Where the hell did that come from?
Halfway to the top, I stop and turn around. I look west, down into Puget Sound and over to Vashon Island. The view is an intense mix of colors. The dark blue water. Vashon Island’s midnight green trees. And the whitest, puffy clouds. Winter in the Northwest. I don’t know if it’s worth all the days of depressing rain and gray for the few unbelievable hours a month that look like this.
But it might be.
I get greedy. I think about what I might see from the top of the hill. My heart starts pumping hard—in a good way. I rotate myself toward Pac Highway. I huff and I puff, sucking in chunks of air, hiking up as fast as I can, thinking this might be the most perfect morning ever.
It is. The mountain’s out.
Mount Rainier.
Crystal clear.
The white snow popping the massive volcano’s outline out of a bright blue sky.
This place is amazing.
MAKING SURE IT DOESN’T SUCK
I GET TO LUIS’S. He says his mom’s got to work all weekend, so she won’t be interrupting.
I figure we’re mostly done writing the poem. Luis looks tired, but he’s way hyped, like he stayed up all night thinking about it. “We don’t have much time, Sam. We have to make sure this doesn’t suck. We don’t wanna look like idiots.”
“Okay.”
“We can’t just be rhyming to rhyme. We gotta be saying something.”
“Okay.”
So we talk more about what we have to say, what we want our classmates and Cassidy to understand about us. And we end up laughing our way through the day. By the time it’s over, we’ve thrown out what we had and we’ve got a whole new poem with a superhero theme.
I don’t know if it’s great. But I think it’s pretty cool.
We huddle at the kitchen table and silently read what we have. Luis reads it out loud a couple more times. He seems happy with it.
“Are we done?” I ask.
Luis studies it. “Hard to say.”
He gets up from the kitchen table and heads to his room with page in hand.
I follow.
He walks over to his closet door, opens it and disappears inside. Blankets and dirty clothes fly into the room. There’s a clunk of stuff being shifted. In a second, he walks out holding a black-gray machine. It’s a huge old-fashioned typewriter. It looks like something from a hundred years ago.
“Where’d you get that?”
“My grandpa died and left it to my mom. She never uses it, so she gave it to me.”
“Do you use it?”
“Not much.”
Luis grabs a piece of paper from the closet and puts it in the typewriter. He cranks the knob and the paper scoots into place.
“You got a laptop?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Luis says. “In my mom’s room. She lets me use it whenever I want.”
“Why don’t we use that?”
“I can’t explain it.” He points at the typewriter. “You just gotta hit a key.”
He waits for me, so I do it. Thwack. An i snaps onto the paper.
“Feel that pop?” Luis asks.
“Yeah.”
“Pretty cool, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever feel a computer do that?”
“No.”
“That’s why we’re using the typewriter.”
He pokes the machine one finger at a time, searches for the next letter, then pokes again. He squints, concentrating on the searching and poking.
The only sound is the metal arms of the typewriter smacking the letters of our poem onto the paper.
I go use the bathroom.
Come back and watch Luis type for a while.
Get another root beer.
Return to more typing.
Finish the root beer.
Go to the living room and watch Pat and Vanna. Then Alex Trebek all the way to Final Jeopardy.
I head back to Luis’s room and wait until finally—finally—he whips the paper out of the machine. And studies it.
“Check this out,” he says handing me a page. “Does it look done?”
I don’t know what the hell done would look like. But I check it out and tell him it looks pretty cool.
“Really? You think it’s done?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“I think so too. I think it’s done … for now.”
BOUNCE
WE’RE FINISHED FOR THE DAY. I put my jacket on to go.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I thought we were done.”
“Done writing. Now we got to be able to speak the thing backwards and forwards. If we aren’t one hundred percent confident, it’s gonna blow. No matter how good the poem is.”
I take my jacket off.
We start reading the poem out loud together. It’s hard.
But I try my best. I stumble along.
Suddenly Luis waves his hands in the air and shouts, “Stop. Hold the phone! This is slam poetry, Sam. This ain’t old folks’ theater.” He smiles and says, “You’re gonna put a guy to sleep with that kind of slop. Those words gotta BOUNCE, man! We gotta mean what we say and say it like we mean it. We gotta be rock stars! MCs, busting a funky flow with these lines. You dig?”
I do not dig. And I don’t know whether to laugh or to run.
I look at Luis, and it’s clear he wants me to do this.
So I decide to laugh.
And to try.
“I dig,” I say. “I’ll bounce.”
We practice reading the poem until it’s time for me to go home for real.
Luis makes me promise I’ll work on the bouncing.
I promise.
He says, “Good.” Then he grabs a pen and napkin off the kitchen table and starts making a little calendar.
“What’s that for?”
“When slackers are feeling fine, that’s when they sit on their useless asses and stop working. And, yes, I’m talking about you.”
The calendar is thirteen boxes, one for each day until the March 8 slam. In each box, he writes the hours I’ll be coming over to his place to work and the hours I need to practice alone at home.
“Who’s the real Luis?” I ask him. “The tough guy I see at school? Or the royal dork scheduling my poetry practice on a dirty napkin?”
He’s immediately serious. “Whattaya mean?”
“I mean, uh, you just seem really different than at school.”
“How do I seem at school?” he says, sounding pissed.
“Nothing. Forget what I said.”
“How do I seem, Sam? At school?”
“You seem … kinda tough—”
“Tough and…”
“And, uh—you know—not like … like a guy who would work on a project like this.”
“Okay. Let me get this straight.” He grips his hand tight on my shoulder and glares like he did when I stared at his scar. “What I’m hearing from you, Sam, is you don’t think Mexicans can write poems or do schoolwork. Do I have that right?”
“No, Luis! That’s not what I meant! What I meant was—”
I stop myself before I tell him, You seem like a cold-blooded gangster at school.
Then he points at me and shouts, “Ha!”
What the hell?
He holds his fist to his mouth, laughing. “Got you, Sam. I got you.”
I force myself to smile with him.
“You shoulda seen your eyes,” he says. “You were like—” He does a crazy imitation of me looking scared as hell.
“You got me, Luis. You totally got me.”
He gives me the napkin and a pat on the back. “You’re cool, Sam. See you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow.”
I take off, wondering what just happened.
YELLING AT AN OLD MAN
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24TH.
I head over to Luis’s for another day of work.
As I walk through the gate, I see him leaving an upstairs
apartment. There’s a super-old African-American man leaning out the door on his walker, pointing his finger at Luis and hollering in the rain. Luis hollers something back that I can’t hear. The old man waggles his finger and slams the door shut. Luis hops down the stairs.
I don’t know what to make of it. It doesn’t look good when teenagers yell at old men with walkers. Doesn’t look good at all.
Luis sees me coming and waits for me to get to the apartment.
“Who’s that?”
“Mr. Graves. Family friend.”
Is he serious?
“He’s cool. We get in some arguments sometimes, but it’s all good.”
I make the choice to believe him.
SOLOS
INSIDE LUIS’S APARTMENT, WE READ THE POEM TOGETHER. I’m trying to bounce but I know I’m doing a shitty job of it.
Luis doesn’t seem too concerned about my lack of bounce, but something is bugging him. He keeps stopping and losing focus. His head swivels, like he’s looking for something.
I ask, “What’s up?”
He sits there with his hand on his chin. He rubs his shaved head, goes hmm … and says, “Too much rhyming.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I think the rhyming is good.”
“So we keep the rhyming?”
“Oh yeah, we should keep it. We just need to break it up.”
He grabs a red pen and starts marking up the pages as he talks. “We wrote this whole thing for the two of us to say together. We need to break that up too.”
“How we gonna do that?”
“I’m pretty sure we need our own sections. Short poems. They shouldn’t rhyme. We’ll each write one and just stick them in there to change things up.”
“But when we read it for the deal at class, we’ll read those parts together, right?”
“No, man, that’s the point. It’s like a rock song with guitar solos. We’re each gonna take one. It’s your moment to shine, Sam.”
I don’t want a moment.
Bouncing is one thing, but shining is something different altogether.
I didn’t sign up for shining.
I don’t know what to say.
I don’t mean to offend Luis, but I leave the room because this is crazy.
I go grab a root beer.
After it’s been too long, he comes to the kitchen and asks me if I’m okay.
“Fine. Just thirsty.”
“You wanna grab one for me, Mr. Manners?”
Now the gangster is all concerned about manners.
I grab him a can. He takes an aspirin bottle out of his pocket and washes a few down with a swig of root beer.
I look at him like that was a lot of aspirin.
“Nasty headache. Don’t tell my mom. Mexican moms are the worst worriers in the world. Especially Mexican-American ones. So keep it on the down-low.”
“I won’t say anything.”
“Sam, our poem is gonna be great. It flows. And that flow is gonna be even more ass-kicking if we break out of it then come back to it. You’ll see.”
I take a long sip of root beer. He can tell I’m not convinced.
“So you go home and think of something—real short, no big deal—and I’ll do the same. We’ll come back tomorrow and check out what we got. If it works, cool. If it doesn’t, we can trash that idea and come up with something better. All right?”
I wanna say no, but I can’t.
He makes it sound like it’s nothing. Like it’s the easiest thing.
So I don’t say no.
I want to.
But I don’t.
I say, “Okay.”
THE BLUE NOTEBOOK
I GET TO MY GRANDPARENTS’ AND OPEN THE DOOR.
“GOOD-BYE, SAM!”
Not now, Gilbert.
I head straight for my closet.
I dig all the way into the back and take out the backpack. Zip it open. Reach in. Root around, and pull out my old blue notebook.
I open it. The smells of Aberdeen and salt water and dirt smack me in the face. I think about writing back then. In the yard under the cedar tree, down at the pier, at the river …
I read some lyrics.
Some of my songs: “Fish Hook.” “Jealous Teacher.” “Bent Frame.”
The lyrics are crap.
I was a punk writing stupid lines, trying to sound like a rock star and failing miserably.
But I wrote ’em.
I tried.
And goddammit, I’m gonna do it again.
Right now.
I turn to a fresh page in the notebook. I set it on my desk and put my pencil on the paper. I tell myself I’m not gonna pick this fucking thing up until I’ve written something to take back to Luis. I’m gonna sit here and do this.
MORNING
I WAKE UP AT MY DESK. The sun’s back. A ray cuts through a gap in my curtains, reflecting up off the white page of my notebook, stinging me in my face.
I look down at the page.
There’s nothing there.
I stared at it for an hour last night and fell asleep with nothing.
I look back up at that beam of sunlight. I open the curtains and check out the morning. Something about it makes me start writing.
When I stop, I’ve got a poem.
This sliver of sun
Slicing through curtain cracks
Cuts a hot stripe on my skin
Dragging me up
When I don’t want to be bothered
Don’t want to see, hear, feel, think.
This sliver of sun
Spreads like wildfire
And I have to watch.
I throw my glowing curtains open,
Feel a warm hand touch my face
Through squints
I watch the sun rise higher
Birds singing the soundtrack
As light paints the day with color
Like for the first time
I think I’ll give this day a chance.
DON’T LOOK BACK
I DIDN’T HAVE THE GUTS TO SHOW LUIS AT SCHOOL.
I’m showing him now.
My heart is blasting.
He’s got one hand on top of his bald head, the other holding my poem. His eyebrows are scrunched until he looks up from the page.
“I know. It’s shit,” I say, reaching out to grab my notebook.
Luis pushes my hand away. “Don’t, man. It’s good.”
I don’t believe him and he can tell.
“It starts bleak. And sad. But it’s hopeful. And it’s gonna work. Here’s mine,” he says.
I read it. It’s about him liking a girl. She has got to be great, because in the poem he seriously wants her.
“It’s all right?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You sure?”
I hand it back. “Yeah.” He knows it’s good. I don’t know why he’s asking.
He thanks me and says we should practice the stuff we wrote together yesterday.
A couple times through and my shaking goes away. I get the words out all right. Us reading together sounds good.
We get to the part where my poem is supposed to go. Luis stops reading and I know what he wants.
In a split second, I feel my throat go dry. I feel it close up on me. I cough it back open enough to ask Luis for a drink of water.
“Sure, man. No prob.”
I hear Luis open a cupboard and grab the glass. I hear him turn on the tap.
I try my poem out. I whisper it to myself. I say the whole thing from beginning to end.
No big deal.
It’s gonna be okay.
I can do this.
I hear his footsteps walking my way and I start shaking again. I hear Gilbert in my head and those kids from Rainier Middle School. Luis is back. “All right, Sam, let’s hear what you got.”
“I should probably write something different.”
He’s got two glasses. Gives me one.
I chug.
“It’s good,” he says, popping some aspirin. “It fits. Read it.”
I try to read but my throat shuts down on me harder than before.
I cannot speak.
I hear Luis tell me it’s okay. “Don’t worry about it, man. It’s cool. Let’s go back to the top and read it all together.”
He counts us off, “One, two, three, go—”
And I do.
I grab my notebook and bolt.
Because this sucks.
This whole thing is a crock of shit.
“Sam, don’t—”
I head straight for the door.
“Sam, it’s all right! You don’t have to—”
I slam it and haul outta there.
And I don’t look back.
CAN’T ESCAPE
I LEFT LUIS’S SO EARLY I’M IN BED BEFORE DARK. Just like old times.
“Floyd the Barber” is blaring. I try to see Kurt singing that song. Try to visualize crazy Floyd coming after Kurt with his razor-sharp scissors.
But no matter how much I try, this brain movie is all me.
Gripping my notebook.
Red face.
Open mouth.
No words.
Running away.
I feel cold coming in through holes in the blankets. I see light knifing through the covers, and I don’t want it to.
I get out of bed and tuck my sheet and blanket in as tight as I can.
But I still see light.
I throw off my covers and get up. Swing the closet door open and yank out an old comforter and a wool blanket. I tuck in all corners.
I’m on my back, the blankets weighing on my face, soaking up my wet, warm breath—and, goddammit, there is still light in here!
I bury my face in my pillow and scream the lines of my poem until I exhaust myself and fall asleep.
MUMMIFIED
MORNING COMES. I can’t move from my bed.
Ginny knocks on my door.
I tell her I’m sick.
I skip school.
I don’t take a call from Luis.
Don’t get dressed.
Don’t even get out of bed.
Ginny comes back again and again; I just grunt every time she asks me how I’m doing. And I turn down all offers of sweet potato stew, Thai potpie, fruit salad, fruit leather, hot tea, iced tea, orange juice, NyQuil, DayQuil, Pepto, Vick’s VapoRub.
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