Tales of the Madman Underground (3 page)

The bus pulled up at another crowded stop and a bunch of kids piled in. Some rabbity-nervous freshman girl, carrying a big heavy pack for some reason, stood next to my seat. “I’m harmless,” I said to her.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m harmless,” I said. “That looks heavy. Sit down.”

She blushed but she sat.

I kept staring at the back of Paul’s head. Of all the group, Paul was the one I most needed to avoid hanging out with, because he was the heart and soul of the Madman Underground, the one who had named it.

For some reason, back when we were all in eighth grade, Paul had gotten hung up on reading
The Catcher in the Rye
and
On the Road
and he’d just kept reading them over and over all year, first one then the other, about one week per book. They sounded real boring, so I never read either. From what Paul said, they had three things in common: One, they were both classics, ten or twenty years old. Two, they were about young guys that didn’t give a shit what people thought. Three, both books used “madman” as a compliment.

So Paul started calling the therapy group the “Madman Underground,” and everyone else picked it up. The name stuck like a coat of paint, at least inside the group.

And supposedly nobody outside the group knew there
was
a group. Of course we all knew that wasn’t true. High school was like the little clear plastic tunnels that Paul’s hamsters lived in: you could run a long way but never get out, and always, everyone could see you.

So I was going to change tunnels. This year, no ticket for me. No Madman Underground. Normal normal normal.

Fuck. I wondered what Paul’s trip was.

The bus bottomed its shocks on the turn into Oakbrook, the closest thing that Lightsburg had to a suburb: a tangle of winding streets just outside the city limits, with houses that started looking fake the day they were put up, lawns that had no sidewalks or fences, station wagons or pony cars parked out on the street, and wide driveways full of the toys you saw on TV.

Oakbrook houses had “rec rooms” and “dens” and “foyers” and all kinds of pretentious shit like that, but what they were was plywood and Z-Brick boxes with plastic “ironwork” and pot-metal “brass” and hollow chipboard columns on the front. The last couple years, I’d made some money sticking all that frouf back on with Liquid Nails.

Everybody out there talked about their houses like they were always for sale, calling them “homes” and saying they lived in “a three-bedroom New England saltbox home” instead of “a big white house with siding and a sloped flat roof.”

But no matter how much molded plastic and pot metal you stuck on those cheap-bastard houses, the cheap-bastard just came bleeding through. They were on septic tanks so the yards stank all summer, especially after the low spots flooded. Because they only had county street maintenance, they had potholes the size of townships. And the kids from there were always in town anyway, paying a quarter to use the library, the pool, and the skating rink, because Dad and Mr. Knauss had fought to put in nonresident fees (and been called cheap bastards themselves for that).

Back when Dad was mayor, they’d tried to annex that land and the developers had put up a big fight and the city had lost. Later, while Oakbrook was being built, Paul’s father, on City Council, had tried to annex them and make them pay property taxes. Nobody else on the council wanted to do anything that would actually make the Oakbrookers pay their fair share, but sticking their kids up for candy money was pretty popular.

“Lightsburg politics in a nutshell,” Dad used to say. “A perfect balance between spiteful and ineffective.” That was one of a million things I missed, and Paul missed, too—we could still crack each other up talking about the way our dads would get rolling on the subject when the families’d do cookouts together. “Maybe they should just incorporate and get their own school district,” Dad would say. “Put in some used singlewides for the town hall and school if they can get them cheap enough.” And Mr. Knauss would add, “They could be our cross-town rivals. Come on out Friday night and see the Lightsburg Wildcats versus the Oakbrook Fighting Cheap Bastards.”

The school bus bucked and slammed along through Cheap Bastard Acres, picking up more people, and Jolene hollered and made everyone find a seat.

At school, I was one of the last people off because I’d sat so far towards the back, and I wanted to give Paul a head start.

Jolene gave my arm a squeeze. I don’t know why all of Mom’s friends were always touching me, but I didn’t mind much when it was Jolene. “Have a great year, kiddo.”

“Thanks, but I have other plans.”

MY FIRST CLASS was college-track senior lit, taught by Coach Gratz. It bit the big hairy bag. I’d had Gratz before, twice, and that was like about four times too many.

How I happened to be taking this class from Gratz kind of happened in two stages. The first stage, last spring, was God’s punishment for my taking my mother out for her birthday.

I
knew
it was dangerous to get all dumb and sentimental. And yet all the same, right when I was about to sign up for my senior year classes, I tried to really celebrate Mom’s birthday, instead of just giving her the money to get drunk, high, and laid, like I had the year before. This time, I told her, she was going to be just slightly spoiled, and I was going to take her to Pietro’s, the semidecent pizza place in town. It had red-checked tablecloths, if you didn’t mind that they were fake plastic-coated canvas, and slightly better than decent pizza, if you were flexible about what you called decent.

“Are you sure you can afford this?” Mom asked, as soon as we’d already ordered.

“It’s your birthday, Mom, and I don’t spend money I can’t afford.” I wasn’t sure whether she was trying to be my loyal protective concerned mother, which would be nice for her to at least try for a change, or if she was setting me up for one of her sermons about “ucky ucky money,” so I played it neutral. “You know I have a bunch of jobs and I’m a miser, Mom. It’s just that last night I was visited by these three ghosts, the Ghost of Mom’s Birthday Past, the Ghost of Mom’s Birthday Present, and the Ghost of Mom’s Birthday Yet to Come, and they all showed me the true meaning of Mom’s Birthday, so I ran out into the street in my nightgown and started giving money to urchins and stuff. That’s why I ordered us the El Supremo Dreamo Extra Large. It’s twice the size of Tiny Tim. Of course
we’re
gonna both be twice
our
size by the time we finish—”

She was giggling pretty good by then, so even if she had been setting me up for a sermon, I’d managed to step out of
that
bear trap pretty neat and clean. “So what’s new at work?” I asked. She could always crack me up by saying mean shit about her coworkers.

She took a moment to light one of her Kents, take a deep drag, and pose with it; Mom used her cigs to wave around at least as much as she smoked them, so she probably only got like half the cancer she paid for. “Dull as
shit
all day, Tiger.” She always kind of emphasized the swear words when she was talking to me, I guess to remind me I had a cool mom that would say
fuck
and
shit
in front of me. “So I did one whole chapter of my real estate course, and filled out the answer sheet, and mailed that in. If the school is even still in business, now I’ve done eight chapters, with seventeen to go. So there’s some progress in my personal world, anyway.”

She’d started that correspondence course three years ago. Every couple-few months she’d do another chapter, mail it in, and get a grade back a couple weeks later, always an A because the assignments were retarded-chimp easy, and open-book besides. Supposedly once she finished the correspondence course she’d be all set to take the exam for her real estate license, but she could have just walked in and taken the exam; the course wasn’t like a requirement or anything. I’d speed-read the whole book in one long weekend last year, but then I’d been real disappointed when it turned out that in Ohio you had to be eighteen to sell real estate (I figured it couldn’t be any harder than selling radio ads, and it paid a lot better).

Come to admit it, I knew good and well that Mom was taking the course so slow not because she wanted to get her license but because she wanted to avoid it. I had no idea why she’d want to stay a secretary/receptionist, but that was what she wanted.

Meanwhile, though, she could sure tell a story. She took another drag, then posed again, one arm across her chest to shove her boobs up, the other holding her cigarette vertical, head cocked to the side, the basic clever-and-flirty she did all the time when she was pretending to listen to Neil and the other losers.

She talked quite a bit of dirt about Mary, the part-time office help, who was a couple years older than me and screwing two of the married sales agents, which was why she never actually did anything “except her nails and hair,” Mom said, “which she does at her desk for hours. And whatever she does to her nipples to get them to stick through her blouse like that all the time,” Mom said. “That doesn’t happen naturally till you’ve had like ten babies. Oh, and she does talk to her girlfriends on the phone, but since we have to keep the line open she only does that maybe half the working time in the day. I just think of her as not really an employee, more like a benefit, we supply the sales guys with hot and cold running slut.”

Then she got going on all the weird gross stuff they found out at the Merton house when old Pearl Merton finally died. There were all these cat skeletons, boiled and cleaned like for a science fair project, with tags on them naming which cat they’d been (I almost asked Mom if she’d like me to start doing that for her cats instead of maintaining the cat cemetery in the backyard, but it was her birthday so I was being nice). Old Pearl also had a stack of Bibles all the way up to the ceiling at the north-east and southwest corners of every room, and three waist-high pyramids of carefully washed beer bottles in her attic. It didn’t seem to me like it meant much more than that old Pearl was crazy.

After that, Mom got into how she thought her friend Judy might lend her some money to write and publish a book about the connection between Nixon and flying saucers.

I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I mean Judy wasn’t going to give her the loan—Judy was lucky to keep the doors of her little head shop/record store, Officer McDoodle’s, open.

Come to admit it, I figured Nixon would leave on a flying saucer well before Judy would loan Mom money or Mom would get her real estate license.

So she rambled back and forth between her jokes about Mary the Slutlette, which I wished she hadn’t been quite so loud about because like everyfuckingbody in town went to Pietro’s, and Pearl Merton’s whole closet full of unopened tins of Christmas cookies, and how Daniel Ellsberg used to work for national security and must have had the secret codes for contacting the good saucer people (“elves”), and Nixon and his bunch must have been trying to steal the codes to give them to the bad saucer people (“grays”).

I don’t know what got into me to ask her, “So why would Ellsberg leave the codes in his psychiatrist’s office? Instead of in a safety-deposit box or something, I mean.”

“Because a psychiatrist is like a priest or a lawyer, baby, they can’t divulge your secrets. And he’d
never
put it into a safety-deposit box at a
bank
—they’re all
in it
.”

“In what, Mom? I’m falling behind here.”

“Yes, you are, sweetie.” She leaned forward, holding her cigarette down low so that smoke went up past her face. I think she was trying to look extra mysterious. The candlelight caught her face on the underside, which made her makeup look like she was telling stories at a Halloween bonfire. “I’ll show you. Show me a dollar bill. Actually we just need the back of a dollar bill.”

“The front comes with it,” I said, fumbling in my wallet.

“Oh, you.” She giggled, so she was still cool—good. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re very literal, Tiger?”

“You, just now.”

“Hah hah. Now look here at the back. What does this say and what is that?” Her fingers rested on two spots.

“This says ‘Federal Reserve Note,’ and that is an eye in a triangle floating over a pyramid, Mom,” I said. “You went all through this a couple times last winter, so I looked it up. The Federal Reserve is the bank that all the other banks use to clear checks, and the eye over the pyramid is supposed to be the eye of God, or a Masonic symbol because a lot of the Founding Fathers were into Freemason stuff, and nobody really knows whether the Masons on the committee that created the seal put it on there, or if people just liked the idea of God watching over us all. Personally I like the idea of God watching over my money.” Not a real subtle hint.

She dragged my dollar bill toward her with the two fingers she’d been pointing with, daring me to point out that it was mine, and I felt like it, but I also decided it was her goddam birthday and she wasn’t getting this easy an excuse to spoil it.

With the dollar bill safely in her purse, she glared at me, puffing out smoke fiercely. I could tell she was having an idea, which was always scary.

Just then Lyle, the waiter, showed up with our pizza. Mom sat back and turned her radiant-happy love-you-sweetie smile on him. Lyle had been a senior when I’d been a freshman; he was a shy, gawky guy with shoulder-length gray-blond hair, and always seemed pretty startled that anyone noticed he was there. Mom cranked the wattage, asking him how he was, remembering things about him, and getting him all stammery.

Once she had him flustered, she said, “Well, I guess we have to let you get back to work. Oh, and Lyle, please get us a bottle of your house red wine, and two glasses.”

“Um, I’ll need to see some I.D. for him. Um.”