The Big One-Oh

by Dean Pitchford

  How desperate? I’ll tell you how desperate.

  I went to ask my sister for advice.

  “What’re you asking me for?” Lorena scowled when I pushed ahead of a long line of people waiting at her cash register in the Chick-A-Dee Restaurant. I figured that it was okay for me to cut in line because I didn’t want food. Just a theme.

  “Because. If I don’t get a theme of my own, Mom and Vince are going to make me have a cowboy birthday party.”

  “Ugh,” Lorena groaned. “Cowboys are so lame. QUIT IT!”

  She didn’t say that last thing to me; that was for Brad, her supervisor, who had come up behind her and pinched her fanny. As usual, Brad was wearing his “talk-to-me-People!” headset in a special way so that it wouldn’t muss his hair, which he spends about ten hours arranging every day.

  “What? My hand slipped,” Brad grinned as he slid a tray toward the guy at the head of the line. “Three pieces white meat. Large fries,” Brad smiled. “Thanks for eating at Chick-A-Dee.”

  Then he winked at Lorena and went back into the kitchen, barking into his headset, “People! Where are my onion rings?”

  Lorena rolled her eyes. “He’s always grabbing my butt.”

  “In Monsters & Maniacs, y’know, the July issue? This girl sticks a fork in a guy’s hand for doing that,” I advised.

  Behind me, a lady with a big red purse whined, “Can I order, miss?”

  “Charley, beat it,” snapped Lorena. “I gotta work.”

  “But what about my theme? For my party? I need a theme!”

  “Well, don’t come crying to me! I don’t have any ideas. You need somebody with ideas.”

  And I swear my jaw dropped open. That was one of the few times in her whole life that Lorena actually said something that made sense.

  Because I did know somebody with ideas.

  “Actually, I’m what people call a consultant,” Garry explained.

  “But your card says ‘the Idea Man.’ Is that really you or did you just buy cards that said that already?” I asked.

  “Well, I have ideas, sure. But they’re . . . they’re for businesses.”

  “But you agree, don’t you? There’s no way I can do a cowboy theme for my birthday party.”

  “No,” Garry shook his head. “Cowboys . . . cowboys are really tired.”

  “Thank you!” I yelled.

  I looked around at the room we were in. Garry had emptied one of the bedrooms in his house and made an office where he goes to work every morning. It’s filled with computers and copy machines and stacks of files and piles of papers. There’s a map with little colored pins pushed into cities all over the United States and Asia and Europe, and above that, six different wall clocks are set to the time in Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, London and Rome.

  “You work in here all day?” I asked.

  “All day.”

  “And in your garage all night?”

  “Uh-huh. Want something to drink?” Garry led me into the kitchen, where empty TV dinner boxes were scattered all over the countertops.

  “Love those TV dinners, huh?” I said.

  “Oh. Yeah.” He picked up a few of the boxes, embarrassed that the place was such a mess.

  I sat on a high stool at his kitchen counter. “Okay. I won’t take up much more of your time, but I need a theme for my party. Fast.”

  As he poured glasses of water, Garry shook his head. “No no no. You don’t want to rush this.”

  “But I gotta! My birthday is only a few weeks away.”

  “Ah. But!” He turned to me. “This is no ordinary birthday, huh? This is a big one.” He held up one finger. “The big one . . . ,” and, with the other hand, he made a circle, “. . . oh. The Big One-Oh. Get it?”

  I stared at his finger figures for few seconds until I realized what he was making with his fingers. “Ten!” I cried. “One-Oh. Yeah. I’m gonna be ten.”

  Garry nodded. “Double digits, huh? Life begins.”

  The way he said that flooded me with such a feeling of specialness. A feeling of importance. A feeling of . . .

  “Now, how in the world did that get there?” Garry suddenly said, squinting at something on the finger he used to make the “one.”

  “What?” I said, leaning forward to see.

  “Oh, it’s just this fingernail. It’s . . . it’s longer than it should be.” And, as he said that, Garry laid his finger down on a chopping block, picked up a big kitchen knife, and WHAM!, brought it down and chopped off his finger!

  I just about flew backward off my kitchen stool before I realized that there wasn’t any blood. As a matter of fact, the knife just kind of bounced off the rubber finger that Garry had substituted at the last minute.

  “Didn’t scare you, huh?”

  I shook my head. “Sorta. Not really.”

  “Well, dang,” he sighed. “It’s something that I’ve been working on.” Then he held up the squishy finger for me to see.

  “I think it needs work.”

  He nodded in agreement. I reached out and took the phony finger from him. “These are so cool.” I looked up at him. “How do you make them?”

  “Oh, it’s easy. Did you ever make a footprint in wet concrete?”

  “Once,” I nodded. “When we poured a new patio at our old house.”

  “Okay. So now imagine making an impression of the top of your foot as well. Then when you put those top and bottom halves together, you create a mold. And when I pour this stuff . . .” he squished the phony finger, “. . . called latex into the empty space in the mold, it dries in the shape of whatever you want. See? Simple.”

  My mind was racing with the possibilities. “You mean, you could make, let’s just say . . .” I held up my right hand, “. . . a copy of my hand?”

  Garry smiled. “How long can you sit still?”

  To help the latex dry, Garry keeps his workroom warm. So he flipped on a bunch of space heaters until it got to be about a hundred degrees in there. But, honestly? I hardly noticed the heat once Garry started working.

  He had me cover my hand with oil so I wouldn’t get stuck, and then he pressed my hand into a pan he had filled with a fluffy goo that looked like marshmallow cream. It felt kind of gross at first, but Garry made me promise not to move my hand while the goo was hardening, so I didn’t.

  And even though we later had to repeat the whole process with the back of my hand, I didn’t get bored because Garry kept telling me awesome stories about the movies that he had built effects for back in North Carolina.

  He talked about making a skull with a cleaver in it for My Principal Is a Maniac!, which I had actually seen on the Sci Fi Channel.

  “You made the skull with the cleaver?” I gasped.

  “That was mine,” he blushed.

  He described the swamp monster he created for Honey, I Ate The Kids! And there were about a dozen more that I’m forgetting now.

  “And then, the last movie I did—the very last,” he sighed, “was called The Coming Of The Brain Biters. Now, on the other films, I was one of a bunch of guys on the crew, but this one . . . this was entirely my baby. And this was a good story! It was about this evil alien bacteria that falls to earth. When people get it on their clothes, it eats into their skin and travels up to their brains and comes blasting out their eye sockets.”

  “Whoa!” My head was reeling. “I would totally see that movie.”

  “Right?” Garry was excited. “So I made all the alien bacteria and the brains and even the eyeballs.” He picked up a perfectly painted eyeball from the counter and held it up proudly. “This was one.”

  I was stunned. “That’s so good it’s scary.”

  Garry smiled. “Thanks. Yeah. I did all the effects for every scene in the entire movie.”

  “You must’ve felt great,” I said.

  “Wait,” Garry warned, holding up a hand. “Opening night. We stood in the back of a packed theater, ready to watch the audience jump out of their seats. And my fir
st big moment came . . . the first big scare that was going to get the first big scream, and . . . and . . .”

  He stopped.

  “And?” I prompted.

  Garry shook his head. “They laughed.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. They laughed. Just a few people at first. But that’s all it took. Soon the whole audience was hooting and whistling and throwing popcorn at the screen. It was all over.” He turned his face away.

  “So what happened?”

  He shrugged. “I left the theater. I went home. Packed my stuff. And I moved here.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t your fault,” I said.

  “No,” he sighed. “I had been working toward that moment since I was twelve. And nobody—not one person in that audience—freaked out. I just wanted to . . . to scare them. And I couldn’t.”

  After a silence, he looked up at me. And he held up the eyeball.

  “You want it?”

  “Seriously?!”

  “I don’t need it anymore.”

  I took it, and all I could say was, “Whoa.”

  “Fortunately,” Garry continued, “I have a college degree in business, so I fell back on that. I make a lot more money now, believe me. It was the best thing I could have done. Getting out of the effects business.”

  He got quiet for a second, and then he shook himself and said, “Speaking of ‘getting out,’ let’s get you out of that mold.” He pried my hand out of the hardening cast, and he took that mold and the one we’d made earlier over to a table where he set them in front of a space heater to finish their drying.

  But the whole time Garry was busy with that, I was staring at the latex eyeball, hypnotized.

  And I completely forgot about Garry making my “third hand.”

  I forgot about getting a theme for my party.

  I forgot about making friends.

  Because—and I know it sounds stupid—but at that moment I thought that eyeball was probably the most perfect present I had ever, ever received.

  That night in bed I set the eyeball on my pillow, and I stared at it.

  It reminded me of Monsters & Maniacs, Issue 114—“I Only Have Eyes for You—FIVE HUNDRED OF THEM!!”

  And, as I lay there, I thought, Wow. This eye will never blink.

  It will never sleep.

  It will always be watching me.

  And I fell asleep smiling.

  16

  I didn’t really knock out Cougar. I know that’s what people said, but the truth is that I never laid a hand on him.

  I was alone at my cafeteria table the next day, playing games with my eyeball. Bouncing it. Winking it. Then I closed one eye and squeezed the fake one in under my eyebrow, like it was one of those single round eyeglasses that old men squint through in fancy English movies. I had just picked up a silverware knife to see my reflection in the blade when—WHAP!—I got smacked from behind, and I heard Cougar sneer, “Made any cakes lately?”

  Cougar’s slap snapped my head forward and sent my fake eyeball flying through the air toward an empty table, where it landed on a dirty plate in a little puddle of ketchup.

  Cougar jerked his head toward the plate and ordered Scottie, “Hey. See what that is.”

  Scottie plucked the eye off the plate, and when he saw what he was holding, he freaked out! He quickly tossed the eyeball to Cougar, who looked down at this thing in his hand.

  And it looked back at him.

  It was still covered with ketchup, which I guess Cougar thought was real blood. He must have gotten scared that he had smacked my eyeball out of its socket, because that’s when he gagged.

  And his eyes rolled up into his head.

  And he fainted.

  No lie. Cougar went down like a sack of potatoes, taking a few empty lunch trays and a chair or two with him. The clattering made everyone stop what they were doing and turn.

  And to them, it seemed like I had knocked Cougar out. The looks of admiration on the faces of my schoolmates were not looks that I was used to seeing, so I didn’t hold up my hands and shout: “I didn’t touch him!”

  I figured I’d let them think what they wanted to.

  Scottie and Mrs. Colby, the gym teacher, and I carried Cougar into the exam room of the School Nurse’s office. The Nurse wasn’t there, but a little paper clock on her door said, “BACK IN 5 MINUTES.”

  Mrs. Colby had to get back to gym class, so I volunteered to sit in the outside waiting room until the Nurse returned. Mrs. Colby said that that was very generous of me, and, after she sent Scottie back to class, she left, too.

  It actually wasn’t totally generous of me to wait with Cougar. See, when Cougar fainted, he squeezed my fake eyeball into his hand, and I knew that if I wanted it back, I had to be there when he opened his eyes.

  The door to the exam room swung open, and I stood up to greet the Nurse. Instead, I was shocked to see Jennifer pop her head out and say, “He’s coming around.” She had a little white nurse’s cap balancing on top of her red curls, and she was wearing a little white coat.

  “Jennifer? What’re you doing here?”

  “Oh. I’m the Nurse’s Aide.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, every day at fifth period, Nurse Dulaney goes behind the gym to have a cigarette, so I come in to watch the office. Mostly I just refill the Band-Aids,” she admitted, but then she leaned close and confided, “but I’m trying to get her to let me draw blood.”

  There was a frightening thought.

  Jennifer ushered me in to see Cougar. He was blinking and groggy, and what was really strange was that his forehead was covered with about twenty Band-Aids, stuck on in a crisscross pattern.

  Jennifer jabbed Cougar’s shoulder and barked:

  “Get up, Leland. We need the bed.”

  “Don’t call me ‘Leland’!” Cougar snarled, and he swatted at her hand. Jennifer ignored him as she bustled in and out of the room, trying to look like she knew something about medicine.

  When Cougar saw me his eyes got narrow. “You . . . !” was all he said. He wagged a finger at me, as if to say, “I’m going to make you sorry.”

  But then he realized that he had something in his hand; he opened his fingers and found . . . my eyeball. Smeared with ketchup.

  “Uh . . . can I have that back?” I held out my hand. “Please?”

  Cougar sat up on the exam table and squeezed the eyeball a few times to convince himself, I guess, that there was nothing to be afraid of. I could tell that he was fascinated, as fascinated as I had been when Garry first gave it to me.

  “A bloody eyeball, hunh?” He looked up with a crooked smile. “You are so twisted, you know that?” And he started to laugh. I was so surprised to see him laughing without even hitting me first that I didn’t know how to respond.

  He held out the eyeball. “That is one scary idea, man,” he said as he dropped it into my palm. And when I heard the word idea, I froze.

  Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was looking for someone with ideas? And now, without meaning to, had I actually come up with one?

  A scary idea?

  Scary idea, scary idea, scary idea tumbled around in my head like a marble in a clothes dryer. And by the time the eyeball landed in my hand . . .

  . . . I had my theme!

  Right then and there, I decided to throw a Monsters & Maniacs House of Horrors Happy-Birthday-to-you-Charley-Maplewood Party!!

  It was brilliant!

  It was inspired!

  It was . . . !

  “What the heck?!” Cougar stopped laughing because that’s when he caught sight of himself in a wall mirror and was freaked out to find that he had, like, an entire box of Band-Aids stuck across his forehead.

  Jennifer re-entered in time to hear his question.

  “Those are for the bump on your head,” she said in the crisp, professional way that she was practicing to be a nurse.

  “There’s no bump on my head, you . . . cow!”

  Je
nnifer simply sniffed, “Oh. My bad.” She reached up and, with a lightning-fast flick of her wrist, Jennifer ripped the entire wad of Band-Aids off in one clean move.

  Unfortunately, when they came off, so did Cougar’s eyebrows.

  People would later tell the story and snicker about how, at that moment, Cougar’s scream had ripped through the halls and classrooms of the entire school, stopping everybody in their tracks.

  But I didn’t even flinch; I figured his eyebrows would grow back.

  And besides, I had my theme.

  MY THEME, MY CAKE AND OTHER MISTAKES

  17

  I had to celebrate finding a theme, and I knew that if there was anybody in the whole world who would understand why I was so happy that afternoon, it would be Garry.

  “You want me to what?” he asked when I got to his house.

  “I want you to make a copy of my face. Smiling. So I can always remember this moment.”

  Garry was not accustomed to having people get so enthusiastic about being covered with slimy goo and sitting still for long periods of time, so he was actually kind of happy for the practice.

  “Let’s do it!” he said.

  Garry clipped a towel around my neck and had me smear oil on the parts of my face where the marshmallow-creamy-stuff would be slopped on. He gave me two straws and explained that they’d have to go into my nose.

  “You’re not serious,” I laughed.

  “Fine. You don’t have to. But when I spread on this goo, it’ll fill your mouth and clog your nostrils and you’ll suffocate. No big deal,” he shrugged.

  Ha ha. Very funny.

  So I stuck the straws up my nose; I looked like a walrus with his tusks in the wrong place.

  As Garry worked, I kept talking, and as I talked, I got more and more excited about my Monsters & Maniacs birthday party.

  “I could have, like, skeletons at the door and skulls on the cake, y’know? And I’ll get scary black napkins . . .”