Call me Jane (The Oshkosh Trilogy)

by Anthea Carson

  I had that nervous, twittery feeling. I hadn’t seen him since before the night we all watched Motel Hell. When they came in, they joined us and didn’t order right away. They had to sit at a table near us, because there were too many people at ours. I could feel Paul watching me with Ziggy’s ape arm draped over my shoulder. I just wanted to stand up and wrench his arm off of me. I started smoldering underneath it. I noticed Lucy was eyeing me too, probably wanting to make sure I did indeed like Ziggy, so I couldn’t move too much or escape from him.

  Then I noticed Krishna.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  She giggled, and continued licking and biting her ice-cream cone: sculpting it. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Everyone started staring, including people not at our table. A middle-aged couple averted their eyes and nervously left the area.

  At first the guys were laughing outright.

  “Stop doing that,” Raj said, and tried to slap it out of her hands. She giggled. “That’s disturbing. Especially watching my sister do that.”

  She licked up and down her ice-cream sculpture, stopping at the tip to lick around it, creating a helmet shape at the top, and running her tongue lightly up and down the groove.

  “Don’t you dare stop her,” said Dave.

  Paul stared with his jaw dropped. Lucy put her hand in front of his eyes.

  “Ever seen one of those?” Ziggy tickled me on my side with his other arm. I know I blushed, and I saw Paul instantly glance over at me.

  “Janey Lou? I doubt it, unless Ken dolls are fully anatomically accurate,” said Gay.

  Everyone laughed at this, except for Paul. Ziggy tickled me some more and whispered an offer to show me a real one.

  “And you? You will never look at one of those,” I snapped back at Gay, “because you don’t want to.”

  There was a tense moment of silence, then Gay replied, “You just better watch yourself, Blondie, because Lord knows you want everyone else to watch you.”

  I felt a hot, tingling sensation on my face when she said this, which caused me to elbow Ziggy in the stomach, at which he point he gripped his sides and laughed uproariously.

  “Come on, Krishna, show us all how you can put that whole thing in your mouth now. We all know you can do it,” said Dave.

  Krishna was ignoring everyone, and working on her sculpture. She was really good at this. It looked completely real, and yes, I had seen one before. I’d seen photos and sculptures at the Louvre in Paris, and in ancient art books and such, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them that’s the only place I’d seen one.

  Krishna was carving out every detail, making it more and more lifelike. The boys were growing silent, and the girls were cheering her on, especially Gay. A crowd had formed of random teenage boys, and Krishna began running her tongue up and down it.

  More crowds formed.

  “Come on Krishna,” Dave pleaded. “Come on, show us you can put the whole thing in your mouth.”

  And that’s just what Krishna did. She nearly fit the whole thing in her mouth, and what she couldn’t fit in her mouth ended up on her face, at which point everyone cheered except Raj, who hid his face in disgust.

  “I am seriously disturbed now,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Now that was a work of art,” said Gay.

  Paul and Lucy had left a while ago to place their order.

  Gay kept bringing up that I’d never seen one. Ziggy laughed, and Krishna giggled wickedly, maniacally.

  Suddenly I felt an overwhelming urge to just push Ziggy off of me, and I did.

  “Get your fucking hands off of me,” I hissed.

  I stormed out of there. On my way out of the Burger King, I heard Ziggy say, “What the hell’s wrong with Janey Lou? Where is she going?”

  “She wants you to call her Jane, she doesn’t like that name,” Krishna told him.

  “Is that why she’s leaving?” Ziggy asked.

  As I looked in the glass on my way out the door, I saw Paul start to walk toward me, and Lucy pull him back by his arm.

  Gay chased me outside and said, “I’m sorry,” she said. “Don’t leave, please, I need a ride home. I’m sorry. I was just kidding around.”

  “Fine, just get in then.”

  “Ziggy is asking whether you’re mad at him in there. You should go tell him you’re not. You like him now, right? I thought you liked Paul.”

  “No. I can’t stand Ziggy. I do like Paul. Ziggy is driving me nuts. He won’t take his hands off me now every time we see him. He thinks he owns me,” I said, as I squealed out of the parking lot.

  “Oh,” said Gay, nodding, staring straight ahead down New York Avenue.

  When I arrived home I was exhausted. I usually wasn’t this tired on a Sunday night. All I wanted to do was sleep and sleep after I drove Gay home.

  “Ziggy called,” my mom said when I walked in the door, which meant she was up, that’s how early it was. I knew I had school tomorrow, and would be even more tired.

  I went into my room and collapsed on the bed. I had nearly fallen asleep when my mom opened the door.

  “Ziggy’s on the phone for you.”

  “I can’t talk to him right now, I’m asleep.”

  “Well, I’m not going to tell him that. You tell him yourself,” she said. and shut the door.

  Normally this would have really irritated me, but I was so tired I didn’t even bother growing mad. I just went back to sleep. If I had been less tired, I still wouldn’t have heard that emergency buzzing sound the phone makes after the person on the other end hangs up. I wondered vaguely, as I fell into a dream state, whether my mom would hang the phone up when she heard it. Maybe it would be my dad, coming in from working late at the office. Why did phones make that sound anyway? It sounded so much more alarming than any other sound, much more than even a siren. I think my dream was starting.

  Suddenly I heard a tapping on my picture window. At first it didn’t even wake me up, just melded together with the sirens and emergency phone sounds and dial tones. Then the tapping became a little louder. I sat up in my bed.

  I turned to look out the window. I didn’t have any curtains, so whoever was out there could watch me sleep, if they could see in.

  I listened, and looked out by my maple tree. Oh no, I bet it was Ziggy.

  “Jane,” he whispered. “Are you awake?”

  “Paul?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, no.”

  “You want to go for a ride? I have some pot,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said, and climbed through the window.

  We drove to Menomonee Park, and then out to the carp ponds by the lighthouse. I arrived home again around 3:00 a.m. and crawled in again through the window.

  EIGHTEEN

  I wandered aimless in the halls outside the cafeteria in front of the gym. The students ate cheeseburgers and fries. I could see Gay over there sitting with all her jock friends. Honest to God, you’d think she didn’t even know my name. Wouldn’t look over at me, wouldn’t even look away from her lively conversation. I was fuming silently about that when Lucy came running down the hall.

  “Ziggy came up to me,” she was out of breath, “he said, ‘Why isn’t Jane talking to me?’ Why aren’t you talking to him?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  I had been successfully avoiding this question for two whole weeks. Every night my mom told me three times that he called, which made me hate him almost as much as I hated her for telling me this. Every night on my pillow there were three or four messages that he’d called, along with the times. Every night I tore them to shreds, angrier than the night before. I finally requested that she stop informing me of his calls. This caused her to double and triple the number of times she told me, and to place the notes in more places to ensure I saw them. They were taped on the refrigerator, taped on the mirror of my bathroom, and since she knew I’d throw them off the pillow, she placed them under the sheets
so they would stick on my skin when I climbed into bed.

  I ended up screaming for her to stop telling me about his calls.

  “I’m just delivering the message,” she shrugged, more indifferent to my outrage than she was concerned about the pan she was about to put on the stove.

  “Ugh!”

  I had stopped going inside when we stopped by his house to pick up dope, and if the party ended up at his house I just went home. Unless Paul was there. Then I always found an isolated place to sit so he couldn’t squeeze me up against another guy again. I hated it when he talked. I avoided his eye contact as fiercely as he sought mine.

  “Um,” I began again, “Lucy, I have a one o’clock class, I gotta go,” and I sped away from her to Mrs. De Muprathne’s room, where I knew she couldn’t follow. She tried, but when she saw me slip in there she stopped just short of the door. Nobody messed with Mrs. De Muprathne. Not even Lucy, though I’m sure Lucy didn’t understand what it was about Mrs. De Muprathne that stopped her. It was something in her eye. It was something in her stature, short, and elegant. She wore diamond-studded glasses. She lifted them back and forth from her nose to her chest with grace and a kind of majestic force.

  “Jane,” she said, “you are late.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I took my place behind Glinda.

  “That’s disappointing. I just read the class your description of a first date: very funny and amusing. I love your writing.”

  “Wow, really?” I said.

  Glinda turned around with her cat eyes and said, “It was awesome. I loved your description of the trees.”

  “You write,” Mrs. De Muprathne hovered, looking for the words, “like a painter paints. I love your imagery. Now the question is,” she removed her glasses and looked at me, “will you ever stick with anything in your entire life long enough to get truly good at it?”

  NINETEEN

  “It was rude of you not to return my calls,” Ziggy said. I stood there, stunned, in front of my car. “We needed to know who could drive,” Ziggy continued.

  Why did he have to say this with everyone standing around, I wondered, everyone silent while he attacked me. Well, not everyone. Krishna stood there looking uncomfortable, the nervous laugh she gave out lasted less than a second. Raj ignored what was going on, and loaded the van and the car with instruments. There weren’t many concerts left for the Transistors. They would all be going off to college after graduation, and that was only a few weeks away. Then there was the summer, and a concert here and a concert there, and then they’d be gone. There was one coming up in a couple of weeks in Chicago at Zack’s Tavern.

  “What do you mean? Of course I’m driving.”

  “People were put out. Inconvenienced, because of you.”

  “God!” I huffed, and turned away from him. “Are you still riding with me?” I asked Krishna, who shrugged.

  “We don’t need your car,” Raj said, stopping briefly from loading the van. “But you can ride in the back of mine with Paul and Chrystal and Dave.”

  Where was Lucy, why wasn’t she coming too? Well, I didn’t know, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask now that Ziggy had made my insides go hot and cold with humiliation. I just hopped into the back between Paul and Dave, and let Krishna ride in the front with her brother. Everyone seemed to be switching cars at the last minute; Gay jumped into Walt’s car with some guy I didn’t know and Tom and Ziggy, who sat with his arms folded. He acted all self righteous like a damn judge. God, did I feel stupid. Thanks a lot, you jerk! My thoughts must be hitting him, because I thought them so intensely. I glared through the window from Raj’s car to the one he rode in. I know he could feel it. How dare he confront me like that? Why should I return his stupid calls? And are you going to tell me that three weeks of that was about arranging the rides?

  Okay, so maybe it was. Who cares? I wonder if Paul knows that. I looked over at him. He didn’t seem to be aware of any of this, so I calmed down a little. Besides, Lucy wasn’t here, thank God!

  We had lots of dope, packed up like underwear and socks. We had beer. Paul seemed chatty and elated, and Raj said, “Let’s go.” We left my car sitting in the Oshkosh North parking lot for the night. I wonder how that little blue tin can looked there all alone in the dark.

  TWENTY

  I don’t know how it started. I don’t know when it started. Maybe it was the fact that we weren’t used to seeing black people in Oshkosh, and the tavern where the Transistors was playing was in a very black part of Milwaukee.

  Or maybe the mere existence of skinhead punks just unleashed something in us, but for some reason we suddenly became a terrible group of racists in the back of that car once we arrived in Milwaukee. Everyone in the back of Raj’s car was telling one offensively racist joke after another.

  I remember having been shocked when I first heard of skinhead punks, and their racist hatred of Jews. Maybe once I let it soak into my consciousness that it was okay, or cool to make jokes about the Jews like the skinhead punks did, suddenly it became okay for the first time to make fun of other groups too, groups I would have never dreamed of mocking before.

  Whatever it was that started us, once we reached the inner city of Milwaukee, the awful jokes in the backseat started to fly nonstop. We all laughed like these were the funniest things in the world, these stupid jokes. They were basically the same theme over and over again: watermelon and fried chicken. See a billboard with black people on it, and an advertisement for chicken, and bust out laughing.

  I don’t know what Krishna and Raj had been talking about up in the front seat, but surely they could see the humor in this. After all, Raj did give me a tray full of cookies with swastikas during those couple of weeks when we talked on the phone and went out a few times. When he told me his phone number, he said to memorize it by the year Hitler invaded Poland.

  “They are eating some watermelon on that front porch–look! Oh my God!” Dave and Paul and Crystal shouted and burst into hysterical laughter.

  In my drunken, high state it didn’t even sound like laughter. It sounded like something else, something frenetic and nervous, like some demonic force had taken over the four of us.

  “Look at that over there.” Dave pointed out the window. He was all decked up for tonight in his black leather with studs and hair spiked to the ceiling and shaved in a Mohawk. I’d never seen him quite this punked out. “They’re eating chicken!”

  “Hey,” Chrystal said, just after she inhaled deeply from her ever-present menthol cigarette. “There’s a sign for another chicken place.”

  In the midst of the next bout of laughter, I wondered, Is this all there was to laugh about, concerning them? But I didn’t say it out loud; I kept this thought to myself because I was sitting right up against Paul, and he was laughing and we were having fun.

  In my drunken, high state, the trees seemed to fly by the windows, shimmering with the green and yellow colors of springtime. There was a certain lightness in the air. It was all okay, this was a great buzz; we were drinking beers and tossing the empty cans out the window, which Raj had to unroll for us electronically. As if we were children, he wouldn’t let us operate the windows for ourselves.

  Paul pulled out his smokeless pipe and filled it with another bowl. I loved that smokeless pipe. I needed to buy myself one of those.

  We must have been drawing closer to the bar. The streets had fewer trees, but instead of letting that ruin my dreamy state, I just adjusted to the new scenery with an equally wonderful feeling of contentment. I had long forgotten being yelled at by Ziggy, since he wasn’t riding in this car. I began leaning my head back against the seat and daydreaming about Paul, listening to the continuous background noise that the racist jokes and laughter had become, when suddenly Raj turned the radio down sharply, then turned it off.

  “Hey!” he yelled. I had never heard him yell before. “Hey, knock it off. You know, I’m offended by those jokes.”

  All four of us came to a jolting stop in mid-se
ntence. The rotten jokes were instantly replaced by the sound of the whirring of the motor and the low humming of the rubber against the road. I think I even lost my buzz.

  We rode the rest of the way to the concert listening passively to a quiet conversation between Raj and Krishna. We looked out the windows. None of us spoke. None of us looked at each other, like we were too ashamed.

  I drank more beers, and when we arrived there, I stumbled into the place in a complete fog. I saw our band setting up their equipment out of the corner of my eye. I couldn’t figure out where I was, what I was doing, and I didn’t care. The alcohol poured in a continual flow. We didn’t need to pay for it. No one cared if we smoked pot right out in the open or rolled joints right in front of both the bartender and the owner, who milled around talking to the Transistor boys.

  I like to call them the Transistor boys because they were all boys, and they all resisted me. The owner of the bar was a man, and yet he wasn’t a man. Not like I pictured a man, anyway, because he was all into everything we were into, including those Transistor boys. He was vague looking, probably because I was so drunk. Just a blurry random bunch of nothing details, but for some reason he seemed important. Maybe because for that night he made us seem important–by us, of course, I mean the band, which me and Krishna and Gay and Chrystal weren’t part of technically. But we received the free drinks too.