Et Tu

I hated my parents. I loved my parents. In the way of teenagers worldwide, though then, since I was a teenager, I strode my capital I self-important/conscious/absorbed down the gritty rubble of Rome Street like the star of my own music video when I had yet to write the song itself.

*

We just called it Rome. It was its own empire. Broken-glass laughter and the cruel whispers of sewer grates. Broken cement of sidewalk square after sidewalk square. We walked in the street instead because we were Romans. Taking names, kicking ass. Forgetting the names. Remembering the ass.

*

There’s me now, tossing a cigarette butt against the curb like I’m tomorrow’s god, thinking I should have taken one or two more puffs. How far to smoke a cigarette down? Not all the way to the filter, but close, right? Fourteen, and full of matches and meanness., puffing out smoke like I was my own factory, practicing for the future I had naively disavowed. Jean jacket and pimples. A girl who said hi to him in the hallways on his mind. On his dick. His mind is his dick, like teenagers worldwide. You can try to ignore that dick, but it has a mind of its own. It’s the cosmic loop of boy puberty-mind, dick, mind, dick.

*

And I’m back, because that boy, he can’t tell this story without fucking it up. I stopped to pick a big fat leaf off of the tree in front of the Linoski’s house. The Linoski tree. No one in the Empire had one like it. Leaves fuzzy on one side with thick veins. I rubbed off the fuzz, I stripped the green from the veins to make a skeleton leaf and I felt like I had accomplished something. My work was done. I walked on.  Johnny Leafstripper, wandering the empire, bringing skeleton leaves to all those who needed to wish on stars. We had no stars. That’s why we were the stars of our own music videos. Oh, the stars were out there, I learned later, once the empire fell and we were left to wander the earth stumbling over tree roots and dead animals looking up at the odd dark skies of the natural world without pollution or streetlights.

*

I’m walking down to Larry’s house. I’m in the present, but I’m grown-up too, like I’m moving myself around like the little army men we played with as kids till we got bored and blew them up, or better yet, melted them in a plastic inferno, inhaling the chemical smell like we’d inhale various and sundry chemicals to get us high-various glues and paints, anything out of a spray can, and any white powder.

*

Hey, Lar.

Hey.

Ready.

Yeah.

He turns his head. “Goin’ out ma.” Slams the door. His dad ain’t home forever. His dad’s a dick who got another lady pregnant and bailed on his mother thinking that was the honorable thing to do.

We had a fucked-up sense of honor in the empire. Like getting your ass kicked, that was the honorable thing. I never quite bought into that one. That’s why I was friends with Larry. He didn’t quite buy into that one either. Our big little secret. He put on his jean jacket. November, fucking November. One of those fucked-up months, eh Lar?

Yeah dude. Gotta smoke?

Larry was a year older and his ma had no money. He couldn’t lie about his age because he looked twelve so he was into stealing and reselling. When Larry talked, it was like lightning spilling out his mouth. Like he was coked up before we were ever coked up, I can’t really do it justice. Sometimes when he talked, it was like projectile vomiting. I don’t mean that he talked a lot. He didn’t. But when he did.

*

We were going on a reselling trip. Meeting the Big Boys Who Had Cars. Was I his partner in crime? Nobody had partners back in the empire. That was too gay. You couldn’t have a best friend. That ended about second grade. Maybe that was our little big secret.

*

The Big Boys Who Had Cars needed cassettes for their cassette decks that were replacing eight tracks. Great for Larry since cassettes were smaller. Hell, he started on albums, which was only a sport in the winter Olympics of the empire and cramped his style. And he did have style, the style of invisibility, pale, short, a little pudgy. He could walk right by you, blending into the surface of everything like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Though Casper was suspect-was he a boy ghost? He seemed pretty gay. Don’t believe me? Just watch some of those old cartoons.

*

The thing was: The BBWHC could easily just rip us off, and they half-knew that, so bargaining was limited. Neither of us had the convenient Older Brother.

*

Larry’s dad hated him. So Larry didn’t hate his dad so much. If my parents had been meaner to me, I might have hated them less,

Nah.

*

“My dad’s a dick,” Larry said. He carried a paper shopping bag full of cassettes under one arm, rattling as we walked. We were meeting TBBWHC in The Field*. The Field* was what was left of The Field after they built The Bowling Alley. It was more of a strip now, a narrow plot of unruly weeds and scrub trees that functioned as our wilderness until we were old enough to drive and create our own. It could be where you meet The Drug Dealer or The mythical Old Black Guy in a Baseball Hat who bought liquor for you. It could be where you met The Girl Who Said Hi to You in the Hallway to exchange hickies and maybe bring each other off if the invisible stars were aligned. Or to meet the BBWHC to vend your stolen merchandise.

*

It smelled a little like cold church on an weekday morning when we were altar boys together down at St. Nick’s with the Assholski Twins who between them shared one brain, and a tiny one at that.  Before it got light. Only the sparrows winking and blinking and nodding on the wires. Smelled like cold comfort and a suspicious itch.

*

“My mom bought me a cat toy,” Larry said. “She’s wigging out. I take out the trash. She think I can’t count.”

“A cat toy?”

“A cat Christmas toy,” he said, chewing and spitting out Christmas. “A ball with a bell inside.”

Larry was once an unlikely baseball star on our little league team. This little chubby kid would get up there and smack the hell out of the ball, which he needed to do in order to get around the bases. He had the eye. The magic hitter’s eye. Coach Kaisek started a brawl in the championship game against the evil Torpedoes who lived outside the empire in the Comfort Zone beyond the highway, where Things were Safe and everyone colored inside the lines. We got banned from the league, and Larry’s magic eye became trained on valuable merchandise and bored store clerks. He was applying his skills.

Thus, in the sad alcoholic logic of his mother, the Cat Toy.

*

We were rounding the corner where the double walls started. First, the old wooden wall pre-Bowling Alley, then the cinderblock wall to double up the distance between our houses and the sound of balls hitting pins and the stink of rented shoes. They didn’t trust us. Just because of a little vandalism. The Legend of the Holy Roman Fire Extinguisher that put out the fire under the hood of Brian K’s car only to be thus confiscated by Authorities who matched serial numbers and busted the ersatz hero fireman James-Not-Jim Reddneckski..

*

I lose my thread. I lose the thin stream of hope that Ray Charles singing C&W and some Iggy crap might be appealing to the BBWHC. Lassie Come Home and don’t piss on the table leg this time. Help us find Timmy with his bag of toys for the orphans.

*

Larry and I were early. Right on time, which meant anywhere up to an hour of waiting.

We stood in the Old Tire Zone of The Field* where we could easily see Otis, the side street the BBWHC always pulled up on, flashing their headlights as a signal as if it mattered to anyone.

“So what is the missionary position, anyway?” Larry asked, apropos of nearby necking against the bark of the One Big Tree that had somehow survived the construction of the empire and the more-recent addition of the arena of bowling.

“It’s where you pray, then fuck,” I think I said, but maybe not. Perhaps I was not that clever. I know I did not add, “thus the sin is forgiven,” or “thus not getting the girl pregnant.” The mythological Girl.

“My mom needs someone to fuck,” he said. “Just not in our house. She needs to go and have somebody fuck her. Like with love. Fuck her with love. She don’t have no heart in it anymore. Living. I mean, a Cat Toy.”

“Don’t be talking about your mom like that. My parents don’t fuck at all,” I said. “It’s no magic bullet.” Or maybe I said “magic bullshit.” My memory’s full of typos and smudged erasers. Erasures.

*

We were in Electronics Class together with Mr. Jones Jones whose words of wisdom consisted of: “No matter how much you shake and dance a few drops ends up in your pants. ” A fucking poet, and he was teaching Electronics. Since Larry was a year older, we were building a car battery recharger for him under the theory that if we built it, a car would come. That Larry’s dad would see that giving his boy an old clunker he could work on in the driveway would also be doing the right thing and it might make him less of a “fag sissy”. Ah, it hurts to write that, but I heard it straight from the cracked, bleeding lips of his father when the cops called him after we got caught shoplifting and he had to come pick up Larry and Larry was crying and hiccupping, which he would not have done if anyone else in the world was picking him up. Hell, he didn’t even really mind the police. He was polite and remorseful, as was deemed appropriate to the situation, and put on his old altar boy innocence like he hadn’t been stealing for years. “My first time,” he said. “I’m really ashamed.” Then his dad shows up, and he’s all blubbery because it wasn’t gonna be no cat toy once the old man got him in the car.

My parents, on the other hand, said nothing. My father was so tired from working overtime, he could barely say, like, whatever, and my mom was the one crying. I had to stay home for awhile, but I saw Larry at school and the result of a back-handed slap.

*

I feel like I’m making it seem all horrible, but we never thought so. We were kind of giddy waiting for the BBWHC.

“They’re gonna love these,” Larry said. He who never listened to music. I went to school dances with Slick Eddie Redfern, the Roamin’ Romeo of Rome and watched him and used my imagination while Larry stayed home and gorged on hot candy bars.

Life was good. We were going to buy those metal horseshoe cleats to hammer onto the bottoms of our shit-kicker boots so when we walked the halls, the Dead Sea of Disdain would part and let us pass and give us admiring glances as homage to the Battery Chargers of the empire.

The Moon was out. Stars were out of luck, but the moon was big enough to make it through. Or maybe the luck was on our side. That night, one of those full-moon nights where it almost looks fake, like you’re on stage or something. Almost made me want to tap-dance on the tires. I wanted to make out with the Girl Who Said Hi. Later, I did, and it was sweet, but not as sweet as I imagined it because in my imagination I knew what I was doing with my tongue, not just licking her face like a dog until she took over.

“Does the moon have a middle name?” I asked.

*

No, I didn’t ask that. I meant to say that we did not know the moon’s middle name. We stood on ceremony with the moon. We stood on the bald, abandoned tires and stared up through the distance in the muffled silence of the pin setting machine cycling through in the rear of the Bowling Alley close to where The Field* began. Could we hear the juicy sucking sounds of the nearby maker-outers? No, we could not.

“Cat toy,” Larry said again. No one in the empire had a cat. If they did, the dogs would eat it. The dogs ate birds, rats, mice, squirrels and random small children.

*

I made that last part up. I am becoming unreliable, getting nervous as we wait for the BBWHC to show up. There they are, flashing their headlights to signal the dead in morse code. Did I tell you I now drink tea specially created to calm you down? No, I did not. That’s how low I’ve stooped. I am a stooper now. Can you believe it, Lar?

*

No, Larry can not believe it. Because he’s fucking dead. It wasn’t anything all that dramatic, but the slow, sad Cancer Boat shedding ballast and mixed metaphors until it either sank or rose to the heavens, depending on what Empire you were raised it, depending on the importance of consistency and reliable narration.

*

So the BBWHC arrived, and we sauntered over to greet them. I paused long and soft over the word sauntered because it was a word not in the Roman language, but when I see those two-nothing but kids, really-kids leave the illusory jungle shelter of The Field*, they walk side by side like two brave imaginary soldiers, battle-tested, slightly jaded, shaking in their cute little shit-kicker boots, so overcompensating into a joyful saunter like bad actors on children’s television or in a high school musical our school would have to part of. The disdain for theatre or even theater was legendary on the crudely paved street of Rome. Movies were tolerated as make-out spots-you paid for the dark uninterrupted seats in the back. Our school banned musicals because. Because? We had no auditorium, no orchestra, no choir, not even a pep band for football games. We barely had football games. It was demeaning to follow rules and stop when someone blew a whistle.

*

Okay, so you’re impatient with me now. Sauntered to the rolled-down open window, smoke curling out cool into the night air. We should have been smoking ourselves. We forgot. In our moon-lit sauntering, we forgot.

“Whaddaya got, punks?” That must’ve been Rod. Rod who rode shotgun through life, who failed his driver’s test because he was under the influence of mental blindness. He had not shotgun, but he was the size of the marshmallow-eating polar bear at the zoo.

Larry handed over his lunch money. I mean, the bag of tapes. Rod ripped it open, and the colorful plastic cases rattled around the front seat, spilling in the dome light’s muted haze. A Plymouth Satellite, dark blue, belonging to Edgar Allen Poe or Edward Munch or most likely Ed Wolvowitch, he of the Visine and that stuff you sprayed in your mouth that people used in lieu of gum back then when they wanted to make out or fool the assistant principal/executioner who was smelling breath at the door of the school dance. The Spoilers were playing, and they attracted thugs like metal slugs to the Polar Opposites, either the name of another band, or the metaphoric anti-equivalent of a safe, peaceful, wholesome dance.

I mention this because in the back seat the Spoilers bass player was reaching forward to examine the cassettes and saying, “I have a bone to pick with youz.” He really said youz, and he pointed at Larry with one of his bass thumping fingers. “Get in here.”

Everybody looked at him because the back seat had no more room. What’s-his-name was sprawled across the other half of the back seat.

“Where?” Ed asked. The cassettes were still rattling around in the car like a pinsetter rattling pins or the odd change in a washing machine. Somebody must have been stepping on them.

“Here, right on my fucking lap, big boy,” he said. “Tell Santa what you want for Christmas.”

“Spoiler” alert: this is the Sad Part. Sometimes, you think it’s the sad part, but it just gets sadder. Like if I told you two out of the four BBWHC died in a DUI the week before graduation and the rest of their lives humping axles at Ford’s.

Binaca, that’s the name of the spray. Larry shrugged, then pulled on the door handle and got in. Whatever happened after that made “Cat Toy” a funny joke for the rest of our lives. Me, I ran.

*

Look at me, look at that boy run through the ruins.