There I stood in silence, my Dad hanging on to me, his face clenched in a grimace of effort. I felt the rush of steaming piss pulsing beneath my fingertips, listened to his stream splashing in the water beneath us. This is where you got your start, boy, I thought.
WILLIAM STARTED BRINGING a basketball with him so he could shoot hoops while the Old Man slept. I stood under the goal and tried to catch the rebounds as William tossed the ball up between puffs on his cigarette.
William was as inscrutable as the Sphinx. He liked to talk, but not about anything personal—just sports and cars, mostly. I wanted to know everything about him: what it was like to take care of people like the Old Man, how he’d happened to end up in the job in the first place, how long he expected to be doing it, what his dreams were, what it was like to be black. I never asked him these things. In fact, though I began to think of him as my best friend, I knew next to nothing about him.
The first Friday in January was my mother’s turn to host the Bible study. The Old Man had dozed off. William and I were outside playing our little game of shoot, catch, and pass as the cars began to roll in.
William had arrived that day wearing the new pair of Air Jordan 2 basketball shoes he’d received from his mother for Christmas.
“Do your shoes make you fly?” I said, passing back a rebound.
“I can fly over you.”
“Prove it.”
“When I’m done with my cig.”
He set his stance in his new white shoes and rocked forward onto his toes, releasing a smooth, arcing jump shot that bounced off the board and clanged through the rim.
“You didn’t call bank,” I said.
William ignored me, catching the ball with one hand and dribbling between his legs, spinning around and popping up a fallaway jumper that rasped through the stiff, frozen net. He flicked his cigarette butt into the grass and popped up another jumper.
“Did you know people are being shot over those shoes?” I asked.
“People get shot over a lot less than a pair of Jordans,” William said.
“That’s true, I guess.”
William stopped and tucked the ball under his arm, gazing back toward the house. Behind me stood a woman in a maroon down overcoat and white Tretorns, smiling at me.
“Hello, Rocky,” she said.
It was Leigh Bowman, back from the funny farm.
Her hair was much shorter and looked dirty. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were wide and glassy. She looked like someone who had just woken up from a case of the flu and walked outside to check the mailbox before going back to bed.
A wave of guilt overtook me. Since she had been gone, we had all been so consumed with our own problems that I had scarcely thought about what had become of Leigh or what I had done to her. I felt like running away. Instead I stuffed my hands in my pockets and trudged over to her. William followed behind, the basketball tucked under his arm as he lit another cigarette.
“Who’s your friend?” she asked.
“This is William,” I said. “He takes care of my dad.”
“Could I trouble you for a cigarette, William?” Leigh asked.
William removed another cigarette from the pack of Kools in his coat pocket and handed it to Leigh. She leaned forward as he cupped the lighter to her face and back to his own.
“Mmm, menthol,” she said. “Perfect on a cold day.”
“I didn’t know you were home,” I said.
“For a few weeks now,” she said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by. Daddy’s been very protective.”
I could sense no irony in her words or in her tranquilized gaze.
“Leigh, are you all right?”
It was Miss Anita, peering out from the side door.
“I’m fine, Miss Anita,” Leigh said, furtively hiding the cigarette behind her back. “Just saying hello to Richard here.”
“Come inside, dear,” Miss Anita said. “It’s cold.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Leigh called back. “In a minute.”
“Hello, Richard,” Miss Anita said.
“Hi, Miss Anita,” I said.
She disappeared back into the house.
“Miss Anita has been my angel,” Leigh said. “She’s been like a mother to me since I got saved.”
“Saved?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I finally understand what it means to know the Lord. It’s truly incredible, especially after what I’ve been through. You know what they were saying about me, don’t you?”
“No,” I lied.
She took a drag from the cigarette.
“That I was possessed,” she said. “By the devil!”
She laughed—a barking sound, like a seal. Little wisps of smoke trickled from her nostrils.
“Leigh,” Miss Anita called again from the house.
“I better run,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.”
She opened her arms. Slower than I should have, I returned her embrace. She felt thin and fragile beneath the down overcoat, as if she had the hollow bones of a bird.
“Bye, now,” she said. “God bless!”
She ran back to the house, her arms stiff beside her, legs trudging along beneath the overcoat.
“Who was that?” William asked.
“My brother’s old girlfriend,” I said.
“Judge Bowman’s girl?” William asked.
“Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”
“Your daddy got some stories to tell.”
“Oh,” I said. “What did you think of her?”
He shrugged.
“She used to be so beautiful,” I said.
“Huh,” William replied.
He took a last drag off his cigarette and extinguished it on the ground next to where Leigh had left her butt. He stooped and picked up both butts and tucked them into the pocket of his coat. I turned toward the house, to the window by the door, where I could see the Old Man peering out at us, up from his nap.
14
ALL THE INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH ANTISEPTIC cleaners in the world can’t purge the stench of oily, pimpled, hormone-charged vileness that permeates the halls of public high schools. The funk hangs in the air like a green mist, almost visibly wafting from the vents of the lockers lining the walls. It is an honest odor; human beings are, after all, a fairly wretched lot.
There were plenty of familiar faces in the halls of Randolph High, including my old tormenter, Jimmy Hutter—once the formidable bully, now just another average white boy among the bustling, blended halls of the proletariat, shuffling along with his eyes downcast, hoping to be ignored. Indeed, in classes of thirty-five or more, one could practically disappear. As the new kid, I would stand out for a few days, but soon enough I’d be just another face among the throngs.
When registering for classes, I learned from the guidance counselor that I would need at least two elective credits to graduate on time. My mother suggested that I take a drama class.
“Maybe now’s the time to get back into it,” she said. “You need an outlet.”
An outlet. I imagined myself as some sort of robot, like C-3PO, my penis replaced by a dangling electrical cord plugged into a wall to recharge.
“You’ll never guess who’s the teacher,” my mother said.
“Who?”
Her eyes flashed with an anticipation that could only be called girlish.
“Mr. LaPage,” she said.
I remembered Rex LaPage all too well. Years before, when he was still the drama director at the Spencerville Fine Arts Center, Rex had been the one who approached my mother backstage after the summer performance of Peter Pan to recruit me for his forthcoming production of Mame.
“One day, honey,” I remembered Rex once telling me, “I’ll be bragging to people how I was the one who gave you your big start!”
Back then, Rex was new in Spencerville. Like a lot of small-town little theater directors, Rex was a refugee from the New York theater world, where he’d been
good enough to earn an MFA at NYU and a slate of off-off-Broadway and touring company credits but never managed to reach the level of not having to wait tables to make rent. Thanks to his advanced degree, Rex had credentials, so he scoured the want ads and found his way to Spencerville, where he was treated like the second coming of Oscar Wilde by the wealthy, culture-starved grandes dames whose fund-raisers kept the fine arts center running. For years, Rex LaPage helmed the theater program at the fine arts center, to varying degrees of success. But money woes had left the center on the verge of closing its doors. When the longtime Randolph drama teacher retired, Rex’s advocates persuaded their friends on the school board to fast-track his teaching certification and offer him the position.
We had that in common to start with, Mr. LaPage and I. Rex had a semester’s head start getting acclimated to Randolph’s indignities, but we were essentially the same—strange birds brought to land in a foreign tree.
Drama classes were held not in the theater but rather in the adjacent basement, which doubled as a classroom and green room: a dim but warm space cluttered with old props and scenery. The walls were covered with posters from past productions, autographed by casts and crews. One long, white-painted cinder-block wall was covered with quotations of favorite lines from at least a decade’s worth of plays, written with black permanent markers and accompanied by the autographs of the students who’d selected them. Instead of desks, students sat on a motley collection of old couches, recliners, and folding chairs.
There was no escaping the recognition of Rex LaPage, who found me immediately among the slouching wave of sullen indifference that tramped down the stairs for fourth-period Introduction to Theater Arts.
“My Young Patrick,” LaPage cried. “Look how you’ve grown! Not quite the chubby little cherub anymore, are we?”
He seemed much smaller to me, for obvious reasons. Otherwise, with the exception of a few flecks of white in his beard and mustache and rather distinguished-looking patches of silver at his temples, Mr. LaPage was exactly as I remembered him: thin, narrow legs in dark jeans; disproportionately large, powerful hands; thick, long eyebrows that moved wildly above his flashing blue eyes.
“I guess not,” I replied.
He held on to my shoulders, beaming at me as if I were a long-lost child instead of a kid he faintly remembered from a few unremarkable weeks’ worth of rehearsals and performances nearly seven years before. What can I say? He was a drama teacher.
Finally he released me. I retreated to an empty club chair near the back of the room. I hunched down into the chair and waited for class to begin. Behind me, I heard the sound of voices in the shadows.
“She literally took the brush out of my hand and started painting,” a girl said. “On my picture. Can you believe it?”
“That woman is the enemy of all creativity,” a boy’s voice answered.
I peered over the back of the chair. An older-looking boy and girl sat in a collapsing love seat. The girl’s face was partially hidden behind a mass of dark hair with streaks of a burnt-orange dye. She wore a black leather biker’s jacket and a long skirt that resembled a Mexican rug over a pair of red sixteen-hole Dr. Martens.
I had seen the girl before: she worked as a clerk at the Kroger where we did all our grocery shopping. The way she passed the items over the electric eye and fired the numbers into the cash register gave her an air of apathy beyond her years.
“What have we here?” she asked.
“An interloper, I’d say,” the boy replied.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know anyone was behind me.”
“Well, now you know,” the girl said.
I smiled and shrugged.
“OK, buh-bye, now,” she said.
She waved her fingers. I sank back into the club chair and turned my attention to Mr. LaPage, who was just preparing to introduce the new student to the class.
“We have a new addition, people, and I know from experience that he’s quite the talented performer,” he said.
A few snickers followed.
“Stand up, would you, honey?” LaPage said.
I rose without protest, hoping to end my misery quickly.
“Class, this is Richard,” LaPage said. “Richard, class.”
I offered a meek wave to the blanket of slack, dull faces and then sank back into my chair.
Mercifully, Mr. LaPage did not force me to participate in any of the day’s exercises—a typical drama-class improv game, followed by a required “scene” performance in which two white students gave an unintentionally amusing rendition of a scene from A Raisin in the Sun. After class, I managed to slip away without having to face LaPage again, lurching up the stairs and into the light, where I prepared myself to run the gauntlet of the school cafeteria.
By the time I entered, the tables were all flooded. The room rippled with noise and energy. No one seemed to acknowledge my presence at all, and yet I felt a palpable fear, as if at any moment I might be hit with a blindside tackle or a lethal projectile. Lowering my head, I walked straight through the room, pushing through the rear doors out onto the smoking patio, continuing on past the hoodlums in their blue jean jackets and the skate punks with their Mohawks and bangs dangling down to their pouting lips, into the yard and out toward a solitary tree. There, I thought, I might consume my turkey sandwich without being violated.
I leaned up against the tree and removed my sandwich from the brown paper bag on which my mother had used a Sharpie to write my name with a flourish over a quick sketch of a sailboat. As I chewed, I noticed the smell of cigarette smoke. From the other side of the tree appeared the girl from drama class—the Kroger checkout girl.
“Did your mommy draw that for you?”
I blushed and nodded. She took a long pull on her cigarette, a Marlboro Light—what Paul used to call a slut butt.
“That’s so cute,” she said. “Does she do that every day?”
“Sure,” I said. “I keep every one of them. They’re all collector’s items. A personal history of sunflowers, sailboats, and daisies.”
“That’s sweet,” she said.
She turned her head and exhaled a long, narrow funnel of smoke.
“Do you like to draw?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I just figured you did,” I said. “You were talking about a painting back in class.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do like to draw.”
“Cool,” I said.
“My name’s Richard,” I said.
“I know,” the girl said. “It’s written on your lunch sack.”
“Oh,” I said, looking down at my mother’s childish drawing. “Sorry.”
“Cinnamon,” she said.
She held a hand out to me. I reached up and touched the cold tips of her fingers.
“Like the song,” I said.
“What can I say?” Cinammon said. “Hippie parents.”
“I’m pretty into Neil Young,” I said. “My brother was kind of a hippie.”
“You have my sympathies,” she said.
She removed another cigarette from her purse and lit it off the dwindling butt end of the first.
“I’ve seen you around,” she said. “At Kroger. Why did you leave Macon?”
“How did you know I went to Macon?” I asked.
“School uniform,” she said.
“Oh,” I replied.
“It’s a little game I play,” she said. “Trying to figure out what people are like from their clothes and the things they buy. You sure can imagine some interesting possibilities.”
“What did you imagine about me?” I asked.
She ignored the question.
“So, like, for real—why’d you leave Macon?”
“I got booted,” I said.
“What for?”
I doubted that an honest account of the circumstances surrounding my expulsion would get me very far with a girl like Cinnamon.
“You don
’t want to know,” I said.
“Ooh,” she said. “Mysterious.”
I shrugged nonchalantly.
“I would have had to leave after this year anyway,” I said. “My old man had a stroke. He lost a lot of money in the stock market.”
“That sucks,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“So you’re ex-rich now, is that it?”
“I guess,” I said.
Cinnamon struck me as the type of girl who would appreciate the inherent drama of a sudden reversal of fortune.
“To be honest,” I added, “we’re pretty much broke.”
She tilted her head and exhaled another neat funnel of smoke from the corner of her mouth.
“Welcome to the lower class,” she said.
She turned her head toward the student parking lot. A black Pontiac Fiero idled at the curb.
“That’s my ride,” she said.
“Are you ditching?” I asked.
“Senior off-campus lunch,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“I’d invite you along,” she said, “but you’re not a senior, are you?”
“Sophomore,” I admitted.
“You could ditch if you wanted,” she said. “I doubt anyone would notice.”
“I don’t think I’d fit into the car,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? He thinks it’s so cool.”
I didn’t bother to ask who he was.
“Guess I’ll be seeing you around,” she said.
She skipped over to the Fiero and slid through the open door onto the passenger seat. I hummed a line from “Cinnamon Girl” in my head. A dreamer of pictures, I thought, as the little car rolled over the speed bumps in front of the school and zipped away.
CINNAMON KINTZ APPEARED to subsist on cigarettes, MoonPies, and Doritos. She spoke of exercise as if it ought to be illegal. She had a crooked canine and an overbite and a slight gap between her two front teeth and a tattoo of a butterfly on her wrist, back when tattoos were still rare and edgy. She eschewed bras with scandalous regularity, allowing her breasts to demonstrate their miraculous, gravity-defying firmness and elevation while testing the limits of a dozen different perfectly aged concert T-shirts.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart Page 17