“That’s it. I’m giving up on the both of you as human beings.”
“What?” Mike asked, squinting dumbly.
“Fine. If you want to be anti-social, fine. If you all want to grow up without any prospects for the future, it doesn’t bother me in the least.”
“What are you talking about, Mom?” Mike asked, shaking his head. Mrs. Madden stood before us, let go of her hair, took a deep breath, and smiled, but kind of meanly. She was a very skinny lady, tall, with poofy blond hair. She wore slacks a lot and smoked more than Mike, I think. She made me kind of nervous when she talked to me because she seemed to want answers to questions I didn’t even know about. Like once when Mike was making out with some girl in his room and I was down playing pool on their pool table by myself, she stared at me for a minute and then said, “What do you think you’re gonna end up doing with your life?” And without thinking I said, “I’m gonna be in a band, probably,” and she let out a quick, sharp laugh and then shook her head and asked, “Really?” And I just shrugged my shoulders and went back to playing pool and didn’t ever know if she saw me hit the eight ball in by accident on the very next shot.
Mrs. Madden opened her purse and fumbled for her Virginia Slims, lit one, and pointed it at Mike, then at me.
“You two are no longer my problem,” she said.
“Really?” Mike asked.
“Really,” she said. “I’ve got this piece of paper from your father saying my marriage has been undone. So you,” she said, pointing her cigarette at Mike, “and you,” she said, pointing it at me, “don’t even exist to me.”
“Cool,” Mike said. “What does that mean?”
“That means,” Mrs. Madden said, gently tugging on Mike’s long red hair, “you two are no longer my responsibility. I am giving up on trying to fix men,” she said, kind of laughing to herself.
“So we can do what we want?” Mike asked, grinning wildly.
“You can do whatever you want,” she replied, nodding.
“We can smoke in the basement?”
“You already do,” she said.
“We can smoke dope down there?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “As long as you don’t try and drive later.”
“Cool,” Mike said. “We can have chicks over?”
“I don’t care,” she said again. “But no going all the way. If either of you guys gets a girl pregnant in my house, you’ll be out on your ass.” She said that looking at me, and I wasn’t even her kid.
“Can we hang out as late as we want?” he asked again. “No curfew and all?”
“I don’t care what you do. You two are no longer on my radar,” and she gave Mike’s hair one more tug and disappeared downstairs to do the laundry.
“This is fucking incredible,” Mike said.
“It really is,” I agreed.
“I mean incredible,” he said, his eyes glassy with possibility. “I will have to call and thank my dad.”
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We have a fucking party. No, no, an orgy. Do you know any girls that will be in an orgy?” he asked me.
“Nope,” I said.
“Too bad.”
“Well, what first?” I asked.
“I am going down to sit on the couch in the basement and smoke the biggest bowl ever.”
“I will join you,” I said, and we went downstairs singing, making trumpet sounds like the advance of kings, following the wood stairs to the unfinished cement basement, one long gray concrete rectangle, past the hallway that was stacked full of boxes and junk and old clothing. Their basement had a pretty decent used pool table in the center of the room and two secondhand sofas pressed against the side wall beside an old rabbit-eared TV. Mike had put a calendar up of the Jägermeister girls, these buxom blond chicks from a liquor ad, and an Ozzy poster from the
Tribute
record on the opposite wall. Because Mike’s room was in one corner of the basement, barely sectioned off by thin wood paneling and two-by-fours, the entire basement smelled like his cigarettes—everything: the sofas, the felt of the pool table, the black curtains covering the small glass block basement windows which hardly let in any light anyway.
Mike crept into his room, dug under his bed for an empty shaving cream can he had made into a place to stash his dope, pulled out a small plastic sandwich bag full of dry green weed, and sat down on his bed to pick out the seeds. He did it quick, in a flash, and was already packing the bowl by the time I had completely made up my mind to smoke it with him.
“OK,” he said, nodding, holding the pipe in front of his mouth. “It’s easy. You just light it, wait until it glows, right? Then suck it in as slow as you can, don’t like try to swallow it down, just like, like, breath it in.” He found his blue plastic lighter and lit the weed inside the bowl, which crackled and gave off a thick, earthy smell. I had smelled it before and it always reminded me of Jessica, Gretchen’s sister—her jacket mostly, this corduroy furry-collared thing—Jessica was the only person besides Mike who I knew smoked a lot of dope. Mike held the lighter over the bowl for a minute, killed the flame, then slowly sucked in a breath, squinting his eyes closed again. He tightened his lips and then smiled, still with his eyes closed, then began to speak, still holding the smoke in.
“OK,” he hissed. “Then you hold it like this,” and he coughed a little and let out a great cloud of bluish smoke. “No problem,” he said, nodding.
He handed me the bowl and the lighter and I put it to my mouth and said, “No problem,” and did what he told me. I felt the tar kind of taste burning the back of my throat and mouth and tongue, then deeper, down, down, down, into my lungs, and I held the smoke there as long as I could before I shot it all out of my mouth, smiling the way he had. Somehow I started coughing, my eyes ballooning up with tears. Mike pat my back and laughed.
“Cough to get off,” he said, taking the bowl back. I didn’t feel much different. My eyes were still watering and my throat felt raw and scratchy. Mike took another tug on the bowl and passed it back to me. I took another hit, trying not to cough this time, but it happened anyway, Mike laughing harder this time, my eyes feeling like a thousand pounds as I blinked the tears out of them, laughing at myself. I felt my ears kind of open up then, like they had been clogged, and my tongue felt hot and large and heavy. Mike got up and put on some Black Sabbath and all of a sudden it started to really hit me. The song, which I knew well, “War Pigs,” sounded different, broken into a hundred parts like a symphony, each instrument separate and multiplied, Ozzy’s voice warmer somehow, like he was someone I knew singing in the room with me. Mike sat back down on the bed and patted my back.
“You fucked up?”
“I think so,” I said. “I think I am,” I said again. “This is OK,” I said. “It really is.”
“Do you want me to call some girls?” Mike asked, winking.
“OK,” I said. “Thanks, Mike, for everything.” Mike nodded, pat my back again, picked up the phone and dialed, then said:
“Amanda? It’s Mike. You’ll never believe what happened,” and Amanda, a blonde hair spray junkie, and her friend, Katie O., who had a lot of acne and so wore tons of pancake makeup but was otherwise pretty cute, were over there in like ten seconds.
OK, the bad part happened when Mike came home from school two days later and noticed his mom had taken out all the telephones in the house. All the phones were gone. He asked her what was up and she just shrugged her shoulders and walked away. The next day when we walked into his house, some dude from the phone company was there and he was putting in an actual pay phone, I mean, right on the fucking kitchen wall, like Mike’s kitchen was a bus stop or something. Mike and I stared at it and he said, “That is seriously fucked up,” and the poor phone guy just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Sorry,” and went back to connecting the phone. Mike shook his head and went to open the fridge to grab an after-school snack of frozen pizza and Jewel-brand pop, but get this: When he pulled on the refrigerator door, it wouldn’t give. He pulled and pulled and then looked down and there was a lock. There was a goddamn lock on the fridge.
“This is incredible,” Mike said, covering his face. “She is fucking insane.”
“That,” I said, pointing at the small golden lock, “is the scariest thing I have ever seen,” because before the divorce got signed or whatever and before Mrs. Madden completely flipped out, you could go over to Mike’s and dig around in his fridge for like anything, usually frozen pizza and Jewel-brand soda pop, and we would eat it there, over the sink standing up, without plates, so we didn’t have to wash them, but nope, none of that now.
“What the fuck is she thinking?” he asked, shaking his head.
“I have no idea,” I said, because I didn’t, and I started thinking about my mom and dad—who, after like six months, was still sleeping on the couch in the basement—and what strange tortures might be in store for me.
“Mom!” Mike howled. “What in the fuck is all this?”
Mrs. Madden appeared from her bedroom, in a baby-blue terrycloth robe, blue towel holding her hair up above her head, blinking coyly. “Yes, neighbor?”
“What is all this shit?” he shouted, shaking his hands.
“All this shit is my shit,” she said with a smile, then edged a Virginia Slim from the pack on the counter.
I stepped back and started taking it all in.
“If you want to use the phone, you’re going to have to get a job to pay for it. Same with food.”
“Wow,” I mumbled out loud.
“Holy shit,” Mike said. “You’ve lost it.”
“Not at all,” she said. “This is the most sane I’ve felt in nineteen years.”
“Well, what about Molly and Petey?” he asked.
“Everyone is going have to pay their way,” she answered, nodding, then turned and disappeared back into her bedroom.
“Seriously,” Mike said, “this is crazy.”
It was crazy. Mike and his little brother Petey, who was only twelve, well, they had to buy their own groceries or pay their mom for meals. The first thing Mike did was go and sell all the records he hadn’t listened to in a while, to avoid having to get a job. He thought his mom would at least come around on the food deal, but she didn’t. Seriously. Mike’s older sister Molly, who had a big round face, the way I liked a girl’s face—kind of mean and smart-mouthed, you know the kind, the kind of girl who looks at you like you aren’t nothing, and then makes out with you just because she’s bored—well, Molly, who was two years older than me and Mike, nineteen and in junior college, well, she came home from work at this bar, O’Reilly’s, saw the pay phones and the lock on the fridge and took off two days later with the tour manager from the band REO Speedwagon—who was very big in our neighborhood because one of the guys, the drummer I think, went to our high school, Brother Rice—and headed out on the road.
That was another blow. Molly leaving just about killed Mike, being his older sister and all. She had always bought beer for us and would tell us what girls like you to do and how to get them to at least consider having sex with you by saying stuff like, “I feel like you’re the only one I can say personal stuff to.”
Now he had no food, no phone, no beer, no older sister to help him through. Sure, he could smoke dope in his basement, but the price of it was hardly worth it, you know? So in a matter of hours it went from the greatest situation in the world to the worst, just like that.
It got real bad for Mike. One night, a few weeks after Mrs. Madden had said she was giving up on us, we had two girls down in the basement, two girls who Mike had met at the grocery store while he had been shopping. All he bought were cans and cans of Chef Boyardee to eat. The girls were definitely Catholic high school girls—from Queen of Peace, which was in a Hispanic neighborhood—because they were as clean as any girls I’d ever seen; not just their soft brown hair, but the way they talked and smoked like very polite foreign movie stars, and even the way they crossed and uncrossed their legs. Well, we passed around the bowl and the girls got high and then I put on “I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore,” which was a song by REO Speedwagon and a good one to set the mood, because Mike had used it before. I was on one couch with one girl, and Mike was in his bedroom. Then I had my hand up this girl’s shirt and was feeling her up over the bra and she had her eyes closed, and her name was Teresa, so pretty, but I thought it was weird that she kept her eyes closed, like if she had her eyes closed she wasn’t going to have to go to confession next Saturday or whatever Catholic girls feel they have to do. Well Mike, he just walked out of his bedroom suddenly and said, “What the fuck is this shit you’re listening to?”
And I said, “What?” sitting up, pulling my hand back.
And then he said, “Don’t you got any goddamn consideration for my feelings, man? I asked you not to play this record anymore.”
And I said, “I don’t get it, it’s a good record,” and he said, “Turn that goddamn thing off unless you want to go in the backyard to do your dry-humping.” Which I did not, because I knew Mike’s secret: A girl on a couch is a lot more likely to just lie there and let you do what you want than if you were, say, in the backseat of a car or under her back porch. By then, I had made out with like ten girls, but I still didn’t know what went on in their heads, if they just looked up at the ceiling and counted the tiles or if they were thinking about their homework assignments or imagining I was somebody special like Scott Baio, but like Mike said, if you can get them on the couch you are halfway there, my friend, or so I have seen.
“Fuck, it’s no big deal,” I said. I stood up and lifted off the record arm and put on Cream with Eric Clapton instead, but the mood was ruined already. When I went to undo Teresa’s bra, she stopped me and asked, “Is there a bathroom around here?” and I nodded and pointed up the stairs and she sat up there for like a half hour until her friend came out and the two of them left, not coming back down to say goodbye or thanks or anything.
I fell in love with a girl named Dorie. She was Mike’s neighbor and the moment I met her, I was so into her it was not even funny. Most girls I didn’t really fall for at first, like Gretchen, who had been my friend for so long that it probably would have never worked out, and, well, I was not one of those kind of guys who was very particular with girls. Mike told me to take what I could get, so I did. There were tons and tons of mostly decent-looking girls who wanted some nondescript, renegade, loner-type to de-virginize them so they could have it over and done with and so they never had to see the doofus again. That was where I liked to think I came in, though it hadn’t happened like that exactly for me yet. Monica Dallas: over the bra. Kelly Madley: down her pants. Kathy Konoplowski: not totally de-virginized, but close.