered if Angel could really make that happen, so I started to leave when Lucky stepped in. “You know, Angel, some night you’re going to be walking home, smiling and shoving a candy bar into your face and someone’s going to smack you from behind with a two-by-four, and when they look for suspects, they’ll have to interview the whole neighborhood.”

  Jorge started laughing.

  “I’m not afraid of anyone,” Angel said. Then he made an obscene gesture and walked away, followed by his two skinny friends.

  Lucky turned to me. “Wow, that guy really hates your guts.”

  EVERY NOVEL NEEDS A VILLAIN

  So why does Angel hate me?

  Because he’s jealous.

 
Try not to laugh when I say that. I’m no genius, I’m not rich, I’m not what you’d call good-looking, and I have no trophies on my desk. But I have a great family—by that I mean we’re close—and I think Angel hates that. When he goes to the cleaners, he hears his mom yelling at everyone while mine does her job and is pleasant. She’s also nice to him, even though he treats her like the hired help. I was at the cleaners one day when he came in for money and seemed confused by my mother’s interest in his schoolwork and wrestling. When he ignored her, I felt like punching him, and I got even angrier when she gave him a piece a licorice she keeps in a bowl behind the counter. It was like watching her pet a dog that was about to bite her.

  Sometimes my mother even defends Angel. “His family is having problems now,” she once said.

  “They seem to be doing okay to me.”

  “I’m not talking about money, John, and even if you have money, you can run into trouble.” She was referring to Angel’s father, who has a gambling problem and, like Lucky’s dad, has a temper. “Maybe you and your friends should be nicer to Angel,” she added. “Maybe he feels excluded.”

  Excluded? Boy, she didn’t know our history with Angel, not to mention the lousy things he says about her. I couldn’t wait until she quit that job, so I’d never have to hear Angel’s mother yell at her, or watch her handling people’s dirty clothes, while she suffocated every winter because Angel’s mother wouldn’t let anyone turn down the heat, even when it was a hundred degrees.

  Angel was also jealous of my house. It’s nothing fancy, but my father worked hard on it. It’s nicely painted, and he laid down hardwood floors in the living room and bedrooms and built new cabinets in the kitchen. It was a project Franklin and I worked on, and after it was finished, we threw a party. My mother had just started at the cleaners, so she asked Angel’s mother to stop by, not yet knowing how mean she could be. Unfortunately, she brought Angel, and they strolled around like they owned the place, Angel’s mother sneering at our rebuilt kitchen, saying it would’ve been better to have a “professional” do it.