Simon Apple wondered—in that moment when everything was moving along ahead of schedule and everybody but Simon Apple seemed on track—why the poets of pop sang of depression and despair, why the wails of the lovesick and lonely topped the charts, why so many faces of the class of ’78 looked besieged, angry, frustrated, frightened, bewitched, bothered and mostly bewildered. The constipated comedy shows on TV weren’t funny, give or take too few exceptions.
As Robert J. liked to say about the endless supply of complaining zillionaires, those anointed angels blathering on talk shows, the celebrity gods and goddesses explaining their pain, “Go figure.”
Simon divided his peers into four camps:
First were the Focused Ones—the achievers, the contenders who already saw themselves snap neatly into place in life’s jigsaw. They would grow up to be doctors, lawyers, tycoons, super-salesmen, marketing wizards. No question, they knew their place in the scheme of things-to-come; they scoffed at the very idea of failure and already planned for financial security and productive old age.
That group played sports, joined afternoon clubs, gave time to worthy organizations, storing chips they knew would be redeemable when the time came to fill out applications to the hotshot universities.
They looked ahead to the day when they’d own sprawling houses, designer clothes, trendy cats and dogs, red Ferraris; they plotted long vacations, first class all the way. They knew who they were and what they wanted. They moved purposefully along The Yellow Brick Road in the direction of Fair and Warmer. They talked about finding perfect spouses and raising shining children. They heard cash registers ring like church bells in the distance.
Those Most-Likely-Tos scared the shit out of Simon who couldn’t understand why they were unconcerned with the slobbering, gore-dripping demons and devils outside their windows, waiting to cut them down to size. Some of those Gung-Ho! fighter pilots might actually make it past Glenda’s city limits but most would end up peddling insurance, owning hamburger franchises or running stores like Quikpix. Simon thought about the empty pages in Robert J.’s album waiting like unfilled graves for snapshots of their private parts. Still, he envied the motivated ones.
He had no clear map of his own future, no North Star to guide him, not even a best-case scenario in his fantasy life. Every career Simon considered seemed like forced labor. His own compass pointed him in simultaneously opposing directions. The prospect of holding down a steady job, of marrying and reproducing was as frightening to him as the game of golf.
The second group Simon isolated in his dissection of Glenda High, rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers, was a larger group Simon called The Whirlpools. They kept time and tide on hold, accepting teenage life as an eternal limbo where nothing counted for much and neither action nor inaction had consequences.
Their dreams were modest, they gladly settled for C’s and D’s, moving generally forward like jellyfish drifting toward shore. They would be plumbers, carpenters, soldiers, dental technicians, secretaries, maybe own beauty parlors or auto repair shops. That crowd dreamt about honeymooning in Vegas or Bermuda with some juicy Glenda boy or girl, then buying attached houses, raising tranquil families, driving American convertibles, watching television—but later, not yet, no way, because—as the magazines and movies told them—this was play time.
The guys argued over baseball, football and basketball stats, issued bulletins on gropes at the Glenda Drive-In or the backseat of a Pontiac Firebird sedan (who went down, who stayed up, who swallowed, who spit up, whose legs spread and whose stayed clamped tighter than the doors to Fort Knox). They fueled up at McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken, alchemists, transforming sugar and grease into volcanic zits they wore like battle ribbons, played Asteroids, zapped alien invaders at the Wookie Arcade, hummed REO Speedwagon tunes about love’s labor lost and found—or found and lost. Mostly they just hung out, killed time, bored silly; the simmering Young, the smouldering Restless, ready to pounce.
The girls flew like sparrows to the Glenda Mall checking out Jordache Jeans—wanting the look any jock would want to know better—drooling over Robert Redford’s buns, defending their favorite Beatle or Bee Gee, waiting for the next episode of Mod Squad, fantasizing a night with Tom Selleck at Studio 54 in New York, New York.
Simon watched The Whirlpools spin from class to class banging backpacks, swinging pocketbooks, happily clueless, content to goof around, smoke a Camel or a joint in the toilet, get through the day, in no hurry to replace their moms and dads. He heard them grunt like the chimps in Tarzan flicks, amazed that they were absolutely unaware that the world was waiting to mulch them. He was a little jealous of that crowd too. Nothing bothered them except homework.
The third contingent was, to Simon Apple, made up of the true elitists: The Sensitives who considered themselves enlightened avatars of the arts. They were the buds of poets, painters, film directors, philosophers, united in their contempt of avarice; the gifted, answerable only to a Higher Power, like the makers of Hebrew National kosher frankfurters. They listened to jazz (Miles, Ella, Bix, Lena, Sarah), folk (Pete, Joan, Woodie, Judy) and classical (Wolfgang, Ludwig, Bella, Igor), talked art (Picasso, Modigliani, Calder, Klee, Matisse) took on Cold War politics (why fiddle with Fidel, mess with Mao or piss on Nikita) went to flicks with English sub-titles, read books they didn’t have to read, and magazines like The Paris Review without pictures.
The Sensitives were a tiny group who managed to find one another in the swirling student clot and quickly circled their wagons against attack by roaming savages. Simon was attracted to that snobby set; he especially liked their long-haired girls with droopy eyes and peacenik jewelry. For some reason they resisted inviting him into arguments over whether Leonard Bernstein was more than 50 percent faggot or did Jack, Bobby, Joe or Arthur make Marilyn come hardest? Their indifference to him, Simon realized, was his own fault. He couldn’t work up enough enthusiasm about who wrote Beowulf —Danes, Krauts or Brits—and he couldn’t manage to bluff it with conviction.
Then there was the fourth contingent, The Night Crawlers, who gathered at midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, wearing white powder on their faces, painting their eyes and lips pitch black, dressing in camouflage jumpsuits, showing tattoos of bats and snakes on hairy arms and militant breasts, dangling skull earrings under orange or green hair, yawning and burping at befuddled teachers.
They called themselves Punks and Goths; there were maybe a dozen of those, and Simon felt some pull in their direction but it bothered him that the self-proclaimed outsiders, the revolution not evolution rebels, were, in fact, more conformist in their appearance and attitude than the Young Republicans.
When his own Polly Moon showed up one day sporting a bra she wore outside a dress made from a burlap coffee sack, one of her legs wrapped in mummy rags, the other in a net stocking, balancing on one high-heeled shoe and one leather cowboy boot, her arms covered by elbow-length white gloves, the silhouette of a bat pasted over her left cheek, Simon’s heart skipped beats. He told himself he was glad that Placebo found her place in the scheme of things but he couldn’t help feeling like he was going to howl.
The Polly Moon transformation confirmed to Simon that he belonged no place; he was doomed to live life at arm’s length, a stranger to everyone including himself.
He understood how his personal history contributed to his sense of alienation. First Hercules, then Neptune; Yesterday’s Celebrity to Today’s Has-Been—heavy baggage by any standard and without much of a support system to help with the lifting. His real mother was a vague blur. Victoria’s face was fading, breaking up in his memory like a rain puddle under a truck tire. Robert J., obsessed with his young wife, was there but not there. Rowena couldn’t help being edgy in her role as mom to a total stranger.
All that was underscored by Simon’s easy access to Robert J.’s album, the keyhole to Glenda’s parallel universe. Simon’s saucer eyes were made privy to truths usually reserved for the most intimate X
-rays; it was no wonder Simon Apple was hard to find, a floating space walker whose tether had snapped, fighting the pull of the sun’s searing gravity.
Sometimes, in public, Simon caught himself humming one of Victoria Wyzowik’s lullabies instead of the score from Saturday Night Fever.
He knew he was in big trouble.
38
Predictably, Simon’s only friend at Glenda High was new in town, one of a handful of black students from a distant suburb, a spindly boy who looked like Sammy Davis Jr., self-contained as an oyster, defended as a fortress. His debut in the school cafeteria caused a buzz when he carried his tray to the small table where Simon sat chewing a rubber chicken slab, reading You Can’t Go Home Again. “Hey, Huckleberry, you got anything against dark meat?” he said.
“Depends,” Simon said.
The unknown quantity sat down across from him and punched a hole in a paper napkin then buttoned it to his shirt. “I can’t keep the damn things from falling off my lap. They should make them with buttonholes. And they should make chopsticks hollow so you could drink soup through them. You heard it here first. I’m Chirp. At least, that’s what they call me.”
“Simon is my name.”
“Look at those plantation Negroes over there,” Chirp said, glancing at Glenda High’s five other African Americans. “All huddled together. I was sent here to integrate so I’m integrating. Free at last. What’s your take on the practice of slavery?”
“I’m not in the market right now. We’re overloaded at the plantation. But what price do you go for?”
“Top dollar,” Chirp said.
“Where did you get a name like Chirp? I thought all you guys were called Leroy.”
“Either I was conceived backstage at Birdland and my dad is Charlie Parker or it came from having a squeaky voice. Take your pick.”
“Charlie Parker, no contest,” Simon said.
“Did you know birds descended from dinosaurs? I’m not talking overnight,” Chirp said.
“I don’t believe in evolution,” Simon said. “If there was evolution how come there are so many pricks walking around?”
“I like a deep thinker,” Chirp said. “With all the tables in this high class cafe I was lucky enough to drop my ebony ass across from you.” Chirp looked up at the ceiling. “Thanks, Jesus. I owe you one.”
Simon Apple and Chirp Bennet began to pal around together. They exchanged high fives in the hall and on the staircase, shared an English class and staked out a table in the cafeteria. When the weather was good they carried their trays out to a bench facing a statue of Paul Bunyan erected by the Lion’s Club.
Most days after school Simon worked at Quikpix and Chirp took the bus back home where he worked evenings in a carwash. Chirp’s mother was a nurse at Glenda Memorial. When her schedule allowed, Chirp could skip the bus ride and hang around until she drove him home.
If Rowena was free to fill in at the store, Simon and Chirp used their free time to shoot hoops, listen to records at Shenkel’s Music, browse comic books and science fiction titles at The Twisted Mind, or just walk around downtown Glenda. They talked about everything from how to read the language of female nipples to sports cars. During one of those catch-all conversations, Simon learned that Chirp’s father was long gone, living someplace in California. Chirp heard the story of Francine Apple’s operatic exit from Simon’s life. That information seemed to cement their tie.
The two loners gradually dropped their heat shields and opened private safe-deposit boxes filled with spiders and a few half digested butterflies. Their relationship was a tug-of-war between suspicion and trust—moving forward, pulling back, meeting somewhere in the middle. After a while it dawned on Simon and Chirp that they might be called good buddies, a major surprise.
One day, sitting in the park, Chirp reached into his backpack and pulled out a drawing pad. He showed Simon a group of his sketches titled “Life Forms at Glenda High.” The drawings were incredibly detailed, almost photographic, but with another dimension; the more exact Chirp’s portraits of people Simon recognized, the less real they became, as if Chirp’s drawing pencils dissolved them into luminous spirits.
“These are fine,” Simon said.
“I guess I can draw a picture,” Chirp said. “Those sketches of yours, the ones you read in English class, they were good too. I was thinking, maybe we could come up with a term project. You do the scribbling. I do the illustrations. No bullshit allowed. We tell it like it is.”
The idea of making a book of revelations had a certain appeal to Simon. “Why the fuck not?” he said, tempted to tell Chirp about Robert J.’s album. Simon had second thoughts about sharing that information.
When Chirp left to catch his ride home, Simon thought about the amazing drawings. He would have expected caricatures or grotesques with gargoyle faces to flow from Chirp’s simmering brain, twisting the population of Glenda High into characters from a horror movie. He and Chirp had spent a lot of hours dissecting that crowd and scattering their leftovers for vulture food. Instead, Chirp made his subjects beautiful; not schmaltzy, not adorable, not cute. Just beautiful. Simon added that news to the box marked You Never Know.
Chirp’s multidimensional vision did create a problem for Simon. It would have been reasonably easy to write a series of snotty blurbs to fill balloons rising from zombie or monster cartoon heads but Chirp’s work demanded much more—a new set of inner eyes. Simon realized, in an uncomfortable flash, that he’d have to take the kids he enjoyed putting down more seriously. And before that was possible he’d have to take a long look in his own mirror.
For his trial run as an author of meaningful prose, predictably, Simon chose Chirp’s quick sketch of Polly Moon. Before he began to write, Simon spent a whole weekend browsing The Song of Solomon, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Rabelais’s Adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel and his prized collection of Archie Comics.
In Chirp’s drawing of Placebo, she sat on a rock somewhere in limbo biting into a slice of pizza, balancing a Coke between her thighs, the expression on her face flickering between Goldie Hawn and Boticelli’s Venus-on-a-Half-Shell. Her spiked, day-glo hair looked softer in charcoal, the safety pins that held her blouse together less fearsome in gray, the bat silhouette on her cheek innocent as a shadow, no more menacing than a birthmark.
In Chirp’s drawing, Polly Moon’s eyes were wide and dreamy, her eyebrows arched into rainbows, as if she’d just caught a glimpse of an approaching lover. Simon wondered who she was loving. Whoever it was, she was making a terrible mistake—her rightful young hart, leaping over mountains of spice, was none other than Apple the Scribe, holding his thesaurus, staring at a naked page, trolling for adjectives suitable to the occasion.
Deadline for presenting term projects to Miss Tabitha Ulman, a fixture for nearly a decade in Glenda High’s English Department, was the following Monday. On Sunday afternoon, Chirp called Simon at Quikpix to say he was stuck in bed with a fever, his mother thought it was flu, and asked Simon to carry the ball.
“All I have is the one picture,” Simon said, “the one of Polly Moon, and one page of copy. I thought we’d show her more stuff, explain the idea, give some details.”
“You do the explaining,” Chirp said. “It’s an act of God. I feel like a tub of cow shit.”
“Just don’t die on me,” Simon said.
On Tuesday, Chirp was still out of action. Miss Ulman requested an audience with Simon to discuss the material he’d submitted. He went after school expecting Armageddon, which is what he usually got.
Miss Ulman was at her desk reading through a stack of papers when Simon entered her classroom. Before she acknowledged his presence, without looking up from her labors, she gestured him to a front row seat. “Are you nervous?” she said. “I think you are since you’re carrying your neck sunk between your shoulders and you’re walking in a slouch. Straighten up. Think spine. The spine in a line. Proper posture is the first rule of good health and well-being. Allow your organs full
reign, Simon. Alignment of the trunk is essential to relaxation and relaxation is the road to fluid expression. Please sit. I’ll be with you momentarily.”
Simon sat. He resented being reminded of things like spines, especially his own. He’d long since developed an aversion to X-rays with their intimation of mortality. He didn’t appreciate being forced to think about his skeleton or guts. It was the same as a discussion of the ingredients in his favorite foods. The inside story was always worse than the outside story. Besides, Tabitha Ulman was an English teacher, not a professor of anatomy. Her turf was grammar and exposition, not body parts.
Simon waited, watching Miss Ulman work. He noticed that she moved her lips slightly as she read and occasionally let out a sorrowful sigh. When she jotted some note with a thick red pencil she let her own spine bend forward enough to reveal the tops of her breasts and the crease between them that flowed softly into her blouse. Simon sat thinking of the Mississippi River dividing the American continent.
He felt himself blush. He’d never had the slightest inclination to examine Miss Ulman’s geography, certainly not to consider her as a sexual object, and there he was noticing how her bosom pressed against her blouse, twin hills on a landscape of flowered rayon. She was up there in age, probably nearly thirty, and even though she was no Marlo Thomas, she was a nice looking woman. He remembered that Chirp once commented favorably on her swift legs and neat behind.
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