Indian Hill (2 page)
“Mr. Talbot, I need you to go to the principal’s office,” one exasperated teacher named Mrs. Weinstedder said.
“I didn’t do anything!” I pleaded. I sure didn’t need my mom picking me up on the first day of school.
“Come, come, Mr. Talbot, we all know you’re the new boy here and I’ve never had this problem before.” She now had her arms crossed and her left foot was tapping on the ground.
“Mrs. Weinstedder, I didn’t do it!”
Her foot was going faster, any faster I figured and she was going to take off. “Young man, you march down to the principal’s office right now or I’ll drag you there by the ear.”
That got a snicker out of the class.
“Mrs. Weinstedder, check my notebook, I don’t even have any pages ripped out of it.”
She started to head towards me, at a svelte 250 pounds I had no doubt she would make good on her threat. I grabbed all of my stuff and headed toward the door. The other students were almost choking they were so intent on holding in their laughter. I was so pissed I must have turned four shades of red.
“That’s right, class, we don’t need his type in here now do we,” I heard her say scornfully.
“Why don’t you shut up you fat cow!” I spewed. That was the line that got me three days suspension. But it was worth it. And I walked out of the class and down the hall towards the principal’s office. I had been taking my sweet time, I was in no rush to go meet Mr. Ratspindler. You knew just from the name what kind of person he was, he’d have my mother up here before I got the seat cushion warm and then the real fun would
begin
. I had gotten about two-thirds of the way down the hallway when some kid I had never seen before came half running with his books and
book bag
out of the class I had just been ejected from. You could hear the class roaring in laughter as he made a mad dash out of the class.
“I know your mother, Mr. Ginson, don’t think that I won’t be talking to her after this little incident!”
“For your information Mrs. Weinstedder, she is
not
my mother, and that other kid was right, you are a fat cow.” The class was now bursting in laughter, a few of the teachers even opened their doors to see what all the commotion was about.
“Hey kid, hold up.”
“You talking to me?” as I pointed to myself.
“No, the
other
kid that just got kicked out of Algebra.”
“Well, I’m Michael, not ‘kid,’ and my friends… at least the ones from back home… call me Mike.”
“Well ‘Mike,’ my name’s Paul Ginson. My friends call me Ginner.”
“Nice to meet you,” as we shook hands. “What are you here for?”
“Well, when she turned back towards the board I nailed her with the second barrel of my spit cannon.”
“Oh, so
you’re
the one that got me kicked out of class.”
“Hey, I’m not the one that called her a fat cow first.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“Hey, I know a short cut to Ratsniffer’s office.”
“What could be shorter? He’s right at the end of this hall.”
“
D
o you really feel like going down there? Mrs. Fat Cow, nice call by the way, doesn’t know how to work the intercom. She won’t even be able to tell him about the whole
thing
until after class, by that time we could be long gone.”
“But we’ll get in trouble.”
“Too late for that.”
I thought about it. “
What do you have in mind?” And that was how I met my best friend.
We spent the day up on the local supermarket’s roof, of all places. If you pulled the dumpster over just a little bit you could climb on that and up a drainpipe and onto the roof. It was an easy climb for a spry 14 year old. I didn’t think my mom would be coming to get me up here any time soon. The thing that struck me the most when I got up there was how huge it was. It looked like a giant shingle parking lot. There were all sorts of vents and air conditioners and fans all over the place. I stood there kind of slack jawed taking in the scenery.
“Come on!” Paul yelled. “If you stay too close to the edge and a passing car comes by they’ll be able to see you.”
I started to move toward the center, but I was getting the willies in my stomach. What if the roof gives, what if someone in the store hears us? What if….
“Come on man.” Paul saw my hesitation. “Don’t worry, the roof won’t cave.” He then proceeded to jump up and down on it. I motioned him to stop and put a finger to my mouth. He yelled at the top of his lungs, “Don’t worry they can’t hear us either!” Then in a more user-friendly voice, “Come on man, I want to show you something.” He headed toward
the
center of the roof where a huge air conditioner was. He then opened up a little trap door that seemed to be there for maintenance, and pulled out five beers. “It keeps them cold,” he said casually as he tossed me one.
“Thanks man,” as I stared in wonder. I popped the top and he wasn’t kidding, I nearly froze my throat and I got a brain freeze to boot.
“Slow down, dude, you act like you’ve never had a beer before.”
Well technically no, it wasn’t my first, more like my fourth but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “Man, I’ve been hanging around this whole summer with Billy Summers and John Smithstone.”
“Oh man, I’m sorry,” he said in mocking tones. “Those two turds would probably shampoo with the beer before they’d drink it.” We both laughed.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“So what’s your story, Mr. Talbot?” he said in his best Mrs. Weinstedder impersonation, which wasn’t all that bad. I told him about the deal with my controlling mother and my dad who headed out to parts unknown every Friday night and magically reappeared every Monday morning. And even the times when he was physically present, he was nowhere near the vicinity mentally.
“Ah, that ain’t
nothing
,” Paul said as he tossed me another beer. “My dad and my real mom got together in one drunken moment and produced yours truly. They tried to make a go of it, but when my dad decided to go to AA and then tried to get my mom to enroll she wigged out and left him. He then married some born again Christian lady named Barb.”
“Like barbed wire,” I said, now starting to catch a little buzz.
“And that she is, a big fucking barb in my ass.” The visual was too much. I laughed and sprayed beer all over the place. Paul joined in the festivities.
“Anyway,” he started after we had calmed down a bit. “She has no clue at all. Dude, I’m not kidding but she actually pulls out a child-raising book whenever she has a problem that she doesn’t know the answer to. She makes me and my sister have family discussion hour after dinner every friggen night. I don’t know what to say to my girlfriend for an hour, what the hell am I going to tell this lady?”
“So what do you do?” I couldn’t believe it. His family sounded as dysfunctional as mine; apparently all was not well in Smallpole.
“Well mostly I just nod and go yeah, uh-huh, exactly. Luckily my sister loves to yack so she takes up the majority of the
time
.”
“What does your dad do during all of this fun time?”
“He sits on the couch, watches sports and drinks bourbon and coke.”
“I thought you said he went to AA.”
“He did, but he didn’t like the part about complete abstinence regarding booze. He doesn’t get smashed like he used to, but I can tell he’s definitely getting buzzed.”
“Your mom, I mean, Barb doesn’t care?”
“Oh hell no, she’s t
o
o busy with her nose in some parenting book trying to find new ways to cope with teenagers.”
“Dude I thought I had it rough.”
“Don’t sweat it I’m pretty much used to her now, besides I read the books she’s looking at so I know how she’s going to approach almost every scenario.”
“
B
rilliant.”
“Yeah, not bad huh?”
“Where’d you get the beer? We’re running low.”
“Well, we can’t get it in this town, the friggen mayor would know about it before dinner. If we go to the town over,
Norwood
, they have an area called the Flats. Sort of the seedier side of Mayberry. There’s a bum there. If I give him the money and one of the beers he’ll buy for me.”
“Awesome, I have five bucks. You got anything, maybe we could get a twelve-pack.”
“Yeah I’ve got four, that should be plenty.”
We split the last beer and climbed down a little groggier than when we had climbed up. “So how do we get there from here?” I asked, more than a little pleasantly buzzed.
“You can’t get there from here.” Paul did his best impression of a
M
aine resident. “We’re going to have to be very careful, we have to get out to
Main Street
and hitch.”
“Hitch? Really?” I had visions of my mother pulling over to give us a ride on our shortened school day.
Paul, seeing the trepidation on my face, piped up. “Dude don’t worry we won’t have to be visible for long. I’ve done this a dozen times and I never had to wait more than ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes is a long time to have your dick blowing in the breeze,” I said out loud.
“Come on man, we’ll be fine,” as he wrapped an arm around me.
“Well I don’t know, maybe we should just go and see Ratsniffer.”
Paul stopped dead in his tracks and eyed me suspiciously thinking that perhaps he had let me in on too many things. Then he realized I was joking, once he saw the grin on my face. “You ass, you had me there for a moment.” And then he chased me to the street.
Eight minutes later, according to Paul’s Timex; we were in the back seat of some old VW van. The driver was a serious hold over from the sixties: Long hair and beads abounding. Luckily for Paul and I, this was a short drive, because ‘Windstar’ as he liked to call himself rambled on incessantly about how ‘The Man’ was trying to keep the people down. I don’t think ‘Windstar’ picked us up for any altruistic reason. I think it was so he could have a captive audience for his rhetoric. The bum had been right where Paul had said he would be and we made our business transaction.
T
his time it cost us two beers. By the time we were able to hitch a ride back to the supermarket, school had long been over and luckily my buzz had worn off. At least the ride back had been a bit more normal. It was just a businessman finishing up his day. The ride might have actually been enjoyable if it weren’t for the jazz blaring through the speakers. Maybe he thought he was giving us some culture. Zeppelin it wasn’t. The only thing I wanted now was maybe a hamburger and a nap. I figured it was going to be about twenty to twenty-five minutes of listening to the ranting and raving at home before I got either of those things though. We climbed back up the roof and put the beer away in our makeshift cooler.
“Well buddy,” I said. “Are you ready to face the music?”
“Oh yeah, I’m all set,” Paul said smugly. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to get the ‘I’m very disappointed’ speech tonight.”
“Well, that’s better than the cussing and cursing that I’m about to get.”
“Good luck, bud.” And I knew he meant it. “Bring a good book tomorrow.”
“Huh? Oh for detention?”
“You forget about that part?” Paul grinned.
“Are we going to get suspended?”
“Hell no, they know that’d be too much fun for us, we are going to get in-school suspension.”
“
Y
ou mean we just sit outside of the principal’s office all day?”
He shrugged. “Yep. Like I said, bring a good book.”
“Thanks, man.”
And then he shook my hand, not in the way old men do, but the way you sometimes see in the movies when someone is falling off of a building and the person still on the roof grabs him up around the elbow. That one motion seemed to cement our friendship, and I think he realized it too. And then we parted ways to each receive our vastly different forms of punishment. Vastly different from what either of us expected. Apparently Barb had a conflict with Paul’s dad and was unable to resolve it, so when Paul’s new little infraction came up she had not had proper time to look it up in one of her books. She blew her top at him; she reamed him up and down the wall. Not that he paid her all that much attention but he was mildly surprised at this form that her attack came in. She was usually much more subtle. Oh well, he thought, he’d have to file this one under rare. I
also
was completely unprepared for the way my mother decided to deal with the situation. I can just tune her completely out when she starts in on me. It’s actually relatively easy; I think that I learned the technique from my father. At least he taught me something. The louder she screamed the deafer I got. It was a perfect defense, she would get louder and louder screaming and cussing and I would pretty much go about my business as if she wasn’t there, it drove her nuts. Finally she would shut up and I could go in peace. But I no sooner walked through the door, and she hit me with the surprise attack, ‘I’m very disappointed in you.’ It caught me so off guard that I actually was taken aback. That was all she said as she turned and walked away. I think I stood there for at least five minutes, I didn’t know whether I should go and apologize to her or go cry in my bedroom, that’s how unprepared I was. I didn’t do either of those things but the idea that she had unsettled me so much was, well, unsettling.