The Genius of Little Things

by Larry Buhl

  **

  I submitted the op-ed to Principal Nicks for his approval. He made a few changes, mostly deleting references to his drug czar work in Washington. I thought we were done, but he still wanted to know what I had against open toilet stalls.

  “I believe everyone deserves privacy.”

  “Try spending time in the Navy if you think you deserve privacy. No stall doors, no stalls. Sleeping quarters? Bunks were side by side and head to head. You get used to it. Learn to like the smell of sweat and feet. And you take your crap where and when you can.”

  I thanked him for the information, and asked whether he wanted me to include his Navy experiences in the op-ed.

  “What do you think?”

  “Yes?”

  “No!”

  Rachel, the Clarion’s photographer, had something to say about the whole sordid matter. I mean about the op-ed I wrote, not the sordid matter of Principal Nicks’ Navy ship experiences. She thought I was wrong not to stand up to him, and she waited by my locker after seventh period just to tell me this. Her hair was even wilder than on the day of the assembly. She looked like the cartoons of someone who had been given an electric shock. She smelled good though, citrus-y. I didn’t notice her eyes at first, because she was standing very close, and I had a habit of not looking people in the eye, no matter how close they were. I realized that I was looking at her chest, and girls don’t like that. I forced myself to look into her eyes. They were green.

  I told her that if I hadn’t written the op-ed, Principal Nicks would have made my life hell. He could kill my chance of being admitted to Caltech. She was sympathetic, to a point, but she was still under the illusion I was some kind of freedom fighter.

  “You did what you felt you had to do, but I think it’s never wrong to speak truth to power. That’s why I’m a journalist. Well, a photographer. I’m trying to write for the paper. It’s such a boy’s club. I have a shot if I come up with a great scoop.”

  “I didn’t mean to say whatever I said at the rally.”

  She didn’t hear me. “Even more than promoting safer sex and drug use, you took on the establishment. A progressive leader does change lives by bucking the status quo.”

  I wanted to say that it was a stretch to call me a progressive leader, since I didn’t have a real platform aside from restroom privacy, which was not so much a platform as a simple right. But I couldn’t get in a word. It was astounding how Rachel could say so much without taking a breath.

  “People who run for office give the most boring speeches. Or they’re jocks and they just smirk and sway. But you have something special. Most candidates would say ‘don’t do heroin’ if they even mention it at all. But encouraging needle exchanges, that’s bold.”

  “I did that?”

  “Yes! And STD testing. A girl wrote an anonymous letter to the paper and said your speech made her think about getting tested. She said if it weren’t for you, she would have gone around spreading Chlamydia.”

  Rachel had an even bigger agenda than praising me. She wanted to do a feature story on me. She would need three interviews, minimum. “This way you can do an end run around the administration. You can say what you want. Tell everyone the principal made you take back those things. And I think everyone wants to learn more about your life. At the risk of sounding selfish, this could be a career-making story for me. By career I mean my high school journalism career. If I do a great job they’ll have to make me a regular reporter.”

  I said I wouldn’t make a good subject because I wouldn’t be SGA vice president, because Principal Nicks called off the election.

  “That’s one more reason to do the story. Vindication. I promise I won’t write anything deleterious about you.”

  “But you wouldn’t be writing a hagiography.”

  She leaned in as if murmuring to a hidden microphone in my vest pocket. “You’re probably the only person in this school who knows the word hagiography.”

  I agreed to meet her for one interview, with the option to do more if it didn’t go badly. Assuming she was truthful about wanting to write something semi-positive about me, I could use it in my application materials for Caltech.

  Plus, she was likely one of a precious few at Firebird High who would use the word deleterious, let alone use it correctly.

  The plan was to meet at lunch in the outdoor courtyard. Rachel insisted the interview would only take half the period. I expected her to show up during the first part of the period, but this didn’t happen. While I waited for her on my shady bench, I heard some guy shout, “Where’s our stall doors?” I knew it was directed at me. I raised my head and squinted at a group of students lounging in the sun at the next table. A girl in a halter top smiled—flirtingly?—at me. “Can we recall him if he doesn’t deliver?”

  I informed her I was not in SGA, and, therefore, I could not be recalled.

  A guy with spiked black hair talked with his mouth full. “Who beat you out?”

  “He was the only one running.” This was from a girl who was draped over a muscular guy’s shoulder like a slutty squid.

  “There was no election,” I said. I don’t think they heard me.

  “Can you still distribute condoms and pot?” the muscle guy said.

  “The administration won’t allow it,” I said. “But they are open to distributing sex toys and heroin.”

  Three seconds passed. Then they laughed. It was like I had given the secret password to their club. The halter-top girl waved me over. I scooted to the end of my table, close enough to hear them, but not close enough to invade their turf. The halter-top girl proclaimed me too funny, and then she shifted to oral sex. I mean she started talking about oral sex, not performing it.

  It became clear after a minute or so that the conversation would no longer involve me. I knew this because nobody asked me anything or even looked at me. My tenure in the cool kids club could have been measured with a stopwatch.

  I returned to my previous perch in the shade. When it looked like Rachel wasn’t coming, I commenced with my lunch. About five minutes before the bell, Rachel bolted to my table. She wore beige overalls and a black t-shirt. Her hair was different, tamed. I could clearly see her face. Pretty, I thought.

  “News room crisis,” she said, out of breath. “Is it still okay?”

  I told her it would be fine. But in reality I was a little miffed. Rachel plopped her notebook and recorder next to my pickles and immediately asked what made me decide to “rock the boat on drugs.” I was momentarily confused, because the way she phrased it made it seem like I was a drug-addicted sailor.

  “Your speech? You did try to rock the boat, didn’t you?”

  “I cited statistics, that’s all.”

  “What about STDs?”

  I stuffed two chips into my mouth and considered what she was asking. Surely she didn’t want to know whether I had any STDs. As I’ve said before, I dislike ambiguity.

  She was staring at me, pen poised.

  “I was researching drugs and STDs for an audition for the debate team,” I said.

  “You’re joining the debate team?”

  “Probably not.”

  She spent the next minute writing. She used one of those oversized grippy pens that made her look like a preschooler trying to write for the first time. Then she asked me to describe a typical day. By that time I had already taken a bite of my pickle. She turned off her recorder and waited patiently for me to finish chewing.

  “I go to the library,” I said, after swallowing.

  She turned on the recorder. “Every day?”

  “Not on Sunday.”

  “And drugs? Do you use them?”

  “Only allergy meds.”

  “My mother and I are both allergic to peanuts,” she said. “Isn’t that strange? Allergies are hereditary, I think.”

  I didn’t tell her about my BiMo’s food allergies. That would have led to the revelation about how she died, and that was a box that didn’t need to be opened. />
  “What are you eating?”

  I showed her what had not been consumed. I told her I brought the same lunch every day.

  “Fascinating,” she said, in a tone that suggested she thought it was more odd than fascinating. Then she leaned in.

  “Tell me about little Tyler.”

  I coughed.

  In sixth grade, there was this kid, Charlie, who referred to his male organ as “little Charlie.” It was an irritating and juvenile way of referring to one’s privates, which, in my opinion, should not be referred to at all. I was fairly certain Rachel was not asking about my genitals. Rather, she was fishing for information on my childhood, which was almost as bad.

  “I read a lot of books,” I said.

  Rachel jotted down far more things than I had stated. I wanted to pivot off the topic, so I cleared my throat and made some exaggerated fidgets, which may have made me look like I had poor muscle control.

  “Tell me five things you’re carrying in your safari vest right now,” she said, looking up from her pad.

  Across the courtyard, two guys shouted, “hands off my…” and “…yours, dude.” Students jumped up, and action rippled out beyond ground zero. Then, just as suddenly, the fight stopped. Students sat, one by one, like the wave at a football game. Rachel hadn’t noticed the truncated fight. She was staring at me.

  “I prefer to not talk about personal matters.” It came out harsher than I had intended. But she had pushed me into it with her big green eyes and compliments and proper grammar and talk of “little Tyler.” Mostly, the problem was my childhood. There wasn’t much good about it, and I didn’t want her to share it with the school.

  Rachel clicked off her recorder with a touch of peevishness. Before she left, she tore a piece of paper out of her notebook and wrote her number on it. From the way she pressed hard, I assumed she was ticked at me.

  “If you decide to open up, call me,” she said.

  I hated my lunch, suddenly. The Swiss cheese was slimy and warm. The mustard was runny. The chips were compressed sawdust. Why did I choose to consume this five days a week? I wanted to tell Rachel that I was tired of being such an obtuse clam, but I had no practice being anything else. I wanted to be like the guys at the next table, with slightly less overt machismo. I wanted to be, if not exactly a cool kid, and not necessarily the firebrand who advocates sex demonstrations and drug dialogue—or drug demonstrations and sex dialogue, or whatever I had advocated—then, at least, a guy who did not spend his formative years hiding out in library stacks. I wanted to be a guy who wasn’t afraid to share things about his life when a pretty girl paid him attention.

  That’s what I might tell Rachel if I ever saw her again.

  **

  September 21. Things I usually carry in my safari vest:

  · Sunscreen. The sun causes skin cancer.

  · Sunglasses. The sun can damage retinas.

  · Tissues.

  · Ibuprofen.

  · Claritin.

  · Antacid.

  · Pens.

  · A small bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

  · Eye drops.

  · Saline spray.

  Dry eye is a problem caused by living in the desert. That’s why I carry eye drops and saline. A doctor told me once that tear ducts can dry out in below 10 percent humidity. One would think tear ducts would produce more moisture to compensate. But in some people, they don’t. My ducts seem to be barren.

  **

  Even though I needed the money, I would have preferred to let Levi have my shift at Covenant Catering. With me was a new co-worker, Tina, who was hired for her ability to drive a van and be pretty. We were catering a party for a nine-year-old. The parents were not home. It was just me, Tina, and a strangely Zen-like housekeeper. It was bound to end badly.

  I knew there would be a problem the moment we pulled up to the house. It was not unlike the Kim’s—new, fake-opulent, with way too many vases, enormous paintings and glass items. The kids, all boys, were Satan’s spawn. As boys tossed pepperoni, gouged furniture with forks, and basically recreated scenes from Lord of the Flies, Tina whined, “I neeeed you to stop doing that.” This only made the brats worse. The housekeeper stared at the scene as if she were watching a sunset, on downers. It was only my quick reflexes that managed to save a lamp from crashing into a window. And I don’t think it was my job to save the lamp.

  The crowning touch of the event was when the birthday boy emptied the contents of his stomach—three glasses of grape soda, pineapple pizza and coconut cake—directly onto a Persian rug. I watched the event unfold, as if in slow motion. The kid stopped running, like he just had a sudden, deep thought. His hands made a fast, quivering motion, as if playing an accordion at triple speed. Then the purple chunks flowed and splashed.

  As Tina and I unloaded the serving trays back at Covenant Catering’s kitchen, Mr. Ferguson told me the birthday brat’s parents were unhappy. He would be forced to deduct the cost of the damage from my pay. But not from Tina’s, because she was new and she had been attending his LDS indoctrination meetings. Given the amount of destruction to the house, it would be weeks before I was in the black. I could have asked him to consider the cost of the lamp I saved, but I knew that would be useless.

  When I was about to punch out, I decided to quit. There was no pen or paper anywhere, and Mr. Ferguson was in his office, on the phone. I wrote my resignation letter in fresh guacamole on the side of a stainless steel refrigerator. It read, simply, Tyler quits. The guacamole letters began running seconds after I wrote them. I left anyway. Mr. Ferguson would have to figure it out.

  EIGHT

  I started my job hunt at Starbucks. Their rest rooms were cleaner than any food establishment I had ever encountered, and they were open early. A downside was their essay question. Tell us about yourself. It occurred to me that I should write and memorize one essay for Starbucks, for Caltech, for Rachel, and for everyone who wanted the Quick-and-Easy Guide to Tyler.

  The manager, a very pale white guy with a nose ring and asymmetrical hair, kept glancing at me as I struggled to produce an essay, which was becoming a mess of crossed-out sentences. I gave up after twenty minutes. I told him that I spilled coffee on the application, even though there were no liquids anywhere near me, and even though spilling coffee would suggest clumsiness or carelessness, which should be disqualifying traits for a barista. I requested a fresh application for the road, but the manager said he couldn’t allow them to leave the store. I told him I would be back.

  The other businesses on my list served up no such application dilemmas. That’s because not one was hiring.

  I returned to the house at three. It was a good thing I didn’t stay out longer, because Janet had planned a party for me. Though it was technically not a surprise party, I was surprised that she was going through with it. No FoPa had ever thrown me a party for any occasion. None had given me an iPod, or a cake, or anything. Occasionally, I would receive a birthday card from whatever case manager was assigned to me, often with my name misspelled on the envelope.

  A week earlier, Janet had brought up the possibility of a birthday party. “We’re thinking of throwing you a party. What would you like?” I laughed a little bit and said, “enchiladas and strawberry cake.” These were the first things to come to mind. I don’t like enchiladas or strawberry cake. I assumed by the use of the word thinking that Janet had asked a hypothetical question. For example, if I said, I’m thinking of doing sexual things with Zoe from my Creative Soul class, that wouldn’t mean I was planning to act on those thoughts. Because I didn’t believe Janet had been serious, and because I was busy working on my science fair proposal—it was not easy to save the bees—I invited nobody to this “party.”

  As I entered, Carl saw me from the living room and pointed, as if I were a fugitive or a celebrity. “There he is!”

  Janet shouted from the kitchen. “Carl, put on that song.”

  He shouted back. “Can you be more specific?”

>   “The woman who sings about being seventeen.”

  “Janis Ian? The song is about how she has no friends. Isn’t it?”

  “Put on something. I’m grating cheese.”

  Carl cursed at his CD collection and finally decided on sitar music.

  In the kitchen there was a large cake, stacks of paper party plates and trays of rolled up things with cheese. Janet was chopping, stirring, pounding, tossing and rinsing. “I’m making fifty enchiladas, in case your friends are hungry,” she said.

  I told her she didn’t have to go to all the trouble.

  Janet stopped grating. “I know that. We discussed this.”

  Technically we had not discussed it. The previous day, she had asked, via the refrigerator white board, how many friends I might invite. I wrote back. Twenty. As with the original query about the party, I thought it was a theoretical question.

  “I don’t think that many enchiladas are necessary,” I said.

  “How many friends did you invite?”

  I said nothing. I detected her lip curl.

  “Your sister will be here,” Carl said, somewhat optimistically, to Janet.

  They shared one of those married couple looks. In this case their thoughts were easy to discern. Tyler has no friends, so cue up that pathetic “seventeen” song.

  My birthday wish was for the enchilada ingredients to fly apart and return to their original containers. I left them alone while I made last-minute phone calls to previous science lab partners, former teachers and any number I could find. Nobody was home and they probably wouldn’t have traveled across town to the party of someone they barely knew, anyway. I could have called Levi, but he made me swear to never call his house, and his parents wouldn’t let him have his own phone. I didn’t even think of calling Rachel, though I had kept her number in my Box o’ Crap.