Boy Minus Girl

by Richard Uhlig

  Dad drops the newspaper and says to me, “Last night you said you wanted to go on a family vacation this summer. Well, I think I’ve come up with just the place.”

  “You have?”

  He nods. “Rock City.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s this big field filled with massive rocks—some as big as our house!—formed millions of years ago before the Ice Age. Can you imagine?”

  “So . . . it’s just . . . a bunch of rocks?” I ask.

  “Not just a bunch of rocks. Big geological rocks. Some shaped like birdbaths and turtles. It’s the only place on earth to see such a thing and—get this!—it’s right here in Kansas. Only about an hour’s drive from here.”

  “That sounds terrific, honey!” Mom says, setting the plate of bacon on the table. “That way we won’t even have to pay for a motel room.”

  “I mean, why go all the way to Florida when Kansas has such a fascinating and educational landmark?” Dad asks. “You can’t go wrong if you stick to your own backyard.”

  We’re still in Kansas, Toto. Forever.

  Twenty minutes later I’m on my way to school, coasting my Dirt King bike down Tripp Street hill, when I hear a familiar voice coming at me from behind: “Hey, Leth-bian!”

  Shit! My heart speeds up and I pedal like a madman. “What’th your hurry?! Y’got a boyfriend waiting?!”

  I pump harder, but Brett the Brute’s Sting-Ray bike churns up effortlessly on my left.

  “I’m talking to you, faggot!”

  I swerve right, cutting through the vacant gravel lot of the Phillips 66 station. When I veer onto Broadway, Brett is right there, greeting me with: “Nith try, cock breath!”

  He sticks out his big black sneaker, and the next thing I know, I’m sprawled on my back on the grass of Flood & Son Mortuary. There Brett straddles me, his butt pressing painfully into my abdomen. I try to wriggle free, but the lard ass must weigh 250 pounds. Brett has been held back several times and is twice the size of a normal eighth grader. The terror of Harker City Junior High, Brett once broke my best friend Howard’s nose in gym class. He has threatened several of our teachers, and Principal Cheavers is frightened to death of him. Last summer he stole a car and was put in juvie.

  Brett’s meaty, callused hands press my face sideways into the dewy grass.

  “When I thay you pull over, you do it, y’hear me?!” Brett isn’t a patron of deodorant or hand-hygiene. “Y’hear me, Dickhardt?!”

  Through the grass blades I spot a yellow school bus. Staring out the window at me, gape-mouthed, is Charity Conners.

  Brett shoves my head harder into the grass. “Thay you’re thorry.”

  “I’m thorry!”

  He eases up. “That’th more like it. Now, I have thomething for ya.” His rough lips stretch into a devilish, snaggletoothed grin. He digs his butt into my abdomen and rips the loudest, longest fart in Dickerson County.

  When I look up, the school bus and Charity, my Charity, are gone. Alas. And—crap!

  “ ‘At’ is not a place, people!” declares Mrs. Crockmeister, her narrow-set little eyes glimmering as she holds up a red-inked paper. “Who lives at ‘at’? No one! How many times do I have to tell you this?!”

  I’m staring three seats ahead and one row to the left—where she sits. Her shiny, helmet-like black hair hangs to her ears and contrasts beautifully with her white skin. I very much want to kiss that long, long neck. Among the many obstacles: I haven’t said one word to her since the fifth grade, three years ago, when I called her “Turkey Tits.”

  You see, in elementary school I found Charity Conners totally annoying: she was always the first to finish her schoolwork, made the best grades, and acted real superior to everyone. In Mrs. Olsen’s fifth-grade class, we were assigned neighboring desks and pretty much ignored each other. Then, one Friday afternoon during the Weekly Reader current-events filmstrip, I whispered something to Howard, who sat on the other side of Charity. She turned to me and said, “Hush up, Lester, I’m trying to listen.”

  “Why don’t you shut up, Turkey Tits.”

  She blinked twice, then flipped me the bird. When I came into school the following Monday, Charity’s desk was empty and Mrs. Olsen informed us she had moved to St. Louis with her folks. Good riddance, Turkey Tits. Or so I thought.

  Then, a month ago, there I was, seated in this very room, when the door opened and Principal Cheavers ushered in the sexy new girl with the cool haircut. My breath was taken at the sight of her swimming-pool-blue eyes and pillowy lips. I was instantly in love. She was so . . . not Harker City.

  “Everyone, this is Charity Conners,” he said. “You might remember her; she lived here a few years back. Please make her feel welcome.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Where was that annoying girl with long black braids and the clacking retainer?

  “Ahoy, mateys, it’s my goil, Olive Oyl,” Howard whispered over the top of his opened Guinness Book of World Records upon seeing her tallish frame step through the doorway.

  “I think she looks . . . exotic,” I said.

  “She has a face like one of my mom’s lady-head planters,” Howard retorted.

  I silently, vehemently disagreed; she was pretty—really pretty—just not in the usual cheerleadery way.

  “Still doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do her,” said Howard as he made a little hip-thrusting motion under his desk. With his Bugs Bunny teeth, marshmallowy body, and incessant spouting of trivia, Howard stands even less of a chance of getting laid than I do.

  Plus, I think, he overcompensates for the fact his dad is the ultra-uptight Reverend Bachbaugh.

  Charity Conners doesn’t dress like the other girls, either. No jeans and white canvas sneakers. She wears long black dresses, strings of pearls—and worn bowling shoes! Word has it her dad is an engineer on the railroad and was transferred back to Harker City.

  Every time I approach Charity, I feel my face heat up and I scurry like a scaredy-cat in the opposite direction. Talking to cute girls has always made me nervous, but this particular girl—she might very well recall that I’m the guy who once called her Turkey Tits.

  Last week I was down at Ratcliff’s Pharmacy getting a root-beer float with Howard when I spotted a new men’s cologne called Instinct. “Made from the musk of wild boars!” the label declared. “Men, let pheromones do the work for you. Warning: women may violently throw themselves at you.”

  “Please, please don’t tell me you’re going to buy that,” Howard said.

  “Says here it’s scientifically proven to make females go wild,” I said, uncapping the bottle and sniffing.

  Howard cringed. “Smells like Aqua Velva Barnyard. The only thing you’re going to attract with that are sows. Soo-eeee.”

  But I believe in science, and I instantly forked over the ten bucks. The next day I dabbed it behind my ears and on my wrists and made a point of standing behind Charity in the cafeteria line. She sneezed. Twice. The following day I splashed it on my chest, arms, and legs.

  “Oink!” Howard ran up to me at my locker and started dry-humping my leg. “I love you! Oink! I must have you! Oink!”

  Now, back in English class, I look at Charity, who is reading the biggest magazine I’ve ever seen, something called Interview. Soon, soon, soon, I will talk to her!

  After third period, at the first-floor water fountain, I glance at the sign-up sheet for the eighth-grade talent show taped to the wall and see a new entry: “Howard Bachbaugh—break dancing.” I beeline to Howard’s locker, which is chock-full of books containing pointless facts: Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Mind-Boggling Facts, The Book of Lists, This Will Surprise You.

  “What is this about you break-dancing?” I ask.

  “That’s correct,” Howard says, a little snootily. “I’ve perfected my moonwalk. Among other things.”

  “Such as?”

  “You’ll see next Friday night.” And he saunters off, kinda cocky-like. Very un-Howard.

  I turn to walk away j
ust as Mom, in her nursing uniform and little winged hat, strides past, her white orthopedic shoes squeaking on the red linoleum floor. I spin back to the sign-up sheet, pretending not to see her. Sometimes she comes over to my locker “just to chat” or to bring me something for lunch—once she kissed me in front of everyone! Mom is our school nurse. But there are barely ninety kids in the entire junior high, so she only comes in on Mondays or when there’s an emergency. The rest of the week she works at Dad’s office.

  Please understand that I don’t blame my lack of popularity on the fact that my dad has touched the scrotum of nearly every guy in school, or that my mom shows sex-ed films and gives guest lectures about menstruation and nocturnal emissions in health class. No, I know that I am unpopular because I am not a jock. Football, the sport that determines where one stands in the food chain, is simply “too dangerous” according to Mom, and according to me. I hate the idea of wearing all those pads and slamming into someone. At Dad’s urging I went out for basketball in the sixth grade. I didn’t make a single basket the entire season, never mastered a layup, and resented having to stay after school and miss The Andy Griffith Show.

  Barney Fife is my hero. Skinny, awkward, eyes bulging out like a fish. And he still manages to have a girlfriend. Thelma Lou, and sometimes “sweet” Juanita.

  When I get home that afternoon, Uncle Ray’s Corvette still gleams in front of our plain little house. I open my bedroom door, and once my eyes adjust to the dimness, I freeze at the sight of Uncle Ray lying on the bottom bunk, reading The Seductive Man. Blood rushes to my face. Has he been snooping through my stuff? Did I leave it out?

  I clear my throat. “Hey, Uncle Ray!”

  He turns to me. “Lester the Mo-lester!”

  Tossing the book aside, he wraps his hand around the rail of the upper bunk, pulls himself up, swinging his legs to the floor, and stands.

  “Lookit you!” He bear-hugs me, pulling me off the floor, then sets me down. “You must be the star of the basketball team.”

  “Not even close.”

  “Say, thanks for letting me crash in your room.”

  “No problem.”

  “And hey, you need privacy to jerky the old turkey, just give me the word and I’ll make myself scarce.”

  It takes me a moment to figure out what he means, and then I try hard not to look shocked. My parents never joke about stuff like that.

  “So, tell me, kid, you got a girlfriend?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  He holds up The Seductive Man. “Yeah, well, don’t you believe any of this new-age, sensitive-guy bullshit. It won’t get you halfway to first base.” He flips to the back cover and the soft-focus photo of the author: a bald, middle-aged man with a gray beard and black turtleneck, his sensitive face tilted a little, his caterpillar eyebrows furrowed thoughtfully. All he needs is a pipe to look like Mr. Sanderson, my science teacher—and a permanent bachelor.

  “You can’t tell me this douche bag is getting any,” Uncle Ray says.

  I dutifully crack up, mostly to cover my humiliation.

  He thumbs through the pages and reads in a lisping voice. “ ‘The first rule to making her love you is to be your kind, interesting, sensitive self. Women want a friend first and foremost.’ ” He snaps the book closed, causing me to flinch, and flings it onto my desk. “No. They. Don’t. Chicks want excitement and fun! Lots of it!”

  This is why I love Uncle Ray: he’s the only grown-up I know who talks to me like I’m a man.

  “Is that your secret to getting women, Uncle Ray?”

  He smiles. “Y’know, guys’d pay top dollar for tips from a pro like me.”

  “Take it off the fourteen years’ worth of birthday and Christmas gifts you owe me,” I shoot back.

  He looks a little taken aback; then his lips crinkle into a smile. “I like how you do business, kid. C’mon, I need a smoke.”

  We go outside and settle on the front-porch steps. He sticks a cigarette in his mouth, lights up, takes a long drag, and gives me a sidelong glance. “All right. First, you need to lose the Linus look.”

  I glance down at my beige corduroys and orange-and-white-striped shirt.

  “Those pants’re way too big on you,” he says, his cigarette bobbing up and down with each word. “Women like to see a man’s ass and package, least a hint of it. And that shirt says, ‘I watch Benny Hill and jerk off in a gym sock.’ ”

  I love Benny Hill. How’d he know? Howard and I have seen every episode.

  He sucks on his cigarette and blows smoke rings into the still air. “And what’s with the ’do?”

  “What about it?” I touch the back of my head.

  He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Carter’s out of the White House. Time to enter the eighties.”

  Is this the reason girls don’t go for me—because I’m a fashion disaster? I’ve always taken pride in what I wear, but what if I am totally out of it and don’t know it? Suddenly I feel like Stanley Johnson, the greasy-headed geek in my class who wears corrective shoes and snorts when he laughs.

  Uncle Ray mashes out his cigarette on the top step, flicks it into Mom’s rosebushes, and rubs his hands together. “You got good raw material, kid. Revamp that look and go get ’em.”

  For the next hour, in front of the bathroom mirror, I experiment with my “’do.” Mom has always cut my hair the same way, ever since I was in the first grade. I try watering down the cowlick in back, but it keeps popping up like a nerdy weed. I try parting my hair on the right, but the way it sweeps across my forehead, I resemble a pubescent Hitler. Parting it down the middle, I look like a loaf of Home Pride bread. Do I have “problem” hair? Will it doom me to the life of a virgin? Will I still be spending my nights with Mom watching Johnny Carson when I’m thirty? Are the African tribeswomen of National Geographic the only naked females I’ll ever see? Is the Skin So Soft bottle the only—

  “Les, darling!” I hear Mom call out from downstairs. “Time to wash up for supper!”

  We all sit at the kitchen table eating Mom’s chicken chow mein, a dish we have maybe once a year when company comes over. Is she trying to impress Uncle Ray? To appear more worldly? Dad’s mood is soaring, thanks to Uncle Ray, who keeps refilling Dad’s glass with red wine from a big jug marked Carlo Rossi. Mom, a devout teetotaler, frowns on Dad’s rare instances of drinking, but Uncle Ray made a big deal about how he brought this expensive vintage Italian wine to celebrate the family reunion, and I can tell Mom feels she can’t really say anything against it. I’ve never seen my father talk so much.

  “Ray, can’t tell you how good it is to have you back,” Dad says, his speech a little slurry. “You know, just the other day I was thinking about that fly-fishing trip we took with Dad to Colorado back in ’64.”

  Uncle Ray laughs and rolls his eyes. “Don’t remind me.”

  I glance at Dad and Uncle Ray sitting beside each other. With the exception of their prominent Eckhardt brows, it’s hard to believe they’re brothers. Uncle Ray has a thick head of hair while Dad is balding, with patches of gray sticking out the sides. Trim and muscular, Uncle Ray looks as if he’s spent every day of his life in the wind and sun; whereas Dad, who could rest his hands on his gut, looks as if he’s spent the last twenty years working in a tunnel. Dad’s wide-lapel brown Sears shirt makes him look all the more small-townish and out of it. Suddenly I feel a little guilty. Would Dad look more alive, more like Uncle Ray, if he didn’t have to work so hard to provide for me and Mom?

  “So there we were, at the top of Pikes Peak,” Dad says with a beaming smile, “and the moment we all piled out of the car, it starts rolling backward.”

  Uncle Ray laughs and shakes his head. “The old man forgot to set the parking brake!”

  “You should’ve seen the three of us running down the mountain after that Plymouth,” Dad laughs, his eyes tearing up.

  Uncle Ray guffaws.

  “The car shot right through the guardrail,” Dad says as he pantomimes with his
hands, “dropped a good hundred feet, and lands on top of a pine tree.”

  I laugh, although I’ve heard this story a hundred times. It’s one of Dad’s favorites. Mom produces a tepid smile while nibbling her chow mein. I notice she keeps looking at Uncle Ray out the corner of her eye.

  “I never saw Dad so angry.” Dad lifts his wineglass and wipes the corners of his eyes with the back of his hand.

  Uncle Ray places his elbows on the table (something Mom never allows Dad and me to do) and leans forward. “He was angry ’cause he had no one to blame but himself.”

  Dad abruptly stops laughing.

  “That’s the thing about our old man,” Uncle Ray says, suddenly serious. “He never could admit he made a mistake. Even that day. He claimed the parking brake was busted. I’m surprised he didn’t blame the mountain.”

  A tense silence follows, and Mom places her fork on her plate. “Ray, we don’t hear from you for what? Almost four years? And then, out of the blue, here you are.”

  Uh-oh. Here we go.

  “Better late than never,” Dad says, a little too quickly and jovially. “Honey, please pass the chow mein.”

  “Don’t worry, Bev,” Uncle Ray says. “I won’t be in the way.”

  Mom shifts a little in her chair, as if digging in for battle, and asks, “Are you still playing guitar in that rock ’n’ roll band?”

  “Nope. Y’know, we stood a real shot at landing a contract with a big label,” Uncle Ray says, “till our lead singer died.”

  “How?” Dad asks.

  “ODed on Freon,” Uncle Ray says, and sips his wine.

  “Freon?!” Dad asks, horrified. “How does someone overdose on Freon?”

  “Sniffed it from a pressurized can. Lungs froze instantly. Died right on top of a groupie.”

  Mom and Dad exchange a concerned look; then Mom clears her throat and says, “Let’s see now.” She glances at the ceiling as if there’s a list written up there. “Before the band you were an actor, if I’m not mistaken, and before that you were a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas.”