Darla had told us that her parents were “pussy-nerd wimp-ass trustfunders who inherited a fuckload of money and spend it all in New York, L.A., Aspen, Acapulco, all those shitholes. They always come back complaining it was nothing like what they expected, but they always go again.”
She usually had the house to herself, a big old place on the hill. Old people in town said that house had once been
the
place to be invited. Now it was
the
place for the kind of party that parents didn’t want their kids at—or most kids’ parents, I ought to say. I’d run into my mom at two of Darla’s parties, but I think she was just there to score pot, or because Neil had crashed it.
Darla’s big plan was to go somewhere east to school and never come back to Lightsburg at all, so she played serious-student real hard. Like always, today she sat in the center of the front row, opened a pad to take notes, and set four neatly sharpened pencils beside it to the left. (Paul and me had timed her once: class hours were fifty-four minutes, with six in between for getting to your next class, and sure enough, with Mr. Irish, this one obsessive science teacher we had who always started exactly on time, Darla changed pencils every thirteen minutes and thirty seconds, exactly one quarter of the class time.)
She stuck the suction cup on Mister Babbitt’s ass onto the desk so he faced her. She plucked at his ears for a moment to make one stand up straight and the other droop at whatever exactly the right angle was.
Paul came in, and took a seat far away from me, over in the corner behind Danny. He didn’t look at me at all.
I wondered if maybe he had a crush on that invisible sophomore girl he sat beside on the bus. Normally he got crushes on prom-queen all-American shampoo-commercial girls whose major conversational gambit was “What?” and whose huge boyfriends would beat the shit out of him.
He was my best friend but he wasn’t perfect, you know? I was worried about him, and, come to admit it, pretty hurt.
Coach Gratz walked in on the balls of his feet, arms held away from his body like he expected someone to yell, “Ready, Wrestle!” He had gold-blond hair, piercing blue eyes with little crinkles in the deep tan around them, and a hard-edged cleft chin. He wore dorky stretch-knit shirts, the ones that go over your head like a T-shirt but have a few buttons and a collar, to show off his hard muscular body and keep Mrs. Gratz horny. He always wore the same bolo tie with a turquoise and silver slide, because the dress code for male teachers said a tie, but it didn’t say what kind.
He slung a big stack of books onto the desk with a bang. I don’t think anyone jumped as much as he’d’ve liked.
“Hi, since I’ve had everyone in this room for one class or another, sometime in the past, you all know I’m Coach Gratz, and I’m not Mrs. Kliburn. For those of you who took this class because you heard Mrs. Kliburn was easy, tough. For the rest of you, we’re gonna learn some stuff. It won’t all be easy, and it won’t all be—”
“Excuse me, sir,” the new girl behind me said. I looked around. She had very thick, messy, wavy blonde hair that sat on her head like a thatched roof. Her wire rim glasses perched on chipmunk cheeks smeared with acne, above a mouth full of braces. The white T-shirt she was wearing was too big on her; she looked like she’d missed her last three months of meals.
“I haven’t been in one of your classes before,” she said. “My name is Martinella Nielsen. Most people call me Marti.”
Gratz frowned. “Well,
Marti
, that is
very
interesting. Normally in my class you speak only when there is a reason for you to speak.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
That was about twice as polite as anything Gratz was expecting, and he kind of half-froze in shock.
The moment for tearing into Marti slipped right away. When he launched into the tirade for the second time, it just didn’t have that old Gratzical energy.
Anyway, Gratz announced, “with great pleasure,” that we were going to read
Huckleberry Finn
first, because it was “the greatest American novel.” We knew that because Hemingway said so. Or something. Then he hollered about how our literature was just as good as anybody else’s literature, so there, and if you didn’t know
Huckleberry Finn
you “didn’t really know what it was to be an American.” Once he slipped back into his groove, I tuned out.
One thing about Gratz was kind of funny in a pathetic sort of way—you could tell that he really did like books and poetry by the way his eyes would light up, especially when he got off his lecture notes and just talked. The Budweiser company didn’t want people to drink beer half as much as Gratz wanted us to like poetry. But the poor guy just couldn’t shake his terrible fear that literature might be for fags.
He finally said, “Far enough for today,” and made a pencil mark on his lecture notes so he’d know where to start the next day. “Paul, Cheryl, Karl (uh, Karl Shoemaker not Carl McGwinnick), Danny, Darla, and
Marti
, see me after class. It will just be a minute.”
That was annoying. Us Madmen didn’t associate with each other in public. We didn’t need some dumbass football player or one of the jackoff smart kids to come up to us and make bibby-bibby noises with his finger and lip. Even though it was the seventies and like half the people you saw in movies were seeing a therapist, it was cool in the movies, but not in real life. Kind of like being black—every cheap bastard in Oakwood watched Flip Wilson, but you should have fucking heard them when they thought a black family was going to move in.
We surrounded Gratz’s desk. Cheryl and Darla stood with arms wrapped around themselves, Paul looked at the floor, Danny leaned across Gratz’s desk and hung his head, as if to hide his face. Marti stood behind me.
Gratz pulled a letter from his stack of paper and waved it like a summons. “It says here that Doctor Marston suggested that all of you should continue on in therapy this year, except for you, Marti, but your old school doctor recommended it.
“Now, I know a lot of you kids hate therapy, and I don’t really like having six kids missing from class every other Monday. What I wanted to tell you all is that if you don’t want to go this year, I’m on your side. If you need me to write a letter or something, well, I’ll be happy to. Okay, that’s all.”
We turned and had to struggle out through a bunch of sophomores coming in for Gen Am Lit. When Paul and me had both had Gratz for that class, we had called it “Read Like a Man.” Last year, that had become the nickname among all the kids a year younger than us; we were hoping “Read Like a Man” would stick this year, too, and eventually be what everyone called it. This is the sort of thing legends are made of, at least in places like Lightsburg.
Cheryl and I had Hertz’s trig class next, over in the other wing, so we walked there together. “I can’t believe he did that,” Cheryl said. “Couldn’t he have just said ‘All the mental cases, please see me after class’?”
“Gratz,” I agreed, “absofuckinglutely pure Gratz.”
She made this growly, frustrated noise and shook out her thick mass of curly hair. It reminded me how pretty my friend was, and what a great body she had. Knowing how creeped out she’d be, I hated myself for noticing.
“So is Gratz the biggest asshole in Ohio or just in Lightsburg?” Danny asked, behind us.
We both laughed and Cheryl gave him five.
“I don’t know if I’d want to do the research, checking out every other asshole in Ohio,” I pointed out.
“Good point.” With Danny walking just behind us, I was reminded how big he was, and how tiny Cheryl was; it made me feel safe to have him standing over me and it made me feel like her protector to be standing next to her, and just then I didn’t give a shit that a normal guy wouldn’t be with the Madmen.
Normal is still important, I’m still going to be normal, but normal isn’t everything
. It was my new idea. I was going to stick to it like a fresh coat of paint; the old idea obviously was just the primer.
Mrs. Hertz wasn’t really a pushover. No math teacher can be because they can see your bullshit too easy. But she was nice, and she hated to say “you’re wrong,” and best of all, she was as heavy a smoker as my mother, so between classes she was always charging down to the teachers’ lounge to suck down those nasty skinny brown almost-cigars, and it usually made her a couple minutes late to class, so there was more socializing and less math in my life.
Which was good because Bonny was early to class, and I hadn’t really seen her all summer except to wave to. It had been kind of a relief when she’d dumped me last spring, but I still wanted to be friends. When school was out, we didn’t see much of each other because she worked as much as I did, maybe more.
Her parents had an import shop up in Toledo. They’d go on long trips to buy stuff for it, but the shop only made about enough to pay for those trips, plus to pay the help and keep the doors open, not much more. Now and then they’d get a jackpot, some guy would come in and buy up a lot of stuff, and then they’d give Bonny some serious money to keep the house going, maybe two or even three months’ worth of money, but that only happened maybe once a year.
Meanwhile, Bonny had to have money for groceries, clothes for her younger sister and two brothers, the house payment, and all that. She said her parents never asked her where she got it, didn’t even seem to be aware that most of the time when they were away they weren’t sending any money.
The shop paid straight into her parents’ account, which Bonny couldn’t take money out of, so if they didn’t send a check, like they usually didn’t, whatever money the shop made might as well have been on the moon.
She wasn’t going to nark on her parents, since that could mean the kids being taken away or even her parents being busted and doing jail time. So Bonny made the money, one way and another. And she was in the Madman Underground because now and then she’d throw a fit of temper or a crying jag in front of teachers. Bonny would never explain that the screaming and throwing things wasn’t “just for no reason” as teachers would say about her, but because she was getting by on a couple hours of sleep and worried sick about paying the mortgage and hadn’t heard from her folks in a month while they knocked around the south of France. She had at least a couple of those a month, so she got her ticket every year like the rest of us.
Except me, of course, Mr. Normal. Remember, this was my year to be normal. With friends, of course. In my guise as the normal member of the Madmen.
Bonny was a cheerleader because she did anything that would look good on those college apps—cheerleader, choir solos, Service Club, plus all the science clubs, math team, and chess team, but she wasn’t much of a conformist. Today she was looking sort of like Grace Slick or Ja nis Joplin after a three-year famine, in three layers of skirts and a vest with a lot of gold piping over a blouse that looked like the curtains from a funeral home, and enough bracelets for any six regular girls, and her red hair was spilling out of a purple scarf, like maybe she’d been thrown off the belly dancing squad for overdoing it.
“So,” I said, “still robbing thrift stores?”
She slapped my arm, not hard. “Ask me about my new job, Karl. Big hint, I can’t dress like this there. I have to wear a uniform.”
“Oh, my god, I’m being replaced. I knew Mayor Mc-Cheese was a treacherous bastard and he’d stab me in the back. Just watch out when you’re alone with Ronald McDonald—he likes to squeeze the meat and pat the buns.”
She snorted. “Actually it’s even grosser than mopping the McPiss off the McFloor in the McCrapper. Not the clown—the monkey.”
“Pongo’s?”
“Yeppers. They had a girl quit and Darla got me in before they even advertised it. Steady hours and it won’t conflict with choir or cheerleading. How’s that for cool?”
“Cool,” I agreed. “How many jobs you have right now?”
“Oh, cleaning out those offices downtown, handing out cigarette samples at the concerts in Toledo, the paper route, and this. So four. Where are we?”
“Still tied,” I said. “I have cleaning McDonald’s, selling ads for WUGH, helping Browning deliver couches, and my gardening and handyman racket. It’s a good thing school is such a joke or we’d be so fucked.”
Cheryl coughed.
Mrs. Hertz had come in behind me and heard that. Shit.
Danny and Bonny and Cheryl were all fighting down laughter, and so was Larry O’Grary, the weird sci-fi hippie freak kid that was hanging-out buds with me and Paul.
At least it was Hertz, so I wouldn’t be getting a ticket for this. She was cool and smart enough to know that hating school wasn’t crazy. Another reason to hope she didn’t blow out a lung before graduation.
She started right in where geometry had left off, without even a
hi
or a
how was your summer
, and kept us busy. Okay with me, really—I got to spend like forty-five minutes being normal without having to think about being normal.
I know smart guys are supposed to hate gym class. I loved it and signed up for it every term. It beat the shit out of study hall, I can tell you that. I always seemed to have so much energy, and it felt good to burn it off and get to play with the other guys, it was usually a whole hour when nothing could bother me, and it came with a free hot shower that didn’t smell like a litter pan. That was another reason I was looking forward to Army Basic; gym all day, not much homework, and no after-school job.
Danny and me suited up fast in those silly “uniforms” they had for gym—a pair of purple shorts with a built-in jock that would only give you any support if you were hung like King Kong, and a sog-baggy yellow T-shirt with a picture of a wildcat on the front. Opinion was divided as to whether the Lightsburg Wildcat looked puzzled, drunk, or constipated.
Coach Korviss was an okay guy. Even though he was the gym teacher, he was a lot less of a coach than Gratz. “All right,” he said, “obviously we’re all here to get a work-out every day, so we’re starting out today running, just to see what kind of shape you’re all in.”