Standing over the model, remembering all this, Swope soon realized that Savage was just blowing hot air at him. A little bit of managerial hard ball. That was all it was. There was no way he could give the job to anyone else. No way. He knew what Swope had done. Could do. The threat was not real. The job was his. After all, it was to him that Barnaby had given his precious model when it came time to move it out to Newton.
“The Swope surveys his minions.”
He looked up from the model to see a scruffy teenage boy standing in the doorway. He was quite a sight, this kid. His long hair was limp with pubescent secretions; his small eyes almost invisible behind the purple-tinted granny glasses perched at the end of his thin nose. His skin was so pale that it suggested bad diet and lurking disease. His chest seemed particularly meager, collapsed like a pothole where a breastbone should have protruded.
His clothes were equally problematical. His army surplus jacket was emblazoned with a bizarre array of flags—Ecology, Union Jack, Skull and Bones, Old Glory, Rising Sun and, most baffling, the Republic of Panama. For equally obscure reasons, an alligator clip dangled from his breast pocket flap. Beneath the jacket was a T-shirt bearing the mirthless likeness of John Lennon and his demented-looking wife. The boy’s Levi’s were on the verge of disintegration, torn so widely that his bony knees poked through like twin skulls. If Swope didn’t know better he’d have thought this was some kind of delinquent hippie dope fiend who should be immediately escorted from the premises.
But he did know better. This was his son and only child, Edward McDonald Swope. The flower of his generation, whose recently concluded high school career was the stuff of legend: 1590 on his SAT’s. Awards up the wazoo: Moot Court, National Merit. Captain of the state champ High I.Q. Bowl team. Two separate scholarships to Harvard, where his admission to the law school was a foregone conclusion. This was no regular kid. This was his boy. Swope knew better than to sweat the clothes or the hair or anything else. All that would clear up, just like the acne. Leaving behind this amazing specimen. This miracle.
“Morning, Edward,” he said.
“Morning? I daresay not, padre.”
Swope checked his watch. It was already past noon. Jesus. He ambled across the carpet and settled in behind his desk, beckoning for his son to grab one of the leather chairs.
“So, Teddy—what the hell happened last night?”
2
Teddy stared at his clock radio with the single eye he was able to pry open, waiting for one more minute to flip over before he finally got out of bed. It was late: 11:19. This was the third time he’d awoke this morning, starting with the 4 A.M. stagger to the bathroom to void an evening’s worth of Charles Chips, French onion dip, Boone’s Farm Tickle Pink and his mother’s famous lasagna. The second wake-up had come when the phone rang around six, though he’d only been conscious for a few seconds on that one. Since then his sleep had been so dreamlessly deep that he’d left a residual puddle of saliva on his pillow. His wrist was creased and humming; a strand of long hair had become involved in the gunk gluing his left eye shut. His tongue was dry and his bladder pulsed painfully. It was definitely time to rise.
The clock moved, its number flipping like a lazily dealt card. Ten more minutes, Teddy bargained with himself. In return for that he would not do a single bong hit until 6 P.M. Just as he closed the deal with himself a hot cell of headache moved in behind his eye, reminding him just how insane last night had been. True, now that it was summer every night was supposed to be wild, a rolling party of wine and weed and music whose master of ceremonies was none other than Edward McDonald Swope.
College loomed, and Teddy would be damned if he didn’t eke out every ounce of hedonistic bliss from these last months of freedom. But yesterday was no party. The fight had been a cataclysm, an apocalypse that threatened the plans he’d so carefully laid for a long valedictory bash before Harvard. Though fight was perhaps the wrong word, suggesting a two-party scuffle, easily broken up and quickly forgotten. This had been a downright donnybrook, involving dozens of combatants gripped by deep tribal hatred. Teddy had watched in fascinated horror from the loft as they got it on, doing actual bodily harm with fists, feet and the martial arts weaponry that had become the rage since Kung Fu debuted. He and Joel and Susan had only narrowly escaped. If Teddy hadn’t thought fast, who knew what those crazy fuckers would have done.
Though intense, the fight wasn’t exactly a surprise. Trouble had been brewing at the teen center for weeks now. The converted silo had been getting increasingly rowdy, with new arrivals intent on causing mayhem showing up nightly. They were nothing like the old crowd, scruffy peace-loving kids who came in the cars their parents bought them, any riotous impulses they might possess muffled by Baggies of high-quality herb purchased with ample allowances. The newcomers were rednecks and angry blacks, brawling strangers who packed the silo like steer rustled from two genetically incompatible herds. The trouble had started in April, when the first ominous haiku of hatred had begun to appear on the walls. “Fuck whitey suck my dick.” “Nigger are assholes Allmans 4ever.” Illiterate, but pithy. Toilets were clogged with tumors of paper; gum stoppered the drinking fountain. Stuff got stolen. The center’s long-standing directors, married hippies named Josh and Merrie, had begun to go AWOL, leaving the silo to its own increasingly raucous devices.
The carefree integration that had existed since the center opened three years earlier vanished. Tough white migrants from West Virginia and Pennsylvania and their Cannon County cousins gathered on the top floor, where there was Ping-Pong. New blacks, not affable kids like Joel but remorseless boys and their gum-smacking girlfriends, congregated below them to play pool. There was no mixing other than in the bathrooms, which became a DMZ where one traveled at one’s own risk. Which left Teddy and his crew nowhere to go but up into the silo’s cramped loft, formerly used as a storage area for tumbling mats and surplus furniture. Back when Teddy ruled the center, it had been a place where couples came to french and toke, an aerie that reeked of bongwater and Love’s Baby Soft. Recently, however, it was the last place available to kids not part of the warring factions below. Their numbers had thinned recently, with old-timers seeking refuge at the mall or the slanting pier at the lake. By last night there were only eight of the original tribe left. They’d cowered invisibly below the loft’s short wall when the melee broke out. As fists and furniture flew, Teddy finally understood that his days as king of the teen center were over.
The fight had started over music. A cacophony of private tape players had recently begun to fill the silo, replacing the Yes and King Crimson that had once echoed unchallenged on the center’s big Panasonic system. After some records had been stolen a few weeks earlier the stereo was locked in the office, where it remained quiet until a half hour before the fighting broke out, when some rednecks Teddy had never seen before, hard-eyed crackers with stringy goatees and Confederate-patched sleeves, broke in and commandeered it. Their goal was brutally simple—to drive out the hated blacks by playing Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” as often and as loudly as the system could bear.
It wasn’t long until the brothers stormed up the stairs to remonstrate, pointing out in their inimitable style that the inbuilt speakers drowned out their various small offerings of Stevie and the O’Jays. The whites, unmoved, bolted the office door. Teddy watched from on high, wondering if any of the black kids had actually seen the aptly named albino currently serenading them. In case they hadn’t, the rednecks plastered the album sleeve to the window. The melanin-free Winter floated there, an apostle of honkyness for those proud African eyes to see. That was all it took. Converse-shod feet were aimed at the office’s flimsy door, quickly splintering and dehingeing it. After a thirty-second scuffle a big black guy with a fisted pick in his hair broke through, tearing the needle off the record just as Edgar’s synthesizer performed another rowdy breakdown. To Teddy, the ear-splitting scratch sounded like the end of more than just a song.
Shoves, kicks
, punches. Pool cues were wielded, a Miller quart chucked. Kung fu weaponry was deployed with vigor and skill. Teddy watched it all in astonishment. Although he and his friends had been the objects of menacing stares for weeks now, this was the first time he felt actually imperiled. Joel gathered Susan under his arm. Both looked scared and vulnerable. As the center’s sole interracial couple, they’d been drawing dirty looks from both camps of late. Susan wanted to stop coming altogether after finding dried gobs of spit on her back when she took off her blouse one night. She’d been called a nigger lover once too much. And the ever-peaceable Joel had almost thrown a punch a few days earlier when a skinny black kid Tommed him. As Teddy considered whether or not to hold his ground a six ball flew over the railing, striking a gym mat with a dull thud.
“Comrades, let us repair to the drawing room,” he said.
“Affirmative, Will Robinson,” Joel answered.
Luckily, there was an exit on their level that led to the fire escape. Pushing open the door set off a gratuitous alarm—Teddy could already see the Cannon County sheriff’s prowlers arriving in force. After reaching sea level the three of them ducked through the village center and out into the sleepy streets of Newton, where the hissing of gaslights intimated a ruined summer.
“Where to?” Joel asked once they were safe.
“I’d better get home,” Susan said. “Curfew.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Ah, children,” Teddy said.
They began to walk toward Susan’s house. She lived in Fogwood, in one of the boxy aluminum houses her father sold. Teddy and Joel lived farther south, in Mystic Hills, where the houses were made of wood and the yards had trees.
“That was intense,” Joel said.
“It only confirms my hypothesis,” Teddy explained.
“Which is?”
“People are animals.”
“Animals are animals,” Susan said, flipping back a rogue blond strand. “People are people.”
“Ah,” Teddy said. “The tautologist speaks.”
“What did you call me?”
Joel diffused the brewing argument with the howled refrain of “Let’s Get It On.” Local dogs responded. They walked in silence until they reached Susan’s house. Teddy watched from a few feet off as they frenched, right there in the road.
“I think I see Irma,” he said finally.
The couple broke apart as if they had been electrocuted. They stared at the house for signs of Susan’s ever-vigilant mother. All was dark and quiet.
“Where?” Joel asked.
“I thought I saw a curtain move,” Teddy lied.
“I don’t see anything,” Susan said, leveling a suspicious stare at him.
“Sorry. Next time I won’t say anything.”
After she was inside Teddy and Joel continued on toward Mystic Hills.
“I wish you guys would get along,” Joel said, readjusting his omnipresent leather visor.
“Sorry, man.”
“It’s just getting hard to hang with you both.”
Teddy felt a brief pulse of fear run through him.
“I said I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, anyway,” Joel said. “You gonna tell your dad about tonight?”
“He’ll hear. Prolly already has.”
“The Swope will be pissed.”
“Incanfuckingdescent.”
Joel smiled.
“I can just hear my dad,” he said, his voice going basso. “Those kids have just got to stay in school. Educate themselves.”
“The Earl.”
“Yeah.”
They made affectionate fun of their dads for a while, re-creating what would certainly be their horror at the fight. As they walked and talked Teddy couldn’t help but think how much better it was without Susan around. They reached the top of his road. He was glad he’d left his car home. His head was spinning.
“Do you want to enter my humble abode and partake of the storied herb?”
“Better not,” Joel said. “Got to get up early tomorrow.”
“Early? Egads.”
Joel kicked at a rare bit of loosened gravel.
“Nah, Susan and I were gonna spend the day in D.C.”
Teddy suddenly felt a lot more sober.
“Really? Doing what?”
“Just hanging out.”
“Oh.”
They stood in silence for a moment.
“Well, have fun.”
“Yeah. I’ll call when we get back.”
“Bring me one of those moon rocks everybody’s talking about.”
Joel laughed and then he was gone. Teddy watched him for a moment before heading down to his own house. He couldn’t believe that Joel was going to D.C. without inviting him. They always went there together. The Smithsonian. Watching the freaks on Dupont Circle. Drinking beers at the Rathskeller, where they never got carded. He hated the idea of Joel going with Susan and not him. It felt too much like getting ditched. And he swore he’d never let anybody do that to him again. Not ever. Sure, Susan had friends down there from her dad’s army days, though that was no excuse for counting Teddy out. No excuse at all.
At home, he let himself in through the back door. His parents were asleep. He locked himself in his room, smoking one last bowl that quickly turned into three. He cranked up Imagine on the headphones, then Plastic Ono, then his customized Lennon-only Beatles tape. In between tokes he made his way through an entire pack of Hubba Bubba to quell his aroused taste buds, creating a brain-shaped mass on his nightstand with the spent pieces. As he smoked and chewed and listened he thought about what the teen center fight meant. The sound of that needle across Edgar’s organ; the way the cops had stormed through the door, their nightsticks drawn, eager to apply wood shampoos. The days of the Fogwood Teen Center, the court of the great and sage Teddy Swope, were over. No more dispensing bowls of Panama Red as he told his friends about the National Geographic documentary on the rope divers of Papua New Guinea or recounted the plots of Siddhartha and The Crying of Lot 49. Either his dad would close it or the place would be filled with so much security it wouldn’t be worth the hassle. Despite the weed and Lennon’s consoling voice, Teddy felt depressed. What was supposed to have been his last perfect summer before Harvard was suddenly looking deeply problematical. His hangout had been sacked by infidels. His best friend was otherwise engaged with a dumb blonde whose only virtues were an ass from heaven and a willingness to donate it to the cause of Joel’s horniness.
Life sure could suck.
And then, because it was two-thirteen and you could only listen to “Crippled Inside” so many times, he turned off the stereo, killed the light and hit the hay.
“Teddy?”
His eyes snapped open. Eleven forty-one. He’d somehow managed to fall back asleep. This had to be a record. Incredible. Sometimes Teddy amazed even himself.
His mother stood in the doorway.
“Hon? Sweetheart? Are you sick?”
“Only in my soul,” Teddy quipped.
Her pretty powdered nose wrinkled.
“What’s that next to your bed?”
He looked at the mound of chewed gum.
“My brain.”
“Well, wrap it in something and put it in the trash, please.”
His mother slowly came into focus. She was dressed immaculately in one of her Mary Tyler Moore getups. Peach-colored pants suit. Matching hair band needlessly holding back spray-stiffened hair. Buffed jewelry, much of it shaped like seashells. Gooey black makeup.
“Do you want lunch?” she was asking.
“Surely you jest.”
“Well, I’ll make a sandwich.”
“Go wild, Ma.”
In the shower he discovered a massive zit on his left shoulder. Sucker was a real ICBM. He launched it, sending a dollop of creamy goo against the clouded glass door. He gave his johnson a few probing yanks but there simply wasn’t enough blood this early in a hangover. Besides, he was out of pHisoHex, his lubricant
of choice, as it not only provided optimum slickness but also fought the acne on his shaft. After showering he threw on some jeans and his Two Virgins T-shirt. It was the flagship of his wardrobe, custom silk-screened from the bootleg record he’d bought in Baltimore when he went for his interview at Hopkins, his number-two safety school. (Number one: Dartmouth. Three: Bowdoin. Four: Bucknell.) The front of the shirt showed John and Yoko buck naked, full frontal, Lennon’s uncircumcised knob and Yoko’s fun bags there for all the world to see. On the back you could see both of them bare-assed, just like on the record sleeve. Fairly fucking cool. It had been a month since he’d last worn it, having concluded it would not go down very well with the new crowd at the teen center. Today, he’d wear it in protest of his forced exile.
It was noon by the time he made it to the kitchen table, his hair wild and damp. His mother had been good to her word—a decrusted olive loaf sandwich rested on a mauve plastic plate, surrounded by a Vlasic wedge and a pile of chips. What you might call a culinary joke, Teddy thought. Beside it was a cup of scummy instant iced tea in which three contiguous crescents of ice melted. And a vitamin. Jesus. Here he was, almost eighteen, about to go to Harvard on twin rides, a National Merit and a Vernon T. Bagwell, whoever the fuck he was. And his mother still gave him a Flintstones vitamin. What’s worse, it was Barney. She sat at the table, poking distastefully at a mound of low-fat cottage cheese that was speckled with pineapple chunks.
The New City Page 3
