Jack, he’s gonna be a football star
Diane debutante backseat of Jacky’s car…
Waking up sucks. I’m going to be late for school again tomorrow, I can already tell. Just like I was late today. Just like I’m late every day.
This morning I must have pushed snooze about 30 times. I didn’t want to believe world outside existed. When I finally threw myself out of bed, it was already after 8, which meant I’d already missed first period. Damn. I grabbed an apple and tried to bite the gummy shit off my teeth as I ran out the door and I was halfway to school before I realized that it didn’t matter; I’m not a college prep kid. Nobody notices that you’re not there unless you’re an AP kid. They walk around with this new stiff posture, as though they’ve forgotten what losers they were before this year, like they’re trying to remind the rest of us that we’re supposed to treat them with awe and respect — even the teachers are supposed to look up to them — because they’re going someplace, and they’re above the kind of failure that, they’ve decided, forces someone to end up teaching at a shithole high school like Grant.
As if going to college is any big deal. I might go to college too if I feel like it. I’d be kind of college kid who wakes up late for all his classes, and ends up missing algebra and gym, but in college that’s not such a big deal. There are all kinds of college kids like that. I read in my Mom’s People magazine that some famous actor, I forget who it was, couldn’t graduate from college because he missed too many gym classes, and he still ended up doing okay.
Anyway, everybody I’ve ever known who’s been into learning — like, Knowledge — has been basically stupid about all the important things anyway. All they can talk about is facts, and what are facts? Facts are just things that you memorize. Dad knows all kinds of facts. Facts and theorems and the periodic table. He knows all that shit. Just so he can go play video games all day in some office and think about monosodium-glutamate and Red Dye Number 5 or whatever it is chemical engineers think about. It’s like his brain is stopped up inside a Pyrex beaker.
After all the rain
I will be the flame…
The day before he moved into the Days Inn, Dad gave me his ’82 Pinto. He took me to Denny’s. This was a big deal. It was the only time he had actually seated himself for a meal with a member of the family in over a year — except last Christmas dinner, which doesn’t count because I slammed out of the house after Julie started in about “why can’t we all be nice to each other and show that we care because it’s Christmas and our eyes are supposed to be all misty with nostalgia and happiness.” She didn’t get it. We were shouting at each other because we cared too much and our eyes were misty, just not in a happy way. So she had something close to what she wanted; it was the rest of us who didn’t.
The fact that I was sitting in Denny’s with Dad could have meant any number of things. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to get to know me or what until he told me that I didn’t have to order the all-you-can-eat Mexican Bar. Dad’s a total cheapskate, and “you can order anything” was way out of character. I ended up ordering the Mexican Bar anyway, just to see the disappointment in his eyes and watch him fumble for a way that wasn’t quite so much like bribery to connect with me. This was a pretty fun game, actually. Watching him squirm and showing him he wasn’t the only one who knew how to ruin something important.
Last summer, I wanted to join the Live Oaks country club and learn how to play golf. I’d been watching a lot of Saturday afternoon TV and golf looked like a good game; you could think about things while you played, and you didn’t have to be part of any team of people you only sort of liked. Also, the name: Live Oaks. The people who went there all did seem alive. When they walked to their Volvos and Saabs in the parking lot, they had this casual self-confidence to them, like they’d never once wondered what it took to live. I wanted to be alive like that. I figured there must be some connection between golf and this sense of life; that’s probably why they named the golf course Live Oaks. I was going to become a pro golfer, like take lessons at Live Oaks and then join the pro circuit and be seen every Saturday afternoon by golf fanatics. I was going to be the next Fuzzy Zoeller, a hero to young golfers everywhere.
And for no reason at all, Dad nixed that one. He couldn’t even tell me himself — he had to go through Mom, who wrote down his words so she’d get them exactly right: “You are not going to get any golf lessons or set foot in that country club. We don’t associate with the type of person who patronizes establishments of that sort. Also, you won’t have time. You’ll be getting a prestigious job at one of the fine establishments at the mall this summer.” As if I wouldn’t know the real reason he said no. He hates it when I try to do anything he’s not already better at than me.
Part Two
Just say the word
No! I won’t say the word! I hate the word!
Sus-sus-sudio-o-o…
God this song sucks. I’ve never met a single person who likes it. Why do they bother? I don’t get it.
It’s like on my way to school today. I made a pact with myself not to talk to anyone unless they talked to me first. It was a kind of an experiment; by the time school was over, I’d be able to tell if anyone actually cared that I was there. I walked in as the bell was buzzing for the end of first period. I saw Kelly Arnet in the lobby, and asked her what they did in algebra. Just like that. It only took me about two seconds to break my pact. She bugged her eyes at me and gave this big dramatic sigh, like “Why is someone like you annoying someone like me?” and then she said “I guess you just shoulda been there.” Kelly Arnet sucks. All I did was ask her a stupid question. I didn’t even really care what the answer was.
Maybe I’ll try not to talk again tomorrow.
… one o’clock on this bright, hump day morning, and if my producer, Rita, can be trusted, it looks to be a cold one out there in the A.M. Wind-chill factors of — What was it?
Negative 18 degrees — With the wind-chill, it’s supposed to get down to negative 18 degrees.
You hear that?! Negative 18 degrees! All you normal people out there, just be prepared.
We’re not normal?
No, we’re just radio people. And those of you who …
At least they’ve got real DJ’s who talk to you like they know you’re there. Even if they are pretty stupid, they know you’re there. Andrea West, she’s good. She’s good. This guy’s pretty dumb. He’s in the studio right now, though; that’s a good thing to know.
Most stations are pretaped somewhere out in California. They play an hour’s worth of songs and then they play that hour’s worth of songs again and again and again and they have the same talking between the songs, so that it’s just one hour’s worth of everything that’s been put on some tape and then put on a loop and then shipped out to every radio station in the country. I mean, there’s only so much of Rick Dees you can take before you throw the radio into the wall and end up having to sit there in silence.
Dad doesn’t know good music. If there’s a music with less energy than elevator music, that’s the kind of thing he likes. He listens to this crap on Lite FM when he’s in the car. He smokes his Mores — which is the brand Mom used to smoke; now she smokes Virginia Slims, and he wouldn’t follow her that far — and complains about how the beat’s giving him a headache. Like, the music’s not lite enough for him or something. They play songs by James Taylor and Cat Stevens and The Beatles, songs that still have lyrics. He likes songs that don’t contain any residue at all of whichever pop song they’ve destroyed. Either that or songs that didn’t have any life in them to begin with. When he hears one of these, he runs out and buys the album. The musicians he really adores don’t copy someone else’s material in a bland way; they’re actually trying to say something about blandness. They revel in it. They find artistry in the celebration of emotionlessness. And they have an eager audience in Dad.
I went to a fair once and ended up almost winning at the dart game — not actually popping the balloon on the real prize spot, but popping all the balloons around it. The barker gave me a consolation prize; a cut-out bin recording of Irish Folk Tunes Performed by the Amazing Arkansas Woodwind Ensemble. Since I don’t win things all that often, I brought it home with me, and Dad ended up playing it all the time. I think it became his favorite album for a while.
He finally stopped playing his stupid records after Mom made it a condition for his staying in the house. She said, “I swear to God, Bill, if I catch you moping in front of that record player one more time, I’m going to snap all your records in half. Alright? Give it up. You’re not fooling anybody with this poor me routine. If you have to keep living in this house, the least you could do stay out of our way. You’ve got all those tools, you’ve got a whole damn workshop down there in the basement. Why don’t you use it for once and build yourself a little hovel down there?”
What I still can’t figure out was why she didn’t leave.
Part Three
Now I’m looking at a flashback Sunday
Zoom lens feeling just won’t disappear…
Whenever I got caught in one of their fights, I took her side. I don’t even know why. Something inside me said that I had to. I’d do my best impression of the Dad on “Family Ties,” overly sensitive to his wife’s needs, and say something that would get the point across that, even though I’m not a woman, I agreed with her completely.
Sometimes I didn’t even know what she’d said. I just knew that it was Mom’s house and I liked it that way. I liked the fact that she was in charge. It meant that someone was tending. Someone was focusing all of her creative energy on making sure that this house was the best house possible — making sure that this was a home.
I would admit it. If I were asked directly. I would admit that I love my mother. I might talk a lot of shit about her to my friends, but, sure, she’s alright. She’s good. She’s beautiful and strong. She’s a liberated woman who chose the career of mothering. She chose to make a career out of love.
When I leave, it will be to set her free.
That’s not true. When I leave, it will be to set me free.
I’m not gonna be like Dad. He should’ve left before it ever got to the point of his moving to the basement. I think he thought that he would prove his worth and gain some abstract kind of respect by being a man of principle. He wasn’t just acting nice because that’s the way he is. He wasn’t that honest about it. He’s always got ulterior motives for everything.
Just like when he gave me his Pinto. It wasn’t really a gift. The look on his face was enough to tell me that. He was trying to buy me, my allegiance or something. Some kind of respect. He could tell that I’d stopped taking him seriously. And he wanted my pity, too. He wanted me to think he was a good guy.
It’s too late, though. Our respect is all gone — even Julie’s, and she adores him.
By the time he moved out, Mom had started making him sneak in and out of the house by the back door. She says he’s passive-aggressive. She saw an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael about passive-aggressive men. The men were on, their victims were on, they duked it out quietly and, I guess, passively. Mom wrote away and got a transcript of the show. Sometimes she reads it out loud to Julie and me; when we slam our bedroom doors on her, we can still hear her sitting at the kitchen table, reading it out loud to herself.
She says he didn’t love her, he took her. He took her house, he took her food, he took everything she did, and tried to “smile it into being his,” is what she says. She says that if he had it in him, he would have beat her. Instead, he just hung around.
That seems a little overdramatic to me.
But every time I figure this thing all out, and I get to the place where he finally took off and moved into that Days Inn across from the mall, I…
Spots. Wait a minute– Wait a minute — there. They’ve turned into a blue and gold kaleidoscope.
And I’m wasted
and I can’t find my…
It’s 1:56. Jesus. Two hours. I’m never going to be able to stop my head. I still… I mean… Fuck. There’s no way I’m going to be late for school.
Part Four
…And I’m wasted
And I can’t find my way home…
If I went to college, I’d at least not be here anymore. But it seems like — I don’t know, it’s so stupid. Like, Mrs. Sullivan, the guidance counselor. She’s suddenly the most powerful person in school. There are all these guys who used to just hang out who now hang around outside her office. And all she does is make me feel like shit.
“Maybe you should shoot a little lower, Scott. Have you thought about a two-year school? Just to test things out and see if you’re ready?” It’s like you’re only allowed to go to college if you’re a pretentious asshole.
Why can’t I feel good about something too?
Like my music, like classic rock. It doesn’t apologize for anything, and it’s not ashamed. Just guys, we’re gross and obnoxious, but you know what, so what? At least we’re not ashamed of ourselves. “Free Bird!” Play “Free Bird,” man! It’s good music. I can feel it when I hear it. I can feel it in my stomach and in my fists.
…can’t find my way home
Mom still hasn’t taken down the plywood and cinder blocks Dad set up in the basement for a bed. She hasn’t gotten rid of the gift subscription to National Geographic that his parents gave us for Christmas last year. She did get rid of a half-empty box of Trojan non-lubricated condoms She gave them to me. “I don’t need these any more,” she said. “Just make sure you use them with someone you care about.”
She never used to talk to me about any of this stuff. She was normal, like a mom. She’d tell me where I left my high-tops and sit and watch “Remington Steele” with me. Now she talks too much. You can’t get her to stop. She sits at the table with her wine cooler and spouts all this stuff about Dad. Like she’s trying to set the record straight or something. There’s really no reason for me to hear about it. She says, since he didn’t have the balls, she told him she’d decided to leave herself, that she told him she’d found a house and everything and if he wasn’t gone by the end of the week, she was moving out and he’d finally understand what it was like to take care of two teenagers without any help. She says then he got so angry he threw his favorite coffee mug into the kitchen wall and “slinked off feeling guilty for having ruined all our lives.”
It’s like she’s as angry at Julie and me as she is at Dad.
And she makes this stuff up, too. It’s not even true. I was in the living room pretending to watch the Weather Channel during the last fight they had, and when I sprawled the right way on the couch, I could see into the kitchen. She didn’t say anything about having found a house, she vaguely mentioned that she was going to leave. Julie and I didn’t have anything to do with it. And Dad didn’t throw anything.
He raised his fists into the air — it was the first time I’d ever seen his fists — as if he was about to smash them down on the kitchen counter. As he reached up above his head, he froze and I thought I heard him shout something, but I didn’t. He wasn’t talking. What I heard was his silence, slightly diluted by the Sergio Mendes rendition of “The Fool on the Hill” coming from the Weather Channel. He held his arms up like that for almost a minute, and when his fists dissolved, I could almost feel the sting from his fingernails squeezing into his palms. They sank, almost rested on the counter but, as if he knew it was no longer his, passed over it, and instead, he patted his hips like he didn’t know what to do.
I wanted to turn down the volume on the TV but I knew if I did, they’d realize I was there and I’d be disrupting something important. For the first time in I don’t know how long, they were actually communicating with each other.
The silence grew louder and louder. My father finally gave his hips a last pat and put a period on the whole event. As he turned I saw how dry his eyes were. He left the house like he’d just watched himself die or something — like his soul had just been whited-out. My mother followed him into the living room, and after the door clicked shut, I grinned at her — almost laughed. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought we had won, that we’d been set free.
She looked through me vacantly for a moment, and then she started sobbing.
It seems like she’s forgotten all this now. After two or three wine coolers, she starts trying to tell me what a good man I am. That I’m turning into someone really special. That I’m such a better person than Dad is. And even though this is supposed to build me up, what it does is make me feel gross. She looks at me with that same expression she had on her face right after Dad left and I can tell I’m supposed to put my arms around her in a way I don’t want to. It’s freaky. I don’t think she really even likes me anymore.
Part Five
Have you ever been sure that you had made a wrong turn? Did you stop and think that you might never get back to the road that makes you feel good? Some of you might feel like this right now. We’ve all been in this place before. We’ll all be there again. Remember, it’s never too late to turn onto a footpath and change the road we’re on. We only need to have the courage to do it. We only have to forgive ourselves, and love ourselves, even when we’re lost.
Because love is the answer. The world can be a cold and mean place, but if we love, we can shine a little light into it. Who knows, we might light up someone else’s life along the way. We might never know what kind of effect we’ve had, but that’s okay. This is the greatest of virtues, unconditional love. Agape.
So if any of you are feeling particularly unlovable tonight, feel free. Come hum through the stars with me, Andrea West, the hummingbird of the night.
It’s two o’clock. Andrea West comes on at two. It’s nice. The radio waves change. They get rounder. They don’t prickle quite so much. I imagine her floating under a pair of massive wings, crackling through the static, stretching across the length of New Jersey and lifting all the kids who can’t get to sleep up out of this shithole, humming classic rock songs as she goes.
I can tell what she looks like just from listening: She wears fraying boot-cut blue jeans and billowy cotton blouses. When she goes out, she throws on a brown suede jacket with fringe across the back. She doesn’t have time for makeup or anything, but she doesn’t need it; she looks like the wind and the rain and the sun, and makeup would just ruin all that beauty.
Whenever she comes on, I think I should call up and ask her for a song, but I wonder which one, and what would I say to her? It’s better just to listen, to not embarrass myself.
Dad called again today and I picked up. He said, “Hey, Scott, how you holding up?”
I hung up on him.
When he called back ten minutes later, I let it ring until Mom got it. They talked for over half an hour. I could hear her crying through the bathroom door and I wondered when I’d started to be such a dick.
…my hands felt just like two balloons
I tried to look but you were gone
You would not look
You could not understand
This is not how I am
I have become…
Floyd is so great.
My hands felt just like two balloons. That’s exactly what happened in English class today. My head was on my desk and I was zoning out, wondering why I always get so tired after lunch. I wasn’t worried about Mrs. Dryer. She’s senile. She can hardly see to the back of the room. Even with her trifocals. It’s December and she still doesn’t know any of our names, so it’s not like she was going to notice I was sleeping.
The fake wood was cold and I imagined that there were little icicles growing up from it and honing into my forehead, like to clean my brain out or keep it refrigerated or something. I liked that. And the more I concentrated on the icicles, the more everything else disappeared. I let it hypnotize me. My body began to inflate. My head began to shrink. After a while, my head was as small as a match tip and my chest was filling the whole room.
I was playing with the steel legs of my chair which were even colder than the desk. My hands were large and rubbery. Just like two balloons. Their regular size was still there inside, but mostly, all I could feel were the balloons. They kept growing. All of me kept growing. I was blowing up bigger than the classroom, bigger than the school, bigger than the whole world. I felt this expanding power in me.
So, where’d that feeling go? Right now, my body’s as small as a Star Wars figure. It’s hard and stiff and there’s nothing in it. My head is full though. It is a gargantuan ’50s-style computer, taking up the whole room, and it’s full of all kinds of useless information. I can’t program it anyway I want. It just goes and goes, churning through whatever random crap has been punched into it. People are flashing across my eyelids. Chuck D., Winona Ryder, Peter Jennings, Tom Petty. People I do know now. Beautiful Lauren who won’t talk to me at school, Mrs. Dryer, Mrs. Sullivan, Julie, Mom, Dad…
…Girl, there’s a better life for me and you…
My body’s expanding and my head is shrinking now. The transition is the most amazing part. The current somersaults out of my mind and rushes through my spinal cord. It swims out into the expanding balloon of my body.
I’m rising up into the air.
Dad can’t find me here. I can see right through him.
Mom can’t touch me. She can only wave from a long way off.
The AP kids wouldn’t understand this feeling. I’m moving in all directions at once.
My hands are on the steering wheel of my Pinto. I am driving down the Jersey Turnpike. Andrea West sits next to me. She has placed her hand lightly across the back of my neck. Her finger massages the base of my skull.
I’m floating.
I’m floating away. She’s carrying me forward.
