“But you didn’t wet your pants on the bus. You wet your pants at the bus stop.” I’m trying not to laugh when I say this.
Crash looks at me suspiciously. “I’m dead meat,” he says.
“Dad will handle it okay. He’s just been upset about Grandpa.” Which is true. In fact, we’re all worried. My grandfather’s eighty-five and coming off his second stroke. Although my father didn’t have a great relationship with him as a kid, they’ve gotten closer over the years, and Crash and I try to hang with my grandfather whenever we can.
“I’m roadkill,” Crash says.
“That’s kind of dramatic.”
“Not if you’re the kid who wet his pants.”
When we get to the house, my mother has left for work and Irene for school. My father peers up from his newspaper. He’s about fifteen years older than my friends’ dads, so he looks tired a lot. But he’s in good shape, so most people think he’s only about fifty. He has a receding hairline and gold wire-rimmed glasses. Someone once said he looked “smart.” I tracked down that word in the Book and think “professorial” works better. He actually was a high school history teacher, but now he’s retired and works part-time at a local golf course’s pro shop. Whenever someone asks why he retired early (at fifty-nine), he responds with three words: “Crash and Benny.”
“I’m afraid to ask what this is about,” he says matter-of-factly.
I have to give Crash credit because he gets right to the point. “I wet my pants. I know I’m a loser, so you don’t have to say it.”
In fact, my father has sometimes used the word “loser” when completely frustrated by us, but he’s always spent the next two weeks apologizing for it, so I’m not sure why Crash is bringing it up.
“You’re not a loser, Crash,” my father says.
He points to his damp crotch. “Oh yes I am.”
“Do you know why this happened?” my father asks.
“Why does it matter?” Crash says.
“It matters because you can’t fix something if you don’t know why it’s broken.”
This is an interesting conversation, but I wish he’d just let Crash change instead of lecturing him. I’m about five feet from Crash, and I can smell the urine. “I’m going to be late for school,” I say.
“I’ll drive you both.”
“But I want to ride my bike.”
“Right now, Benny, I don’t care what you want.”
Crash interrupts. “Can’t you just tell me what the lesson is, so I can change?”
“The lesson is that you spent all morning complaining to your mother. You whined about the clothes she set out for you, you blamed her for misplacing your book, and you grumbled about your cereal being soggy.”
“Well, it was.”
“It got soggy while you were complaining.”
I can’t help smiling when he says this.
“What are you smiling about?”
“Nothing,” I say.
My father turns back to Crash. “In short, you wet your pants because you spent the morning focusing on crap instead of taking care of business.” He never would have said “crap” if my mother were here, and if he had a copy of the Book (which I once offered him), he could’ve chosen from “baloney, drivel, idiocy, hogwash, twaddle.”
Crash responds by saying about twenty times in a row, “Okay, okay, okay,” and then my father sends him upstairs.
Ten minutes later, we’re on a brief stretch of the interstate because my father decides he wants a doughnut before taking us to school. He’s dodging a black BMW that cuts us off. “Idiot,” he says, making a hand gesture I’ve never seen before. It’s like he wants to shoot the guy the finger but doesn’t want to do it in front of us, so three fingers go up and flail in various directions before he slaps his hand down on the wheel. “These morons think they drive bumper cars.”
“Mom doesn’t like name-calling,” Crash says.
“And I was actually going to buy you a doughnut, Crash,” my father says.
“He’s right, though,” I add, even though you’d have to page through about a thousand synonyms for “moron” to do justice to Rhode Island drivers.
“And I was going to get you one too,” my father says, obviously happy with himself.
Now, my mother would’ve seen this drama as a very “negative” way to start the day, and Irene, who hates conflict of any kind, would’ve had to be put on medication, but the three of us aren’t too fazed by it. Just the opposite, because my father, in spite of his threat, ends up buying Crash and me apple fritters, then giving us high fives when he drops us off, as if the apple fritters were a reward for surviving each other or passing some kind of Alvarez test.
Ms. Demigoddess
In homeroom, Beanie says, “Where were you this morning? We waited for you at the bike rack.”
“Long story,” I say.
“Just the usual dementia praecox, I guess,” Beanie says.
“A little early for wordplay, Beanie, don’t you think?”
“You know the rules, Benny: there are no rules.”
Big Joe, who’s sitting in front of me, turns and says, “Geeks.” Big Joe’s head is the size of a basketball, but he has a tiny nose, like someone hit it with a hammer about a hundred times. He has a blond brush cut and dark-brown eyes. Just about every guy I know with blond hair has blue eyes, but it’s like God was sleeping on the job when Big Joe was born. That would account for his huge arms, which inexplicably are attached to very tiny hands.
“Speaking of dementia praecox,” Beanie says.
“If you write it down,” Big Joe says, “I’ll bet I could guess it.”
“But then you’d be part of our club,” Beanie says. “And that would be demented.” He looks slyly at me, and Big Joe completely misses Beanie’s word hint.
“Too easy now,” I say. “Yeah, it was crazy at my house this morning. It was definitely dementia praecox.”
“Not so fast. You got the dementia but not the praecox.”
“That’s not even English.”
“No, it’s Latin,” a familiar, sarcastic voice butts in from behind. “It means ‘premature.’ So ‘dementia praecox’ means, put crassly, ‘crazy before your time.’”
“How did you know that, Claudine?” Big Joe, somewhat in awe, says. Big Joe is always gaping at Claudine. She could order him to kneel on his chair and bark like a puppy if she wanted to.
Claudine doesn’t answer, but instead holds up a black book. It’s a Latin dictionary she lugs around because she signed up for an experimental class. Some big-shot administrator decided that we’re all dummies unless we know Latin, so the school is offering a special section to seventh graders. After I discovered the Book, I almost signed up, but my father said learning Latin is about as useful as speaking Martian.
Although Claudine annoys me, she’s right that many English words come from Latin, so I always tell Beanie and Jocko not to play our game around her. I can’t stand it when she acts superior.
“Anyone can look a word up,” I say.
“You should know,” she counters.
“Not true. We guess words from their contexts,” I say, making myself feel smarter than I am.
Big Joe just won’t stay out of it. “What’s context?”
Context is something our English teacher Ms. Bogan taught us last year, but before I can answer, Beanie starts in. “It’s like if I say, ‘Big Joe is a constant vexation to his peers,’ everyone knows Big Joe makes fun of everyone and threatens them, so it’s easy to guess the meaning of the word ‘vexation.’”
Big Joe squints, his left eyebrow jutting up about an inch higher than his right. He points his little index finger at Beanie. “Recess,” he says.
Now Beanie’s going to have to volunteer in the library if he doesn’t want to get hassled, but he’s smiling, so it must be worth it.
“You’re just annoyed, Benny,” Claudine says, “because I know more about words than you do.”
“
Yeah,” Big Joe says, “what’s your problem with Claudine?” Then he looks at her. “If he bugs you, let me know and I’ll teach him a lesson.”
“I don’t have a problem with you,” I say to Claudine. By now everyone in the class is listening.
Becky Walters starts fake-coughing into her hand, and Paige Burnett, another friend of Claudine’s, says, “So not true.”
“Well, I don’t,” I repeat.
“You can’t even look at me when you talk to me,” Claudine says.
She’s right about that. Claudine has long, reddish-brown curly hair that falls over her shoulders. Her face is thin, her nose tiny, but she has big eyes that freak me out. They tend to sparkle every time she gets excited, which is always, sometimes morphing from green to blue for no apparent reason. All I know is that when she stares at me, I get very confused and feel my face redden. I’ve thought about mentioning it to Jocko because he’s friends with a lot of girls, but he’d probably laugh at me.
Fortunately, before I can answer, Ms. D comes into the room, placing her satchel on her desk. She looks around, then at me, and says, “Have I interrupted anything, Benny?” as if she assumes I’m causing trouble. “No, Ms. Butterfield,” I say. She’s looking snazzy today in white jeans, black sandals, and a red silk sleeveless top. She’s also wearing a white pearl necklace. She has a round face and high cheekbones, her blue eyes seeming to have grown larger since she got her hair cut short. She looks like an older version of Claudine, especially because her hair is red. I mentioned that to Beanie once, and he said, “You’re not going to start stalking her, are you?”
Jocko is the one who came up with Ms. Demigoddess. When we first saw her, Beanie said she was “hot,” but that didn’t work for Jocko, so he went to the Book. “Princess,” “prima donna,” and “goddess” didn’t quite fit either, but “demigoddess” did, because a demigoddess is part human and part divine. I know that seems over the top, but then you haven’t seen Ms. D. Even when she does simple things, like emptying her satchel, as she’s doing now, she seems, well, I haven’t found the right word for that yet.
She addresses the class. “As I told you, besides the usual spelling, writing, and grammar, we’re going to focus on poetry for the month of October.”
A major guy-groan follows.
“Why is it that boys hate poetry?” Ms. D says, waiting for a boy to answer, but Claudine beats us to it.
“Because they think they’re supposed to,” she says.
“Interesting,” Ms. D says, placing her hands palms down on her desk and leaning forward. When she does this, her necklace sways back and forth, kind of hypnotizing me.
“How about because it’s dumb,” Big Joe says, waiting for kids to laugh, but they don’t, so he tries again. “I mean what good is poetry? No one talks it.”
Paige Burnett, who’s always writing stuff in her journal, then slamming it shut when you walk by, says, “People ‘talk it’ every day, you big goof.”
“No name-calling,” Ms. D says, though I can see she’s more amused than angry.
You don’t want to mess with Paige. She’s smart and knows it. She wears these bright-purple glasses specked with silver, like she’s proud of all the reading she does. She also plays lacrosse, and I get the feeling she could smack you around if you annoyed her. “What I mean,” she says, composing herself, “is that poetry is music, like rap music”—then she gawks momentarily at Big Joe to emphasize his stupidity—“and we listen to it every day. Kids are always singing lyrics,” and she goes on about how “poetry is also found in nature,” followed by a lot of other strange ideas.
We can tell Ms. D is excited by this turn in the conversation because she’s striding around on her long legs, making sweeping hand gestures. She gets so worked up about literature that she must be pretty pooped by the end of the day.
“Now we’re onto something,” she says. “Let’s ask one of the Word Warriors what he thinks.”
I’m hoping she’s talking about Beanie, and I wish we had kept the club secret, but why have a club if you can’t exclude people, and kids won’t know they’re excluded unless they know the club exists.
“What’s your take on poetry, Benny?” she says.
My take is that I think less about poetry than I do about the two glands on Spot’s rear end that the vet told us to massage twice a week.
I go for something simple. “It’s not anything I really think about.”
“But isn’t the point of the thesaurus and synonyms to help us see the metaphorical implications of words, and isn’t that what poetry is partly about?”
I can almost hear Claudine’s head nodding crazily from behind.
“Huh?” is the best I can do.
Ms. D laughs. “Huh?”
“Sorry, Ms. Butterfield, but that’s a little heavy for me.” Now everyone’s laughing, and Paige’s face seems frozen between rage and pity for me.
Ms. D approaches my desk and places her hand on my shoulder. This is the first time she’s ever touched me, and my heart is doing a strange kind of rumba.
“Not to worry, Benny,” she says, then scans the entire class. “Even those of you who think you understand poetry and metaphor have a lot to learn, which is why my poet-friend Caulfield Thomas Jones is coming to class tomorrow.”
“Not that dweeb,” Beanie mumbles, but Ms. D pretends she doesn’t hear him.
Caulfield Thomas Jones is a poet and novelist who’s supposedly from England and who the school pays to make classroom visits, even though none of us have ever heard of his books.
“Now, let’s get back to basics,” she says. “I asked you to look up Jack London last night. What did you come up with, Paige?” For the next ten minutes, we all sit comatose, listening to how Paige stayed up until three a.m. making sure her paper would be longer than anyone else’s.
Grandpa
When I get home, my father’s finishing up laundry. He seems distracted, so I know he’s been working on his book about the stock market crash of 2008. I should say he’s rewriting the book, because every time he sends it to a publisher, they tell him it’s “too general.”
“If I hear that one more time,” he says, “I’m going to blow up something.” You might think someone who talks like this is pretty crazy, but he exaggerates on purpose to jerk people around.
My mother would say this rant is a “negative response to rejection.” But she’s not saying anything right now, because she’s at work. She’s a hospital administrator. I’m not sure what she does, but that hospital must be the most positive one in Providence. I imagine nurses sticking smiley-face decals onto your head as they wheel you into the operating room.
“Where’s Crash?” I ask, watching Dad empty the dryer.
“Up in his room.”
“What for?”
“For shooting off his mouth.”
“Boy, is he having a bad day.”
“The whole world’s having a bad day, Benny.”
I let that one go. “Can I help?” I ask.
“With the world?”
“No, with the laundry.”
“You don’t think it’s feminine to do housework?”
“Huh?”
“That’s what Jocko or whatever-his-name-is-this-month said.”
I try to place that conversation but can’t.
“You were on the back porch talking about your English teacher again.”
Now I recall Jocko saying something about my father being like a mom.
“You got Jocko wrong, Dad. He thinks it’s cool you’re home and that I have an older dad.”
“He won’t feel that way when I’m dead before you even get to college. You know, three out of my five best friends have bitten the dust.” He makes this point quite frequently, which annoys my mother, who’s thirteen years younger than him. She thinks this kind of talk scares Crash, who has obviously demolished the mood of the house today. I often wonder whether he’d be different if my parents had called him Jay or Asher, since b
oth those names mean “happy” in other languages.
“You’ll live forever, Dad,” I say.
He can always detect a fake positive response, so he ignores me. “Look,” he says, “I’m going to finish this pile. Then we’re taking your grandfather putting. He’s not doing too well.”
“You want me to get our clubs?” I say.
“Whatever you do, don’t forget Crash’s putter or we’ll have to sedate him.”
Ten minutes later, we’re on the road to my grandfather’s house in East Providence. It’s a pretty uneventful ride. Crash seems exhausted by eight hours of his own orneriness, and my father doesn’t discover any rich CEOs or incompetent drivers to yell at.
When we pull up to the house, my grandfather is sitting on the front porch, holding his putter between his legs. It’s October but warm, so he’s wearing tan shorts and a striped polo shirt, along with golf shoes and his blue Navy PT Boat hat, whose headband is stained white with sweat. Strands of gray hair fall to his neck, and his arms and legs are spotted with different shades of brown moles, which my father says are the result of years of playing golf and being a mailman.
“Hi, Dad,” my father says.
“Hi, Grandpa,” Crash and I chime in. My grandfather’s about the only person Crash seems happy around.
“That woman,” my grandfather says, pointing behind him. His eyes, sky blue, seem agitated.
“That woman” is Gloria, my grandfather’s second wife. He’s been married to her for about thirty years, and all they do is fight.
“Two marriages,” he says, “and I couldn’t get it right. Boy, did you luck out with Marjorie.” He has a little trouble standing, so my father helps him.
“It’s Margaret, Dad.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
After the second stroke, my grandfather dodged paralysis, but he has trouble with names and can’t make sense of words when he tries to read, which ticks him off. But he can still putt a ball around the practice green at Firefly, the par-three course where my father works.
“I’m going to whip you guys today,” he says.
“If you can stand that long,” Crash says.
The Life and Times of Benny Alvarez Page 2
