“You can’t do that, Victor. You can’t flip-flop. You have to stay true to your convictions or—”
Wilfred and Kothenbeutal ran through the kitchen. Wilfred was dressed in only soccer shorts and sandals. Shower water beaded his skin. Kothenbeutal was dressed in a dark suit like he just got back from a job interview. “Victor—Rex,” Wilfred said, running, end-spinning a football back and forth. “We’re going to throw around the ol’ pigskin on the ol’ ice until we slip and knock our ol’ teeth in! You coming—!?”
Rex leaned closer. “If you don’t stay true to your convictions—”
“You coming!?” Wilfred pleaded.
“Shut up! Get out!” Rex said.
“Jesus-wesus!” Wilfred said. “Looks like Mr. Barky-bark’s not in.” He spun the football to Kothenbeautal and scampered around Rex with jazz hands to the ceiling. “Is he? Is he? Mr. Barky-bark of the Barky Bunch ain’t no in! Is he?”
Rex stood and shot his chair back. “Haargh!” He lunged to swipe an arm around Wilfred’s waist and Wilfred spun free like a running-back—his shower sandals clapping. The two slipped out through glass French doors.
Rex sat back down. “Where were we? Yes…”
Wilfred waved at me from outside, between throws.
“Victor, what is it you want?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if there was one thing you wanted to accomplish this year, what would it be?”
“I guess, I want to get a girlfriend.”
“That’s good. That’s a good goal. We can help you with that. But you gotta stop being a hypocrite.”
“What do you mean, ‘being a hypocrite?’”
“I mean all this business at your Standards Review about how everything has to change and then just a second ago you said that some guy, Moses, a million years ago can make rules that we all still have to live by. That doesn’t fit together. If you want to succeed. If you want to get a girlfriend, then when you’re in Rome, you gotta do like the Romans. You can’t swim against the current. You can’t be at odds within yourself if you expect to succeed in this world.”
“I guess you’re right. I—but I think you’re over simplifying.”
“No simplification. Just truth. Here,” Rex opened his messenger bag and pulled out a couple of palm-sized, blue frat party invites that had a Xeroxed picture of a hand drawn guy in football pads pulling back to throw beneath the heading ‘After We Win!’ “It’s an After We Win party. We’re throwing a party here after we beat UNL on Saturday. There are a bunch of Alphas from Lincoln coming up to stay here and they’re bringing girls too. There’s going to be all kinds of girls here.” He handed the invite to me. “You need to start getting yourself ready. You need guidance. There’s some wisdom that your Pledge Dad should have given you but he didn’t. So we’re going to have somebody else show you the ropes. A local Alpha legend: The Snitz.”
“The Snitz? I already know The Snitz.”
“You know of The Snitz. You don’t know him. He’s a local Alpha legend.”
“He’s a drop-out and a bartender…?”
Rex got dreamy-eyed. “A local Alpha legend. He’ll be at the party. I’ll make sure you guys get introduced beforehand and that he gives you all his knowledge.”
“I don’t know…”
“He’ll be your guide. Like Virgil was to Dante in their journey from Hell to Paradisio.”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“It’s perfect. It’s fucking perfect!”
CHAPTER TEN
MA RED'S REVENGE
Later that week, around eleven o’clock at night, I walked downstairs and out the Blue Room’s French doors to the front patio’s cement landing and brick ledge. A car sped by along the main drag: “Whooooo!” some drunk underclassman boy yelled, leaning out an open window.
Ice-sheeted branches hung; spreading above; twinkling from the moonlight and the humming blue streetlights as the lustrous, green-tinged blackness of grass blades flittered.
I stepped toward the center of the landing and lit a bummed cigarette; drew a drag into my lungs; coughed, felt the warmth in my throat, the high and—for the first time—that confusion of voluntarily killing myself.
There was a sound like sandpaper was scraping somewhere to my left and I turned to find Ma Red sitting on the brick ledge beneath the projected roof with her back against the house’s façade.
“Ma Red?”
“Hello, Victor.” Her slow hands crocheted something thin and red.
I walked closer to her. “Hello, Ma Red.” I took another drag of the cigarette and noticed something to the right of her. It was a flask—a small, silver flask.
She saw me see it and realized it was too late to hide the thing. It had a crest affixed to its side—the Omega girls’ unmistakable crest of a textbook using a rose as a bookmark. I hadn’t known she was in a sorority, much less an Omega girl.
She flustered after failing several times to catch the red yarn and draw it through her last loop. So she let the purple rod dangle from her needlework and grabbed the flask, unscrewing it and took a long swig. In the dim light, her hair looked a darker silver and it seemed she had abandoned the idea of bringing back her blonde locks. She offered her flask to me and my fingers touched the crest’s smooth ruby-pearl inlays. I took a short swig, grimaced and turned my head.
“Oh—for crissakes—don’t do it like that!” Ma Red said, hoarsely.
“I wasn’t expecting gin.”
“A lady drinks gin—stays off her breath. Besides, who taught you to pull like that? You pull a gun, you shoot; don’t you?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
She looked with disgust between the flask and me. “Why spare yourself the dog’s bite when you’re looking at its teeth?”
I handed it back to her. “It’s a little cold out here to be crocheting, isn’t it?”
Her eyes dreamed over the black grass blades. “… those pictures in my suite that I grew tired of staring at.”
“What are you crocheting?”
She smiled. “It was going to be a scarf, however, my needles started chaining and they made it much too thin. I decided it’s a ticker tape message for an old beau of mine.
“He’s passed, so he won’t receive it.
“It starts with hugs and kisses and ends with walking papers.”
Sure enough, the crocheted strip started with needlework showing ‘XOXO’ and a third of the way in was nothing but ‘XXXXXXXX…’
“This old beau of mine was the father of my departed son, though he and I were never wed.” She looked up at the moon. “He never accepted Danny as his. It pained him to see his legacy crippled in our son.” She scooted forward and pulled the creases out of her grey skirt, then took another swig. “Let me ask you a question, darling.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling the heat of the cigarette nearing my fingers in the cold air.
“Do you think a rotting, rotten face can still smile? I mean, after it’s been long below.”
The cigarette burned my fingers. I dropped it. “I’m not sure, Mrs. Redding,” I said. I rubbed my fingers.
“Well. I certainly hope it can’t still smile,” she said with a flat expression. “Did you know that my niece won’t even let me see my grandnephew?”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
“She won’t.” Ma Red looked at her crochet rod as if it were something alien. “She listens to her mother. Her mother doesn’t care for me because—you see—I was somewhat of a dish in my day as you may have surmised”—(ladylike belch)—“excuse me, my!—I was in fact a dish and her mother has never forgiven me for a few of my teenage indulgences that infringed upon her.” She screwed the cap on her flask and swished the remnants round in circles. “Now is that fair?”
“People shouldn’t hold grudges that long.”
“Yes. Exactly, dear.”
“I’m going to head inside, Mrs. Redding. It’s cold out here. You might want to do the same.” I
turned toward the French doors—
“Oh, there’s something else, Mr. Hastings. I’ve used my free time wisely—you see. I’ve taken care of that business between Mr. Nicodemus Smith and Mr. Rex Blauwern. The memorandum I mailed to Nationals is tacked in the stairwell.”
“It is? You must have just put it up. I bet it was tough getting the house officers to agree on the wording.”
“I did not consult with Mr. Blauwern,” she said.
I went upstairs to the stairwell to look. Just as she had said, a Xeroxed letter, typed on official house letterhead, was tacked on the stairwell’s corkboard:
Dear Nicodemus Smith,
I would like to formerly apologize on behalf of the men representing the Sigma Tau chapter on the night of Wednesday the 28th of November for their actions. As you well know, I’ve been the House Mother of this chapter for nearly twenty years. In that time we’ve both seen changes, but that which remains in constancy are the values espoused by the Alpha’s founder Howard Taffeld Scobey; namely: Mirth, Prudence, Earnestness, Vigilance, and, most assuredly, Piety.
These are good boys, Mr. Smith. I love them so. I hope we can both endeavor to remember what it was like to be of their young age and how this is a formative time in their lives. In many cases, such as this present incident, disobedience can be confused for what it truly represents: a sincere attempt to understand the world around them.
Mr. Smith, as we grow in years, we recognize many things. Not the least of which being that the transition to manhood is seldom a sharp nor a precise one. I’ve kept close to the hearts and feelings of the young men in this house. I’ve even watched a few of them make that silent transition into manhood. There is, however, no assurance that every young man will make the correct decisions and, thereby, mature. Maturity is very important to my heart. It is the singular indication of whether an adolescent has reached his potential. Every woman appreciates the importance of maturity, I assure you; since a mature man can enter wedlock, have children, and support his family. Nothing can be more important than this. Unfortunately, as I noted above, not all boys can mature. Rest assured, sir, that the Sigma Tau chapter remains a bedrock institution providing His teachings and molding young minds to His One Truth that is His Love.
Earnestly Yours,
Miss Elizabeth Redding,
House Mother of Sigma Tau Chapter
Enclosures:
Two gratis tickets,
Des Moines Lyric Opera House
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EGALITARIAN COMPUTERS
I was sitting at my desk doing some homework when the shrill beeps of the house phone’s intercom invaded my thoughts. He breathed so heavily into the receiver that it was obvious Drake had run from his room to the house phone while worked up in some frenzy: “Now here this! Now here this! No longer do the members of this house have to be enslaved by the monarchy of some 1980’s server/host bullshit!”—gasps—“Now every computer has equal voice! Equal voice! For those of you that only speak in techy, buzzwords, I’ve finished linking all forty-one house computers in a peer-to-peer network. I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re thinking why should I give you so much power, right? I’ll tell you why I did it. Just like the countries that rise from tyranny and oppression to democracy and equal rights so too can each user be his own king of equal standing”—gasp—“You can search through the hard drives of every computer in this house as if it were the hard drive in your own computer”—gasp—“If Johnny Slap-jaw from one of the downstairs rooms finds something you like on the Internet at noon—some porn, an application, a new song—you can have it on your hard drive at 12:01”—breath—“Beat that! I defy anyone to do better! You can’t stop this revolution. This is where it starts. Right here. It’s going to turn into something wonderful: A real-time technocracy, an enlightenment, a hive mind!”—breath—“Now there’s a decision to make. Are we going to be a bunch of pussies or are we going to be men? Are we going to hide and squirrel away our treasures? Like: ‘Oh, I don’t want Johnny Slack-jaw to see the porn I just found, that’s just for me, or, this weblog, this word doc manifesto isn’t finished so I’ll hide it in a hard drive partition like some sweet candy-ass!’”—gasp!—“No! Just because God said we were sinners and made us wear clothes on the streets that don’t mean we can’t be naked in cyberspace. It’s a second chance after Adam’s Fall, my brothers. Don’t waste it! Eat this fucking apple of knowledge—and live!”—gasp!—“LIVE!”
“Dork,” someone yelled from a nearby room.
I closed my Physics book and looked to the repairs Brad Torsten had made to my Ethernet outlet. A couple days ago when Drake had set my computer up for the peer-to-peer network I asked him to install this software called NetNanny with full restrictions to minimize my temptation and ability to download porn. (I let Drake come up with the password and hide it from me. He was sort of like my sponsor).
I had a feeling that something interesting was going on inside Drake’s room. I decided to head to the other side of the hallway to see what he was doing.
In the hallway, one of the long fluorescent lights must have just burned out because it was dark but I could see the light around the corner as I stepped over the confetti that the pledges had left mashed into gray carpet from their sorority festivities last night. From inside an open door a boyfriend and girlfriend fought over one of those concatenated reality shows where a show is made about a show, is made about a show, is made about that first thing that was ‘real’. “Why are we even together!” David Williams screamed. “All we ever do is fight and I just told you that all that bitch wanted was the fucking five-hundred thousand dollars!”
I walked past without looking inside and knocked on Drake’s closed door.
“Who is it?” someone said. I didn’t recognize the voice.
“Victor,” I said.
There was low talking.
The door opened to reveal Thomas Clark. He tried to look a little to my left. “Is it just you?”
“Yah,” I said.
“Come in then.”
I walked into Drake’s room and saw him sitting at his computer while Thomas Clark sat back down at his seat with his laptop. Drake’s roommate, Robinson, was elsewhere as usual.
His room was barely lit by the yellow pin line slits of Venetian blinds. It was cool and dry as soft Hendrix simmered. A red pilot light glowed eternally on his coffee pot. Mugs scattered nearby had infected the desktop with wet brown rings. Under his loft, he had a sea green velvet couch with cedar side-caps and a gaudy, brass accenting stripe. The surfaces, the carpet, the glass coffee table, the desktop, they all seemed to grow, sprouting things like crumpled military styled shirts, bic lighters and bent, wet matches. Along the desktop, near the door, he’d left wallet chains and Zippos crafted in silver and chrome with fanged spikes and demonic bloody-eyed caricatures to keep the Normals at bay.
This was the first time I’d been in Drake’s room when he’d had his black light on underneath his loft and it drew my attention to some dark collage he had hung on the back wall. Aluminum sheets of foreign beer cans’ licorice lavenders, sterling silvers and amber yellows had been cut with tin snips into a jigsaw puzzle sown with black gut suture and sporting emblems flourishing foreign umlauts, inverted exclamations, and tildes. The edges had been cut to outline a perching Roman eagle and the dark colors reflected black light off the crinkled aluminum, giving the impression of a mythical swamp of ethereal creatures, teaming and hiding in darkness.
“Nice collage,” I said.
“It’s beer cans,” Drake said as he leaned toward his computer screen, typing.
“I see that. It must have took a long time.”
“I got obsessed with beer when I got cancer,” Drake said. “I thought I’d never get the chance to drink it.”
“And now?”
“You know I can’t stand that stuff. I drink wine and whiskey, mostly.”
Thomas Clark closed the door behind me and tried the silver doorkn
ob, making sure it was locked.
“What are you guys doing in here?” I asked.
“We’re going through people’s computers and copying all the coolest stuff onto our hard drives,” Drake said. “Before people chicken out and get pissy.”
“It’s a cyber-Freudian frat-boy collage,” Thomas Clark added. “I told you this was a great idea, Drake. We shoulda done this earlier!”
Drake spun on his black leather task chair. “Let’s get you set up, Victor. You’ll join us in this fun.” He grabbed his laptop off his desk which I assumed was wi-fi connected to the peer-to-peer.
I took the laptop from him and sat on his couch.
“Do you have your thumb drive on you so you can save stuff?” Drake asked.
“Always,” I replied. I opened the notebook and turned it on. “Are you guys sure this is a good idea? I mean—morally right?”
“Everyone’s deleted their cookies and partitioned off their financial and sensitive stuff,” Thomas Clark said. “Plus, we all agreed to do it. So I don’t see the harm.”
“Well…” I hesitated.
“Here,” Drake said, as he handed me a sheet of paper. It listed network IDs with room numbers.
The first computer I went for was Rex’s. He had a bunch of nude pictures of platinum blondes in his My Pictures folder that he’d probably gotten from Playboy.com. This porn was in the very same folder as his high school era pictures of his family. In these family pictures he joked around and roughhoused with all his older brothers. There was one family picture where they were at the Grand Canyon and Rex—wearing a white trucker hat turned sideways—had jumped over the back of two largish fair skinned brothers, holding them in headlocks. His face gleamed with youth and naiveté while his brothers looked past the camera, haggardly.
Of all his files, his word document journals were the juiciest. One of which, I found confusing:
Growing Up Wired Page 9
