Palo Alto

by James Franco

  “I’m tired of wandering,” said Cyrus one day. “I wish there was something more exciting to do. . . .”

  Part II

  Wasting

  Things got bad at the Children’s Library. I started taking the books home without checking them out and then not returning them. Sometimes Fred and I would get high and draw dicks and pussies on the animals in the books and then put them back on the shelves. One time I was in the Secret Garden and I tried to carve APRIL into the bench, but I didn’t finish because one of the librarians came out, so the carving just said APRI, but the R was a little unfinished and the I was really light.

  Then one day after school, my mom told me my probation officer wanted me to call her. I called from the kitchen phone while my mom washed vegetables in the sink. As the phone rang I watched my mother with the vegetables and I realized what a small woman she was.

  “Hi, Janice,” I said into the phone.

  “Teddy, I’m gonna need you to come to my office on Tuesday after school.”

  “That’s the day I go to the Children’s Library.”

  “You’re not going there anymore and you know it.”

  “What do you mean? I love that place,” I said, and my mother looked over.

  “Well, you screwed it up,” she said. “I’ll see you at three twenty on Tuesday. Don’t be late, and you better not drive here.”

  My mother was holding half a green pepper. She looked so sad. The water ran in the sink.

  On Tuesday, during first period auto class, Barry Chambers and Bill and I went out to the train tracks to try some of the weed that Barry had been growing in his backyard, on top of the shed. We walked down the tracks a little and stood near the Bat Cave. No Goth kids or anyone else was around. Barry had the stuff rolled in Saran Wrap. He unrolled it and there were two thick, glistening buds. Barry broke off enough for a bowl and filled his smooth porcelain rainbow pipe. The stuff was strong. When I coughed, Barry said, “See, I got the good shit.” Bill took some and he coughed too.

  “How’d you grow that?” said Bill.

  “I just ordered the seeds from Amsterdam and followed instructions,” Barry said. Barry was Mormon and cuddly like a sea lion and Bill was half Mexican and dumb.

  After we smoked we sat on the rail of the tracks. The graffiti on the cement wall of the Bat Cave looked good. ORFN was up, and MSTK, and REVERS, written backward, and the best was LUST. With my eyes I kept tracing the way the letters flowed into each other. They were so well done I could taste them like chewy candy.

  “What’s up with you and April?” I asked Barry.

  “April is crazy, but we’re gonna fuck.”

  Bill had been quiet the whole time, but he said, “Yeah, fuck that shit.” I guess he meant April was the shit and Barry should fuck her. His eye whites were pink and the veins were apparent. He was yukking.

  I stood up and went to the wall. I had a black Sharpie in my pocket and I wrote SHIT FUCK COCK SUCK DIE ASS NOTHINGNESS MEANINGLESS CRY. My writing went a little over LUST, but he was big and in red spray paint.

  “What does all that mean?” said Barry.

  “Nothing,” I said, but it was something. Barry let us use his Visine and then we went back and made it before the end of auto class. I banged on the side of an engine with a hammer and then I sat in a metal chair. In English, I looked at a book but the words didn’t separate; all the letters were ants marching into the crease.

  After school, the weed was wearing off and I walked with Fred toward the court building where Janice had her office. It was near California Avenue, so we just walked down El Camino. Fred had been doing crazy things lately. Stupid things, like throwing rocks through house windows at night, and then running.

  “Can you believe that Barry is gonna fuck April?” I said.

  “No,” Fred said. Fred had never fucked, and I had only once. It was with Shauna. Everyone called her Dog Bite Shauna because a dog had bitten her and there were two horizontal scar lines on the left side of her face. We did it at a party, and when I was finally on top of her I closed my eyes because her face was so close. We kissed while we did it and I remember being surprised because I was holding her face and I couldn’t feel the scars, but when I opened my eyes they were there.

  “Barry? I mean why Barry?”

  “I don’t know, cuz he’s a fucker,” said Fred. “And he’s nice.”

  “But Barry? He’s, like, chubby and he’s Mormon and… I mean, I don’t think he’s ever fucked before. Why does she like him?” We thought while we walked.

  “He plays drums,” said Fred.

  “Whatever,” I said, and we walked in silence. On a public mailbox I drew a face with my Sharpie. It was a mournful face, and next to it I wrote,

  FUCK INTO THIS

  BORN INTO THIS

  At California Avenue, Fred went into the café at the Printer’s Ink bookstore to get coffee and I walked on to the court building. It was three thirty already.

  I went to the seventh floor and checked in and then waited in a wooden chair for Janice. I wasn’t high anymore but I was so tired I kept my backpack on when I sat. I was slumped to the side of the chair when she came out.

  “Okay, Teddy.” I stood up. “Nice shirt,” she said. I had a red plaid shirt on and the pocket was ripped so it hung funny. She was fat, and wearing tan pants. When she turned, her ass was this huge ugly thing that was wide and flattened from sitting. In her office, I took my bag off and sat in the heavy wooden chair across the desk from her.

  “So,” she said, and then was very still. Her face was like her ass, flat and wide. Her cheeks stuck out farther than her temples and they hung like the jowls of a Saint Bernard. Her skin was oily and olive-colored with splotches of red around her nose.

  I didn’t say anything. The walls were beige and the ceiling had those white squares with little holes in them. It was the most boring place I had ever been. Finally she asked me if I was high and I said I wasn’t and she said she could test me if she wanted to and I told her that would be okay, but she didn’t say anything more about it. Then she said, “You drew a dick on the Runaway Bunny?”

  “No, that was Fred,” I said.

  She asked who Fred was but I didn’t answer. “Did you have friends visit you while you were doing community service at the Children’s Library?”

  “No, no one came, it was me. I’m sorry I drew the dick on the Runaway Bunny, and the vagina on the mom bunny. It was really stupid, I’ll pay for the book.”

  “Yes, you will, of course you will, but you’re not doing the rest of your hours there. The librarians don’t want you there anymore.”

  “They like me.”

  “No, they don’t. You’re lazy and you carved ‘ape’ into their bench outside.”

  I started laughing. It seemed really funny at the time so I kept laughing. Maybe I was still high. “I didn’t write ‘ape,’ I wrote ‘apri.’”

  “What the hell is ‘apri’?”

  “Nothing, just some shit.”

  “Well, you’re paying for that too,” Janice said. I said okay, and she asked what kind of asshole I was, defacing libraries. I said I didn’t know. Then she handed me a list of places where I could finish my community service hours. I had thirty-two hours left. I could work at Goodwill, I could clean up graffiti, I could work at Planned Parenthood.

  “Goodwill sounds okay,” I said. She was looking at her own copy of the list.

  “No, actually you don’t get to choose,” she said. “You’re working at Sycamore Towers.” Sycamore Towers was a nursing home. My great-grandfather had been there before he died at Stanford Hospital. I used to visit when I was about three and he’d always give me chalky candies. “Great-grandpa candies,” we called them. There is a photograph of him and me shaking hands in the doorway to his room: he is tall, in a gray suit, with white hair; and I’m in a diaper, standing on my toes to reach his hand.

  I started working at Sycamore Towers. It had fourteen floors; I worked on the twelfth. Ther
e was a desk station for the orderlies in the center of the floor, and from there the four wings extended out in each direction, so the place was shaped like a crooked cross. Each wing held eleven rooms for the residents: five on one side of the hall and six on the other. Near the orderlies’ station there was a community room where the old people worked on crafts, and across the hall there was a TV room.

  Most of the old people were in wheelchairs and they didn’t move much. They usually sat dispersed about the four halls doing nothing. There were also some that lay in bed all day and had bedpans. Except for the meals and craft time, the old people were left to themselves. Some watched TV in the TV room and a few read, but most stared at nothing.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays I’d walk to the Towers after school. I’d get there around three thirty because it wasn’t very far, over near University Avenue. When I arrived at the Towers the old people would be having their craft time in the community room. I would sit with them and make sure they had their beads and crayons, and if anyone needed water I would get it. They would do crafts for an hour and then they were free until dinner at six. I would push them around in their chairs and clean up after them and get supplies from the storage room for the orderlies.

  There was another kid working off community service hours; his name was Brian and he went to the other high school, Gunn. He was Asian, and had a tall head and a square haircut, so he looked like a number 2 pencil eraser. He was a smart kid but he had two hundred hours of community service because he made a bomb at school.

  One afternoon when he and I were in the elevator bringing up packs of toilet paper from the basement, I asked him about the bomb.

  “It wasn’t a bomb,” he said, like he had been waiting for me to ask. “It was supposed to be a joke. I mean, I’m good at chemistry and I knew what I was doing, I’ve done it a bunch of times before. It was supposed to be a smoke trick, that’s it. All this smoke was going to come out of the drinking fountain, and everyone would get scared, big deal. But the guy I did it with fucked up and put the pipe too far into the fountain, so there was no room for the smoke to get out and the whole thing exploded.”

  “Oh fuck,” I said.

  “It was bad. The cement went flying and there were flames and a bunch of backpacks got completely melted and a few kids got burned on their backs and heads. One girl had her hair burned off on one side.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

  “Yeah. What’s worse is I got expelled. And I was supposed to go to Duke next year, and they pulled my scholarship.”

  For a smart guy Brian seemed dumb, the way his huge head bobbed around when he talked. Just before we got to our floor he asked me if I liked the old people.

  “They’re okay,” I said. “They’re just like big children.”

  “They fucking smell,” he said, and then the bell dinged and the doors opened and he walked out.

  Crafts for the old people usually meant drawing with crayons, or stringing beads, or making cat’s eyes with yarn. At first I just sat and watched; their weak fingers had difficulty gripping things and some of their wet mouths hung open. On the third week I started drawing them. I had put in a lot of time in drawing classes, especially since the last arrest. In the evenings I didn’t work with the old people, I would go to life drawing and portraiture classes at the Palo Alto Art League. It was just this cool old building that was actually pretty close to the Towers. My teacher, Mr. Wilson, was this wily old guy with a beard like a wizard who wore all denim, every day.

  I started bringing my sketchbook and sketching pencils. I usually just drew the old people’s faces. I would draw life in their eyes even though many of their lights had gone out. I would capture their decaying skin with as much realism as possible. Wrinkles within wrinkles, blotches, hair in wisps. And their necks like fowls’: bone protrusion, saggy-soft flesh, goiters. I drew all of the people on my floor many times. The orderlies didn’t care that I hardly helped because they were worse than I was. They were all young, and argued in Spanish and laughed around the orderly station; and the guy orderlies would tease the girl orderlies, and they all would flirt; but when they dealt with the old people they were mean and cold, as if all the old people were animals.

  “Those are cool pictures,” Brian said. “They make me think of death.”

  “I’m trying to draw them with some dignity. It doesn’t seem like anyone else cares,” I said.

  “It’s hard, man. Who wants to care for someone who has lost his mind and motor skills and can’t take a shit without help? That’s why you have all these stupid assholes here, to wipe their asses for them.”

  “But the orderlies don’t care about these people.”

  “No shit, because they have to wipe their asses and change their bedpans and listen to their insanity every day; we only have to be here twice a week. Imagine if you were here every day.”

  “I hope I die before I ever come to a place like this,” I said. Brian said I probably would because I smoked cigarettes.

  I drew one woman more than all the others. Her name was Tanya. I liked her because of her smile and her eyes. That was all, she wasn’t any smarter or more coherent than the rest of the old people. She just radiated kindness.

  I’d draw her in all different ways. Her face with its cross crinkles, like bunched cloth around her eyes; her mouth: wrinkly soft from so much smiling. I’d draw her full-bodied; grinning in her wheelchair, sitting over the beads that she would thread and drop, which bounced, sharp-sounding, on the floor; or in the TV room, hunched in her sweater: birdlike, brittle, her chair angled slightly away from the television because she wasn’t really watching. And her smile always like a child’s.

  One Thursday, during craft time, when they were all coloring with their crayons, I placed two of the drawings I had made of Tanya on the table in front of her. Tanya was working on a red house; the jagged red scribbles shot all over the page and into the blue mountain she had drawn in the background. When I put the pictures down she stopped with the crayon. The color was called “Watermelon.” She looked at my pictures. They were good; one was of her face and caught her warmth, the other was a picture of her in her chair, hunched and staring at nothing. She picked one up and then the other, and then she cooed.

  “Ooooh, these are nice, very nice. I don’t play with games, but I like this so much. My daughter come, and she walk good.” Then Tanya put them down and was drawing again. I thought she had already forgotten about me, but as she was going over the jagged marks of the barn with Watermelon, she said, “I’m drawing a barn. The place I grew up in when I was a little girl. My daddy said, when peacetime come to the horses, then we all sleep. Sleep, sleep good, you think?” And then she stopped drawing and looked at me like she wanted an answer.

  “Sure,” I said, “sure,” and she smiled and all the warmth I liked came into her face, and then she went back to drawing.

  The next day was Friday. In auto class Barry said his parents were leaving for some Mormon thing and he was thinking about a get-together at his house that night, not a party but a group of people to celebrate the full harvest of his plant. I said I would think about it, but I knew it would be him and April all over each other.

  After school I went to the Art League like I usually did on my days away from the Towers. I had a class from four to seven and another from seven to ten. It was me and a bunch of older people and one young Asian girl who was pretty good. There was one model per class. In the early class the model was a guy named Ogden who was about fifty-five; his body was muscular but his skin hung a little loose. The teacher, Mr. Wilson, walked around with his gray beard and bald head, and denim shirt tucked into his jeans. He would lean over and give suggestions to people.

  I was drawing in a different way than I usually did. Usually I would try to be as exact as possible, like a Renaissance painter, but all that seemed like bullshit suddenly. The drawings of Tanya did something to me. I think I had really captured her, they were my best drawings, but it didn�
�t mean anything. Everything was changing, things felt different, but I wasn’t sure why. I was drawing Ogden in a much looser way than I usually did. Usually I would just do one drawing per pose, but I was doing five to ten and letting them drop on the floor. Mr. Wilson stood next to me and held his chin in his hand.

  “Going fast. Really fast,” he said. I said I was and kept drawing.

  “You know, Picasso drew fast,” he said. “He could draw a dove in sixteen seconds, and they’re great, right?”

  “The doves? Yes.”

  “But that sixteen seconds had six decades of work behind it,” he said, then he dropped his hand from his chin and smiled through his beard. Most of the other students had heard him because he talked pretty loudly, and they all approved of his wise observation, grunting and saying, “Ahhh,” and “Oh, how true, how true it is.” Wilson went on: “Picasso started off painting in a classical style, but it was only after he had mastered the masters that he broke tradition and became Picasso. He knew he had all the skill of Raphael at age sixteen, but that wasn’t enough. Technical skill is never enough. He needed to find his voice. We all have a voice or a style, but it takes practice, practice to find it. The technical stuff needs to become second nature.” Everyone agreed with this part too. Wilson said quietly to me, “You remind me of Sylvester Stallone.” I stopped drawing. Wilson went on: “I used to go to art classes with him. He was always trying to break away from classical form.”

  One of the ladies spoke up. “Sylvester Stallone, the actor?”

  “That’s right. He’s a huge art enthusiast and not a bad artist either.” Everyone was surprised and talked about it for a bit. Someone said that underneath all that muscle he was actually a really intelligent guy. “He did write Rocky, after all.”

  During the Stallone discussion, Ogden held his pose. I tried not to listen and draw, but something had gone out of me. I picked up a few of the drawings that had dropped to the floor. They looked like a kid’s drawings, except they were of a naked man.