Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality

by Bill Peters

  Or, maybe this glass-particle feeling I’m feeling is that feeling when you stay awake in your room until you’re sure the rest of your friends, who went out without calling you, have gone to bed.

  So I start thinking that, maybe, the glass-particle feeling is like those times at night after I closed my eyes long enough and I couldn’t tell if I fell asleep. I’d open my eyes, and the light at the bottom of my door would be gone. And the dishwasher would be on, sloshing water, like the inside of a dark mouth.

  And the thing is, I begin to understand this glass-particle business more when I turn on CMF. Next to my bed, the red light from my radio’s ON switch stretches out a few shadows in the dark. CMF has been playing the same eight songs in the exact same order between 4 and 5 a.m. for about four months. Def Leppard’s “Hysteria,” the fifth song in the rotation, comes on. And, during the outro, when the band coasts on the D chord, it gives me this stomach-level feeling, which made me stay in my room all night when I was fifteen, imagining girls who I liked moving out of town, until Lip Cheese or whoever called to tell me that Necro wanted to climb on the high school roof that night.

  And the feeling I get, I realize: The stomach-level feeling is this same actual fifteen-year-old feeling, this basic intro-to-sad kind of thing. Not like a looking-back kind of sad—like, “Oh, I remember those sad times.” The feeling I get now, while “Hysteria” ends, feels like I am actually in the present tense of being fifteen.

  Like there are different levels of being sad. Fifteen-year-old sad, climbing-on-the-school-roof sad, DWI-ing-it-in-one-direction-until-gas-runs-out sad. They’re still there, not gotten over, filed away. The Sad Archives, I’d probably call them. Here I am, still there.

  That’s what this glass-particle feeling is. The same way, when you dream, it can break your heart when someone forgets to bring a stapler to a funeral. But next scene, life is fine. But still, all the while, there’s this voice in the back of everything you’re dreaming. The kind of voice that, when I finally do fall asleep tonight, asks, like it’s the beginning of an AM station politics debate, if freinium hens can munter themselves.

  PINNING BOW TIES ON THE DEAD

  When me, Necro, Toby, and Lip Cheese actually see Wicked College John in his hospital room, that’s when you say “Shit” and have it mean something.

  “Jesus!” everyone—except Necro—says.

  The side of Wicked College John’s face is food-poisoning pale, zippered with stitches. There’s a Vaseline kind of shine to his forehead, a plastic tube up his nose and another in his mouth. A length of white tape stretches across his face like a handlebar mustache, and his cheeks are blotchy. A brown, telephone-receiver-shaped saliva stain is next to his face on his bed’s scratchy pillow.

  And the look on Toby’s face: more terrified than the rest of us, blood leaving his cheeks. Something seems to change in his eyes—pupils shrinking, irises clenching into fists. He leans down, tie dangling, and he rubs his eyes and looks at me:

  “Somebody knew we were there,” he says. “We just survived an assassination.”

  “I grant that you have a point in that this is very messed up,” I say. “But maybe we should let the police . . .”

  “Unacceptable. Somebody did this. This is pinning bow ties on the dead.”

  Toby leans back, closes his eyes, exhales, and does a double-bass-drum pattern with his boots. “Pinning, bow ties, on, the dead,” he says, jabbing his finger into his chair’s plastic armrest.

  “What is that, a phrase?”

  “It is a phrase, Nate. It’s taking a messy situation, a death, and putting a little bow tie on it to neaten it up, to say This Didn’t Happen. Pinning Bow Ties on the Dead. To cover up for the fact that this situation is much more of a nebulous, you know, thing. I handed that watch piece to the investigator last night, and nowhere on the news do you hear the headline: ‘Watch found.’ You tell me that’s not the police hoping everyone forgets about this and goes back to their bread makers and their 401(k)s and their freaking dollhouse lives—unquestioning.”

  Necro stands up suddenly, twirls his keys, and relaxes his shoulders, and Toby spends a few seconds noticing this.

  On a silver, pie-tin-shaped balloon tied to the armpads of a chair, a message says WELCOME BACK! Take-out containers of cold chicken wings and issues of Maxim have been stacked on the box heater below the window. On top of the magazines is a set of keys that has the Mercedes logo. The keychain tag reads GET BETTER!

  This, when, look at any of us in formal get-better clothing—my red white and blue Bills shirt with two buttons and a collar; Lip Cheese’s khakis and hair parted way off to the side; Necro’s Native American braided square-dancing belt and blue jeans.

  Wicked College John’s Mom—whose heels you can hear stabbing the floor from down the hall—rushes back into the room from the cafeteria, comet-tail of perfume behind her because she’s never not exasperated. “Can I also say you guys don’t need to dress up like he’s dead?” she says. “It’s medically induced. People come out of comas every day. His brain is in, like, mint condition, it’s just been shaken.”

  Her face is radioactive orange, makeup paved on, hair napalmed with bleach, figure like an aging swimsuit model. She’s carrying a shot glass-sized yogurt cup in one hand, and she sits down in a chair at the bedside. When she leans over Wicked College John, I can see a tribal-type tattoo on the slice of skin on her back, between her Aerosmith T-shirt and her pre-faded, pretty-much painted-on jeans.

  “I brought KFC, sweetie,” she whispers into Wicked College John’s ear. She waves a magazine with Carmen Electra on the cover in his face, then drops it on his thigh.

  “No luck?” Toby says for no reason.

  “The red freckles, those bumps on his face is a rash, it’s some irritation thing from either the Compleat or the tube itself,” his mom says. “I told the doctor and food services: This family can’t have food with high concentrations of nickel.”

  “Dishydrosis,” Lip Cheese says. “That’s why I shouldn’t have the fries at Applebee’s. But I cheat all the time.”

  She crosses her legs habitually. “I told the cafeteria, I know your salads are pre-made,” she says. “But is it rocket science to pick the almonds out? I told them: No nickel. The inside of my mouth: There are these bumps. But do these f—ing f—gners care?” she mouths the two words.

  Lip Cheese’s pupils spread, hypnotized by John’s stomach rising and falling under a baby blue blanket. And, when the information makes its way into my brain that he is actually, one hundred percent, in a coma, I kind of say to myself: “Huh.” Then I find myself thinking about how I’m starting to feel something (which is progress, maybe?), like “Huh,” plus one.

  “Listen, ma’am,” Toby says, posture spring-tensioned. “We’re here to extend our sympathies, and, in addition, to …”

  “He’s not dead yet,” Wicked College John’s mom says, touching Toby’s arm, then jerking her hand back and squeezing some hand sanitizer into her palm. “Sorry, I’m very sensitive toward—sorry. They do jaundice phototherapy one floor down. Those babies—it’s creepy.”

  “We understand this might be hard to take,” Toby says. “But it’s possible there was a domestic attack.”

  Wicked College John’s mom brushes something off her shirt, looks into her lap, and shakes her head: “Don’t tell me this, don’t tell me this, don’t tell me this.”

  Necro, this whole time, leans against the doorjamb, looking out the window at the ventilation shafts on the roof of the neighboring building. He hasn’t said a word so far today. I look at him—to a) see if he’ll make eye contact, and b) to therefore see whether he’s mad at me about what I said to him after he went Tadahito Murakami: Ninja Surgeon on Wicked College John, and if he’s mad at me because I didn’t help him with said surgeoning.

  On the walk through the cold back to the car, Necro at least lets me bum a cigarette off him, but he just hands me the pack, without saying, “Sure!” or “Take and be my guest.�
�� Wind spreads Lip Cheese’s hair like a helicopter hovering over a field, and Toby removes his suit jacket, untucks his dress shirt, and squints into the sunlight.

  “Buildings don’t just explode,” Toby says, unlocking his car. There’s red all around his eyelids; he keeps taking deep breaths; his lips look way fatter. “They even said they were skirting the authorities. They even said some community organization informed the police about them. Coincidences don’t just happen side by side.”

  Necro, who shrugs.

  “You know who did this, I’ll tell you. Ask me who it is.” Toby says, as if, suddenly, it’s the end of the Clue game, and rain is slobbering down the windows, and the lightning is making the room only black and white. He inhales, the camera narrows in, the violins drop your heart off a cliff.

  But then he hesitates, exhales slowly, and says, like maybe he can’t think of anyone:

  “Luckytown Hastings.”

  “Fucky-Sucky-town Hastings,” Necro says.

  “Luckytown Hastings?” I go.

  “Wait. What are you talking about?” Lip Cheese says.

  Lip Cheese has a point. Maybe it’s actually very, very weird that Toby would bring up Officer Luckytown Hastings, once our Private Enemy No. 1, with parted hair that’s so neat it looks like it snaps on. Because, we haven’t Rioted on Luckytown Hastings in at least six years. Here he was, in a picture from the Democrat and Chronicle, bricks of cocaine on a table, all scrubbed-clean looks, except for his right eye, which has a tiny black dot, a mini-pupil, just below his main pupil, like a moon orbiting a planet. Make a joke about the eye, you’d be carrying your legs home.

  He had all those qualities and yet I’ve forgotten what he looks like. His real name is Tom Hander. All he did was run after us a lot. The more I think about it, the more he just seems like some guy.

  But this is me, going to bed tonight, in my Bills Zubaz pants, moving my forehead muscles around in a caring way and caring about all this. Because, maybe Toby has a point: What about that night me and Necro paintballed Luckytown’s truck, and then only a week afterward Luckytown just happened to pull Necro over for expired license plates. What about how after Necro spraypainted the phrase HULKAMANIA RIDES ALONE onto Luckytown’s truck, Luckytown chased us down the street, wearing these cow-patterned slippers, and caught Lip Cheese, and pinched Lip Cheese on the tricep so hard that he had this yellow and purple sore on his arm and, from there, the flu for two weeks. And, then, as the rest of us ran away, Luckytown literally yelled into the street as we ass-bolted into the woods: “I will eat you alive!”

  Because, when I wake up the next morning, after Mom has gone to work, the news shows that, while I was asleep, three fires occurred downtown—total Roasted Face of Satan as your downtown map. Authorities find a charred-up mattress in a boarded-up apartment building, burn patterns cursived all over the bedroom. Near the Liberty Pole, the second floor of an apartment collapses after another fire, and an old man on the second floor breaks his leg. I think at first: Maybe those two fires are simply regular fires that sort of happen and I’m just paying more attention now. But then, an explosion blows out the mirrors in the Y’s weight room—and investigators find shrivelings of what might have been a soda bottle that maybe contained explosive liquid. Police detain or arrest or apprehend Rambocream, whose real name is apparently Brandon Ross, but they let him go without charges. Some radio host calls the whole thing a “race-war amalgamation.”

  And, while there are no suspects for the Race-War Amalgamation, people at an all-black church on Joseph Ave. hold an antiviolence vigil a few days later just in case.

  Then, the next night, nothing. The phrase “race-war amalgamation” is never mentioned again, and I find my mouth hanging open in disgust when sports goes back to taking up half the news’s half-hour.

  Because, my mom grew up blocks away from the Liberty Pole. When I was way younger, during what I’d maybe call my Snowpants Indoors Phase if I’d known Necro then, she took me to the Pole’s Christmas lightings, where they bring out the mayor and for an hour the city seems safe. Up close, the Pole looks like a junkyard harp; the tall buildings around it are quiet and the square around it empty except for maybe a lone wheelchaired person moving slowly through. Blocks away though, from East Ave? Those lights, strung along the metal wires that extend downward diagonally from the pole, look like a lit-up extension of the street, like a ramp of light, lifting suddenly into the sky.

  So maybe I think the lights are nice, the way much of downtown is perfectly nice, or the way how even though I never go to House of Guitars, I still hope it stays there forever. So maybe my point here is that it sucks, is all, that nobody cares when a building in Rochester burns down.

  Except, when I wake up—the next afternoon now—to get my Thurman Thomas jersey, right when I’ve finally worked up the most focused Pope-like Boner of Hate for Luckytown Hastings that I can, here’s Mom. She appears over my shoulder with a colon full of Level 10 Bitchentery:

  “Goddammit Nate! You were here this entire time? I told them you were out!”

  “Told who?”

  “An investigator—for an insurance adjuster!—came by this morning and wanted to ask you about that explosion! I told him you were out, because I just assumed, for whatever reason, that there’d be no possible way you could have been sleeping this entire time and only be getting up at 4:45 p.m.”

  She passes me briskly in the kitchen and heads toward her bedroom.

  “Don’t say it like I blew up the building!” I say.

  But like all moms, if the Japanese bomb your house, she’ll tell you it’s your fault for living there. She turns around.

  “Three hundred dollars. Rent,” she says. “You will start paying at the end of April. I will not have a freeloading knife collector in this house.”

  “Mom!”

  “Go work construction somewhere,” Her Witchy Tundracuntedness says. “It’s good for your hands.” She laughs her one Ha. She hands me the investigator’s card, but I’m so pissed I tear the card up and let the pieces float to the floor and walk out of there right in her face.

  Because when Toby drives us to find Luckytown, you can already hear the harmonica in the wind, the Bow Tie Being Unpinned from the Dead. The gravel hisses when we pull into the lot of Goateez Sports Bar, out in the shoebox storefronts of Victor, the town where Luckytown hangs out, because we just know this, though I forget how.

  On the Goateez marquee, it says: 8PM WET T-SHIRT CONTEST / 10PM CHRONIC PARADIGM. Cars are parked even on the grass across the street. Inside, it smells like peanut shells and roasted clothing. The decorations are standard Box of Atmosphere: Coors banners; dark wood lacquer that’s a little greenish like old, infected chocolate; dimming softball trophies and shamrocks.

  Me, Necro, Toby, and Lip Cheese shoulder-wedge through the crowd—no Genny or Labatt’s or Shea’s here. We stand behind Toby. I can barely see above or around his shoulders.

  But when we see Luckytown Hastings—with his friends at a booth, collared shirt under a black sweater, anchorman grin perfect enough to put you to sleep after a workday—I no longer want any part of this, am suddenly so embarrassed that I’m unable to see anything in front of me, blood cells in the Pope-like Boner of Hate returning to base. The blood cells in Toby’s Pope-like Boner of Hate, too, appear to be returning to base. Because when Luckytown notices us, Toby spins away to avoid eye contact.

  “Actually let’s just hang out,” he says. “This is Colonel Hellstache. I didn’t mean Luckytown when I said that.”

  “Wait—what are you talking about?” Lip Cheese says.

  “I said I don’t know why I said Luckytown Pinned Bow Ties on the Dead! I was upset! That tape over Wicked College John’s face messed me up!”

  “Pinned what, Toby?” Luckytown says, suddenly from behind, gnashing his whole body at us.

  Toby looks down and, as if remembering to, folds his arms and says, “Nothing.”

  Luckytown turns to his friends, who are both we
aring Dickshirts—one with the Goldschlager logo; another that says HOW DO I LIVE? on the front and FCKN’ LOUD on the back. He lowers his voice, like he’s maybe impersonating someone. “Does he have a raincoat for that?” Which his stupid friends laugh at for some reason. Like it’s a joke.

  “A raincoat for your eye, maybe!” Lip Cheese yells, pointing at Luckytown from over Toby’s shoulder.

  Luckytown, whose meanness alone, if you liquefied it and drank it, could kill a man, stands up from the table. He grinds his teeth down to powder. Toby’s face muscles deaden with what might actually be fear. So he yells:

  “Everyone! Everyone!” And when the crowd quiets, Toby appears even more scared, like he hadn’t anticipated talking to a quiet room. “Um, so basically, this guy, Tom Hander, he may—or maybe not—have made a bomb out of a Timex watch to blow up the Rochester Public Broadcast building. So, you know, we were just dropping by to, you know, accuse him of that, and to make you all aware of, you know …” Then, Toby yells, in total Auxiliary-Level Embarrassment-Recovery Mode: “Pinning Bow Ties on the Dead! Our friend is in a coma because of this man right here!”

  Except, then? Luckytown, and everyone in this Mung-Hut Dynasty of a bar, starts cracking up! The crowd noise picks up again, like they’re celebrating something. Somebody pats Toby on the back, and not in a mean way.

  “Pathetic, pathetic, kill yourself already, you children,” Luckytown screams over the crowd. “The fact that someone unconditionally loves you at all you piece of maternally deposited …”

  He stops and inhales, face recomposing itself like a VCR rewinding him into calmness. “I don’t feel all that sorry for anybody who associates himself with some boy”—and he points his finger hard at Necro—“who, when he’s bored, exchanges weapons and chemicals and explosives with people who have tried to form a currency called the David!”