“Yeah, maybe,” he said.
“Hey, you thinking about asking anyone to Homecoming?” I asked. “It’s coming up quick.”
“Who? Who am I going to ask?” he said, shaking his head. “The only other people I talk to is you and my mom and dad. And I ain’t asking any of you.”
At the flea market, we ended up stopping at this booth where this man had all kinds of weird, foreign horror flicks. The guy was tall and thin with a brown ponytail that ran down his back. He was wearing a Blizzard of Oz T-shirt and was smoking, nodding his head to some Dio he had playing.
“You guys wanna see something scary, check this one out—it’s from Italy,” he said, sliding a videotape of Lucio Fulchi’s
Beyond
across to me.
“Dude, I’ve seen that one already. It’s garbage,” I said.
“OK, how about
Evil Dead?
” the guy asked.
“Man, that came out like ten years ago. Do you got anything, like, unknown?”
“Have you ever seen El Santo, the masked wrestler from the ’50s?”
“Duh,” I said. “I was asking about serious horror.”
“Well, OK, how about this,” he said, sliding a blank VHS tape toward me. “It’s a VHS transfer from an old 8mm.”
I picked up the videotape and read the title:
Lion vs. Tiger!
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Five bucks to find out,” he said. I had the five bucks I was planning on spending on the butterfly knife, but
Lion vs. Tiger!
How could you resist it?
We went back to Rod’s house, locked his bedroom door, slid the tape inside, and waited. A black screen came up:
THIS DOCUMENT IS A WORK OF FACT: SADLY, WHILE FILMING A SHORT FILM WITH THE VERHOEVEN CIRCUS IN FINLAND, OUR CAMERA CREW BECAME WITNESS TO THIS TERRIBLE ACCIDENT.
Then it cut to a grainy black-and-white shot of a lion swiping at the bars of its cage. A strongman in black tights strikes his whip at the animal, trying to get it to perform, maybe. He turns and closes the gate to the cage. The camera follows him as he smiles, says something unclear, and flexes his muscles for the camera. He lifts the bar for another cage and leads a magnificent tiger out by its collar. And then, from out of frame, the lion attacks, escaping from its cage somehow, knocking the man on his back. The strongman rolls to his side, catching a meaty claw to his neck. The tiger lunges, hissing and growling, snapping its claws near the lion’s head. The lion snaps back, leaps forward, and sinks its mouth into the tiger’s neck. The tiger turns and catches one great paw into the lion’s throat and then quickly, with one movement, has its enormous jaws around the lion’s neck and begins snapping wildly. The tiger retreats as a gunshot goes off, limps into its cage, and stops moving. From out of frame, two cameramen help the strongman to his feet, and the lion lies there, its black eye blinking, before you can tell that both animals are dead.
“Shit,” I whispered. “That was intense.”
“Yeah it was.”
“It’s just like fucking high school.”
“Nope, it’s the whole fucking world,” Rod corrected.
“Yeah. Shit,” I said. “Listen, I got to use your can.”
“Sure,” he said.
I crept out of his room and went down the hall to the bathroom, shut the door, then double-backed around to the front room. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was just happening as I was doing it. I knelt down as quietly as I could before those hundreds and hundreds of records, looking nervously for the Chet Baker one. I found it, slipped it out of its place, and started to open it. Why? I dunno. I think I was going to try to steal it. Why? I dunno, really. I mean, I could say it was because I wanted to give it to Gretchen, but then again, I dunno. Maybe I was just jealous of his dad and everything, I’m not sure at all. I do know I looked up to be certain his parents weren’t around and there was Rod, standing there, silent, watching me just like that, not saying anything.
“What are you doing?” Rod asked.
I closed my eyes and felt my heart drop like a hammer in my chest.
“I dunno, I’m sorry, man. I was just looking.”
“Why are you doing that?” I looked up again and it seemed like he might start crying. His face was dark and his eyes were shiny.
“I … I’m sorry, Rod.”
“I would have given it to you if you asked.”
“Oh, man, I’m sorry. Really.”
“I think you should leave,” he said.
“OK,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He opened the front door and looked at me. “I thought you were my fucking friend.”
“I am,” I said, and knew how dumb that sounded even as I was saying it.
OK, I was an asshole. A real, total, super fucking asshole. I sat in my bed all night feeling like shit, like crying—but I didn’t—and I thought about calling Rod up and apologizing, but for some reason I couldn’t do it. I just sat in bed with the pillows over my head. For some stupid fucking reason I just couldn’t do it; I couldn’t say I was sorry because I was so fucking embarrassed and everything. I put on a mix-tape Gretchen had made for me like a year ago, Things Been Bad, and the first song that came on was by the Lemonheads, when they were punk, and it was called “Fucked-Up,” where the singer sang, “I fucked up, I don’t want to hear it.” The next song was by the same band, and it was called “Hate Your Friends,” and he sang, “When you got problems you can’t solve, it’s enough to make you start to hate your friends.” I rewound that song and played it over and over and over again all night, twitching and convulsing like an epileptic in my bed.
At Gretchen’s, what we did sometimes was go through all the rooms in her house, just kind of snooping. It was something we did a lot, I guess. We’d get so bored that we’d go through her sister’s and parents’ rooms, looking for stuff to either laugh at or take. We’d go through her dad’s clothes looking for money, or her sister’s hope chest to find silly shit, like condoms and love letters. We usually started in her parents’ room, lying on the floor, searching under the four-poster bed which was made-up perfectly with pink pillows, the white sheet taut and wrinkle-free on one side, but totally ruffled and unmade where her father slept, which I thought was sad and kinda strange, I guess, how he still only slept on his side of the bed.
“Wow, look at this.” Gretchen pulled out her parents’ photo album from their wedding and smiled. It was opened to a particular page already, a photo of her mom from her wedding day. It was very pretty but it made me feel sad, right away.
“My mom’s a ghost now. But she was pretty, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said.
In the photo, Gretchen’s mom was laughing, just a very small parting of the lips, and from the picture you could totally hear the sound of it, a small burst of giggles—very delicate, very tiny—which usually ended with her mother pardoning herself, raising the back of her hand to stifle her happiness. It made me feel very awkward and sad, staring at it like that. I hadn’t seen much of her mom’s stuff around, only one or two pictures really, since she had been gone, I guess.
“You miss her bad still?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
In the photograph, Gretchen’s mother was wearing a long white veil made of the thinnest lace you could imagine, her face covered completely, her dark eyes only spots of very delicate softness, making the veil wet with tears. She looked like a tiny, beautiful angel all in white, sitting there at a table with a white plastic tablecloth, posing demurely in a metal folding chair, her own father in a dark suit and her own mother in pale blue standing behind her, looking grim and looking down. Gretchen’s mother was smiling up at the camera with the small fairy-tale smile her sister now had, her immaculate fingers reaching up to press a small sparkling of tears of laughter away, always, always with the back of her hand. She looked like a ghost, like Gretchen said; otherworldly, you know, that was her kind of beauty: so lovely, so precious you felt bad for seeing it, knowing it wouldn’t last. Gretchen didn’t look anything like her mom. She looked like her dad, I guess, short and stocky. I glanced from the photo over to Gretchen. At the moment, Gretchen’s arms and legs and the tops of her hands were covered in black ink that declared,
“I am a prisoner of class politics,”
and her forehead had broken out in a number of unexplainable blackheads. But there was still something there from her mom—maybe her laugh or that look in the eyes; maybe mischief, I guess.
We went to Jessica’s room next. In there, on her white wood dresser, Jessica had had a framed photograph of John Denver since she was like seven. It was fucking lame, but hilarious. In the photo, John was holding a guitar and singing. Jessica loved John Denver. Once, their parents had taken both of the girls to see him in concert. There wasn’t anything about it that Gretchen ever told me except that after the concert, her dad had carried her up to bed.
Jessica’s room was the opposite of Gretchen’s: mostly pink and white, with framed photo collages on the wall of Jessica’s cheerleading friends, pressed flowers, teddy bears, other miscellaneous girlie crap. The room was a big fucking sore spot between the sisters. Since Jessica had been born first, she had been given the bigger room. The worst part wasn’t that it was bigger, it was the tree: a big oak that ran right up to the window. Jessica had been using it to slip out at night since she was fifteen.
“So?” I said.
“So,” Gretchen said. She stole a tube of glitter lipstick from the dresser and quickly applied it. Gretchen looked around the room for a minute, wondering, and then there was John Denver, grinning hopelessly back, his plain, smiling face and guitar and long hair looking so out of place and Gretchen leapt at it, laughing.
“What are you gonna do?” I asked.
Quickly, Gretchen slipped off the back of the framed picture, removed the photo of John Denver, set it back down on the dresser, and very carefully, only touching the edges of the picture of her mom laughing, placed it within the silver frame.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Let’s take my mom out for a ride,” she said and I nodded, not knowing what to say.
After a little while, listening to the Escort strain to turn over, the Clash blaring “Spanish Bombs,” Gretchen got the car started. She pulled the framed photo from her purse and placed it along the dash, the ghostly reflection of her mom staring back at us.
“That’s a little creepy,” I said.
“You don’t have to come with,” she said, and I nodded again, keeping quiet.
Gretchen jammed the pen into the cassette player and fast-forwarded to “Straight to Hell” as she turned up the volume and drove off. The radio gave a sputter and then stopped working altogether. It made a whiny, clicking sound, then a low buzz. Gretchen turned the volume down and said, “Fuck it.”
Outside, I watched the neighborhood as we quietly went past. It was sunny out, just before sunset, and the leaves in the trees were beginning to lose some of their greenness, giving over to fall, allowing for these bright patches of blue sky. Kids were playing football on their front lawns, shouting, running out in the street.
“Very American,” Gretchen said with a laugh. “All of them are future rapists.”
A mailman was delivering the mail, whistling as he went, the wheels of his mail cart turning, one of them wobbly. We knew him. He had short gray hair and wore shorts well into the winter. We had seen him once sitting on someone’s front porch smoking. There had been a black mailman for a few weeks, but then somebody said something and now there was this white old guy who smoked on people’s front steps.
Fucking south side,
I thought. Gretchen started to light a cigarette but stopped, smiling at the photo on the dash. She tossed the lit cigarette out of the window and began pointing out the way the world looked as we passed. “It’s real sunny today,” she said to the photo, “and that asshole mailman is leaning against somebody’s fence.”
Some time later, the radio switched on, the cassette became unstuck again, and Momma Cass from the Mamas and the Papas began singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”
“Man, that’s real pretty,” I said, and could not fight the feeling that it was her mom’s voice from the photograph, but talking about stuff like that just sounds weird, unless it’s happening at that minute, I guess.
As usual, we drove around with no direction, and ended up finding our way to Stacy Bensen’s. We screeched to a halt in front of the white brick house. “What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Just wait here a minute,” she said. “You too, Mom.” Gretchen jumped out, ran up to Stacy Bensen’s garden, lifted the two blue bunnies, then the elf, then the swan from where they rested, and placed them on the front porch again. This time she placed the two rabbits on top of one another, and the elf beneath the swan, as if they were all doing it together. She nodded, then rang the doorbell and booked back to her car, too out of breath to laugh.
“Dude, there is something seriously wrong with you,” I said.
At the Yogurt Palace, where Gretchen’s sister Jessica worked, we sometimes found ourselves killing time, asking for different samples, staring at the real customers, until Jess demanded we leave. Gretchen would shout, “I am an American! I can do what I damn well please!” then. knock over the straw dispenser and we would run out, screaming.
We came in and Jess sighed and then she saw Gretchen with the framed photo of their mom. Jessica was behind the counter, in a bright pink apron and pink blouse and pink and white Yogurt Palace painter’s cap, and she just shook her head. There was nothing she could do about us. She was there alone until seven when Caffey, the boss she was nailing, came in.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jess asked, folding her arms in front of her chest.
“Hanging with Brian and Mom,” Gretchen said, winking.
“That’s not even funny. If Dad sees you doing that, you’re gonna send him to the loony bin. Don’t you guys have something better to do with your lives?”
“No, not really,” I said.
“This one’s my favorite.” Gretchen handed the frame to her older sister. “But doesn’t she look like she’s just gonna die early?”
Jessica stared at the photo, touched the thin glass, and nodded. “Yeah, she does, I guess.”