by Joe Meno
6. Put a glob of the color dye on the top of your head and start combing it through. This is where the second person is really helpful, otherwise the back of your head will look like shit.
7. Once it’s all rubbed in and your hair is saturated, blow-dry it. Why? I dunno, this is what Kim said to do. Maybe it is supposed to cook it in or something. Wait like an hour.
8. Rinse it, but when you do, stick your head under the faucet instead of taking a fucking shower. If you take a fucking shower, the run-off dye will get all over your face and shit and stain you like a dumbass. Then the next day at school or the mall or whatever, you will look like a fucking poseur. Hold the towel over your face and wash off the shit. Don’t shampoo, just rinse it.
9. Use the skin cleanser or nail polish remover to clean up the color stains around your hair line. You’re probably gonna have to scrub pretty hard.
10. Take a Polaroid now because it will never look as good as it does right after you rinse it the first time. Expect that your fucking pillow and bed sheets will be ruined, like Gretchen’s, which were stained pink, permanently.
11. Why do you want to dye your hair, anyways? To look punk? Don’t you know, everyone dyes their hair to look punk? Duh.
OK, back to the mulletheads: Just before the stoplight could change back to green, the driver of the Trans-Am shouted, “Faggots,” and Gretchen shouted back, “Douche-bags!” and then she did it: She jumped out of the car and went right up and snapped the Trans-Am’s antenna right in two. Their loud, riffing wanker rock vanished immediately—“ Come Sail Away” disappearing, the radio going totally silent, totally quiet. The two motorheads, one of them in a black Alabama concert T-shirt, the other in his acid-washed vest, jumped out, flexing their mullets, and both of them began pulling on these black leather weightlifting gloves—they actually had them, these fingerless black leather gloves. When I saw them pull out the gloves, I thought, Oh shit, and I didn’t know if I should start laughing or start getting very fucking worried. But just then the traffic light turned green and a brown station wagon, which had been cruising along pretty fast, being driven poorly by an old, glassy-eyed man, slammed hard into the back of the Trans-Am. The Trans-Am, which had been idling, spun and screeched and its plastic red fender got crinkled all to hell, the whole car being knocked sideways, totally, completely.
As Gretchen hopped back into the superbad Ford Escort and we sped off, I had one thought and one thought only: This year. This year everything’s fucking changing for the worse for me.
ten
We lived on the south side of Chicago at the time. Our neighborhood was in bad trouble: brick bungalows in straight, arranged lines, appearing block after block with their small tidy lawns hiding this very quiet intent no one said out loud. You could see it in the uniform mailboxes and many statues of the Virgin Mary and repeated pots of matching flowers; in the white kids playing on their front lawns, parents talking over the fence, retired people raking up their leaves:the same kinds of faces and same kinds of last names, street after street, block after block, house after fucking house. The message to me was clear: If you’re not white, don’t fucking cross Western Ave., heading west. Do not do it. Don’t come into this neighborhood. Don’t drive through, or you’re gonna end up hurting bad.
We lived on the south side, me in Evergreen Park and Gretchen in Mt. Greenwood, two neighborhoods set side by side but split by 103rd Street, in a city world-renowned for its dangerously racist history. There were huge race riots on the south side in the summer of 1919 that left 38 dead, more than 500 injured, and a lot more homeless, that were started by the killing of a black teenager at the 26th Street beach. That seems kind of random and historical, but it wasn’t, although I did have to do a history report on it freshman year. Then there was the exploitation and dehumanization of the Pullman porters, poor black youths who were treated so unfairly by the railroad boss that he demanded a slab of concrete be poured over his coffin, out of fear his grave would be later pillaged by angry south side workers. In the last decade Harold Washington, a smart-talking black politician, had run and won the mayoral office, but only after months of all kinds of racial animosity, including an incident in which St. Ben’s Catholic Church was defaced with the word “nigger” the night before he came to deliver a campaign speech.
Both of the neighborhoods Gretchen and I lived in were OK, both pretty similar, I guess. They both had houses that were mostly small, brick bungalows in the style which was made popular on the south side in the 1940s. Both neighborhoods were mostly Irish Catholic, both home to the notorious St. Patrick’s Day Parade, in which lug-heads from all over would gather to puke green beer in the street. There was an Irish bar every few blocks along 103rd and 111th. I’d see kids all the time, in grammar school and high school, from both neighborhoods, wearing T-shirts and jackets that proudly declared, “South Side Irish.”
Evergreen Park was this small town bordered by Chicago on three sides, but it wasn’t considered part of the city, even though the same kinds of people lived in both neighborhoods, all of them white and working class, Irish Catholics mostly—not bad people, but not tolerant people either.
The thing was, there were no black people in Evergreen Park and none in Mt. Greenwood either, even though it was still considered part of the city. They were not wanted there or allowed there—nothing. Why? Mt. Greenwood was full of the homes and families of white Chicago firemen and Chicago cops, who always had a real bad reputation for being racist. But it wasn’t just a reputation, it was the fucking truth. And that wasn’t in 1919 and shit. It wasn’t even the ’40s. It was fucking 1990. I don’t know how they did it, honestly, besides intimidation and threat of force. Maybe that’s all they needed.
There were these racist cops and then their kids, growing up on their parents’ racial prejudice and increasing frustration—nigger this, nigger that—who were running around calling themselves White Power. White Power? These kids had no idea what White Power was, really. At least, I didn’t think so. To me, it was a name these idiots associated with the anger they felt, the ignorance. Like calling yourself punk; it was just one other label to help create an identity, to give you a sense of purpose. But the White Power kids were tolerated—not only tolerated but fostered, looked past, ignored completely, even when they put some black kid in the hospital for walking past the imaginary racial dividing line that ran along Western Ave. There were some tough kids there, kids who had played football and gotten bored, or had wrestled for a year or two before getting turned on to smoking dope and buying used vans and Cutlasses and Novas, growing their hair long in the back, wearing their acid-washed jean jackets, Nike high-tops, S.O.D. T-shirts, that sort of thing. Most of them were into metal or hardcore—you would hear it blasting from their cars as they howled past you, “Kill Yourself!”—though none of them looked any different than any of the other burnouts we knew. The White Power kids tolerated the other stoners and the punks in our neighborhood as long as they were white, I guess, even if they looked like fruits, and for the most part none of them ever bothered Gretchen or Kim or said anything about how they dressed. I guess they thought the punk kids were all pretty harmless. We listened to some of the same music like the Misfits and Samhain, and some girls dated some of the punk guys and some of the White Power kids, so they didn’t have a problem with me, or Kim or Gretchen, considering how goofy they looked. But when I saw Tony Degan and his other cro-mag thugs, I don’t know. I’d dig my hands into my pockets in fists of kung-fu-movie-type rage, but not say anything and eventually just walk away.
Sometimes driving around in the blue crappy Escort after school, we would see black people who had been stopped by the Evergreen Park cops and were being hassled, their cars searched and them being frisked, just for driving through. I am not lying about this shit, seriously. Once, I had gone with my older brother to play basketball up at Hamlin Park—basketball, which I sucked at but my older brother Tim made me play because he said I had to do something to prove I wasn�
�t really turning into a girl, which I think my dad made him do. Well, while my brother and I were playing, two Evergreen Park cops came up and said, “You better not steal those basketball nets like a bunch of niggers,” and one cop hit his nightstick into his hand and the other nodded, and then both walked off. And that story is fucking true.
The class thing in our neighborhood was very important to Gretchen because of all the fucked-up punk music she listened to. “The world is racist and chauvinistic by nature,” she said. “How come every person with a shit job, like at McDonald’s or at the 7-Eleven, is like black or Mexican? Do you ever see a white kid working at McDonald’s? Maybe. Maybe at the register, but they sure ain’t back there frying the fries.” She’d say this nodding with herself and it would make me want to kiss her even more, her believing in things I had never even taken the time to think about.
eleven
At school, again.
Bad-ass horror movie titles for those direct-to-video horror films which could include at least two partial sex scenes, like all those knock-offs they have at Evergreen Video of Halloween and Friday the 13th, in which I could star as the slasher, possibly:
1. A Night of Agony, A Night of Pain
2. Enchanted by Evil
3. How the Undead Weep
4. The Hangman’s Hand
5. Kill for Thrill
6. Night Seductions
7. The Game of Deadly
8. Beware the House that Bled
9. Lethal Injection
10. Sleepover Party Camp
11. The Crypt Has Spoken
12. Brother Mooney Speaks with his most sinister discussion of anal-ass grammar which eats your fucking soul for one hour every fucking day nonstop and there is no end in sight ever never ever until your fucking eyeballs bleed out of your skull and they have to clean it all up with that motherfucking red sawdust stuff and even then you have to fucking listen, so you have to jam pencils in both your ears and I’m sure you’d find a way even then, wouldn’t you, Bro. Mooney? you baboon.
twelve
OK, this is another mix-tape Gretchen made me which was all about the summer before, which she titled, Better Days, when it seemed everything was all right, so listening to it was kind of like going back in time, even though it was only a year ago when Gretchen first got the Escort and I had been seeing this girl Colleen, not actually seeing her like dating, but seeing in the sense that I saw her at the Chinese Wok counter in the food court at the mall, and I had found out her name and she knew who I was and, well, like I said, it seemed like there were these secret messages on the tape that reminded me of when everything was still good for me:
Police and Thieves/The Clash
We sang this one in the parking lot of Arena Lanes, this bowling alley, after we had each stolen a pair of bowling shoes some night that summer.
Panic/The Smiths
Wow, this one seemed to be about our lives that summer for sure, because it was when Gretchen first got the Escort and even though it was used, the tape player still worked but there was never anything good on the radio, it was all crap all the time, and there was this line in the song where the singer sings, “Hang the DJ, the music that constantly plays says nothing to me about my life,” and when I first heard it, I thought, That’s exactly right, man.
Hateful/The Clash
Another sing-along song, this one though, was, to me, about the time Gretchen thought it would be funny to drive really fast behind a student driver—you know, the kids who drive around with the big sign on top of the car—and so Gretchen was like swerving and riding the poor kid’s tail and kept honking her horn at different stoplights until finally the driver’s ed teacher got out, and she was this crazy-looking woman with permed hair who was screaming like a fucking banshee, and Gretchen tried to back up, but she backed into a parked car and had to pay two hundred bucks to get the other car’s headlights replaced. The song that was on when she backed into the other car? “Hateful.”
Ball and Chain/Social D.
Social Distortion was one of Gretchen’s bands that I actually liked because they were kind of just rock’n’roll. When the singer sang, “I even got me a little wife,” I always thought of Colleen, the girl I had been seeing at the food court at the mall, because in my mind she was my girl that whole summer and she was like 4'5”, very tiny.
Ratt Fink/The Misfits
OK, I had no idea what this song was really supposed to be about, but it reminded me of the time Gretchen got arrested for shoplifting at this department store, Venture, and when they had her empty her pockets, all she had were like ten bags of Gummy Bears, and she said when they tried to find out her name, all she kept saying was, “R-A-T-T-F-I-N-K,” because some old lady had spotted her shoving the candy in her pockets and the same lady was just standing there, watching from outside the security office as Gretchen was interrogated or whatever. This was a good sing-along one, too, I think.
I turned the tape over and read the track listings, and got very sad, suddenly.
I Know It’s Over/The Smiths
Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want/The Smiths
Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now/The Smiths
Straight to Hell/The Clash
Asleep/The Smiths
One, they were almost all by the Smiths, and two, they were all slow songs about dying, I think. I think maybe she was trying to tell me something like, My mom is dead and I am still sad about it, or something like that, because the title of the second side was just Carol, her mom’s name, and that was it. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I just called her and said, “Thanks,” and she said, “Yeah, no problem,” and for some reason, I ended up listening to the second side all night, thinking about Gretchen lying in her room. I guess it made me feel better somehow, like her making this tape for me and saying she felt bad a lot, too. It just made me feel a lot less worse, maybe.
thirteen
Other than that, I would sing gospel out loud, really loud, in church, and that made me feel OK. Really. Every Sunday to get out of my house I’d go to mass, by myself even. The church I went to was Queen of Martyrs on 103rd, where I had gone to grade school, and it was nice, all baby-blue inside with these shiny stained-glass windows and light-wood pews and with all the gold of the altar shining and these nice wood Stations of the Cross posted along the wall everywhere. Everyone in the neighborhood went to church, I guess, even if they were pretty shitty. My mom went by herself early in the morning. Me, I usually went to 11 o’clock mass and I would sit somewhere in the back, usually with the old people, their white hair like wisps of cotton candy, their grubby clothes smelling like mothballs and the thrift clothes Gretchen would buy at the Salvation Army—old people, who, like me, were there by themselves, maybe. I guess if you go to church enough, you just go and say the things and kneel and pray without even thinking, because that’s what I did. I mean, I had been going to Catholic school all my life and I never really thought about what I had been taught; I just kind of went through the motions of it all. Worse than that, I would kind of check the women out—you know, high school girls, hot-looking moms, stuff like that. I would have all kinds of weirdo fantasies—nothing satanic, you know, but pretty involved anyway. Most of the fantasies involved me imagining what the hot girls would look like as they walked up the aisle to get married, their hair all done-up, their soft faces behind white veils, smiling nervously. I dunno why I fantasized about that. Sometimes I would take the time to think about what was going on with my mom and dad and sometimes it would make me so sad I’d have to excuse myself and go to the bathroom to keep myself from fucking crying.
But like I said, the thing I liked best was the singing. I mean it—I would go there and really belt it out like a total retard, you know, because I was there by myself and didn’t have to worry about looking dumb for doing it, and it felt nice to be singing the same song as everybody—you know, belonging—and, well, all the old people around me loved me for it; they would nod and smile an
d I would shout, “Amazing Grace” or “How Great Thou Art,” thinking that some day, one of these old ladies would be interviewed for some rock’n’roll documentary about me and in the film the old lady would nod and wipe her glasses and say, “That boy had a voice like a saint. Like a saint,” and have to look away from the camera to keep from crying tears of joy at the thought of me.
Get this, though: One time Gretchen and I were in the car, and she was smiling and watching me only mouth the words along to “Hope” by the Descendents, and she said, “My dad told me he saw you singing in church,” and I said, “No, man, I just mouth the words,” and she said, “No, he told me you were really singing,” so I stopped singing when I went there, from then on, and I went back to just thinking about my mom and dad.
fourteen
Dinner at Gretchen’s was the best. When I was an “invited” guest and not just standing in the kitchen, watching until I made my way over to begin working on whatever leftovers had been left, it was nice to sit at their table and eat like a member of their family. It was very sad at her house since her mom had died a few years back, but it was better than at my house, I guess. I tried to be very polite because Gretchen’s dad always looked very, very worn-out and very heartbroken, like he might start crying at any minute. He was a sad-looking guy, eyes like runny eggs, with a narrow face and dark tidy hair, but he was always very generous to me. Usually, Gretchen would be silent. She would just stare at her dinner plate and move her food around, you know. Her older sister, Jessica, a fucking super-fox, would completely ignore me. I’d try to talk, tell everyone about my day, but since they weren’t my family they weren’t very interested. My family didn’t ever really eat together. Like I said, my dad hadn’t been around much lately and my mom was always working, my older brother Tim was always somewhere doing jock stuff, and my little sister Alice was usually staring at herself in a mirror. So I guess I went over to Gretchen’s whenever I was invited for the sense of belonging I thought I was so desperately lacking. It felt nice to pretend to have some kind of normal family.
