You Don't Know Me

by David Klass

  I do not remember signifying any interest in the subject, but the man who is not my father plowed ahead with his peculiar variation of a father-to-son pep talk.

  “Mona was my angel. There was never anyone like Mona. I look at your cow of a mother, and I think of my Mona, and it makes me ready to puke. We were made for each other, Mona and I. You have no idea, John. You’ll never have an idea. Love like that is only given to a few people, and you’re not the kind who’s going to ever risk enough to find it. The day I married Mona was the happiest day of my life. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, and she was my reward. We spent three years together. We had a great house and I was raking in the bucks, and it was made in the shade—”

  The man who is not my father broke off.

  I saw a small opportunity to cause him pain and, of course, I seized it. “I always thought she died in a car accident,” I said. And then I asked him, “What happened to Mona?”

  He did not answer right away, but I believe his fingers squeezed a half inch into the hard plastic of the steering wheel. “What happened?” he finally repeated. “I took my lumps, that’s what happened. She was like your father—cold as ice. She met a man who owned a car dealership and he flashed some cash at her. That was the car accident. If I ever meet him, he’ll regret he was ever born. So she left me, and I did a little drinking and I lost the house and I pretty well flushed myself down the toilet, and here we are all in the septic tank together,” the man who is not my father said with a bitter laugh, finishing off with the kind of vulgar image he is particularly good at constructing.

  He drove the big truck for a few minutes in silence. “But my point is, John,” he finally said, “that I took my lumps. And your mother is the best I can do now. And your mother took her lumps. Frankly, Johnny boy, you were one of those lumps she got stuck with. But that wasn’t your fault. And, I grant you, you’ve taken some lumps yourself. So we’re all here in the septic tank together and we’ll just have to make the best of it. And if having me as a father doesn’t sit too well with you, look on the bright side. You’re already in high school. Pretty soon you’ll be out in the world, and you can go wherever you like and do whatever you damn well please.”

  That, as far as I can remember it, was the man who is not my father’s pep talk to me as we drove home from the forest. I am sorry to report that it did not fill me with hope or make me feel very much better, but I don’t believe that was its point. I believe the central message and purpose of the pep talk was to let me know that I am now the expendable member of the family, so to speak, and I should set my sights on the open road.

  I also believe I understand why the man who is not my father allowed me to ride back from the forest in the front seat of the truck, next to him. He kept me locked in the back so that I did not see any places by which I could identify the basement garage or the warehouse. He is not a stupid man, this man who is not my father. Just in case I do try to go to the police, he has made very sure that I have nothing to tell them. I do not even know in what state the loading and unloading of the TV sets took place.

  I have no evidence. It would be my word against his. And he is my new stepdad, whom I clearly hate. The man who is not my father is a very devious man, and he has got me right where he wants me.

  I have also, in the past two days, had two brief conversations with my mother. She is apparently practically living at the hospital, where her aunt slips in and out of consciousness. Both times she phoned home in the evening, at a prearranged time, and the man who is not my father stood five feet away and listened to every word of my two brief and stilted conversations with her.

  “How are you, John?” she asked, the first time she called. As if she cared!

  I heard my voice answer her back, cold and flat. “Fine.”

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye, but I needed to leave right away. I hope you understand it was an emergency.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aunt Rose has been fighting hard, but it doesn’t look good. I had to be here with her.”

  “Sure.”

  “How’s school?”

  “Okay.”

  “And band? Are you practicing your tuba?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re not saying much, John. Is everything okay?”

  I glanced at the man who is not my father. He was standing close enough so that I could smell his breath. “Sure,” I said, “everything’s fine.”

  I heard her hesitate. “Did you hear the big news?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wanted to tell you myself. But we can talk about it when I get back. It’ll be great. You’ll see. We’ll be a family together.”

  “Sure,” I say, so elated with the prospect that I nearly take a bite out of the phone. “Congratulations.”

  “You two are getting along okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll put him back on. He’s right here. Bye.”

  I am sad to report that my phone conversations with my mother also did not fill me with hope or make me feel better about my life.

  It is now noon on Monday. Tomorrow I must go to school and face Mrs. Moonface and somehow explain away a whole weekend’s worth of algebra homework that I did not do. Also, I believe that Billy Beezer is probably back in school, and we may still be in a state of war. Finally, Mr. Steenwilly will expect me to have made significant progress on my tuba solo, when the truth is that my tuba has been hibernating at the bottom of my closet, which I believe it thinks is a pond.

  My closet may indeed be a pond, because it is certainly not a clothes closet. It is not a clothes closet, because there are virtually no clothes in it. All my good clothes were left in Glory Hallelujah’s basement when our brief snuggle on her couch ended so abruptly. Perhaps they have been seized by the police as evidence.

  I have not seen Gloria or talked to her since I followed D.D. out the pet door, and it is not a comforting thought that tomorrow Gloria and I will be reunited to discuss our romantic past, present, and future.

  Let me state for the record that I do not want to go to antischool tomorrow. But I also do not want to stay in my home that is not a home. I cannot run away from home because that would be a surrender, and, anyway, I do not have a home to run away from. I therefore also cannot drive away with Miranda, which is okay because she does not exist.

  You do not know me, so you can’t possibly know how trapped I feel. I am not trapped in a truck, or locked in a room. I am trapped in the worst kind of trap a fourteen-year-old boy can be trapped in—I am trapped inside my life that is not a life.

  So I lie here in my bed, for hour after hour, looking up at the spidery cracks on the white ceiling.

  18

  Fateful Tuesday begins

  It is Tuesday, fateful Tuesday, and I am standing on the third floor of my antischool, in front of my locker, issuing threats.

  I have dialed the correct combination. I have turned the knob three to the left, four to the right, five to the left. I have pulled the handle gently, and then more firmly, and then with all my strength.

  But the door has not opened. It has not even attempted to open. If anything, it is now locked more securely than when I dialed the combination. In fact, I have never seen a locker door, or any other kind of door for that matter, settle itself so resolutely into its frame and grasp its own hinges as if hunkering down for a long Russian winter.

  My locker does not have a mouth, so it cannot speak, but it is thinking, “Begone, dorkheimer. You have no power here anymore. You, who call the man who is not your father sir, who cannot even run away from home because you don’t have a home to run away from—I will never again open for the likes of you.”

  Homeroom will start soon, and I am running out of time and patience. I lift up my boot. “Do you see this?” I ask my locker door. “Are you by any chance acquainted with the words ‘steel toe’? Or do the words ‘permanent dent’ mean anything to you?”

  My locker door is not intimidated. “My grandfather was a v
ault at Fort Knox, and if you try to dent me with a kick you will only tear some ligament that will never mend.”

  I draw back my right leg to give my locker door a good swift kick. I believe I do manage to put a small dent in it, or at least nick off a bit of blue paint, but my locker door fights back. It reaches out, grabs my right boot by the heel, and with a jujitsu move flips me over onto my back. I was not expecting a counterattack, and I believe that as I fall I let out a loud scream.

  From my supine position on the hallway floor I see several of my fellow students staring at me, and I believe I hear a few unkind guffaws. I give them back the old dead-fish gaze. “Do not stare at me like that, because you are merely wasting your time. I am already a dead flounder lying on the dock waiting to be scaled. Since I am brain-dead and my sensory nervous system has long since been switched off, I cannot suffer anymore. Save your stares and laughs for those still capable of registering shame and feeling pain.”

  I slowly stand up, my right leg, knee, and foot throbbing like they will all have to be amputated by the school nurse at the earliest opportunity, and only then, out of the corner of my eye, do I see that Glory Hallelujah has walked up, and is standing less than three feet away.

  She is wearing a light blue sweater that looks so soft I believe it may actually be made of cotton candy. Her lovely blond hair falls gently about her shoulders, like the boughs of a weeping willow tree upon a grassy riverbank on a midsummer morning. But her blue eyes, which are focused on me, are not twinkling like warm stars. I am sorry to say they are glittering like cold dagger points.

  “Hi,” I say. “I was just practicing a soccer move.”

  Gloria does not say anything, but I believe her face reflects doubt that what she just witnessed has ever intentionally been tried on any soccer field by any player since that globally popular game was invented.

  When the silence stretches beyond the awkward point, I fracture it with another conversational salvo from my ineffective arsenal, whatever that means. “I kind of need the stuff I left at your house,” I tell Gloria.

  Once again, she does not reply, but in addition to anger, her face shows just a bit of confusion. I believe she has no idea at all what stuff I am talking about.

  “My sweater, my shoes, and especially my jacket,” I explain. “I left them right by the couch.”

  Her lovely lips part, and I see that she is now preparing to join our conversation. “And that’s what you have to say to me?” she asks in a voice so cold that I believe her vocal cords must be lubricated with antifreeze or they would snap apart.

  I do not know how to answer this question, so I nod.

  “You have a lot of nerve,” Glory Hallelujah tells me. “That stuff’s gone.”

  “Gone where?” I ask.

  “My father took it. I think he burned it.”

  I think of my green Christmas sweater and my good tan jacket going up in flames while the Bulldozer squirts more lighter fluid on them. “But . . . those things belonged to me,” I point out in my humblest and most reasonable tone.

  “If you wanted them so badly, maybe you shouldn’t have left them there,” she replies.

  I do not want to argue with Gloria on fateful Tuesday, but I cannot resist pointing out, “I did not want to leave them there, but I did not have much choice. I had to leave in a hurry.”

  Her blue eyes get even colder. I believe they are now twin icicle points glittering in the polar sun. “You had a choice,” she says. “You could have stayed and faced the music. I stayed—you could have stayed. Instead you ran.”

  My locker attempts to join the discussion. It cannot speak, because it does not have a mouth, but what it is trying to say to Gloria is: “You are absolutely right. He is a pathetic coward, and you are wasting your time with a dorkheimer like him. Blow him off, and let’s go get a cup of coffee.”

  I will deal with my locker later. There is a hacksaw in the shop room. I focus my attention on Gloria. “Of course you stayed—you live there. But I didn’t have a choice. Your father was going to kill me. And I need those clothes. Especially my jacket. There was some money in the pocket.”

  Gloria steps forward. I have never seen so much anger in such a pretty face before. It is like a hailstorm on a bright spring day. “So you’re worried about a little money that you lost?” she asks. She is now rather close to me. That would normally be a pleasant thing, but on this particular morning Gloria is not in a friendly mood. Indeed, I believe she could spit venom like a cobra.

  Her voice drops down to what I would call a whisper, except that the word “whisper” implies a soft quality, and there is nothing soft about the questions she suddenly fires off at me like quick pistol shots. “John, do you have any idea the amount of trouble you caused me?” she demands. “What could I say when you ran off? What could I tell the police? What could I say to our neighbors who came by to see if anything was wrong?”

  “I’m very sorry you had to go through that,” I say. “But, Gloria, I did not create the situation.”

  “Oh, like I did?” she asks. “Like I carried you down there against your will. I can see you’re great at taking responsibility. Do you have any idea what my parents did to me?” She hesitates, for dramatic effect. Her pearly teeth clench and unclench. “I was grounded for the whole weekend,” she finally announces, as if she has spent twenty years in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island. “I missed the Victoria Challenge Cup. Mindy Fairchild rode Luke all through the show because I wasn’t there. And she won a blue ribbon. There’s a picture of her and Luke hanging up at the stable now.”

  I briefly consider Gloria’s punishments and misfortunes, holding them up next to my own, and I decide that fate has let her off rather easily. “Well, I suffered a bit, too,” I tell her. “It hasn’t been easy for me either. Okay?”

  Glory Hallelujah—how is it possible for your pupils to flash like warning lights, and for your adorable nostrils to flare so violently they almost rip your nose apart, and for you to draw yourself up like a Roman emperor about to declare war on some hapless province? And since we are having a private conversation, why is your voice rising from a low level till it now fills the entire hallway?

  “DON’T YOU EVER SPEAK TO ME AGAIN,” Glory Hallelujah commands. “DON’T PASS ME ANY OF YOUR STUPID NOTES. AND DON’T TELL ME ANY MORE OF YOUR DISGUSTING LIES.”

  We are attracting quite a bit of attention. Surely the students now gawking at us will leave their lockers and go to their homerooms to give us some privacy.

  “What lies?” I ask.

  “YOU’RE NOT ON THE SOCCER TEAM! I ASKED GARY CAMPBELL, THE CAPTAIN. HE JUST LAUGHED. HE SAID IF YOU TRIED OUT FOR THE SOCCER TEAM, THEY WOULDN’T EVEN LET YOU WIPE THE MUD OFF THEIR SHOES!”

  It occurs to me that the captain of the soccer team is probably stretching the truth a bit. I believe that if I tried out for the team, they would indeed allow me to wipe the mud from their shoes. But I hesitate to point this out to Gloria, because her face is flushed and her voice is now so loud that I believe it can probably be heard all through our anti-school, from the French lab on the fourth floor to the boiler room in the sub-basement. “MY FATHER WAS RIGHT ABOUT YOU!” she shouts, pointing at me with her right hand. “YOU’RE A FAKE AND A PHONY! BUT NOW I KNOW EXACTLY WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE. YOU’RE JUST A LITTLE COWARD AND A LIAR!”

  There are gasps and some scattered applause from several dozen of my locker neighbors, who are apparently willing to risk detention to see the end of my little encounter with the prettiest girl in our anti-school.

  I look back into those beautiful blue eyes that I have spent so much time dreaming about. “No, Gloria, you’re wrong,” I hear myself say. I don’t know where I get the courage, but I am looking right back at her, and I believe my own eyes may be flashing just a bit. “You see, I don’t know who you are.” My voice is getting louder, too, and she actually takes a half step backward as I proclaim the truth, loud enough for all in the hallway to hear: “AND YOU DON’T KNOW ME. WE
WENT OUT ON ONE LOUSY DATE. YOU DON’T KNOW ME AT ALL.”

  “Fine. Let’s keep it that way,” she says, turns on her heel, and walks quickly away.

  19

  Fateful Tuesday Picks up Steam

  There are five minutes to go in anti-math class, and I am trying to survive a triple threat. Death lasers are being aimed at me from two directions, from Billy Beezer on my left and Glory Hallelujah on my right. If I were to duck suddenly, they would be firing right at each other.

  Meanwhile, in the front of the room, Mrs. Moonface is in rare form. She has wrapped up the unit on mixture equations, and moved on to the next subject in her algebra gibberish curriculum. She has spent the entire period lecturing on a new species of mathematical mystery called Linear Systems in Two Variables. She has filled up a world-record three entire blackboards with rules, examples, and solutions for graphing and unraveling these profound puzzles.

  She is now waving a rather large piece of chalk around, like a pioneer trying to fend off a bear with a bowie knife, and saying, “So, I hope you all now see that solving a system of equations consists of finding all the ordered pairs, if any, which satisfy each of the equations in the system.”

  No, Mrs. Moonface, I do not see that at all. What I see is that you waited all weekend for a handsome man named Jacques sporting a polka-dot bow tie to show up at your door and take you swing dancing. He never showed up, so you have decided to suck up all the disappointment, loneliness, and misery you feel, meld it in your mind as if in a trash compactor into a fifty-minute algebra lesson from hell, and spew it back at us in the form of indecipherable graphs and incomprehensible equations so cumulatively toxic that I believe they could corrode vulcanized steel. You have just glanced at the clock, and I believe you are at this very moment composing a death question to winnow out at least one member of my anti-math class before our period ends.

  Mrs. Moonface, today I have more urgent worries. There are forces at work against me in this class even more deadly than algebra. I believe at any second my textbook will catch fire from the laser beams flashing at me from Glory Hallelujah’s blue eyes and the ion blasts directed at me from Billy Beezer’s nose cannon.