Play Me Backwards

by Adam Selzer

  “Come on,” I said. “I’m going to have sex anyway, right? Don’t you want me to be safe?”

  “The only safe way is not doing it, Leon.”

  “I’ll bet I know what’s really going on here,” I said. “You want girls to get pregnant. You probably think that eating the placentas of teen mothers will keep you young or something. That’s why you don’t give out condoms, right?”

  She made a face like she was about to gag, and I felt, for just a second, like I had been born again.

  “Seriously,” I said. “That’s why you don’t like birth control or abortions. So you can get your grubby mitts on regular helpings of locally grown teen placenta.”

  She started to say something, but I kept talking.

  “So, do you glug them straight out of the bucket, or do you mix them in with a shake every day for breakfast and lunch, and then have a sensible dinner?”

  She gave me this look like a caterpillar had just crawled up her ass and she was trying not to react.

  “I’d thought you’d matured past this phase, Leon,” she said.

  “Nope.”

  She was probably the only person on the planet who felt like I was more mature now than I was in middle school.

  If I had matured at all, really, besides just in the sense of starting to grow facial hair and all that shit, the only real evidence was that I had pretty much come to grips, psychologically, with the fact that I really wasn’t any cooler than my father.

  My father was a dork. A complete dork. There’s no nicer way to say it. But he was no slacker; after a long day of being the bad boy of the accounting firm, he’d come home and mess around with his various collections, cook up a “food disaster” with mom, or get to work on one of the inventions he was always working on. I hated his posters with dopey motivational phrases on them, which he plastered all over the house, but they seemed to work for him. He was no slacker, at least. He was cooler and more ambitious than I was, honestly. Accepting that was about as hard a thing as I ever had to do.

  I wasn’t quite as embarrassed by him or my mom as I had been in middle school, but I was still dreading letting Paige meet them. For one thing I couldn’t really trust them not to mention Anna. And I couldn’t just ask them not to, because then I’d get the old “it sounds like you’re not really over her” lecture.

  Furthermore, Paige wanted to come over on a food disaster night. She had thought they sounded hilarious when I made the mistake of telling her about them.

  It wasn’t as simple as just cooking a bad meal. When they did a “food disaster,” they actually dressed up in appropriate attire for each particular disaster meal. If the cookbook they were using was from the 1950s, Mom would wear a poodle skirt and talk about Eisenhower. Dad wore hideous leisure suits that he bought at thrift stores for stuff from cookbooks from the 1970s.

  When I was in eighth grade, they found a stapled-together, hand-typed-and-photocopied cookbook called True Americans Are Grilling Americans. For that they had taken on the roles of Lester and Wanda: Grilling Americans—a couple of white trash hicks who wore muscle shirts and talked about Wheel of Fortune and killing bears a lot, in between talking about food (which usually consisted of well-done meat and enough ketchup to choke a whale). They liked being Lester and Wanda so much that they’d kept playing them occasionally, even when they moved on to other cookbooks.

  Now, after four years, the saga of Lester and Wanda was like one of those epic Viking poems that goes on for eleven thousand pages. They had backstories; there were subplots, recurring characters, and everything. Probably even some symbolism. I took on the role of Americus, Lester and Wanda’s no-good son. I didn’t say much at the meals—I mostly just grunted and acted like a total bum, which wasn’t exactly hard. A lot of nights I was really just playing myself.

  On the night in question, when Paige was coming, my mother made something called a Pop Art Pineapple Casserole from a 1967 book called Kitchen Freakout, which was supposed to be “hippie food” but was probably written by people who’d only seen hippies in cartoons. The picture of it in the book looked like something you’d normally see in a petri dish.

  When I left to pick Paige up, Mom and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in grungy clothes and pretending to be Lester and Wanda reacting to a hippie cookbook.

  “You don’t s’pose eatin’ this stuff will make us into no godless commies, do you?” asked Mom/Wanda.

  “Don’t worry,” said Dad/Lester. “If it does, I know a fella we can call to come shoot us.”

  “You guys think maybe you can turn it down a bit tonight?” I asked.

  “We’ll try,” said Dad, in his normal voice. “But isn’t this what people in Oak Meadow Mills think we slobs on August Avenue act like, anyway?”

  Mom laughed and socked Dad in the arm.

  “Don’t worry, Leon,” she said in her own normal voice. “We’ve got our embarrassing stories about you carefully picked out. We won’t stay in character for long.”

  I had told Paige that they were doing a hippie cookbook, and when I arrived at her place she was wearing a peasant shirt, faded jeans, and one of those dream-catcher necklaces that they sold at Earthways, with a single braid tied into her hair. She looked pretty hot, really, but I had neglected to tell her that they weren’t actually being hippies tonight.

  I tried to explain about Lester, Wanda, and Grilling Americans. Paige said it sounded fun, and like real family bonding, but there was the same doubt in her voice that I detected when she agreed to go into Stan’s basement. It may have occurred to her that this was going to be weirder than she’d imagined.

  “I’m in the wrong costume then, huh?” she asked. “Should we go back so I can put on a flannel or something?”

  “Nah,” I said. “They’ll just pretend that Americus brought home a hippie girlfriend and make it part of the scene. I’m not going to promise it won’t be really embarrassing.”

  “It can’t be worse than having Autumn at my place,” Paige said. And she bravely followed me to my car.

  This was a milestone I don’t think I’d reached before: doing something with Paige that I’d never done with Anna, even though I knew Anna wanted to. Anna was always asking about the food disasters, but I was so embarrassed by them back then that I wouldn’t have let her come to one even if she’d offered to let me watch her change into whatever outfit she wore for it. Not even if the cookbook that week had been Cooking for People in Swimsuits. I had been fully confident that if she saw a food disaster, she’d never speak to me again. Unless she thought that they, and my parents, were awesome, which would have been like a knife in my back.

  Now, maybe it wasn’t so much maturity as simply giving up, but the idea of someone else seeing a food disaster didn’t fill me with so much dread. I realized that I wasn’t too cool for them. Not even close. And a part of me was curious as to how Paige would react to something like this. I’d seen her among squalor and filth and even a bit of geekery, but not among pure dorkiness.

  Mom and Dad were nice enough to talk like regular people when Paige and I first arrived, but as soon as they served the Pop Art Pineapple Casserole, which contained both chicken and marshmallows in addition to the pineapple, they ceased to be my parents and became Lester and Wanda: Grilling Americans. They pretended that Paige was an actual hippie that I’d brought home for their approval, and of whom they were trying to be understanding and tolerant, in a hillbilly sort of way.

  “Is this what your people eat, Paige?” asked Mom/Wanda. “Down on the commune?”

  “Uh . . . yeah,” she said.

  “They mostly eat granola, Ma,” I grunted. “They got better sense than to eat this crap.”

  “Tastes okay,” said Dad. “But it needs some ketchup and red meat.”

  “It tastes like garbage you’d find in the Dumpster outside of a candy store,” I said. “And I’ll bet it can defy gravity. Look.”

  I scooped up a spoonful of the stuff and threw it at the ceiling,
where it stuck like glue. Paige squealed—I guess I should have known that throwing food at the ceiling wasn’t something that went on very often in her house. It wasn’t unknown at mine. Many food disasters were better thrown than eaten.

  “See?” I said. “Groovy.”

  “Oh, lord,” said Mom. “He’s smoking the weed. I knew it! She corrupted him!”

  “You’re cleaning that up later, Leon,” my dad said, in his normal voice. But I could tell he wasn’t mad. He was probably too busy thinking of ways he could modify the casserole recipe and invent an edible glue or something. Then he laughed, and mom laughed, and after that we gave up on trying to stay in character.

  “You’ve eaten plenty of things that were worse than this, Leon,” said my mother. “And I’m not talking about the food disasters.”

  My dad snickered. “Did we ever tell you about how you once ate some of Beethoven’s hair?”

  Paige smiled and grabbed my arm, then looked at my dad. “Do tell,” she said.

  I stared at both of my parents, whose faces were so full of glee that I could tell they were sitting on a story they’d waited years to break out.

  “Beethoven’s hair?” I asked. “As in Beethoven the dead composer?”

  “That’s the one.” Dad smiled.

  “At what point did I ever eat any of Beethoven’s hair?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure I’d remember eating a piece of a dead person.”

  “It was when Leon was a baby,” Dad said. “I’d just gotten a job at the accounting place, and I was hoping I could invent something to make me rich enough to quit the job before he started school.”

  “That certainly worked out,” I said, sarcastically.

  “Can it, Leon, I’m telling a story,” Dad said with a laugh. “Anyway, I was having trouble coming up with ideas. Then I found a catalog for a place that was selling tiny, quarter-inch strands of Ludwig Von Beethoven’s hair. And I thought that having something like that, something that came from the head of such a great genius, might inspire me.”

  “You let him buy something like that?” I asked my mother.

  “Well, it was either that or let him fly a kite in a thunderstorm like Ben Franklin. That was his first choice,” said my mother. This did not surprise me for a second.

  Paige grinned and nibbled at the psychedelic casserole.

  “How did you know it was really Beethoven’s hair?” I asked.

  “It was real, Leon,” said my mother. “Believe me, I made him check into it before he spent any money on it. Some guy bought a whole lock for tens of thousands and defrayed the cost by selling little bits to people like your dad.”

  “So, I bought this tiny strand of Beethoven’s hair,” Dad went on. “And when it arrived, I got it out of the little case that it came in, and I was holding it on the tip of my finger, just seeing if some of his genius would be transferred into me via osmosis or something. I remember I even had a recording of his Fifth Symphony playing.”

  “But no inspiration?” I asked.

  “Oh, it was inspiring, all right,” he said. “I was so moved that I brought it over to your high chair to show it to you. And I was saying, ‘Leon, this is a bit of one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived,’ or something like that, and holding it up to your face. Then you opened your mouth and bit my finger, and that was the last I ever saw of Beethoven’s hair.”

  “Ew!” said Paige. She covered her face with her hands and laughed.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said.

  “Boy, did we panic for a minute there,” said my mother. “We were ready to call an ambulance.”

  “From eating a tiny bit of hair?” I asked.

  “Well,” said my father, “we looked up some info on Beethoven, and it turned out he died of lead poisoning—and the reason they know that is because they found traces of it in strands of his hair.”

  “Luckily for you, you can’t get lead poisoning from a tiny, two-hundred-year-old piece of hair,” said Mom. “But I was still sure you were going to keel over dead any second for days.”

  “Maybe it helped me build up an immunity,” I said. “That explains why I’ve been able to stomach all these food disasters.”

  Paige laughed and laughed, but she laughed even harder and said, “Oh no, oh no,” when I said I was going to have some business cards printed up that said LEON HARRIS: CLASSICAL CANNIBAL. I thought that having eaten a bit of Beethoven was kind of awesome, really. It’s not everyone who can go around saying he ate a bit of a famous dead composer.

  All in all the dinner could have gone a lot worse. At least Mom didn’t break out the naked baby pictures or anything; there had been enough picturing me naked at the last “meet-the-parents” event. But afterwards, as I took Paige back home, I got the distinct impression that the whole night had sort of weirded her out. She tried to cover it up, but I could tell.

  “It was . . . interesting,” she said.

  “Hey, I never said my parents were normal.”

  “I know you wouldn’t remember something from when you were a baby, but do you think your dad is serious about that story about Beethoven? Or is it just, like, one of those stories you tell like being on the crotch-kicking team?”

  I thought about that as we came to a stop sign on a pockmarked intersection. “Mom wouldn’t have gone along with it if it wasn’t true,” I said. “And buying up a piece of famous hair is exactly the sort of thing Dad would do.”

  “You’re just like him, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t answer. I may have accepted that I was a lot like him in my mind, but saying it out loud was another thing.

  And I wasn’t totally sure what she wanted me to say.

  This is the thing about relationships: When you meet the parents, you have to think about the possibility that you’ll end up with this person forever, and that dinner with the parents might be a preview of what your future would be like together. And I couldn’t blame Paige if imagining a life like the ones my parents lived freaked her out a bit. It was one thing to be with the Poop Guy for a while, but quite another to be with a guy who might be forty years old and pulling out “Classical Cannibal” business cards.

  Of course, there was always a chance I’d end up living like Paige’s parents myself, even if it wasn’t what I wanted. Maybe I’d even end up in one of these mirror-maze subdivisions full of vinyl siding and ride-on lawnmowers and everything else that made punk rock necessary in the first place. Staying in the suburbs is what happens to pretty much everyone from the suburbs, right?

  Obviously, Paige had never imagined living among the cannibals any more than I had imagined living among stainless-steel kitchens.

  But that’s life, I guess.

  17. PERMISSIONS

  I came to realize that the yearbook staff was a regular hotbed of Machiavellian maneuvering. Paige kind of thrived there; there was something about girl-world drama that really brought out a different side of her than what I usually saw, but which sort of made her come alive. If someone said something about someone else, she would get right up, pick a side, and start fighting.

  At the yearbook meeting after the dinner with my parents, there was an argument about whether they should include a couple of pictures that showed two different girls wearing the same outfit. It seemed like a stupid thing to be concerned about to me and a few other people, but I didn’t want to get involved. It meant a lot to Paige.

  “They’ll both want to kill us all,” she said. “They’ll go down in history as people who copied each other. Is that how any of us want our class to remember us in fifty years when they look at the old yearbook?”

  “Well, it’s their fault for dressing like that,” Leslie said back. “We’re not here to create a legacy, we’re here to create memories, and we have to tell the truth about people, or we’re just creating false memories.”

  “So what? No one’s going to want to remember the way things really were. That’s why people like my dad think high school was great. They blocked out
the way it really was.”

  I just ignored this. I wasn’t there to make decisions. I just laid out the pictures they chose.

  This sort of shit consumed the yearbook staff. Paige would be fuming about it for hours. And I would smile and nod and try to tune it out, because she got really upset when I laughed or tried to tell her that in fifty years our yearbooks would mostly be gathering dust in storage lockers and basements, not inspiring memories. They weren’t going to be a source of real nostalgia and no one would think of them as a legacy. Not really. It was just a bunch of bullshit, if you get right down to it. I suppose yearbooks always are.

  For instance there was this one picture of Mr. Larson, the science teacher, and the caption the committee picked was (get this): “Mr. Larson imparts his daily dose of wisdom to a batch of eager minds.”

  I could think of two things wrong with that caption. First, you’ve got your “eager minds” shit. Then, you’ve got the very notion that Mr. Larson had any wisdom to impart in the first place. The man wasn’t even wise enough to get his nose hairs trimmed before operating a Bunsen burner. The day when his nose hairs caught fire was bound to come one day; I always imagined that the flame would work its way up the hair, like a fuse, and then there’d be a little explosion and he’d end up standing there with his face covered in soot, like a cartoon character who’d just bitten into a carrot that turned out to be dynamite. That was the kind of event I’d want to commemorate in a yearbook.

  Really, though, if I looked through the thing years down the road, I’d probably just see Mr. Larson and realize that his nose hairs weren’t any longer than mine had gotten to be, and younger generations who had heard me tell the legend of Mr. Larsons’s hairy nostrils would realize that I was no more a reliable source than Ishmael.

  As the Battle of the Matching Dresses raged on, I excused myself to go to the library and do some layout work. I’d made it to the “Senior Class Through the Years” section, and had to scan in all the pictures of us from the last twelve grades that the committee had scavenged, and figure out how to set them up to look their best on a page.