by Jack Gantos
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t trick you. She changed her mind and decided not to go out with you.”
“You ripped me off all along,” I said, feeling all high and mighty. “You and Virginia were just using me.”
“Well, who is worse?” he asked, sounding a little huffy. “Me for trying to make a little extra tip money? Or you and your blind brother you put to work on the beach?”
He had me there.
“Well, what about the date?” I asked, getting back to the real subject. “Were you just going to let me stand out here all night?”
He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and removed a twenty. “Here,” he said. “This should make up for some of it.”
“No thanks,” I replied. “I can’t be bought off.”
“I’m not trying to buy you off,” he said. “I’m trying to make you feel better.”
“I don’t want to feel better, either,” I said. I took a big breath and accidentally swallowed my chewing-gum tooth patch. I was horrified. “Excuse me,” I said. The words whistled out of my mouth.
Just then Virginia opened the door all the way. “Sorry, kid,” she said. “This was all his idea. I told my brother I wouldn’t go out on a date with someone I didn’t know. But he just took your money and set up the date anyway. He figured I’d go along with it, but nobody tells me who to date!” She gave her brother a dirty look.
“I can’t blame you,” I said meekly, whistling the words.
I didn’t know what else to do. I just wanted to get out of there. But since I had the flowers I held them out and said, “These are for you.” They tilted forward like an icecream cone and my yellow-and-green loogie slid off and splattered on her shoe.
She glowered at me. “What the heck is that?”
“Whoops. Sorry,” I whimpered.
“Sony’s not good enough,” she said furiously, and stepped forward. “Clean that off,” she said, and pointed at the loogie.
“No,” I said, stepping back. “No way. It was an accident.”
“You little creep,” she said, pouncing at me and grabbing my shirt collar. She yanked me forward. I tripped over the front step and fell half into the house. I tried to push myself up but the little sister jumped on my back and held my head down.
“I gave you a chance,” Virginia said from above. “Now lick it off.” She raised her black patent-leather pump, with the shiny yellow-and-green loogie on top, to my lips. “Lick it off or I’ll squish you like a bug.”
It was my loogie to begin with. What goes around comes around, I thought, then stuck out my tongue and slurped it up as if eating a raw oyster out of a shell. It wasn’t so bad.
“Oh, gross!” Virginia hollered. As she jerked her shoe back she kicked me on the lump.
“Arghh!” I moaned.
The little sister rolled off me. “That’s sick,” she said and slapped the floor. “Sick, sick, sick.”
“Oh, man,” the bartender said. “That is the most humiliating thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff.”
I turned my head and looked up at him. My eyes were watering and it looked like I was crying. But I wasn’t. It was the allergies. “Really?” I asked with a whistle. “Is this really the most humiliating thing you’ve ever seen?”
“Really,” he confirmed. “No doubt about it.”
“Then shake,” I said. I stuck out my hand and he pulled me up onto my feet.
“Goodbye,” I said.
I staggered toward my bike. As I pedaled away I glanced at the three of them in the doorway and remembered my writing motto: A WRITER’S JOB IS TO TURN HIS WORST EXPERIENCES INTO MONEY. I only had twenty dollars in my pocket but I felt like a millionaire.
One
It was dark. I stood in the backyard and pulled my swim mask down over my face, and slipped the snorkel mouthpiece between my teeth. I removed a handkerchief from my top pocket, poured half a bottle of English Leather cologne on it, then reached above my head and carefully poked the handkerchief into the snorkel tube. I took a deep breath and the rush of cologne fumes nearly knocked me over. But it was better than smelling the fumes of the dead and rotting.
I was doing it again. I stood above BeauBeau’s grave and thrust the shovel into the dirt. I looked over both shoulders one more time just in case someone was watching. “God help me,” I muttered. I lifted the shovel and threw the dirt over to one side. I pushed the shovel down again. “I didn’t mean to dig you up the first time,” I said to BeauBeau. I lifted the shovel, flipped the dirt onto the pile, and pushed the blade back in. “Now I have to do it again.” I grunted as I lifted a big lump of damp soil. Suddenly it was as if I had pulled the cork stopper out of a bottle of the worst-smelling substance known to man. A fog of nasty-smelling BeauBeau fumes began to unfurl and it curled up around me as I shivered. Then from the mouth of the hole came a string of fearless, red-eyed albino rats. I took a step back. I didn’t want any of them sneaking up behind me and running up my legs.
Dad had said I got off the hook from killing rats at the concrete factory because some other dad gave his son the job. But I was back on the hook, and I was mad. I knew these monsters had been feasting off of BeauBeau’s flesh and they were gonna pay. I raised the shovel up over my head and brought it down on the one closest to my shoe. I hit it so hard I drove it into the soft earth, as if I were pressing chocolate bits into cookie dough. “Take that, you grave gourmet,” I muttered. But then it squirmed around and clawed its way out of the indentation. That spooked me. It couldn’t be killed. I stepped back and before I could hit it again it ran back into its hole. When I looked up, there were half a dozen rats crawling around the dirt, sniffing for food and licking my shoes. “Scat,” I hissed, and kicked one cleanly into the neighbor’s yard. The rest knew I meant business and scampered back into one of their tunnels. I dropped my shovel and ran to the side yard and sat down under a tree. I pulled off my swim mask and snorkel and tugged my handkerchief out of the snorkel tube. I poured more English Leather cologne on it, then held it over my nose and mouth and took deep breaths. I was thinking about the low road, and the highroad in life. It was my plan to take the highroad and do great things. I knew it would be harder, but still it was the road less traveled and would be worth it in the end. But I had slipped, and I was stumbling along the low road with the lowest of low-minded people—the Pagoda family. When we had lived in Fort Lauderdale, before Barbados, the Pagodas were our next-door neighbors. They were definitely the most demented people in the world. Their oldest kid, Gary, had a criminal record as long as my arm. Frankie, who was my age, was psychotic ever since he dove off the roof of their house and hit his head on the edge of their swimming pool. And green-haired Susie was totally out of touch with reality.
And now I had joined the Pagodas on the road to ruin. I had bragged to Mr. Pagoda about the dog coffin. That was a mistake. Now he wanted to see it. If he liked it he thought we could make a lot of money selling them to people who bought fancy pet products. He knew a lot about selling pet products, and had made a fortune on them while we were away in Barbados the previous year, and the thought of making Pagoda gold is how I got sucked into digging BeauBeau back up.
This had all started about a month before.
We were sitting in the living room after dinner and Mom was reading the Fort Lauderdale News. “Look,” she said to Dad, and pointed to a section of the newspaper she had folded back. “Mr. Pagoda is running for public office.”
Dad looked up from his book. “Oh, Lord,” he moaned sarcastically.
“Is he running for something, or away from something?” I asked, trying to be clever.
“It says he’s running for District Council on the Anti-Pet-Tax Platform,” Mom replied.
“That’s what happens to people who can’t hold down a real job.” Dad said. “They become politicians.”
“What’s the anti-pet-tax platform?” I asked.
“Mark Woody, the guy who is now in office, wants to tax pet o
wners an extra registration fee that will go to paying for animals that have no homes,” Betsy explained.
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.
“It’s nonsense,” Dad snapped back. “Taxes will never even out the differences between the haves and the have-nots. If it were up to the government, each time you paid to have your shoes shined, you’d be charged an extra tax for barefoot people. If you drove a car you’d have to pay a tax for people who walked. If you had a house you’d have to pay a tax for people who slept on benches. You can’t tax all the hardworking people to help out all the lazy losers. That is liberal nonsense.”
He had lost me. I thought we were talking about pets.
“It does say that Mr. Pagoda is a Democrat,” Mom said, adding fuel to the fire.
“Figures,” Dad muttered. He was a true-blue Republican. His dad had been a Republican, and had said, “If an ape ran for President, I’d still vote for him as long as he was a Republican.”
One time I was writing a civics paper for school and had asked Dad what the difference was between the two political parties. He explained that if there were two starving Democrats left in the world, and only one piece of meat, they would split the meat down the middle.
“That sounds right,” I said, taking notes. “Sharing is good.”
“Don’t fall for it,” Dad objected. “They might share it, but secretly the Democrats are sneaks. As they split the meat you can bet each one is thinking, I hope you choke and die on the first bite, so I can have the rest. Democrats will stab you in the back. But the Republicans play fair and square. They’ll stab you right in the chest. Instead of sharing, they’d fight it out so that the winner would get the whole hunk o’ meat.”
That’s why he was a Republican, I figured. They were tough, and not embarrassed to be mean.
“The Democrats,” he continued, “are weak. They’d rather share than fight. But believe me, neither party tries to change things for the better. They just feed on greed.”
I had used his ideas in my paper and the teacher gave me a low grade and wrote a note asking where I got my nutty ideas. I was too embarrassed to tell her I got them from home, so I said I got them from a TV talk show.
Now, before he could really get worked up about government taxation, Mom cut him off. “Well, let’s drive over to the old neighborhood,” she suggested.
“Sure,” Dad said. “Maybe there is a big cage around the Pagoda property, and they are all under house arrest along with all their stinking show dogs.” He smiled at the thought.
We got in the car and drove a few miles from one side of Wilton Manors to the other. It didn’t take long to reach our old neighborhood. We cruised up the streets, past the Metrics’ house, the Peabos’, the Gibbonses’, and the Veluccis’. They all looked the same. Nothing had changed. It didn’t even seem as if the grass had grown, or new flowers had bloomed. It wasn’t that I expected something dramatic to have happened, like everyone building a second story, or painting their houses plaid or polka-dot, but I thought there would be some noticeable improvements. Maybe that was because I was always changing, hopefully growing up and getting better, and I guess I expected the same from the rest of the world. But when I looked out at the neighborhood, it was the same old shabby place, and it wasn’t getting any better.
And then we stopped in front of the Pagodas’ house. Nobody said a word. There was no cage around their house as Dad had wished. But something had definitely changed for the better. Their house was beautiful. Their scruffy old lawn had been replaced with new sod so that it looked like a perfect hair transplant. All the dead tree stumps had been yanked out and smoothed over. The house was freshly painted in a soft peach. The shrubs and boxwood hedges were crisply trimmed. There was no broken glass in the windows. And there were a gold Mercedes and a huge SilverStream Motor Home parked in the new double-wide driveway.
“Are you sure this is the right house?” Pete asked.
“Check out the roof,” Dad said, and pointed. “You can still see the shadow of the red atom-bomb target they painted up there.”
“The question should be,” Betsy said, “do the Pagodas still live in this house?”
Just then the front door to the silver trailer opened and Gary Pagoda stepped out, yawned, and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
“Oh, my God,” Mom cried out. “Look at him.”
All of us leaned to one side to stare out the windows, so that the car tilted. He was dressed only in skimpy French underwear and the tattoos of women and birds and bumper-sticker sayings all over his chest and arms made it look as if he had fallen asleep on the Sunday comics.
“Cool,” Pete said. “I want tattoos like that!”
I hope he didn’t mean the naked lady on Gary’s shoulder.
“The only tattoo you’ll get will be from my right hand on your backside,” Dad cracked.
“It’s not polite to stare,” Mom said, and slipped her hand across his eyes.
I also thought the tattoos were cool, but after what Dad had said to Pete I just kept the thought of getting one to myself. Dad had an anchor tattooed on his arm, but he had been in the Navy and excused it by saying he was drunk and stupid and young when he did it, and afterward it was too late to change. I wasn’t drunk, but I was young and I did worry that I was stupid. But I still wanted one. In fact, I wanted a couple hundred. I had this idea once of getting the world’s greatest art tattooed across my back. I’d have the Mona Lisa, Whistler’s Mother, Washington Crossing the Delaware—all the classics. Except the paintings would be the size of postage stamps, so I could travel around the world as a one-man museum and make a fortune by taking off my shirt and selling people magnifying glasses. When I first got this idea I was so thrilled I told it to Betsy. She replied that if I tattooed a line between all the freckles on my face it would spell out “bonehead from another planet.”
“I wonder where they got the money to fix the place up?” Dad asked, rubbing his chin.
“Maybe they sold a couple of those brain-damaged kids to a medical lab,” Betsy replied.
“Or just won the lottery,” Mom guessed.
“Maybe Mr. Pagoda finally invented something really important,” I suggested. “Something that has changed the whole world.” Everyone looked at me as if I was out of my mind.
“Well, maybe,” I repeated.
“Yeah,” Dad said sarcastically. “And maybe one day you’ll change from a knucklehead to a rocket scientist.”
Here we go, I thought. It was bad enough having to worry myself on the subject, but my family only made it worse. I had just started eighth grade and it was open season again for jokes about my IQ level. And Mom was back to feeding me fish sticks. Now as I gaped slack-jawed at the rich-looking Pagoda house, I felt really dumb. I had always thought I was smarter than all of them rolled into one. But how smart could I be if I was just sitting there in a rust-bucket of a car while thinking, I wish I were a Pagoda.
“We better get going,” Mom said. “If they see us they might invite us in.”
“Yeah,” Pete said, and wrinkled up his nose. “And if you breathe the stinky dog-poop Pagoda air in their house you’ll be paralyzed for life.”
Dad put the car in gear and we slowly cruised down the street and around the corner. When we got to Wilton Manors Boulevard there was a billboard with Mr. Pagoda’s giant painted face beaming down on us. VOTE PAGODA! NO PET TAX! it read.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, joking around. “For once you and Mr. Pagoda are on the same side.”
“That just goes to show you how bad my luck is in this town,” he muttered.
No one said another word. The Pagodas had passed us by and we were all depressed. Mom tried to cheer us up by having Dad stop at the Dairy Queen and treat us all to a strawberry dip. But it only reminded me of the time Mr. Pagoda poured a gallon of his experimental cherry-colored sun-block into the swimming pool and made us all dive in about a hundred times. Each time we climbed out, we were recoated with a waxy, pinkish
oil which floated on the surface and was supposed to “automatically safeguard the skin,” according to Mr. Pagoda. Unfortunately, it made our feet so slick the only way to reach the end of the diving board was to crawl out on our hands and knees.
Two
Two days later Pete burst into my room. “You won’t believe this,” he shouted, waving a shiny brochure above his head. “You aren’t as dumb as you look. You were right. Mr. Pagoda invented something and now they are rich! Look!”
I snatched the brochure out of his hand and threw myself across the bed. THE PAGODA PET PAD was printed in bright red letters across the top. Below was a picture of a dog cautiously staring at a little rug that was blocking its way into a living room which had been prissily decorated with white furniture. It looked like God’s living room. Below the picture was an explanation: “Vet Approved. The PAGODA PET PAD is a safe and painless way to correct bad pet habits! Keep pets from entering rooms and off of furniture. Just plug in the PAGODA PET PAD and once your pet receives a few uncomfortable shocks, it will soon alter its problem behavior. GUARANTEED.”
I looked at the price. “Eighty bucks!” I shouted. “No wonder they’re rich.”
I could have thought of the Pet Pad, I said to myself. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t thought of Kleenex, or toilet paper on a roll, or toothpaste, or tiny screwdrivers to fix your glasses, or back scratchers on a long stick, or Pet Rocks, or any of that stuff. I wished I were one of those people who had just one brilliant idea and turned it into a fortune. Mr. Pagoda had, and now I felt more stupid than ever before.
While Pete was busy telling everyone what he had discovered, I rode my bike over and looked at their house from across the street. Someone had stuck a hand-drawn sign in his yard. PAGODA for District Council—NO PET TAXI! I read it twice before I realized there was a mistake—NO PET TAXI! Then I thought, well, maybe he was against pets riding in taxis, too. After all, he was now a politician so he was obligated to keep saying stuff. And who was I to second-guess him? He was the one with the brains and money.
