by Adam Selzer
“That thing about getting him to kill himself over the course of the semester was a masterstroke, Leon,” said Dustin.
“You guys do know I wasn’t serious, right?” I asked. “I was just messing around.”
“Of course we do, ass monkey,” said James. “But we happen to think you were on to something. We probably can’t get him to kill himself, but maybe we can depress him so much that he’ll pull a Mrs. Smollet and resign.”
“I’m in charge of the depressing poetry,” Dustin said, twirling a pen like a baton. “I can make most of the depressing poets in the literature anthologies look like Groucho Marx.”
Dustin had spent sixth grade writing naughty limericks on the bathroom wall, and in seventh grade he had graduated to writing naughty sonnets, which were much longer. He’d written a pair of sonnets that had served as the narration for La Dolce Pubert. Shortly thereafter, he’d gotten interested in Rudyard Kipling, whom he described as a “hard-core badass” who wrote things like
When you’re wounded and left on
Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut
up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
He was really into that for about a week, until someone described Kipling as “the kind of poetry your gym teacher might write.” It was true; his poems tended to go on and on about how to “be a man, my son,” and you could easily imagine him shooting you in the knees and telling you to walk it off. After that, Dustin quietly renounced “badass poetry” and discovered free verse and beatnik poetry, which was rambling and weird and tended to be about walking around the city, having sex, and drinking coffee with jazz musicians. I think the day the first beatnik poem appeared on the bathroom wall, all the teachers took a field trip to the nearest church to pray for their lives.
A minute after we sat down, Trinity came to the table.
“You hoodlums again,” she said, sounding thrilled. “You want the usual?”
We all nodded. Small cups of coffee all around.
Trinity nodded and brought out our drinks, the pins on her dress rattling all the way. She acted like she hated us, but we sort of suspected she liked us better than she liked most of the customers. Edie practically worshipped her—she thought that covering ball gowns with pins made a profound statement of some sort, and for once, I think she might have been on to something. Shortly after meeting Trinity, she’d gotten into punk rock, which she considered appropriately communist friendly, and had dyed bright red highlights into her black hair.
Anna had practically been bottle-fed on coffee, and she and her father had made it sort of a mission to get me into it. When I’d started drinking it, I was filling up my cups with more cream and sugar than actual coffee, but I was trying to wean myself off the cream until I could drink it black, like Anna did. I was getting pretty close.
The coffee at Sip was not the “gourmet” kind, but Anna and her parents were of the opinion that “bad” coffee was actually a lot better. There was a certain taste that coffee could only acquire by sitting in the urn for a really long time. And anyway, those jazz guys in the fifties probably weren’t drinking coffee made from only the highest-quality Colombian beans. They were drinking sludge.
A few minutes later, Dustin asked Trinity to turn down the music so he could read his latest poem, which he’d been scribbling on a napkin. She nodded, and took the stage herself.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, as though she were announcing that they would be closing down due to a gas leak, “it is with deepest regret that I subject you all to the poetic stylings of Mr. Dustin Eddlebeck.” Dustin stood up to bow, then walked to the mike.
“I’d like to read a new piece,” he said, “entitled ‘The Final Push-up.’”
He cleared his throat and began to read.
“O Coach, where is thy sting?
At the bottom of the empty bottle
of Gatorade, the last few drops are
turning into crust,
like the last drops of blood
in your cold heart,
pumping slowly, like
a seven-hundred-pound sixth grader
trying to do that third and
final push-up,
wobbling a bit
and then crumpling on the mat
like a crushed paper cup,
discarded, scattered to the four winds,
et où sont les neiges, et où sont les neiges?
If it’s better to burn out than fade away
like an athlete dying young on the finish line,
his heart bursting like a sudden solo
in a Miles Davis record,
then it’s better to put your head in the oven
just like Sylvia Plath, who never
did a sit-up to my knowledge,
than to dry up like the last few drops
of aforementioned blood,
sitting in your wheelchair,
trying with the little strength remaining
to sputter “Drop and give me twenty”
to the nursing home attendant.
Drop. Sputter.
Drop. Sputter.
Drop and give me.
Sputter.
Twenty.
Thank you.”
There was a smattering of applause, and Dustin jumped off the stage and came back to the table.
“One of your better efforts,” said Anna. Beatnik poetry suited Dustin pretty well.
“Thanks,” said Dustin. “Think it’ll convince Coach Hunter to kill himself?”
“I doubt it,” said Brian. “I’m not really sure he can read anything other than football playbooks.”
“That’s a good point,” said James. “Maybe we should write up a depressing playbook or something.”
I tried to imagine a playbook that said something like “27 pass the ball to 12. 12 start running, and just keep running and running, because everything is pointless anyway.”
We sat there and drank our coffee. I kept my coat on so Anna couldn’t see what a good job she’d done giving me the hickey—I was afraid that would just make her want to give me another one on the other side of my neck. Still, her foot was brushing against mine, and I was pretty sure she was doing it on purpose.
Meanwhile, Brian and Edie were up to their usual routine of making Bambi eyes at each other, and Edie occasionally sucked on Brian’s fingers like they were pacifiers or something. It was disgusting, but it kept her from talking, which could occasionally be a blessing.
Finally, Brian withdrew his hand from Edie’s mouth to look at his watch. “It’s probably about halftime,” he said. “You guys want to head out of here?”
“What for?” Anna asked.
“I feel like getting a burger,” he said. “A cheap one.”
“We’ll probably have to go up to Cedar Avenue to get a cheap one,” I said. “It’s quite a walk.”
“It’s only a couple blocks farther than the high school.”
Edie made a nasty face. We all generally preferred Sip and the places that were left in the triangle to the retail wasteland on Cedar Avenue, but Edie hated even to set foot on that street.
“Do we have to?” she asked.
“You won’t die,” said Anna. “It’s not like you’ll disintegrate the minute you step into a Burger Box parking lot.”
“I might,” she insisted.
“You won’t,” said Anna. “The government stopped setting booby traps to catch communists in fast-food parking lots when the Berlin Wall fell.”
“C’mon,” said Brian. “Pretty please?”
Brian was a cool guy. Clearly, any man who is into both mechanical things and fire is destined to do great things in life. But if there’s anything more disturbing than seeing your dad with a Mohawk, it’s seeing a pyro saying “pretty please.”
Edie rolled her eyes and said “Whatever,” and we dropped our money off on t
he table. James and Dustin stayed behind; Dustin was busy scribbling another poem on a napkin, and James was busily looking over his shoulder.
We headed out into the cold and started walking back north, toward the high school. The wind had picked up a bit since we’d been in the coffee shop, and now it felt like an arctic wasteland outside. I felt like we were trekking through the frozen wilderness toward Shangri-la or something, except that the destination was not a tropical paradise—it was probably going to be a gas station that sold cheap frozen burgers.
Brian and Edie clung to each other really tightly, kissing frequently, and for a moment I worried that their lips might stick together, the way your tongue can stick to metal when it’s really cold out. But they seemed to be able to separate pretty well.
Anna, meanwhile, had her arm wrapped around mine, and I couldn’t be sure whether it was a display of affection or just an attempt to stay warm, but I decided to consider it the former.
Cedar Avenue was a few blocks past the high school. When I was a little kid, it was a mostly empty road that you took to get to the mall or the interstate, but over the last few years, it was as though someone had planted strip mall seeds around it, and practically overnight, it had turned into the new downtown. Even the stores inside the old mall were starting to close down.
The road was lined with giant signs that shed light all over the place, making the snow on the ground glow red, blue, and yellow. The giant blue Mega Mart sign at the end of the street stared down as if it were surveying the whole scene; if it had eyes, it could probably even see the skeletons of the stores on Venture Street that had closed down after the Mega Mart opened. If the noise from the traffic died down, I’ll bet you could hear that sign laughing.
Good ol’ Comrade Edie made no bones about the fact that she thought the whole street was disgusting.
“Being on this street,” she said, “is like being in a commercial for something I don’t want.”
“Yeah,” said Brian, “but where else are you going to go for a cheap burger at this time of night?”
“C’mon,” I said. “I’m pretty sure the Quickway lets communists in. Their sign is red.” Don’t ask me why, but communists tend to be attracted to things that are red. If anyone makes a public television nature documentary about suburban commies, they’ll have to mention that.
Inside the Quickway, Brian immediately headed for the slushee machine and started to pour himself an enormous one.
“Jesus, Brian,” said Edie. “How big a slushee do you need?”
“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?” he asked. “It only costs a dime to upgrade to the ‘holy crap’ size. You can’t pass that up.”
“Sure you can,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Brian, “but I wouldn’t want it on my conscience.”
He took his slushee, which was roughly the size of a barrel, to the cooler, where there were a bunch of plastic-wrapped one-dollar sandwiches and a little microwave for heating them up. I picked out a turkey sandwich on honey wheat bread with caramelized onions, Anna got a BLT, and Brian and Edie both got cheeseburgers—Edie may not have wanted to be there, but I guess commies have to eat, too.
“All they have are cheeseburgers,” she whined. “Why can’t they have any without the damn cheese?” She took the burger out of the plastic wrap and took out the slice of American cheese, putting it in her pocket before she put the burger in the microwave.
As Brian and Edie took their stuff out to the parking lot to eat, Anna and I took turns with the microwave.
“Edie’s sort of a whiner, isn’t she?” I asked.
“I guess so,” said Anna. “But my dad hates this street, too. He says it makes the town look like the airport.”
“I think so, too,” I said, though I’d never really stopped to think about it. I didn’t want to seem like some kind of copycat, but Anna and her dad were pretty good at convincing me of pretty much anything. If anyone else, like, say, my parents, had told me I should build up to drinking my coffee black, I would have thought they were insane.
We joined Brian and Edie in the parking lot and stood around eating our food, watching the cars drive in and out. My sandwich wasn’t half bad; turkey, honey wheat, and caramelized onions had sounded suspiciously fancy for a gas-station sandwich, and I questioned how they could use safe ingredients, keep them fresh, and still be able to sell the thing for a buck, but it tasted all right, and it didn’t glow in the dark or anything, as far as I could tell. The sky was dark, but there were so many lights going that I probably couldn’t have told if the thing was glowing. Maybe that’s the idea behind having gas stations well lit.
The night air was thick with the smell of French fries and dirty snow. Near the door, somebody had written the word “SHIT” on one of the bricks with Wite-Out, presumably protesting something or other.
After a few minutes, we started heading back in the general direction of the high school, since we’d have to get back in enough time to warm back up. If my dad picked me up and I looked like I’d been out in the cold all night, I’d be in big trouble.
Once we got past the Burger Box, on Seventy-first and Venture, the green sign for Wackfords Coffee came into view, and Brian called out “Wackfords!” and socked me in the arm. I would have been pissed off if I weren’t well familiar with the rules of the Wackfords game—when you see a Wackfords, you shout “Wackfords!” and whack the person next to you in the arm. You can really get hurt playing it in the city, where there’s one on every corner.
We were about the last town in the state to get a Wackfords, and Edie, naturally, was pissed that they had come to town at all. The only person I knew who’d actually been inside was Dustin, who’d gone there once to try to arrange a poetry reading and had been told that they never did things like that. They tried to act like a cool coffee shop, like Sip, but for all I could tell, they were really just another fast-food joint. They made the employees wear uniforms and everything.
Edie stood in front of the Wackfords sign when we got closer to it. It looked like she was having a staring contest with it. The green light covered her entire body and made her look sort of like an alien in a bad sci-fi movie from the 1950s.
“You suck!” she screamed at the sign. Anna and I couldn’t help laughing at her.
“Yeah, man!” said Brian.
“It’s not even a coffee shop,” said Edie. “It’s just an office!”
“Yeah,” said Brian. “An office!”
Edie pulled the slice of American cheese out of her pocket, tore it in half, and threw one of the halves directly at the sign. It hit it square on the “R,” stuck there for a second, then fell to the ground.
Suddenly, a head poked out from the door. It was a young, curly-headed guy in a Wackfords apron.
“Aw, be nice,” he said. He shut the door and disappeared back into the store just as Edie was throwing the other half of her cheese at him. It fell well short of the door, and I was glad she hadn’t hit him. I doubted you could actually be arrested for assault with half a slice of American cheese, but it’s best not to take your chances with things like that. Especially in towns where cops are expected to be busy chasing gangbangers but don’t really have much to do.
We stood there in the parking lot for a minute, surrounded by signs that towered over us like giants. A few of the gas-station logos were reflected in Anna’s glasses. I thought that maybe, someday in the future, another, newer downtown would pop up a mile or two north, and all these places would be empty shells of stores just like the ones that were starting to fill up Venture Street and the mall. All the signs would be like gravestones. I’d go up there with a can of spray paint and write “Here lies” above the names of the stores, if I was still in town, which I prayed I wouldn’t be.
That night, after I got home, I stood at my window, looking at all of the different-colored lights in the sky. I could see a bunch of rooftops from the Flowers’ Grove neighborhood a couple of blocks past mine, and, back behind those,
quite a few of the lights from the signs on Cedar Avenue. Red from the Quickway. Yellow from the Burger Box. I couldn’t see any of the blue Mega Mart sign, except for maybe a bit of a hazy blue glow, but right between two rooftops a few blocks back, through some bare branches of the January trees, I could see just a little bit of the green from the Wackfords sign. I’d never noticed it before. It hadn’t been there very long, after all.
Before I finally went to bed, I stared at that little green light for a long, long time.
On Saturday morning, I noticed a new bit of Magnetic Poetry on the fridge:
Darling son
light of your years
please glow from our wisdom
and keep certain parts
behind closed pants
until you grow into marriage.
I wished I had Dustin Eddlebeck’s skill at writing poetry to put up a response. I was pretty sure I could write a better poem than that, but Magnetic Poetry has certain limitations. If they made tiles saying “go to hell, geezers,” my mother would not have allowed them on the fridge in the first place.
That evening, I got a call from Dustin.
“Can you be at Sip at about seven?” he asked. “Anna’s called a summit meeting.”
“She did?” I asked. “Why didn’t she tell me herself?”
“Summit meeting, man. It’s protocol.”
Summit meetings, when the gifted pool got together to plot some form of strategy, were rare—we’d only had one of them before, about a month after La Dolce Pubert was finished, when we’d plotted ways to make sure every kid in school could see it. The protocol for summit meetings was that Anna would be notified first (unless it was her idea, which it had been both times now); then she’d call Brian, whose last name was after hers in alphabetical order. He’d call Marcus Clinch, and Marcus would call James Cole, and James would call Dustin Eddlebeck, who would then call me. My job would be to call Jenny Kurosawa, whose name came after “Harris” on the list.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
As usual, Jenny’s parents gave me a regular interrogation as to why I wanted to talk to their daughter—if it wasn’t school related, they probably would have hung up on me. I was sure she’d never told them about my getting suspended over a movie for which she herself had helped with the music. If she had, they probably would have blocked my number. I had to make up stories about algebra questions for a good five minutes, but that was easy enough—I didn’t have to be much of an actor to convince people that I didn’t understand polynomials. Finally, they let her on the phone.