by Blake Nelson
Then he gave me back my paper. On the bottom was written:
no more numbers or lists in my essays.
no more writing about other students.
no more insulting people or using derogatory language.
no more subheadings or other manifesto stylings.
Cogs wouldn’t even give me a grade. He said I had to do it over. Still, I liked that he called it manifesto stylings. He actually wrote that. Which is rad.
DISCO BOWLING
Went bowling with Gabe on Friday night. We were meeting a girl named Renee, who Gabe likes. He wanted me to be his wingman. Though I do not possess extensive “wingman” skills, I agreed to go.
Gabe’s mom drove us there in the Ford Expedition. I felt like an evil warlord sitting in the back of it, looking down on smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. I said nothing, though. Gabe checked his cell phone for any further communications from Renee. There were none.
We walked into the bowling alley. It was noisy and it smelled like socks. People were running around, talking on their cells, giggling about whatever, drinking diet soft drinks.
We found Renee. She was with two other girls and two boys I didn’t know. They were typical high school students of suburban extraction. The girls wore Nikes and low-rise jeans and hoodies. They conducted themselves like CONSUMER AMERICANS, chewing gum and talking about recent purchases and what brands of beauty products they preferred. The boys were the same—T-shirts, skate-shoes with the laces tucked in, baggy jeans.
Gabe asked Renee what was up. Not much was. They were about to start bowling.
Gabe and I changed into our bowling shoes. Renee tried to start the automatic scorer. It wouldn’t come on, so she pushed a button that summoned the man at the front desk. This man was a very large person with a mullet. Also his pants didn’t fit, so we saw his ass crack when he leaned over the scoring table. Everyone thought this was the funniest thing they had ever seen. Especially the boys. “Did you see that guy’s ass crack!?” they kept saying. Har har har. It became the running joke of the night.
In case anyone is wondering what I looked like, I was at that moment wearing brown polyester slacks, a tan shirt, and my black sweater that has the elbows cut out. I also had black socks on and some old white deck shoes I found at Salvation Army. I also don’t shampoo my hair, which is long and hangs partially in my face. In short, I looked like a total freak by the standards of other CONSUMER AMERICANS. I visited Oslo a couple years ago. I fit in better there. In my own country I look like an alien.
Also, in case anyone else is wondering, my own family is not particularly ecologically aware. In fact, my dad is one of the worst polluters ever. He never met a combustion engine he didn’t like. My all-time favorite Dad story is the time he took a generator with us camping in Arizona. For an entire weekend he ran a gas engine, in the woods, to charge his computer and watch his little TV. It was hilarious. And terribly sad. My sister, Libby, tried to get him batteries for the TV so we wouldn’t have to listen to the generator running all night but he wouldn’t.
“Batteries run out. Gas engines never run out,” he told my sister. He actually said that.
Back at the bowling alley: Once the automatic scoring thing was fixed, we were good to go. We all typed our names in. Gabe and I tried to find bowling balls. We walked around looking at the different colors and sizes.
Gabe considered many different balls. He was worried that if he didn’t choose the right one, Renee wouldn’t like him as much. “Does this one look too girly?” he asked. “Are the black ones cooler than the ones with swirlies?”
This is the typical fallacy on which all of CONSUMER AMERICA is based. Some piece of useless crap will make people like you.
We started our game. The first girl up was Renee’s little sister, a freshman. She ran forward and threw her bowling ball into the air. THUNK. The ball smashed painfully onto the wood and bounced and rolled into the gutter. Gabe and I looked at each other. Freshmen are pretty funny.
She didn’t care, though. As soon as she was done, she got on her cell phone and started telling her friend about a rash someone had in her gym class. What do you think it was?…I don’t know…It was all red…and bumpy…and sort of…gooey.
Gabe elbowed me. My turn. I stood and found my ball. Everyone watched me and I began to feel self-conscious. I took my place and stared down the polished corridor at my objective, the ten pins lined up in a triangle. This was the moment I realized that it was Disco Bowling night. I realized this because I saw a sign above our lane that said:
Wow. Disco Bowling. I checked my watch. It was almost ten. We were in luck.
But it wasn’t Disco Bowling yet, and I still had to take my turn. I walked forward, swung the ball back, swung it forward, let it go…but just like the freshman girl, my release was a half second late. The ball went too high. THUNK. It bounced twice and piddled into the gutter.
“My ball holes were sticky,” I explained to the group. The boys laughed. Sort of. The girls looked at me funny. They could sense I was holding myself apart from them. Which was true. I didn’t mean to. It’s just that I don’t know what to say to people like them. No one wants to hear about my doomsday scenarios. And I don’t want to talk about ass cracks.
“Dude, what happened?” Gabe whispered when I sat down. This was uncalled for, since I did get four pins on my second roll.
“Dude, whattaya mean?” I said back. “I got a four. Let’s see you get a four.”
Gabe stood up. It was his turn now. I called him “dude” a couple more times to annoy him. Then I sat back.
He got a six.
We got through our first game. Everyone settled in. Then one of Renee’s friends came over and sat beside me. Her name was Stephanie.
STEPHANIE: So what’s your deal?
ME: What do you mean?
STEPHANIE: You’re sitting here by yourself. You’re not talking to anyone.
ME: I’m shy.
STEPHANIE: You know what they say. Shyness is a form of vanity.
ME: Really?
STEPHANIE: Sure. Shy people are trying to bring attention to themselves. But in a negative way.
ME: I didn’t know that.
STEPHANIE: Doesn’t it make sense, though? If a person won’t hang out, isn’t that sort of vain?
ME: Maybe so. Who said that, anyway? Is that from the Bible?
STEPHANIE: It’s probably from somewhere. What happened to your sweater?
ME: Nothing. I cut the elbows out.
STEPHANIE (looking at the elbow holes): That’s weird. Are you in Drama Club?
ME: No. It’s just a thing I do. It makes the sweater look old. It makes it look like I’ve had it so long the elbows have worn out.
STEPHANIE: But you haven’t, though.
ME: I know. It’s just this thing I do.
STEPHANIE (sighing): I guess some people just have to be different.
ME: So what about you? What’s your deal?
STEPHANIE (relieved to be talking about herself): Oh, nothing much. I go to school. I hang out with my friends. You know…
ME: Huh.
STEPHANIE: What else? Ummmm. I like to party.
ME: Yeah. A lot of people like to party.
STEPHANIE: And I like to, you know, do stuff…and chill, and listen to music. And just…hang out, basically…
ME: That is really interesting.
STEPHANIE: I’m more of a stop-and-smell-the-roses type of person. Aren’t you?
ME: Pretty much. Yeah. I’m a smeller.
STEPHANIE: I mean, I feel like, why get all worked up about stuff if you don’t have to? You know?
ME: Yup.
STEPHANIE (as the lights are dimmed): Oh no. What’s that? Why are they turning down the lights?
ME: I think it’s time for Disco Bowling.
STEPHANIE: What’s that?
ME: See that big sign over there that says Disco Bowling?
STEPHANIE: Yeah?
ME: That’s what it i
s.
At that point Disco Bowling officially began. They dimmed the lights, put on some Bee Gees, turned on the sparkle ball. It was like being in the seventies, in a disco, except nobody was dancing, and there was bowling. Actually, Renee and Stephanie danced between their turns. They did the ride-the-pony dance, turning little circles in place. I think that’s supposed to represent a sexual act, but I’m not sure. They were ignoring Gabe and me at this point. Gabe didn’t look too good. He was doing his hangdog thing. Poor Gabe. He never gets what he wants. Who does?
When it was time to go, Renee barely said good-bye. Gabe and I ended up standing alone in front of the bowling alley. His mother came and picked us up in the Ford Expedition.
We pulled out of the parking lot. The Ford Expedition, by the way, has a huge metal battering ram on the front in case you need to punch through any walls or blockades or any other man-made barriers on the way home from the bowling alley. It also has little metal grates around the signal lights, in case rioting strip-mall goers decide to attack you with baseball bats while you’re signaling a left turn. All that extra weight, of course, burns huge amounts of extra gasoline.
In the darkness of the backseat, I asked Gabe how it went with Renee.
“You saw it,” he mumbled. “She barely talked to me.”
I nodded sympathetically.
“You could have helped a little more,” he said. “You could have been a better wingman.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was.
James Hoff
Junior AP English
Mr. Cogweiller
MAKEUP ASSIGNMENT: four-page essay on a person who has influenced you
THE IMPORTANCE OF MOMS
Mothers are an important influence on their children and the other kids in the neighborhood. Take my friend Gabe’s mom. She is a nice mom. Gabe likes her. The other kids like her. I like her. On the surface she appears perfectly normal. She reads Oprah books and waits in line at Starbucks and has a purple Patagonia fleece she wears every day. But if anything goes wrong, she dissolves into tears and panic. She is deeply afraid of the world. That’s why she has fourteen credit cards and drives a Ford Expedition with a two-hundred-pound metal grate on the front. Because they protect her.
Then there’s Rich Herrington’s mom. She is the hot mom of our group. Apparently, among any group of high school boys, there is always a “hot mom.” Mrs. Herrington plays her part. She wears a sexy bathing suit at the pool, which definitely looks good on her. She is not like Gabe’s mom, who is just trying to survive another day. Mrs. Herrington wants to look like the latest celebrities on TV or the cheerleaders at school. She consumes vast amounts of USELESS CRAP that she thinks will keep her young and desirable. Of course that is not actually possible, but that doesn’t stop her from buying the USELESS CRAP. Which is good for the economy. And good for the boys around the pool.
There’s another mom down the street everyone calls “the punk rock mom.” She wears tight black jeans and checked Vans. She and her husband have a girl who is in eighth grade. They enrolled her in all these special programs for the “gifted” or the “artistic” or whatever. That can’t be good. Gabe tried to talk to her once and she just ran off. She dresses sort of punk rock herself but she isn’t that into it. It must be embarrassing to have parents who are trying to be cool all the time. We saw her crying once while she was riding her bike. She’s gonna be a total mess in high school.
My mom is one of the better moms. I like her, anyway. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She started to go to medical school, but then she met my dad. Now she manages a medical supply business. I don’t know how my dad got with her. He’s a bonehead. My mom’s smart and pretty chill about stuff. Even when we disagree, we understand each other. Still, I don’t talk to her as much as I used to. When my dad left, we got closer. And my little sister, Libby, too. The three of us rallied around each other. But then Dad came back and there was a new distance between Mom and me. That was because my mom had to spend more time on him. And kiss his butt.
My friend Jessica Carlucci’s parents are the smartest of all my friends’. Her dad is an architect and makes houses out of alternative materials with solar panels and non-detergent washing machines. Jessica’s mom does yoga and eats organic food. Jessica’s parents are the only grown-ups I’ve met who seem to know what’s up. But when you look at them closely, most of it is just surface. Like her dad has a garage full of useless luxury items, along with a full arsenal of the same gas-powered crap my dad has. Their gardener soaks their lawn every week with poisons and chemicals to get it just the right shade of green. And her mom, too; beneath the yoga exterior, what is there? She shops at Nordstrom. She buys plastic water bottles by the case. She never thinks about how much jet fuel she’s using when she’s flying around doing her consulting business.
Does being smarter and a little more aware do anything? Does it change anything? No. I never say this to Jessica, though. She’s sensitive about her family because her dad had an affair when she was little and their family almost broke up. So there’s a “no talking about anything” policy in their house. Everything is FINE.
The End
February 6
Wow. I never got a D before. It felt kind of liberating. You can only go up from a D.
Cogs didn’t look too well today. I hope he’s feeling all right. He stood over me for several seconds when we got our papers back, giving me the Cogweiller stare.
After school I asked if I could do another makeup. He strongly encouraged me to do so.
February 7
Hung out with Jessica Carlucci after school. We went to the gym to watch her sister’s JV basketball game. Jessica was talking about college stuff. All the smart kids are thinking about college stuff now.
Last year when I broke up with Sadie, Jessica helped me a lot. That was the period when we changed from knowing each other to becoming actual friends. I wonder why we never went out. She does seem to like me. I’m not sure why. Because I understand her, I guess. I don’t judge her. I don’t know why I don’t judge her. I judge everybody else.
Jessica is very pretty. And she wears really nice clothes and earrings and gets her hair done and all that. She’ll marry some good-looking rich guy someday. That’s what I thought as I watched the girl basketball players fall over each other chasing a loose ball. And she’ll live in the West Hills and take her kids to tennis lessons at the club. She will grow up to represent everything I hate.
But you know what? Jessica Carlucci was the only one who understood what it did to me to break up with Sadie. Nobody else got it. Nobody else understood. She used to call me late at night, to see if I was okay.
So there you go.
James Hoff
Junior AP English
Mr. Cogweiller
MAKEUP TO THE MAKEUP ASSIGNMENT: four-page essay on a person who has influenced you
KARL MARX
One person who has influenced me is Karl Marx. He was a revolutionary and the first Marxist (duh), and an important thinker who has influenced people around the world.
Karl Marx was alive during the Industrial Revolution, when the first factories were being invented. He looked around and saw that poor people were going to have to work in the factories, and he realized that the men who ran the factories were going to take advantage of the poor people, like make them work twelve hours a day and make little kids work and just generally screw them over in every way possible. It was a very bad situation and it was only going to get worse.
So Marx got involved.
Actually, he didn’t get involved. He went to the library and read a lot of books and let his hair grow so that when he became famous he would look distinguished and have a huge beard like other notable philosophers.
Anyway, after he read a lot of books, he wrote The Communist Manifesto, which is awesome and one of my favorite books.
The Communist Manifesto tells all those poor people to get together, not take any crap from the factory owners, and
fight back. There’s some philosophy and other complicated stuff, too, so that people can study it in college and write books about it.
The main thing I like about Marx is all those years he spent hanging around the library. Whenever I’m at the Central Library downtown and I see homeless people wearing pots on their heads or talking to newspaper boxes, I think: That might be the next Karl Marx.
Or maybe I am the next Karl Marx. Because I spend a lot of time thinking about the evils of the world and wandering around the public libraries. Also, as soon as I can, I’m going to grow a huge beard because huge beards are rad.
The End
February 11
Yes! This is what Cogs wrote on the bottom of my essay:
You are not Karl Marx. And you need a conclusion to this essay. But good explanation of Marxist ideas. B+
I can’t believe it. B+! I’m getting to him. The Cogster!
PART
2
February 12
Will and Sadie broke up. They’ve broken up before, but now it’s definitely over. It’s official. I guess all the Activist Girls were talking about it before school. Jessica gave me the full update.
It’s always bugged me that I didn’t get a new girlfriend and Sadie got Will. It seemed so like her to get with someone right away. And so like me not to.
To be honest, the news kinda weirded me out. After school I walked with Gabe to Fred Meyer’s where we wandered the aisles like we do. We went into the sports section and threw the nerf football around. Then we played some frisbee golf. I couldn’t stop thinking about Sadie. It’s hard to imagine her without a boyfriend. I don’t know why exactly. It’s not like I care what she does.
