The Big One-Oh

by Dean Pitchford

  As we spoke, a lady wearing a lot of lipstick and biting her fingernails rolled her cart behind Garry.

  I continued to him: “What was that . . . thing?”

  “Well, what did it look like?”

  I shrugged: “It looked like you had chopped off somebody’s foot or something . . .”

  The lady behind Garry snapped her head up as I added: “. . . like you hacked it off at the ankle.”

  “Exactly!” Garry exclaimed. “That’s what I was going for!”

  The lady’s eyes opened wide.

  “And was that blood? Cuz it looked like it was dripping with blood,” I wondered.

  “Yes!” Garry cried. “But did you think that there was too much blood? I always worry that there’s too much blood.”

  That’s when the lady made a little “Yeep!” sound and raced away so quickly that her shopping cart left skid marks on the tile floor. Garry and I both looked after her. Then we shrugged at each other.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, he said, “My name is Garry.”

  “I know. Garry Quarky.”

  He seemed surprised that I knew both his names, so I added: “Sometimes your mail comes to us by mistake, so . . .”

  “Ah,” he nodded. “I don’t know yours. Your name.”

  “Oh. I’m Charley. Charley Maplewood.”

  He extended a hand, so I shook it, but I didn’t squeeze it as hard as Vince had been trying to get me to.

  There was a little awkward pause until I asked: “Okay. So. This foot-thing? What’s that about?”

  “Well, Charley,” said Garry, “I’ll show you.”

  12

  Garry Quarky’s garage was amazing.

  Where ordinary people would park their car, Garry had built this . . . this laboratory, a wacky workshop full of unbelievable objects and machines and drawings and other nifty things. When he first snapped on the overhead lights, I couldn’t stop saying “Wow!” for about ten minutes.

  He had little models of spaceships, but spaceships like you’ve never seen. Some of them looked like pirate ships with rocket thrusters coming out the back, and others looked like fish with steel wings. A bunch of them hung from wires overhead, dangling up there next to miniature planets with rings and stars and volcanoes shooting off of them.

  Garry had hundreds of clay models of dinosaurs—some of which actually lived a million years ago, and others that he just made up.

  He had created monsters that have, like, twelve arms, seven legs, horns instead of eyes, and hair made out of snakes.

  And then there were the body parts.

  There were phony noses and ears thumbtacked up on Garry’s bulletin board; there were rubber fingers and hands and toes and feet scattered all over. And eyeballs! Everywhere I looked, Garry’s rubber eyeballs looked back at me, all squishy and soft. Most of them were a dull gray color, but some of them were painted to look like the real thing.

  Garry even had complete faces lying around, sort of like Halloween masks, but much realer. They were the faces of actual people who all volunteered to let Garry slather some kind of goo all over their faces and make masks of them. I don’t know who those people were, but if I saw them again on the street I would recognize them immediately!

  “I used to do this,” Garry said, after I finally stopped gasping and gawking at everything in the workroom.

  “Do ‘this’?” I asked. “You mean, make fakes?”

  “They’re called ‘effects,’ ” Garry corrected me. “I did ‘ef fects.’ ”

  “Whoa,” I marveled, still looking around. “For what?”

  “For movies.”

  “For Hollywood?”

  “Not Hollywood,” he shook his head. “North Carolina. Believe it or not, they make movies there, too.”

  “In North Carolina? Really?”

  “Really,” Garry smiled, looking around, and from the way he spoke, I got the feeling like North Carolina must have been a special time in his life.

  “So how come you’re in Fresno now?” I asked.

  Garry’s face sagged, like the air had gone out of his cheeks, and he looked away from me as he sighed, “I . . . I stopped.”

  There was a silence then, and I could only hear the hum of the fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. I decided not to ask him any more about North Carolina that day.

  “So, tell me about the noses,” I said, pointing to about thirty different sizes and shapes that were lined up along a workbench like little soldiers.

  That question seemed to perk Garry right up. “Oh! Noses. Now, noses are fun.”

  “Why?”

  “Because! I can take a cast of anybody’s nose, and by adding a bump here or a wart there, I can turn that person into a wizard or a monster or whatever I choose. The possibilities . . . they’re endless!”

  Excitedly, he crossed to a bulletin board from which he pulled a thumbtacked ear. “Ears, on the other hand, ears can be difficult. They’re full of crevices and corners, and it can be really hard to . . .”

  He suddenly stopped and turned to me.

  “Is this boring?”

  “No!” I almost yelled. “How can you ask that?”

  “Well. Cuz Stacy, my girlfriend . . .” then he corrected himself: “my ex-girlfriend . . . she was always telling me how boring I can be.”

  “No,” I assured him.

  He crinkled up his nose. “Really?”

  “Really.” I gestured around the room. “Just look at this—it’s awesome! The spaceships and the creatures and the squishy feet—we could talk about this stuff for hours, and I would never get bored.”

  So that’s just what we did.

  13

  When I ran into the kitchen late that afternoon and started telling Mom about my afternoon at Garry’s, I found her rushing around, putting ice in glasses, pouring peanuts into a bowl, and straightening her hair a lot.

  “And all those things—the models and dinosaurs and noses and stuff—he calls them effects, y’know? But he doesn’t do effects anymore, on account of something that happened in North Carolina that he doesn’t really want to talk about.”

  “Doesn’t want to talk about,” Mom muttered absent mindedly.

  “So now, he has a new business and he works out of his house . . . see?”

  I held up the business card that Garry had given me when I left his house. Above the words GARRY QUARKY: THE IDEA MAN was a little drawing of a glowing lightbulb.

  “Look! It says right here: he’s ‘the Idea Man.’ Pretty cool, right?”

  “Very cool,” Mom smiled, never slowing down. At that moment I could have told her that I was going to shave my head and join a motorcycle gang, and she would have answered, “Very cool.”

  Mom turned and blinked at me, as if she was surprised to find that she wasn’t alone in the kitchen.

  “Oh! Hi, honey,” she smiled. “Where are the cheese crackers?”

  She knows where the cheese crackers are, but I could tell that her brain was off about a mile away, so I pointed to the cupboard. Then I continued.

  “And what that means—being ‘the Idea Man’—is that companies from all over the world call him and pay him to come up with ideas to make their businesses run better and stuff. He’s that smart, Mom.”

  “Smart. Wow,” she answered in her blurry way. “And who is this?” She picked up a tray with snacks and cold drinks on it and headed out of the kitchen.

  “Garry,” I said.

  “Is he a new teacher?”

  “No! Garry! Next-door-Garry!”

  Mom stopped in her tracks and turned to me.

  “That creepy man? Why on earth are you talking to him?”

  And that’s when I stopped and gasped. “Well, why are you talking to him?”

  I pointed across the room to where Vince was sitting on the sofa.

  I thought that the whole Mom-and-Vince thing had ended the night he called me a freak and slammed out of our house. But I guess he had been phoning her at work and apologizing, an
d that must have worked, because here he was on the couch, like a stain you can’t get rid of.

  “Hey, Killer,” Vince smiled and stuck his hand out. “How about a handshake?”

  I didn’t move.

  “Charley, honey?” Mom chirped. “Vince and I have been talking, and he feels . . . he feels really . . . really . . .”

  “Bad,” Vince helped her out. “I feel bad about missing that dinner you cooked the other night.”

  “And Vince has something that he wants to contribute to your birthday party,” Mom added quickly. “Tell him, sweetie.”

  Sweetie? She called Vince sweetie?

  Vince sat forward and cleared his throat. “Well, yeah. Down at my store, The Paradise Pantry, I kind of run the show.” He looked to Mom. “Who’m I kidding? I do run the show!” Then they both laughed.

  I didn’t.

  “So,” Vince continued, “when you figure out what you want to do about a birthday cake for this big wingding of yours, you come to me, and I’ll fix you up. Whaddya say?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  But Vince looked to Mom with a look that said, “How was that?”

  And instead of nodding or winking at him, Mom leaned over and gave him a kiss! It wasn’t a long one; more like a little peck.

  But, still! A kiss!!

  “I can make my own cake,” I said in a very low voice, hoping to show Vince who was boss around here.

  “I’m sure you can, buddy,” he chuckled, “but can you decorate it? Cuz I’ve got a crew down there in the bakery department who can give you a birthday cake that’ll blow the top of your head off. And you know what I’ve been thinking of for you? Do you?” He leaned forward and whispered: “Cowboys.”

  I twitched. “What about them?”

  “As a theme. For your party.”

  Are you kidding me?! I thought. Maybe you haven’t heard about Jamie Wiggerty’s birthday party? About me and the pony? Maybe you didn’t have to put up with the whispers that went on for years afterward, the snickers in school hallways of, “Giddyap, Cowboy!” But I can tell you right here and now that there is no way I will allow anything even remotely “cowboy-like” to ruin my birthday party!

  I didn’t say any of that, of course. I only thought it as I stood there, listening, while Vince enjoyed the sound of his own voice.

  “Yeah, we do a swell Cowboy Cake,” he boasted. “Little plastic horses. Little cows in little corrals. And we got these teeny-weeny cactuses.”

  “Cacti,” I corrected him.

  “Huh?”

  “ ‘Cacti.’ It’s the plural of ‘cactus.’ ”

  “Oh. Whatever. You come to me once you’ve got a theme.” Vince looked me in the eye. “You are gonna have a theme, aren’t you?”

  A theme?!

  Nobody had ever told me I would need a theme!

  I trudged up to my bedroom and opened my Birthday Notebook to the heading: THINGS TO DO FOR MY PARTY.

  Below that, #1 and #2 still stared back at me: MAKE FRIENDS and WATCH PEOPLE WITH FRIENDS TO LEARN HOW. I groaned.

  I hadn’t done either one of those yet, and now, suddenly, I had an entirely new, additional duty.

  Underneath them I wrote: #3. GET A THEME, and it felt like the weight of the world had just dropped onto my shoulders.

  14

  As I passed by in the school hallway the next day, I overheard Donna telling Dina and Dana about a party that she had been to recently. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been interested, but when she said, “And guess what the theme was!” I flattened myself against a locker around the corner to listen for any suggestions I could pick up.

  “Princesses. It was an all-princesses birthday!” Donna exclaimed.

  She went on and on about how all the girls at the party got their hair piled up on top of their heads, and then they put on fake jewel crowns and they ate little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. From the way that Dana and Dina were squealing and gasping, I guess that teensy sandwiches are somebody’s idea of a good time, but no.

  No cowboys.

  No princesses.

  No, thank you.

  Later, in the upstairs boys’ room, I asked Darryl Egbert if he’d ever had a birthday party. I thought it would be a good time to ask; he had just gotten a 100 on a science quiz, so I figured he wouldn’t be throwing up anytime soon.

  “A birthday party? As a matter of fact, yes. Once,” Darryl nodded carefully. “I was turning eight. I was allowed to invite four friends from the Pre-Teen Chess Club to join me for the occasion.”

  “The Chess Club? So was that the theme of the party?” I asked eagerly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The theme. Was ‘chess’ your theme? Did you dress up like kings and rooks and knights? And was your cake decorated like a checkerboard?”

  Darryl regarded me strangely. “No. Actually, my father drove the five of us up to San Francisco. To Chinatown.”

  I had been to Chinatown, so I knew about the cool shops and restaurants and banners and paper dragons everywhere.

  “Oh, okay, so was Chinatown your theme?” I asked. “Did you have Chinese food? And did you light Chinese sparklers instead of candles on your cake?”

  “No!” Darryl was getting annoyed now. “My father knows a very inexpensive barber in Chinatown. So we all got hair-cuts. And afterward, on the way home, we ate sandwiches my mother had packed.”

  Darryl smiled at the memory. “Yeah. That was fun,” he said, and then he walked out.

  “I had a Backstage Birthday. That’s a good theme, don’t you think?”

  I hadn’t even asked Jennifer Mobley for suggestions, but there she was, cornering me in the library after school. I had gone in there hoping to find books on “birthdays” and “themes,” but before I could look them up in the card catalogue, Jennifer dragged me into an empty aisle.

  She had heard from Darryl about how I had “bombarded” him with “very odd questions” about “birthday themes and Chinese food.”

  “So! I was gonna be seven,” she began in her annoying voice, “and my mom noticed that a tour of The Lion King stage show was coming to the Saroyan Theatre downtown, y’know? So, because she knows I really, really love music and dancing and singing, she got tickets for me and eleven of my friends to go. It was going to be so great!”

  She held up a finger for each part of her story: “First, we were going to see the show; second, we were all going to get souvenir T-shirts; third, we were going to go backstage and meet one of the dancers who played a leopard or a parrot or something. And finally . . . !”

  Jennifer smiled real wide and shook her red curls out. “Finally, we were going to have birthday cake that had, like, a theater stage drawn on it, with the curtains parting and a picture of me in the frosting, like I was walking out into the spotlight! It was so beautiful!”

  She sighed.

  “It’s such a shame that we never got to do any of that.”

  “Why?”

  “All because of Jeffrey Stovall.”

  “Why? What did Jeffrey Stovall do?” I wondered.

  “Well, everybody was having a good time, up until the scene when Simba watches his father get trampled to death by the water buffaloes. That part is so sad, don’t you think?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “When that scene happened, Jeffrey Stovall started sobbing. Not just crying. Sobbing. Then it was like a flu that gets passed around; one by one, each of my friends started weeping. And they wouldn’t stop!

  “At intermission, Mom decided we should leave, and I couldn’t talk her out of it. So when we all climbed into the van without seeing the second act or getting the T-shirts or going backstage, I couldn’t help myself; I started to cry.

  “And when my mom pulled onto the freeway, things got even worse. She was in such a hurry that she zoomed past a policeman on a motorcycle, so he flipped on his siren and came after us. And when my mom saw his flashing lights and had to pull over, even she started to cr
y.

  “So, now my friends were wailing and sobbing, ‘What did we do wrong?’ I was still pretty upset about missing Act II of The Lion King, so I told them that we were all going to jail because we left the theater early.

  “That made them wail even louder.

  “Then, as my mom was handing over her driver’s license to the cop, Jeffrey Stovall had his accident.”

  “What accident?” I couldn’t believe that Jennifer had tricked me into caring about how her story ended.

  “Well, after crying for so long, Jeffrey had a headache and a stomachache, so that’s why he leaned out his window and threw up onto the policeman’s boots.”

  “No!”

  Jennifer nodded.

  “And unfortunately, Jeffrey’s vomiting had the same effect on all of us that his crying had in the theater.”

  “You don’t mean . . .”

  “Uh-hunh. Everybody started puking right and left. When the policeman saw all these kids blowing chunks—and even though he had Jeffrey Stovall’s breakfast all over his boots—he took pity on my mom. He got on his motorcycle and turned on his siren and gave us a police escort home.”

  “A police escort? Really?” I was impressed.

  “Yeah. That part was cool, but by then, nobody had an appetite, so we never lit the candles or cut my cake or anything. And when everybody’s parents came to pick them up, they were all still crying, so their parents stared at my mom and wondered what she had done to upset their children so terribly.

  “Plus, the van smelled for about a year afterward, even after Mom and Dad scrubbed it out with bleach about seven times. So. That was my Backstage Birthday.”

  Jennifer sighed real deep and her eyes got a dreamy look in them.

  “I’ll never forget a single minute of it.”

  Then she snapped her head around to me. “Why were you asking?”

  “Huh? Oh!” I stammered. “No reason.”

  15

  After school, I sat on the bank of the drainage canal behind the school, stared at my Birthday Notebook and shook my head. Time was slipping away. My “big day” was approaching fast, and I hadn’t done anything on my THINGS TO DO FOR MY BIRTHDAY list. I was desperate.