I looked down at my digital calculator watch, then I looked up at the clock at the front of the classroom. Both of them said 1:13. American History, 6th Period, Bro. Flangan’s room, Brother Rice Catholic High School, Chicago, IL, USA, North America, Planet Earth. Two more hours of this fucking shit. I sighed, then dug into my back pocket and checked out the mix-tape Gretchen had made me:
(I am a) Rabbit/The Lemonheads
Devil’s Whorehouse/The Misfits
Gimme Some Head/GG Allin
Dear Lover/Social D.
Lover’s Rock/The Clash
Day After Day/The Violent Femmes
I got it suddenly. All of the songs were about fucking. I looked at the side of the tape, where the title was: I Got Pubic Lice. I kind of laughed out loud in class, then covered it quick with a cough. I looked at my watch and then at the clock once more. I started at my list again.
Like I said, I heard about everything after school. In the parking lot of Mother McCauley, where Gretchen parked her crappy blue car and where I’d meet to bum a ride home every day after class, I sat on the hood and listened, watching as Kim and Gretchen re-enacted the whole Stacy Bensen fight thing: the other girls giving them looks in the hall, Gretchen remembering being a fat kid, even with her shouting the “Suck my dick, Barbie” thing. I just listened and nodded. Whatever happened that day, I’d have to hear recounted in minute detail before we could go home. I really didn’t give a shit about Stacy Bensen. I knew her but I didn’t have a problem with her. I wasn’t punk rock at all; I didn’t go looking for fights. Like I said, I was into metal and hard rock like AC/DC, Mötley Crüe, Metallica, stuff like that mostly. I guess I was kind of a pussy. In high school, I dressed the same every day: lame—blue flannel shirt over the white button-down shirt and black tie I had to wear, black pants, and black dress shoes that were scuffed almost gray. I had dirty-brown hair that hung in my eyes, like a mop I guess, and also my huge brown plastic frame glasses which I needed to wear because my eyesight was so weak. Also, I had a wicked-bad case of acne—on my face, on my neck, even down my back. Like I said, I guess I was a quiet kind of kid. There wasn’t anything punk about me in the least. I always thought the punk kids were a bunch of fucking phonies; I thought they tried too fucking hard, maybe. I mean, I had grown up with Gretchen and Kim—we had been losers together in junior high on the Bloom Junior High Math Team, in which Gretchen had been the club president—and that was the only reason we hung out anymore, I guess: We had gotten used to being losers all together, maybe.
“And I got a note sent home,” Gretchen bragged, digging in her school bag, “and a three-day in-school suspension.” She rifled through her folders and pens, found the blue paper note, and held it up proud—over her head, like it was a scholarship or an aced test or something. I just nodded and looked away.
“Are you guys going straight to Gretchen’s house?” I asked.
“I got to go to work,” Kim said.
“Well, I dunno. I don’t really wanna go home,” I said.
“What’s your malfunction, Brian, you pussy?” Kim asked, and shoved her finger into my chest. I looked down at her shiny black combat boots, then over at Gretchen, who was wearing dark black sunglasses and still waving the letter up high, and then I lowered my head.
“I’ve got a serious problem,” I mumbled.
“What’s
your
serious problem?” Gretchen asked, laughing.
“Nothing,” I said.
“What? What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Just fucking say it,” Kim hissed. “What’s your fucking problem?”
“My dad. It’s kind of weird. He started sleeping down in the basement,” I muttered, and then lowered my head.
“Well, what the fuck does that mean?” Kim asked.
“I don’t know. Before I went to bed, like a few nights ago, it was late, you know, and I saw him on the couch and then he saw me and he said, ‘It’s OK, Brian. I’m going to be sleeping down here for a while.’”
“Well, do you think they’re going to finally get split ?” Kim asked.
“I dunno know, I guess so,” I said.
At night, my pops, who worked at the Tootsie Roll plant and who, no matter what, always smelled like chocolate candy, had started sleeping downstairs, where my room was also located. I liked my dad a lot; he was quiet like me. When I was a kid, and even now, he’d come home from work and hold his hand out and make me guess—
which one?
—and then he’d drop a few Tootsie Rolls into my palm. My mom said that was why my acne was so bad. My dad had acne, too. It didn’t bother me, because my dad was always singing and telling corny jokes. He would come home with bags and bags of Tootsie Rolls and we’d build these enormous structures—the Eiffel Tower, the Sphinx, all from Tootsie Rolls—for their annual Employee Father and Son Contest. Sometimes, he’d take off his glasses and wipe them and stare off into the future like he had something important to say, but then he wouldn’t say anything, just like me. And now he was sleeping in the basement, alone and lonely, and it made me feel awful. I didn’t know what was going on with him exactly.
About my mother, well, I don’t want to say too much except this: When I was in grammar school at Queen of Martyrs, there was this pumpkin-carving contest every year. And like every year my older brother Tim and I would win, because our mother had carved the pumpkins for us. We really didn’t want her to, you know, she just kind of made us. So there is this black-and-white photo of me in like third grade and Tim is in sixth grade, and our picture is being taken for winning the pumpkin-carving contest again and he is standing on one end of this long table and I’m standing on the other, and there’s all these other kids in between us, and Tim’s pumpkin is this really beautifully hand-painted Indian Chief and mine is Dracula with bared fangs and they have exactly the same features, the Chief and Dracula, because my mom did them both, and no one, none of the teachers or principals or whatever, noticed or wanted to say anything. That was just how my mom was about a lot of things, I guess.
“Dad, aren’t you going to get lonely sleeping down here?” I asked him, standing in the dark, watching his face switch colors with the flicker of the TV.
“It’s OK, Bri, thanks for asking.
There’s plenty of room down here, son. I bet there’s a good movie on tonight.”
“All right. Well, I mean, what about mom?”
“Oh, well, she keeps getting those hot flashes. It’ll just be easier to sleep down here for a while.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, OK, goodnight.”
“Goodnight, son.”
That night, I heard him out there snoring, watching an old Western, the sounds of shootouts and gunfights on TV echoing with him mumbling in his sleep. I felt kind of bad for him. I mean, there he was, his soft face, his dirty-blond hair, his work boots standing at the foot of the couch, him breathing through his nose, snoring loudly the way I did. I saw that he still had his glasses on, so I kind of crept out there and just stared at him and slowly, I guess, lifted off his glasses. For some reason I tried them on; they fit my face, but the prescription was too strong. But it was funny, him and I having the same size frames, and then I folded the glasses closed and set them along the arm of the couch as carefully as I could, still trying not to wake him. I looked down and felt something under my bare feet and there were like five or six Tootsie Rolls lying in place all around my dad’s folded pants, which was kind of funny, and I stood over him for a minute more and I wondered why nothing seemed to be good for anyone over the age of eighteen.
“So, is he gonna move out or what?” Gretchen asked.
“I dunno. He’s just sleeping down there for now.”
“Did he say anything to you about it?” she asked again.
“Nope,” I said. “Not really.”
“That’s really fucking weird,” Gretchen sighed, patting my back.
In a gesture completely unlike Kim, she turned and hugged me, wrapping her thin arms all the way around my neck. I felt her spiky bracelets against the side of my cheek; I smelled the fruity, sticky odor of her styling gel; the bubble-gum sugar of the wad of Bubblicious in her mouth; I felt her small, firm, full-packed breasts against the front of my chest as she squeezed. To be honest, I had lusted after Kim all throughout junior high. I had fantasized about getting in her pants and worse, much worse, but it didn’t even feel hot when she was hugging me. It felt bad. It felt bad because she had done it, which must have meant I looked pretty fucking pathetic. I closed my eyes to keep from crying and she just stood there, hugging me like that. And then it happened: She breathed right beside my ear, accidentally, but it was hot and moist, and right away I began to get a full-on erection.
“Dude,” Kim said, “are you getting a chubby?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, that’s what it feels like.” She let go of me and leaned against the Escort. “This is why nobody’s nice to you, Brian.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said, and we all climbed inside to get Kim to the mall to work on time.
At school, most of the time all I ever did was make plans for band names of superstar hard rock groups I would one day be part of, coming up with set lists and song titles and making rosters with various band members and everything. Even during band class, a class I was truly embarrassed for having ever taken, because,
Come on, man, marching band? Have you ever seen the Q-tip hats? And funny jackets?
It was also awkward because it was a class we shared with girls from Mother McCauley, girls who, nine times out of ten, were more nerdy and socially retarded and gangly than me, because,
Come on, what hot teenage girl plays the oboe or coronet in her spare time,
right? It was the only reason I had signed up for the class, the girls, I mean, and I couldn’t have been more mistaken. So when I was supposed to be playing the xylophone, following along to the bass clarinet, I would hear the crappy, corny carnival music rising from the worn and misplayed trumpet section directly behind me and be thinking of me, rocking out, with a superstar backup band, in front of a huge stadium of screaming, braless, well-endowed female fans.
Like my new masterpiece, which was so good it begged to be committed to the page: In Gods We Thrust, the greatest hard rock album by the greatest hard rock band ever, The Young Gods, featuring Tommy Lee on drums, Eddie Van Halen on lead guitar, Izzy Stradlin on rhythm guitar, Cliff Burton on bass (if he had been alive, but since he was dead, Geddy Lee would have to play bass even though RUSH fucking sucked), also Eddie Van Halen on keyboards, and Brian Oswald, lead vocals/xylophone.
1. Rip it Like You Should
2. Something Wicked this Way Comes
3. In Gods We Thrust (title track)
4. Everyday Survivor, the ballad
5. Lay Down for My Love
6. Nobody Has to Know (You Like It)
7. Under the Gun (the controversial suicide song)
8. Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder And You’ve Got my Eye
9. Ain’t Nowhere to Go, Ain’t Nowhere to Run from my Love
I had bad feelings. At the time, we were driving back from dropping Kim off at the mall. I was looking through Gretchen’s bag for some gum or candy when I found this fucking note Gretchen had written and I held it up and started reading it, Tony Degan. Tony Degan. The next time. The next time I’m alone with you, I’m going to let you do it. I’m gonna let you do anything you want to do, and Gretchen fucking flipped out and began screaming. “I Want to Be Sedated” was playing on the crappy Escort radio as Gretchen pulled up to a stoplight, tearing the note from my hands, punching me, still yelling.
Just then, two fucking motorheads in a red Trans-Am pulled up beside us at the stoplight and started blaring “Smoke on the Water” by the most god-awful classic wanker rock band of all time, Deep Purple, and then, like always, they started making comments about Gretchen’s hair, which was a very fucking bad idea.
“Nice hair!” the driver laughed, giving Gretchen the thumbs-up, elbowing his buddy. The driver had a fantastic mono-brow and an acid-washed jean jacket that was cut at the shoulders to fit like a real super-looking vest—except it wasn’t super-looking, it was lame and trashy.
“Did you do that to yourself on purpose?” the other guy shouted, raising his hands in feigned confusion. He was taller, with mirrored sunglasses and an American flag bandana. The comments these two meatheads made were typical fucking south side Chicago: totally obvious, totally pointless, even a little hypocritical, considering both of the dudes had serious shoulder-length, well-coiffed mullets any carnie operating a Tilt-a-Whirl would envy.
“Go back to fucking California!” the one with the mono-brow shouted, revving the engine a little.
“Freakshow!” the other added, pointing at us, as if we didn’t know who he had been fucking with; as if he was saying, by pointing his finger,
Yes, you! I am making it clear now that I am insulting you!Even though I am only a night stocker at the Radio Shack; even though I am twenty-eight and have an illegitimate kid and bills from the white T-top Camaro I wrecked; even though I am a glue-huffing idiot who blows all my cash on coke whenever I can get it, you are the ones who are to be made fun of because, to me, you are funny-looking, and this is the best thing I can do to insult you: me, pointing my finger like this, so I will keep pointing
. And he held his finger out like that, jabbing at us and pointing again and again until I turned my head and looked back at Gretchen.
The reason it was such a fucking bad idea to make fun of Gretchen’s hair was because it had taken four months for her to dye it pink, because the Manic Panic she had bought wouldn’t take, and she had tried everything—bleached it, peroxided it, we even drove out to this mall an hour away in the suburbs to a Sally Beauty Supply to get this crazy industrial strength whitener, but she had left it in too long and pieces of her hair had broken off—and finally, after months of trying, she had gotten it right and now it was a cool-looking, bright, outer-space pink.
If you want to go through the trouble and if you want to know how to dye your hair right, here’s how, for fuck’s sake: