Also, the job had given me plenty of time to develop these long fantasies where I’d be behind the counter of the Yogurt Palace and Dorie would come in and “Beth” by KISS would be playing and her brown hair would be blowing and she’d unzip her jeans and the golden crown would rise on up and we’d go in the back and have some sex and I never worried if I was good or not, because it was always only a dream. So what I really wanted at that time was Dorie, and not just the van or to be out of my house. But the van did have a spider on it and fuck you if you say I already mentioned it, because it was just that bad-ass.
The other dude I had to work with on Saturday nights, Tom, was no good. On the first Saturday night we worked together, an empty, boring night with no customers the entire evening, Tom looked at me, kind of checking me out, staring at me up and down, and asked, “Bro’, can you keep a secret?” Tom looked like a regular kid: medium height, medium build, mild case of acne, gray tattered baseball hat always turned around backwards on his blond head. He had a goofy way of talking, kind of like ghetto, I guess, even though he was more pale than me. I don’t think he was too sharp a kid. I mean, I think he would have been an OK guy if he hadn’t been so dumb and greedy.
“Yo, can you keep a secret or not, dude?” he asked again.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said.
“Check this,” he said, pointing over to the cash register, “I got a system.”
“A system?”
“A system,” he said, nodding. “It’s perfect.”
“Really?”
“Check it,” he said again. “When the people come in, I don’t ring them up.”
“So?”
“I mean, I take their money, you know, charge them or whatever, and then I pocket the money.”
“Why the fuck do you do that?”
“What do you mean, why?” he asked. “To make money.”
“Don’t you get paid for working here?”
“Yeah, but that’s shit. I go to my crib with cash money doing this.”
“Well, that’s cool, just don’t do it when I’m around. I need this job.”
“What, you don’t think I need this job too?” he asked.
I kind of laughed and turned, going back to wiping down the glassy sneeze guards.
“I axed you a question,” Tom said, stepping over beside me.
“You
axed
me a question?” I said, mocking him. “Where are you from anyway?”
“What the fuck do you care where I’m from,” he muttered, giving me a tough look. “I come from Oak Lawn.”
“Oak Lawn?” I asked, shaking my head. “Do you even have black people living there?”
“Yo,” he said, holding his hand up in a weird gangster sign, “you need to give respect here. I don’t take anyone’s shit, see?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, turning my head so I didn’t laugh. “Good luck with your system.”
That night when the only customers came in—two elderly women in matching blue head scarves who ordered the smallest scoops of mint chocolate chip we sold—Tom tried to do his “system” on them, asking for their money without ringing them in. I stood beside him, making up my mind not to let him fuck this up for me.
“Yo, Tom,” I said as he reached out to take their money, a measly dollar-fifty, “you forgot to ring them in, bro.” He turned to me and glared, blinking, then turned to the ladies and said, “I’ll ring them in after I take their money.”
“Yo, Tom, why not ring them in now?” I asked.
“Don’t you have tables to clean?” he asked, still holding their dollar and two quarters in his hand.
“No, I got them already. Here, let me do it,” I said, and punched in two small cones. The cash register buzzed and bleeped and I took the money from Tom’s hand, placing it in the appropriate bins.
“You’re fucking dead, bitch,” he said, whispering under his breath. All night I was waiting for him to come at me with a knife or a set of brass knuckles or a roll of quarters or a broom even, but he didn’t do anything. We locked up, finished cleaning, and just as he was leaving, I said, “Sorry about that, Tom. I just don’t want to get busted,” and he nodded and stormed off to his car, a gold Cutlass Supreme with vanity license plates that said, “MR.SLICK.”
I came in the next day early to work my shift and found out I had been fired. Tom had gone home and called Caffey, the boss’ son, and told him he had caught me stealing, and also mentioned he knew about Jessica and Caffey fooling around, and that was it for me. The dreams of my staying the hell away from my house, the dreams of the van with the spider on it, the dreams of impressing Dorie, all gone, just like that.
I swore if I ever found out where that kid Tom lived, I’d put a hurt on him for lying and getting me fired, I swore to fucking God, sincerely.
In the 7-Eleven parking lot, I kissed Dorie again. We were waiting for Mike to try and buy cigarettes and Dorie was standing by the dumpster which was littered with graffiti like EAT PUSSY and ME, 1988, and there was the big red-and-green 7-Eleven sign burning in the night and some mother was in the passenger seat of a long brown station wagon screaming at her kids and some guy in a white Air Conditioning/ Heating van had left it running with the radio on and Buddy Holly’s “Every Day” was playing with its corny toy piano and Dorie was leaning against the red bricks of the 7-Eleven and she had her lightblue jean jacket on and blue jeans and a T-shirt that said
Spay and Neuter Your Pets
, and her brownish-red hair was looking very straight—her bangs just above her tiny eyebrows—and she was carving her name into the brick with a white stone, which wasn’t really working, and she had been eating an orange popsicle and was singing along to Buddy Holly, and so when I finally kissed her for a second time, well, it tasted just like Orange Dream.
At this time, I decided it would be cool to have lines shaved into my hair—you know, like Brian “The Boz” Bosworth from the Oklahoma Sooners—like where you have long hair in the back and the sides are short and there are lines like shaved into the side of your head in a cool pattern. I thought that might, you know, make it for me; might, you know, be my “thing,” you know, who I could be: the guy with the shaved lines in his hair. I had seen Bosworth on TV months before, when my older brother Tim was watching some homo-erotic football game, and the dude’s hair looked very cool. So I asked Mike to try it and he wouldn’t do it. I mean, I even went to Osco Drug and bought a hair-trimmer kit for twenty bucks and there I was and no one would do it; I even asked Mrs. Madden and she said she’d do it for fifty bucks. It was like everything else: You get a good idea and people go out of their way to make it hard on you.
Like Mike’s basement: It sounded like a great idea, but now his life was shit. He had to work at the lousy pizza place all the time, had to buy his own food, couldn’t make telephone calls, hadn’t seen his sister Molly in a month, and because of all that, he had started fucking up bad at school. He would just not study. He would not turn in his homework or do any assignments and he went from being a low-B/ high-C student to being a hardcore flunker, just like that. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say to cheer him up. He was smoking a lot of dope—before school and after and even sometimes in between classes—and he had bombed our last history test very, very bad, and the hot Ms. Aiken had asked to see him after class and she wanted to know what was going on with him and he just shook his head and got up and left. So, shit.
We were down in Mike’s basement and he was pouting like usual, going through his depression thing, which I think all his dope-smoking didn’t help at all, and Dorie finally came over because I had been calling her all day, and, well, I thought maybe she could get Mike out of bed. She came by with a book she had gotten from her school library about the Boston Strangler and one about American serial killers and I thought,
What an excellent girl
, and she was planning on helping us with the Final Project. But Mike, he was in such a fucking mood, he just kept playing “Changes” by Black Sabbath—which was a very weak song where there was like a piano,
a piano on a fucking Black Sabbath song
, and Ozzy kind of mumbled about going through changes—and all Mike did was lie on his bed, and it was the first time I really had looked at his room in a long time, with the bowls and onehitters and dirty girlie magazines lying out in the open, and Dorie just shook her head and said, “Mike, your home life is definitely fucked,” and he lifted his head up from the bed and said, “I totally know.”
“Listen, man, we need to do this project,” I said.
“Who gives a fuck about it?” he asked, moaning. “Everything else is fucked up.”
“What about Erin McDougal?” I asked. “That’s going good, right?”
“Fuck,” he sighed. “It’s only a matter of time before I fuck that up too.”
“You need to snap out of it, man,” I said. “Come on, let’s go to the mall or something.”
“Just leave me alone!” he shouted, burying his head under his pillows. I pulled on his bare foot, but he wasn’t moving.
“Forget it,” Dorie said, sad, “if he wants to be miserable, let him be miserable. I got to get to work anyway.”
I followed her up the stairs and out into the backyard and asked her, “Dorie, would you still like me if I got my hair cut like Brian Bosworth?”
“Who?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.
“The guy from football with like lines cut into his hair? Like a design.”
“I think it’s going to look stupid,” she said, shaking her head. “I like your hair the way it is. It’s nice,” and she patted it.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “It was just kind of a dumb idea I had.”
“Give me a kiss, I’ve gotta go,” she said, checking her watch. She snapped open a tube of whitish lipstick and quickly redid her lips.
“You really gotta go?” I asked.
“Yeah, my ride’s coming to pick me up.”
“OK.” I reached up and kissed her as hard as I could, sliding my tongue in and out of her mouth, holding her hands in my hands as she giggled and then growled, planting a big white lipstick kiss on my cheek. I walked her to the front of Mike’s house and a super-fine black Firebird pulled up beside us, idling at the curb. The dude behind the wheel—some dick with mirrored sunglasses, a black headband, and a furry black mustache—honked twice, turning down Winger or some other bad-hair rock on his arena-rock-sized speakers. I stood beside Dorie, my mouth dropping open.
“Call me later,” Dorie said, disappearing into the car. I watched them burn rubber as they pulled away and immediately, in my brain, I began to do some very poor mathematical calculations:
•I did not have cool hair, contrary to Dorie’s comments. I did not have my own look at all.
•I did not have a job anymore, which meant no money coming in.
•At this rate, I could afford to take Dorie to a matinee, enjoy one cheap appetizer at Bennigan’s, and take the bus back to an enchanted evening of romance and bliss watching Mike blaze up and then complain.
Like this, I was never going to get to do it with her if I couldn’t get some money together, and, well, things did not look very good for me.
Until
Until
Until the events that transpired one afternoon at a fucking Dungeons and Dragons game changed everything.
OK, on Saturday afternoon these geeks that Mike knew, these nerdy Dungeons and Dragons kids, called him up out of the blue and asked if they could buy some dope off of him. It was a golden opportunity, because there were like five or six of them and each wanted to buy some. Why? I dunno, to prove they were all cool or something, maybe. The main geek was this kid Peter Tracy, who I knew from our high school. Mike had gone to public grammar school with him and had played D&D with him a couple of times, I guess, back in junior high, but they hadn’t talked in years. So when the kid asked, “Can you bring it by tonight? It’s important,” Mike said, “We will be there,” and hung up the phone quick.
The idea was to give them just a little pot, just enough to get them slightly stoned, and pack the rest with oregano, an old stoner trick. That way Mike was only selling a little of his stash and getting paid for like five times as much. It was simple and brilliant and easy. We hopped on a bus and ended up in Oak Lawn, off of 111th Street, down a row of apartment houses to a dead-end street. We walked around back as the head geek had instructed and knocked on the back door twice. The kid’s mom, a very June Cleaver type, with the short brown bob and blue dress, white apron, and dishpan hands, answered the door, smiling. “Oh, hello there, boys,” she beamed. “Come in, come in.”
“Thanks,” Mike said, patting down his hair.
“We haven’t seen you in a long time, Michael. How are your parents?”
“Swell,” he said. We walked in through the back kitchen door, smiling and nodding at Mrs. Tracy as she asked us to wipe our feet. You could tell she was one of those ladies right away. Like I said, she had perfectly bobbed brown hair, a blue and white frilly apron on, and a soapy mop in her hand. Mike and I apologized and wiped our feet on the mat, and she said, “The boys are in the front room in the middle of a game right now.”
“Great,” Mike said, rolling his eyes.
“Would you like to hang up your coats?” Mrs. Tracy asked.
“No, we’re just stopping by quick,” Mike said.
“Oh, but I insist,” she said and made us take off our coats. I looked around the kitchen for a minute and saw how clean the countertops were, how spotless and perfect every surface was, how all of the geeks’ jackets were hung by the back door, Mrs. Tracy’s blue linen jacket, her red purse, all perfectly arranged on descending hooks, how everything in this house seemed to be singing; and I thought of Mike’s kitchen, which was a fucking mess and had this diseased head of lettuce sitting in the sink for weeks, and my kitchen at home, which was never used for anything because no one wanted to be at home to eat. We walked down the hallway, past the goofy photos of Peter Tracy as a baby—dozens of them, because he was an only child—and you could almost tell he was going to grow up to be geeky:His head was huge, like eight times larger than the rest of his body, and he had a moody, arrogant kind of look as he regarded the camera coldly. We walked through the hall, then out into the front room where five or six ultra-nerds were doing their fucking role-playing, shouting and tossing their twelve-sided dice and what seemed to me like kind of mentally jerking each other off, maybe.