by Chris Lynch
A big hand fell on my shoulder.
“What is it, boys?” the manager asked me.
“Huh? Huh?” I asked, startled. “What is what?”
“The deal. What is the deal? I noticed you been prowling our aisles for an awfully long time. Now fun is fun, but we get enough prank shoppers in this store—”
“We’re not pranks, sir,” Mikie said.
“Good. So then why don’t you tell me what you need, and I can help you on your way.”
“I don’t need anything,” Mikie said happily. “I’m with him.”
Mike and I must have looked like one of those old married couples I always saw bickering over medical stuff in drugstores. “See that?” I snapped at Mikie, forgetting the store guy completely for a minute. “It’s so bad you’re embarrassed, and it’s not even your problem.”
“Okay then, what is it you need?” the man interrupted. He was very tall, that manager. “What are you sweating about, son?”
“I... ah... I, it’s a condition. I have a condition.”
There, I said it, right? Whew, that wasn’t so hard.
“Well then, you’re in the right place. That’s our business. What do you need to help your condition? We only want to help you.”
Come on, Bishop! I screamed internally. It’s Stand and Deliver time. You are a man now. You messed around with a woman, for crying out loud. Messed around with her hands, anyway. You got VD, sort of. You shop at Big and Tall—you can handle this situation.
It’s natural. Nothing at all to be ashamed of. This guy sees it every day. Well, he probably doesn’t see it every day...
Tell him!
The manager sighed. “You want condoms, don’t you, kid.”
Oh my god. Stress. Stress.
That was it—something had to be done. It was time to act.
I dropped my basket and ran like a rabbit. Like a sidewinder rabbit.
Mikie followed right at my heels.
“Well, that was an excellent decision,” he said when we were far enough away from the store that I could stop running. “Now you don’t have your cure, and CVS is off limits. Pretty chicken there, El.”
“Ya, well if you were any kind of friend you’d have stayed there and bought the stuff for me.”
He paused long, but for effect, not because he really needed to think about it.
“Nobody’s that kind of friend, Bishop.”
Bishop. He was calling me Bishop now. The great beast was distancing me from everybody...
“Anyway,” I said, “it’s not really an issue anymore, because I think... ya, I think it’s going away now.” I smiled bravely. I winced. “Ya, there it goes.”
I smiled. I winced.
Damned if Monday didn’t eventually come around. I did feel a little better before that. Didn’t get scabies. Or psoriasis or VD or malaria for that matter. And there were no new eruptions on any other parts of my body since I avoided all stress by spending Sunday reading magazines and watching a Ren and Stimpy marathon.
But then, Monday.
“Now, where were we?” Metzger asked. I swear, he spent the whole weekend frozen in the spot where I’d left him on Friday. Same location in the school lot, same grimace on his face, same sumo squat. Looked like he was the one with the ’rhoids.
“Where were we?” I shot back. “Well you obviously were right here. I was everyplace else.”
“There’s no way out this time. I’m gonna kill you now, chickenshit,” he said. He was very angry, apparently. He was also right. I couldn’t run away this time because I had to go to school.
Guys were filing past Metz and on into the school as if he wasn’t there, even though he was making a pretty good spectacle. This was quite a thing, since most of these guys would stop dead and watch if it looked like a pair of beetles might start fighting on the sidewalk, but Metzger just couldn’t generate that kind of interest.
So I figured, me too.
I stared straight into his eyes, angled toward him with my fists clenched and my teeth clenched. He stiffened, readied.
And I walked right on past and up the stairs.
Caught the boy pretty well flat-footed, I reckon.
“Hey,” he shouted. I’m sure he could have done better if I’d given him more time.
“What?” I said. “I whipped your butt on Friday, why should I waste my time again?”
“You... the hell...”
I left him tripping over himself. Why not, right? Who’s to say I didn’t, you know, in the big picture, whip his butt?
I was handling my bully issue pretty well, don’t you think? Now if only all my other issues were as stupid as Metzger.
At lunch in the cafeteria that day, Mike, Frank, and I were visited by a major senior personage. One of the biggest and toppest of the seniors—one of the elite whose boots Frank’d been licking on his way up the social ladder—came over and hovered above our humble table. His name, spoken only in hushed tones around here, was Darth. And yes, he’s as warm and fuzzy as it sounds. But not in any obvious way, not like your regular teenage bully. This guy, if we were in an old movie from the 1930s or something, would be smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder. And he’d have a little pencil-line mustache. Girls and their mothers would love him. Nice shoes, quiet, smooth manner. But there is a big-time scariness in there that is kind of like a dog whistle, recognizable only by dogs—meaning guys.
Yet, at the same time, he was—there’s no other way to say it—irresistible. He didn’t speak directly to just anybody, but it was exciting when he did. You got a sense in every conversation with Darth that you were going to get shot to smithereens the next time you sat in a barber chair. But it almost didn’t matter. Like it would be an honor to get creamed by such a guy.
Such a guy.
He came up behind me so I wasn’t even aware until I saw all the other ground squirrels like myself scurrying away, and the table became covered in a darkness like a solar eclipse.
“Hey, Darth, man,” Frank slurped. “Have a seat. Can I go stand in line for you? They got the spice cake today. Can I get you a spice cake?”
Since Frank didn’t have the dignity to be embarrassed for himself, Mike and I blushed for him. The three of us, and Darth, were the only ones left at the table.
“Ya, do that. Go get me a spice cake.”
Frank was gone like a rocket. Darth turned to Mikie. “Go help him get me a spice cake, would ya?”
Mike is no lapdog. But he’s also no punching bag. So when he just sat there in the face of a direct order from Darth, at least I had the good sense to sweat like a pig. Frankie stood frozen halfway to the cake line.
It was a quiet, tense, damp moment, which did not seem to have a solution. Until one just happened.
Darth nodded at Mike. Like an agreement. It was amazing to me, but really it shouldn’t have been. See, if I had tried to do what Mikie did, I’d be wearing my underwear up over my shoulders about now. But this is Mikie’s thing, how he always makes his way, and people just seem to get it, to go with it. And for Darth, well a lesser criminal probably would have tried to break Mikie, but instead he seemed to appreciate him.
Which is not to say Darth doesn’t still get what Darth wants.
“If you wouldn’t mind, Michael,” Darth said, sounding very reasonable.
Mikie nodded back at him, and got up.
Leaving me alone with Darth. A newsworthy event. I’d have never expected it. The other freshmen and sophomore lowlifes—whose eyes peeped and blinked in our direction like raccoons from the Dumpster at night—certainly never would have put this scene together. I figured trembling was probably the right thing to do.
“Quit the shaking shit, will ya?”
Okay, wrong. I froze.
Darth nodded at me and gave me a friendly smile. I returned same.
“Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever woulda believed it.” He said it like this was the continuation of a talk we’d been having for weeks even though our one previous exchang
e had consisted of this:
“You gonna finish that?” He was referring to my lunch. It was not lunchtime, we were not in the cafeteria, I had not started the lunch, never mind finishing it. In fact, I had been walking into the building at the beginning of another fine school day, swinging my brown-bag lunch at my side.
I had stopped, stared at the bag, and nearly wept, knowing what was in there. Two Underwood chicken spread sandwiches on oatmeal bread, the oil of one of them making a glorious clear stain on the side of the bag like the pioneers’ windows that were made of paper that they would then smear with—
“I said are you finished with that?” He was an impatient businessman when you didn’t keep up with him.
“Sorry,” I had said, handing over the bag. “I was daydreaming. Just checking, but, it would be futile to resist, right?”
He’d looked concerned for me. “Yes. And possibly dangerous.”
So, really, this would be our first chat, but it felt like we’d known each other for a long time.
“When we heard, me and the guys were all sayin’ that if we were going to bet on something like this, you would have been probably the second or third last—maybe the fourth if you lost a few pounds—but anyway close to the last guy we ever would’ve figured.”
It seemed that needing to know what he was talking about was not as important as going with the flow. I shrugged. “Me too. Goes to show you never can tell, huh?”
“You never can.”
He leaned close, put a fatherly arm around my shoulders. “So hats off to you, guy. Who gave you the VD?”
Ah-ha.
Well this was certainly a type of popularity I never figured into the bargain.
“You know!”
He laughed. A most insulting laugh, actually. “Of course I know. I’m me.”
“Wow,” I said, and meant it. “That’s kind of shocking, that you can know everything, about everybody. And so quick. Like the FBI.”
“Whoa,” he said modestly. “Not everything, of course. I don’t know, like, what your grades are, or when your birthday is, ’cause I don’t give a shit. And I wouldn’t know if, say, a guy got sweat socks in the mail from his grandma for his birthday...”
My god. Did it mean he controlled the U.S. Postal Service, or my gran?
“But VD? You don’t get VD around here without me knowing about it. That’s like, my thing.”
Such a lovely thing. And now it had brought me and Darth together.
“VD killed George Washington,” Darth shared. “And Al Capone. Did you know that?”
There you go. Another fine community I’d gotten myself into.
“I didn’t. Thanks.”
“But you don’t want to die.”
“Uh-uh,” I agreed. “Not today, anyway.”
Darth scanned the crowd in all directions, looking for authority figures who outranked him, like maybe the Pope. Then he pulled a little something out of his sock. Under the table he slipped it into my hand.
It was a tube, like toothpaste only smaller, more metallic, stiffer and colder. I brought it up to the table-top to get a better look, but he slapped my hand so I lowered it again.
I squinted, craned my neck, stretched, stretched. Must have looked like I was eating lunch out of my own lap.
I giggled with a thought. From my position there with my face in my groin, I shared the thought with my new friend. “Hey, if I knew I could do this I never would have gotten myself into trouble in the first place.”
He slapped the back of my head. I jocked myself with my own chin. Another first.
Finally I could read it.
EXTREME UNCTION.
I popped my head up, not knowing what to say. I took a shot. “Cool.”
“It is, it’s very cool. Minty, even. Like Vicks VapoRub, only better. And very special rare stuff. Imported. Not available elsewhere.”
“Great. So what’s it for?”
“It’s for your problem.”
“My...?”
“Your pecker problem.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. What then, a teaspoonful a day?”
He slapped me on the back, laughing. “You’re funny. We gotta keep you alive for a while, I think.”
“That’d be good.”
“Ya, so what you do is, whenever Mr. Fizzy starts feeling like he’s gonna fall right off—and believe me, you’re gonna feel like you wanna let him—you just slather some of this stuff on it, and the fire will go out. Clears up some o’ the crust too.”
Crust? Oi.
I spoke more softly now. Not to be more secretive, but kind of like when one guy gets kicked below the belt and the whole group talks funny for a while in sympathy. “This is the cure, then?”
“Nah. It’s better, though. The doc’ll give ya pills to cure it. This’ll just make ya feel good through the rough times. Some o’ the guys put this stuff on even when they don’t got anything wrong with ’em, that’s how good it is.”
Wheels turned.
“So it’s not, you know, disease-specific? It’s more of a general... salve?”
“Ya, that’s it. Salve-ation, right?”
“And I could put it on, say, a cut, or... a rash, or something...”
“You mean your ’rhoids? Sure.”
Is nothing sacred?
I curled back up into snail position. “Thanks. ’Preciate it. See ya ’round.”
He smirked. A smirk of disbelief. Showed me his big hairy palm. Yes, hair growing in the palm. “And it’s only gonna cost ya two things,” he said way kindly, which was way scary.
“Only two?”
“Yup. The first is fifty dollars.”
“F—? Darth, I don’t have fifty—” I stared down at the tube of EXTREME UNCTION. There was nothing written on the label other than the name. And that looked like it was hand-lettered.
“You can’t get this in any stores,” he said, sounding like a Ginsu salesman on TV.
He was gently waving both hands now to ease my fears (which was of course fanning my fears). He’d gone from brotherly to fatherly to grandfatherly in short order. I was sinking fast.
“You don’t have to pay me right now. It’s your good fortune that I also finance.”
Does it sound to you as if “No, thank you anyway, Darth” was an option? Nah, me neither.
“Thank you, Darth,” I said as weakly as possible.
“And the second thing is even simpler,” he said brightly. “All you need to do is give us your solemn-oath confirmation that this girl—her name is Sally, if I’m not mistaken—did in fact give you this problem.”
Oh. Oh my. That was the simple part then? A quick calculation left me with the options of either lying and dragging another person through the mud with me, or—gasp—disappointing Darth.
Now, while our friendship was still kind of new, it did trouble me greatly to think of disappointing him.
And who was “us”? How did Darth become multiple all of a sudden?
What to say?
My disease had made me popular. I’d get a badly needed reputation, one I’d never be able to actually earn on my own. And I’d get to keep my lunches. Anyway, maybe I didn’t have to lie. How did he put it? Did Sally in fact give me the problem? Well, sure, the whole thing with the hands. Scabies, VD, psoriasis, what’s the difference, really?
Just one bit of clarification, and I could get through this. “Now, solemn oath means exactly what here?”
Darth sighed. Breaking me in was wearying him. “You will find, Elvin, that in dealing with me, you are playing on the field of honor. Honor is all that matters. Trust. I trust people not to let me down. When you do that, people tend to not let you down. The honor system is the best system.”
Ah, that again. I’ve worked with that system before.
“Yes,” I said. “Sally gave me my problem.”
By the time the words had left me, my stomach was doing flips, my mouth had gone dry. It had seemed, when Darth presented it, so simple. And then, it w
as so not.
Darth stood up. “Enjoy the ointment,” he said, walking away from me as if I had a disease or something. Does it seem to you that I just did something bad?
Greasing The Skids
I FELT BETTER JUST holding it in my hand.
The ointment, ya pervert.
It was like a magical thing, like inside this small, obscenely expensive tube, was the gel that controlled my popularity. Everybody wanted a piece of me now.
“I cannot believe,” Frank said, “that after all this time with my nose up that guy’s ass...”
Is it just because I was oversensitive to the issue at this point, or did people generally make ass references way too often?
“... he turns around and buddies up with you.”
“Do you have to say it like that?”
“What? Say what?”
“You. The way you said you, meaning me, was like I was something stuck on the tip of your finger.”
“Sorry.” He seemed to mean it. “Can I be your friend?”
Sigh. “You’ve been my friend for a long time, Frank.”
“Ya, but now I want to tell people.”
This time the sigh was out loud, and unintentional. “Sure, Franko, you can tell people. Why did I think popularity was going to be more fun than this? Why does it look so good on you? Is it like a suit, or a nice fabric like silk or something, that it just hangs better on one person than it does on another?”
Then, after a pause, Frankie sighed back at me. Which was something. He doesn’t pause before speaking, as a rule. And he does not sigh publicly. “Okay, El, listen to me. This is what I want you to do. Ready? Don’t pay attention to what popularity looks like on me. In fact, don’t pay too much notice to what I look like at all.”
“What are you talking about? I thought you were showing me how great it was to be like you?”
“That was before Darth. Okay? Darth is, like, not a nice guy, you know?”
“I don’t know,” I said, the old nerves acting up as we got too near to serious. “He has a certain—”
“El,” Frank snapped. “Popularity can be expensive.”
He wasn’t talking about the fifty-dollar unction. I was this close to joking my way right out of this conversation. If I had not known how much Frankie had endured to make his way into the inner circle, I would have.
