“Look at Grandma and Grandpa. Do you think they ever looked happy?”
“Nope. Wow, look at her eyes,” Jessica said. “She’s laughing so hard she’s crying.”
“You got her smile,” Gretchen said, taking the picture back. Jessica blushed, I dunno, maybe wanting to say something nice, but all she said was, “You guys want anything to eat?”
“Yeah,” Gretchen said. “I’ll take a raspberry blast for Mom and a chocolate vanilla twist for me.”
“Brian, you want anything?” Jess asked.
“No, I’m cool,” I said. “I don’t eat ice cream.”
Jessica nodded and began filling two small Styrofoam cups with each flavor, pulling down on the lever until each one was filled properly.
“Why don’t you get a new job, Gretchen?” Jessica asked. “You guys seem bored as hell.”
“I’m spending quality time with my family,” Gretchen replied, sinking a spoon into the bowl of raspberry.
“Well, where you headed after here?” Jessica asked.
“I dunno. We might go shoplift something.”
“Well, be careful. If you get arrested, you two’ll have to sit around for a while. Dad’s working late and I don’t get off until seven.”
“OK,” Gretchen said. “Hey, Brian and me were talking. How old were you when you lost your virginity?”
“What?” Jessica took a step back, folding her arms in front of her chest again.
“How old were you when someone popped your cherry?” Gretchen asked.
“Why are you asking me this?”
There were no customers in the yogurt shop and the sound of the fans overhead just kept on spinning.
“Forget it,” Gretchen said.
“Well, how do you even know I’m not a virgin?” Jessica asked.
“Because we saw the rubbers in your dresser.”
“Oh.”
“So?”
“I dunno. Sixteen, I guess.”
“With who?”
“Bill Paris.”
“The kid with the blue Camaro?”
Jessica nodded. “Yeah.” Then she asked, “Why’d you want to know?”
“I dunno. We just wanted to know. For comparisons.”
“Well, what about you guys?” Jessica asked.
Gretchen’s face went red. “I dunno. Last year,” she lied.
“With who?”
“My hand,” Gretchen sighed.
“Brian Oswald, what about you?” Jessica asked.
“I haven’t found the right girl yet,” I said. “Why, are you offering?”
“No,” she said, then looked down. “Well, that doesn’t mean anything.
All the people I know who started having sex when they were young are all fucked up now.”
“You don’t have to lie,” Gretchen said, looking up. “We don’t mind. Really.”
“It’ll happen, and when it does, it’ll be nice because you waited.”
“I guess.” Gretchen looked down at the framed photo. “Mom and me and Brian are gonna go meet some sailors. See you later.”
“OK. See ya,” Jess said.
“
See yaaaaaa
,” Gretchen whispered in a ghostly voice, holding the photograph of her mother up, shaking it. “And Jess?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for not being a douche-bag.”
Going to somebody’s basement party that Friday night, I decided I would totally have to make my move on Gretchen, do or die. It also meant three things:
1.
I would try and tell Gretchen how I felt, but I would probably puss out.
2.
. If Bobby B. came with Kim, he would hit someone in the back of the head.
3.
Something would happen and Gretchen and I would get in some sort of argument by the end of the evening.
I had been walking around the mall to avoid being at home because my mom had the day off of work, and I was just strutting around, heavy-eyeballing the hot chicks with their light-blue eye shadow and glitter lipstick, in patent-leather high heels and black turtlenecks and mini, mini jean skirts, all of whom worked at the hot-chick stores like Express and Benetton; and also, I had been busy getting a boner in front of the Frederick’s of Hollywood, staring at all the red and purple and black bras and panties, wondering if it might not be so bad making it with one of those mannequins as long as they were wearing those hot panties; and also killing time at the Aladdin’s Castle video arcade to check on a high score of
Rampage
I had made the week before.
In between all that, I called Gretchen at the pay phone and asked what she was doing and she asked if I wanted to go with her to this girl Esme’s party and I said, “Why the fuck not?” and decided:
This
.
This was most definitely it
. There was only like two weeks left before fucking Homecoming and it was a Friday night and still like summer outside, warm and clear, and it made you feel kind of reckless, like you didn’t have a care in the world—which I did, but you know, I was trying to outsmart myself, maybe. I went and bought like a bottle of Drakar, this bullshit Euro-cologne and doused myself in it and took the bus over to Gretchen’s and we went together from there.
OK, have you been to a basement show before? I had been to a couple with Gretchen. It was loud, usually. The way it usually worked was someone’s parents went out of town and someone got a friend’s band to play and then another and another and so about a hundred kids all crowded into someone’s basement to listen to some shitty punk rock band do Ramones covers, while someone else would start moshing and someone else would start making out and someone else would break up with somebody.
Like I said, the punk kids usually annoyed the fuck out of me, with their green liberty Mohawks and ripped-up jeans and safety pins and spikes and shit, because it was all a put-on. The joke was they were supposed to look beat, like scummy and fucked-up and scabby, but if you’ve ever waited for a girl to fucking dress like that, well, it takes time, because none of it is an accident. By the time Gretchen was ready, with all her get-up and gunk in her hair and shit, it was already after eight and we headed over to this girl Esme’s house in the suburbs—Palos Hills, I think—about a half hour southwest of the city.
“Do you know whose house we’re going to?” Gretchen asked.
“I guess,” I said.
“You guess? Brian Oswald, this girl fucking loves you,” she said, laughing.
Which wasn’t exactly true. At a party, I had once made out with this girl, Esme, and I had kind of gotten nervous and blown it by being stupid. When she gave me her phone number to call her, I did. But on the phone I was more uncomfortable and awkward than I was in person, and so I started lying my ass off and said I was a singer in a metal band. When she had asked the name, the best I could come up with on such short notice was “Ramrod” and she said, “Cool,” and she asked if we had any shows coming up and I said, “Sure,” and then she asked if she could come check us out and I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I just stopped calling her.
“Brian, maybe you can sing for her tonight,” Gretchen said with a smirk.
“Maybe you can fuck off for mentioning it. That still is the longest relationship I’ve ever had,” I said, kind of pouting.
We followed the long, winding, tree-lined subdivision road around and around until we found the right house. We pulled up out front, Gretchen and me, her pink hair all spiked-up and shiny, a black spiked choker around her neck, her silver chains dangling from her wrists, all kinds of black mascara and lipstick and glittery eye shadow on her lids. She looked hot—not pretty, but hot like a porn star maybe—but she had to check herself in the mirror again. We were sitting in the magnificent Escort and Gretchen was fixing her lipstick and more than anything in the world I wanted to grab her and kiss her; I wanted to make out with her right there, but I didn’t. Instead, I watched as she took out a piece of Kleenex from her purse, put it between her lips, and then crinkled it up, the imprint of her hot mouth, the kiss I could have had if I wasn’t such a pussy, maybe. It was weird and it made me feel weird to be noticing things like that, but that was what I was thinking. I was thinking about getting her to kiss me. But that was it; I had blown a good chance. We got out of the car and headed up toward the house, me with my hands in my fucking pants.
About this suburban home: It was big and white—about three stories, it seemed—with a two-car garage and a perfect, newly sodded lawn with its own fancy, built-in sprinkler system, which I noticed right away because, hey, I mowed lawns and
this was the suburbs
and everything. There were like about twenty shitty punk rock cars parked up and down the street which was, like I said, this winding cul-de-sac, which was surrounded by this thick, black, metal, shiny suburban subdivision fence. There were about eight more cars parked in the girl’s driveway, with kids pulling amps and guitars and cases of beer out of their backseats and trunks. The two-car garage door was open and we followed some kid who looked like he was eleven—short, skinny, pimply, with orange spiked hair and a NO FX T-shirt—through the garage, past a pristine black Lexus, into a small hallway and down into the unfinished cement basement.
It was like every other basement I’d ever been in, suburban home or not: one long wood flight of stairs down, a few single light bulbs hanging from single wires, and a washing machine and dryer beside some bed sheets hanging on a line. There were about fifty kids there already and it was hot—real hot—down there, with a few fans blowing, but not much air getting in. Like I said, I knew the girl whose party it was, Esme, and shit. I didn’t know if that was her real name or not, but I always thought it was hot, and she was a sophomore at Mother McCauley and kind of friends with Gretchen and she had her dyed-red hair cut in a Chelsea—you know, with the long bangs but the rest of her hair shaved? Also, she wore these cool, retro black cat’s eye glasses because I think she was slightly cross-eyed. Like I said, I had made out with her once, kind of by accident. We had been at another party, like a year before, and we were sitting on a couch talking about bands, and she said her first record was
Appetite for Destruction
by GNR and I said that was my favorite record of all time and soon enough we started kissing. Then she giggled and said, “Your name’s not Darren, is it?” and I said, “No, it’s Brian,” and we both laughed and she wrote her name and number on the back of my hand, and then, like I said, I called her and got nervous and lied. More than anything in the world at the time, I wanted to feel her up because she had very small breasts but never wore a bra and always had on these very tight T-shirts, which drove me fucking crazy. I dunno. Now, I guess Esme was only interested in guys who were in punk bands, which is the way it usually goes with those kinds of girls, I guess. I thought the only way to a woman’s heart like that was by being a somebody, and I wasn’t even close to being a somebody. I mean, fuck, I was in the marching band if that says anything.
Like I remembered her, there she was: Esme, sitting on top of the washing machine drinking a bottle of beer, her red Chelsea looking lovely, talking to Kim, who was there with Bobby B., who, like always, looked bored with everything. They all waved to us and smiled, Bobby B. flashing me the devil sign. As we came down the steps, I could hear a brittle-sounding guitar pounding out power chords from a cheap-o practice amp and tinny drums that seemed far away and muffled, like one of those windup monkeys. At first I thought someone was playing a record on a stereo that had blown its speakers, but when we got to the bottom of the stairs, I saw some band was already playing.
The band was called the Morlocks! with the exclamation point and everything. It was this guy Jim’s band, a guy who we all knew, a sophomore at Evergreen Park, the public high school. The name Morlocks! they got from the
Time Machine
by H.G. Wells, which I had read myself. They couldn’t really play too well and didn’t have a bass player; it was just a singer, guitar player, and a drummer, and they didn’t have any real equipment, but to me it was still a band, because to me a band isn’t anything but an idea, good or bad, and once you get the idea it’s only a matter of time before it either happens or it doesn’t. I had been thinking about being in a metal band for years and it was almost as real to me as if it had already happened. Jim had an idea and it was the Morlocks! and he wrote the name
MORLOCKS!
very satanic-looking all over his jean jacket and shirts and on the white rubber tops of his Chuck Taylors with black magic marker. I always thought that it was cool that he wrote his own band name all over everything, even though no one had ever really heard of them. The Morlocks! played about seven songs, one after the other, three of them by the Ramones; the rest were songs Jim had written about this girl we had known, Sheryl Landry, who shot herself when we were in junior high, songs with real subtle titles like “Ricochet Baby” and “I Wanna Be Your Bullet.” Mostly the songs were pretty bad, pretty uninteresting, but Jim had a lot of energy and kept spraying beer at the kids who were standing up close. I felt jealous for a good ten minutes watching them play. Not because they were good, but because they were not good and still people were loving them. Especially the girls. Especially Gretchen.
OK, it kind of broke my heart but I looked over and saw Gretchen was up close to the corner where the band was playing and she was dancing with her eyes closed like she was alone and she had her hands over her head and she wasn’t moshing like some of the other kids—dudes, mostly, who were karate-chopping the air and kicking and shoving each other; they were younger kids mostly, with recently dyed hair that left color splotches along their necks because they hadn’t been told to use Vaseline, or skater kids in their favorite band T-shirts, like Naked Raygun or the Circle Jerks, with their one long strand of hair that hung in their faces like Glenn Danzig. All of them were sweaty and laughing and dancing hard. When we went to these basement shows, I never danced because I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I just sat beside Kim and Bobby B. near the washing machine just watching, like always.
Like I said, it wouldn’t have been a real party if Bobby B. had not tried starting a fight. See, Bobby B. hated punk music. He would bitch about it all the time. “There’s no fucking guitar solos. Those fucking bands should learn how to play their instruments,” he’d tell me while working on his van or at some other basement show. The only reason he came was because of Kim, who he was on-again/off-again with anyway. Punk music was just another thing for them to argue about, I guess. I turned to see what Bobby B. was thinking of the Morlocks!and he gave me the devil sign again, followed by a thumbs-down, rolling his eyes. “This is fucking noise,” he yelled as loud as he could. Kim covered his mouth, shaking her head, but not before two skinny straightedge suburban kids had heard, their bald heads glistening on their bumpy crowns with sweat. The straightedge kids were all straight: no drugs, no smoking—no sex? I’m not sure about the last one. They were like a weird, hard-core kind of cult that was very fucking arrogant, because they didn’t ever get fucked up. They were like the student council kids of that scene. They were dressed in matching Minor Threat T-shirts, which was kind of fucking weird, and they had black bondage pants on, with the four hundred zippers, all tapering down to their twenty-hole combat boots. They also had black magic-markered X’s on the back of their hands, you know, to let you know who they were, I guess. It was like being punk wasn’t special enough, so they had to be a group within a whole fucking group.