“So when kids grow up, they don’t figure all this out, about God and dying and that kind of stuff?”
“No, Early, they don’t. I guess we just become more comfortable with the mystery.”
My eyes wandered down to the floor. My father’s shoes were next to the bed. Mom leaned over to look down at the shoes herself. There was a space between us. It had always been there, but before, when my father was there, he and I shared the space my mother required. It didn’t seem so big back then.
“I wish that day never happened,” I said.
Mom said, in a slightly different voice, “Save your wishes, Early. You’ll need ’em later. Life is for doing, not undoing, and wishes are for the future, not the past. Your father loved you.”
Did you ever see a kid drawing a picture? And it looked so easy? The face of a clown, or maybe the wings of a bird, and you thought, “I can do that. It’s like riding a bike, or eating. Anybody can do it.”
And then you tried. The wings didn’t look like wings at all, but more like brown walls. The clown looked like nobody.
And then it occurred to you. That kid can do something I can’t. That kid can draw.
four
After the death of my father, I fell into a moral tailspin, grasping at right and wrong, ultimately choosing the rebellion of invisibility. But before I settled on invisible and average, I managed to break a few laws.
We used to take our bicycles to school. Eddie’s mother wouldn’t allow him to ride to school with Jake, and Jake considered Eddie to be just this side of retarded. So I alternated between the two. Eddie and I stopped at the drugstore most mornings. I stole candy.
I didn’t just steal the candy haphazard and random. I spent entire days drawing diagrams of the store. Locating mirrors, cameras, the viewpoint of the pharmacist in the back and the fat lady at the front on the register. I made Eddie repeat the plan over and over.
“I stand by the candy bars and keep my eyes on the door.”
“And how long do you stand in that spot?”
Eddie squeezed up his face.
“I forget.”
“Five, Eddie, five. Count slowly. Five Mississippis. By then I’ve got the property in my pocket. If you stand there too long staring into space they’ll get suspicious.”
Eddie said, “Why don’t we just pay for the candy bar? I’ve got a dollar.”
I would say, very condescendingly, “You just don’t get it, do you? It’s the plan, Eddie. It’s the point. Remember? We agreed. Everything should belong to everybody.”
Eddie thought a moment. “Does that mean somebody could just take our bikes outside and ride away?”
I didn’t have an answer for his question.
The next day, at the drugstore, we put the plan into action. It had already worked twice before, but on this particular day I decided we’d go for the mother lode, two Snickers bars.
We walked around the store very awkward and stiff. Looking at mirrors, pretending to size up hairbrushes or some other such thing. The adrenaline rushed through my veins like a raging river. The only thing that kept me from vomiting was the requirement to look composed in front of Eddie. He picked up a tube of shampoo, and his hands shook wildly.
Eddie whispered, “I don’t really want a Snickers.”
“Don’t back out on me now. We’ve come this far.”
I took Eddie by the elbow and led him toward the candy. The janitor, a black man older than my mother, was mopping something off the floor near the front door. He glanced in our direction and went back to mopping.
I positioned Eddie according to the diagram. One by one I checked each point of interest. With my eyes directly on the eyes of the fat lady stocking the shelf behind the counter, my hand reached out and fumbled for the candy bars. I shoved them quickly into my pocket. It felt like my heart would explode.
From behind, seemingly out of nowhere, I heard the black man whisper, “It ain’t worth it.”
I turned and saw the janitor mopping the floor only a few feet behind me and Eddie. His eyes were looking downward. I couldn’t speak. I thought of running but my legs wouldn’t move me, so I just stood there. Eddie’s mouth was actually open. He was white as cotton.
With his eyes still looking downward, the man whispered, “Put ’em back.”
I’d never been so afraid in all my life. All he had to do was raise his voice, or look up at the fat lady, and we’d be caught. Maybe go to jail in a police car. Who knows?
I slowly slipped the candy bars out of my pocket. Keeping my eyes on the black man, I put the candy back on the shelf and waited to see what would happen next.
The janitor pushed the mop a few extra times across the linoleum floor and turned away. He left us standing there. Eddie was the first to move and I followed him outside, never to return to that drugstore again in my life.
I’ve often thought about that day. If my plan had been successful again, and maybe again after that, would I have lost the fear of being caught? Would I have slipped over the edge and learned to steal for a living? Probably not, but who really knows? The small daily twists and turns through the maps of our lives are sometimes just as important as the big dramatic forks in the road.
Years later I read in the newspaper about kids making elaborate plans to kill people at school. They drew up diagrams, considered evacuation routes, and planned it all down to the detail. One kid was the leader, and one kid was the follower. They couldn’t have been more nervous than me that morning standing by the candy with Eddie Miller, but at the end of their day those boys murdered twelve kids and then stuck guns in their own mouths. Somewhere along the way they must have gotten extremely lost.
The first completely naked woman I saw was in a magazine. Jake Crane stole two dirty magazines from Mr. Henderson’s garage. We’d been in the garage a few days before to help the old man move a worktable. In the corner was a stack of Playboys and Penthouses. After my encounter at the drugstore I was hesitant to plan a theft, but this was different. They were just stacked up in the garage. It’s not like they were worth much on the open market, but to two twelve year olds, the value was high. Curiosity and hormones drove the scheme, and Jake took the wheel.
The old man didn’t leave home much. We staked out the place after school for three days in a row. Documented his comings and goings. Finally, on the third day, the old man drove away and left the garage door wide open. Jake waited for the car to turn the corner and took off like a shot. There was nothing subtle or sly. Snatch and grab, run like hell to the spot in the woods, and stare at vaginas.
We both acted like we knew a lot about the damn things. This many years later, from experience, I don’t think anybody knows a lot about the damn things. Not even women. And yet our mothers have ’em, and babies come from ’em, and God knows what else goes on in there. But that day in the woods, turning the pages of Mr. Henderson’s dirty magazines, I was transfixed, and so was Jake.
It didn’t make a lot of sense, but I knew we had to see a real one. The opportunity presented itself when Jake’s cousins came to visit. Two sisters, Mona and Janine, seventeen and eighteen years old.
It was nighttime. The cousins, their mom, and Jake’s mom were all talking in the living room. We waited until the right moment and slipped outside. Jake and I climbed on his roof and positioned ourselves directly above the bathroom window. The window was small but strategically located above the shower.
Mona was the first to enter the bathroom. We laid our bodies at a downward angle, faces peeking over the roof edge, just a few feet from the small rectangular window. We counted on the darkness outside, and the bright light in the bathroom, to make us virtually invisible.
Mona messed with her hair and looked in the mirror very intently at a bump on her chin. She pulled off her t-shirt and dropped it to the floor at her bare feet. In an instant the white bra was on the floor next to the shirt. I could feel a slow rise in my jeans and a dryness in my mouth. No words passed between me and Jake.
&n
bsp; Mona walked from the mirror to the tub, her smallish, taut breasts barely moving as she walked. She turned the shower on and looked upward at the window, but didn’t flinch. We held our positions, the edge of the black shingle shoved up against the bridge of my nose.
And then she dropped her pants to the floor. And before we could wish for more, the cream-colored panties were down. The brown patch was there to be seen for an instant, and then Mona stepped into the shower.
We watched her wash herself and I remember being amazed at how little time she spent touching the good parts. It almost seemed she didn’t understand their importance, or certainly there would have been more attention to the details. The part where she dried herself with the white towel, as I recall, was the best. Mona squatted down a bit to reach far places and ran the towel through the crack of her ass. The pressure in my pants reached new levels, like an unscratchable itch deep below the surface in some primal region of my loins. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and hoped Jake didn’t notice.
I’m not sure of the exact moment, but at some point I became uncomfortable watching the girl. She went back to the mirror and spent more time examining the bump on her chin. She stepped away and looked at her body in the mirror, clearly unhappy with her hips. It became apparent that Mona wasn’t just perky tits and a patch of brown. She was a person. A person in the bathroom, believing she was alone, looking at herself in a time of privacy, and I wondered if anyone had ever spied on me in such a time.
Mona left the bathroom. The window had fogged up slightly, so we moved our heads to find clear spots and waited for the next girl. Jake’s mother came through the bathroom door. There was no protocol for such a situation. I waited for Jake to speak, and secretly wished he wouldn’t. Since seeing Miss Crane topless that fateful day, my imagination had painted vivid pictures in my mind.
Miss Crane flipped off her shoes. She unsnapped the button on her pants. Jake lifted himself up, and I immediately followed suit. We sat that way for a while.
“Let’s steal a beer from the cooler.”
“Okay,” I said.
And we did. A Budweiser. I tried not to let my face show the nasty taste, swallowing the cold liquid quickly and handing the beer back to Jake. After just a few sips my head felt light. We brushed our teeth with our fingers to get rid of the smell and sat down in the living room with the women. I couldn’t look at Mona. She wore a yellow t-shirt with no bra underneath, and a pair of shorts. Just minutes earlier I’d watched while she washed and dried herself. Knowing she was so close, with no window between us, no contrast in darkness to hide my face, I felt an odd mix of dirty and good. Unable to look at Mona, but at the same time surrounded by her presence.
Twenty years later, in the grocery store, I ran into Mona in the cereal aisle. She was fingering a box of Captain Crunch. I barely recognized her. She was at least a hundred pounds heavier, and those perfect little breasts, three children later, hung like dog teats from her chest.
I continued to smoke cigarettes off and on, separate from any physical addiction, but learning to like the idea of smoking alone. I’m sure my mother knew, just like I’m sure she knew about the beer, and the dirty magazines hidden in my closet, and sneaking out my window at night to terrorize the neighborhood, ringing doorbells and lighting things on fire. But she never said a word. She never started the first conversation about any of it. At the time it seemed purposeful, cold, like she’d be damned before she paid me the least ounce of attention. It wasn’t until many years later I figured out she simply wasn’t capable.
I entered high school in this state of misidentification. I didn’t fit any of the standard categories, and I wasn’t strong enough to start my own. It seemed everybody else had a better idea of the world than I did, and on the first day, the very first day of high school, I was tested. After weaving through the lunch line in the unfamiliar cafeteria, I found an empty table. A goofy-looking freshman named Peter Jankins sat next to me. Although I secretly longed to belong to a group, Pete Jankins wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. He was even goofier than me, acne between his eyes, big shoes.
A few minutes into our delicious meal, two guys sat down across from us. Seniors. Big sons-of-bitches. One of them wore a football letter jacket. The other just smiled at us, reminding me of the time I watched the neighbor’s cat push around a lizard until the lizard gave up all hope.
After a few minutes of me feeling like the lizard, the guy with the smile on his face turned up his chocolate milkshake and filled his mouth. He rose slowly from the chair, leaned over my tray of lunch, opened his mouth, and spit a stream of milkshake down upon my Salisbury steak and brown gravy.
The guy leaned back and sat down in his chair, content to watch the lizard. I looked at Pete, his mouth agape, and then looked at the guy across the table. If I did nothing, just let it happen, it would continue to happen my whole life, in one form or another.
Time seemed to slow down, but there was really no time to think. I just shoved my tray as hard as possible across the table, stood, turned my back, and walked away at a crisp pace. As I walked away, I expected to feel a large hand on my shoulder. Maybe a fist against the back of my head. But I didn’t look back. I just walked outside, turned the corner, and wore a baseball cap to school the rest of the year, hoping I’d never see the smiling guy again, and if I did he wouldn’t recognize me. I stayed out of the cafeteria, and on at least two occasions had the opportunity to hear Pete Jankins tell the story like I was David and the milkshake guy was Goliath and I killed the giant, when really all I did was push away my lunch tray as a minimal display of defiance and flee the scene.
Although I was pleased to have taken such action on my own behalf, spending the rest of the year in hiding helped contribute to my desire to become invisible and my decision to remain average. I started to seek people to save, because in retrospect, after the death of my father, I was never really able to build strong friendships, and everybody knows, if you’re unsteady, become a savior.
five
Who am I?
The universal question, for the high school student in particular. Repeated like a mantra in the teenage subconscious, a low hum below the surface, everpresent, annoying yet elusive. I loved baseball, but I wasn’t good enough to play in high school, so I didn’t fit with the baseball players. My grades were average (fittingly), and therefore the National Honor Society skipped me. For a while I tried to pass as a drughead, or whatever the hell they call themselves, but I didn’t care much for drugs. I remember actually putting pepper in my eyes one morning before school so I’d look stoned.
Monica Houston said, “What’s wrong with your eyes?”
I smiled stupidly and mumbled, “What do you think?”
She squinted to see. “It looks like bits of black pepper.”
I panicked and defended myself too lucidly. “It’s not pepper. That’s stupid. I smoked a big joint on the way to school.”
“With who?” She asked.
I hesitated an amazingly long time. “Nobody.”
Monica Houston said, “Let me make sure I understand. You smoked a big joint on the way to school by yourself and somehow ended up with black pepper in your eyes.”
It was too much work to be a drughead, especially since I didn’t like drugs, so I fell into a sort of no man’s land. The high school abyss. But all that changed the day I met Kate. She became my focus. At first from a distance, and then later with no distance between us at all.
There was a graveyard down Dugger Road, tucked away under big oak trees with Spanish moss hanging from the limbs like long gray beards. During the day the sunlight would cut through in sharp spears to the ground below, succeeding only briefly, allowing the earth to stay moist and the gravestones to turn a dark shade of green. But at night it was the scariest and darkest place in all the world.
Who knows where or when the legend of Onionhead began? He was described as a large man, some sort of caretaker of the cemetery, with a bald head and huge black boo
ts. Some said he was grotesquely deformed, one eye lower than the other, with six fingers on his right hand. The image and description was formed through years of eyewitness accounts and outright lies, but if you were sixteen years old and taking your first midnight ride down the long twisting road to the cemetery, almost anything was believable.
I’d heard about Onionhead since grammar school. He didn’t become real until we were able to drive. Going out to the cemetery on a Saturday night with a carload of teenagers was one of the things to do. At the time we had no idea why we did it. It was an early challenge of manhood, I suppose. Facing fear to impress each other, or more importantly, to impress a girl. I can remember my first visit to that cemetery like it was yesterday.
Jake somehow got permission to use his parents’ van. At the time, I was working as a stock boy at a local grocery store. My shift ended at nine o’clock on Friday nights, when the store closed. I saw the gold van sitting out in the parking lot. There was no plan to go look for Onionhead. The plan was to drink peppermint schnapps and smoke cigars. Beer had long since lost its luster for us. We’d moved to a level of importance in the world worthy of peppermint schnapps and Swisher Sweets. The van smelled like a barroom.
Joey Shannon sat in the passenger’s seat. His nickname was Bluto. He was round and unshaven, with a unique ability to shotgun a fourteen-ounce Old Milwaukee like it was nothing. He was the arm wrestling champion of the western world and often took on challengers at strange times.
The other guy in the gold van was Toad. I never knew his real name. His nickname was such a perfect fit it never crossed my mind he might have another name. He was the guy who always sat in the corner. One night he rode home in the trunk of a girl’s car because there wasn’t enough room inside. Toad didn’t seem to mind.
We all drank from the same bottle and tried not to make a face when the warm schnapps burned our throats. We inhaled cigar smoke and blew smoke rings when the van wasn’t moving. As lost as I was in the world, it felt good to be young. There is a beauty in youth that exists all alone. A freedom that can never be recaptured.
The Wait Page 3