“But this is my last night to go, and you know it’s the only thing I look forward to,” I sobbed.
“I’m sorry, Oran. If it helps, you can blame me,” he said.
“No! It doesn’t fucking help! You guys are just a bunch of fucking assholes! Fuck all of you!” No one laughed this time. For once it seemed like they heard me. I ripped my hands from Ed’s and ran out the door, pissed.
I went to the trampoline and lay on my back and watched the stars spin around. I’d never been that pissed in my life. Scared, lonely, insecure, nervous, anxious, and depressed, yes; but I’d never been angry like this.
“Hey, Oran.” I looked over to where the voice came from and saw Ed standing by the side of the trampoline.
“What do you want?” I said.
“I just don’t want this to be your last memory of being here. That would make me and everyone else very sad.”
“Then let me come.”
“I can’t do that,” he said.
“Then leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that either…. Hey, come here for a minute.”
“What for?”
“Okay, I’ll come over there,” he said, stepping out onto the trampoline and lying down next to me.
“You know, adults can make mistakes, too.”
“No shit,” I said. He got a chuckle out of that, but went on.
“It’s even easier to make mistakes when we’re trying to do something that’s never been done before, and I may have made a big mistake tonight by letting you drink that bottle of wine. I was thinking you might learn a lesson about alcohol. Well…that lesson will come tomorrow morning, for sure. But listen though, if all you learned while you were here was some swear words and that you love your brother, I would be satisfied and proud of my part in it. But I suspect you have learned a lot more than that, and that you might see that as well in time. Hey, you see all those stars up there?”
“Uh-huh.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I could see the stars.
“Well, I don’t know all the answers to everything, actually I don’t know much at all. I’m just a goofy fat bald guy who thinks the education system knows absolutely nothing, but I believe that everything happens for a reason, and that those stars up there, or the Universe, or whatever, knows all the answers and if we are open to it, everything works out the way it’s supposed to.
“I don’t know if you learned a lesson about alcohol, or that adults are just ‘a bunch of fucking assholes,’ as you so eloquently put it. I don’t even know which of those lessons is the right one. I just don’t want you to define your whole experience here by what happened tonight. Okay?”
I couldn’t follow him, so I didn’t respond. I did know that a bunch of anxious kids were waiting to go roller-skating, and that Ed was talking to me at the risk of pissing everyone else off, so it was kind of hard to stay angry even though I was trying. He grabbed my hand again, and we just stared at the stars for a while in silence.
“Hey, you ready to go?” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re gonna get you cleaned up, give you a cup of black coffee, and go to the rink,” he said, helping me up.
“Really?” I forgot all about trying to stay angry at him.
“I’m taking a huge risk, so you have to promise me that you won’t act all crazy and start yelling at everyone. People don’t like seeing drunken seven-year-olds. It freaks them out. We’ll see if you’re okay to skate when we get there, but if not, at least you get to be with your friends and listen to your music. Okay?”
“I promise, I’ll be good. Thanks, Ed.”
“I don’t care if you’re good. Just no yelling, and try to walk a little straighter.”
Even leading me by the hand, I kept bumping into him and tripping. But with a little concentration I was able to keep something of a straight line.
The rest of the night was a blur of falling over repeatedly and bothering the DJ.
“Hey, can you play ‘Beat It’?”
“Sorry, kid, I just played it ten minutes ago.”
“How ’bout Miami Sound Machine?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“Freak-A-Zoid?”
“No, kid. I just played all of your songs.”
“How ’bout ‘Super Freak’?”
“I don’t know what the hell happened to you tonight, but you’re really starting to bother me. I was nice enough to play all of your goddamn songs, and now I want you to be nice enough to leave me alone so I can do my job and play other people’s songs,” he said, starting up “Fly Like an Eagle.” “Now get the hell out of here, and don’t come back!”
“How about ‘Beat It,’ then?”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered. He put his headphones on, and I finally walked away.
The next day was brutal. Carol was nice enough to let me sleep in, and I just stayed in bed drinking water. She also brought me a bucket so I didn’t have to go to the bathroom every time the water came back up.
It was sad leaving that place. Everyone came to see us off. Even the high school kids took a break from doing their weird math problems to come out and wave good-bye. I don’t think I’d ever said a word to any one of them.
four
Tells of how the young man came to be enslaved by the mighty god Chiva
I WOKE UP AS USUAL in my almost pitch-black room to hundreds of kids screaming and yelling from the schoolyard ten feet from the back of the storefront. Our rooms didn’t have any windows, and the kids were pretty much the only way I knew whether it was day or night. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel that bad. It was usually a struggle to get out of bed, but I was wide-awake, and still dressed from the night before, so I got up and went straight to the kitchen to make some coffee.
Jake was standing on the counter holding a staple gun and a flattened red playground ball—one of those all-purpose rubber ones used for everything from kickball to basketball. Every day at least one, and sometimes as many as five, would end up in our backyard, if you could call it that. We actually referred to it as “the swamp” or “the bog,” because that’s really what it was. Immediately outside our back door was a small fire escape that looked down into a horrifying mud pit filled with rotting trash. Four feet across from the fire escape was the fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence separating the swamp from the schoolyard, and a few hundred screaming kids. We had made a serious attempt in the beginning to clean it up, but as soon as the residency hotel upstairs had opened, we started finding all manner of weird shit out there, mostly bottles and cans, but also a startling quantity of syringes, broken crack pipes, and used condoms, as well as empty purses, leftover food, and of course, the red and yellow balls that came over the fence.
Reaching around Jake’s legs to grab my French press, Jake said, “I only got one today.” He was referring to the balls.
“You really are an asshole,” I responded.
“Hey, you got to admit it’s a good idea,” he said, laughing.
Jake’s new “art” piece was a bit of a sore spot for me, and he knew it. When school had started up, not only did the balls start landing in the swamp, but they were always accompanied by a group of little kids, screaming “Mister! Hey, mister!” through the door at us. Depending on my mood, I would either ignore them or go down into the pit to get their balls. It’s true the kids would get annoyingly desperate sometimes, but they would be so goddamned excited and thankful when you threw the balls over that I almost always gave in. Jake, however, hated it.
“When are they going to shut the fuck up?” he would ask.
“Jesus, man, they’re just kids. Chill out.”
“Yeah, but when are they going to learn not to kick them over the fence?”
“Jake! They’re fucking kids! Who cares?” It was a rare occurrence that I was the one preaching acceptance, but even though the kids’ desperation made me kind of uncomfortable, I really had nothing against them. Jake, however, was continuously devis
ing ways to get the kids to shut up. One day on my way to the bathroom he called out to me.
“Hey, Oran. Check it out.” He was holding a ball in his left hand and a utility knife in his right. “Eh…what do you think?”
“About what?” I asked.
“My new piece,” he responded.
“What are you talking about, ‘your new piece’? You’re actually going to make something?” I said.
“Hell yes, I’m making something, and trust me, you are going to love it.”
“Oh no,” I sighed. “Do you think after listening to all your bullshit art conversations that I would trust you? You know me better than that.”
“Exactly. I do know you, and little Cranberry is finally going to be psyched about art again. Are you ready?” This was followed by a long pause. “I’m doing an installation with the balls.”
I waited for more, but there was nothing.
“Yeah…and?”
“So I came up with an art piece that will finally shut those kids up. I’m going to start collecting the balls and staple them to the wall up there. When the kids figure out they’re not going to get their balls back, they’ll finally stop screaming at us.”
“Jake, that is super fucked up. Do you realize how fucked up that is?”
“What do you mean? You like ‘fucked up.’ That’s your whole thing. I thought you would love it. I mean, at least you have to admit it’s a good idea.”
I could tell Jake was actually a little bummed out.
“It might be a funny idea, but it’s fucking mean. Have you seen the look on those kids’ faces when they lose their balls? It’s the look of pure panic, like they’re going to die if they don’t get them back,” I said.
“Good. Maybe when they find out that they won’t die from losing a stupid ball, they’ll realize it’s not such a big deal, and stop screaming at us all day.”
“Just ignore them!”
“No way, man, this is going to be great! So listen, if you’re out there and see any balls, I need them for the piece.”
“What? Are you nuts?” I yelled. “Go ahead and make your little art piece, but I’m throwing every ball I find back to them!”
“Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Okay, Cranberry, but just remember, I wake up before you.”
As much as I may have believed I cared about the kids, Jake was right. If I was unable to wake up for a job, I certainly wasn’t going to get out of bed to climb down into the pit and retrieve balls.
I watched Jake try to attach the new ball to what, in a very short time, had become bigger than any of us had expected. The thing was already about twelve feet wide. Not a bad-looking piece if you ignored what was behind it.
“Hey, so Lawrence came over last night,” I said while I was waiting for my coffee to steep.
“Oh yeah, what did he want?” Jake asked.
“He didn’t seem to want anything. I guess he just came by to hang out or something,” I said.
“Huh.” He wasn’t really listening. Jake was starting to have trouble getting the balls to stay on the wall, because there were too many of them at this point.
“Yeah, it was kind of fun actually.” That got a little more attention. “Fun” wasn’t a huge part of my vocabulary at the time.
“What…you guys hung out? I thought you hated that guy,” he said.
“I thought so, too. He’s not bad, though. Anyway,” I continued “you know the other night when he did his thing, I smoked a little of the heroin, and I didn’t really feel anything. But last night he brought some over, and man, that shit is pretty good.”
“Yeah, it smells like honey-baked ham.”
“Hmm…I thought it smelled more like molasses,” I said.
“I had some the other night, too. I kind of felt something, but I’m not sure what exactly. It was good, though?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m kind of surprised…I mean, I smoked a lot of that shit last night, but I feel totally fine today, no hangover. Actually I feel good, and I haven’t even had my coffee yet. Don’t you think it’s kind of strange that these ‘hard drugs,’ like heroin or coke don’t seem to fuck you up as much as alcohol or pot? I mean, last night I just felt kind of relaxed, but if I smoke even one hit of weed, I can’t do anything. It seems to me they got it backward.”
“That is weird,” Jake said, not paying attention anymore. He was going nuts with the staple gun, trying to get the balls to stay up, but it wasn’t happening.
“You think I should use longer staples, or start using nails?” he asked me.
“I’m not helping you with that thing,” I answered, finishing my coffee. “All right, I’m going to go sand some pianos,” I said.
As I was walking out, Jake said, “Don’t forget to tell people about the Cisco party on Friday night.”
“Are you serious?” I asked. We had an unplanned Cisco party back when we had first moved in, and the results had been disastrous. Cisco was a fortified wine, but it wasn’t like any alcohol I had ever had before. That shit may have been the strangest drug I had ever done, and you could buy it right next door in grape, cherry, strawberry, or tropical punch flavors. Before the night was through, I had somehow gotten into three fights with my friends, and I don’t fight.
“Don’t you remember what happened last time?” I reminded him.
“Yeah. It was fun, remember?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying not to think about my oldest friend, Jibz, whom I had hooked up with at the end of the night. I had been in love with her for as long as I could remember, and as usual, I had found out a few days later that she was with a new “serious” boyfriend. She could be single for months, but whenever we got together, she would always find someone the next day. Why not me? I asked myself over and over. As many times as it had happened, it never got any easier to deal with.
Depressed, I walked the ten blocks to my internship, the first two of which were spent fending off junkies trying to sell me “one and ones.” I was so used to this from living in the neighborhood for the past seven years that most of the time it didn’t really bother me. I just got really used to saying no twenty or thirty times until I cleared the two-block radius of Sixteenth and Mission. The thing I couldn’t understand was that I had been saying no to the same people for six years. After that many nos, over that many years, it would seem fairly clear that I wasn’t in the market. But these guys never let up.
“Looking?”
“One and ones?”
“Chiva?”
“Coca?”
“Outfits?”
They were like zombies who had learned a few words to trick you into thinking they were human. Sometimes they would form complete sentences like, “Come on, man. Look at me. I’m fucking sick. I need the credit.” They always looked fucking sick to me with their abscesses and open facial wounds. Zombies.
“No…Nope…I’m cool…No…Not looking…No, really. I’m not fucking looking!” This was my mantra whenever I left the house.
THIS INTERNSHIP WAS LIKE any other internship I’d ever had—a thinly veiled scam to get suckers like me to do free labor. The thing was, all the other interns would figure it out in about a week and stop coming back. I had been sanding pianos now for three months and continued to show up. This guy, Dietrich, would scout the classifieds for free pianos, sand them down, put a coat of varnish on them, and then sell them a week later for around fifteen hundred dollars. Actually, I sanded and varnished all the pianos, and then he would come downstairs and tune them.
“Hey, Dietrich. When do you think I’ll be able to start tuning pianos? I think I’ve got this sanding thing down.”
“Did you finish the Chickering?” he asked in his weird German accent. He sounded slightly effeminate, which I had thought was pretty hard for Germans.
“Yeah, I finished it last night,” I responded.
“Very good. You know that Knabe in the back. You can st
art sanding that one today.”
“Yeah, well, I think I’m pretty good at this sanding thing by now, so why don’t you give me a lesson on how to tune the Chickering?” I tried to sound pissed off, but it was pretty ineffective.
“Oh, don’t worry, we’ll get to that, but I’m actually working on something upstairs right now. Soon, okay?”
It’s not that I wasn’t aware that he was scamming me, but I had something of my own scam going. I had called Jack and told him about my idea of going into piano tuning, and if he could just help me out for a little while, I would soon be making a hundred dollars an hour tuning pianos.
“Okay, just tell Patti I said it was all right,” Jack had said. Patti was his secretary, and I talked to her far more than I talked to him.
“Hi, Patti. It’s Oran.” I had to call her every month.
“Oh shit. How much is it, eight hundred?”
“Eight fifty.”
“Okay. I’m going to the bank this afternoon.”
“No problem. Thanks,” I said, hanging up the phone, feeling like a piece of shit. It wasn’t taking money from my dad that bothered me. He had just bought a three-million-dollar house in Santa Barbara. He could afford it. It was that I was surviving off this guy’s guilt. Whenever I saw him, about once every two or three years, I always felt as if I were his dark side in physical form: a hunched-over, chain-smoking, cynical bastard who presented solid proof that he was capable of leaving his pregnant wife with a one-year-old child, and that maybe he wasn’t the self-help guru he was praised as. To be fair, I never gave him much reason to think anything else of me. I experienced such an awful combination of anxiety and anger whenever I saw him that I had a hard time even talking.
I had always thought that his whole self-help shtick was a racket, but his new book exceeded the limits of what I thought was possible in terms of sheer vapidity.
“Ask me about the book,” he’d said the last time I had dinner with him.
“Uh, why do I need to ask? Can’t you just tell me?”
“This is how people get to write off their expenses,” he answered.
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