“I wasn’t thinking anything”— except that girls might as well be another species—“but why does Dr. Clark think you’re puking?”
“She has no real clue.” She reels back around to face me. “I have no telltale symptoms of bulimia,” she sticks her finger in and out of her mouth, revealing her perfect china-white teeth. “And anyway, Dr. Clark’s cool as hell for an adult. You’d never think she was someone’s mom.”
Chimney paws at Cleo’s feet, so I drag her fur coat up the driveway. My dilemma is trying to get Chimney away from her and at the same time not letting this girl out of my sight. She heads down the sidewalk and picks up a record leaning up against her bike, returning to show it to me. The cover shows a guy wearing a scarf with his shut eyelids painted blue.
“Hey,” she says, “my mom gave me money to buy this old Gary Wright album today for agreeing to see Dr. Clark. You want to hear it?”
I smile up at God through a gap in the billowy clouds. “Sure.” Music might as well be oxygen; I’d die without it. “Follow me,” I say, motioning for her to come down the driveway, trying to remain cool. I hear a snickering on the Clark side of the shrubs, like someone has been eavesdropping on our conversation. Had Pauley Clark come down from his secret attic hovel?
In my basement three minutes later, I drop the needle on the song “Dream Weaver,” and I’m suddenly transported by the music to outer space, tethered to a spacecraft. The song will put you in a trance like the melody is scientifically designed by a musical hypnotist. After I come down to earth, we sit on the couch, and my legs won’t stop a nervous fidget. Meanwhile, Chimney whines from the top of the stairs, clawing to open the door.
What is up with that dog?
It dawns on me that I’ve never been with a girl in the basement alone, let alone anywhere else, and wonder if I shouldn’t make some lame move on her, but then I remember we aren’t on a date. Then again, she’s wearing my mood ring. Guys are always thinking of moves on girls, but I’d heard Paula Constance from Holy Redeemer actually made a first move on Larry Turner, a normal kid just like me, in the balcony of Kensington Theater during a midnight showing of Young Frankenstein. Thoughts swirl dizzily in my head but are interrupted by Mom’s Rainbow vacuuming upstairs, which is louder than a KISS concert.
I go over and turn up the stereo and sit back down next to her. My left fidgety leg and her right leg are a shoe box apart. An eerie silence goes by before I think of something to say.
“Did you happen to see Pauley Clark next door?” A Pauley Clark sighting is as rare as a Fabergé egg. And I want to know who’s snooping around behind the shrubs separating our house from the Clarks’.
Cleo pops off the couch and roams around my basement, eyeing my kid stuff. “No, why?”
“Pauley’s my sister Kate’s age, I think, but he doesn’t even go to a regular school.” Pauley’s a big mystery to me, just like the rest of the Clarks. He just moans from the upstairs window like he’s the hunchback of Notre Dame. “He hardly ever goes outside.”
“That’s odd.” Cleo grabs a Stan Smith tennis racquet from underneath the ping-pong table and does a forehand swing. “You play tennis?”
“Not much, you?” I hate tennis because the wannabes are so damn pretentious with all their Bjorn Borg headbands, perfect white Tretorn shoes, and private lessons at the indoor courts at the Kensington Tennis & Racquet Club. Kate plays tennis (Billy was excellent before he quit) but refuses to play with me unless she’s desperate because I fire moonballs into the air, and she just gets fed up chasing the ball, normally throwing down her racquet in protest.
“I used to play, but I don’t have the energy anymore. Mom’s worried about that, too. Won’t get off my ass.” Her shoulders slump, and she plucks the tennis strings while leaning against the ping-pong table. “What are you doin’ this summer?”
I want to say “spending the summer with you,” but I’d just sound like some smart-ass jerk. “Caddying at the country club.”
Her eyes perk up. “Oh yeah?” She does a slow-motion backhand. “You’ll probably see my stepdad at the club someday. He plays there almost every morning.”
Her parents must’ve divorced or her real dad’s dead, but I don’t want to bring up a potentially prickly subject. I hear Chimney growling at the door and pray Virginia doesn’t bring down a load of dirty laundry with my underwear on top. “What’s your stepdad do?”
“Golf.”
Perhaps I’ll caddy for him this summer. “No, I meant for a job.”
“Archaeology professor at the University of Detroit. He’s an expert in Ancient Egyptian stuff like pyramids, pharaohs, and mummies.” A fake serve scrapes the tiled ceiling, causing flakes to float to the floor. “That’s why he nicknamed me Cleopatra, but my real name is just Cleo.” With her straight black bangs, she could have played Elizabeth Taylor’s daughter in that old movie Cleopatra they run every single Easter.
“Ford is short for Gifford.” Now what in the world did you say that for, you idiot. No one’s heard that name since kindergarten when “Gifford Quinn” rolled off Ms. Lewis’s tongue during roll call on the first day of class, which spawned mirthful giggles. Pop came up with my name on account of Grandpa’s bigwig gig at Ford Motor.
Cleo traces the lines on the palm of her hand. Am I in your future? “You go to Holy Redeemer, Gifford?”
“It’s Ford. Since first grade. Are you Catholic?” Maybe she’d gone to Our Lady of Sorrows, which is on the other side of the Hills, but I’m pretty sure she’s a public schooler.
“Funny, Giff …” She laughs out loud and places the Stan Smith on my ping-pong table, which is covered with my plastic yellow racetrack.
Please don’t let her think I still play with Hot Wheels. I eye an old comic book, an issue of Daredevil and the Black Widow, on the floor in the corner and pray to Thor she doesn’t think I’m still reading comics, too.
“We’re atheists unless you count Egyptian goddess worship.”
Sign me up. “Did the ancient Egyptians have a church?”
“Of course, Giff. They worshipped at the Ramesseum temple.” She sits back down next to me. “I usually tell people I’m agnostic instead of an atheist.”
Hmm. She told me. I guess I’m not just anyone. I ask her what the difference is. She flicks her bangs out of her eyes. “Agnostics believe there is no way of knowing if God exists or not. Atheists think there is no God. Period.”
She isn’t like the other girls in my class; she’s strange and mysterious. Her matching gold wristbands and headband glitter under the fluorescent ceiling lights. I’m thinking summer vacation might be really, really good this year.
“Does Jack Lott go to Holy Redeemer?” Cleo asks out the blue, bursting my bubble dream.
Skipping static fills the basement as the A-side ends. The stereo arm makes its way back in place. “Yeah, Jack and I did eight years together at Holy Redeemer Prison. What about him?” I get up and flip the record to the B-side, “Love is Alive,” hoping she says she and Jack are first cousins, and any chance of the two of them dating are DOA.
“Just wondering, that’s all.” Cleo bounces off the couch and swings her hips back and forth to the music. “I saw him at the club the other day playing in a tennis tournament and heard he was Catholic.”
Who the hell cares? Jack’s a member out at Devon Hunt Club, but there is no way I’m going to tell her this and make her think he’s any cooler. All the well-to-do kids from the Hills are members of some private sailing, tennis and golf, or hunt club. “They were playing at Kensington, but I was too sick to play, so I sat and watched. He’s pretty good.” The song ends, and she stops swaying. “A real hard serve.”
Unlike mere mortals, Jack Lott doesn’t need to pretend he’s a superhero because he is a real hero to us Holy Redeemers. Scoring touchdowns, making last-second winning basketball shots against our rival, Shrine Academy, city c
hampion in the 100-yard dash, top-ranked junior foil fencer in the state. Oh yeah, and a great tennis player, too. A Norse-looking musclebound kid, and good natured to boot.
Jack’s twin older brothers, Tony and Graham, are sports legends in the Hills, too. Graham had been the starting quarterback on Catholic High’s state football championship team. Tony Lott had been slotted to throw the javelin at the Olympic trials before President Carter boycotted the summer games in Moscow because of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. What an epic bummer that was. Years of training pissed away in an instant.
I realize if Jack Lott is my competition, then I need to up my lame game and say something negative about him, but I can’t think of one stinking thing. Plus, if he finds out, I’ll have to go into the Witness Protection Program.
“I’m pretty sure he’s got a girlfriend.” This isn’t necessarily a lie because I’ve never known him to be without one going back to the second grade, when he dated Stephanie Crow, a third grader.
“I would think so,” she says, with a dreamy, faraway tone to her voice.
What the hell does that mean? “I would think so.” She digs through my record collection and pulls out and puts back a Bay City Rollers cover. Who still listens to those S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y guys? Kate, that’s who.
A few years back she’d gone bonkers about the scarf-wearing bandmates from Scotland and ordered a Rollers Kissing Kit from 16 magazine at the height of Rollermania. The Rollers got their idiotic name when the drummer threw a dart at a map of the United States, landing on Bay City, Michigan, which is only ninety minutes from Kate’s bedroom. One weekend my sister convinced Virginia to drive her and Betsy Carmichael to Bay City so Kate could write a pathetic letter to the Rollers mailbag at 16 magazine, saying she’d visited their namesake. They not only published it but mailed her a signed poster of all four Rollers in their knee-high socks along with a T-shirt that read “Rollers 4-Ever.” The highlight of her life so far.
Cleo skips over Kate’s lame buys and picks out Frampton Comes Alive!. She’s got decent musical taste. Nice.
She holds the album cover to her chest. “I looove this album.”
“You can borrow it.” I almost take those words back; my albums might as well be my closest friends, right along with Chimney and Rocket. On second thought, if she borrows something, she’ll have to bring it back, and then I’ll give her another album … and so on and so on…
“I have it,” Cleo says in a who-the-hell-doesn’t-have-this-album? tone. “I just made a new mixtape and included ‘Baby, I Love Your Way.’”
I don’t own the technology to make a quality mixtape yet because my cassette player won’t plug into my old stereo, but I’m saving up for one with my caddy earnings. Cleo clunks the Frampton album back in the rack.
“Oh yeah, I did see his sister.”
She’s lost me. “Jack Lott’s sister, Bailey?” Bailey Lott is infamous for getting gonged on The Gong Show while balancing on a ten-foot-high tightrope, singing the “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“No. Pauley Clark’s sister. You mentioned something about never seeing Pauley.”
“Oh, Jenny Clark.” Jenny puked her drunk guts up in our driveway once, and Pop wrongly blamed Billy for the mess. Virginia somehow knew the truth and wondered out loud at me over breakfast why Billy didn’t try to blame it on Jenny. He even cleaned it up with the garden hose. “She’s my brother’s age.”
“Well, she’s gorgeous as hell. Reminds me of Susan Dey from The Partridge Family.”
“People say my dad’s a dead ringer for Reuben Kincaid.” Chimney must have nosed open the door because I hear the muffled pound of pawbeats down the stairs. She prances by me and hovers guard next to Cleo. What in the world, dog?
Cleo glances at her Cleopatra watch, which reminds me of the Martian in the poem who tells his fellow Martians that humans wear time on their wrists. I just want time to stand still. “Oh, I gotta go, Giff.” She takes two steps toward the stairs before stopping and whirling back around. “Maybe I’ll see you next Friday?”
The electrical fuse box in my heart blows. Pretend cool, Ford. “Sounds like a plan.” Vinyl from my shaky hands slides back into the jacket sleeve. I watch her disappear up the stairs while I choke Chimney with her collar.
Wait, what? I run upstairs and outside and catch up to her in the patch of grass between our driveway and the Clarks’. “What’s next Friday?”
She slips out of her flip-flops, puts them in her basket, and mounts her bike. “My next therapy session. What else?” She places her hand in a gun formation and fires at the Clark house before weaving her way down Dot Ave.
Next Friday I’ll invite her back to my house for 7 Ups, peanut butter Space Food Sticks, and basement music after her date with Dr. Clark. Waiting for 168 hours to see Cleo will feel like an eternity. I haven’t looked forward to something like this since fellow Holy Redeemer Veronica Brophy invited me to a KISS concert at the Pontiac Silverdome last year. After bragging around the world about my good luck, I’d waited for hours on my front porch, but Veronica never showed. Cleo wouldn’t do that to me, would she?
henever Rocket has something exciting to tell me, he can’t wait one second, even if it’s after midnight. I’ve just fallen asleep when I’m woken up by rocks pelting my window. I open it and see Rocket standing in our yard with a flashlight in his hand. “Get down here.”
I wipe a century of sleep from crusty eyes. “Unless you tell me Jimmy Hoffa’s eating Ding Dongs in your kitchen, consider yourself dead.”
“No. This is better than that.” He holds up something in his hand, but it’s too dark to see. “Don’t be a stupid putz. Get your ass down here or I’ll give it to someone else.”
I crane my neck out the window as far as I can but still can’t see what he’s got. Chirping crickets are about the only thing you hear at night in the Hills. If you count the chirps for fourteen seconds and multiply it by forty, you’ll get the temperature. Seventy-two degrees, I calculate. Rocket won’t let up until he shows me whatever moronic thing he’s found, so I slither down the stairs, careful not to wake Virginia, and find Rocket waiting in the same spot.
“What’s so important at this—”
“This will blow your mind.” He slowly brings his arm around, flashes two concert tickets in front of my face, and focuses the flashlight beam on the tickets.
Must be some mistake. “You’re going to see The Boss?” I eye the ticket, double-check the date, and can’t believe my eyes. No mistake. Front row!
“No, idiot.” He shoves me in the chest. “We’re going. You and me. Tomorrow night.”
I jump up and down so high I practically skim a low-hanging cloud. So far this is the most epic moment of my life. I feel the ticket to make sure it’s real, and it is, because it’s got the date and everything. It might as well be a million-dollar bill. “How’d ya score these?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Sometimes it’s better not to ask Rocket too many questions because you might not want to know the answer. He sprints around our yard like a spaz, and I chase the flashlight’s beam under the bright moon. I can’t believe my good fortune. In just twenty-four hours, I’ll be ten feet from The Boss and the E-Street Band. I’ve played the album Darkness on the Edge of Town so many times I’ve had to replace the needle on my turntable.
Billy has every Springsteen album, but they were in his bedroom, where I’m forbidden to go. Then he fell into a weird jazz phase—mellow Pat Metheny-type crap—and didn’t notice when I nicked some of his old rock albums last year. Most kids wouldn’t pick Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. as the most brilliant Springsteen LP, but I do. “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirit in the Night” not only rhyme if you say them right after another but are probably the most badass, triumphant, poetic songs ever written.
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. also has an ace album jacket. The front and back of the a
lbum have all the words to the songs, and a flap covers the front, and when you turn over the flap you realize it’s a fake postcard in Bruce’s own handwriting with a list of his bandmates and a picture of him for the postage stamp, smiling with his mustache and scrawny beard.
Normally I listen to Rocket’s albums because he has scores along with his brother Basil, and we debate the greatest Boss songs ever. I don’t have enough money to buy many albums of my own, but one caddy loop can buy me one album. Nick Lund once claimed he saw The Boss eating clam chowder at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit before a gig at Cobo Arena. Nick has a story for everything and would probably one-up you even if you had a date with Joey Heatherton, so you’re generally better off just shutting the hell up. I don’t know why everyone can’t see through Nick’s bullcrap like I can.
On the morning of the concert, I rise early, pull out each Springsteen album in chronological order, and figure I’ll stay inside and study the lyrics of each song. With my luck, the Soviets will decide to drop a nuclear bomb on today of all days. I replace the stylus on my turntable with a new one I bought uptown at Vinny’s Hi-Fi and close my eyes to the aching sounds of “The River.”
Just a few lines in, my solitude is rudely interrupted by a throbbing knock at the door. “Get lost, cyclops.” What does Kate want now? Always accusing me of stealing her hairbrush, zit cream, or People magazine.
“Open up.”
Great, it’s not Kate. It’s Pop trying to ruin my glory day.
“It’s unlocked.” I pull my headphones down around my neck.
“You need a ride to the country club, bud?” He’s wearing a bright smile along with his breakfast apron, after chugging liters of Maxwell House. Mornings are the peak time of the day for Pop. “I made your favorite. Pancakes and bacon. Give you some energy for caddying today.”
No way I’ll kill Pop’s good mood; they’re far and few between, so I nod. “Sure, Pop.” I wasn’t planning on caddying today, but I figure one loop would get me enough cash to buy one Boss T-shirt at the concert.
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